- This long novel is in four equal parts. There are no chapters. It's a slow burn and intensely powerful.
- The first two parts were published separately in 1976 in a novel titled A Lifetime On Clouds. The final two parts have been published in this new release for the first time, although Murnane submitted the four parts for publication at the same time in the 1970s. The half-century delay is shameful.
- For the undeniable fact is that this novel is a masterpiece. ALL FOUR PARTS OF IT.
- We are transported deep into the sexual obsessions of young teenage boys who attend a Catholic high school in suburban Melbourne. Adrian Sherd and his friends are constantly cleaning their pipes and fantasising about having sex with Hollywood movie stars, and talking to each other about it.
- They are devout Catholics.
- The constant observation about people and places, and relentlessly building drama into microscopic ordinariness is typical Murnane. The voice in this novel however is that of the teenage Adrian and it’s pitch perfect.
- On the surface it’s a comic tale. Adrian’s attraction to the pretty Denise on the train is funny. The names of the Catholic sodalities and parishes are truly awesome. And his Aunt Kathleen is a pious fool, inculcating all sorts of nonsense into Adrian’s head. The fake Irish and Italian stories of heroic sacrifices of fervent believers fed to generations of Catholics are all there.
- However, underneath this seemingly innocent facade is a searing indictment of the primitive and fundamentally inhuman beliefs and practices of the appalling cult that was Irish-Catholicism in Australia in the mid 20th century. The Church had no understanding of, or care whatsoever for, the psychological, emotional and sexual development of the young people under its care. What the Brothers and visiting priests were communicating to the students on a daily basis was bog-Irish ignorant in the extreme. Murnane is remorseless in his portrayal of this brutal version of child abuse.
- As a victim of this tradition myself I felt the pain. (I vividly remember the scary prophecies a Brother Viator told us in grade six, which Murnane refers to, about how the Communists would invade Australia in the 60’s and the priests would be hung from lamp posts in Melbourne in 1970).
- Adrian’s marriage dreams are pure adolescent fantasies, meant to control his lusts. He also thinks he’s remarkably like the author and monk Thomas Merton! ‘Thomas Merton had written about the great monastic revival sweeping the United States. Young men all over the country were realising that a monastery was the only place where they could live a sane life’.
- Before graduating from high school Adrian is judged intelligent and mature enough to be accepted into a junior seminary to train to be a priest. On a whim he decides to chose a religious order, rather than the secular priesthood. In both streams however the theological ignorance pushed into young immature minds in those days was astonishing. (Which makes me wonder whether this book would appeal to non-Catholics at all).
- In the seminary Adrian begins to question familiar precepts, and imagine other careers. Is he beginning to liberate himself? Hardly. If anything his immature piety is making him sillier, for example his longing to join the Cistercian monks and leave the Charleroi seminary in his search for ‘the true perfection of God’. Which he doesn’t do thankfully, although he does leave the seminary.
- His imagination though is still vivid. He dreams of lecturing in English or Philosophy or school teaching or becoming a poet. ‘...even though he had put aside his ambition to be a priest or a monk, he was still called to a special vocation and marked out from other men’.
- He’s always deciding to dedicate his life to transient obsessions. England and its nature scenes are one. He choses not to continue his schooling and matriculate. He’s rooted in otherworldliness. As a reader I found myself crying out: 'Just matriculate, go to university, and get a fucking life!'
- He becomes obsessed with poetry. English poets in particular, like Arnold, Thompson, Patmore and Housman - one after the other. He wants to be one, and to lead a solitary, single, sage-like life. (‘He tried to keep a fairly troubled expression on his face’). In the end he discovers Rimbaud.
- In the meantime, to get some money, he lands a junior job in the public service. Here's an interesting line: ‘He began to keep a lookout for other young public servants who might have pursued unusual interests in the evenings behind the drawn blinds of suburban houses’.
- He later discovers through another English poet that a ‘pure marriage’ was just as sure a path to God as a life in Holy Orders. So has he turned a corner?
- He's now 18 years old, still immature, and still attracted to some form of monasticism. But a saving grace undoubtedly is that he’s developing a very sharp consciousness of traditional roles and the expectations of society - informed as it is by the Women’s Weekly, and inflamed by his fevered imagination.
- Nevertheless I left the novel convinced that young Adrian Sherd will eventually grow into a mature and attractive adult. He will have survived his upbringing and be freed.
- This is an exceptionally good book and well worth your time and effort, especially as we all confront Covid-19 and the tensions between the West and China that have been manufactured around it.
- To see the stupidity of Trump and his phony war with China, not just on the origin of the virus but on trade and tariff issues, is painful. And to see Australia's Foreign Minister, the usually respected and competent Marise Payne, so lazily suck up to to the US by parroting Trump/Pompeo's call for a formal inquiry into the virus's origins in Wuhan, is insulting. And to witness the now fashionable branding by conservative politicians and their media lackeys (including our own Dutton) of the Chinese government as the 'Chinese Communist Party Government' is sickening because it is so ignorant.
- Which is why Professor Mahbubani's superb book is so welcome. It's a tonic and the vaccine against stupidity we now need.
- Mahbubani has a great gift for writing with clarity and lucidity. (I first encountered him in his 2018 book Has the West Lost It and my note to myself was: I’ll read this clear, cut-through little book - which reads like a wise man's passionate and persuasive homily - many times over the next few years). His Asian perspective enables him to be very objective. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and was for ten years Singapore's ambassador to the UN.
- The one major reason this book is so compulsive is that Mahbubani doesn't hold back. He unleashes whenever necessary. He's not anti-American, just clear-eyed and honest and ferocious when necessary. Its perspective is so sane, sensible, and founded on deep research and experience. He is also very up to speed with Australia and its place in the world. His advice to Australia is sound: 'The country that will have to make the most difficult geopolitical choice will be Australia...If Australia were to heed the extreme American voices calling for US allies to decouple themselves from the Chinese economy, it would commit national economic suicide'.
- Everyone interested in today's world and its political, economic and social challenges, should devour this gem of a book. Especially politicians, and idiots.
- Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by this highly lauded novel. There’s nothing terribly original about it and it lacks real power. I was expecting a lot more.
- A few weeks ago it won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Book of the Year, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the People's Choice Award.
- There are three voices and three narratives that structure the novel: the Christian missionary Ferdinand Greenleaf's letter to Dr George Cross in Britain in 1915, outlining his travails over many years; the recently deceased grandfather Albert Gondiwindi's Dictionary of the Wiradjuri language and his detailed summary of indigenous traditions and practices; and his granddaughter August's story of her return from London for Albert's burial and her re-connecting with her extended family.
- The three voices have very distinct characteristics. Greenleaf's letter, broken up into chapters throughout the book, is powerful and very informative. It provides continuing commentary on colonial attitudes and indigenous suppression, appalling neglect by governments, the vicious and murderous flogging, raping and shooting of aborigines by whites, the non-response by police and the courts, and the way young children were constantly stolen from their parents and sent to white boarding school and homes.
- Disappointingly, August's judgement of his views at the end is unduly negative: '...the Reverend had been wrong too...He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.' She ignores his abandoning of his Lutheran beliefs in the end because of their racism, and his commitment over decades to honouring and arguing for the rights of the indigenous communities.
- Winch acknowledges her debt to Bruce Pascoe’s highly influential Dark Emu. Albert Gondiwindi’s dictionary describes in detail the indigenous farming and fishing traditions outlined by Pascoe.
- A minor part of the narrative is the recently approved tin mine on the Aboriginal land. There’s always mining. It's a cliche. And there's Native Title.
- The young girl’s’ grandparents, Elsie and Albert, were loving and well respected elders. They stepped in and brought up August and her older sister Jedda after their parents had succumbed to drugs and alcohol.
- Winch's depiction of August's large extended family and their interactions and respect for each other is, unfortunately, rather too nice. The narrative is far too sentimental. There is one exception - a beautifully written account of a brolga intruding and 'dancing' at the funeral service, prompts August to recall ‘Uncle Jimmy Corvette who liked to climb into their beds when nobody seemed to notice’. So finally, half way through, comes a gut punch. Jedda suddenly disappeared at a young age and has never been found. We later learn what happened.
- I couldn't help comparing Winch's rather tepid portrayal of the family with Melissa Lucashenko's brilliant rendering of the vigorous, angry and always fighting Salter family in her classic novel Too Much Lip. In comparison, Yield is a bit too thin.
- This book won the Stella Prize in 2020, and no wonder. It’s such a well written and powerful work that it simply takes your breath away on virtually every page. It's easily the most extraordinary non-fiction book I’ve read in many years - and I’ve read a lot of them.
- Hill makes it clear from the start that she's investigating the wider issue of ‘domestic abuse’, not the narrower one of ‘domestic violence’. Most abuse is psychological and emotional rather than just physical.
- She examines all the usual theories why abused women don’t 'just leave', and it's very enlightening. ‘In the 1980s and ‘90s 'Stockholm syndrome', 'battered woman syndrome' and 'learned helplessness' became the dominant models for domestic abuse experts and lawyers’. Surveys show ‘fear of destitution’, well ahead of ‘fear of violence’, was the leading reason women were afraid to leave their abuser. Financial abuse was also prevalent. Abusers were ‘controllers, exploiters, schemers’.
- It does require a bit of commitment this book, because its content is ugly. Hill rubs your nose in it. But that’s what gives it enormous power. The many examples Hill provides of abuse are horrific and heartbreaking.
- Broadly, there are two categories of abusers according to well-regarded researchers: ‘Cobras’ and ‘Pitbulls’. The Cobras are cold and calculating, always in control. The Pitbulls are paranoid and reactive, their anger building slowly and then exploding.
- But why are men violent towards women? There are two broad theories: the ‘feminist’ model and the ‘psychopathology’ model. The feminists are confident that ‘it’s not pathology, it’s society’. But the deeper question remains: what is happening in the abusers' minds? Hill believes there is a need to integrate both viewpoints. She is relentless and exhaustive in examining in detail the academic and professional literature and data.
- The issue of the patriarchy is central: men’s power over women, and some men’s power over other men. ‘And some of them are looking to their own home as a place to restore their lost power. The essence of patriarchal masculinity....is not that individual men feel powerful - it’s that they feel ENTITLED to power’.
- Regarding the smaller cohort of female perpetrators, Hill interrogates the academic research, which is often flawed. There is too much false equivalence. ‘Male victims of female perpetrators are almost never at risk of being killed’.
- I found the chapter on the children affected by the abuse heart-wrenching. They are too frequently treated appallingly by so-called legal professionals and the courts - against all evidence and sense, thrusting the kids back into sole custody by their abusive father. Why the system doesn’t fuck the living bejesus out of these vicious perpetrators and throw them in jail is beyond me. And treat the women and children with the respect they deserve. It obviously makes me so angry. And it makes Hill angry as well.
- The inadequacy of police procedures are laid bare. ‘Why should coercive control - the most dangerous kind of domestic abuse - be invisible to the criminal justice system?’ ‘It’s time that Australia got serious about protecting victims and made coercive control a crime'.
- ‘For women with children...no system is as punishing - or as dangerous - as the family law system.’ Hill details horrific stories about decisions from judges against the mothers and children and in favour of the abusing father, and they're utterly heartbreaking. ‘Only a royal commission can reveal what is going on with the family law system, why it is happening and what we must do to change it - and change it for good’. ‘...violent incidents are happening more frequently, and becoming more severe’.
- There is a chapter at the end called 'Dadirri', an Indigenous term meaning 'inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness'. It is one of the most powerful in the book. The vicious treatment of Aboriginal women and men by racist police and other authorities is beyond belief. The story of Tamica Mullaley from Broome, her father Ted, and her 10 month old son Charlie who was brutally raped, beaten and killed by her former partner, will bring you to tears.
- There are ways to lower the rates of abuse. In the small city of High Point in North Carolina and in regional towns like Bourke in NSW, ‘focussed deterrence’ is working. Community groups, including the police, legal authorities, pastors, mental health and other support groups, have come together and collaborated to strengthen their efforts to significantly reduce offences. The focus is on collaboration and coordination, and in both communities the results have been astounding.
- Hill ends on an optimistic note: ‘If we were to become really serious about ending domestic abuse, and devote the resources necessary to do it, the results could be spectacular. It would, in my opinion, be one of the greatest nation-building exercises in Australia’s history’.
- The narrative drive English historian Tom Holland builds into this richly magnificent story is gripping. It’s the story of the birth of Christianity and the profound influence it had through the centuries. Holland's prose is very lucid and at times poetic, making the story highly readable and engaging.
- Importantly it’s not a theological treatise, built on faith, but a secular investigation of how and why ideas developed and the profound influence they had. It's a history of thinkers and events.
- Christianity freed Jewish monotheism from its ‘God’s Covenant with Israel’ exclusivity and made it universal. The generous, welcoming embrace of all classes and races made it the most civilising and powerful tradition the world had and has seen. ‘The divine nous, far from lingering in the motionlessness of a chilly perfection, had descended to earth’.
- Holland explores the key influence of Paul, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine and others: early Christian scholars who defined the ‘canon’, the most representative tracts of the new tradition.
- As the centuries roll on kings of countries and empires convert to Christianity and with their armies conquer pagan and barbarian tribes and unbelievers. Christendom is well and truly established by the end of the first millennium. Ancestral gods and pagan rituals had been conquered. ‘From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all’.
- The Middle Ages were intensely problematic. There were wayward moves. Pope Gregory VII (1073) initiated a ‘revolution’: priests had to be celibate to avoid giving in to their natural lusts; kings had no right to confer bishoprics; the church had to be freed from the state. ‘A model of reformatio had triumphed...The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution’.
- The articulation of ‘Natural Law’ was a milestone - all equal before the law, regardless of rank, wealth, lineage. The poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was a human right’.
- Philosopher Peter Abelard and his insistence that 'God’s order' was rational, and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend fostered the establishment of independent universities in Paris, Oxford, and many other places across Christendom.
- The rediscovery of Aristotle in the early 1200s and the work of reconciling his philosophy with Christian doctrine was a major contribution by Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately Aristotle’s belief in female inferiority became very influential. ‘The female is, as it were, an inadequate male’. Aquinas struggled with this, as it was contrary to Genesis. In his mind both sexes had been divinely crafted for precise and specific but equal purposes.
- Regarding marriage and homosexuality, Gregory was adamant: amidst fear of plagues cities needed cleansing of ‘sodomy’.
- In 1517 Martin Luther emerges and the Reformation begins. Luther objected to the institutional church governed by clerics and canon law.
- Global expansion of Christianity begins - to the Americas and China.
- Holland tells the story and ultimate tragedy of Galileo Galilei superbly well. Galileo's new ‘lens’ to observe the heavens was becoming a sensation in scholarly circles. He hated Aristotle and ‘the potbellied theologians who locate the limits of human genius in his writings’. His and Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism was judged however by the newly established Inquisition as ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy’, so the most celebrated natural philosopher in the world spent the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest.
- We then move forward to the beginnings of Modernism: Spinoza, sceptical of Christianity, contended that ‘a close reading of scripture would demonstrate it to have been of human rather than divine origin’. He advocated the primacy of reason not faith.
- The 'Enlightenment' movement was becoming highly influential. Voltaire’s anti-Christian writings in particular. '...the Christian sect’s...bigotry and intolerance had served to ‘cover the earth with corpses’ '. The French Revolution followed. To be free from the Middle Ages was liberating. ‘...a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages’. But ‘the brotherhood of many proved a fantasy. There was only one timeless language: the language of power’.
- The growing demand for the abolition of slavery, however, remained. ‘Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.’
- And key thinkers kept emerging: Charles Darwin: removed theology from the natural world; German psychiatrist Richard von Kraft-Ebing explored homosexuality: ‘...should be regarded not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition....homosexuals deserved to be treated with generosity and compassion’. Karl Marx: ‘...discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history...For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil’; Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even gods putrefy! God is dead’. But beliefs in the dignity of man and the dignity of labour - these were Christian through and through.
- In the 20th century Fascism emerged - Hitler and Mussolini: ‘There was no place in this vision of the future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity’. Their fierce reaction to Christianity was testament to its power and influence.
- And colonisation of Africa and other key parts of the globe: ‘...the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity’. Ironically however it was Christianity that ‘had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice’.
- Holland's closing chapters bring us to the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Bush; Iraq; Islamic terrorism; ISIS; the passions around Angela Merkel and the wave of Islamic immigrants to Europe in 2015; Charlie Hebdo and its definition of itself as ‘laicise, joyful and atheist’. ‘To trample on superstition was to lay claim to the light’.
- Dominion is a rewarding and engaging history of an immensely powerful tradition that has profoundly shaped our world.
