Angela Costi reviews Stamatia X by Effie Carr

December 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Stamatia X

by Effie Carr

ISBN: 9780648170716

Primer Fiction

Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI
 
 

Stamatia X is a novel fuelled by Greek philosophy, grammar, poetry and history to tell the riveting story of a Greek-Australian, migrant family’s return to their “homeland”. Nostalgia has no place to dwell in this book as the family of five return to civil unrest, violence and the absurd, rampant malpractice of a military dictatorship. The year of their return to Greece is 1973. This is the year of pent up, popular protest against the ruling colonels, when students occupied the Athens Polytechnic calling themselves the “Free Besieged”, demanding “Bread-Education-Liberty!”But then to be brutally bulldozed by a tank crashing the gates of the Polytechnic, leading to deaths, including 24 civilians. In the chapter titled, “17 November”, Effie Carr utilises the complexities of her main character, Stamatia, to reimagine this definitive historical event – the outcome is extraordinary.

Although Effie Carr’s Stamatia X was formally released in 2018, it wasn’t until 2019 at the Greek Writers’ Festival, based in Melbourne, that the book gained wider recognition among the literary community. It went on to be highly commended for the Book Prize 2019 by the Greek-Australian Cultural League. With its intricate weave of mythology, history and use of grammatical trope, it’s certainly deserving of a larger, international readership.

The third-person narration begins in 1970s Australia and is mostly told through Stamatia, a 13-and-a-half-year-old female, born in NSW of Greek migrants. Stamatia in Greek means “stop”. Stamatia is keenly aware of her father’s disappointment in her gender as he wanted his firstborn to be a son: “She thought her name was appropriate given that her father wanted to stop having any more female children” (9). Greek Orthodox patriarchal traditions are questioned through Stamatia’s intellect and distinct gift for learning. She has a photographic memory and significant synesthesia, enabling her to effortlessly recite the entire 158 stanzas of the ‘Hymn to Liberty’, a poem written by Dionysios Solomos, which is used as Greece’s national anthem. Her mother, Maria, despairs at Stamatia’s intellectual capacity:

Why did Stamatia have to be this way? She thought Stamatia had to learn to conform and become more selfless. Or else, be forced into it. No good could come of such an individualistic nature. There were more prospects in silent conformity. (36)

After Vasili’s alcoholic dejection at Stamatia’s birth, he grows to rely on his daughter’s resourcefulness and “studious disposition” (39). As the first born and the daughter, Stamatia is in the unenviable position of “parentifying” Vasili with his decision to return to Greece. In a surge of emotion, Vasili pushes the responsibility of making the decision to return to Greece onto Stamatia, and she unfortunately accepts:

She felt ashamed for him, that he was so confused and troubled. She was angry. She felt lost. She was floating in a vacuum… It was her decision, her journey now. She would have to make it her journey. By force if necessary. (39)

With resonances to Odysseus’s journey of return, Stamatia has quests and challenges to face before she disembarks in Greece. In particular, she is expected to know the Greek language as fluently as a well-educated, Athenian-born speaker. For the past four years she has been “in training”, “much like an Olympic athlete” (21). Vasili believes it’s imperative that his daughter “assimilate into the Greek high school system” (22) and so Stamatia is tutored rigorously for two hours, three times per week, by the perfectionist, Mr Lalas, a classics expert with one seeing eye “who had fled from Greece when the Junta had staged a military coup in 1967”(14).

The relationship between Mr Lalas and Stamatia is intriguing as it wavers between mutual respect (as if they’re philosophical peers) to one of mutual antipathy, as they labour over gruelling grammatical rules:

Stamatia loved studying the stories of the revered books, but found the endless conjugation of verbs and the outrageously huge tome of classical irregular verbs tedious and oppressive. (15)

As Stamatia conjugates verbs – delivering them from the past to the past continuous, and from the present to the present continuous – she realises her life seems stuck in the continuous present, the constant act of here and now without any sense of future.

In another reflective lesson with Mr Lalas, they explore the meaning of the word epistrophe. Although commonly known as a noun, its etymology is Greek and it means “to return”, “to turn upon” and further:

In music it meant a refrain, to return to an original melody. It was one word with so many possibilities. She loved that Greek had the capacity for expanded meaning. One small word could mean so much. (17)

This word, epistrophe, services the novel’s narrative arc splendidly. Its literal meaning in Greek is “turning about” which is what the final chapter conveys. As the story returns to the original migration from Greece to Australia. The journey embarked on by Vasili and Maria aboard the famous ship, the Patris, is told mainly through Maria, the young wife and mother-to-be. Maria is pregnant with her first born, Stamatia. As a developing foetus, Stamatia, expresses her dilemma from the womb:

How do I keep my head above water? I’m suspended yet connected to a giant placenta ball, which is connected to her. She feeds me. Breathes for me. Could I play with the placenta ball? Will this make me a boy? It could be good practice for when I’m in the park with my father. My mother is so worried. (238)

The refrain throughout the novel is how parental expectations of, and roles for, a Greek daughter are unequal and unfair in comparison to that of a Greek son. Stamatia’s two younger siblings are boys, and although they are not teenagers yet, their world of toys and games doesn’t seem to be compromised by responsibility or duty. Indeed, this story of inequality for Greek-Australian females within the Greek Orthodox social code is acknowledged through oral histories, news articles, the arts and literature. On a personal level, my own experience as the eldest daughter of a conservative Cypriot Greek household aligns with Stamatia’s discrimination and mistreatment.

Significantly, Effie Carr’s detailed rendering of Stamatia shows a multi-faceted character preventing shallow tendencies towards pitying women from culturally diverse backgrounds who experience oppression. Stamatia is both fascinating and feisty. Even as a six-year-old, she recognises the painful truth “that she had been supplanted, uprooted in her parents’ affection”(63) by the birth of her younger brother, Christos. But this little girl doesn’t hide from her anger and jealousy as she tries in desperate ways to regain her parents’ love and attention. There is her failed attempt to smother Christos with a pillow and then developing an eating disorder:

Stamatia realised that it was easy to stick her fingers down her throat and purge the

small quantities of food she was forced to eat. It was strangely satisfying to be able to do this. The reaction she got from her parents thrilled her. This was the final straw for Stamatia’s mother, who made an appointment with a child psychologist. (71)

From birth, Stamatia was destined to interrogate the status quo with her inquisitive mind and thirst for knowledge, therefore attempts to erase her identity and dignity are her epistrophe. The X after her name is apt. In Greece, when her father is ludicrously imprisoned by the corrupt regime, her status is elevated as her father’s saviour. She gives a most precious medallion, her only connection to her deceased Grandmother (Yiayia) Fotini, in exchange for her father’s release.

Still, on another level, we come to understand “the X factor” that drives Stamatia as human and signifies her as symbol. Her female body is acknowledged and activated in a sexual encounter in Greece with Philip, an 18-year-old. Although she is four years younger, she takes the lead, but panics when she hears her mother’s urgent voice, as she realises she’s no longer a virgin. She decides that her destiny differs from that of her mother’s: “She never wanted to marry a nice Greek man.” (128)

Stamatia’s story is also part of “the Greek continuous past” (112) as the novel is interspersed with vivid stories and memorable characters within the context of Greece during WWII, including its civil unrest and military dictatorship (during the early to mid-20^th century). There’s Yiayia Fotini with her colourful dresses and swimming regime, the poignant war story of Giovanni Modeno and Sophia, as told through young Vasili, and the explosive incident that caused a gifted and political Lalas to lose his eye.

Stamatia X is another creative documentation of Greece’s history. One that doesn’t shy from showing complete systemic failure for Greeks who stayed and those who returned. It places the Greek daughter squarely in the foreground as she navigates between duties to her family and their country and finally, to herself.
 

ANGELA COSTI is known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry. She is a poet, playwright, reviewer and essayist. Her latest poetry book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, Spinifex 2021. Her latest chapbook is Adversarial Practice, Cordite Poetry Review, May 2024.

David Coady reviews A Brief History of Australian Terror, by Bobuq Sayed

December 9, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

A Brief History of Australian Terror

By Bobuq Sayed

ISBN

Common Room Editions

Reviewed by DAVID COADY

Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries out for a full-length book, updated to address the surge of Islamophobia since the beginning of the Gaza genocide.

Sayed briefly mentions that Islamophobia in Australia can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but his focus is on recent history, especially the history of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Sayed writes about the subject from a highly personal perspective. This is appropriate because it touches his identity closely, especially his identity as a Muslim person of colour; it is also an identity which is glaringly under-represented in Australian public debate. I think it is appropriate that this review should be equally personal. Of course, there is no shortage of people such as myself (white, straight, cis males, brought up in a mostly Christian culture) being given platforms to opine about this, and every other conceivable, topic. Nonetheless, this is the only perspective from which I can write, and any attempt to adopt an objective stance toward a highly subjective book would miss the point of it.

Sayed writes that “a white Australian could have made the exact same criticisms” of Australian Islamophobia that he and other people of colour have made “with none of the accompanying backlash (p. 35)”. That seems to me to be a slight exaggeration. What is true is that white Australians face much less backlash than non-white Australians when they speak out against Islamophobia. After all, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Antoinette Lattouf were sacked by the national broadcaster for hurting the feelings of Islamophobes and racists, while Laura Tingle was merely reprimanded and forced to undergo “counselling” for essentially the same thing. But less backlash is not no backlash, and many white Australians have been deterred from speaking out against Israel’s genocide, out of fear of negative social and professional consequences; and both the genocide itself and the repercussions for speaking out against it are, to a great extent, the product of Islamophobia. Yet, precisely because the backlash white people face for speaking out is less, our obligation to do so is all the greater, and the silence of many of us can only be understood as timidity and, in some cases, cowardice.

The backlash against people of colour who speak out is even greater when they have, like Sayed, been granted political asylum in Australia; in which case they are expected “to tow a respectful line” to the country that gave them sanctuary (p. 34). This expectation, of course, ignores Australia’s role in creating refugees in the first place. It is particularly outrageous to expect Afghan refugees, like Sayed, to refrain from criticising the Australian government, given that Australian troops have recently been found by the Brereton Report to have committed numerous atrocities against unarmed Afghans.

Sayed has the courage to talk about Australia as a perpetrator of terror and about Muslims as its victims. This is, of course, a reversal of conventional wisdom, according to which terrorism is, almost by definition, carried out by Muslim insurgents who “enact callous bloodshed against American and European powers for no reason other than their hatred of our freedom and our wealth” (p. 24). As Sayed says, the purveyors of this conventional wisdom are not only committed to a demonstrably false account of the actual motivations of those usually categorised as ‘terrorists’, they are also oblivious to the fact that the freedom and wealth which these ‘terrorists’ allegedly hate come to a great extent “at the expense of the rest of the world, whose resources, labour and land are expropriated” (p. 25).

Sayed is keenly aware of how dangerous this ignorance is. He points out that Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” is virtually unknown in America or elsewhere in the West. This letter makes it clear that 9/11 was, to a great extent, motivated by the occupation of Palestine. Sayed quotes bin Laden’s own words on the subject:

The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(p. 28)

Sayed is not an apologist for bin Laden. He objects to bin Laden’s frequent conflation of Zionism with Judaism, and suggests that it is due to such “legitimate shortcomings that the letter is largely discounted and that its intended audience, the American people, are mostly ignorant of the fact that it even exists” (pp. 28-29).

This seems unlikely. The conflation of Zionism with Judaism, so far from being peculiar to bin Laden and his followers, is absolutely pervasive in the West. This conflation has always been central to Zionist ideology, and it has been used for the last 76 years to promote Western hegemony in the Middle East, and to smear the Palestinian solidarity movement. Most people in the West are ignorant of the actual motives of bin Laden and other Muslim insurgents, not because those insurgents conflate Zionism with Judaism (most of them don’t), but because Western governments and media outlets conflate Zionism with Judaism (and anti-Zionism with anti-semitism). Hence, we are constantly told, and a depressing number of us actually seem to believe, that indigenous resistance to ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now genocide, must be motivated by anti-semitism. The lie that anti-semitism is principally a Muslim, rather than a European, phenomenon is central to contemporary Western Islamophobia.

Sayed is adept at identifying ways in which imperialists “dominate accounts of language and temporality” (p. 26). The automatic labelling of resistance to occupation as ‘terrorism’ is a particularly clear example of the former. Sayed says that “whether terrorism as a term is salvageable is yet to be seen (p. 12).” Unfortunately, Sayed doesn’t tell us how it could be salvaged. My own view is that the term is unsalvageable. It does no good; there seems to be nothing we can say with it that we can’t say equally well or better without it. And it does considerable harm, by systematically discrediting resistance to imperial aggression.

Public discussion of Palestine is a clear example of imperialists dominating accounts of temporality. Israel’s attack on Gaza is presented as a response to the Hamas attack of October 7 2023, while any discussion of what preceded the Hamas attack is frowned upon. Similarly, Israel’s behaviour is routinely justified by reference to the Holocaust (even though that had nothing to do with Palestinians), while few people in the West have even heard of the Nakba. In short, we can go back to October 7th, but no further, and we can go back to the early 40s, but not to 1948. Finally, we can go back to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, but not to subsequent millennia of largely Arab civilisation in Palestine.

Sayed is aware that not all victims of Islamophobia are Muslims. Anyone who can be racialized as Muslim is a potential target of Islamophobic hate. Sayed speaks of his family feeling compelled to try to pass as Italians, in order not to be identified as Muslims (p. 19). There is clearly a lot of overlap between Islamophobia and racism, but they are not the same thing.

It seems impossible to separate the racism from the Islamophobia in Australian attitudes to Palestinians. Islamophobia and racism work together to make Palestinians seem an undifferentiated mass, which makes it possible for us to ignore their slaughter.

Sayed has made an excellent contribution to an important topic. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this promising young writer.

DAVID COADY’s current work is on applied philosophy, especially applied epistemology. He has published on rumour, conspiracy theory, expertise, blogging, fake news, post-truth, extremism, and democratic theory. He has also published on the metaphysics of causation, the philosophy of law, climate change, cricket ethics, police ethics, fatphobia, the ethics of horror films, and ‘scientific’ whaling. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, the co-author of The Climate Change Debate: an Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry, the editor of Conspiracy Theories: the Philosophical Debate, the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy and of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology.

Roumina Parsa reviews Translations by Jumaana Abdu

December 6, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Translations

by Joumaana Abdu

Vintage

ISBN 9781761343872

Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
 
 
For people in diaspora, the perceived value of our creative expression has traditionally been contingent on the telling of familiar stories. To write into the demands of “authenticity” is to perform with pre-existing notions of our identities as the baseline. The market-prescribed version of diaspora is one in which the pool of our experiences is all made of the same still water, its depth swelling with each faltered variation from the retelling of “loss-exile-return”. As a knowable thing, it’s a comfortable iteration of the foreign because it can be named; “home” as the shared contested nebula of our personhood. Yet I question, if we are to always operate with this struggle as our centre (working either to reject or affirm it) are we truly distancing ourselves from the violence of our oppression, or cementing its bind through relentless association? It is perhaps this consideration that has allowed Australian diasporic writers to stray from the confines of mainstream narratives. Picking up Translations by Jumaana Abdu, I craved to not hear a familiar story. And Abdu, a bold and poetic POC voice in Australia’s literary sphere, got close to not telling one. 

Translations follows a divorced Muslim woman, Aliyah, moving to a run-down property in rural New South Wales with her young daughter. Between shifts as a nurse, Aliyah works on transforming the property with the help of a Palestinian imam hired as a farmhand, nicknamed Shep. Here, Aliyah must navigate the notion of “home” as a haunted space, as a reunion with an old friend, dreams of the previous owners, and interactions with Indigenous Peoples intensify the question of what it means to belong. 

Abdu’s cited intentions with her debut novel are noble ones. Aware of the hyper-visibility of Middle Eastern and Muslim suffering, particularly in the past year, Abdu approached the representation of her characters with a commendable objective: ‘I wanted to afford my characters the dignity of ambiguity, to prove ambiguity was possible despite the demands for explanations that have infiltrated identity politics’ (1). 

In refusing to exist in the loaded context of the “other”, Abdu allows herself to create in the space left by what is negated. The decision to leave Shep’s real name unknown, for example, is one such praiseworthy move towards what is traditionally only afforded to white characters: assumed neutrality. 

This manifests in a refreshing depiction of the Middle Eastern/ Muslim/ female body that is not focused primarily on its experience of pain. The “neutrality” is emphasised through descriptions of Aliyah’s physical labour. When Abdu writes ‘her body had become unbearable’ (p62), it is not connected to her identity but to the corporeal; her working on the land. Cleverly, when Abdu does position the body within a meaningful framework, she relies not on the hyper specific, stereotyped experiences of WOC, but traces its sinews out to the universal. 

It comes out most beautifully in her simpler sentences: ‘I forget what it’s like outside myself. Right now, out here… the wind and all the rest’ (p269). 

The temptation could be there to suggest Abdu does go back on her promise of characters who ‘demand compassion without having to bleed’ (2). Aliyah recalls a traumatic miscarriage, her mother’s unexpected death, and her friend Hana is revealed to be a victim of interfamilial abuse. And yet, the foundation of universality grounds these characters’ pain in their lived experiences not as Muslim POC, but as people – or more poignantly in these instances, as women. This avoids what Edward Said called “self-orientalisation” (3), while also underscoring cultural traumas to be understood as such. Shep detailing his personal connection to Gaza, for example, is a purposeful and necessary distinction of the Palestinian experience that can be witnessed, but not claimed, by the collective. This is tenderly communicated through the imagery of a splinter in Shep’s finger, that is never removed by Aliyah, a nurse, despite repeatedly seeing it. 

In play with contrasts, this physical distance between Shep and Aliyah accentuates her nearness to Hana, and it is here that Abdu’s writing truly shines. Her appreciation for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is apparent in this portrayal of a female friendship with cosmic closeness. But more distinctly, it is the added element of religion that takes readers to a rarely represented intersection: Islam and queerness. Abiding by her premise of ambiguity, Abdu never explicitly defines the women’s relationship. 

Instead, it is expressed once more through the body: ‘The girls threw their arms around each other, pressing hard to leave a mark, or better yet a scar, something lasting, something to span a vastness, to absorb and hold and revisit’ (p93). 

In a novel that explores the notion of a homeland, there is something uniquely moving about two women being each other’s mooring, through distance and time. In a standout line, she writes: ‘What was a country? Here was a beautiful girl.’ (p87). 

The infused undercurrents of queerness within Aliyah, a hijabi Muslim, applied in tandem with her distinctive independence and assertiveness, affords Abdu the opportunity to dispel the archetype of the Middle Eastern woman presented in traditional media. Yet this nuancing of “the Muslim woman” is unfortunately undercut by the degree to which Abdu applies strict conservativism to the relationship between Aliyah and Shep. The two cannot share a car, with Aliyah instead riding in the back of his ute. The two cannot be indoors alone, expressing the desire for a chaperone mid-conversation. They react with embarrassment when Aliyah’s 9-year-old walks in on them at the cusp of a vulnerable discussion, and they opt to utilise two iPhone cameras as a make-shift mirror so Shep can cut his own hair and be untouched by her. As the fresh fluidity and raw physical expression of Aliyah with Hana is stunted with Shep, the female-Middle Eastern-Muslim body is returned to the original politicised position Abdu had valiantly rerouted from. It is a regretful undoing of the best part of the text. A retracing of the long shadow cast by men over Aliyah, and even larger, over women. 

This pervasive conservatism clashes once more against an additional element: Abdu’s understandable, but ultimately unnuanced, commitment to re-imagining Islam in the reader’s eye from beneath the Western gaze. Utilising Shep as a “translator” of Islam to the uninitiated reader, Abdu emphasises the liberal elements present in the religion – particularly feminism – in his sermon dialogue. Literarily, this poses a contradiction; Aliyah is presented as both the maverick – divorced, queer, feminist – and the conformist – willing to consider a marriage proposal from Shep’s friend who she interacts with once at a sermon. Here Abdu’s ambiguity clause results in a weakness in her character’s verisimilitude. Without knowing how Aliyah is led by her faith, and why, her varying beliefs construct her not as a person of multitudes, but one of unexplained inconsistencies. 

Culturally, Abdu’s rose-tinting of Islam as a religion in line with the collective oppressed highlights an area where greater perspectives could have been considered. At a sermon where a man is raising money for Yemen, Abdu writes: 

‘[He] called them my people though Aliyah knew him to be Lebanese. But the white woman on her right with a redheaded baby nodded to agree, my people, and the Bengali grandmother handing out dates on her left nodded, my people, and the children, like a pocketful of gems, nodded my people, and every Arab and Malaysian, my people, my people, with a pride so boundless it seemed that if one Lebanese man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of Yemen, then any one man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of the world.’
(p251) 

By underpinning Islam as the foundation of community, belonging to the choir of voices (both displaced and not) singing “my people”, Abdu omits the voices of those who experience Islam as a force of oppression. Neglected is the historic Arab colonisation of the Middle East and beyond, the rise of extremist powers such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the IRGC in Iran, and further Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, in place of a sentimentalisation of worldly kinship under Islam. 

She continues: 

‘Here were people who loved belonging to each other across oceans, swept into a corner of the Australian bushland, huddled in a barn doubling as a place of worship because the townspeople had no room for Pangea in the streets.’
(p251)

This emphasis on the idealised unity of diaspora, in contrast to “the townspeople”, fails to honour the book’s initial, exciting venture into the negated, universal space. It instead decorates the existing depiction of diverse peoples in Australia as a monolithic community united and isolated through our sole identifier: oppression. Perhaps most unfortunately, Abdu’s dilution of difference between those in varying forms of exile also extends to the depiction of Indigenous Australians, at one point connecting their experiences of unhomeliness to ‘hijabis in France’ (p267). The ungroundedness of this approach has a ricochet effect. Aliyah’s indigenous coworker Billie expressing belief that Shep’s Muslim mother was the spiritual reincarnation of her deceased uncle (the only Muslim she had known) comes across as a one-dimensional interpretation of Indigenous beliefs, rather than an expression of POC connection. 

In Translations, Jumaana Abdu invokes the philosophies of Edward Said in writing: ‘I think it matters what people see. It depends – depends on who’s making the image, who the image is for’ (p146). A new image is quietly born in her work, and bravely so, but it is just as quietly buried. Against the aesthetic touchstones of “the Middle Eastern” – desert dunes, a headscarf turning into a flag in the wind, hardcover editions of One thousand and One Nights – Abdu’s strength in imagining a new way of belonging is muted. We are returned to those still waters, uniform and indistinguishable, denied once more the individuality afforded to whiteness. Perhaps, the alternative is a story that is yet to be translated. 

NOTES

1. 1.Abdu, J. (2024b) We love to dissect our ‘private lives’, but is forgoing privacy the only way to prove I am a human being? | Jumaana Abdu, The Guardian. 
2. 2.ibid.
3. 3.Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

A.D. John reviews Because I Am Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston

November 11, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Because I am Not Myself, You See

Ariane Beeston

Black Inc

ISBN 978-1760644505

Reviewed by A.D. JOHN

 
I tumbled headfirst into Ariane Beeston’s beautiful, poignant, and heart-wrenching memoir, Because I’m Not Myself You See. It affected me like no book has in recent memory. I devoured it over a weekend, engrossed in a story that opened my eyes to postpartum psychosis—a condition both terrifying and isolating. Whilst reading, I was reminded of novelist and poet Alice Walker’s words: “Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” In many ways, Beeston’s memoir is its own furious dance—a lionhearted, defiant act of poetic expression that transforms pain into a resonant story of fortitude, resilience, and healing.

This work confronts us with the unsettling realities of postpartum psychosis, a condition that endures in the background of mainstream medical discourse despite affecting countless new mothers. As a psychologist and former child protection worker, Beeston occupies a unique position—offering a rare, paradoxical insight that deepens her fears of inadequacy while arming her with the language to understand it. Her narrative is not merely a personal testament but an exposure of a societal blind spot, challenging the stigma surrounding maternal mental health.

Throughout the opening chapters of Because I’m Not Myself You See, Beeston leaves a breadcrumb trail of personal insights that, in hindsight, hint at her later diagnosis. She recounts her time on the phones at the DoCS helpline in NSW, her role as a field caseworker at a Sydney community service centre, and, most ironically, her “dream job” as a psychologist at a DoCS office in Western Sydney. These roles bring her into frequent contact with removals and the organisation of visitations for parents labelled “unfit” by the system, with her team informally referred to in the office as “The Removalists.” This nickname alone subtly foreshadows her own fears as a new mother; it’s easy to see why, after the birth of her son Henry, she becomes anxious that someone might come to take him away. Her distress deepens when she notices a rash on Henry, a sign she misinterprets through the lens of her professional experience, and her internal alarm only grows louder.

Beeston shares intimate truths, painting a raw picture of postpartum reality. From night sweats following Henry’s birth to the disquieting struggle of bonding with her newborn son, she uncovers dimensions of new motherhood that are seldom acknowledged. The pressure she feels when an instinctive connection with her child doesn’t immediately form is particularly heart-wrenching, resonating as deeply human, delicate and vulnerable.

In the chapter titled “Transference,” Beeston explores the delicate boundary where professional support blends imperceptibly with emotional enmeshment, an involvement from her doctor that disrupts the clarity of the caregiver-patient relationship. The confusion this overstepping instils within her is palpable, a reminder of the delicate balance required in therapeutic settings, where boundaries exist to protect as much as to heal. This encounter, brief as it seems, sends her spiralling, introducing a tension that will take years to unravel. Yet, as absorbing as this chapter is, Beeston chooses not to delve deeper into the complexities of transference, leaving questions unanswered about the broader implications of therapeutic attachment and the ways in which a healer’s intentions can inadvertently wound.

The memoir is not without its difficult moments. The direct and indirect accounts of loss—whether from suicide, infanticide, or neonatal death—are haunting. These stories are challenging to read, yet Beeston presents them with an unflinching honesty. They underscore the urgency of recognising maternal mental health and its wide-reaching impact, emphasising that it is a critical component of well-being for both mother and child.

Even within the darkness, Beeston finds moments of levity and resilience, drawing a chuckle from the bleakest of situations. In the chapter titled “If They Make Me Do Art Therapy,” while staying at the mother and baby psychiatric unit at St John of God Hospital in Burwood, she shares her humorous perspective on art therapy sessions. 

Recovery, as Beeston reveals, is not a linear ascent but a labyrinthine journey fraught with regressions and unforeseen detours. The memoir dismantles the comforting illusion of a definitive cure, exposing the fragility of mental health and the perpetual vigilance required to maintain it. “Even after you’re better and no longer just living but thriving, if you’ve lost your mind before, you carry the fear of losing it again,” she writes. This acknowledgment disrupts conventional narratives of mental illness as a journey from sickness to cure, insisting instead on the authenticity of fluctuation—a more honest reflection of lived experience.

Equally compelling is the portrayal of her husband, Robb, who stands beside her with steadfast support throughout her journey. His unwavering compassion highlights the vital role that partners play in navigating postpartum challenges. Beeston reflects on the pressures her illness places on their relationship, acknowledging the complexities both faces. She contemplates the sacrifices Robb makes for their family—the missed opportunities—to provide stability for their son after years of “choppy waters.” His experiences underscore the need for greater awareness and support for partners, who often grapple with their own emotional struggles while striving to remain a steady source of strength.

Beeston’s literary style elevates the memoir beyond a personal account. Using techniques like epizeuxis and polysyndeton, she weaves a hypnotic rhythm into her prose. The deliberate repetition and flowing conjunctions mirror the relentless cycles of her mental health struggles, pulling readers into the pulsating heart of her experience. The memoir becomes an immersive journey, where language itself serves as a conduit for emotion, amplifying the relentlessness of postpartum psychosis.

The memoir also masterfully examines the gradual erosion of friendships. Beeston recalls the quiet drifting apart and isolation that arises when one’s world narrows to the immediacy of survival. She acknowledges her friends’ efforts to stay close yet admits to a sense of retreat as her energy is consumed entirely by caring for Henry. This honest exploration uncovers how illness can reshape relationships, fraying bonds once considered tight knit.

What distinguishes Because I’m Not Myself You See is its unflinching examination of the interconnectedness of personal and systemic challenges. Beeston does not isolate her experience within individual pathology but situates it within a broader context of cultural and institutional shortcomings. Her advocacy extends beyond the immediate challenges faced by mother and baby, thoughtfully exploring the relationships that surround them—especially those of fathers and partners. Beeston urges for a more holistic approach to mental health that considers the entire family unit.

In her introduction for the memoir at Abbey’s Bookstore, Ariane shared that this is the book she wished she’d had while going through her battle with postpartum psychosis. I believe it’s a book all parents should read. To declare this recounting “important” for parents or anyone close to them feels like an understatement. Ariane’s raw chronicle of those dark days and her journey back into the light offers not only profound insights into mental health but also a deeper understanding of this brutal and oppressive affliction, helping loved ones and partners become more prepared and supportive. Above all, this courageous work has the potential to save lives.
 

A. D. John is a Wiradjuri writer residing on unceded Gadigal land. He is a recipient of the 2023 Penguin Random House “Write It” Fellowship and a winner of the 2023 Writing NSW Cultivate Mentorship Program. His work has been published in Mascara Literary Review and Kill Your Darlings magazine. He is currently studying for a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

Holden Walker reviews Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh

November 4, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Thanks for Having Me

By Emma Darragh

Allen & Unwin

Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER
 
 
 
 
 
I cannot say I’ve ever had the eureka moment in which I found myself lost in a novel that felt like it had been written for me or had been written about the world I knew personally. Perhaps my interest in Australian fiction has unintentionally favoured rural towns, characterised by their isolation and unforgiving natural landscapes. Although these stories come close to offering something familiar, their small-town melodramas still feel worlds apart, for I do not know them in the same way I know the lower food court in the central Wollongong shopping centre, the one accessible when you get off the escalator in front of Coles, the one Vivian visits in the opening lines of Emma Darragh’s 2024 short story cycle, Thanks For Having Me.

Thanks For Having Me feels like a photo album, where every captured moment is a detailed but temporally scattered snapshot of working-class life, featuring nostalgic recollections of playing ‘doughnut on a string’ and finding hidden Christmas presents. Darragh creates a dynamic depiction of youth from the 1960s to the 2020s through strategically placed allusions to recognisable traditions, routines, and cultural attitudes. These moments of familiarity and recognition elicit intense empathy for protagonists Mary Anne, Vivian, and Evie, each of whom personifies a different epoch. While Darragh provides ongoing narration of her characters’ contemporary lives, this is often intercut with memories that create a dynamic portrayal of girlhood and womanhood. Reflecting the spirit of the times, this is a coming-of-age narrative spanning almost sixty years.

Darragh’s rendering of the Illawarra feels incredibly immersive. The short story collection transports readers across postcodes, from Vivian’s central Wollongong apartment to Mary Anne’s Berkeley home, and through bus stop, car park, and RSL club in between. Symbolic of Mary Anne’s attempted but ultimately failed escape to Sydney, Thanks For Having Me remains isolated from any grand notions of metropolitan Australia; instead, it reads as a love song to an often-overlooked city. The text’s emphasis on place as a narrative device serves as the ‘tie that binds’ the three revolving protagonists to their history, identity, and ultimately, to each other.

Darragh’s character voice and perspective, accurately and effortlessly reflect the zeitgeist occupied by her protagonists. This style is cleverly integrated into Evie’s narration when she describes Vivian’s apartment as ‘urbancore’ and describes Vivian’s tea towels as ‘aesthetic’. Character perspective is further developed in the values and beliefs of each protagonist, influenced by their environment and reminiscent of the cultural landscape they inhabit. This is explicitly seen in Vivian’s allusions to disordered eating behaviours in her early adolescence, catalysed by her interest in popular magazines and the supermodel culture of the 1990s.

Darragh’s rotating protagonists create the capacity for readers to see not only themselves but also their mothers, grandmothers, and daughters mirrored in the text, an effect that is achieved not only through her commitment to dense and complex characterisation but also through her signature use of compounding minor details, all of which contribute to the composition of stories that resemble genuine memories. For me, this technique was most effectively executed in the characterisation of Mary Anne, who, despite bearing no biographical resemblance to anyone I have ever known, reminded me considerably of both my mother and my maternal grandmother. Perhaps it was something in her affinity for chocolate or That’s Life magazine; but whatever the case, I could not overlook the radiance in Darragh’s depiction of women inhabiting a fictional yet vibrantly realised Illawarra.

In addition to fostering an impressive emotional connection between reader and text, Thanks For Having Me offers valuable commentary on the nature of familial relationships, often more specifically, those between mothers and daughters. Further, an unexpected but impactful theme that also emerged in the text was the cycle of unintended negative influence parents may have on their children.

When a story is focalised through the perspectives of the women as children, we are exposed to memories that portray the mother-daughter relationship in a manner that highlights subtle and unintentional cruelty. These moments include when Mary Anne burns her hands dropping a cake and is met with scolding instead of sympathy. Similarly, when Vivian buys herself a tube of lipstick that makes her feel confident and pretty, Mary Anne implies she doesn’t like it by telling Vivian she wasted her money. Each character’s childhood perspectives emphasise the distance between herself and her mother.

It is not until years later that both Mary Anne and Vivian experience the impossibility of being a perfect parent, more specifically, the impossibility of flawlessly executing the level of patience and kindness that they wished they had been on the receiving end of in their own youth. Realising this reality, Darragh explores the duality of motherhood, the moments of connection and triumph but also the moments of conflict and disappointment. The impossibility of perfection is beautifully personified through Vivian’s character. From the beginning of the collection, it is evident that Vivian desperately wants to be a good mother to Evie; however, her short temper and violent disposition repeatedly undermine this goal. This dichotomy is first alluded to when Vivian’s desire to welcome Evie into her home leads her to overspend at the supermarket. Directly following, as Vivian tried to leave the shopping centre, her frustration with a persistent ‘chugger’ causes her to lose control and punch him.

Vivian’s history of being quick to anger is further demonstrated in her memory of hitting Evie at the beach after she refused to put on sunscreen. Darragh’s cleverly integrated flashback adds essential context to the strained relationship between mother and daughter. Vivian’s loss of emotional control is later emphasised when it is suggested that Vivian hit Evie harder than she realised, leaving a painful bruise that remains visible days after the incident. Despite this, it remains evident that Vivian loves Evie dearly and tries her best to be a good mother to her. However, Vivian is a victim of the same reality that has impacted the generations of women who preceded her: the impossibility of perfection and the inevitable navigation of the mistakes and misfortunes that arise when attempting to raise a child.

Thanks For Having Me is an intimate and nostalgic rendition of the lives of multiple generations of women in the Illawarra as they navigate both the joys and sorrows of girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. The collection is coloured by its vibrant narrative voice and its skilled execution of multiple perspectives, each revealing the coming-of-age experiences of its three protagonists. The text examines the complex and turbulent nature of familial relationships across eras, navigating the subject with empathy, nuance and a touch of Darragh’s radiant sense of humour. Above all, Thanks for Having Me is a text that made me, and with any luck, will make others, feel seen and understood.

Chloe Robinson reviews Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki

October 26, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Refugia

By Elfie Shiosaki

Magabala Books

ISBN 9781922777133

Reviewed by CHLOE ROBINSON

Having previously reviewed Shiosaki’s writing, I picked up Refugia with high expectations, anticipating powerful language and incredible storytelling. But this went well beyond my expectations, achieving its 5-star status, not even halfway through the opening section. I read through the collection twice without leaving my chair, turning the pages by lamplight many hours after I should’ve been in bed, rendered shellshocked and starstruck, completely entranced and unable to set the book down.

Refugia is the latest poetry collection by Noongar and Yawuru writer, Elfie Shiosaki, whose debut collection Homecoming (2021) was shortlisted for the Stella Prize among numerous other awards. Drawing inspiration from the first year of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s search to understand how the first stars and galaxies were formed, Refugia, takes us on a journey to understand the formation of the Swan River Colony in 1829. Each poem in the collection is presented as a star, in a sky littered with history, begging to be explored. As we journey through the collection, Shiosaki paints a breathtakingly raw portrait of our country’s history, full of nostalgic evocations of earth and space, and unfiltered retellings of the violence inflicted by colonial settlement. Pulling from both the National Library of Australia archives and the UK Parliamentary Archives, Shiosaki seeks to understand the origins of western settlement, exploring the violent formation of what is now known as Western Australia, through the colonizer’s language, as well as her own. The collection paints a breathtakingly raw portrait of our country’s history, the power of the earth and the stars, the years of unjust violence, and the ongoing journey to recovery. The collection revives the heartbeat of the land buried under the bloodied footsteps of Western invasion.

in cosmic cliffs
womb of dust and gas
a story is born
(p.3)

The opening poem, ‘a galaxy of stories’, immediately transports you into the constellations of history kept alive through storytelling. You are greeted by the ‘womb’ of the earth, the birthplace of a universe of stories, and begin your journey through the stars, and toward an understanding of our history.

…hundreds of billions of stars
warping space
stretching light from the early universe
      hurtling towards my eyes
(p.3)

Entering the collection feels like stepping into a world beyond time and space, into a sparkling sea of stars and stories. Yet, in turning the page, we are faced with an act of omnipotent and inescapable destruction, the meteor that is John Stirling. We are first introduced to western invasion, through ‘Chicxulub Impact/1829’, the second poem in the collection. Here, the year of Stirling’s invasion (1829), is coupled with an image of extermination: ‘Chicxulub’ the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, and, in a striking echo of the events of 1829, the beauty we have been introduced to in the opening poem, is crushed, buried ‘under the burning debris’ of colonial settlement (p.4). The two events, introduced through the poem’s title, only separated by a forward slash, act as mirrors of the other, Stirling is an architect of extermination, his footsteps on Noongar Nation, an asteroid crushing all life on earth. Our journey toward understanding the formation of Swan River, is immediately characterised as one of mass erasure, the sky of stories we travel through, now blackened with the horrors of colonization.

In this collection, Shiosaki refuses to shy away from the atrocities bloodening the land. Horrific events have occurred and Shiosaki will not let us look away. Placing texts extracted from national archives throughout her collection to depict the unjust cruelty and senseless violence perpetuated by historical figures we are taught to celebrate.

Whereas divers of His Majesty’s subjects have by the license and consent of His
Majesty effected a settlement upon certain

      wild and unoccupied lands
(p.19)

These lines, pulled from the Western Australian Act 1829 in the UK Parliamentary archives, sit among the people the act seeks to erase; ‘naming and claiming lands known as intimately to the Whadjuk as the smiling lines around our own grandmothers’ eyes’ (p.20). Shiosaki makes us look beyond the statues donated by ‘CHANNEL NINE AND RADIO 6KY’ (p.11) and the lies written in our history books ‘decisive encounter massacre’ (p.29) toward the truth, recorded in official statements, which shows that Stirling knowingly and savagely massacred a community. In this collection, Shiosaki skilfully manipulates language, reworking texts previously used to validate the violence perpetuated by colonial hands, to dismantle the ingrained cultural perceptions of their fraudulent innocence.

Despite the pain seeping throughout the collection, there remains an unrelenting sense of hope, ‘I refuse / to walk on Country / wounded / limping’ (p.68). Shiosaki refuses to let us ignore what was taken, yet, we do not lose sight of what remains, the stars – and the stories within them – are alive, passed down through the earth and through those who walk upon it. The title poem ‘Refugia’, the only poem in the collection set in the future, is a manifestation of this hope, a reckoning of country, the land enacting its revenge on those who have unjustly intruded upon it. Refugia tells the story of eucalyptus avia, a tree system emerging from the earth to disrupt the foundations of the city above it, displacing the people who have settled upon it and reclaiming the land stolen years ago. White picket fences are turned into rubble and life returns to the land. The earth becomes a character of resistance and regeneration, where hope is not just a possibility, but something alive.

Their root systems cracked open footpaths, roads and foundations of every house and building, bending and breaking them to
      the will of a new master.
(p.78)

Refugia is a powerful and emotional exploration of our country’s history, the future that should have been, and the horrific reality of what was. Shiosaki takes us on a journey through the history of our country, simultaneously confronting us, with the truth of western settlement, and its ongoing and inescapable consequences. The violent history that has been paraphrased and minimised in our history books, is placed, raw and untouched, directly across from heartbreaking explorations of the pain and suffering modern Australia was founded upon. Never before in a poetry collection–or in any text for that matter–have I encountered such a wholistic exploration of our land’s history. The collection delves into heartache, grief, love, hope, family, violence, genocide, and everything in between. I finished Refugia in awe, wiped away my tears, and haven’t stopped recommending it to anyone who will listen. A masterpiece of language, and a powerful exploration of our country’s history, Refugia is a work of art that belongs permanently in the Australian curriculum and on all Australian bookshelves.

 
CHLOE ROBINSON (she/her) is a writer and avid reader born and raised in Bunurong and Wadawurrung Country. She is currently undertaking her Masters in Writing and Publishing at RMIT University after completing her Bachelors in English Literature at the University of Melbourne.

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon reviews Flow by Luoyang Chen

October 22, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Flow

Luoyang Chen

Red River Press

Available at Amplify Books

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON
 
 
Flow is both a verb and a noun, an elusive character and a slippery act of movement, in Luoyang Chen’s beguiling debut collection, Flow (Red River). While Chen tells us in his biography that he is interested in the lyric “I” and the vocative exclamation of “O” in his work, this collection reaches far beyond the concerns of the speaker (“I”) or the audience/addressee (“O”) . The self in Chen’s Flow is both expansive and indefinable, with the collection exploring these aspects in migration, queerness, racism, boundaries of the self and modern love. The poems in Flow remind us that “Love prevails at any place/At any time” (51) while this may sound like an empty aphorism, the complexity of the ideas Chen examines in this collection leads the work beyond cliché. Flow shows us that embracing love is an act of defiance against the forces and systems of xenophobia, homophobia, colonialism and oppressive governments that will attempt to make us hate each other.

Chen’s journey into becoming a poet started in Fujian, China, where they began to explore the work of Chinese contemporary, classical and Misty Poets such as Li Bai, Tao Yuanming, Bei Dao and Gu Cheng (Liminal). Then as an IELTS student they were introduced to classic works of English literature, joining a poetry club at Trinity College in 2016 where they discovered the work of Sylvia Plath among others (Liminal). Chen’s background, rooted in both Chinese and English literature, brings a depth of perception and complexity to their work that few of their Australian peers can touch and is reflected in the body of work in Flow. This collection was produced through Perth’s Centre for Stories successful Hot Desk Fellowship that offers emerging writers a space to write, mentorship and a path to publication through the publisher Red River Press.

The performative nature of this collection is highlighted by Chen’s division of the book into Acts I, II and III, each act opening with a well-curated quote from poets Gu Cheng, Bhanu Kapil and Joy Harjo in turn. Act I opens with a poem about migration, setting up this idea of migration as “flow” or movement throughout, while simultaneously introducing the fictional narrator “Flow” who leads us on our journey into exploring the slippery nature of self and identity. In Act I, Flow scratches the surface of Australian society and reveals the monolingual, monocultural hegemony beneath, leaving little space for languages or cultures other than English. Here there is no space or tolerance for error, yet in “Flow Following Errors” Flow finds a way to endure: “To mistake / Wagga Wagga / with waka waka / is not a crime…Australia is a multicultural country and thus Flow can” (19). Among poems exploring the inexplicable motivations behind racism and hate crimes, including murder, like the list-poem “A Notebook of Flow” (25), the poems in Act I also examine Flow’s philosophical musings, on Wittgenstein, and the possibility he is living in Plato’s cave, “Flow dances with his shadows on the wall” (21). For Flow is elusive, Flow could be “river / stream / smoke of incense / parts from the flame inside the body” (14). As such Act I establishes the course of this narrative that dances and moves from philosophy to socio-political observations to Flow’s examination of the transmutable self.

Act II probes Chen’s experimentation with the “reverse lyric” (Donnison), which rather than expressing the personal “I”, studies the constructed self through a third person character. In Act II Flow begins to delve into physical love, questioning in “Sex Animal” if they are the playful, show off, a “willy wagtail”, or simply a desire driven “sex animal” (40). Yet the specter of otherness arises again in “Museum of Ghosts” when Flow must question their place in Australia, “Flow needs to constantly remember // That he is not Australian / often he forgets” (38). For what is it to be seen as Other, yet not be aware of one’s otherness or ghostliness? Through the character of Flow, the reader begins to see how they are the centre of their own world, and that this othering is placed upon them by outside forces, by the power structures of racism and society. Chen questions these heirarchies and how they bleed into relationships of love and desire, asking “But at night Flow cries and / Mourns for your entitlement and betrayal // Competitors and lovers, / What is this you want?” (38). In Act II we begin to see Flow’s rising self -awareness of being made abject and their inability to stop the surge of this process. “The energy of Flow” is not necessarily soft and gentle as we imagine a slow-flowing river, it can be as “cataclysmic” as a fast-moving flood (15). Migration is as much an act of going with the flow in the new country as it is an act of pure annihilation and then rebuilding of the self.

Although Chen uses spare language in Flow there is a sense that each word has been carefully chosen. Like an expert minimalist painting, the poems in Flow show how less is more; less not necessarily meaning simple as the complexity of topics covered attest. “Cooking Words” is a standout poem that renders the entanglements of the English language for a foreign language learner where “…the content of a sentence is / meaningless, the fluency of a sentence / is stuck in here, in his tongue: rootless, useless; / and still Flow cooks, cooks his words / to articulate this unpresentable eloquence” (39). Cooking is a way to incorporate, distill, and make something edible to share once the ingredients of words are reduced to their essence over time.

In Flow as soon as the reader believes they have this collection worked out the poet deftly alters the course of the text. In Act III the lines between Flow and Luoyang become blurred, with the lyric “I” beginning to bleed into the poems, “Ebbing Wave” being a case in point where “Flows’…identity is rooted in the conspiracy of detritus // a half-lie Flow often tells: Luoyang means the setting sun” (63). Love, the body, messages from a mother and letters to friends and lovers begin to seep into the flow of Act III, where the personal begins to pierce the archetypal skin of Flow. “Letter to Andrew Sutherland” is a particularly touching poem which is an ode to friendship, the power of art and lost love, where Chen writes “I believe one of us is a myth” (58). “Trauma” utilizes the power of space, repetition and enjambment to deconstruct four words “this is / what is”, making a commentary on how trauma intersects and shatters a life. It is in this final act that the collection seems to hit its stride and I wonder if Chen should have dug deeper into the personal throughout to highlight this ebb and flow between the identities of Luoyang and Flow. Yet Flow is overall an immensely satisfying read because we get to partake in the development of the character Flow through each act. This collection explores both how we shape ourselves and how outside forces shape who we become and introduces a fresh new voice to Australian poetry.

Flow’s world is one where nothing is static, even poetry, where everything is movable and unrooted and shifts beyond the binary. It is the world of the immigrant, the lover, the liminal artist striving to find answers yet never settling for simple solutions.
 
Works Cited
Chen, Luoyang. Flow. Red River. 2023.
Chen, Luoyang. Heartlines [interview]. By Annika Donnison. 2024 https://centreforstories.com/stories/heartlines/luoyang-chen/
Chen, Luoyang. 5 Questions with Luoyang Chen [interview]. By Liminal Magazine. 2024.
https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/luoyang-chen

Angela Costi reviews Witness by Louise Milligan

September 26, 2024 / mascara / 0 Comments

Witness

by Louise Milligan

ISBN: 9780733644634

Hachette

Reviewed by Angela Costi
 
 
The Trauma of Trial for Survivors of Crime

Traditionally, an investigative journalist provides an in-depth analysis of a matter or issue of public concern without having experienced the problem being uncovered. This is not the case in Witness. In Louise Milligan’s book there is a merging of non-fiction and memoir as Milligan shares her personal experience of being called as a witness in the trial of George Pell. The detailed interviews with a vast cross-range of participants and players in the judicial system, together with the lived experience of the author, provide an absorbing account of being a witness within a criminal trial process. Witness is an invaluable addition to the well-spring of accounts by survivors of crime, advocacy agencies and law reform bodies seeking to reappraise the legal system’s treatment of witnesses in sexual offence matters.

We are introduced to the legal process through the journey of the survivor and note the number of people involved, including the police officer, the prosecutor, the defence lawyer, the judicial officer, the social worker (Witness Assistance Service) … But their roles are contained or constrained according to regulation and practice, which further adversely impacts survivors. We come to understand that the victim of a sexual crime has a compromised role from the moment they report the crime to the police, and during the legal proceedings instigated – they are “a witness”, which involves being cross-examined. This adversarial process entails the prosecution lawyer and defence lawyer going into ‘battle’, the former to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and the latter to create doubt within the collective mind of the jury. It’s an anomaly (or an apathy) of the criminal adversarial system that requires a victim of a sexual crime to be a witness to the crime itself in the proceedings. A daunting and traumatic task. Milligan’s account of the cross-examination process shows how “blunt and brutal” it is for the survivor who is also treated as a witness.

Milligan provides transcripts of questions posed by defence lawyers where in order to garner a seed of doubt for their client’s case, they are prepared to override courtesy and respect. Some of the cross-examination tactics used include humiliating the survivor with particular tones, such as ones associated with derision or incredulity, using double-negative questions to deliberately confuse, “asking so-called ‘tag questions’ phrased in the negative – ‘he didn’t do it, did he?’” and being preoccupied with graphic and unnecessary details of the crime to garner emotive reactions for tactical advantage. As Milligan states, the impact on survivors is as bad as the crime itself:

Certainly, for the countless survivors of sexual crimes I have spoken to over the past few years, there is one commonality that stands out perhaps more than any other: to be disbelieved and disrespected in a courtroom when you are reliving a terrible event from when you are a child, or a vulnerable young woman, cuts people to the bone. I’ve spoken to people who have abandoned the process because the undermining that inevitably occurs is just too much. And to people whose loved ones killed themselves before the process of assassinating their characters was over. (21-22)

Milligan brings this heart-breaking statement home through an extensive account of what happened to two survivors. Firstly, we meet Saxon Mullins. Reflective and resilient Saxon Mullins speaking her truth despite a harrowing, “dehumanising” cross-examination experience. We learn of her ordeal in the alleyway, her courage to report, the five years of back and forth in court, how the conviction by a jury was appealed against by the well-resourced accused, Luke Lazarus. The matter was eventually left in legal limbo as the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal found that the judge erred in her decision (by failing to consider steps taken by the accused to determine consent) however, a retrial wasn’t allowed. This understandably sparked a public response for reforming the consent laws with the NSW Attorney-General, Mark Speakman, stating:

Look, it’s not a satisfactory outcome for a complainant to go through four hearings, two trials, two appeals, and in the end the accused has to be let go because we’ve had the judicial process going on too long. (135)

Milligan provides an intriguing post-trial interview with Ian Lloyd QC, the defence counsel for Luke Lazarus. She ventures into wanting to understand the personal motivations, emotional intelligence and empathetic awareness of defence advocates in sexual crime matters. Is there a “cognitive dissonance” that enables them to execute demoralising questions to survivors? She concludes:

From our discussions, I can see Ian Lloyd wants me to know that he has a heart. And he does. He empathises with these women and children who come before him with their awful stories. It is, by his own admission, ‘a very difficult process defending these guys’. (37-38)

Through her insightful interviews with defence barristers, Milligan asks us to consider questions such as: What type of system allows defence lawyers to feel comfortable transgressing the few in-built checks contained in section 41 of the Evidence Act regarding improper questions? What type of system allows defence lawyers to be at ease with and resort to unrestrained “bullying” or unchallenged “rape myths”? Milligan unravels these sorts of issues with various law reform and complaints personnel, including the Legal Services Commissioner, Fiona McLeay, who agrees that there is a long, long road towards change of this nature. As Milligan states:

In my hundreds of conversations with survivors over the past few years, I don’t think any of them have ever mentioned going through any sort of complaints process about what they endured in court. I get the feeling most of them would have no idea that the mechanism exists. And even if they did, they’re generally just too spent. (95)

Paris Street is the other survivor we come to know well in Witness. We are provided with an extensive account of his multiple ordeals: sexual grooming by a senior coach, Peter Kehoe, when he was a fifteen-year-old student at a private boys’ school; being harshly cross-examined by Robert Richter QC; actively “unsupported” by his school as they sided with the coach; writing an honest letter to Robert Richter about how:

I live with a scar in my mind from your cross-examination. (289)

Paris Street shared both this letter with Milligan and the disappointing response he received from Robert Richter. This exchange only served to compound the despondency and the futile wish for hope that there could be some acknowledgement, some change, so that a teenager’s experience of cross-examination isn’t another form of abuse.

However, many of the barristers interviewed by Milligan argue that the “pendulum has swung too far in favour of complainants.” To counter this, Milligan reminds us of the statistics born from studies of sexual assaults being reported to police and those being pursued in court:

An analysis by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers of sexual assault statistics published in September 2019 found that of the 52,396 sexual assaults reported to NSW Police between 2009 and 2018, charges were only laid in 12,894 cases.

Of the 12,894, 7,629 went to court. Of those, 2308 were dropped at trial, 1494 found not guilty. The remaining 3827, or roughly 50 per cent of the total that went to court, were found guilty. That’s just 7 per cent of the cases that originally went to the police. (104)

Throughout Witness, we are reminded of this vast disconnect between the priorities of the adversarial system versus those of the survivor of the alleged crime. Milligan asks us to consider whether there is another way of gaining the truth without re-traumatising the victim/survivor? We are told that the Victorian Law Reform Commission is considering this question, among others, in its review of improving the response of the justice system to sexual offences. In the mix of reforms is a new approach of “restorative justice”, but there are serious reservations about its efficacy given it involves the victim/survivor facing their accused/perpetrator in the same space, where the power-imbalance is stark and still not alleviated.

One suggested way forward is for survivor/witnesses to have access to legal support in the form of their own legal representation in the trial process. However, many legal counsel and judicial officers are against this as they believe it compromises the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof, the public nature of the proceeding, the accused’s position in the eyes of the law… But as Milligan reminds us:

The complainant can be absolutely forgiven for thinking that the system is comprehensively stacked against them. (367)

Milligan does not evade her own experience of being called as a witness. She describes her heightened anxiety and panic from unreasonable documentation requests at short notice from the defence team for George Pell. Like Paris Street, Milligan was also brutally cross-examined by Robert Richter QC – the transcript of her cross-examination shows various undermining, offensive and discriminatory tactics being used by the defence. She describes feeling so “alone” in all of this despite her continual acknowledgement that, unlike other witnesses, she had a legal team supporting her. Rather than engaging in self-pity for her own predicament, she highlights the profound unfairness for the multitudes of victims who do not have the means or access to legal support that she was able to receive – they each sit utterly alone and unprotected in the witness box.

Towards the end of her book, Milligan is having a heart-to-heart moment with Peter Morrissey. It is here that she opens the wound of her experience as a witness:

the only thing in my life that was as bad as that day was when my first husband died. And I had to go and identify his body at the morgue. (372)

This is an astonishing statement from a seasoned investigative journalist we have come to know as courageous, sharp and tough. If the current system can retraumatise a journalist like Louise Milligan in this visceral way, we can only imagine the depth of damage to survivors. Witness takes a strong stance and calls this out as an injustice against survivors, and one which undoubtedly, needs to be changed.
 
 
ANGELA COSTI is a freelance writer with a community-engaged practice. She is a graduate of both Law and Professional Writing and Editing. She has worked as a lawyer in the local government and in the social justice sectors. The author of five poetry collections, nine produced plays and a community textbook. Her recent chapbook is Adversarial Practice (Cordite Poetry Review, 2024) and her recent book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex Press, 2021). Her forthcoming book, The Heart of the Advocate is due out in March 2025 with Liquid Amber Press.