Things that I found

Not angry, disappointed: Australian cricket's legacy.

2018-03-30T09:51:00.000+11:00

It is easy to feel sorry for Steve Smith. He’s a young, highly-strung man in a position of great responsibility in the public eye who is currently struggling under the tonne of bricks that fell on him from a great height. He allowed a ball-tampering scheme to go ahead, and lied to the umpires on the field, then lied to the public in the press conference where he was supposed to be coming clean. As a consequence, he has been stripped of the captaincy for two years and banned from playing international and interstate cricket for 12 months. His latest press conference saw him break down in tears, unsurprisingly.

Australian fans and officials have been accused of over-reacting. Perhaps, but I don’t think this is merely a response to one instance of ball-tampering and clumsy cover-up. This is a response to being embarrassed by the on-field behaviour of our national team for two decades. Ever since Steve Waugh announced that they were aiming for “mental disintegration” of the opposition, as if the cricket field was a early branch of Ahu Ghraib, the Australian cricket team have put an unholy emphasis on sledging. What is sledging? It is the organised, systematic, verbal abuse of opposition batsmen. Wow, you might think, that sounds a lot like bullying, which we’re all against. It does, because it is.

A lot of people confused sledging with the witty put-downs one used to read about in books such as “Chappelli laughs” or Max Walker’s “How to hypnotise a python.” It’s actually more along the lines of “How does Brian Lara’s cock taste?” as said to a young West Indian batsman by one of our best fast bowlers. And this was organised - he didn’t even think that up himself. They have team meetings to decide on their campaigns of sledging. They selected a keeper to bat and for his ability to keep up the chatter, not because he was the best keeper. In this latest series, they demanded the stump microphones be turned off so they could sledge. This would be time and energy I imagine better used in practicing batting, bowling, and fielding, but what do I know?

So why have we gone along with it? Why has it taken this long for the Australian public and officials to be angry? Simple - we were winning. Shame on us. Under Steve Waugh we were the best team in the world. Under successive captains, we’ve been less so. “Hard but fair” was their mantra, always claiming to know where the ‘line’ was. It was easy to spot the line actually; whatever the Australians did was on the right side, however the opposition responded was on the other. We were winning, so bad behaviour was called ‘professionalism’, ‘larrikinism’, ‘the Australian style of game’. As our success rate started going down, the number of people questioning the team went up. There were those who never liked it and said so - full credit to them. But it has taken this ball tampering incident for CA to realise for two decades they had been letting successive Australian teams bring the game into disrepute, and maybe they should do something about it.

The players were under a lot of pressure on this tour, far from home, and losing. Perhaps what the SA cricketer said to Dave Warner was horrible. But when you’ve been antagonising someone precisely in order to make them snap, and when you succeed they don’t snap in a way you like, I’m not sure the moral ground you think you’re on is all that high - or moral. Large sections of the South African crowds behaved poorly. Darren Lehmann, now thankfully Australia’s ex-coach, during the last Ashes series asked the Australian crowd to make a particular English cricketer cry and go home. It’s more like immoral quicksand.

Nor is Australia alone taking the game down this slope where it is now. Weak officials and powerful money brokers have seen cheating and corruption blight the game. There are plenty of people to look at beyond the three Australians at all levels across the globe. But I’m just focussing on the sledging, Australia’s specialty and pride. This summer I enjoyed watching some schoolboy First XI matches, games you’d imagine played in the best spirit of the game, with some of the players already enjoying representative honours. Yet batsmen were abused on the field by close-in fielders. Here’s one direct quote: “You’re a fucking ugly cunt.” Not all teams indulged in this behaviour but one is too many. There should be no place on the cricket field for that, but neither the umpires nor the coaches did anything about it. These boys are the future of the game. This is the legacy of these two decades of sledging. The Australian cricket team should be ashamed. It’s time international cricket took a deep breath and start to get the game back to what it was; a game of honour and fair play. Australia has a chance to lead the way.

Getting ahead of the game: Australia's next mini-series

2018-03-26T18:04:00.001+11:00

A lunch room at a cricket ground in Cape Town. Two discouraged looking men are discussing the day’s play

SMITH: I don't understand it, we just can't get on top of these South Africans.

WARNER: I know.

SMITH: Where could we be going wrong? We don’t need to consider our skills or tactics at all. Are you still talking yourself up?

WARNER: Endlessly. Actually the wife's a little sick of it if I'm honest. And the kids.

SMITH: And the sledging?

WARNER: We had an emergency meeting of the sledging subcommittee last night, and we reckon we are on point. We are in THEIR HEADS

SMITH: But didn't one of them get into yours?

WARNER: Yeah and that was really mean. That was over the line.

SMITH: Yeah the line is so important isn't it? And that's why we're so good at it, because we know where the line is, and can define it for the other teams.

WARNER: If they ask.

SMITH: And they never do.

BOTH: Until it's too late.

WARNER: And then it’s all, ooh the Aussies are so mean. Sometimes I just want to… sniffles

SMITH: putting his arm around Warner’s shoulder. It’s all right mate. You didn’t do anything wrong. You never do.

Pause

Enter BANCROFT

BANCROFT: G’day Skipper, g’day Mr Warner. How’s it going? We got a plan to get these blokes out? Have we? Huh? Huh? Cause you guys are ace and if anyone can come up with a plan it’ll be you guys. Yeah. Can’t wait to hear it. I bet it’s a really good one.

SMITH: Go away.

BANCROFT: Yeah, sure skip, anything you say skip. I’m over here if you need me skip.

Exit BANCROFT

Pause

SMITH: What if we, you know, cheated?

WARNER: Cheated?

SMITH: I mean, take professionalism to new levels.

WARNER: Ohhhh. Wouldn’t that be, maybe, over the line?

SMITH: Not if we do it.

WARNER: Good point.

SMITH: If we interfered with the ball.

WARNER: With the ball?

SMITH: A bit.

WARNER: Don't other teams do that sometimes?

SMITH: Oh yeah. All the time. It’s practically part of the game.

WARNER: And how did we react to it?

Pause

SMITH: I think we were cool with it.

WARNER: Yeah cool, that's right. I'm pretty sure we stayed on the right side of the line.

SMITH: I'm not sure the line applies in that situation.

WARNER: But if did, we were.

SMITH: Because we always are.

WARNER: Exactly.

SMITH: But how would we do it?

WARNER: It would need to be subtle. What if we used this bright yellow tape?

SMITH: Yeah, that won’t show up on cameras at all.

WARNER: There’s cameras?

SMITH: I think so.

WARNER: But I can't do it. For some reason those South African bas…

SMITH: Language! You’ve got a small fortune in the swear jar already.

WARNER: Those South African bounders …

SMITH: Much better.

WARNER: … have taken a real set against me. They’ll be watching me like a hawk.

SMITH: I know. I don’t understand it. No-one talks themselves up as much as you, nor sledges as well.

WARNER: It’s a mystery.

SMITH: And I can’t do it, because I’m the captain.

WARNER: But isn’t it your responsib -

SMITH: I said, I can’t.

WARNER: What if we asked someone whose place in the team is heavily dependent on our good will?

SMITH: That would be good. But who would be silly enough...?

Pause. They both smile, look at each other, and call:

BOTH: Bancroft!

Enter BANCROFT

BANCROFT: Yeah fellahs?

END OF SCENE

Old movies, forgotten awards

2018-03-19T22:46:00.000+11:00

I don’t think I particularly like the Oscars anymore. I was never mad for them, didn’t sit up watching till midnight avoiding the news so I wouldn’t know who won what, or of later years trying to find a venue to watch them live. Awards themselves are of dubious value, award shows even more so. When Nicole Kidman pretentiously said “Art is important” to defend her going to the Oscars in the wake of 9/11, the obvious riposte, “Yes but award shows aren’t”, wasn’t mentioned. Ultimately, good work doesn’t always get awards, and awards don’t always go to good work. And as Johnny Carson (I think) said, the Oscars are two hours of entertainment jam-packed into a five-hour show.

Over the last few years Hollywood’s night of artistic self-congratulation has turned into a night of moral self-congratulation, when stars wear dresses of a certain colour or badges to show their disapproval of an appalling mode of human behaviour that has been in the headlines mainly because it is prevalent in Hollywood, whose disapproval is strongest in hindsight. They seem to confuse wearing a designer dress of one colour instead of another as some form of activism, like those people who wear “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt regardless of how they actually treat women in real life, or those people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts and have never once gone from war to war so they can shoot people (I assume that’s what they’re supporting; it was Che’s favourite activity.) I’m not sure how many more open secrets Hollywood can all pretend to be appalled by.

I also dislike the articles that appear discussing the films etc that should never have won the Oscar. I think they’re mean-spirited (which admittedly is spiritus temporum) and again confuses awards with the worth of a film. I of course have my opinions on films I think weren’t worthy winners but good luck to those artists. It doesn’t change anything that matters. So overall, while I will never claim to be uninterested in the Oscars, I am tending towards the disinterested.

But I still like films. One good thing this year is the Foxtel are showing all the best-film award winners in order. I say ‘all’, it’s actually ‘a lot’ but does include the first, 1927’s Wings, through to last year’s Moonlight. There’s a lot there I’ve only ever heard about but never seen: All about Eve, The Apartment, The Deer Hunter, and those that I haven’t seen for a long time: Shakespeare in love, which I will defend to the death so sod off. I would love to have the time and wherewithal to sit and watch for several days, which is a ludicrous idea but still. It’s sobering to consider how many of these films are forgotten. But such is art - and awards.

One film I did watch was 1930’s big winner All Quiet on the Western Front, which won Best Picture and Best Director. It’s one year older than my Dad, and like him, sometimes shaky but stands the test of time well. The acting can be wooden and melodramatic but the film itself greatly affecting. A class of young German schoolboys are implored by their fiercely-patriotic teacher to enlist in the early days of the war, and we follow them through training, battle and their deaths. (Spoiler-alert I guess - but the film is 88 years old and the novel older and WWI isn’t a byword for happily-ever-after.) Some die on the battlefield, some in the hospital. One soldier spends a night in a shell crater, watching the enemy soldier he stabbed die over the course of the hours. He goes home but find no-one understands what he’s been through, least of all the teacher who started him there. It’s following them on this journey that makes it such a moving film. The ending is devastating and the final shot haunting.

The novel was written by Erich Maria Remarque, a WWI veteran, based on his experiences in the German army. Making the film in the late 1920s meant there were plenty of veterans around to act as advisors, in particular Germans, some of whom appear as trainers in the training sequences. The battle sounds are like nothing I’ve ever heard. An old corporal, Kat, describes the sounds of different shells to the newcomers, and I think this specificity is reflected in the soundscape. This closeness to the original event I suspect gives the film a verisimilitude later films can lack, despite advances in technique.

It’s also interesting to watch a film made before Hollywood imposed the Hayes Code on itself to prevent government censorship. A French soldier is blown up leaving nothing but his hands still clinging to the wire - a memory of one of the German veterans who worked on the film. Swimming in a river behind the lines, the young German men spot some French women and bribe them with food. Bare bottoms are seen when they boys show off in the river, and it’s clear the night does involve sex, without being explicit. This sequence is at once touching and pathetic. The women are desperate for food, but the subsequent liaison is one of genuine human connection, which both parties are clearly craving. It’s a

sequence that would not have appeared a decade later for example. For different reasons it may not appear if the film were made now. (There are stories of a new version coming.) And I don’t know if it’s a reflection of German society of the novel or American society when the film was shot, but the boys are also much freer displaying physical affection towards each other. It makes them seem much younger, and their descent into the horrors of war that much more terrible.

The film, like the book, was banned in Nazi Germany for the negative picture of the war. The film was banned in Poland and France for being pro-German. Controversial in its day, still affecting now. We should all be so lucky in the work we create.

The Uses of Churchills

2018-03-13T08:40:00.002+11:00

Just recently we’ve had a lot of Churchills. Gary Oldman won an Oscar for his, John Lithgow won high praise for his, and Brian Cox … well, Brian Cox got stuck with an incredibly dud script. We’ve also discovered that if you make a show with Churchill, you get to add a great part for a female actor of a certain age: in these three examples, Kristin Scott Thomas, Harriet Walter and Miranda Richardson, all play his wife Clementine who was his great supporter, sounding board, conscience and moderator.

But there’s been great and lesser Churchills before 2017. In 2010 Churchill inexplicably turned up as George VI’s supporter in The King’s Speech, played by Timothy Spall. Albert Finney played the part with Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine in 2002’s The Gathering Storm, Brendan Gleeson and Janet McTeer in the 2009 sequel, Into the Storm. Last century saw Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years with Siân Phillips, an eight-part television series (playing Churchill was a theme of Hardy’s career) and Simon Lord as Young Winston with Pippa Steel as young Clementine. And that’s just the highlights.

There’s little mystery as to why Churchill attracts writers and actors. He was born in the age of Victoria and died in the Second Elizabethan Age, a name he coined, living through almost a century. He was a lonely neglected child. He took part in the Boer War and both World Wars, as reporter, soldier and politician - in WWI, soldier and politician. He went from outsider, to insider, from party to party, from voice in the wilderness to the roar of the British Lion. He was given the job of Prime Minister at perhaps the most vulnerable point of Britain’s long history and lead it to triumph. He was a prolific historian winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and also Time Magazine’s Man of the Half Century. Often wrong-headed, he was responsible for military disasters such as Gallipoli and Norway, and yet without him, who knows how long the Nazi control of western Europe could have lasted, and with what consequences. He fought for the Empire and lost it. And at the height of his triumph in the Second World War, he was dumped by the British public who never quite forgave the Tories for the 30s. It’s a hell of a story. Combine with that his character and physical characteristics - the voice, the oratory, the cigars, the drinking, V for Victory, the wit - it’s almost as he decided to gift future actors with too much to work with.

Which makes one wonder, why make stuff up? History doesn’t happen in neat dramatic lines of course and so a certain amount of trimming and editing is part of any historical script. Both The Crown and Darkest Hour have also altered history but not I think fatally. Darkest Hour has Churchill hopping on to the underground. As history it’s wrong and out of character, but dramatically it works. It also talks to Churchill’s ability to draw inspiration from the people, and his actual habit, later, of getting the results of some of the first political polling in Britain. It dramatises the strong connection between Churchill and the people during the war.

The Crown goes a little further. When Churchill had his stroke in 1953, the Queen was one of the first people informed, even if it was kept secret on a wider scale. Churchill was a lot of things but never deceitful to the Crown. Not so in the show. But the show is about Elizabeth II and it gives Claire Foy a wonderfully-written scene where she scolds Churchill for his deception, putting him in his place, while demonstrating her respect for him. It’s beautifully played too by Foy and Lithgow. My favourite episode of The Crown was later when Churchill was having his portrait painted by Graham Sutherland. Again it’s beautifully written and played, this time between Lithgow and Stephen Dillane as the artist. I can forgive a lot for that.

But Churchill. Oh my dear, Churchill.

Winston Churchill as a panicky fool so overwhelmed by his doubts about D-Day that he prays in cod-Shakespeare for a storm to wreck the invasion. Churchill despised by his generals. The screenwriter, Alex von Tunzelmann has taken some facts, such as Churchill’s suggestions for diversionary attacks on other fronts, and the sidelining of the UK as a world power, and spun pure tosh. Ironically Tunzelmann is an historian who wrote a series of columns about historical films, rating them both as films and as history. Her own work fails as both - it’s a dull silly film and execrable history. I have not read any of her other work but this seems to be her first crack at World War Two, and at film writing. I hope she improves in both. Her thesis is bad and her exposition clumsy. “This is our last briefing on Operation Overlord, the assault on the German occupying forces in the north of France,” announces John Slattery as Eisenhower. One almost expects one of the other generals to pipe up “We’re going to do what to who now?”

Many writers proclaim their discovery Churchill’s feet of clay as if they’re the first ones. And we live in an age that loves to drag down great people to our level - or lower if possible. I can’t think of any other reason you would write and produce a film so poor as this. Which is a pity; there’s a strong cast of British and American actors wasted here. There is, as a friend of mine much more knowledgable about these things said, a good film to be made about British doubts about Operation Overlord. There is also plenty of material to play with about the relationship between the British and American generals before and after D-Day. This film is not that film.

Ah well, you say, it’s just a film. But history is taught less and less at schools and most people’s understanding of history is drawn from films and television. I think it’s becoming more important for screenwriters to get history right. With any luck, Churchill will gain the fate it deserves - forgotten and unlamented.

Women in the background? Ellen Kelly

2017-12-02T10:28:00.000+11:00

For some years now historians have been trying to recover the stories of the forgotten groups of history, groups that have been marginalised by law or society and so have had their stories untold. These groups include women, blacks, native groups, gays and other minorities that for one reason or another have gone under the collective societal radar. These new histories have been invaluable in giving a fuller, richer and truer picture of societies.

One of the problems with this however is the question of material. If people are ignored by society, or taken for granted, or treated as hostile or threatening elements, then the evidence for their lives can be much slimmer, better hidden and can take some ferreting out, or in some cases, assumptions must be made. Which is all part of the process.

But it was with some surprise I saw Grantlee Keiza’s book Mrs Kelly: The Astonishing story of Ned Kelly’s mother” was such a thick book, over five hundred pages in hardback. I’ve long thought the women in Ned Kelly’s life needed more attention as both the inspiration for, and great supporters of what is known as the Kelly Outbreak. This was a period of two years from 1878 when a policeman named Fitzpatrick tried to arrest Ned and his brother on his own which went terribly pear-shaped for him, to the Stringybark Creek murders, where Kelly and his gang killed three of the policemen who were now searching for them, to Glenrowan, where three of the gang were killed in a day long clash with police, and through to Kelly’s hanging in November 1880. The recent Australian musical Ned! gave the women more of their due, and here I thought was a book that would do the same. The thickness of the book was encouraging. Mrs Kelly outlived her most famous child by forty years. What had she done in that time?, I had wondered. Here I thought was the book to tell me.

Nope. Mrs Kelly does give a much fuller story of the early life of Ellen Quinn, whose family were free immigrants from Ireland. We have her relationship with her father and his family, which has ramifications even after her marriage to Red Kelly, an alcoholic ex-convict. Despite their hard work, they end up at the bottom of the colonial society, and in Gretta, a small town that is a den of thieves; horse thieves mainly. That she and her children ended up criminals to lesser and greater degrees is hardly surprising. After her husband’s death, she takes up with two men in turn, both of whom get her pregnant, and both of whom abandon her. George King at least married her and lived with her for some years, something Bill Frost didn’t bother with. In all, she had twelve children and the misfortune to outlive all but four of them.

But once she goes to prison in 1788, in the aftermath of the ‘Fitzpatrick Incident’, the bulk of the book tells us the story - again - of the Kelly Outbreak. We hear bits of life inside for a woman with six-month old child, but not much. Seems it would be useful and interesting to hear more of life in a women’s prison in the late 19th Century but no. Kieza goes though the Ned Kelly story again without new useful information or insight. Michael Kennedy, one of the policemen murdered by Kelly, by all accounts a decent man, gets a bigger role here, which is refreshing I admit. Keiza seems to take delight in recounting everyone who made a disparaging remark about the Kelly women, especially Kate, famed in her time both as a beauty and a wonderful horserider, and one of the Kelly Gang’s most loyal supporters in word and action. But Keiza finds someone who found her unattractive and quotes him. That’s putting the women to the forefront.

But the worst is that after Ned’s death, the next four decades are disposed of in a little over fifty pages. And it’s not just Ellen Kelly. Ned’s hangman’s story gets wrapped up. Phew! That was keeping me awake. His sisters, his cousins, policemen and members of the judiciary, all within fifty pages. Like any other book about Ned Kelly, the writer loses a lot of interest once Ned is dead. Which is fine if you’ve called your book Ned Kelly. If you’ve called it Mrs Kelly, it’s unforgivable.

Staring into the abyss: Looking back on some recent history

2017-05-15T09:11:00.000+10:00

I once read a article criticising George Lucas. I know, I’m as shocked at you are. The author took exception to Yoda’s lines, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering.” He summed up his objection to this by saying no-one ever hated Hitler so much they became a Nazi. (Never mind that Yoda never makes the link from fear to the Dark Side complete. Suffering leads to the Dark Side? Or what? Damn you Yoda, I need closure.)

Whoever the writer is, he may now have to concede Yoda was on to something. I did study 20th century German history, including the rise of Hitler to power, as part of my Arts degree. That was some time ago, but when people kept insisting Trump was exactly the same as Hitler, I kept wondering if they knew something I didn’t. To be frank, I was fairly sure they were wrong and engaging in hyperbole (once again, shocked as you are) but I thought I’d better check again, just to be sure.

So I listened to Richard J Evan’s The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany via Audible. This is the first volume of his Third Reich Trilogy which has been acclaimed as the best general history of the Third Reich extant. To sum up, I was right. The differences between Hitler’s climb to power via multiple election campaigns and Trump becoming President almost on a whim, and the vastly different histories of Germany and the United States, are too many to go into here. Read the book. One major difference is that Hitler was able to destroy the Weimar Republic in large part because many of the other parties, Right and Left wing, were committed to doing the same thing, and previous administrations had already greatly reduced the role and power of the parliament long before Hitler put it out of its misery. But I digress.

What did strike me as having similarities to today’s politics were some of the Nazi tactics. The SA brownshirts were well-known for beating up opponents in the streets or at their meetings. (As were the Communists.) And if the Nazis weren’t able to prevent speeches other public events being run by political opponents on the grounds of public safety (mainly fear of the fights that would break out orchestrated by the Nazis) they would attend the event and with shouting and other methods make it impossible for the event to continue.

Let’s see: beating up opponents, preventing speeches on grounds of public safety, and shouting down speakers. Who does this these days?

Mainly it seems to be people who don’t like Trump. The so-called Antifa (Anti-Fascist) movement actually appear in masks and beat up Trump supporters. At least the Brownshirts showed their faces. Students who consider themselves liberals ie those who respect other people’s opinions and beliefs even if they differ to their own, shout and disrupt and in some cases physically threaten speakers they don't like to stop them speaking on their campus. They have built barriers and lit fires to stop people from going in to listen. And that’s if the university administration haven’t already withdrawn the invitation to speak on grounds of public safety.

So Yoda has been in some way vindicated, and George Lucas revealed as a writer of surprising prescience. There are people who hate Trump so much they have become fascist in order to stop him. To quote Christopher Booker, "Evil men don't get up in the morning saying, 'I'm going to do evil.' They say 'I'm going to make the world a better place.'" Or to quote Terrence Rattigan, "The trouble with being on the side of right, as one sees it, is that one often finds oneself with such questionable allies."

The old sow that eats her young: surviving Ireland

2017-05-09T10:24:00.003+10:00

The history of twentieth century Ireland is a complex one, with wars, terrorism, partition, combined with strong social conservatism, religious oppression and economic depression, yet coupled with a strong and vibrant culture and economic revivals, all culminating in a peace process that is still playing out.

Sebastian Barry is fascinated with this history, particularly the turnaround from 1916-1921, when via wars, terrorism and negotiation, a British Colony became a divided country and loyalties were overturned and vilified. Barry’s McNulty brothers of Sligo, Eneas, Jack and Tom, all live through these times and later decades. How they do so, the effects on their lives and the lives of those around them, form the core of three of Barry’s novels, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), The Secret Scripture (2008), and The Temporary Gentleman (2014).

The three novels do not operate as a trilogy in the traditional sense of telling one story in chronological order. Rather we get stories that by their nature overlap, sometimes illuminating each other. It’s more a mesh than a thread. I read them in reverse order of publishing. In reading The Temporary Gentleman, there was a reference to his sister-in-law being confined to an isolated hut and I thought, what’s that story? I was delighted to discover there was a novel that told it: The Secret Scripture. Having read that, I wanted to learn more about the oldest brother Eneas who could only visit his family furtively. So they can be read in any order. And they encourage rereading of each other. We know people remember the same events differently and Barry has captured that very well.

The narrative style of each book is different. Eneas’s story is told in third-person. The Temporary Gentlemen is told as a journal, middle brother Jack trying to work out the steps whereby he ends up a remnant of the British Empire living in Africa’s Gold Coast. The Secret Scripture is two journals, one from Tom’s wife, Rosemary, now around a century old and living in an asylum, and that of her doctor, William Grene.

Both Eneas and Tom suffer from having taken ‘the king’s shilling’. A stint in the British Merchant Marine during the WWI sees Eneas ostracised on his return home. With little other option, he takes a job in the Royal Irish Constabulary and that puts him on an IRA death list. It is his best friend from childhood who is designated to warn him off. For the rest of his life, Eneas is on the run, a wanderer like his namesake.

Glamorous Jack ends up in the British Navy in WWII, but his main problem is his drinking, which affects not only him and his career but has a devastating affect on his wife Mai and their children. Only in exile, writing his journal, does he start to realise that he may be the bad guy, the person responsible for all that has gone wrong in his life - and his beloved wife's.

Tom also marries a beautiful woman (Barry thinks being beautiful in Ireland is a forerunner of tragedy). Haunted by memories of her childhood, her father, rebels and soldiers of the civil war, Rosemary breaks the social mores of Sligo and ends up rejected by her husband and condemned by the local priest. She is imprisoned first in a lonely shack then the asylum. As she tries to remember events from nearly a century ago, her doctor is trying to do the same, finding old records and piecing together her story. With mental illness in her family, plus decades of confinement, Rosemary is not a reliable narrator, but then, neither is her doctor or priest.

Barry has taken fragments of his family’s history, and turned them into gripping narratives. I would be interested to know how much detail of the other stories Barry had worked out when he wrote the first in 1998, as they work together well. His writing is poetic and lyrical. The endings of all three tend towards the sudden, and I’m not convinced they entirely work, but these are still three excellent novels.

And the mesh is widening. In New Orleans, Eneas wonders if he should stay in the States, perhaps find his great uncle who emigrated there. That uncle's story has now been told in Days without End (2016), a novel set in the US Civil War. Like The Secret Scripture, it has been awarded the Costa Book of the Year. Another visit to the McNulty family beckons.

"Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?": Lives of the Beach Boys

2017-05-04T09:16:00.000+10:00

Did you hear? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his lyrics, a decision I’m still not convinced by. I’m not sure how comfortable Bob is with it either, given his reluctance to go and collect the thing. I know a trip to Sweden with a dinner, gold medal and a lot of money sounds horrid but it can’t be that bad.

But I suspect part of his reluctance is part of my discomfort; lyrics aren’t poetry, and don’t operate on their own. They aren’t written to be read or recited but rather sung or listened to. Which isn’t to say a good lyricist isn’t as skilful or artistic wordsmith as any other writer. But for a lyricist words and music, as the old Jo Jo Zep song said, go together. There have been a number of books about music or lyricists that have the words printed but the only way you can really read them is to have the tune in your head as you do so. Otherwise they lose a lot of their life. And while there is no Nobel Prize for music, there’s none for mathematics, art, architecture, engineering, and a whole lot of other human endeavours as well, and it doesn't make them less important.

The interplay between lyric and melody is crucial. Tim Rice in his autobiography quotes the first verse of his lyric for the tune that became “I don’t know how to love him,” which he maintains would have killed that song dead had it ever been released, despite the melody. All together now:

I love the Kansas morning

Kansas dawn comes to greet me

Kansas winds

Shift and sigh

I can see you now, we’re flying high

Kansas love of mine

(It’s a prison song, a man in a jail cell in Maine lamenting his girl back home. Really.) On a more worrying note, George Gershwin’s songs are sung less and less, due largely to his brother Ira’s sometimes twee lyrics, despite the beauty of the melodies. Words and music go together.

Which brings me in a very roundabout way to two autobiographies I have read lately from two of the founding Beach Boys, Mike Love and Brian Wilson, both released in 2016 within weeks of each other. Mike Love is the front man of the band, one of their lyricists, and still goes about with a band called ‘The Beach Boys’, although he is only original one there.

Brian Wilson who wrote, arranged and produced the Beach Boys music, also tours but with ‘The Brian Wilson Band’ as Love has the legal rights to the name. It’s a long story.

The two books couldn’t display a greater contrast. Love’s is chronological, detailed, sometimes to the point of tedium, and I have to say, aimed at scoring and settling points. He feels his part of the Beach Boys’ success has been undervalued both financially and artistically. And to be fair to the man, he’s right. His lyrics on surf and girls was one of the features of their early albums and a big part of their appeal to people who had never seen the beach, leading to their worldwide success. As lead vocalist and front man, he was a dynamic performer. His name was kept off many of the singles for which he was lyricist (by Murray Wilson) and he had to sue to get his rightful recognition and money. Despite his practice and championing of transcendental meditation, he clearly has trouble letting go of years of resentment and anger and it seeps throughout the book.

Wilson’s books is more amorphous, drifting from present to past, in no particular order. He can go from a description of his current family life to a session of Pet Sounds almost in a sentence. The oldest son of an abusive father, he has famously struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues, and these things affect him still. He finds it difficult to talk about his father Murray, the man who gave him music, who was crucial to the band's early years, but who also beat him and belittled him. His therapist Gene Landy saved his life, but also drugged him, abused him and exploited him. Yet here Wilson is, still writing, still performing but also aware of what his survival has cost. The book can be generalised at times, but at others picks up details and stories that may otherwise have been overlooked. He’s not the most reliable narrator, which he is aware of, but the writing is never confusing, and throughout displays a generosity of spirit that is lacking in Love’s work.

Love is defensive. Although he is open about his own shortcomings as husband and as a father, as a band member he did no wrong. All those stories you heard about his criticisms of Pet Sounds or SMiLE? “Don’t fuck with the formula”? Never happened. Not one of them. Ever. And so much of the Beach Boys music would never have happened without his magic touch. Just a word, a minor suggestion and near disaster turns into commercial magic. I think he is overplaying his hand. He is also trapped in that idea that good work is commercial work, otherwise it's not good. He's not alone there.

Love’s greatest problem is that he is a classic Alpha male in a situation where he must play second fiddle. While his lyrics work in the main part, that is all they do. They don’t get taken out of the song and quoted, they way Dylan’s do. Or The Beatles. He is a workaday lyricist, successful for sure but no more. Nor as he got older did he ever really attempt to move on from his milieu of beaches and girls. Sometimes it worked - “Do it again”, “Kokomo” - other times it was embarrassing, tending towards creepy - “Hey little tomboy”. Love’s attempt at being political , “Student Demonstration Time”, is likewise painful to listen to, and his song about transcendental mediation oddly jarring. I have read some of his solo work is quite good but I haven’t listened to it.

The greater talent in the band was of course Brian Wilson. His melodies, his harmonies, and his arrangements are some of the greatest in the pop era. What still draws people to the Beach Boys is this music, sometimes in spite of the lyrics. “Don’t Worry Baby” is a stunningly beautiful song - about drag racing. They lyrics here are by Roger Christian, who wrote all the car song lyrics. Other lyricists include Tony Asher (Pet Sounds), Van dyke Parks (SMiLE), himself and other band members. Another big hit "Sloop John B" was a cover of a folk song. As he got older, he pushed himself as a musician, which lead to seeking out new collaborators. Some of his most beautiful work was not commercial but was genuine artistic expression.

In short, Brian Wilson’s successes were not limited to his work with Mike Love. But Mike Love’s success is limited to his work with Brian Wilson, and he resents it. (Another exception here: "Kokomo" was the Beach Boys’ only number one hit for which Brian Wilson neither wrote or produced.) But at their height of commercial success, Wilson and Love were the core of the Beach Boy's writing. The biggest hit for the band, "Good Vibrations", was a Love lyric to Wilson's music and arrangement. Mike Love has been undervalued for his contribution to the band, and unfairly characterised as the Villain to Wilson' Hero. That said, I think the main difference between these two autobiographies is instructive: Love admits to Wilson’s talents, while Wilson champions Love’s.

"All the live long day" Working the railway

2017-04-21T09:27:00.000+10:00

For most people today the train is just a means of getting to work. From our suburban station, we ride in increasingly crowded carriages until we get to the city stations, and shuffle off onto crowded platforms and up uncertain escalators and out of the station and off to wherever we work. We don't think about the trains all day until work is over and we hope it's running on time and we can repeat the procedure and get home as quick as we can. Aluminium, hopefully air-conditioned, rubbish on the floor, graffiti on the windows, rubbish and graffiti on the seats, they are a means to an end and nothing more.

And yet, if from inside a train late at night, you see the yellow light on an empty platform, perhaps a young couple waiting together, you are reminded of the romance the rails once held, and sometimes still do. Watch a busy city station when a steam engine happens to pull through. Voices drop, heads turn, and together we watch this archaic vehicle make its way noisily, belching black smoke, hissing steam, rattling on the rails, and all we see is an elegant survivor from a simpler, more innocent time, and there in the chaos of a modern city, the station becomes a sudden pool of yearning. Then the train goes and modernity floods us in its wake.

Trains were the harbingers of modern life. Now we could travel great distances in reasonable time and reasonable comfort. People who had never travelled more than ten miles from their home could travel across countries, across continents. And many did, a whole world opening to the common person. Crops, livestock, and minerals could now be transported quickly and efficiently from deep inside a landmass and taken to the ports for transportation across the seas. Modern globalisation began with the rails.

Now we needed to know the time in other places. If a train left New York, say, at midday, when would it encounter the train from Chicago, which left at Chicago's midday? Two metal behemoths driven by engines powered by high pressure steam heading towards each other with no idea of when or where they might meet and no way to avoid each other if they did was clearly a recipe for disaster. Time zones were introduced across the United States expressly to make sure everyone knew where trains were going to be at any time.

So the history of trains is not just adventure and romance. Making long distance travel relatively fast and convenient saw small towns, often self-contained communities, become mere specks on the way to somewhere else, as goods could now come in from the big cities and the young people would go away. The death of many a small country town was heralded by their train station.

They have been the tools of oppression and control. The transcontinental railway of the United States brought the country together and made it easier to drive the Native Americans off their lands. The trains of India, now a backbone of the country, were put in place by British companies to take their produce out of the country and get armed troops to trouble spots as quickly as possible. The train timetables of 1914 made war inevitable as armies were mobilised via rail even before war was declared, with no way to bring them back. And how can we forget the millions shovelled into trains and freighted to the death camps of Nazi Germany, through stations with flowerbeds and painted clocks that no 'passenger' would see twice? Or the long tracks across Russia to take their internal enemies to isolation and death in the gulags? Even now, China has built an "impossible" rail line into Tibet through the natural border of the Himalayas, an act described by the Dalai Lama as 'cultural genocide'.

Tom Zoellner in his book Train: Riding the rails that created the modern world - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief covers well the many facets of railway history, and the train's continuing economic and social impact. There is a good potted history of trains, (the Americans called it the 'railway', the British the 'railroad', then at some point they swapped) then the rest of the book is taken up of his travels on long-distance trains, including going down the length of Britain, crossing Russia and the United States, through India, China, South America and the super fast trains of Japan. Each chapter considered the purpose and history of these lines, and their future. Rail is still the most efficient and greenest way to transport heavy materials across country, even if governments are reluctant to spend money on the infrastructure. Perhaps one of the impacts of global warming will be a return to the trains on a greater scale. While the book isn't as enthralling as I had hoped, it is good. Perhaps to a more dedicated train man, there would be greater appeal.

As I've mentioned, I work on the trains in Melbourne Australia. Since the 90s, railway patronage has boomed from a long decline as people got tired of putting expensive petrol into cars to drive to difficult-to-find parking and paying through the nose. Government (not only Victoria's but everywhere; the long decline and sudden rise of passenger numbers was common throughout the first world) was slow to react, and tired facilities and other inefficiencies saw long delays and cancelled or overcrowded trains. Since I've been working, however, new trains continue to be bought and put into service, more services are running and are more on time, stations are being redeveloped, or new ones added, and level-crossings are disappearing, leading to a more efficient passenger service. Co-incidence? Perhaps… I'm not going to pretend everything's fine, but it is much better and continues to improve. People are voting with their feet and passenger numbers still rise.

I don't think we'll see another golden age of the railway. The luxury services are more expensive than flying, by quite a margin, and we all seem to have less time than ever. Attempts to put in fast trains between Sydney and Canberra, or other Australian cities, always come up against the barrier of cost versus benefit, perhaps rightly. Europasses and long rail trips are the stuff of holidays and backpacking, not of everyday life. But next time you're in the train, heading to work, wondering if they guy next to you even knows what deodorant is, try to listen to the rhythm of the wheels in their timeless pattern on steel, rock and wood, and ponder the long history that you are part of, every time you ride.

Let the Trumpfish sound? The history of Huey P Long

2017-01-18T11:20:00.000+11:00

It starts with a Democratic Party running a primary where 'the powerful politicos decided the results beforehand and controlled the voting by means both fair and foul", and whose candidate "ignored the rural and impoverished areas." It went into a campaign described "as amusing as it was depressing", and ended up elevating into public office "a man possessing neither culture nor refinement, a man whose every public or private act is offensive to good taste", a man "without a scintilla of respect for worthy womanhood."*

Louisiana state politics from 1928 to 1936 is not exactly a world away.

The man then was Huey P Long, Governor, Senator and Presidential candidate. He called himself the Kingfish, and the nickname stuck. For his admirers, and they ran into the tens of thousands in his home state and through the country, it spoke to his down to earth manner, his humour, his preparedness to get down and dirty if he needed to, and his slogan, Every man a king. To his enemies, who numbered about the same, it suggested a bottom feeder in a swamp, dangerous and difficult to catch.

He took Louisiana out of the dark ages in many ways. He built thousands of miles of roads, bridges over the Mississippi, gave free textbooks to all school children, expanded and improved the state university, and instituted literacy classes for adults. He did so through coercion, a wide system of patronage, extortion, bullying, kidnapping, nepotism (which didn't always work - his brother was one of his greatest opponents), almost bankrupting the state and making himself very rich indeed. He took control of the powerful Democratic Party machine, that tried and tried again to stop him for their preferred candidates, and made it his own. When he died he held operating power in almost every government institution the state of Louisiana had to offer. He was the nearest thing the United States so far has had to a fascist leader.

Huey P Long inspired art, Sinclair Lewis's "It can't happen here," the story of a home-grown American fascist leader, and Robert Penn Warren's "All the king's men" the story of a backwoods politician who turns from idealist to demagogue. Both novels have been turned into plays and Warren's twice into a film, once in 1949 to Academy-Award-winning effect, and again in 2006 to lesser effect. (Some acting is so bad, someone once said, only a great actor is capable of it; hello Sean Penn.) The art, it must be said, had no effect on him. (To be fair, he was mostly dead at the time.)

I first came across the Kingfish when I saw the second half of a Ken Burns documentary. At the time he reminded me of Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen who likewise took an economically backward state into the twentieth century by fair means and foul. But the Kingfish was Joh only more so. Both used the elite branches of the police service for political purposes, but Joh never set them on political opponents, brandishing their machine guns, forcing them out of buildings. Nor did Joh ever get into fistfights on the floor of parliament. Or kidnap anyone.

Long came to mind more recently for obvious reasons. People want to compare Trump to Hitler, largely because Hitler is one of the few people from history who is generally known. If you don't like someone's politics, there's no-one else to compare him to. It's easy, and generally unhelpful. But he reminded me of Long - the vitriolic attacks on opponents, the disdain for the press, the hatred by his enemies, the worship by his admirers, playing to the crowds, and the strong appeal to people who felt forgotten by a complacent government. And the abuse by his opponents of his followers. In Burns's documentary there is footage of a politician dismissing Long's appeal as merely to "the ignorant in distress", as if dismissing them with the former epithet meant you could ignore the latter. And in the end, Long was assassinated. People are already hoping the same will happen with Trump. Too often people opposed to violence and hate find both quite acceptable if aimed at someone they don't like.

Long also built an enormous tower to his own memory. It's the Louisiana State Capitol and you can see it for miles as you drive towards Baton Rouge. It's ludicrous, 36 stories high, looking as though it's a New York skyscraper that got lost, 48 steps leading to the front door, each engraved with the name of a state in order of admittance to the union (Alaska and Hawaii since added to the top step), and marble sourced from around the world in the foyer. It cost $5 million dollars in Depression dollars. God knows what it would cost today. Facing it across the lawn is Long's grave, topped with a large monument, featuring a statue of Long staring at his Capitol. The guides like to tell you that the concrete monument was paid for by his opponents, to make sure he couldn't get out. (Worth doing the tour if you're in the area) So vanity - there's another common feature to the two men. (Also, as self-given nicknames go, 'The Kingfish' is much better than 'The Donald'. What does that even mean?)

But there are big differences between the two, and they're in Long's favour. Long was a dynamic speaker, both with prepared speeches and off the cuff. An opponent tried to appeal to the poor by talking about his childhood in bare feet. Long responded "I can go one better than that! I was born in bare feet!" Long was also extremely intelligent. He studied law for one year (of a three year course), missed most of his classes and failed his subjects. He insisted on sitting the bar exam however, and due to his own hard work and private study, passed. He later argued in the Supreme Court, where noted jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes praised his legal mind. (He often appointed himself state counsel while Governor, another way to line his own pocket.) This was also a product of his prodigious memory, which meant he remembered clients from his days as a salesman when campaigning, nor never let a slight go or an enemy unpunished. (Pettiness - that's something else they do have in common.) He worked fantastically hard travelling thousands of miles (even before he had improved the roads) into the poor and rural areas of the state and made them his own. James Thurber, the novelist, cartoonist and humorist, remembered his almost constant state of movement, even when 'relaxing' in his hotel room.

But the biggest difference is that Long knew how to run a party machine, government departments, and both houses of a legislature. Yes he did so corruptly, but as more than one enquiry found, that was business as usual in Louisiana, taken to the nth degree. Trump has no experience in this area at all. Even the General presidents, Grant and Eisenhower, who had never held public office, knew how to deal with massive organisations under astonishingly adverse conditions, while dealing with the quirks, varying skill levels and interpersonal squabbles of subordinates. I'm not sure what Trump brings to the table, except enormous self-belief. His own party don't like him and he has no legislative experience. He keeps talking of his business nous, but this seems spotty at best. Imagine a general arguing "I won a number of battles to be fair. Not the war, sure, and some of the other battles were pretty grim if I'm honest, but you know, some." So whatever he may want to do or not to do, you have to query his ability to do so.

Huey P Long for all his considerable faults was fighting for the poor of his state, and did improve infrastructure and education. He lost sight of his ideals, and confused the means, acquiring all the power he could, for the end. What is Donald Trump fighting for? Most of the leading political analysts knew he could never win the election, so they can't tell us. We're getting four years to find out together.

*All quotations are from Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P Long, by Richard D White Jr

"Real life? Or is this just fantasy?" The story of the stories of Santa.

2015-12-07T20:28:00.005+11:00

I've always had a soft spot for Santa Claus. Heck, I know, we all do but for me it goes further than that. I was named after him, or more specifically, St Nicholas, and now, almost 46 years later, I'm fat and jolly.

Santa Claus, like Christmas itself, is a combination of history, Christian mythology and Pagan mythology. Generally speaking, stories, factual and legendary, of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in the 4th century became mixed with Norse mythology, largely stories of Odin, and other traditions and stories, to create this jolly fat fellow in red and white with a big beard, who whips around the world in one night to bring all good children presents on Christmas Eve. He has been celebrated in song and stories,movies and books, and portrayed as elf, human, jolly, stern, and psychotic robot. The only thing missing is a gritty re-boot, although that can only be a matter of time. Odin's missing eye could come in handy.

There have been attempts to give Santa a backstory, one that explains the elves, the workshop, the red and white look, the reindeer, the gift giving, the stockings, and above all the magic. The first attempt that I knew of was one of Rankin and Bass' stop motion animation classics, Santa Claus is coming to town. There the story is told by Fred Astaire and Santa was voiced by Mickey Rooney.

I saw this annually for many years on TV and since TV now is not so helpful, I watch it on DVD every year. It's set in a Ruritanian country, and Kris, an orphan brought up by elves, defies the miserable rule of Burgermeister Meisterburger to bring gifts to the children of a small town. Eventually, with the help of a reformed Winter Warlock and others, he does the same to the world. It's a charming tale, one of the best of the Rankin Bass stable.

It was some years later I discovered they had gone to the well a second time with The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a much darker and more mythical approach. Indeed, some fifteen years separate the two films. There the Great Ak, Master Woodsman, with many other forest spirits and creatures, debate whether the man called Claus had done enough to earn the Mantle of Immortality. A baby abandoned in a magic forest becomes Claus, a skilled toymaker. Again he conceives the idea of spreading happiness with toys, helped by his adoptive faery and elven family. But this quest is actively opposed by certain forest spirits who will kill him if they can. This one was not considered as successful, although I found it striking on first viewing. When the credits told me it was based on the novel by L Frank Baum, he of the Oz books, I was determined to find it.

This was pre-internet days (yes children, there were such times) and obscure books were difficult to find. Many years later I did find a copy in a second-hand bookstore. Sadly, I found it more in the vein of Baum's lesser Oz books, episodic, lacking a strong drive, and Claus is not the main mover in removing the threats to him or achieving his dreams, and so becomes a passive character. I have not seen the TV special for a long time, but I remember it as better. Perhaps I am wrong. I should get hold of it too. There is a more recent 2D animation, but it is not very good, although it did hold the attention of my seven-year-old niece nicely.

More recently, Jeff Guinn attempted to bring the stories of Nicholas of Myra together with fables of Santa to write theThe Autobiography of Santa Claus. It's an admirable attempt to marry history and myth into a coherent whole but for me it was bit earnest and a teeny bit dull - it lacked magic.

This year has seen a wonderful addition to the ranks, A boy called Christmas, by Matt Haig. While it hits many of the same points, elves, reindeer, presents, stockings etc it does so in a charming, off-beat and irreverent way, and the story as a whole has unexpected, fresh rhythm.

You may wonder how I know the true story of Father Christmas and I will tell you you shouldn't question such things. Not right at the start of a book. It's rude, for one thing. All you need to understand is that I do know the story of Father Christmas, or why else would I be writing it?

Nikolas, born on Christmas day, is the son of a woodcutter in Finland, whose only two Christmas presents ever have been a sleigh and a doll made out of a turnip. When his father joins an ambitious group looking for proof of elves up in Lapland, Nikolas is left in the care of his deeply unpleasant aunt Carlotta, and, as you might say, adventure ensues.

This is not a twee, nor even a safe story. Nikolas and the other characters he meets on the way are in genuine danger, and death and exploding heads can ensue. But through it all is the thread of belief in magic, and believing though you've never seen it, like a mouse can believe in cheese, even if he's never seen cheese. The illustrations by Chris Mould are fun and charming, and occasionally help to push the story along, or at least explicate a point otherwise glossed over. There's even some reindeer poo and wee jokes, if you like that sort of thing - and who doesn't? And in the end, it all boils down to the joy of giving.

I think this would make a lovely gift, and would be excellent book to be read aloud. I think you should get in quick before it becomes a classic book everyone knows. And available in bookstores right now!

Tried to smile, gave it all away? 'Smile' lost and almost found.

2015-02-11T08:12:00.000+11:00

There is an excellent series of small books on great or significant albums called 33 1/3. If you are interested in popular music, you may want to get hold of these. Each album is selected by the author, each with their individual approach and style, reflecting on the album, the artist, and the times they operate in. With more than one hundred books and counting in the series- from Serge Gainsborough, to Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash, Hole, Public Enemy, Flying Burrito Brothers, Black Sabbath and Kanye West - they cover a wide range of style and times. If you feel so moved, you can pitch an album and have a go yourself.

Personally, I have Swordfishtrombones (Tom Waits) ABBA Gold, Pet Sounds, and Smile (both The Beach Boys) from the series. So far, only the Beach Boys have two albums covered in the catalogue. Even odder, one of those albums doesn't exist. Not really. Which is maybe why it's there.

Smile was the great unfinished album of the 60s. So the story goes, hearing the Beatles' Rubber Soul, Brian Wilson, the composer and producer for the Beach Boys, was inspired to write an album in which every song was good, no filler. The result was Pet Sounds, often held up as one of the great albums. The Beatles' response to that was Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, no slouch itself. Wilson went to top that with Smile, a teenage symphony to God, as he termed it. But pressure from his band, himself, his drug-use, his already fragile psyche, and from the industry saw increasingly-eccentric Wilson crack, and put the tapes away, never he said to be used. Wilson himself went into a long period of psychological trauma, from which he emerged periodically only to fall back, until he made a solo comeback, problematic in itself, in the late 80s. The man back today producing new music, appearing live around the world, is a scarred-survivor.

But some of the songs did come out on other albums; 'Heroes and Villains', 'Barnyard', 'Vegetables', 'Momma Says' 'Wind Chimes', 'Wonderful' and 'Surf's Up', the song that prompted Leonard Bernstein to call Wilson a genius, all made their way onto other releases, some as whole songs, some as fragments. (Van Dyke Parks, Wilson's lyricist for Smile, suggested 'Surf's Up' be put on one album and used as the title instead of the planned Landlocked, and the album should sell a million. He was right.) Wilson's magnum opus, 'Good Vibrations', previously released as a single, was the band's first million seller and was meant to be the album's climax. Why that never happened has been the topic of books, movies, articles and countless discussions and arguments.

The Beach Boys next album instead of Smile was Smiley Smile, which Carl Wilson described as a bunt, rather than a home run. The Beach Boys stumbled ahead of the game here, with an album whose production was simpler and more direct. Dylan and the Beatles were both to offer much simpler albums in its wake. Hopes that Smile would ever see the light of day faded and fans responded with pirated bootleg versions, arguing over which songs would make the album and in which order. My favourite comment of all time, about just about anything on the internet, was one fan who declared, "I don't care what Brian Wilson says, [name of song] was never going to be on Smile!" If that doesn't sum up the world of internet comments, I don't know what does.

Then in 2004, the unthinkable happened; Brian Wilson toured presenting a live version of Smile, then released a studio album, Brian Wilson presents SMiLE. The arguments started immediately, how much was this the Smile album, really? It was forty years since he had first attempted it, production methods are all so different, didn't he say it should never be released, the voices were not the Beach Boys, and so on. Indeed, given what had happened to him in the interim, how much was Brian Wilson still Brian Wilson? The album was a critical success, winning a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Then in 2011, the Beach Boys management released The Smile Sessions, doing what the fans had been doing for decades, creating an album from the session tapes. It too was supervised by Wilson but it too is not the Smile album, by definition. In any case, there are now two official versions of an album that doesn't exist.

Being a bit of a Beach Boys tragic, I have both versions in my collection. Wilson's is the better for mine, better finished with a better flow, which only makes sense, as he extensively reworked the material with a band, led by musical director Darian Sahanaja, while Parks reworked the lyrics. The voices are not the Beach Boys, but they're pretty darn good. I can also see why the rest of the band was so worried about it. It is an unusual album, a collection of three suites rather than a traditional pop album. Park's lyrics are poetic, obscure, baroque. You can hear the influence of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Wilson attempting to give pop music the same veneer and relationship to classical music as Gershwin did for jazz. The opening number, 'Our Prayer', would not sound out of place next to the 'Humming Chorus' from Madame Butterfly. The album has a ambition and scope that is unmatched in popular music.

In any case, 33 1/3's Smile is an atypical book in the series. Usually, the track by track analysis of the album takes up the bulk of the book. Instead, we have an essay on the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, the progress of their music and its place in the popular pantheon, as well as an examination of the story and myth of Smile. Only in the last few pages are individual tracks glanced at. The author Luis Sanchez finds a much more positive story in the tapes from the Smile sessions. Instead of a man falling apart, he hears a man in control of himself, his music and sensitive to the needs of his collaborators. There are other books on the subject that I think are better. As it never actually examines the album itself, it doesn't really fit in with the series. I was disappointed. There is much to discuss with the extraordinary music and lyrics, the differences between the 1966 tapes and the 2004 versions musically, lyrically, as well as the differing track orders proposed by Wilson then and now, but Sanchez does nothing with any of this. It's a missed opportunity.

Why Smile was never finished in 1966 remains a mystery. We can never know what it would have been like, but at least we now have some good educated guesses to go on.

For what it is worth

2015-01-08T18:35:00.001+11:00

For what it is worth, here are some of the images that got their creators murdered. Technically I suppose this puts me at risk but I seriously doubt I put my life in danger by publishing them. Even from this small selection you can see that Charlie Hebdo is an equal-opportunity offender. If you google them, you'll find absolutely spectacular Christian blasphemies, among other images, all offensive to someone I'm sure. Charlie Hebdo are in the tradition of French anti-clericalism, one of the moving spirits behind the French Revolution.

Remember, if you don't believe in freedom of speech for speech you don't like, you don't really believe in freedom of speech.

We must not allow the fanatics for whatever cause damage or limit our freedom.

We must not make excuses for them.

We must stand for what we believe.

Sic semper: Killing Kennedy and Lincoln

2014-12-17T07:36:00.003+11:00

Lincoln and Kennedy are the bookends of presidential assassinations. There were attempts before and attempts since, as well as two other successful kills, but they are, so far, the alpha and omega of that story. Which is partly why their deaths attract the most attention. A quick google search for books on both topics will bring pages and pages of results, let alone web pages, papers, articles popular and academic, films, TV and yes, at least one musical, Sondheim's Assassins, which starts with Lincoln and ends with JFK. We probably don't need anymore - but here goes.

The Kennedy assassination is well-known, on film, and still controversial. How could a single gun-nut shoot down the president? Why was he killed himself while surrounded by policemen days later? Surely there is more to this than meets the eye. Coincidences, conflicting eye-witness reports, and inconsistencies all tend to prove there was a lie being told to the people.

Vincent Bugliosi would disagree. Bugliosi was a successful and experienced District Attorney in Los Angeles, prosecutor of the Manson Family, and the author of Helter Skelter. Having acted as prosecutor in a mock trial of Oswald, his professional curiosity was piqued, and the result is Reclaiming History: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a large (1600 pages) ambitious book that aims to put to rest the idea that anyone but Oswald was responsible for Kennedy's death. (I didn't actually read this book, but instead listened to Edward Hermann reading it. Which was good, but I didn't get any illustrations - of which there are 32 pages!) As for the inconsistencies, the coincidences, Bugliosi will tell you that is part of any real-life murder, which rarely have a scriptwriter to neaten things up.

It would be pointless for me to reproduce Bugliosi's arguments, and more importantly evidence, as it would be tantamount to reproducing the book. The first section, available as a separate book, Four Days in November (which was made into a film, Parkland) details the assassination and what immediately followed, hour by hour, minute by minute, and during the assassination itself, second by second. It is as thorough a retelling of the events from Kennedy awaking on November 22 to Oswald's burial on November 25 as you could ever find.

The second section goes through the main conspiracy theories and exposes their utter lack of evidence and their fantasist origins. Again, going into detail would be tedious, but in printed form Bulgiosi provided references and notes for you to follow. As an example, take the fourth shot. Oswald, as has been demonstrated several times, had plenty of time and expertise to make his three shots. But when the House Selected Committee on Assassinations in 1976 , lead by a Senator who believed in the conspiracy theory, handed down their report, they said there was a fourth shot, hence a second gunman and a conspiracy. They could not name anyone who was part of that conspiracy and in fact explicitly ruled out the usual suspects - CIA, the mob, FBI etc. Their only evidence of a second shooter was an audio tape of a motorbike that was supposed to be part of the motorcade, allegedly recording a fourth shot. It was the only evidence for a fourth shot, and the expert who identified it as such said the tape could only be supportive evidence and not evidence in itself. Apart from technical problems with this tape, we are supposed to believe that a motorcycle policeman close enough to hear four shots, 150 meters behind the car, neither revved his engine to join the rush to the hospital, nor turned on his siren, but instead continued in the same fashion as he did before. Moreover, other acoustical evidence on the tape suggests the 'fourth shot' took place a minute after the first three. Far more likely then, it was a motorcycle in another part of town and the shot, static or some other innocent noise.

Not that evidence or lack thereof will put a conspiracist off their pet theory. Indeed, they will say people like myself are falling for the Big Lie, one told often enough so that people will believe it. But consider this: most people believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy despite the utter lack of evidence. What then is the Big Lie and who is falling for it?

The image of John Wilkes Booth leaping from a theatre box to the stage, and breaking his leg in the process is imprinted on the historical imagination. It may also be wrong. Having shouted something - Sic semper tyranis? The South is avenged? A theatre full of witnesses disagree - he walked quickly from the stage through the wings to the stage door, mounted a difficult horse and rode off. The leg was broken, it seems, later on his ride. What else do we picture incorrectly?

Lincoln was only one of the victims on April 14 1865. His Secretary of State Francis Seward was also attacked that night, and left with horrific injuries, while the attacker assigned to Vice-President Andrew Johnson lost his nerve at the last minute. The conspiracy was ambitious in scope, months in planning, had different members coming and in and trying to get out, transformed from a single kidnapping to a planned triple-murder, and yet we only really know one name, that of Booth. And having read American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W Kauffman, I'm not entirely sure Booth would be unhappy about that. What he would be deeply grieved by would be the high esteem Lincoln is held in today, and why: freeing the slaves, and prosecuting a successful war against the Confederacy.

Like Bugliosi's book, this is a detailed account of the assassination. As this was a long conspiracy which started before November 1864, naturally the author can't go into hour by hour build up, but for the assassination itself and its immediate aftermath, Kauffman does just that. By the time the other conspirators were tried and hanged it was July 1865 so this book is covering a lot more time in a much more user-friendly length. It is a very readable book, wearing its deep research lightly. Clearly the emphasis is on Booth, his colourful family, his life and motivations. Again there are myths and misconceptions here that Kauffman is keen to clear up. Booth's career was not on the wane, nor was he losing his voice. His plan to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond was a wild one, but not without possibility while the war was continuing. But he dithered so long, Robert E Lee surrendered and people were waiting for the other Southern armies to follow suit. Those who had heard of his plan mocked Booth and his grandiose scheme. The South was falling, Booth was losing face, so out of vanity and bitterness, he crept into the theatre box and shot the President at point blank range.

His other stated motivation was Lincoln's supposed tyranny. And he was not alone in that thought. Suspending habeas corpus and other sections of the Constitution for the duration had made Lincoln some bitter enemies, and more than one of them had wondered out loud and on the record where was the Brutus to stop this Caesar. Booth was consciously following in the Roman's footsteps to save a Republic. But even then he waited too long, by a day. As Kauffman so elegantly puts, it, "Booth had hoped to to kill Lincoln on the Ides and highlight his resemblance to Caesar; but instead he shot him on Good Friday, and the world compared him to Christ."

But Booth's victims went far beyond the President. Any hope of mercy for the defeated Confederacy was gone. Lincoln's wife was eventually committed. Henry Rathbone who was seriously injured trying to capture Booth in the theatre box, went mad with guilt years later, murdered his wife and saw out his days in an asylum. Seward never fully recovered from his wounds. Booth would write to people with veiled hints, including Vice President Johnson, so as to implicate them in the conspiracy if it went wrong, to the point where lives and careers were damaged and destroyed, and people still ponder if Johnson was part of it. Booth was a vain, calculating and cunning man, who was a successful actor, and a successful assassin, whose actions brought more pain and trouble for the Southern states he was claiming to protect. Sic semper indeed.

Conflicting witness reports, inconsistencies, and coincidences are scattered throughout both the deaths of Lincoln and Kennedy. In one case we don't even consider them important, in the other we use them to create conspiracies to implicate the world. Lincoln died in a simpler time, we in the grip of the parochialism of the present would say, so his death was simpler. Kennedy was our hero, and heroes don't get killed by misfits. Extraordinary men get killed by extraordinary means, vast conspiracies, full of hundreds of evil men. But life is not neat nor well-written. A lone gun nut reaches for his moment, and the rest is history.

Born to Rule: Edward VIII

2014-10-14T16:53:00.000+11:00

Nice photo-op

There is an air of romance about Great Britain's Edward VIII and fair enough; he did give up the throne for love. Beyond that, my only impressions of him have been garnered from popular culture - a selfish man (perhaps) a womaniser (true, although his marriage was a long and successful one) and nasty to his brother (not true, at least not before or during the abdication crisis: later perhaps) whose life after the abdication did not amount to much (well..) After reading Philip Ziegler's Edward VIII, while I feel more informed, I cannot say I feel much better towards the subject. I do think this is as sympathetic a biography as you're going to get, without lapsing into hagiography. It's a very effective retelling of the Abdication Crisis, which in the end is the most interesting thing about Edward.

The marriage which was not expected to last - Simpson was not Edward's first great love affair, and the others had petered out - did so until Edward's death in 1976. Given our next king will be a divorcee married to another divorcee, we can see that time has changed (although whether she will be Queen is still a matter of speculation.) It was Noel Coward who suggested that there should be a statue of Wallis Simpson in every town in Britain, as a tribute to the woman who stopped Edward becoming king. It was a typically waspish Coward thing to say, but contains more than a kernel of truth. A lot of the anger directed towards Simpson derived from her nationality and her marriage status, not to mention her commoner status. But she did seem to bring out the worst in Edward, through her love of money, jewellery, and attention. Not to mention her friends in Germany. But Ziegler dismissed the more lurid rumours about her life and sexuality, simply from lack of evidence.

The other use that Edward gets put to in literature is as King of England in the alternative universe where Germany won WWII. Edward, like many of his time, was an appeaser of the Germans and an admirer of the order that the Nazis brought to what had been a country in some chaos. He visited Germany in the late 30s, met the top Nazis, and has been accused of being pro-Nazi.

Ill-advised photo-op

Ziegler seems satisfied that Edward would not have been a puppet king for the Nazis, should the opportunity present itself. But I cannot help thinking he might have been; not a puppet as such, but he would have seen himself as a mediator between the Germans and the British people. In any case, the point is moot. (In case you're wondering, WE WON!)

This book does spend what seems a lot of time on Edward's youth but I think Ziegler is trying hard to find the boy who became the man who renounced the throne. He felt constrained by his role as a prince, hated the ceremony and dressing up. During WW1, despite being in uniform and asking otherwise, he was kept from the fighting and spent most of it at one headquarters or another which he resented. (He went on record several times saying how much he hated the Germans; indeed he seemed to share most of the common prejudices of his age.) He was also aware of the working class and their life and often commented on a need to do something for them. But in the end he lacked the application, and to be fair, the means to do much at all. If he had kept his throne, he may have kicked against the traces but one suspects he would have stayed a conservative course.

Edward's post-adbication life was about half of his life and yet it takes up perhaps a third of this book, even less, which gives you a fair indication of its action-packed nature. He does well as Governor of the Bahamas during the Second World War, working hard to improve the local economy and the position of the majority black population. But apart from that, most of his energy seemed to be spent on making the Royal Family keep him the style he had become accustomed and trying to get his wife made a Royal Highness. As neither of them were in the line of succession, it seems a fruitless argument. He never seemed to put his energy or his name to anything of use to anyone but himself and his wife.

Possibly from
the Abdication
Crisis

In the end, I kept thinking of what was the point of Edward VIII? If you are born to the royal family, supported by the resources of the people of Britain, and then opt out of what you were born to do, what is the point of you? Perhaps once he had stopped being king, he should have gone out, got a job, and got on with things as Mr Windsor (or Saxe-Coburg or whatever. Actually, just change his name to Sax Coburg and become a jazz man. Ok, that's a bit silly.) Such a path would be unthinkable then, and perhaps now. But we fetishise self-fulfilment these days to the detriment of everything else - responsibility to others, for example. Responsibility to your society. Edward may have been the harbinger to the modern liberal fallacy that your happiness is the only thing that matters and damn everybody and anything else. Duty, sacrifice, selflessness are all qualities we disparage so we can all be the best you you can be, and I don't see society improving as a result. I don't suggest one should ignore personal fulfilment but I'm not convinced it should be the driver of society that it is. In The Madness of George III, the king's last line (in the film at least) is that the Royal Family is there to be an example. Maybe we all looked to the wrong King.

Fabulous monsters: The end of excess?

2014-06-04T09:55:00.000+10:00

The 1960s are popularly held to be a watershed in human history. When the children of the Second World War, freed from the austerity of the last war, and under the shadow of the third, turned away from traditional values of family, law, sex, religion and headed off in a new direction, they began a seismic shift whose aftershocks we still are feeling today. We are over half a century from the 60s which means we live with those who knew the world before then, those who came of age then, and those who have only known the aftermath.

On the other hand, has that much changed? Two books I've just read both claim to detail a marker of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Furious love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the marriage of the century, by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, traces that turbulent love story, while Party of the century: The fabulous story of Truman Capote and his Black and White Ball, by Deborah Davis looks at the writer's life through the prism of his party. Tantalisingly, the stories almost cross: Burton and Taylor were invited to the ball, but were filming overseas and were unable to attend.

Both are stories of excess. The fabulous Burtons, or Dick and Liz as they were known to their distaste, were creatures of excess, of love, of sex, of money, of alcohol, of fighting. Their love seemed to consume them, and their lives together were a tumult. They gave each other strengths that made them both braver people and better actors, but she was the winner of two Oscars while he, nominated for seven, never won one. He was haunted by the stage career he never had, though he denied it. On one bender, he was carried away, crying out "I could have been Lear!" She claimed she was happier being Mrs Burton than Elizabeth Taylor movie star and indeed her acting career became less important to her as she got older. Their fights were legendary, part cathartic, part love-play, part putting on a show for their world-wide audience.

But the fights became more real, more vicious. Though he tried several times to reform, Burton couldn't be sober and with Taylor at the same time. She too overindulged in food, her weight fluctuating alarmingly, and in alcohol, although she held her booze better than her husband. Their love affair was killing them. And younger actors were coming through with regional British accents, unlike the RP accent Burton spent so much time perfecting, the women with fashionable slender figures that Taylor could never hope to emulate. (And growing older is always professionally harder for an actress.) They separated, divorced, remarried and divorced again. In the end both personal and professional pressures forced

them apart, although they were part of each other's lives until the end. Burton married twice again before dying as a result of alcoholism and other long term health issues at only 58. Taylor, who married 8 times in all, became a movie star without movies. Famously she championed the AIDS cause from the 1980s, inspired she said from giving Burton the courage to admit publicly to his haemophilia but in the 1960s. Furious love is fascinating story, and well told, going well beyond any sort of trashy 'expose'.

Truman Capote's career peaked in 1966 with the publication of In Cold Blood. He had gone from a poor Southern boy to a friend of the rich and famous. He celebrated with a masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in November of that year. He planned it to be the party of the century and you could argue he achieved his aim. Davis looks at Capote's life both before and after this party, but the party dominates. Planned to the nth degree and publicised with a touch of genius, it was national news when it happened. The guest list, so revised, polished and altered over months, was a combination of the rich, the famous, the literary, the beautiful and included Capote's friends he had made in Kansas. The party itself was a success although some guests claimed otherwise. Candice Bergen said the party was dull and left early, and in a photo looks spectacularly bored. But that was not the popular perception, and that was all that mattered. But Capote was unable to follow up the spectacular success of In Cold Blood, and the time for palling around with the wives of rich men seemed to have passed. Capote's career was down hill from that time on, and in the end, he was a drunk and a drug addict. He too died young but his flame had died long before. Burton by contrast gave one of his great performances in 1984, the year he died.

Both claim their stories show an end to an era. And perhaps they are in their way. Actors and writers don't seem to live in the way of the Burtons and Capote. But celebrities spending money on frivolities that could save small nations has not gone away, nor has our fascination with them. On the contrary, it has increased to the point where we don't seem to care why they are celebrities, as long as we can see their photos, read their 'candid' interviews, follow the ups and downs of their relationships and careers, and when one of them dies, we mourn as if one of our immediate family has gone. Perhaps we have changed, but that doesn't mean we have changed for the better.

And his voice may or may not be heard: The intrusive biographers

2014-05-25T20:18:00.001+10:00

Byrne's helmet. Compare the description

I've just read Peter Fitzsimon's latest tome, Ned Kelly: The story of Australia's most notorious legend. It's a best seller but I can't think why. While well-researched, it has no new insight into the topic or the people involved. It is written in present tense which according to Fitzsimons gives us the sensation of being there as, apparently, we have never used our imaginations before. If 727 pages of deathless prose like this appeals, by all means read on:

Undoubtedly the best of the helmets is the one that has been made for Joe Byrne. In a clever design twist, a curve at the top of his visor reaches down almost to the bottom, covering the exposure of his nose and leaving his two piercing blue eyes staring out, rather like a bemused koala.

Otherwise, move on. There are many other and better books on Kelly out there.

Fab: An intimate life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes is a sometimes sniping tome that again covers well-worn ground without finding anything particularly new. I'm not sure there is any mystery to Paul McCartney, he's a pretty open book. He has an enviable gift for melody, which even John Lennon acknowledged, even if McCartney's detractors won't. He wrote the most covered song of all time in Yesterday, contributed to some of the greatest songs of modern popular music as part of the most influential rock band of all time, and by all accounts puts on a fantastic live show.

There is a quotation in from David Puttnam that I think does sum up McCartney, comparing him to Ridley Scott

[B]oth men of immense, immense, immense talent who on their deathbed are likely to look back on their career with some satisfaction, but with some dissatisfaction, in that I’m not sure that either of them — Ridley and Paul, both very wealthy and everything — I’m not sure either of them has absolutely delivered what was in them.

Perhaps McCartney's problem was that his songs came too easily, and after Lennon, with rare exception, he never found someone to push him to the heights he was capable of. Mind you, I'd say the same about Lennon, who was a more interesting lyricist, but didn't always avoid the issue of disappearing up his own arse.

On the other hand, would McCartney care? By any definition he's had a successful and happy life, marred with the loss of his first wife and a failed second marriage (which this book dwells on to a distasteful degree) and of course, the loss of the friends of his youth and the partners of his extraordinary early success. He's lived most of his life in the public eye and with astonishing riches. He's been very generous to his family, his home city and friends. And his children all seem quite happy and down to earth. That's a great success there.

Both these biographies suffer from the current affliction, that is the intrusive biographer, which is quite the trend. When I read a biography, I like to think I have heard the voice of the subject and not the author. Jim Henson: the Biography by Brian Jay Jones, is much closer to the old-fashioned style of biography and is all the better for it. By its end, I felt I had learned much more about Henson, and that, however at a remove, I had spent some time in his company. Which by all accounts was a pretty good place to be. This is an authorised biography but I cannot imagine anyone but the most perverse biographer finding much dirt on Henson. His creativity, his supportiveness, his curiosity, his optimism are all in plain view in his work. And his influence goes on today. I'm sure I am not the only person in the world who knows his outlook on humour and life is indebted to both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, as well as so many other projects. And who but perhaps George Lucas would prefer the CGI Yoda to the original puppet performed by Frank Oz?

Some years before his untimely death Henson wrote two letters to his family to be read after his death. (In one letter he said it felt an odd thing to be doing, but would be much more difficult once he had died.)The second ends like this:

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.

Now that's a man whose voice is worth hearing.

"Game as..." Ned Kelly, thief, murderer and hero.

2014-02-25T20:55:00.000+11:00

A few months ago, an Ethiopian co-worker asked me, 'What's the thing with Ned Kelly? Wasn't he just a criminal?' I said 'I think it's the armour, have you seen the armour? And he had a Robin Hood thing going which helped.' But in the end, I had to agree, it is odd. For those not in the know, Ned Kelly was a bushranger, a Australian combination of highway man and cattle thief, whose gang eluded the police from 1878-1880 after they killed three police who were sent to capture or kill them.

He is not the first to ask this question. Victorian Police for example hate the Kellys. Every year in their parade for officers killed in action, they have three riderless horses to represent the three policemen killed by the Kelly Gang. Without a doubt, Kelly was a career criminal and his final plan was to massacre a train full of policemen. If he were alive today, we wouldn't like him much at all.

But he isn't around now and that may be part of the point. Although his career as a criminal had started with some stock theft before Stringybark Creek, he had spent three years in prison for riding a horse that someone else had stolen. The actual thief got three months. His mother was put in jail with little provocation, having been arrested with her three day old arms in her arms. Kelly, and others in the district, had little reason to respect the law.

The relationship between the people and the police is different now than in 1878. Now we have a trained and professional force and if we think we detect them in corruption or other wrongdoing, there are mechanisms for reporting and dealing with such actions. In 1878 we had no such guarantees. Ian Shaw, in his book Glenrowan: The siege that changed a nation, says the Kelly Outbreak, as it was known, was caused in part by bad policing and bad policemen.

The Kelly Outbreak has been the subject of countless history books and novels, plays, two films (one of which claims to be the world's first feature film) and a major Australian mini-series, made on the 100th anniversary of Ned's death. Without a doubt it is one of the major myths of post-colonial Australia. Shaw's book focusses on the final act, the siege of Glenrowan, that started with the murder of an informant, and ended with three outlaws dead, police wounded, civilians wounded and killed, and Ned on his way back to Melbourne for his trial. (He was taken off the train at North Melbourne Station, where I work. That's not important, but I like to know it.)

The great strength of this book is the detail it can give to the siege. You can follow the police commissioner from his table at a Melbourne Club along the train ride from Spencer Street (now Southern Cross Station) to Glenrowan. While most accounts focus naturally on the outlaws and the leaders of the police, Shaw is able to investigate more of the characters around them. And here he finds heroism, stoicism and appalling behaviour. We (famously) have the wounded Ned coming back to try to rescue his friends, and we have a police officer firing deliberately on civilians. We have terrified civilians (and their names, and their relationships) and bravery from all over.

The siege at Glenrowan was designed to be mythic. Kelly saw it as the final act of defiance, an end to police presence in northeast Victoria, and the gang fought in armour, like knights lost in time. Whether he was planning to establish the Republic of North East Victoria, as Ian Jones believes, we'll never know. But as an end to the Outbreak, and the end of the bushranging era, no writer could have come up with anything better. The reporters who had made it to the little town knew they were witnessing the biggest story of their lives.

Perhaps that is part of the reason Kelly lives in our memories, because he set out to. In his statements to police, speeches he gave during his robberies, the Jerilderie letter, and at his trial, he gave himself a role as a man wronged, a family victimised, and painted himself part Robin Hood, part Masked Avenger. And it was not a portrait without some truth. When Ned Kelly walked out of the mist on the last morning of the Kelly Outbreak, clad in armour, blood streaming from his wounds, calling a challenge to the police, did he know he was entering the history books? My bet is he did.

"Oh captain, my captain': Haig and Churchill, war leaders.

2013-09-07T09:59:00.001+10:00

Making up quotations to suit yourself is not new. One of the most popular fauxtations of WWI, the British army being lions led by donkeys, was created by the man who “quoted” it, British historian Alan Clark. He seems to have adapted it from other sources, about other wars about other armies, to use in his book, The Donkeys, about British military offencives during the war. As an image, it was picked up by the creators of Oh what a lovely war, which depicted British generals as incompetant at best, and callous butchers at worst. This image in popular culture was still in use in Blackadder goes forth, which had General Melchett as incompetant and callous, and had Haig literally throw (model) soldiers into a bin while planning an attack.

But popular culture may not be your best guide to history. A shock, I know. Douglas Haig’s reputation

went from respected in the aftermath of the war, until his relatively early death in 1928, through to villainy in the Sixties, as part of the antiwar movement of the time, to a more balanced and nuanced rehabilitation more recently. No-one is claiming he never set a foot wrong, or did not make decisions that cost thousands of men’s lives needlessly, but his reputation as unimaginative, unfeeling, and incompetant is nevertheless undeserved. Indeed one of his earliest critics, who criticised him during the war, was Winston Churchill. Writing his history of World War One afterwards, he was forced to admit, given the circumstances and resources available to Haig, Churchill’s respect for him grew.

Water Reid’s Douglas Haig: Architect of victory is part of the move to redress this imbalance. Reid does not argue Haig was the best General available to the British, but he argues he was the best Commander in Chief, a role that demands much in administration and organisation and human resources, as well as military concerns. Haig oversaw an increase in his army from three hundred thousand to three million men (including soldiers from the Empire) and a revolution in military technology in the same time that has never been equalled. Far from being unimaginative or staid in tactics, he increased the engineering corps’ experimental section from by a factor of seventeen and was enthusiastic to introduce new weapons such as tanks that would help his soldiers. No other man at the time had this capability. By war’s end, the British army was the most efficient army on earth, bringing together infantry, armour, artillery and air support together, using tactics painfully learned, and in an attack that drove the German army from the centre of France back to the German border. Other experts, generals, politicians, expected the war would last until 1919. Haig was the only one, literally, who saw how the war could end in 1918, and was central to making it happen.

Churchil of course was Prime Minister of Great Britain in WWII. By this stage he was a veteran of three wars, including the First World War. He was a man of almost indominatable courage, imagination and energy. It would not be an exaggeration I think to say that Britain would have lost the Second World War without him. And if Britain had lost, sought peace with the Nazi regime, how would the attack on Russia have gone then, with a full German army concentrated on one side, and an entirely

unsupported USSR on the other? For all of the astonishing tenacity and courage of the Russian soldier, and their leaders’ disregard for their welfare, the modern world would be very different.

Carol D’Este’s book Warlord: a life of Winston Churchill at war 1874 - 1945, is a study of Churchill as a warrior both on the field and as a leader of a warring nation. As a leader Churchill was responsible for some dreadful decisions that cost many men their lives such as the attacks on Gallipoli, Norway, and Greece. Yet no-one else could have done what he did, invigorated the British nation to stand and fight when nearly all hope was gone, and their allies defeated. In his failures were elements of his greatness – imagination, the search for a bold stroke, his unwilliness to do nothing when danger was present. He was a flawed leader, and D’Este doesn’t pretend otherwise but he was a great man, and in the right place at the right time.

It is one of the ironies of Churchill’s life that he was to oversee the transition from Empire to a small nation on the second tier. By allying with the US and the USSR, he ensured the defeat of Nazi Germany but he also brought in the next generation of great powers. Churchill was central to the war effort up to 1941. Afterwards he was not, and he knew it. He still made his presense felt, and had his influence and of course his wonderful oratory, but Britain’s day as a world power was waning, and all he could do was eulogise the sunset.

Churchill knew war personally, had seen the massacre at Omdurman, (which De’Este sees as the beginning of the war between the Muslim and the West still going on today) and fought in the trenches in France. And yet he gloried in battle, and even in his sixties, leading the nation, yearned to grapple with the enemy personally. Robert E Lee said it, but Churchill knew what he meant: “It is well that war is so terrible, else we shoud grow too fond of it.” This conundrum, love of battle and awareness of it’s horrors also fed into Churchill’s leadership.

Churchill knew something else. He may have forgotten it in the attack on Italy but he knew it. Going to war means you have to know what you are fighting for, and you have to go all in or not at all – “war to the knife”. As we grapple with the Middle East, this is worth remembering for all our leaders.

Oh enough war. I have a book on octopuses now.

'Fathers and Sons' Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad.

2013-08-08T15:50:00.000+10:00

Most people don’t like going to the dentist. Me, I’m fine. It’s not a hobby or anything but it’s not a fear I have to conquer either. And this is due to my childhood dentist, Mr Roberston (Later it on it was more chummy and I called him ‘Col’.) He and my father, a GP, worked in the same building and shared the waiting room. He would make jokes, pretend that the sight of teeth made him sing, and generally made going to the dentist, if not something to be looked forward to, at least something that could be fun.

His son Ben went to school with me. Apart from the fact our fathers worked in the same building, (so did we, come to think of it) we didn’t have much in common. Ben was a good sportsman and I was not, always a major division in a private boys school, and to the best of my recollection, we didn’t have any of the same classes. So while Ben and I had nothing against each other, we never became good friends either.

I’ve just read Ben’s book Hear me roar: The story of a stay-at-home dad. I probably came at this book from the wrong angle. I’d heard that Col ‘didn’t come out too good’ in this book, so I was reading mainly for that story. But the main thrust is Ben’s experiences when he suspended his journalism career to become the stay-at-home parent, first with one, then two sons, and the effect it has on his life and his marriage. It’s a journey that takes him from the euphoria of new fatherhood through to depression and all stages in between.

He’s also worried about the effect he has on his children. And this is where Col comes in. As a parent, it turns out, my funny childhood dentist was angry, violent, foul-mouthed and deeply unpleasant for his wife and children to live with. When the book begins, he is merely a bad example for Ben to react against as his own children take him to his limits, as children do. But when his estranged father rings him and announces he is dying with cancer, Ben chooses to go visit him, and resume their difficult relationship.

This is the central section of the book and for me the strongest. But as I say, I was reading from the

wrong angle. Those who are parents might connect as strongly or more so with the stories of the challenges and satisfactions of raising children. I found all that entertaining, written with journalistic clarity and humour. But it was Ben’s relationship with his father, and how it plays on his mind, that held me.

This is no ‘Daddy Dearest’. Ben forces himself to remember the good times, when his father was the father he wanted. There is one incident when he is explicity trying to make his son feel as safe and protected as his father made him feel at a similar time. And he knows his father was a good provider and ensured his childen lacked nothing material. But it seems it was like how a friend of mine described having an alcoholic parent – you never knew which parent you were coming home to. I cannot imagine what that was like. The older I get, the luckier I realise I’ve been.

And it made me think. What Ben is talking about is, in the main, a common experience for stay-at-home mothers. I’ve always been sympathetic to parents but obviously I have no idea of the experience. And I begin to get some idea of the vehemence behind my mother’s resentment every time an official form compelled her to say she didn’t have a job.

One of Ben’s mantras as a parent is I’m not going to be like him, which helps him contain his anger and frustration. Studies tell us the most abused children do not become abusers themselves, becaust they cannot imagine doing to others what was done to them. Ben is a good example of that. In the end, I believe, no matter our background, we all choose who we are.

And so it turns out I didn't know my childhood dentist at all well. But I do remember him as a man in a mask. It's heavy-handed imagery I suppose but not at all inaccurate.

"To the ends of the earth" Hunting Evil

2013-07-28T17:21:00.000+10:00

I just finished watching an episode of the new BBC series of Father Brown. (Spoiler alert). The victim it turns out was a Nazi killer and the criminal one whose family he killed. Both spend time dressed as a Catholic priest. Escaped Nazis in England? The Catholic Church as a haven for killers? Both are true, as detailed by Guy Webster in his excellent Hunting Evil: How the Nazi war criminals escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice.

I am fascinated with Nazi Germany. A cultured highly educated nation, whose leaders appreciated art, poetry and classical music were between them responsible for one of the greatest horrors ever perpetrated upon by one set of human beings upon another. World War Two was bad enough, but the Holocaust, the systematic and deliberate attempt to wipe a group of people to the last individual off the earth was unprecedented and so far unreplicated. There have been other genocides but none so deliberate and priortised. It has been argued if the Nazis were not so anti-Semitic, the released resources could have seen them win the war. In other words, the top priority of Nazi Germany, as they ran a country and a war, was to kill every Jew on the planet. To do this, they sacrificed both the country and the war.

The full extent of the crimes against humanity took a long time, years, decades in some cases, to become apparent, in part due to their extent. Even so, during the war, the Allies declared that they would hunt the criminals to the ends of the earth. In practice, once Germany was defeated, priorities changed. No-one will be surprised to find that counties such as Argentina, Syria and Paraguay were happy to forget about Nazi atrocities as it suited them. It is a little more startling to find Britain, the United States, France and Soviet Russia, doing the same.

In his introduction, Webster says he considered changing his title to ‘Hunting Evil - or not.’ Once the Second World War was over, priorities changed. The Allies were now split, the Communists trying to overthrow the West and vice versa. This was their top priority, and if it meant using Nazi war criminals for their expertise in espionage and knowledge of the other counties, they would do so. Which is not to say there were not other parts of the same governments trying to bring Nazi criminals, often the same individuals, to justice. But the necessary resources of personnel and money were never made available. People driven by a sense of justice were left dangling.

Speak of Nazi hunting and Simon Wiesenthal comes to mind. For decades he was the face of trying tobring justice to those who had escaped. Sadly, as Walters shows, many of his achievments, the dramatic incidents in his life, were the stuff of exaggeration, even fantasy. His organisation claimed to have captured over a 1000 Nazis. In truth, they captured ten, and the information they provided to other organisations was often little more than rumour. They did give some support to the capture of Eichmann, more to the capture of Stangl, but even then Wiestenthal exaggerated, eventually putting himself in a wrestle with Eichmann in Argentina. But for all his faults he did keep the issue in the world’s eye, and made sure that time would not erase the memory of the crimes.

Nor was he alone in his misinformation about Nazi escapees. In the 80s, the US and Israelis finally put some real effort and money into hunting down Josef Mengele. Wiesenthal gave them information Mengele was here, now here, now here. But Mengele was already dead and buried. The money and effort that they put in went to finding a four-foot deep grave in a Paraguayan jungle.

Other myths get busted here too, notably ODESSA, the organisation that ran Nazis out of Europe and into safe havens. It probably never existed, certainly not as the professional rich organisation in Frederic Forsyth’s book. Escape groups did exist but were small, ad hoc, and more in the nature of mates helping mates. The notorious Bishop Hudal, the priest who hid and aided many Nazis as they went through Rome was oddly motivated by what sounds like Marxists ideals: the war was a conflict between two economic systems and the actions of individual soldiers should not be cause for their punishment. Among the people helped to escape was Franz Stangl, later convicted for co-reponsibility for 800 000 deaths. It is entirely possible that Hudal did not know who Stangl was, or what he had done. Not many people did. By the time Stangl was publicly identified as the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, he was already in Brazil.

Stangl never changed his name. His wife sent mail back home to Austria, telling their friends where they were. They registered with the Austrian embassy. Yet even when his crimes became apparent, his friends did not betray them and the government, it seems, did not even run a check through their files. He was arrested finally in 1967. Even Mengele registered at a West German embassy, giving his real name and address. This is the most disturbing aspect of this book, the widespread lack of will from governments, churches and individuals, to do anything. And such will as existed is fading. We have had other wars, other attrocities. Do we try and bring justice? Or do we try to use moral relativism to reduce our responsibility to do something, as was attemped by Klaus Barbie’s defence lawyer? Or do we wait till the criminals are old or dead, and say, no matter how monstrous their crime, ‘it was all so long ago, it’s just not worth it’?

I have a theory why we are so ready to call someone like George Bush Jr or John Howard a Hitler, though the comparison is ludicrous. It comforts us to think that if someone like Hitler were to come along again, we would be among those who would resist him. But the truth is, most people in Germany, even if they did not agree with the Nazis (they never won an election outright) went along. It took extraordinary people to resist. We are the 99%, or so we’ve been told lately. 99% went along. And given the chance to punish the Nazis, after a brief outburst of justice, most people slung it into the ‘too hard’ basket. The Nazis fascinate because they are humanity at its worst. And the reactions of the non-Nazis, German, Austrian, and from every other country, could have been ours. I don’t know I would have resisted. And that thought terrifies me.

"Where's Eddie?" - Eddie and the Cruisers

2013-07-02T08:31:00.001+10:00

Some excellent films have been made of B-grade novels, while some truly terrible films have come from excellent novels. Truffaut said something like a work of genius is an idea that has found its ideal form of expression. Which may explain why good novels make average films and vice versa.

Eddie and the Cruisers was a failure at the box office but has become something of a cult classic. My brother introduced me to it many years ago. It features Michael Pare as Eddie Wilson, a combination of Jim Morrison, young Elvis Presely and Brian Wilson, and Tom Berenger as Frank Ridgeway, or Wordman, a college kid who ends up the band’s lyricist and keyboard player. After the Cruisers hit the big time with their first album, Eddie is killed in a car crash. The story takes place two decades later, when interest in the Cruisers is revived and someone is tracking down Eddie’s lost tapes, the rumoured second album, and isn’t afraid to kill to get them. It’s a good movie and the music is good even if it rather sounds like what Bruce Springsteen was doing in the 80s rather than rock of the 1960s. (Do us all a favour and avoid the sequel, Eddie and the Crusiers II: Eddie lives! That exclamation mark is a shriek of disappointment.)

I was surprised the other day to walk into a library and see a new edition of the novel, by P F Kluge, sitting on the shelves. One, I didn’t know it was a novel and two, it seemed a bit odd to bring it back. So I borrowed it and have come back to tell you all about it. It’s not a bad read. The movie kept pretty close to the story, although they have softened it somewhat. The novel is darker and more violent, but I think the scriptwriters made the right call there. I don’t think the tone of the novel and the stakes quite justify the violent ending of the novel, and suit better the pathetic villainy of the movie. But the novel is a loving tribute to the music and the power of the music of the early 1960s, and the terrible power of youthful dreams. The Maguffin of the lost tapes, with the surname, makes me fairly certain that Brian Wilson and the long lost Smile album form part of the inspiration for the Eddie Wilson character, while his sexy onstage persona and reaching for philosophical insight brings to mind the lost Jim Morrison. Perhaps it’s all a bit of anachronistic jumble of rock heroes but it seems to me that’s the nature of popular music, someone new who reminds you of someone else.

Anyway, I had an enjoyable few days reading the book and even ordered a copy to be sent to my brother for his birthday. If he hasn’t got it yet, and this is the first he knows about it – happy birthday AB!

'Warriors three' - The Collapse of the Soviet Union

2013-06-17T07:32:00.000+10:00

Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II: there are no finer names to get Lefty blood boiling. John O’Sullivan, a conservative writer, journalist, and editor and one-time advisor to Thatcher, finds all three admirable. But then that’s how it goes. One side’s heroes are another side’s villains and God forbid we should find anything admirable in our villains or disappointing in our heroes. Not that The President, The Pope and the Prime Minister: Three who changed the world is a hagiography. But it is certainly written from a conservative viewpoint.

Its main thrust is the part these three played in the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are those that will tell you the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway. Oddly these are often the same people who were screaming at the policies that were brought in place to try and engender the collapse of the Soviet Union. These policies will never work! They’re dangerous! We’ll be at war before the USSR collapses! [USSR collapses] Oh well, that was always going to happen.

This is the argument used whenever someone we don’t like does something that is good; that was always going to happen, or as an alternative, oh anyone would have done the same in the same circumstances. God knows I’ve done it myself. But John O’Sullivan shows that the downfall of the Soviet Union was brought about in large part due to the change in direction at the Vatican, Downing Street and the White House when these ‘conservative’ leaders took quite radical turns.

It was Richard Nixon who engineered Détente, a policy of co-existence that was to ensure that the two

most powerful nations in the world would have no reason to go to war. But what this did, as writers and dissidents such as Natan Sharansky will tell you, was to trade the human rights of people living under the Soviet Union for international stability. Living in a Western democracy that now was under less threat, this probably seemed like a good deal. Living in a gulag, less so.

Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II refused to accept the Soviet Union as a fact of life. And this was quite a radical step. During Reagan’s presidency for example, Teddy Kennedy visited the USSR to advise them how to deal with Reagan. This was not done out of any traitorous leanings but because Kennedy, like so many, assumed the USSR was not going anywhere and so to antagonise them as Reagan was doing, was dangerous. It was sincerely held belief, and as it turns out, wrong.

John Paul knew what living under a Communist dictatorship was like, which drove his policy towards the Soviet Union. His visit to Poland in 1979, which O'Sullivan sees as a starting point, was greeted by thousands and thousands of his fellow Poles, giving them the knowledge that their unhappiness with their government was shared by millions of their fellow Poles. Between his speeches calling for free and just government and their sheer will and numbers, the Poles received strong moral support for their long and difficult campaign for freedom.

This was supported by political, military, economic and moral pressure from Britian and the US. Sullivan brings together many of the events of that time from 1978 through to showing the effect on the Cold War endgame, including the Falklands War, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the assasination attempts on all three of his main players. Some of the stories as played out in popular culture are revealed as having layers. For example, Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative as it was known was a controversial attempt to build defensive missile shield in outer space. This was portrayed at the time as as dangerous game of military-economic brinkmanship. Less well known was Regan’s repeated offers to the USSR to share the technology. If both sides had it, then they could both reduce their nuclear stockpile as it would not be much use. This offer was knocked back, more than once. Certainly I never knew this. Doubtless the element of risk was still there. But if O’Sullivan’s account is accurate, Reagan read the Soviets better than they read him.

Of course it was not just these three people who brought about the change. From Lech Walena through to the thousands of politicians, workers, protesters and dissidents in many countries, most of whose names we will never know, there were many others, and their struggles and sacrifices were crucial. But their efforts would have been in vain without the support of these leaders showing it in practical terms on the world stage.

You can read of more critical accounts of this time - His Holiness by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, for example - if you wish, and I don’t claim this book to be the final word. Any big topic like this requires wide reading. Nor, before anyone jumps and down, do I claim these three are beyond criticism. But it shook a few of my preconceptions of the time, particularly my view of Reagan, and that’s a good thing. If you only read to find writers you agree with, what’s the point of reading at all?

"You can't go home again." - The fourth book of Gormenghast

2013-05-18T15:23:00.000+10:00

Some years ago when I was touring with a show to Melbourne, my friend Eugene Gilfedder and I were browsing in a second-hand-bookstore when he pointed out a book Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and asked if I had ever read it. I said I hadn’t and he urged me to. The first book of the series was not there though so I didn’t buy it that day. When later I moved to Melbourne to live, I went to the same bookstore and bought the trilogy. And I’m glad I did. Thanks Eugene!

The current big buzz in fantasy is ‘Game of Thrones’ which also tells the story of old families. But whereas the Seven Kingdoms is a country in flux, to say the least, Gormenghast is a massive castle where the Groans and the people that serve them have lived in a manner unchanged for countless centuries. The protagonist, Titus Groan, is born to be the 77^th Earl of Groan, and live his life exactly as his ancestors did, dictated by rituals and tradition, the purpose of which have been lost in time. Outside the castle, a small town surrounds the walls and beyond that, is forest. The world Peake creates is astonishing – gothic, baroque, fantastic without magic or dragons, and the characters are as vivid and memorable as any Dickens came up with. The language is rich and dense, like a thick woolen tapestry of exquisite design.

In the first book, Titus Groan, we follow the inhabitants of Gormenghast from the moment of Titus’ birth through to his ceremonial naming as heir seven months later. The creepy spine though this story is Steerpike, a young man working in the kitchen who connives and murders his way towards power and freedom.

The second book Gormenghast follows Titus from age seven to seventeen, and culminates in confrontation with Steerpike. Both are young men suffering under and fighting the weight of meaningless tradition. But Steerpike’s methods are underhand and violent, whereas Titus simply, at the end, walks out.

Which takes us into the third novel, Titus alone. This is often considered the least of the trilogy and I have to agree. Where we might have thought we were in a medieval castle somewhere, it turns out the world is much more modern. Outside Gormenghast is a steampunk world of cities and cars. Titus’ adventures here are episodic, and while the characters he meets are still memorable, the book never achieves the solid world of its predecessors. Peake himself was already suffering from the neurological diseases that would kill him in his fifties, so perhaps that affected his writing, or perhaps he was striking out in a new direction. The book it seems was never quite finished by Peake though, and that’s how it feels. Indeed, when the BBC made the television series in 2000, they only used the first two books.

Part of the problem is Titus himself. In Gormenghast he is surrounded by richly eccentric characters. Just their names gives you something of their flavour; his father Sepulchrave, his sister Fuchsia, the minister Flay, the cook Swelter, Dr Prunesquallor, Nanny Slag and Sourdust, the Master of Ritual, and on and on. Titus himself is something of a cypher, which works in the first two books but leaves him exposed in the third. Peake had intended two more novels in the sequence, Titus Awakes and Gormenghast revisited as their working titles. But early death, as I say, prevented that. So we are left with two excellent novels and third which though flawed is certainly worth your time in reading.

His widow, Maeve Gilmour, an artist in her own right, found some of Peake’s notes for his fourth planned novel, along with a few fragments of the opening chapter. From this, she wrote fourth Gormenghast novel, which continued Titus’ adventures in the outside world. Whether she ever intended this to be published, or whether she did it as a means of keeping a connection with her dead husband, we don’t know. But her granddaughter found the manuscript in the proverbial attic, and it was published in 2011 under Peake’s original title, Titus Awakes.

Sadly it’s not very good. Titus moves through this story without purpose, consciously letting himself drift where the tides of life take him. He doesn’t ever seem to be in that much danger, and never really in a situation where he cannot extricate himself without too much trouble. You can’t feel too much for this character or what happens to him.

The ending however is quite moving. Titus meets a man three times, in a hospice, in a monastery and finally on an island with his family. The man is clearly an artist and each time Titus meets him, he feels a deep connection with him. And each time, the man is healthier and happier than before. Clearly, even without knowing too much about him, this is Gilmour’s portrayal of her husband, his journey in reverse order to the one that led from Peake’s house on the island of Sark to the hospital where he died. In the end, Titus stays with the artist and his family on their island home. Whether Peake ever would have had Titus come home to Gormenghast, Gilmour did bring him home to his creator.

As a novel, it’s negligible. As an act of catharsis or connection for a grieving widow, it acquires an odd power. I’m glad I read it.

"What are they marching for?" Remembering ANZAC Day

2013-04-28T10:55:00.000+10:00

In Australia, we have just marked ANZAC Day, which is our version of Memorial Day. We also mark Armistice Day in November, but ANZAC Day is our big one. It's a public holiday with dawn services, marches featuring veterans, their relatives and descendants and current serving men and women in major cities, special church services, and much drinking as the day goes on.

It is the anniversary of an attack on Turkey on the 25th of April 1915 which ended as a tremendous failure. ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) as well as troops from Great Britain, Ireland, France, India and Canada managed to get ashore in the Dardanelles, but fierce defence from the Turkish troops kept them pinned on the shore, with the furtherest point achieved at Chunuk Bair by New Zealand soldiers. After eight months of bloody fighting all Allied troops withdrew.

Although British troops lost far more men than the ANZACs, for Australia, then just a little over fourteen years old, the campaign was of a far greater significance. For the first time since we became a nation, we sent troops overseas and they acquitted themselves not only well but heroically. The reputation of the Australian army was made in that campaign, with praise coming from British commanders as well as Turkish opponents.

Looked at this light, it's no mystery why ANZAC Day so quickly became such an important day. It was marked the very next year and by 1923 had became a holiday. In the 60s and 70s, with the anti-war protests of Vietnam, and WWI veterans becoming a dying breed, the march and the day was in danger of becoming obsolete. Since the 90s it has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, and is recognised as a day of solemnity, thanking those that died in the service of their country, and recognising all the victims of war, be they in uniform, at home, or even belonging to the enemy. Still doesn't mean that old soldiers don't like a beer when they get together.

So being popular, and involving war, the more progressive type has to find fault with it. The ANZAC myth has produced the ANZAC myth myth, which tells us just about every thing you know about ANZAC campaign and the day is wrong, ill-informed, propaganda and glorifying war. Po-faced pundits on television, having neglected to study history, ask in very serious voices provocative questions that only they dare to ask, not realising, had they studied history, those questions have been asked and answered before. History is another subject people don't feel the need to study to pronounce on it.

The reputation of the ANZAC soldier has been exaggerated, they say, blaming C E W Bean, the official war historian. But Bean's work is impeccably documented and the praise that came from ally and enemy real enough. What about the soldiers that ran, that turned away from the enemy? They are in there too, and in the large print. But the vast majority of soldiers fought well, so if the emphasis of our memorial is on them, we are only going with numbers. Maybe they did join for a lark, to get away from small towns and be with their friends. But when they were confronted with the reality of war, they met the challenge.

Like in many other areas of life, there seems to be an idea that focussing on the negative, the worst of people, the darkness is somehow more courageous, more real, than focussing on the positive. But we're kidding ourselves. There is a thing called the Parochialism of the Present, the belief that what is now is the best that has been. The ANZACs challenge that idea to say the least. They provide an example of bravery and self-sacrifice that we, in our comfortable, rich, well-protected lives have never been called on to match. I pray God we never will be. But there is that thought, in our darker hours, that maybe we couldn't. And it's much easier to denigrate the example than to think that we won't match it. In the end, if all you know of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles is the ANZAC legend, where troops were ashore in an ill-

conceived plan badly carried out, fought bravely, suffered, earned the respect of their allies and their enemies before evacuating in a well-planned, well-performed operation, you've actually got a pretty good idea of what happened.

ANZAC Day marks the day when Australia went from a political idea constructed from votes and legislation to a nation on the world stage, and we use this day to remember all those who suffered in war then and since. If you want to pooh-pooh this day, go ahead. We live in a free country.

PS: This entry was inspired in part by John Hirst's Sense and nonsense in Australian history, a collection of his essays from a career studying Australian history. It's worth checking out!