Listen to Grattan CEO Danielle Wood in conversation with renowned journalist Eleanor Hall, as they discuss Grattan’s top six thought-provoking, compelling, and relevant books from 2022. It’s been an extraordinary year, and these are extraordinary reads – not only for the Prime Minister, but for all Australians interested in public policy.
Danielle and Eleanor are introduced by the CEO of State Library Victoria, Paul Duldig, and joined by the authors of three of these wonderful books, Debra Dank, Sam Vincent, and Jessica Au, in this event recording.
The Grattan Institute 2022 Summer Reading List for the Prime Minister is:
- Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity – Claudia Goldin
- We Come With This Place – Debra Dank
- My Father and Other Animals – Sam Vincent
- Cold Enough for Snow – Jessica Au
- Buried Treasure – Jo Chandler (in the Griffith Review)
- Healing: Our path from mental illness to mental health – Thomas Insel
Purchase the books from Readings
Transcript
Paul Duldig: Good evening, everyone and, and welcome. My name is Paul Duldig CEO of State Library Victoria. Welcome to tonight’s policy pitch event, the Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List 2022. On behalf of State Library Victoria, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional lands of all the Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems.
We recognise that our collections hold traditional cultural knowledge belonging to Indigenous communities in Victoria and around the country. We support communities to protect the integrity of this information gathered from their ancestors in the colonial period. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present, who have handed down these systems of practice to each new generation for millennia.
The policy pitch is a joint initiative between State Library Victoria and Grattan Institute that explores public policy for Australia’s future. For 166 years, the State Library has been a catalyst for learning. We are Australia’s oldest public library. And an active community voice, building knowledge and culture.
Since 2008, the Grattan Institute has significantly shaped the Australian policy conversation through its independent research. At a time when we face unprecedented global and local challenges, I can’t think of a better partnership for highlighting essential nation shaping reads. That contend with our past and our future.
2022 has been a year of reckoning with climate health and social trials. We’ve seen Australians face devastating natural disasters, the social and health challenges of living with COVID 19 and increasingly difficult economic times. We’ve seen the enormous resilience of communities and the importance of strong social ties and mental health support.
And we’ve seen long overdue moves towards reparation with indigenous communities. Tonight, Grattan Institute CEO Danielle Wood and respected ABC journalist and just in time Eleanor Hall reveal Grattan’s top six thought provoking and relevant books and articles of 2022, the reading they recommend for the Prime Minister this summer.
The books that appear on this year’s list remind us that great literature has a role in consoling us and in keeping us thinking, so that we might face our challenges with knowledge and empathy. Many of the books remind us of the ties that bind through family, inheritance and community. There’s a deeply personal tribute to family and country that confronts Australia’s racism.
A novel that is an elegy to a mother daughter relationship. and a memoir of land, family and cultural regeneration. And there are works that, through research and reportage, reveal what is laying unseen and what might lie ahead. An expansive look at women’s struggles for financial and career equity, an essay on the histories held in ice cores, and a bold blueprint for tackling the mental health crisis.
This is a list that will not just benefit leaders. Each of us can grow from these works, which you’ll find in good bookshops, and of course, your library. I encourage you to get hold of them, or perhaps give them as a gift this Christmas. The titles are currently available at readings bookshops. Danielle and Eleanor will be joined by some of the authors of these wonderful books, including Deborah Dank, Samuel Vincent, and Jessica Au, for a deeper discussion that I, for one, am looking forward to.
So, for now, please welcome Danielle Wood and Eleanor Hall, as they bring us the 2022 Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List. Thank you.
Danielle Wood: Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Paul, Grattan really values the connection with the State Library, and I can think of no better place to be discussing these wonderful books tonight. I would also like to acknowledge that we are joining from the lands of the Wurundjeri people and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Obviously, we have an incredible tradition of storytelling in this country, dating back tens of thousands of years. and we’ll be exploring some of that this evening. I am also delighted to be co-hosting this event with Eleanor. I’m particularly delighted that she made it cause I thought I might be flying solo otherwise.
But Eleanor was always one of my favourite interviewers when she was on The World Today. she is known for her intelligent and probing questions. I have missed having her on my radio, but now I know that she is. off doing a Master of Fine Arts, which is a long-held dream.
Eleanor Hall: Just a bachelor’s actually. It’s the first time I’ve ventured to the National Arts School. They certainly wouldn’t let me do a master’s at this point.
Danielle Wood: Maybe that’s the next step, but anyway, always wonderful to see someone pursuing their, their long-held dream. And tonight, is certainly one of my favourite nights on the work calendar, up there with budget night.
For those that know me, that’s, that’s a very big call.
Eleanor Hall: We loved it. Budget night.
Danielle Wood: But it is, it’s such a wonderful. Indulgence to talk about, six truly wonderful books. they are the six books or more technically the five books and one essay that our staff have put forward for the prime minister to read, and to read over summer.
And I think summer reading is a little bit different to, other reading is a little bit more time for contemplation and expansiveness and hopefully a bit of sand in the spines of some of these books. it is not the time for sort of turgid or worthy tomes. So, we put a lot of emphasis in choosing the books on readability.
They have to be, beautifully written. they also have to have something to say about contemporary Australia and, or policy in Australia. and we make the job a little bit easier by, requiring that they be released in the last year. So, Grattan Book Club has been very busy this year. We read more than a hundred books, to come up with this list.
I would like to acknowledge the huge efforts of Grattan staff, many of whom are here, and particularly to Amy and Esther, there they are, second row, for the great work they did in organizing it all and corralling and getting me to make a final decision. will Anthony Albanese read them?
I am not sure. We will certainly be sending copies to the lodge. I am hoping one or two might pique his interest. he’s a thoughtful man. I think he will be reading over summer as alongside maybe a game of tennis or two. and certainly, I hope obviously as policy engaged Australians that you might Want to pick up a couple as well, or even all six.
so, we are going to be discussing these six fantastic reads this evening. you will find the Grattan write up of the books on the website. As Paul has said, there is a readings page where you can purchase all of the books, get them online. we are going to be running a pretty tight ship tonight, so there won’t be time for audience questions.
but a few of us will be hanging around afterwards if you want to come up and have a chat. Let’s get started. Eleanor to kick us off. We come with this place.
Eleanor Hall: Indeed. Well, first, let me say thank you very much to Danielle and Grattan for inviting me to be here. I’m apologizing also for the flight from Sydney.
You know, you all know what it’s like, my first post COVID flight. but anyway, it is an absolute pleasure to be here with you this evening, to be talking about these books and to be with you recommending them to the prime minister. I’d also like to pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation on whose land we’re gathering and who’ve been telling stories here for tens of thousands of years.
So, our first book. is We Come With This Place by Deborah Dank, who, as Daniel says, is here tonight and will be joining us later up on the stage. I absolutely love this book. I found it poetic, generous, and absolutely compelling. This is a book for our times, and it’s a book for a prime minister who wants to bring a voice tonight, a First Nations voice to the parliament.
I also think that Anthony Albanese and I think he will read, and I hope he reads this one. I think he will find it. It’s a funny book. It’s a heartbreaking book and it’s a gentle book. And I think he will find it an absolute pleasure as I did. so, we come to this place is a book that invites us into Debra’s world.
Gudanji and Wakaja country, and into her family. We’re given the privilege of hearing family stories that travel back and forwards in time. They’re often in language, which is delightful, and they never arrive in a Western linear manner. Deborah describes her book as, A strange kind of letter written to my place.
And it’s a place that she evokes so vividly that you feel like you’re there around the campfire with her and with her family and with some members of the family who’ve passed on. Here, Deborah asks us to listen to the land. As it whispers tales of connection, and love, and endurance, and teaches us how to live.
We hear about the fabulously female centred creation beings, so unlike the Christian stories. The marvellous story of Deborah’s grandfather, who seemingly by magic extracts fish from an on the surface arid land. a little fish lunch treat for her. It’s just the gorgeous story, which I’m perhaps hoping that Debra might read.
We see Debra’s own children and grandchildren laughing and enjoying the abundance of a land that you know how to listen to. But this land also speaks of horrific violence and Debra does not shy away from that. We hear of White colonizers massacring whole family groups. We hear of them deliberately killing the cultural leaders of 10 groups all at once.
We hear of wanton destruction of country. We hear of the rape of her grandfather by cattle station managers. Of the forced flight of her father from his country. We hear of the cruel discrimination. I’m sorry. I’m a mic person. Are you all able to hear still? It sounded like it was just, you’re, you’re good.
Okay. Sorry. We hear of the cruel discrimination and segregation that she experienced growing up, and we also feel her mother’s ever-present fear that her children will be taken away. Deborah asks us to listen to the land telling these stories. She says, and I’m quoting her here, can you hear the wail in the wind and see the blood running in the dust?
If you look carefully, it’s possible to see the pain as it lies in the land. We, the readers, see, feel and hear all of this because Deborah includes us. She invites us in. So as Australians contemplate the referendum on a voice to Parliament, this book reminds us to listen. Listen when the land tells her story.
Hear the voices of the traditional owners and as Deborah advises us, listen first and then you will know. So, Dani, as you can tell, this is a book that has really moved me and actually I’ve been telling everyone I know, my children, my friends, everyone I know, you have to read this. How did it affect you?
Danielle Wood: Look, it is incredibly moving. it is, I think it’s a real achievement the way that kind of the stories are layered from, you know, Debra’s own stories. Now, her childhood, her parents, her father’s story in particular is incredibly powerful and in the stories of the Gundungji people, the way that it’s sort of worked through, I just think it is incredibly brilliant.
And as you say, that emotional range from, you know, things that are incredibly hard to, to read to these just amazing, beautiful moments of sort of family tenderness, laugh out loud. Funny moments, when, when Deborah was introducing her, white boyfriend of two weeks who she had decided was going to be her, her husband, to, to her family.
the way she described it as sort of a version two of guess who’s coming to dinner and dad’s, Sort of very grumpy and not saying anything. And husband to be is extremely nervous and starts standing at the fruit in the middle of the table with his fork and she’s kicking him under the table. And then I love that at the end, the dad, after, after this poor man’s left mortified, dad says, you know, Bob, you know, he’s a white fella, don’t you?
And it was just absolutely, beautifully brought out. And I think, you know, the whole thing just really, really sings. And I, I don’t know if it’ll embarrass Deborah to say this, but I was talking before to her about what I thought was sort of a masterful structure, and she said, she didn’t actually have any chapters.
The publisher told her she had to, so she just popped a whole lot of paragraph markers in. But it comes across as pure genius.
Eleanor Hall: Well, they’ve got that beautiful illustration at the top of them too, which I found really lovely.
Danielle Wood: It’s fantastic. so, should we welcome Debra herself to the stage? Debra is a proud Gudanji Wakaja woman.
Which, for those that don’t know, is from the sort of Barclay Tablelands in the Northern Territory. Debra has spent almost 40 years working in various roles in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. She helped establish the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, which is involved working with remote communities to provide place based, community identified responses to literature.
we come with this place as actually a space for Spin off of her PhD thesis, which I find extraordinary because there is absolutely nothing dry and academic about this read. welcome Deborah.
Debra Dank: Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here and I’d like to acknowledge the land on which we are gathered tonight and also, Yeah, my mob, Gudanji Wakaja mob in Territory. Thank you.
Eleanor Hall: And Debra, congratulations first, and I’m just going to ask you a few things that, even at the very start of your book, something really struck me.
You say that Our relationship with our place is not easily told in English words or Western ways. And I wondered if you could just tell us a little more about that.
Debra Dank: See, that’s the best question and I couldn’t have written that for myself if I tried. it’s, it’s why I did the PhD because as somebody who’s been involved in education for a very long time, I have seen Aboriginal kids really, really struggle and often exist within a deficit framework and so I’m really, really passionate about understanding what, language does to that engagement and so my PhD is about looking at all of those nuanced messages that exist underneath English, because English is 1500 years old and our oral traditions maintain validity for up to 15, 000 years.
So, there are a lot of, a lot of nuances that we miss within English.
Eleanor Hall: I think that, that you mentioned the oral traditions. I think that’s another thing, isn’t it? That English is a written language. You’ve got an oral language and there must be so much more subtlety in it.
Debra Dank: Absolutely. And I, I, I know that we’ve been told that we have an oral tradition for a very long time, but you see, we never had art traditionally.
And now, our, what I think of as books within Aboriginal culture because they contain iconography, exactly the same as does our books. and my mob have the capacity to read those, those stories. So, we just have a different format within the, the written, space.
Eleanor Hall: And you of course have several languages, one being your poetic English.
One thing I’m really wondering about is given the, the attempts at destruction by white colonizers and some of those stories we just heard. horrific. it’s extraordinary that the stories and the traditions that you’re telling in this book have survived. How were the stories able to be kept alive?
Debra Dank: 250 years is not even sunup for our people. you know, when, when we think that since the arrival of Captain Cook, non-Aboriginal people have been here for, you know, maybe, if we consider a generation to be 25 years. My mob have lived on our place for two and a half thousand generations. So, literally, you know, we can, we see those stories in the clouds and we do hear them, in, in the wind, just with the way the wind blows.
Eleanor Hall: I love that creation story that you tell about the, the three powerful women. Does it strike you that that is so different to the Christian one, which is of course, woman taken from the rib of Adam, which always struck me as utterly ridiculous, but anyway,
Debra Dank: It’s, it’s really interesting because when I went to university, I was, I was just 17.
I’m, I grew up in remote places in the territory and I didn’t have a lot of English. fortunately, I had shorthand, and I could take my lecture notes in shorthand and then worry about. what the actual words were later, but it was just always, yeah, just always something else that, you know, I’m not quite sure it’s
Eleanor Hall: It’s lovely to have a sense of female power.
Anyway, it certainly comes through in your book Now I’m wondering whether we have time to do the reading with them with about the story. Yeah, that’s a lovely story Are you happy to do the reading? I’ve got I know exactly what it is I can grab it but the story that you tell of your grandfather and saying to you, would you like a fish for lunch?
I’m going to get you to read the second little bit of it so while I’m
Debra Dank: Thank you. My daughter designed the cover for me. My daughter won the NAIDOC poster this year, and that’s why we’ve also got these little, images throughout. It’s a map of our place and that’s my dad. That’s gorgeous, isn’t it? Yes, she’s a very smart person. Smart young woman. Bimbo said, Hey Bob, don’t waste it.
And I slowed my gulps to sips. He cupped his hands and drank as he lay facing the hole in the ground. And then, twisting to look up at me, squinting through the glaring sun, he asked, so how many fish did you say? I giggled and sat cross legged beside him and held up two fingers. The heat was already hot on my behind, but I wasn’t going to miss this.
Two fish from a hole in the ground. How could it be? But cool water had come from this place, so perhaps fish could as well. Bimbo lay face down on the ground again and dropped his shoulder, so his arm disappeared into the hole. His face was turned sideways towards me, and he shook his head very slightly, warning me to stay still, to be quiet.
And as I watched, with the heat from the ground steaming my backside, and the smell of the water making me think rain was coming, his mouth twitched. And slowly pulled into a lopsided smile. Unhurriedly, he rolled onto his side, and as his arm came out of the hole, I bent forward to get a better look. He lay on the ground shaking with laughter at the look on my face.
I had seen him do amazing things, but never this kind of truly big, amazing thing. There in his hand lay a perch, with its tiny orange, brown flecks, and its rounded gills working like pistons, searching for water in the air. It was the size of the fish that we often coordinate from the Georgina. I couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.
He tossed me the fish and too hungry now to miss it. I clutched it securely and he turned back to the hole.
Eleanor Hall: I, I, I guess we, we can, we can talk to you here now rather than hear it through the book, but it’s just such a lovely story and there’s a, it’s so interesting. He then puts a rock back over the hole and then he sweeps.
the ground. Now I’m curious whether that’s something that was always done, or was it something that only happened once the Whites arrived?
Debra Dank: It, it wasn’t always done. People always knew, he was a Kalkadoon man. So, if you, know Queensland, Kalkadoons are from, Mount Isa space. And that area was always part of, the travel paths that men particularly journeyed on as they visited different, places for initiation.
It needed to be covered and disguised because cattle had come, and cattle was destroying the water sources. Very, very arid place, that, that this is talking about. and of course, now, we are being fracked, so that water source will be, destroyed. my country’s on, on the Beardaloo Basin. So, yeah, it’s, it’s a very poignant story because, it’s not going to matter that we have not ever told anybody outside of the family where that water source was, because is it gone?
you see, this is the, this is the, the thing. I don’t believe that we’ve done enough research from Aboriginal perspectives and with Aboriginal knowledge to really understand those water systems. one of my cousins, at Borrelula has been involved in, you know, caring for country work for a very long time.
And, you know, some of the scientists have recently found, little water animals and it’s, it’s stuff that our kids have known and played with for a very long time, that we have that relationship with, that we understand. but these are new discoveries. and, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re not very often included in the conversations that would, facilitate, I think, greater understanding and knowledge of, of the entities across that country.
Eleanor Hall: I’m going to speed along a little bit here, but there’s, there’s one other, there’s one other lovely story about, and I’m probably going to say this word really badly, but I The sound of it makes me think of it. There’s this lovely story about you getting all the berries, the berries that pop in your mouth.
And I say, Mama Gajama.
Debra Dank: Yeah, that’s, that’s almost there. How do you say it? I’ve literally just come from the airport. So, my mouth is so dry that I’m not going to be able to pronounce it.
Eleanor Hall: But it’s sort of, if you can say it, it sounds like
I’ve pronounced it so badly, she can’t even tell, she needs somebody to show me the word.
Debra Dank: That word there. Oh yes, so it’s, it’s kanga berries, they’re like little, sultanas, they’re mamagajama.
Eleanor Hall: Ah, mamagajama.
Anyway, look, I was going to get you to talk about that, but I, I’m, I’m aware that we need to, that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got the timekeeper on my shoulder. so, I, I do need to move on to the less happy times because there’s a lot of joy in your book, but it seems to me that underneath a lot of it, there is a feeling of, of, of Fear, and I wonder how much of that there is.
I particularly pick that up from your mother and that journey that you have to the Corbett’s. This is a white family that is one of the rare families that treats Aboriginal families with the respect they deserve and yet There’s a fear underneath your mother all the time that you’re there. Was that fear often underneath even the joyous times in your childhood?
Debra Dank: Yeah, I think so. and I yeah, I need to say first that I didn’t set out to write a book So I’m still a little bit yeah, I, I keep on saying it’s a bit surreal to have this book. but the Corbett’s were really, truly amazing people. you know, they, we arrived at a station, they took us to a house, we’d never had a house to live in before.
they, you know, Mr. Corbett. I, I went across to the butcher shop at the station to get meat for, for the evening meal and he said, you take what you want. And so, at, as an eight-year-old, I already sort of had a little bit of a, I’m not going to say attitude, but perhaps I did. And so, I, I knew what a bullock, you know, what the best cuts of beef were because I’d grown up there.
And I, I identified, you know, I’d like that and that and that and that. He didn’t roll his eyes, he didn’t say no, he didn’t, even question anything. It was just, okay, if that’s, if that’s what you want. it took him a wheelbarrow to take all the meat. My mother was horrified. My dad sort of thought, yeah, that’s my girl.
But they were truly, truly amazing people who just genuinely took people as they were. and I think that what that time that we had on Oban Station was probably some of the safest time for my mum. You know, Mrs. Corbett did things like give my mum a box of pepper to carry in her bag because you never know when those fellows, you know, the, the swaggies, when they would come through, she said, but a really beautiful woman.
And, yeah, so my mum felt very safe there. But she was otherwise genuinely afraid you’d all be taken. Absolutely. Absolutely. you know, sometimes when we went into Camooweal, it was my mum’s mum who sent messages to the local police station that we were in town, because it was a threat to the wider family that, my dad was there because my dad was from the Northern Territory and at that time, we weren’t in Queensland legally.
So, it was, yeah, it was always, a challenge. It was always a challenge.
Eleanor Hall: There are, a lot of horrible things that are experienced by the ancestors that you talk about in this book. And you, you say at one point that, those sorts of experiences often get buried in a pain, and I’m just going to read what you say, a pain that curls into itself and keeps words away.
And then you also say that letting the words fall free will start to heal the pain. How does speaking out do that?
Debra Dank: I think, you know, I, I think one of the great things about not planning to write a book is that I didn’t have any, I didn’t have any sense of constraint about, particular, you know, meeting genre, characteristics.
So, it was wholly and solely for my children to have a record of some of our history, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And there was so much beauty in my family’s history. I just want to say that up front.
Eleanor Hall: It comes through very clearly.
Debra Dank: They’re pretty good people. so I just wanted it to be really honest, and I think the more that we have that honesty, but have the honesty sitting alongside of the joy, I think that gives us the strength to, to understand and to face, the harshness, because, you know, it, in a lot of ways, it, Not a lot has changed for Aboriginal people in Australia.
You know, we’ve, we’ve accessed education. I’ve made sure my children have accessed Western education, wholly and solely so that we have the ability to protect ourselves. so yeah, we, on the surface it looks, quite different, but if I’m being honest, and I’m a Scottish Methodist ancestry, I must say, we you know, we have to acknowledge that, too many times it’s, it’s still really quite challenging.
Eleanor Hall: Just a very quick final question. you’ve said that you, you really were writing this for your children, but knowing now that the Prime Minister hopefully is going to read this, what would you like him, what’s the, what’s the key thing you’d like him to take from it?
Debra Dank: I’d hope that he would be able to see Aboriginal Country As, as a living entity, something that’s far more deserving. of, you know, the, the, the view of it as, economic possibility. I’m deeply horrified and, and it is genuinely painful for my family, to see that, all of these conversations about fracking across the Beetaloo are happening as if the decisions have already been made.
We’ve not been consulted at all. you know, it’s women’s country. and a small group of Aboriginal women are trying to, just get the ability to say no, but we, we don’t have, the privilege of media rule, population size. So,
Eleanor Hall: Perhaps your book will help him. I hope so.
Debra Dank: I, I really hope that he can see, as something so much bigger than the opportunity to make some money.
Beautifully said, Deborah.
Danielle Wood: Thank you so much, Deborah. That’s absolutely wonderful. we will move on now to our second book, which is Sam Vincent’s My Father and Other Animals. So, this one was very much a favourite of the Grattan staff. The campaigning was rolling in very early in the process. it is a beautifully crafted memoir, almost a kind of classic fish out of water story.
you’ve got your sort of 30 something inner city living freelance writer, bin diver, going to help out a couple of days a week on the family farm, hilarity ensues, lots of challenges along the way, but, you know, through that process, you know, Sam becomes a fully-fledged farmer, and he, he takes us on that journey with him, incredibly beautifully.
he weaves in again, a number of really big themes, the importance of, of land and regenerative farming. the toll of drought. a really interesting discussion of the impacts of, of farming animals on the animals themselves, but on, on the farmers too, and the uneasy relationship between farmers and first nations people.
so, I want to come back to some of those themes when we talk to Sam, but the thread that, that really runs most strongly through this book, is the relationship between Sam and his father. and I think it’s fair to say that. It sort of starts out quite distant. They’re mainly sort of grunting at each other about, football, but it, but it deepens and blossoms through the shared endeavour.
And you know, Sam starts out on this journey, with a recognition after his father is involved in mangling his hand in a wood chipping incident, which is, quite a hair raising start to the book, that, you know, his dad might not be able to be on the farm forever, and that’s sort of what triggers him to, to step up, and to start working with his father.
But also, a sense that he wants to make that deeper connection and understand more about where his father comes from, who he is, and, and his relationship to the land. so, I think, I’m a bit embarrassed to learn that, that his dad is actually here, but I, there was just, I got kind of obsessed with him because he’s an economist as well.
So, I was super interested in that, but there are just so many beautifully described aspects of his character, which I think would be recognizable to, to so many people in Australia, that sort of. you know, practical kind of doer, incredibly competent, man of few words, perhaps a little gruff, and the, the details are just beautifully wrought, so, you know, he’s eaten the same sandwich for lunch every day of his life for 30 years, you know, ham, cheese, tomato, and there is in the book, a really lovely description of gender roles on the farm and his mum is hugely important.
Part of the farm and its success as well. But I just wanted to read this because it is also relevant to, a later discussion, but it’s just gives you a sense of, how wonderful the writing is in this book. From a young age, I noticed the transformation that occurred when dad crossed the threshold and entered the house, kicking off his boots on the back veranda and sliding the glass door open with a clatter.
My father, the most multi practical, useful person I have ever met, would revert to a state of newborn dependence. He rarely cleaned, and if mum asked him to, he would ask her where the cleaning products were kept. He rarely cooked, and when he did, a set menu, bacon and egg pie or pea and ham soup, he fussed over which utensils to use and sometimes what they were for.
Once, when I was in high school, Mum was enjoying a night off from cooking, and he stormed into the living room, boiling water seething through the stainless-steel steamer. He held in his hands and yelled, who drilled holes in this saucepan?
The one domestic duty he accepted without complaint was the carving of roast meat. I was always confused by this exception. There seemed no great secret to carving, and if there was, Dad’s misshapen hunks suggested he did not possess it. But one week in early spring, it occurred to me why. Now I’m going to leave the why for you to read in the book, but it does give you a sense of, you know, just how wonderful it is in evoking, those incredibly deep family relationships.
Eleanor, what did you think of this one?
Eleanor Hall: Oh, I loved Sam’s book too. It made me laugh and cry in equal measure and definitely crave figs. I sound like I’m hungry, don’t I? Mama Gajama, anyway, Mama Gajama over here, figs over here. but Sam, Sam has this fig orchard and it’s just so beautifully described that you can sort of taste them as well.
I found it really interesting having Deborah and Sam’s books and I sort of read them in quick succession that they both have, they both have a very emotional connection to the land and Sam, his family recognizes that the land is, you know, has a much deeper history and makes connections with the First Nations local groups there, the Ngambri and the Ngunnawal and I think what’s really interesting and there’s a statistic that really stuck out at me, so I went back to find it, and Sam says that there were 65, 000 Aboriginal heritage sites in, registered in New South Wales at the time he was writing the book.
And 11 of the 65, 000 were on private land, 11. So what’s really interesting to me there from that statistic is just what an unusual thing it must have been then for Sam’s family to have made this connection. And there must be a sense of fear and why, why, you know, that you’d That’s why you wouldn’t do it.
And yet, when you read Sam’s book, there’s this beautiful relationship that develops and also just this sense that they don’t lose anything. They gain an enormous amount by making this connection with the first nations group there. And I just found that just a beautiful part of the story, as well as all the hilarity with the father son relationship.
Danielle Wood: Well, why don’t we welcome Sam up to the stage now? Sam is an author. He is a farmer. his writing has appeared in the monthly, the Saturday paper, the Griffith Review and Best Australian Essays. this is his second book, and we will tease out a little bit more about his farming life now. welcome Sam.
Congratulations. It’s a wonderful book.
Sam Vincent: Thank you.
Danielle Wood: Can you start maybe by setting the scene a little for us? Love to you to tell everyone about your farm at, at, Gullion, and how, how you ended up there?
Sam Vincent: So, in 2014 I was at home in Canberra, and I got a phone call from my mum telling me that not to worry, my dad was in an ambulance, he’d put his, his hand in a woodchipper but he was, he was fine.
So that was a bit of a reality check and, and I went out to the farm the next day, and this was just the latest in a long line of, farming mishaps and, I realised that he wasn’t getting any younger and we needed to. To do something about this, so I started working with him a couple of days a week.
Danielle Wood: And tell us a little bit about the farm and its sort of quite an unusual, you know, sort of topography and its shape.
Sam Vincent: It’s a small farm by Australian standards. It’s pretty close to Canberra and in the Yas Valley, it’s, it’s long and skinny. if you ask my dad what kind of soil it has, he’ll say it’s crap soil.
Some of the paddocks, he says a hungry country, others are thirsty country. So, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty marginal agricultural country for a hundred plus years. It’s been. overgrazed by sheep and land clearing. So, it’s really been a process of trying to bring back what was lost over the past few decades, the way my parents have farmed and what I’m trying to do now.
Danielle Wood: Yeah. I loved those aspects of the book about that sort of regenerative farming and the concept of kind of, not just sustainability, but adding back to the land. And as you say, it was, you know, you were obviously taking it on, but it was something that both your parents were interested in pursuing as well.
Can you, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what regenerative farming is and how you’re going about it?
Sam Vincent: Yeah, I guess it’s a particularly in the West, it’s a, it’s a recent phenomenon. And so, it doesn’t have one definition. it means it’s open to greenwashing, but there’s several definitions.
One I like is by Joel Salatin, who’s an American farmer. And he says it’s farming in a way that improves the commons, whether that’s biodiversity, carbon sequestration. producing nutritious food that has all kinds of flow and effects for society. But increasingly, and since the book came out, I think there’s an even simpler way of describing it.
for so long since the industrial revolution and its application to all facets of human society, farmers in the West have gotten up in the morning and thought, what can I kill today? They spend so much time pouring chemicals on trying to grow one crop or one animal. It’s a really reductionist way of, of thinking.
And RegenAg is more about what can I encourage to live. We’re embracing nature in all its complexities. So, trying to have as, as much biodiversity as possible, as much ground cover, as many different native, perennial grasses, and helpful introduced grasses growing in winter and summer. yeah, using as much.
Not allowing, not allowing water to run off, but, but soak in, encouraging really complex soil life all while growing food. It’s, it’s a realization that this natural complexity makes a farm more resilient to drought and can make the food that you grow more healthy for everyone. So, so yeah, that’s basically the gist of it.
Danielle Wood: And I loved the, your economist dad kind of really kind of put the economic case for it, you know, making nature work for you. Yeah.
Sam Vincent: We were saying earlier, for a long time, people would say to me, how do you reconcile your father’s free market economics with his kind of lefty, greenie, head in the clouds, regen ag?
And I wondered myself, and then I realized that they’re not that different. Just as a lot of economists like him have faith in the invisible hand of the market, he has faith in in nature, in natural systems, if they’re allowed to function as they should. So obviously most of Australian agricultural land has been degraded.
But if we, if we do things like fixing up creeks, helping fix up biodiversity, perennial plants, getting trees back, then it’ll reach a stage where it can, it can work on its own. And these landscape functions can, can work without farmers having to do much. So yeah, that’s where the economics and the farming Comes in.
Danielle Wood: I think it’s wonderful. I, I wanted to come back to the point that Eleanor was picking up on, the work that, that you did, with your friend, Dave, who was a sort of, Aboriginal archaeologist, and then with some of the, the elders in the lands. in establishing the history of the farm and the ochre quarry being registered as an Aboriginal place.
can you tell us about that process, but also to, to pick up on the point Eleanor made, you know, why do you think it is such a low priority? Percentage of private places that have gone through this process, given, you know, what, what you found was a very, rewarding, outcome to come out of that.
Sam Vincent: Yeah. So, the, the background is that in 2016, my friend, Dave Johnson, who I think was the first Aboriginal person to graduate from ANU with an archaeology degree, he asked if he could come just to walk around the farm with me looking for. Whatever we could find. It was a, it was kind of a mini drought in the autumn of 2016.
Archaeologists love drought because they can find stuff. and we spent 2 really enjoyable weeks. Just walking around finding a lot of waste flakes. The kind of what’s left behind when stone tools are created, but nothing spectacular. And then 1 day. on this hill that my family’s always called Bald Hill.
It’s always looked a little different. It has this bright red iron stone. Dave enthusiastically swore and he said, Vinnie, he calls me Vinnie, I found a thumbnail scraper. I didn’t know what that was. It was, it was, It’s a tiny little artifact. It’s since been estimated to be 5, 000 years old and a thumbnail scraper would have been attached to a piece of wood to gouge ochre out of the rocks on this hill.
the ironstone contains seams of ochre. And he came out with some archaeologist colleagues and, and we decided that we’d bring out elders from the Ngunnawal and Ngambri communities. first of all, to them to see this site and, and that began this process of wanting to protect it as an Aboriginal place, which, it means that no one can develop this site, but we can, we can still farm it the way we always have.
And it’s just been such a rewarding process for me. I guess that now that I’m in charge of managing the farm, I feel this great responsibility, knowing that every little decision I make on the 650 acres will impact the overall landscape. And so, I’m always learning about how previous custodians farmed and lived here and, and learning about how people were mining ochre and how important that was.
And, and seeing, The contemporary connection now among the Ngunnawal and Ngambri families, and knowing that I can speak about the Aboriginal history of the farm, not just in the past tense, that it’s now this ongoing thing has just been so fantastic for me and my family, and in 2018, Wally Bell, a Ngunnawal elder, gave it a name, which means yellow ground in the Ngunnawal language, which is really cool.
So now on the Ngunnawal. The map of the farm, we’ve crossed that bald hill, and that paddock is called Deroa Daroa.
Danielle Wood: That’s absolutely wonderful. one of the sorts of ongoing sources of tension with your dad through the book was, your kind of hadn’t, hadn’t grown up, got a real job, had a house and a family.
But the book ends on a very, lovely note with your, young son being born who I think might be over there.
Sam Vincent: She’s over there. She’s here. Orlando. Oh, daughter. Sorry. Sorry.
Danielle Wood: Get there. Absolutely gorgeous. tell us, tell us about life on the farm with the little one and, will we be seeing another chapter in this book in a couple of years’ time?
Sam Vincent: So, she was born just after I submitted the manuscript, so it was pretty crazy, the editing process with the newborn. But one thing I’ve really loved, this year is seeing how compatible farming and fatherhood are. I have her on my chest in the BabyBjorn just about every day, doing various tasks. I had an epiphany last week.
I was doing something a little bit dodgy. I was up on a ladder checking a tank while Orlando was on my chest. And I realized, hang on, I could actually just take her out and have her on the grass, looking up at the sky while I do things that might be a bit dangerous. So, I’ve been doing that since. And it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s really fun.
She can come everywhere I need to go.
Danielle Wood: You’ve got a bit of your dad in you by the sound of it, the risk-taking streak. It’s really lovely. thank you again and congratulations on the book and I definitely will read it if you do another one soon. Thank you.
Eleanor Hall: Okay, so let’s now introduce our next book and author. Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow is like Debra’s and Sam’s, it’s a very intimate book in her case about the relationship between a mother and a daughter. So, it’s a much quieter book than Sam’s. like Sam’s and Deborah’s, it’s, it is, far from traditional in style.
And in fact, it won the inaugural international novel prize, which was set up to recognize innovative works, which expand the possibilities of the novel form. And it will now be published in 15 languages. So, it’s a, it’s a stream of consciousness, no chapters, she didn’t have to put chapters in like Debra did.
It weaves in and out of the present and the past, in and out of memory and imagination, in and out of art and reality. On the surface. It is about a mother and daughter’s trip to Japan. The trip is the daughter’s idea, she’s the story’s narrator, she’s planned a careful itinerary of galleries and restaurants and temples and things that she hopes her mother will appreciate.
As they journey, they talk about Mostly small things. Sometimes the daughter tries to explain to her mother how she’s feeling and what’s important to her about maybe bigger things, like how she feels about a work of art. Sometimes the mother tries to explain horoscopes or religion or something that is important to her.
They tend not to really explain. Connect or understand each other in between there are flashbacks to the daughter’s life in Australia along with Stories that the daughter recalls of the mother’s life growing up in Hong Kong and at one point She tells she tells this story in the book and it’s how she recalls it And she realizes no one else in the family actually can recall this story at all and then there are some times when she realizes she’s remembering smells and sights that are Actually, her mother’s, not her own.
So, it’s, it’s, while on the surface, it’s a travel story, it’s much more complex. And it’s sort of about the slippery, slipperiness of meaning and the elusiveness of truth. It’s about also growing up in a migrant family where language is not always shared. And that reminds me to what Deborah was saying about language and how important that is to a person’s identity and how they express themselves.
And so, it’s, it’s also about how relationships change as we age and whether. The person that we saw at one point, when they change, whether we’re prepared to accept them when they land at the next point. And, So, I think our Prime Minister, who had a very close relationship with his mother, will find the book enjoyable and challenging.
And, although perhaps we shouldn’t be challenging politicians to question the notion of truth at any point, but, I, I did find that I, it was a very quiet book that really got under my skin, and I, I found myself surprisingly really interested in whether Jessica was going to get the next, the ticket for the early train rather than the late one.
I mean, there is so much, so much, so much, Detail in this book, but you really care about it. I also particularly loved her reflections on art because as I mentioned, I’m now an art student. So, it, it was, those things were lovely for me to read as well. As a mother and a daughter, I found it really emotionally engaging too.
Interestingly, some people have said they find it not so engaging and I’m really curious to find out what your reaction was, Danielle.
Danielle Wood: Oh, I found it entirely engaging. I have to say, as soon as I read this one, I was determined to put it on the list. actually, I didn’t read it. I, I listened to it. I originally consumed it in audio book, form, but, I found, you know, in a, in a hectic world, it’s, it is so beautiful and so pared back.
it’s just almost a sort of a sense of calm that evades it for me, which I, I just really loved. I thought. It, the, the novel itself almost feels. So, you know, it’s sort of a weird thing to say, but when I think of Japanese food or Japanese gardens, you know, that incredibly difficult to pull off, but it’s that pared back elegance and simplicity.
And that, that’s what the novel was for me. but also, just the, The, the sort of identification with the, the protagonist who has that just deep yearning for, for connection. So, it’s very clear with her mother that she is going on this trip, she’s taking her mother on this trip in order to try and forge this connection as her mother ages.
And, you know, you always sort of feel that they’re just sort of missing each other. She just doesn’t sort of quite, even though there’s very much love between them, she doesn’t sort of reach that deeper emotional connection that she’s looking for, but that, that sort of yearning permeates the book and it’s incredibly beautiful.
if I can, yeah. I don’t know if you’re going to get Jessica to read, but I just wanted her to read one short piece because I think it’s really, I wonder if it’s the same one.
So, this is at the end, the end of the trip they’ve had together. My mother looked at me and smiled as if she was simply happy to say that we were in each other’s company and to have no need for words. We had said it seemed so little of substance to each other over these past weeks. The trip was nearly ending, and it had not done what I had wanted it to do.
I thought of learning Japanese, how childlike I still felt in the language, how I was capable only of asking for the simplest things. And yet I persisted because I dreamed one day of being able to say more. I thought of the instances where I had been able to converse in a string of sentences, like with the woman at the bookshop, and how good this felt, how electric.
I wanted more of those moments to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me. I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese. And how mine was English and how we only ever spoke together in one and not the other.
Eleanor Hall: That was exactly what I was going to read. Well done.
Danielle Wood: We really should coordinate, but it’s, I mean, there are so many other powerful bits we can get her to read as well. It’s just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book.
Eleanor Hall: But shall we invite? Jessica, up to the stage. Yes, let’s please.
Danielle Wood: So, Jessica has worked as a writer, an editor, a bookseller. Cold Enough for Snow is actually her second novel. and as Eleanor says, she won the Novel Prize, but also the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize. She was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award and the Queensland Literary Award. It has been translated into 18 different languages.
Congratulations, Jessica. It’s a remarkable achievement. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Eleanor Hall: Yes, indeed. Congratulations, Jessica. Now, first, I want to ask you about the title, because you, you realize where it comes from very late in the book, it’s a question asked by your mother. Why did you make it the title?
Jessica Au: I think I sort of; I actually didn’t have a title for quite a lot of the book. the working title was, A Common Language, which is a riff on the Adrienne Rich collection of poems, The Dream of a Common Language.
and I sort of, I kind of thought that spoke to the themes of the book, but it, I knew it wasn’t quite the thing. I don’t know. I think I think what I liked about Cold Enough for Snow was that it was a little bit poetic, I guess. I thought that, you know, if I sort of made my prose plain enough, then maybe I could get away with a poetic title.
I could have probably made it a bit plainer, but, you know, I thought I’d try it. yeah. But yeah, I also really like the sort of, unfinished, fragmentary sort of quality. you don’t really know if it’s a question or a statement. You know, what’s cold enough for snow? Is it the place they’re in, the temperature, the seasons?
and I think I sort of liked the temporality of it, you know, when Snow comes, it’s incredibly beautiful, it’s sometimes magical, but, you know, it’ll inevitably melt and fade, and just like the mother will inevitably pass away, and the daughter will as well. yeah, so I think, and you know, like you said, it is something, it’s a line that the mother says in the book, and it comes quite late.
and I think you have to be careful sometimes doing that, putting the title, you know, as a line in the book. But I, I feel that titles in some way, you know, they do frame the book for the reader. They, they tell you what to focus on. They say something a little bit about intent, you know, to, to pick out this moment above all others.
And I thought that moment was something worth focusing on in a way because it’s one of the Two or three lines of direct dialogue. I think the mother has in the book and it’s an expression of desire when You know the whole trip she’s sort of not really said what she’d wanted the daughter’s asking her, you know Where do you want to go?
What do you want to eat? And she’s sort of, you know, she’s so used to absenting herself She doesn’t say anything but at the same time, it’s a desire that’s undeliverable because where they are, it, you know, at the time, it’s just not the place for snow, but it’s the one thing she wants to see. So, picking that out.
Eleanor Hall: So, what would you like your readers, and I guess again, that one particular reader that we’re hoping that will take your book to his summer holiday, what, what would you like the prime minister to take from your book?
Jessica Au: yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. I always struggle with this question, I think, probably because I think that.
You know, reading is such a porous activity, it’s a meeting between the reader and the, the work, it’s, it’s not something you can control. you know, I will say that I, I wrote it to try and, in a way, define a certain experience with migration rather than be defined, which I Thought I hadn’t really felt growing up.
I felt very defined by others. you know, but if I hope that anyone took anything away from the book, it would probably be, just what I searched for when I read, which is a sense of recognition, you know, it’s. The books that articulate something within you that you weren’t fully conscious of and yet they managed to say it and you recognize something of yourself in them, even if ostensibly you come from, you know, very different backgrounds. And I think, yeah, just that sense of recognition.
Eleanor Hall: And of course, Anthony Albanese also is, is, has a bit of a migrant sort of experience in his background. I guess, the daughter does talk about the, the language divide. And I, just going from the reading that Danielle did then, you say, and the quote again, you say that, so your mother’s first language was Cantonese and your, not yours, the daughter’s, I’m saying yours because that’s how I’m reading it in the book.
The mother’s first language is Cantonese, the daughter’s is English, and that they only ever spoke together in one. You say that you’re wanting to talk about the migrant experience. What sort of a block do you, in communication, do you think that creates?
Jessica Au: I mean, I think it does and it doesn’t, because, you know, usually with parents and I think especially with the mother and daughter in this book, they do have this really strong intimate embodied connection, right?
It’s, it’s almost telepathic. I think they can, you can send sometimes what your family thinks. Even if they don’t say anything, or even if they say something completely different, you know, you can, you can read a lot in there. so, I think to one extent they, they have that connection and if anything, they are reading that constantly throughout the book.
but at the same time, you know, like we were saying, language is linked to culture, it’s linked to history. the way that a certain language structures its grammar, or its vocabulary shows you what it values and what it focuses on. So, I think that there is. Something that the daughter feels is maybe missing there, a level of understanding and maybe it’s just a sort of level of her, her mother’s childhood, you know, that is locked away and I guess she just wonders what it would be like if her mother could express herself fluently with her, with even a sense of humour, you know, that sort of thing.
Eleanor Hall: The daughter tells us that she doesn’t know why she wants to take this journey with her mom. She says, I was beginning to feel that it was important for reasons I could not yet name. Does she name them in the end do you think?
Jessica Au: I don’t know she explicitly names them, but I think that through maybe layering it, she might get a clearer sense and maybe hopefully the reader would get a clearer sense of it.
I think that, you know, at the start of the book she feels that her mother and her are so different, you know, they’ve been born in different places, they speak different languages and, you know, because of the speed and nature of migration, there’s differences in class and differences in education on top of differences in personality.
and I think she feels that maybe they do have this connection, maybe through art or through something deeper. She just has to unlock it for her mother and maybe then that will be what they connect with. And that obviously doesn’t turn out to be the case. but I think she feels in a way that it’s her last chance to, to ask that question of her mother and to find that out.
and I think it also, Shoot it sort of plays into the sense of time with the book You know, I sort of wanted it to be right almost on three levels that you know, what was happening was happening in real time That was one level the other level being maybe these were things her said or things that the daughter had wish she’d said That hadn’t been able to.
And then just the third being that maybe the trip had never happened at all. And maybe the mother has already passed on and it was something she wished she’d done. So, wow. Yeah. Oh, that’s really interesting. I didn’t get to the third level. No, it was pretty subtle.
Eleanor Hall: There is a lovely description there. you mentioned that She was trying to connect with her mother about art.
She, so the, the narrator talks about Greek mythology, and she tries to explain it that it’s like camera, a camera obscure for human nature, quote, by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes. That’s, is that something that you, you feel about art that, that it is trying to speak to us more directly?
Or allows us to see more directly perhaps.
Jessica Au: Possibly. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, it’s difficult to pinpoint any clear purpose sometimes with art because, you know, sometimes you don’t feel anything at all when you look at something, you know, some, but sometimes you can be really moved and sometimes that’s just about immersion or beauty or it’s, it’s something else more radical.
but I, I do think that, you know, thinking about that line about the camera obscura, I was thinking about, A sense of clarity maybe or depth. and I think maybe, you know, going back a bit, it, that thinking has to do with what I feel is a deep problem sometimes with language. like I feel on the one hand it’s a wonderful tool.
It’s a wonderful thing we have to communicate, but on the other hand, it’s really difficult sometimes to convey. The depth and nuance of a whole lived experience. And, you know, sometimes I just reach for things which are like generalities or cliches, and they’re not really what I mean. They’re just easy or the approximations of what I want to say.
and maybe the thing about art, you know, in clarity is that. If it is abstract, say like a painting or dance or music, it doesn’t have to do with words. It can allow you to hold something, undefinable and complex. Or if it’s like a novel, you know, sometimes it’s about the layering. It’s about talking around and around a thing and not naming, naming it explicitly, but just carving out this very specific space.
and you know that sort of triangular relationship you’ve got with yourself, the work of art you’re looking at, and then the experience in, in those gaps, you know, I think there’s room for something else to kind of exist. And that’s what Japan is in a way. It’s, it’s the country that allows her to, to sort of contemplate her Past, her mother’s past, China and Australia, through it, through a third object, thing.
Eleanor Hall: Just, have I got time for one more? Just going to that point that you said about the third layer of reading, that perhaps the mother has already died, there is a point in your book where the daughter imagines going through the mother’s things and she says, or after she’s died I mean, and she says, I knew I would keep nothing, whether out of too much, Or too little sentiment.
I didn’t know. Why is she so certain that she’ll keep nothing?
Jessica Au: I don’t always know. I think, I think maybe there’s a, there’s another part of the book where, you know, the mother and the daughter are sitting together in a church and they’re talking about, spirituality and religion. and the mother sort of makes a comment along the lines of maybe more Buddhist thinking that, you know, she thinks life is and really the best you can hope for is to pass through it.
You know, she says like smoke through the branches until you either reach a state of Nirvana or you suffer elsewhere. And I think maybe the daughter sort of implicitly disagrees with her at the time, but I think deep down, maybe she does understand that aspect of her mother. And. You know, there’s another, point at which, you know, an ex-boyfriend of his is commenting about the narrator.
And she said, he says she could always live in a monastery, you know, doing the same task over and over again. so, I think maybe that there is that sort of continuous line between them that maybe the narrator does feel that. You know, there is something ephemeral to existence and she doesn’t necessarily put a lot of stock in holding physical objects and keeping them.
Eleanor Hall: No, it’s a very, very beautiful book. And there are no cliches in your writing, I must say.
Jessica Au: I hope not. There might be a couple.
Danielle Wood: Thank you so much, Jessica. so next up we have a wonderful essay, by, Journalist, author and editor, Joe Chandler. Joe was unfortunately, no longer able to, to be here today, but she is, certainly very keen for us to discuss her wonderful piece, which was in the Griffith Review, cool, real cool world edition, is it?
and it, look, it’s a piece that taught me a huge amount, it is on Australia’s role in the race. It’s in the Antarctic to hit the million-year-old ice core. so, it was something I have to say, I didn’t know much about, Australia’s Antarctic division is actually a world leader. And essentially there are a number of countries in the Antarctic, racing to get down to this deep, deep core, China, Europe, Japan, Russia, South Korea.
and ultimately, you know, this is a scientific journey. We, we need to understand. that long arc of history to appreciate, what they describe actually is kind of the guardrails of, of how far we can go in terms of emissions by understanding the history. of emissions that we can delve into that ice core.
we understand, how the world might react to the very, unusual position we find ourselves in given the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. so, this is sort of a crucial scientific mission. but it, the essay goes much beyond that, even though it describes that sort of scientific race.
It’s, it goes into the, the sort of geopolitics and the strategic. element of that Antarctic investment, which I found absolutely fascinating. it is something that has waxed and waned over time. So, she talks about how we sort of dropped the ball a little bit in terms of our investment in the Antarctic, through the eighties and nineties in the early 2000, Malcolm Turnbull got back on board, big time, signing the Australian Antarctic strategy.
and. She talks about, you know, why it is that it’s important to be there. one of the people interviewed in the essay talks about it as. You know, partly a flag raising exercise that we are, by being there and participating in this scientific race, we are helping, define our territorial rights in the, in the area.
but at the other side, there is a kind of very different geopolitics, which is when you’re on the ground there, in those incredibly harsh conditions. the country’s banned together. so, there is, she talks about an incident in 2010. it was a Chinese, one of the Chinese people at the Chinese station got hit by an earthmover, very badly injured.
he’s taken to the Russian base. It’s a team of doctors from Hobart that comes and operates on him. A decade later, end of 2020, it’s an Australian that, that’s injured and it’s the Chinese and American teams, you know, basically helping carve out a runway so he can get medivac ed, off back, back in Australia.
So, you know, and that was at a period where deep, tensions between the, the three countries around the pandemic and, and trade. but on the ground, none of that matters. Everyone’s banding together. And I thought that was, a really lovely, discussion of, of just, you know, how that actually kind of plays out.
And there’s a really, I mean, again, it’s beautifully written, a nice paragraph that just sort of sums up that, that duality of the geopolitics. she says that episode encapsulates the disparate threads of the Antarctic narrative that are so captivating. The individual quest for knowledge, recognition, and adventure.
The exposure of intimate character to the elements, the layers of veneer stripped back to raw. The chest thumping of posturing nations, the camaraderie of their emissaries. The outposts of our occupation of this place, which defied human intrusion for so long, are still so tenuous. Rusting fuel drums piled on white ice.
The juxtaposition of mess and purity, vulnerability and magnificence, transience and endurance. This is Earth before and beyond us. So, it is both beautiful and informative. Did you learn much, Eleanor?
Eleanor Hall: Interestingly, I, I, you know, have, have done a bit of reporting on Australia’s role in Antarctica and, and I, I thought also I had done quite a bit on Antarctica, Antarctic Research and its role in climate change, but what I found really interesting was I did not know about this ice core Which is this there’s this battle to sort of or not battle.
Actually, it’s a sort of cooperative competition Amongst countries to find this ice core that goes down a million years and the reason they’re looking for a million years Is that it was at that point that there was this change in the cycle, the system, where the ice ages had flipped, ice age, you know, warming, ice age, warming at a sort of regular rate.
And then a million years ago, something changed. So, they’re trying to find that point. And it’s, that to me was surprising because I knew they were getting ice cores and they’re finding out stuff about the climate and I just didn’t realize they were really actually diving for that. And when they find that million-year point.
One of the things I’m still a little unsure about is what it’s going to tell us. But it’s probably something to, something more terrifying than we already know about tipping points. But one of the things I also found really interesting, and, and there’s a little bit in the book which, I don’t, look I won’t, I won’t Why not?
It’s about how much information that you can find in these ice cores and the thing that struck me was the air temperature a million years ago. Wow, really? So, she says from these samples, scientists can discern past air temperatures, measure precipitation, track concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, other greenhouse gases.
They can open the pages of deep time through traces of aerosols and microparticles. Vestiges of ash archive volcanic eruptions, salts recall conditions in the surrounding seas, sulphur signatures etch the extent of sea ice and the life forms clinging to it. Sprinklings of mineral dust testify to wind circulation.
And then she says, this isn’t proxy data. She says, this is real. It’s extraordinary. And I think one of the things, so, so I, I, yes, I, so funny as a reporter you think you know things and then you realize you’re just a jack of all trades and you know a tiny bit about, well you know this too Sam, tiny bit about lots of things and really not a lot about many things.
So, but I think what was interesting too was, when they discovered this, Will Stephan, who I’m sure all of you know and certainly I’ve interviewed many times, he said that the, the interesting thing was that, so the Russians dug down, I think in 1998, and they’ve got quite close, I think 800, 000. Yes. And they, the things that they found, he said, changed the way that scientists thought.
He said they previously thought the earth was a system, a geophysical system, which influenced life. And what this showed was that life was also influencing the system. And I think that was the really interesting thing, to hear someone like Will Stefan say in 1998, that was a game changer. That, that to me was really interesting.
And of course, then there was all the, the geo strategic things you were saying. I, I just, I hadn’t also kind of tracked the way the geopolitics Matches the scientific funding more recently. I knew that that was what was going on at the beginning when they set up the Antarctic Treaty. Which is a wonderful thing because it’s actually not about planting your flag.
It’s about planting a flag for science and saying no one has complete ownership of this place. And we’re here to discover it together and that that’s a really wonderful part of the story. But I think I mean the fact that it was 2016 I was thinking but wasn’t that a Wasn’t it a coalition government?
Didn’t they hate science? It’s like, oh, hang on, that was when Turnbull came in. Anyway, politics. Let’s get away from it. We should move on. We should.
Danielle Wood: Sorry, I’m being the harsh timekeeper tonight, but I do want to get everyone out on time.
Eleanor Hall: I’m a very obedient time person, having been in that media industry for such a long time.
So now we’re on to our next book, which is, this book. Claudia Goldin’s Career and Family. So, I, there are things I liked enormously about Claudia Goldin’s book, and a couple of points which really irritated me. So, this is probably the most, most dense book on the list, so warning if you’re looking to take it down the beach, it is full of statistics, meticulously marshalled data, but it’s really readable because Claudia Golden organizes the information in such an interesting way, and she includes.
Thank you. Biographical narratives of specific women so that you, you really get a sort of personal sense of it. It’s the story of the momentous change that began when women first started entering the professional workforce in significant numbers in the first two decades of the last century. And the choices about career and family that they’ve made over that time.
And Golden makes it clear she’s only talking about college educated women. So that limits it significantly, but it makes it clear. I, you know, able to be focused and, it’s based on US data, but the similarities with Australia are actually quite striking. So, she tells this story through five cohorts of women.
The first group graduated university between 1900 and 1920, and they had to fight even to gain access to university, and once they earned their degrees, they faced significant legal and social restraints on their careers if they married. So, they had a choice, career or marriage. Or family, less than half of group one ever married and just over one fifth had children.
Then she, the, Claudia Golden calls group two, the group who graduated from 1920 to 1945. She calls them the work, then family group. She says work, not career, which is significant, but you’ll have to read the book to find out because there’s so much detail in this book. I’m not going to tell you everything.
So, it’s still one third of this group never married, including Some really successful career women, I hadn’t heard of this one, but perhaps you had, Danny, Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize for Genetics Research. but those who did marry tended to marry quite late and once they married, their careers were cut short.
They led the fight against, various legal restraints on married women. In Australia, one of the big legal barriers. Was, it was for women working in the Commonwealth public service. They had to resign if they married that was still there until 1966. So, the fight was, you know, the, the fight was ongoing and, career, I mean, group three, they attempted to do the reverse of group two, and they tried to have a family first and then a career, but they faced problems as well.
So more than 90 percent of this group married more than 80 percent had children. This was the. the post war, baby boomer era, but while they faced fewer legal barriers to working, thanks to the efforts of their mother’s generation, there were still social bars and discrimination. So, when they tried to go back to work after having children, it was very difficult.
So, for example, Stanford law graduate, Sandra Day O’Connor, who many of you will know, eventually became a Supreme court judge in the U. S. She couldn’t get a job in a normal law firm when she graduated. And when she, when she came back after having children. Then there’s the women of Goldin’s group four, they had seen their mothers try and fail to establish careers after they had families.
So, they tried the other way around. And there’s a really lovely story in the book where one mother says to her daughter, you know, she sort of advises her to do what she didn’t do because she’d failed. And the pill, of course, helped this group delay children. But then there was a downside to that because some who wanted children found they’d left it too late.
Which leads to the final group, in Goldin’s breaking, you know, breakdown. Building on the efforts of a century of women driving change, this group wanted both family and career and in whichever order they chose. So, it’s here that’s, so this is, this book is very complex, so it’s here that they come up against the big problem that Claudia Golden argues, and analyses so comprehensively in this book.
She argues it’s the key to the gender wage gap. It’s what she calls greedy jobs, and she says it’s the obstruction that’s always been there. So, in a nutshell, the problem is jobs that require Long, irregular hours pay more than jobs that, that, you know, have family friendly hours. They don’t just pay more because you work more.
They pay a lot more per hour for a variety of reasons, which I, of course, won’t go into. this means that couples tend to specialize. And so, one couple will tend to be on call for career. One will tend to be on call for family. The one that tends to be on call for family is the woman. And hence, the job.
The gender wage gap. Now I have a concern here that golden downplay some other drivers of the gender pay gap and like low pay in feminized sectors here. Of course, the carers sector, and also just basic sexism and discrimination, but she does make a solid argument. And on that point, Danielle, I’m intrigued to hear what you make of her greedy jobs analysis.
Danielle Wood: look, it’s, it’s worth, saying at the outset that, Claudia golden is incredible economic historian, probably will win a Nobel prize and has really transformed economics by bringing in this kind of family dynamics into understanding, which is, it’s, it’s so crucial, particularly when you’re talking about economic participation for women.
So, what did I make of it? I mean, I think everything she says applies here. We see exactly the same dynamic in, in the data. and, you know, a big gap opening up in workforce participation after children are born. this kind of 1. 5 earner model as we refer to it, which is, you know, one person in the couple, almost always the dad working full time, often in the sort of more prestigious high paid job, other partner, almost always the mother, in the job that allows her to flex hours and, and deal with, you know, kids sick, I’m going to go and do the pickup.
So, you know, we see the same here, transforming those greedy jobs. will be necessary if we want to push towards a more equal model of workforce participation, along with a number of other changes, including getting men more actively involved in care.
Eleanor Hall: Do you think though that she does downplay that issue of the, the, the female dominated workforce?
Cause she said she does an analysis, and she says, Oh, it’s only 30 percent of the problem. I’m like only 30%? That’s still pretty significant. and, and of course it would be more significant probably if she weren’t just looking at the
Danielle Wood: I think what you are just seeing is, the way that academics work, which is to say, I’ve studied this, I’m talking about this.
Therefore, I’ll just, I don’t think she’s saying that that’s not important. And, and clearly, you know, low pay in feminized sectors, age care, early learning and care disability care, is. It’s very real, it contributes to the wage gap, it’s contributing to massive shortages of workers in those sectors, as we speak.
So, I, I, I wouldn’t read it at all as a downplaying of the importance of that. All she is saying is there is a very, a very other significant thing that we should be talking about. She’s up playing.
Eleanor Hall: Indeed. Now, you of course memorably said in that speech, which launched the Albanese government’s jobs and skills summit, and I’m going to, I’m going to quote you here, because it was such a great, it was such a great line.
You said that if untapped women’s workforce participation was a massive iron ore deposit, we’d have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground. So how is the Australian government going when it comes to releasing this untapped resource?
Danielle Wood: Look, I think they’re taking it fairly seriously.
It’s certainly high on the agenda and probably, on the agenda in a way that it hasn’t been certainly since I’ve been talking about these issues. so, you know, a couple of the big levers. Reducing out of pocket costs of early learning and care. We know that, you know, we face very high childcare costs in Australia by international standards.
Women tell us that is a big barrier to going back to work. so, taking steps in that direction is incredibly welcome. the other component of what they’re doing which is critical and I think really came out very strongly at the summit, is around paid parental leave. So again, we have a very ungenerous system by international standards.
There is a move to extend the amount that’s available and really crucially to make a component of that, a sort of use it or lose it component for dads and partners. and what we know from the overseas experiences, if there’s a dad, start picking that up and start taking that leave in the early years, that engagement with the, the children, maybe taking them up the ladder, you know, that, that will set them up for a closer relationship and a more involvement in, in care as we go on.
And really that, until you get more involved. men involved in, in care, you’re not going to change the patterns. And we’re going to continue to see these women, churning their lives around, trying to make this career and family thing work. you know, what is extraordinary about this book and those five generations is.
Women are kind of trying all these different things and men are just kind of doing the same thing the whole way around. So, my hope is if, you know, the next two rounds of this, it’s men, it will be men. I am extremely conscious of time. We have two minutes left to go. I have not even talked about our last book, which is healing, by Dr.
Thomas Insell. He is the, let me get the topic, the title right, the director of the National Institute for Mental Health, which is essentially America’s chief psychiatrist. we’ve put this book on the list, it is also probably slightly on the heavier end of the spectrum. because mental health is such a critical policy issue, and I don’t know if anyone saw the HILDA longitudinal data that came out last week, but the extraordinary decline in mental health for under 35s, should keep any prime minister.
Up at night. it’s been going for a decade, but it did speed up during COVID. this book I love it’s very Grattan in its style. It’s not just admiring the problem. It’s talking about what we know works. so, it’s not just about, how do you reform the system? He’s very clear. We need to. look more broadly into people’s lives, the, the role of people, human connection of place of having a home and of purpose, particularly through work and people’s lives is critical to mental health.
But as is reforming the system and we know. You know, it’s quite hopeful. There’s a lot of things we know work. We don’t have good systems for bringing evidence base into mental health care. but he calls it healing because he says you can heal, you can, you can recover, and we can make the system work better.
So, if you’re interested in mental health, it is an American book. but it, there are so many parallels with the Australian system that I still think it is very worthwhile read for people who are interested in that area. with that at seven o’clock, I’m going to have to wrap up. I think Eleanor might’ve gone all night and, you know, frankly, we could have, they’re just such a fantastic set of books.
I will quickly mention the wonks list. this is what we think the prime minister should read over summer. The wonks list is what we think the prime minister’s advisors should read over summer. slightly, more technical, worthy tomes. thank you to Alison Reeve, who’s there in the audience for, for leading the charge in pulling that together.
So can I say, thank you again to our brilliant authors. Thank you for the work that you have done, but your wonderful engagement tonight. We’re so delighted to have you here. Thank you to the ever-excellent Eleanor Hall, to the State Library and to Paul for hosting us, and to, all the wonderful Grattan staff that, that read and discussed books and, and to the unflappable bee who pulled this event together.
If you like Grattan’s work, do consider supporting us. we’ve had a very big year. in terms of policy impact in 2022, and we hope to do more of that in 2023. I hope you all have a really relaxing Christmas break and I look forward to seeing you all here for more policy discussions next year.
Thank you and good night.