Against the protests of Bjelke-Petersen

Saving the Reef, Rohan Lloyd, Uni of Qld Press

Cloud Land, Penny van Oosterzee, Allen & Unwin

The Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef are national and global treasures, World Heritage Areas, tourism drawcards, long managed by Indigenous people. But settlers and colonial Queensland governments have been, until recently, keen to plunder them, and their continuity has only been a result of determined resistance by those attuned to their ecological significance, as these two books describe.

Early European settlers saw the Reef as both resource and beauty, says Rohan Lloyd, but size seemed an impediment to thinking that exploiting the former would affect the latter. Indigenous peoples were appalled at Captain Cook’s crew’s greedy harvest of turtles, but the crew probably thought the abundance was inexhaustible.

Seeing the Reef as resource and beauty simultaneously continued through the 1800s. Tourism was promoted, even if sometimes there were some odd attitudes – goats were introduced onto one island which was then extolled for its ‘exotic’ wildlife. But the Reef was also harvested for lime, pearls and dugong. In the early 1900s there were actually concerns it would be underutilised.

But already by 1922 the Cairns City Council was opposing lime mining on one cay because of birdlife. After WWII, resource talk spooked the public. After-all, in the 1950s the Queensland government wanted, to quote Trump, to ‘drill, baby, drill!’ The government legislated for oil exploration while at the same time said that they needed more money for tourism. Into the 1980s the government was still pushing for resource extraction licenses. Police intimidated scientists and protestors. It didn’t help that Premier Bjelke-Petersen was, says Lloyd, a significant shareholder of mining companies.

The Reef may be huge, but it is fragile, susceptible to climate change and other human-created threats (for which Queenslanders can’t be held wholly responsible). A Royal Commission and scientific studies showed the dangers, green bans from unions stopped exploration, voters turned against the Queensland government. But climate change-induced coral bleaching, acidification and starfish invasions are now part of a projected, previously unimaginable decline. It is now common for scientists and tourism operators to burst into tears when talking about their fears for the Reef’s future.

The Daintree may have been saved, but it is only a sliver of the ancient biodiverse rainforests that covered the Far North Queensland coast. In Penny van Oosterzee’s book, the first half is about the Daintree’s riches, the second about dispossession and despoilation.

Cook had noted, contradictorily, that Indigenous residents lacked for nothing, but the land was unproductive (he meant, one assumes, for European style farming). The settlers disagreed with the latter, setting out to destroy the forest to log cedar then sowing inappropriate crops. Van Oosterzee describes the destruction as ‘maniacal’. At Cooktown, almost all red cedar was cleared in the late 1800s. Near Kuranda, on the escarpment above Cairns, red cedar logs were floated down the Barron, and were smashed to smithereens over Barron Falls. In forests, all trees were felled. The largest trees, despite being too big for the logging wagons on the railways, were felled anyway and burnt. Soon supply outstripped demand, and the beautiful timbers were left to rot.

The settlers did not notice the way the land had been managed by Indigenous people, and they not just pushed out but massacred whole villages that had welcomed them. At Herberton, where minerals were discovered, locals boasted of shooting Indigenous people for sport. (We now know this, but there continues to be a resistance to acknowledging it, perhaps because it doesn’t fit an image of Australia most Australians hold). Crops and dairies failed and because settlers didn’t understand the link between rainforest trees and soil stability, widespread clearing caused erosion, polluting streams. (Agriculture run-off in turn damages the Reef.) Van Oosterzee likens all this to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

This legacy is evident in the still-cleared hills of the Atherton Tablelands, where only fragments of pristine forest remain. The World Heritage Area, classed as the second-most ‘irreplaceable’ area on Earth because of its biodiversity and history, is only there because of the efforts of the Hawke Government, against the protests of Bjelke-Petersen and John Howard.

Van Oosterzee owns land in the Tablelands, which she bought from a farmer determined to add to the destruction, and has set about reforesting it. It is now recognised that isolated pockets are not enough, as small populations decline genetically without wider interaction, so van Oosterzee’s contribution is part of wider endeavours to plant forest corridors in a web that links and strengthens remnant areas. This is especially important when climate change is causing movement of species. Unfortunately for some, time may be running out, for as the forests warm, species are pushed up the slopes in search of cooler areas, until they have nowhere higher to go.

Trying to get a step ahead

Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright, Giramondo

Bursting-full of irony and playfulness, Alexis Wright’s extraordinary, epic new novel is an Indigenous Infinite Jest, an antipodean Ulysses. It’s a mountain of magic realism that points to the experiences of and expectations on Indigenous people as they steer between tradition and modernity, and to the way the language of contemporary Australia is jimmied into use, bent at weird angles, hollowed out, hanging like a malignant cloud, like the mysterious haze that hangs over the town at the centre of the novel.

‘Praiseworthy’ is the somewhat ironic name of this northern community, where local man Cause Man Steel, a Don Quixote-type character, also known mockingly as Planet and Widespread for his ambition, is trying to get a step ahead of coming climate catastrophe and fossil fuel shortages by setting up a global transport business based on feral donkeys, which are in plentiful supply in the Top End, and which he collects one-by-one in his battered old Ford Falcon.

He runs into some logistical problems. The townspeople are underappreciative to say the very least – they complain about the stink, and the spirits complain about the disruption to their eternal sleep, as Planet herds the donkeys at the local cemetery. Planet’s wife Dance is also less than enthusiastic, spending her time instead chasing butterflies and trying to figure out how she can be rescued by the Chinese. Meanwhile, the donkeys don’t quite live up to the expectations set by the ancestor spirits who have appeared to Planet in a dream. He is looking for a perfect silver donkey, but only ends up with grey ones – here Wright is hinting, I assume, at how mainstream Australia focusses on the exceptional, exemplary Indigenous figure, while also perhaps hinting at how Indigenous endeavour is judged to be insufficient no matter its extent. Dance is the east-coast imagining of Indigenous culture – vague spirituality and nature – a counter to Planet’s entrepreneurial, ingenious repurposing of a colonialist legacy for the future prosperity of him and other Indigenous people in his orbit.

Characters epitomise various attitudes to Indigenous Australia. Wright’s satire is not subtle, but it is delicious. Planet has two sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk. The latter watches secretly as his older brother wades out to sea and disappears. The townspeople don’t pay much attention to AbSov, as Wright abbreviates his name in a mimicking of a modern cultural trend, until he disappears, then they lament the loss of their Aboriginal Sovereignty and criticise Planet for spending time on wild schemes instead of searching for Aboriginal Sovereignty. Tommyhawk, on the other hand, has spent too much time on the internet and believes the community is full of sexual predators (he thinks his parents are because he is told by the media that they are everywhere), and longs for the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra to rescue him with an air force plane, to whisk him off to the city of plenty. The townspeople think he is a bit creepy.

Planet’s impediments to success are compounded by the townspeople’s suspicion that his ambitions have killed off Aboriginal Sovereignty. Tommyhawk thinks Planet may have even sold Aboriginal Sovereignty’s body to a museum (a reference to the colonialist practice of treating Indigenous bodies as scientific artefacts as well as to the idea that aboriginal sovereignty might now simply be only a historical relic).  AbSov is in turn under suspicion for being a child molester – his girlfriend is slightly younger than he, and therefore underage.

In all this, Wright is sending up Aboriginal attitudes to government, and government attitudes to Indigenous people, as well as the kind of media chatter that pictures so-called remote communities as simply problems to be solved one way or another. Throughout, the mashed-up and turbo-charged language parodies political speak, political correctness, right-wing propaganda and the simplistic appropriation of Indigenous culture. Phrases relating to closing-the-gap, assimilation, human rights and Native Title are swirled around in an alphabet soup, signifiers are out-of-plumb, highlighting how practice often falls short of theory and all the phrasemaking smothers Indigenous reality. Wright is relentlessly innovative, with neologisms like ‘collapsology’, the comic symbolism in layers, and her pile-up sentences reflecting the festering of Planet’s plans and the townspeople’s growing annoyance. There is also a loving send-up of small-town hubris and dysfunction and the hybridisation of cultures that occurs as Indigenous people try to make their way.

Praiseworthy’s mayor is Ice Pick, an albino Indigenous man who believes the way forward is assimilation. As well as battling Planet’s project, in a parody of mainstream media Ice Pick broadcasts to the community that they shouldn’t kill their children but should love them like white people do. He tells them they need to be all one race: ‘Australian’, while a consultant is brought in to advise them to give up impractical ideas about aboriginal sovereignty and workshop positive thinking instead.

It feels like Wright, like a rapacious raw minerals global conglomerate operating in outback Oz, has mined to exhaustion the comedic and satirical possibilities of the landscape, so expansive is her vision. There is something appropriate about the heft of the book, its length perhaps paralleling the weight on Indigenous Australians, and matching the outrageous plot point of the overstuffed cemetery of (live) donkeys. At every turn of the page there is something to laugh at, and, importantly, some opportunity to reflect on the various impositions on Indigenous Australians.

Move beyond the pulpit

King: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jonathan Eig, Simon & Schuster

In his new biography of Martin Luther King, Jonathan Eig notes that none of King’s books were on sale at the gift shop when he visited the King memorial in Washington. Eig asserts that King, one of the most famous religious leaders of the twentieth century, is a symbol of harmony, but that his radical message has been not scrutinised of late. What is clear from Eig’s book is how inseparable King’s radical message is from his faith, especially in his insistence that positive change could only come through the moral high ground of nonviolence.

King’s father was, of course, a preacher – in Atlanta, where theology and social action went together by necessity. As a child, he played ‘preaching’ but didn’t initially want to be a minister – the emotionalism of the Black church embarrassed him. (He later realised it was a necessary ‘safety valve’.) But having a relatively stable and sheltered childhood, and later seeing racism so embedded in American society gave him a kind of guilt, Eig says, that spurred him.

He was a student of the social gospel and was wary of a ‘dead religion’ that only focussed on the afterlife. King thought that change needed also to come from within individuals’ souls, but the Montgomery bus boycott, the first wave of civil rights, reinforced that evil could be systemic. The depth of racism shook his belief in innate goodness and seemed rather to confirm the insight of his namesake, the Reformer Martin Luther, that within human beings there is a deep sinfulness only redeemable by God.

As a religious leader, he reminded audiences that segregation was a moral issue never disconnected from God. His letter from Birmingham jail, almost as famous as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, would redefine American religious leadership, Eig says. It drew heavily on Christian theology to prompt Christian leaders to move beyond the pulpit.

King spoke of the rights enshrined in the constitution, but his language of protest was largely from the pulpit and Bible, both in delivery and content. The Exodus was a particularly rich analogy, unsurprisingly, since Black Americans were the descendants of slaves. He spoke of Black people being weary, just as the Israelites had been weary of their burdens in Egypt, in a land where the authorities were against them. He talked of the ‘promised land’, and like Moses, recognised that he would likely not see it himself.

Like Moses, King doubted his abilities to lead. In public, he seemed in command, in private he lacked certainty. He knew he was a speaker, not an organiser. His numerous affairs, which were his own version of a safety valve (and led the FBI, who tapped his phones, to think of him as hypocritical), likely contributed to his feelings of inadequacy and likely led him to recognise his own sinfulness, like King David, but he took comfort in the promises of forgiveness and redemption. Although he feared for his life, his faith gave him a sense that his own life was subordinate to the cause, that individual sacrifice, to the point of martyrdom, was necessary for the greater good.

He was publicly criticised, without basis, for arrogance, but many, including the writer James Baldwin, noticed his sincerity and humility. Those who doubted his abilities were swayed when they saw him talking privately for hours with the likes of gang members, trying to argue them out of their thinking of the need for counter-violence.

The Black Panthers argued that King and the Black church were conservative and polite, ineffective and subservient. As well as being deeply embedded in the culture of the Black church, and using its potential for mass action, King argued, rather, that nonviolence, to which he was inspired by Ghandi as well as Christ, was the more radical approach. Whites in the South agreed with the Black Panthers that nonviolence was ‘nonsense’. But King saw violence as the easy option, a kneejerk reaction that simply escalated division. The likes of Malcolm X simply played into the hands of the FBI and local authorities who wanted an excuse to clamp down on civil rights demands.

There was a practicality to nonviolence – King rightly saw it as the only way to bring most of the American public with the movement. But there was also a moral high ground – nonviolent protest would shame American whites into seeing the deep moral failure of the country of which they were so proud, and of themselves individually.

Nonviolence required bravery. It was not passive or meek. Peaceful protest in white suburbs was like Jesus enraging the religious authorities. Black Power separatists, in contrast, were like the zealots of Jesus’ day. They perpetuated division, succumbed to hate and invited violent reaction. King, inspired by his faith that described everyone as not perfect but loved by God, attempted to build bridges. He reminded listeners that white people too had died in the cause of civil rights. He always preached love, and this desire to bring reconciliation may have seemed naïve in the face of such depraved antagonism, but it was also radical. King preached more than justice – he invited his fellow activists to love white aggressors, just as Christ had done.

King was also just as radical in his later protest against the Vietnam war. He decided that as a follower of Christ the peacemaker he couldn’t preach the gospel without calling out violence being inflicted on the weak by the strong in other contexts, that racism was related to wider societal divisions. This became another challenge to his fellow ministers, who sometimes hid within the safety of the church. He protested about poverty, and criticised the ongoing war, simply confirming, for the FBI and others, that King had been corrupted by communist ideology. But King was never convinced by communism (at least in its twentieth century, atheistic iteration); his faith drove him to see the ubiquity of injustice, of evil. And he believed that the Christian gospel was not just a promise of eternal reward but, as Saint Paul had radically argued, a force for the destruction of divisions of all sorts.

Then strangers arrived

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, Dan Flores, Norton

They came from the north-west, slowly at first, in small numbers. After Chicxulub, there were pulses of warm and cold, connecting then disconnecting land bridges west to Asia and east to Greenland. Animals moved into North America. Later, taking advantage of one of the colder pulses, one particular animal, an upright ape, moved inland or hugged the coast. By 23,000 years ago they had reached the south-west.   

13,000 years ago, more came, kicking off what later ones would call the Sixth Extinction. They killed off the large mammals mostly, as they had elsewhere. This predator was small-ish, but with tools and endurance, fire and dogs. In Colombia, they painted on the rock walls in the forest animals that went extinct about 12,000 years ago.

By somewhere between 10,000 and 5000 years ago, they created a more conservative culture, perhaps prompted by memories and stories of species lost – bigger bears and wolves and beavers, elephants, mastodons, camels and horses. These were replaced by deer and other bears and coyotes. The vegetation changed.

It was a ‘paradise’, but a modified one. The art of the time showed how they thought of themselves as related closely to the animals, their kin. The animals were feared, revered, celebrated. They were integral to their world. The animals became gods, had human traits. Their adventures explained the past. This new culture, which would become old, was sustainable, not because they used that term, but because they manipulated the animal world for their benefit and understood the dangers of overhunting. They also had sensible beliefs about community, sharing, belonging.

They settled and hunted, built cities like Cahokia and Chaco, 30,000 of them together. There is evidence some of these cities collapsed because of inequality – crops failed, the people rebelled against the elites, who couldn’t guarantee the crops through ceremony, as they had before.

Then strangers arrived – the locals thought them ‘dim-witted’ and ‘greedy’. But the strangers had guns and diseases. The diseases, along with other factors, reduced the local population by something like 90%. Over centuries millions would die. The global climate cooled. Where the invaders had come from, they played and traded on the frozen rivers.

The newcomers, resentful of laws over poaching back home, were exuberant about free access to animals to hunt, even if the locals objected. And they found abundance now unimaginable. Very early on, this land was associated with freedom, which in particular meant the freedom to massacre wildlife. Already in the 1700s, their government, such that it was, was concerned. Colonists noted eerily silent forests.

Part of the problem was that animals became commodities to the newcomers, and attracted by European goods, the locals did the typical human thing – they overhunted and spread out to feed demand. The newcomers, as they spread out ruining ecosystems, were lauded in the new culture as heroes. And they interpreted their holy book to mean that they were not animals and so this slaughter was ordained.

The Indians stood on empty plains in disbelief. Some tried the Ghost Dance, but all they heard was silence. A minority of the newcomers protested – they could see the end – but ‘freedom’ was too important a concept by now in the national ideology. Wardens would be shot and killed over free access to birdlife for feathers in ladies’ hats. Bison and passenger pigeons were the most obvious victims – millions, billions killed. Killing was a form of ‘mass psychosis’, a frenzy of murder far beyond utility. And then they tried to steer the blame onto some other tenuous entity, or to the animals themselves for being too stupid to adapt to ‘civilisation’. Finally, they mythologised themselves as a better race for their prowess at killing.

Some of the interlopers, working with the locals, unable to make amends exactly, worked for an armistice. The country was obsessed with freedom, and angry over the intrusion of government, but the freedom for the human animals was incompatible with the freedom for the other animals, and the freedom to hunt to extinction would be self-defeating. So the hated government made the difference – creating refuges and parks, over the tendencies of individuals to see animals as enemies.

Existentialist but not

Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, Bloomsbury

Much of Giacometti’s work is about figures and their relationship to space so it makes some sense for a book about Giacometti to focus on the artist’s relationship to his space – the microcosm of the studio, and the wider Paris in which Giacometti lived.

It is interesting that he was friendly with Picasso, as they contrast – Picasso the larger-than-life mythology-as-man, filling space, artwork with a robustness and exuberance, as well as being able to, as Giacometti noted sardonically, churn out artworks at a furious pace for a hungry market.

Giacometti, in contrast, paints and sculpts with a distinct sense of the space around figures, the emptiness, the slightness of subjects. Drawings are endlessly worked, line around line but keeping a wiry frame for the light to peek through. Picasso creates volume with one sweeping line.

Picasso has his mansions, Giacometti sees life as nomadic, not about permanency. His studios are small, cramped ‘holes’. (As a child he loved caves.) Visitors comment on the insubstantiality of his rue Hippolyte studio. Here we might see a parallel with the studios of Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud – they are just places to create art, they are the dirt from which the artist, God-like, creates life.

Giacometti was a walker, a night-walker, following prostitutes around the city. He preferred the transaction of prostitution; he was anxious about relationships with women. In his early, Surrealist work the sexuality is ‘suspended’, menacing. (His later sculptures would be more fragile and empathetic.) The Surrealists loved his faintly ‘dimpled’ heads. Giacometti spoke their language, of works coming to the mind fully formed, unforced. But his friends were treated as Surrealist ‘dissidents’; Giacometti was a loner, who inevitably strayed from the orthodox. Ambushed, he was voted out of the Surrealists, perhaps leading him back to more realist works, where he was seeking the ‘truth’ (which might be contrasted with whatever the Surrealists were seeking).

Unlike Picasso, he didn’t seek or revel in the fame. Picasso was industrious with pay-off, innovative, flitting between styles, seemingly effortlessly. Giacometti struggled. As Jeremy Harding says in a London Review of Books article, Giacometti worried endlessly over one problem, transferred aesthetically to the worried surfaces of his later works.

These later works were existentialist but not. He was happy to be roped in to the existentialist circles, with Sartre and de Beauvior, but not. These later works evoked a philosophical response, but Giacometti’s concern was artistic. He was criticised for the new approach – Clement Greenberg thought the new sculptures a downward slide (but then Greenberg championed the non-figurative). Like Guston, he was ridiculed for returning to the figure.

The new works, apparently inspired by Isabel Rawsthorne standing in a doorway, were not about death camps or skeletons, said Giacometti, they were just thin – that’s how they came out, how they were whittled down as he tried to get them right, something unconscious. (Maybe they had an element of Surrealism after-all.) The result of his sculptures of absurdly small figures was that he would sit in a café and see the figures on the opposite side of the street as absurdly small too. Contrast this with Picasso’s chunky women goddesses, arms thrown up in celebration of the sun, thighs as solid as the pillars on the Parthenon.

But to see Giacometti’s problems as purely aesthetic might not be entirely right – death haunted him, in perhaps the same way life seemed to fill Picasso. At the same time, or maybe because of this, Giacometti said he was obsessed with how to breathe life into a head, like the masters – how one captures the spark of life in a portrait, a spark that is so fleeting.

We can’t go back

Yesterday: a new history of nostalgia, Tobias Becker, Harvard University Press

There’s an American pop band, The Midnight, who are part of a ‘retrowave’ subculture that aims to recreate the feel of 80s pop music, with its pulsing synthesizers and naïve neon graphics. The Midnight explicitly refer in their promotional material to the Japanese phrase mono no aware, which they translate as ‘an aching awareness of impermanence’. This seems to me to be a reasonable description of the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.

The term ‘nostalgia’ used to be synonymous with ‘homesickness’ but has come to mean missing a particular time rather than a particular place. The difference in the two, of course, is that with nostalgia, we can’t go back, unlike, in some cases, homesickness. The irretrievable past is a tautology, and our memory is tainted with the loss.

Tobias Becker interrogates meanings and applications of the word in his recent history, but, curiously enough, with some of the examples he uses – Victorian England, the Middle Ages and the like – he ends up deciding the word is a slippery one and is overused (or at least misused).

The use of the term ‘nostalgia’ as a selective, rose-coloured remembering is often a term of abuse, though we might find hints of the feeling in the Romantic movement, even in Greek classics and the Bible. Historians tend to complain about nostalgia being selective, but all remembering must be necessarily selective.

The first panic over nostalgia seemingly occurred in the 1970s, where everything seemed to be shaken up. Then, the focus was the 1950s, a supposedly more stable period. There was even a series of revival concerts showcasing the early years of rock’n’roll. Later, in the 1990s, as cultural critic Chuck Klosterman notes in his history of the 90s, there was nostalgia for the 70s, when things seemed to be more carefree. Inevitably, into the new century there was nostalgia for the 1980s.

Nostalgia is generally seen as an escape into the past to avoid the turbulent present, a reaction to modernity. Progress and nostalgia go together, as force and counterforce, and critics often point to nostalgia being a conservative quality. We don’t usually think of nostalgia as applying to a time when life was more complicated, yet one can be nostalgic for a more liberal and equitable time.

Nostalgia is used as a term of abuse when its holders are accused of wanting to ‘live back then’, supposedly selectively remembering the good times. This may be the case for former Soviet Bloc inhabitants, who fondly remember a sense of common cause, but they admit to other hardships. In many cases (that Becker cites) an interest in the past is simply misconstrued as nostalgia. In other cases, those who describe themselves as nostalgic may do so while insisting that they don’t want to return to the past.

As Becker points out, nostalgia can be conflated with ‘retro’, but it may be helpful to think of retro as lacking that bittersweet feeling associated with nostalgia. Retro too is characterised by its difference from the present, but it is about irony and fun, rather than a wistful longing (which is the dictionary definition of nostalgia). It is possible, though, that irony can lead to longing, as may have happened with attitudes to the 80s, which have developed from interest in the 80s’ over-the-top quirkiness to a fondness for what now seems a simpler time.

I tend to think of nostalgia as related to, say, reminiscences of one’s childhood, but Becker writes about the explosion of interest in historical re-enactments, preservation societies and investigations into family history, which can be sometimes criticised as overly nostalgic. Tracing your lineage may be an escape from a less-than-ideal family life in the present, but not always. Similarly, local history is often done for interest’s sake, rather than through a bittersweet sense of loss. There is simply a curiosity about the past, especially when it increasingly seems so different to the present.

If nostalgia is the right word, in these cases, can we be nostalgic for a past we haven’t lived through? While Becker is sceptical of overuse of the word, it seems that it may be possible, if we feel a distant era had qualities that today lacks.

In that case, can nostalgia be a positive? Could a longing for the past tell us something about the present that needs to be reoriented? Thinking about the past can mean selectively remembering simpler times, when in reality those times may have been more prejudicial, or more environmentally destructive. There is nostalgia for analogue technologies, but digital technologies have made all manner of aspects of life easier. At the same time, nostalgia for a simpler time may mean we note how community seemed more public, volunteering more prominent, people made do with less, and seemed happier as a result. If nostalgia prompts an attention to those things in the present, that’s got to be a good thing.

But then there is also a human inevitability about returning in our minds to the past, in regretful ways or with fondness. We all live in the past somewhat, unless we have amnesia, and there may be an inevitability about remembering good times fondly while feeling something bittersweet about their passing.

The handlebars of fame

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021, Clinton Heylin, Bodley Head

It may seem strange to wish that an 800-page book (volume 2, no less) should be longer, but by the end of Clinton Heylin’s second and final volume on the life of Bob Dylan the years seem to fly by at a rapid rate. Volume 1 covered Dylan’s rise to fame in the early 60s. Volume 2 covers the nearly 60 years after the mid-60s – a heck of a lot to get through – and while Heylin has a tendency to chemically analyse split hairs, the latest decades seem rather hurriedly described. Bob’s life may have settled into legendary monochrome, despite the painting, sculpture, Nobel Prize and ridiculous wealth, but one wonders if there was room for a Volume 3 (‘The Golden Years’?).

It may not be the same river, but we step right back into it, Heylin’s use of first names and references to gigs indicating you had better well have read the first volume. The legendary motorcycle accident in 1966 becomes the dividing line. Post-accident we have the country albums with the strange voice, the gospel albums, the 80s – a time Heylin describes as ‘self-sabotage’ – the long climb back up to the new millennium with the critically regarded (more) recent albums propelling Bob into a pantheon of timelessness, though Heylin says the albums have a fair share of ’12-bar dreck’. Heylin spends equal time admiring and being exasperated. He also calls Dylan a liar and a thief.

After the motorcycle accident there is a loss of enthusiasm and memory. Dylan describes it as a type of amnesia. There is myth making, as with most Dylan – it’s hard to find any agreement on what he actually damaged, apart from the motorbike. But post-accident Bob is burnt-out, the magic carpet ride is over, in Dylan’s own words. The crash may have been as much metaphorical as literal – he went over the handlebars of fame and couldn’t get back on. At least for a while.

Post-accident, there is some music, and painting and domestic life, but when the music comes back properly, the output ‘beggars belief’. Later bootlegs and archival openings reveal unused songs and lyrics. He hunkers down in the basement making music for fun or contract, a musical jukebox teaching The Hawks/The Band old folk tunes. Outside, in the new musical universe, psych rock is howling through the trees. The Basement Tapes and Nashville Skyline follow. The weird voice, more Dwight Yoakum than his usual ‘barbed wire’, may have been influenced by hanging around Tiny Tim, and is yet another constructed persona. Self Portrait is anything but. Derided at the time, probably because it just didn’t seem like Dylan, it has a quirky charm about it. Fans and critics get cranky when he upsets expectations, just like when he went gospel, which, frankly, just shows him tapping into another musical tradition.

Dylan recorded dozens of tracks for John Welsey Harding. His recording process was restless, as he tried on songs and lyrics. The recording sessions take up the bulk of proceedings in Heylin’s book. Mostly they are hilarious: musicians trying to keep up, often lost; Dylan, confusing spontaneity with confusion, explains little. There is endless reworking or sticking with flawed first takes. He is notorious for putting on albums what many consider inferior takes.

Blood on the Tracks is slightly different, with word-perfect first takes, because, Heylin says, the songs were living in his head for weeks. It’s a break-up album because he is breaking up with his wife all through it and the next album, Desire. There’s some material on his romantic life, but that all seems a little veiled as well.

Dylan’s ‘conversion’ is, of course, a key part of the journey, and it was helped along by a girlfriend. It was not a Road-to-Damascus experience. Already in the late ’60s he had been mining the Bible for ideas. As elsewhere, the chronology is muddy, despite Heylin’s sleuthing. It seems the Vineyard Church may have converted him. (The mind boggles at the mental image of Dylan sitting in a bible study class with Vineyard folk.)  Heylin is as perplexed as anyone. Of Slow Train Coming, he says that despite Dylan saying he was doing fine, the lyrics under construction paint another picture. (There’s that feeling amongst critics that he must have been deranged – no-one can take the gospel years at face value.) But then Heylin is happy to contradict himself – elsewhere he says don’t read too much of Dylan’s biography into the lyrics.

By ’79, Bob was in full preacher mode – it seems his reluctance to be prophet to the ‘60s generation burst out in an unexpected way. He got a lot from Hal Lindsey, who said the rapture was imminent. Dylan preached end-of-the-world destruction, but consistent with the complexity of Christian theology, he also said that the pressure was off for the ‘saved’. While he saw the Devil in the world, and a confrontation looming, he also told his audiences the Devil was defeated and they just needed to accept it (to be saved).

Allen Ginsberg, one of the few who made an effort to understand rather than distance himself from it all, although he disagreed, praised Bob’s drive but encouraged him to take on Christ’s gentler attributes. Of ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, Ginsberg protested that the point of the ‘60s was to avoid serving somebody. Bob might have agreed but may have said that’s what was ultimately empty about the ‘60s. Ginsberg’s point was about serving the authorities that led the populace to war. Bob’s point was that if you don’t serve God you serve your own desires – and ample evidence could be found for that.

I wonder too if there was some kind of unconscious racist element to this: for white contemporaries of Dylan, it was okay for Black musicians to be Christian – that seemed part of ‘their’ culture, but for Bob to turn Christian was weird and an intellectual step down. It was not as if Bob was insincere or exploitative – he believed it all and hoped to convert others.

Stubbornly, Bob refused to play the old songs. Reviewers abandoned him like the disciples at Golgotha, but crowds didn’t actually desert him, even if they wanted the old songs. A minority of critics recognised the bravery and intensity even if they didn’t share the faith. Dylan was feisty in concert, but also funny – he told audiences he read only the Bible now, not the newspapers (something that clearly wasn’t true – he was always carping on about being misunderstood, even if obfuscation was his default position).

By 1981 though, he stopped talking about his faith. He seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction he had received, and there was something oddly naïve about this, amongst his generally calculating nature. One friend said he just didn’t realise the bubble he lived in. After Shot of Love he just ran out of steam and disengaged from the religious songs.

Heylin sees the rest of the ‘80s as having had more potential than Dylan is usually given credit for (especially compared to Springsteen, who Heylin paints as Dylan’s upstart usurper). Bob had songs, but he made poor choices. When recording, he would either perversely argue when he shouldn’t, or would stay silent and give in to producers when he shouldn’t. He would come into the studio with good songs only to hurry through them or strangle the life out of them. Then he would leave the best ones off the album, and pick the worst takes.

Oh Mercy, though critically regarded, suffered from the same recording process. Dylan covered these sessions in his Chronicles book, but Heylin describes that book as ‘wall to wall fiction’ with no coherent narrative. (It’s entertaining, at least.) (On the other hand, a girlfriend, ‘Cookie’, appears in Heylin’s narrative – she is clearly an acquaintance of Heylin’s, since he includes a photo of them together, and he believes her every word. This despite berating other girlfriends as completely unreliable.) Lanois is able to get more out of Bob, perhaps, but ultimately Bob is a bit disgruntled. In hindsight, the album is swamped in Lanois’s signature production.

The story of comeback Bob consists, here, largely of stories of recording sessions for albums such as Love and Theft. Here, Heylin is primarily concerned with Bob’s increasing tendency to borrow lyrics and melodies. (Bob coming from the folk tradition, where these things are normal, complicates things.) Love and Theft is a homage to old interwar songs, which includes stealing their tunes, which is perhaps why it’s called Love and Theft.

One musician recalled how before the recording of the 21^st century albums Dylan would have the band run through old songs to rehearse the feel of the classics. They weren’t sure why, thinking they might record some covers, but Bob was just educating them, and once he started recording his own songs, he would refer back to the classics and say he wanted a particular new song to sound like a particular old song. Not only is he a perpetual poetry machine, he’s also an American jukebox. His encyclopaedic knowledge of American music history, which he had early on too, but which he mined well late in his career, stands in contrast, perhaps, to the accounts of amnesia Heylin writes about early in his book.

Big brains

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon, Hutchinson Heinemann

At the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey an ape finds a bone and discovers he can use it as a weapon to gain the advantage over rivals. As well as being a reflection of an often-violent ancient world, this is meant to represent a cognitive leap of our distant ancestors. Cat Bohannon would like to replace this scene with one depicting the development of midwifery.

Too often, Bohannon says, human evolution and what marks us out as distinct as a species is described with masculine bias. Early in her book about the female body, she writes that medical research, unless it is focussing on reproduction, tends to assume the default human body is male, affecting the design of everything from drug dosages to automobile safety to IQ tests.

Her book is a kind of biological history of the female body. Although women’s bodies are not so different from men’s, apart from the obvious additions and subtractions, she writes about how women have more sensitive hearing and smell. Although women have less short-term strength, they have better endurance, and while they lose strength after exercise more quickly than men, they also recover quicker.

The book is graphic without being the least bit titillating. As well as sexuality and reproduction, it is about milk and blood and fat and bones and brains. But far from a medical textbook, it is witty and passionate, and is also an argument for giving women better education and health, based on the importance of child rearing for us as a species. Attending to women’s betterment benefits everyone – it’s well known that giving women more political power leads to more positive environmental outcomes as well.

From her focus on women’s bodies comes non-canonical theories. She sees the development of women aiding other women in childbirth as crucial to our development, especially since the growth of human brains (and heads) made childbirth more difficult and dangerous. She wonders if the availability of wet nurses helped in the growth of ancient civilisations. She thinks grandmothers were a useful invention (perhaps explaining menopause) for holding onto the quickly accumulating stores of human wisdom.

It is often said that human language developed during hunting, or afterwards, when humans would sit around the fire telling stories of the hunt. This assumes that men’s business is the most important. Bohannon writes that since the bonding of mother and child is so important it is sensible to assume that this is where language developed and became more complicated. Besides, other pack animals communicate in hunting; it takes humans to tell stories about, say, the creation of the world or the way the ancestors preserved foods.

The longevity and intensity of child rearing, resulting from our big brains, sets us apart, and has led us to being an incredibly sociable species, something we often take for granted. Bohannon argues that our self-awareness means we can choose to cultivate this empathy – which, by the way, is something at the heart of religion (if it works well). Rather than being locked into our biology, both men and women, inspired by how motherhood has driven our development, can choose to focus more on the cooperative rather than competitive sides of our nature.

There were a lot of complaints

A Northern Wind: Britain, 1962-65, David Kynaston, Bloomsbury

The British winter of ‘62-63 was a particularly bitter one – toilet water freezing, snowdrifts as high as houses, etc. – but eventually there was a thaw, and it is tempting to use that metaphor for what was happening in the period covered by David Kynaston’s latest completed book in his series on the history of postwar Britain (up to Thatcher).

There were changes in the make-up of postwar Britain, as a bureaucracy ramped up with new-fangled ideas, as youth popular culture wedged apart the generations. Others have characterised the era as a whole as being like the change from black and white to colour TV. David Frost, newly prominent TV personality suggested there was a change from ‘do your bit’ to ‘do your thing’.

The wearing of hats declined. Hi-vis vests made their debut, as did Dr Who on TV and James Bond in the cinemas. Oxford and Cambridge talked of admitting women. Anglican Bishop John Robinson, in line with other star theologians such as Paul Tillich and Hans Kung, argued in a bestselling book that churches had better focus on social justice over the supernatural. (This was a time when theological matters could still get attention in the mainstream press.) The queen’s concession to modernity was to get rid of the royal train.

At first Kynaston’s book might seem like a blizzard of voices. (And some of the detail might not be as riveting for non-British readers). But one of the attractions of the series is how Kynaston weaves in the observations of both famous and not-famous Britons, taken from diaries and letters, to bring a contemporary and individual feel to the greater cultural and political history. We get teenage girls’ observations on the death of JFK, housewives musing on TV shows (one Jennie Hill’s clipped observations of some TV shows: ‘v.g.’), the likes of C S Lewis and Philip Larkin commenting on the (changing) morals of the time.

A couple of events in 1963 epitomised these few years: the Profumo Affair and the rise of the Beatles. Political sex scandals would become common in the years that followed – regular tabloid fare. But the Profumo Affair was shocking. While it combined a new freedom of talking about sex in the mainstream (Alex Comfort was doing the rounds, talking freely about such matters, concluding, for one, that abstinence should be equated with malnutrition) with a less deferential press, it seemed to suddenly lift the lid on the goings-on in the upper classes, deflating a previous deference and a ‘discreet era’. David Frost suggested, bluntly, that their hypocrisy was finally unveiled.

The affair also seemed to confirm a slow sliding into oblivion of the conservative government, even if Labour won in 1964 by less than they should have, possibly because, as the outgoing prime minister had famously said, Britons had ‘never had it so good’. But there was also a sense of declining geopolitical influence and morality.

America and the USSR were the global giants now. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which worried Britons as much as Americans. The British Home Office, in typically understated style, advised those preparing for nuclear war that they should take a travel rug and sensible shoes. There were school strikes over the nuclear sabre-rattling. A young Pete Townsend seemed disappointed crisis was averted.

A postwar welfare state was in full swing, as was a modernisation of city centres. While in London, war damage was still visible, a new kind of clearance was happening, with high streets replaced by supermarkets and shopping centres. Apartment buildings were the rage, as modernist architecture proliferated, built with objections ignored. While unemployment and public housing were tackled, a burgeoning bureaucracy meant that those targeted were often bewildered and found it hard to access the right kind of help.

The medical profession was modernising too. There were good and bad aspects – while doctors were becoming more competent medically, some patients missed the less-professional approach, which seemed to some more personal. In some hospitals modernisation was only beginning – children were treated without nuance, head nurses were like wardens. There was work done on mental illness and disability care, but there were often blanket approaches.

Changes in societies are rarely consistent or constant: rapid in some areas, slow in others. Kynaston suggests many older Britons ‘obstinately’ refused the spirit of the times, whether that be immigration or popular culture. Some had barely heard of the Beatles, even as they created waves with a younger generation.

The Beatles, who pop up regularly in the story, benefited from the rise out of postwar austerity, high employment and youngsters with money. They were fresh – more casual, more working class, but also packaged just right, as neat and polite – except for the hair – and goofy. This canny mix meant that at least some adults could stomach them, but the rawness was visible through the seams of the suits and set them apart from the polite popular music, such as Cliff Richard’s, and the novelty acts they were replacing. (Cliff would retain a long bitterness about being upstaged.) At the other end of the scale, the Rolling Stones, whose rawness and lewdness they utilised more obviously, eyed the Beatles’ success greedily.

The Beatles benefited from TV. But not everyone did – one Bob Dylan TV performance was rated ‘incomprehensible’. And that wasn’t the only thing. There were a lot of complaints about ribald new shows with bizarre plots, hosts with inappropriate attire and ‘audacious’ satire. This was accompanied by a rise in equally incomprehensible arty cinema and theatre.

Government bodies were clamping down on racist hoteliers. But as an indication of how mixed history, society and progress can be, one of the most popular programs on TV remained The Black and White Minstrel Show. (It would run for another ten years.)

All the screaming

Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963, Ken McNab, Birlinn

Screaming girls, fainting in the aisles. Screaming girls chasing taxis, vans and tour buses, trying to rip car doors off. Band members hiding in decoy cars, dressed as policemen. Screaming girls, so loud the band couldn’t hear themselves. The rawness of the band drove the rawness of the crowds.

This was one side of Beatlemania (a term apparently coined in October 1963), spreading like a virus. The other side was the careful and relentless push by the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who, while at times out of his depth, knew that the band’s success would have as much to do with publicity saturation as it had to do with talent.

This book is about 1963, when it all broke loose. It is full of quotes from hangers-on, wanting to tell how they had a nice cup of tea with the boys when the country was only beginning to discover them, but you get a sense of the building hysteria, as Beatlemania gripped the youth while the oldies had barely heard of them. Time becomes somewhat elastic.

With hindsight the early hits can seem cute – just pop music for teenage girls, but one young punter in Elgin reported that the thing he was most taken with was the sheer volume. A slightly different response was a comparison to religious ecstasy. One viewer of the band’s TV appearance on ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’ described the ‘Pentecostal joy’. Converted, he became their London promoter. Another viewer described it as ‘rapture’. Helen Shapiro, a singer and national star, whose tour they participated in, later said that they were both raw and polished and were learning how to use the chaos generated by young fans to their advantage.

In Hamburg, they were sweaty, leather-clad rockers. Epstein, pulling them into the mainstream, got them into the suits; comments of the day referred to how they were polite, happy, well-dressed, but then that they also looked like louts with their long hair (which, the band pointed out, wasn’t that long, especially compared to the later shagginess of the ‘70s). Footage of a Swedish TV appearance in 1963 shows how their speed was almost punkish, but they were tight from so many gigs, especially in the old rockabilly covers. There was a palpable, edgy energy. Journalists, deaf to the times and to the band’s appeal, carped on about how they could be good if only they tidied up their rough edges.

John Lennon, especially, was unhappy about selling out (though he repeatedly said his purpose for playing music was to be rich and famous). He was particularly annoyed that the band couldn’t hear themselves play, and therefore were unable to improve as musicians.

Epstein wasn’t worried about that. In January he had them doing wall-to-wall interviews. (McNab comments that they were surprisingly good-humoured about the relentless publicity.) He had them do any old local radio station or newspaper. They would drive for hours to do one interview, on top of frantic touring. They even played at a private boys’ school. This was all to make the most of a single in the charts, which was ‘Please, Please Me’, a follow-up to the reasonably-charting but not yet stratospheric ‘Love Me Do’. They played nearly every night in February, taking a day off not to really have a day off but to record their debut album in a ‘frenzy’. (One day!) The last of the day was the cover of ‘Twist and Shout’, featuring Lennon’s cold-ravaged voice.

There was a fine line to tread, publicity-wise. There was something special about them, yet they were just regular guys. They were happy to breeze through interview after interview, with inane questions and answers. Except for Lennon perhaps, who showed glimpses of the difficult character he would become. He was rude and crude around women – McCartney had to pull him up at times – and a belligerent drunk.

He might have been particularly prickly not just because of his childhood but because recently he had got married to Cynthia in a shotgun wedding, a development he was cold about. (He only popped in for a moment when she gave birth to Julian.) Cynthia had to remain a closet wife, as Epstein promoted the band as four eligible bachelors, even while the others had girlfriends. (The press was content to go along with this farce – it sold papers, after-all, though the beans had to be spilled at some point.)

On tour with Roy Orbison, there were hordes of girls carried out each night by St John’s Ambulance staff after fainting. One of the paramedics said she didn’t understand all the screaming but couldn’t think it was healthy. There were rows of hyperventilating girls curled up in foetal position. They chased the Beatles down the street. (This would become a recurring feature of the whacky American cartoon series, aired in the ’60s.) The police were worried about security. When the band recorded ‘She Loves You’ in London fans got wind and invaded the studio. They didn’t find the band but harassed studio staff, even thinking some of them might have been the Beatles in disguise. The fan club offices couldn’t keep up with the fan mail. Merchandise, official and not, was going gangbusters. There were issues with the Beatles not getting their fair share, but then Epstein couldn’t cover it all and had to outsource aspects of their promotion.

The Beatles spent the first half of 1963 at least saying they were enjoying the attention but weren’t sure it would last. (Lennon’s hubris would come later.) They talked to reporters about what they might do after music. Ringo (quite possibly not pulling a reporter’s leg) thought he might be a good shoe salesman. McCartney and Lennon still assumed that longevity would come as songwriters. (In a way, this was true.) They saw themselves as like the songwriting duos from earlier in the century, like the Gershwins. And they could write catchy songs without them being novelty songs. A comparison with the songs of their contemporaries shows how Lennon and McCartney’s songs had something for posterity. But the Beatles were also partly responsible for a shift in the pop world, wherein singers wrote their own songs. (This became the dominant mode, even if there were always exceptions.)

Ironically, then, they were taken for a ride with music publishing. They signed up to an arrangement where they didn’t control ownership of their own songs and thought others profited just because they, rather than the Beatles, knew the legal subtleties better. Epstein tried to leave nothing to chance, but it was always in danger of running away from him, and he made mistakes.

By the second half of 1963 Epstein had his eyes on the US. By October they had played a famous Palladium show which kicked off Beatlemania in earnest. In November they played to royalty, at a show where Lennon famously asked the well-heeled audience to ‘rattle your jewellery’. But in the US, when a DJ played a Beatles song, he was besieged by calls demanding he take the rubbish off and play The Beach Boys instead. Entreaties to TV host Ed Sullivan at first fell on deaf ears – he couldn’t see their appeal. The Beatles’ record company in the US, inexplicably, didn’t want to waste their time in promoting them.

In November in the UK ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had a million advance orders. It would eventually sell the same in the US. But success would come down to one tenacious American fan, who pestered a radio DJ into playing them, and to Ed Sullivan who finally caved in and took a chance. They would appear on his show in 1964. The Beatles would also visit Australia in 1964, and Beatlemania would go global.