The ABR Podcast

Conceived during a holiday in the spa-town of Marienbad, Lohengrin stands at the crossroads of Richard Wagner’s operatic oeuvre: it was the last work composed before his political exile (as a result of his participation in the Dresden Uprising) while offering a glimpse of the leitmotivic technique that would become the signature of his late style. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reads his review of the recent production of Lohengrin that ran at the Arts Centre Melbourne from 14–24 May. A collaboration between Opera Australia and La Monnaie in Brussels, this Lohengrin was directed by Olivier Py and featured an all-star cast, including the internationally renowned Jonas Kaufmann, Emily Magee, and Warwick Fyfe. ‘At his best,’ Rose observes, ‘Wagner stirs us, slays us, seduces us as no other composer can – a unique entrancement.’

Peter Rose is Editor of ABR.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Writers on Writers series aims to tease some of Australia’s literary treasures out of the Aladdin’s cave of canonicity. A collaboration between publisher Black Inc., the University of Melbourne, and the State Library of Victoria, it began in 2017 with Alice Pung’s book on John Marsden and Erik Jensen’s on Kate Jennings. The series now boasts eleven titles, the most recent of which is Sean O’Beirne’s book on Helen Garner. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Beejay Silcox points out the difficulty of pairing any writer with Garner, who ‘deserves a well-armed opponent, not an acolyte’. For Silcox, this latest instalment encapsulates the idiosyncrasies of the entire series of ‘not quite memoirs and not quite primers’ – idiosyncrasies that have perhaps ‘set [O’Beirne] up to fail’.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, and the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Scott Morrison called the federal election in early April, he did so on an apologetic note: ‘I get it that people are tired of politics.’ This was a predictable gesture from the prime minister: his term has been marked by a series of controversies that have raised many questions about his capacity to lead on some of the country’s most pressing issues, though relatively few about his skill in internal party politics.

In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno looks at the crisis of political leadership in Australia crystallised by Morrison’s government. To see the crisis clearly, Bongiorno highlights the way our contemporary political landscape has been shaped by the concentration of power in the hands of a professional class of party functionaries. As a result, the paths into politics through the major parties have narrowed and are now gatekept by factional operatives, casting doubt on the representativeness of our choice of representatives.

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia will be published by La Trobe University Press in November 2022.

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shortly before Simon Tedeschi’s grandmother, Lucy Gershwin, died sixteen years ago, she recorded a memoir of her wartime years. Gershwin, a Polish Jew, was the only survivor of a family obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Tedeschi’s powerful essay, ‘This woman my grandmother’, reflects on the moment he decided to read her memoirs and encounter the tragic outlines of a life that remains shaded by a reticence typical of her generation. It’s a thoroughly deserving winner of the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its sixteenth year and one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay. The judges – critics Beejay Silcox and Declan Fry and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – chose ‘This woman my grandmother’ from a field of almost 600 entries from 17 different countries. We publish ‘This woman my grandmother’ in our May issue. In this week’s podcast, Simon Tedeschi reads his winning essay.

Simon Tedeschi is one of Australia’s most renowned classical pianists. He commenced piano studies when he was six and gave his first concerto performance at the age of eight, at the Sydney Opera House. He has performed with all the major Australian state orchestras, as well as many overseas, and he has released a number of recordings through Sony and ABC Classics. His first book, Fugitive, is now available from Upswell.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair of Australian Studies was established at Harvard University in 1976 as a diplomatic gift marking the bicentenary of the American Revolution. It was also part of a global strategic initiative that saw Australian Studies visiting professorships spring up in places from Dublin and Copenhagen to Tokyo and Beijing. While not all such professorships have fared equally well, the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies has been bolstered by the financial largesse of its host institution as well as by its record of strong recruitment. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, Joan Beaumont reflects on the history of this unique institutional arrangement and what it might help us see about both the place of Australian studies in a global context and the future of collaborative research.

Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU and author of Australia’s Great Depression.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, few imagined that eighteen years later the company’s skyrocketing profits would actually launch him into space. What started out as a virtual bookstore run out of Bezos’ garage would turn into an e-commerce giant, forever changing the culture and economics of bookselling.

In this episode of The ABR Podcast, James Ley reads his essay-review of Mark McGurl’s new study, Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon. Where McGurl sees Amazon as refreshingly iconoclastic, Ley is more sceptical. For Ley, Amazon’s governing principle of customer satisfaction is precisely what gets in the way of its ability to deliver not just any kind of good, but one which should return us to a more imaginative and less acquisitive version of ourselves.

James Ley is Deputy Editor of Books and Ideas at The Conversation and has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In an age of disinformation, whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have been accorded the status of folk heroes. And yet, as their respective cases show, no other act of public service is harried as ruthlessly and vindictively by governments whose secrets have been aired.

In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Kieran Pender read his cover feature for the April issue, in which he argues for stronger whistleblower protections by examining the case of Bernard Collaery. A notable Canberra lawyer, Collaery has been charged with breaching the Intelligence Services Act 2001 for allegedly passing on information that implicated the Australian government in spying on Timor-Leste for commercial gain. Since 2018, a tortuous pre-trial battle has been fought over the attorney-general’s right to enshroud the case in secrecy. As Pender shows, the Collaery case cuts to the very heart of Australian democracy.

Kieran Pender, a regular contributor to ABR, is an Australian writer and senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Few phrases captured the atmosphere of lethargy and disorientation in which many of us lived under lockdown as much as ‘brain fog’. The term has come to denote a whole range of symptoms – from fatigue and forgetfulness to anxiety and an inability to focus – that serve as an historical marker for our Covid moment. Yet, as literary scholar Thomas H. Ford observes, the malaise is far from unique to the twenty-first century. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Ford as he traces the history of cognitive fuzziness, revealing the persistent concerns about mental overwork for which ‘brain fog’ is only the latest diagnosis.

Thomas H. Ford is Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University and the author of Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (2018) and How to Read a Poem: Seven steps (2021).

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special episode of The ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reads the second and concluding instalment of his 2021 diary, taking us from July to December. These entries continue his chronicle of life under rolling lockdowns – not only for himself, but also for his mother, Elsie, who had moved into aged care earlier that year because of her declining health. Against the arrhythmic schedule of closures and prohibitions, faint tracings of the pre-pandemical world appear: birthday celebrations, an English batting collapse, email trouble, a high five. Written under a cloud of personal and collective uncertainty, these diaries record a son’s observance of his mother’s last days. Elsie Rose died at the age of ninety-five on 15 March 2022.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Author and scholar Kevin Birmingham has shown that books as much as people are worthy subjects of biography. This year he has followed up The Most Dangerous Book, his award-winning account of the battle to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published, with The Sinner and the Saint, a book about the genesis of another classic: Crime and Punishment. In this week’s episode of the ABR podcast, Geordie Williamson reads his review of Birmingham’s latest study, one which ‘brings microscopic detail and a sense of drama to the composition’ of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.