GINA RINEHART (Adele Ferguson) and THE HOUSE OF HANCOCK (Debi Marshall)

THE HOUSE OF HANCOCK: The Rise and Rise of Gina Rinehart

By DEBI MARSHALL
William Heinemann, 2012, 367 pages, $35.95 (pb)

Gina Rinehart: The Untold Story of the Richest Woman in the World

By ADELE FERGUSON
MacMillan, 2012, 490 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

How do you become the richest woman on the planet?  First, choose your parents well and then pursue wealth with ruthless greed.  Gina Rinehart, the Australian mining billionaire ($29 billion net wealth), did just that and two new books on Rinehart explore her world of privilege, profits and power.

Rinehart, both authors agree, is a “carbon copy” of her father, Lang Hancock, whose chance discovery in 1952 of the world’s biggest iron ore field in the Hammersley Ranges near his vast (inherited) sheep station in Western Australia saw him amass enormous wealth from selling the mining rights to Rio Tinto from which the “royalties flowed like Bollinger” (2.5% on every tonne of iron ore) to the Hancock family company - $20 a second, every second, in perpetuity, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars to date.

As a child, Rinehart “wanted for nothing”, and on Hancock’s death in 1992 she inherited his wealth and mining assets without a pick or shovel swung in sweaty effort.  Father and daughter also shared a belief that, as Hancock put it, ‘the greed of capitalism is the only driving force there is’ whilst Rinehart’s business acumen (“rat cunning”, Marshall calls it), plus Rinehart’s obsessive guard over her wealth, has turned daughter, like father, into a wealthy, right wing, politically influential mining magnate.

Rinehart does not like to share her wealth – with governments (through mining or carbon taxes), with asbestosis victims (from Hancock’s old asbestos mine at Wittenoom), with charities (she is a philanthropic tight-wad) or with her employees (she wants to turn the top third of Australia into a low tax, low regulation ‘special economic zone’ with cheap, imported African and Asian ‘guest’ labour).

To protect her riches, Rinehart has taken to court a string of business partners, her own accountants, managing directors, engineers and geologists, many lawyers, her deceased second husband’s former mistress, the billionaire children of Hancock’s original business partner, and, in bitter rifts over the family inheritance, her own father, children and stepmother (Rose Porteous).

Porteous, Hancock’s housekeeper and third wife, was seen by Rinehart as ‘that Filipina prostitute’ (‘she was no cleaner’, said Rinehart) who “snared a multi-millionaire twice her age”, spending the family fortune and threatening Rinehart’s inheritance and status as heir apparent.  The “personal feud between two very rich women” over Hancock’s estate extended to a coronial inquest into Hancock’s death during which Rinehart paid six-figure sums to witnesses to dish dirt on Porteous for allegedly hastening Hancock’s death through harassment and dodgy cooking.  Although Porteous waltzed off with a $50 million haul of assets, Rinehart won the main prize – control of the company and ownership of the mining royalties.

The dynastic soap opera continued when Rinehart, as sole trustee of a $3 billion family trust for her four children, sought to shift their inheritance vestment date by half a century to 2068 when they would be in their nineties, and thus retain the trust money for future investments and their profit streams for herself.  The children’s court case to remove Rinehart as trustee saw Rinehart, with no apparent irony, lecturing her privileged children on their display of ‘greed, jealousy and a selfish sense of entitlement’, reminding the ungrateful offspring that ongoing trust dividend income ‘could have kept you in expensive homes, endless holiday travels, and [your] increasingly very privileged lifestyle for life, without you having to work’. 

Rinehart’s litigious vigilance over her wealth, aided by soaring iron ore prices and massive growth in Asian demand for iron ore, made Rinehart a billionaire in 2006 with much more to come - Marshall cites business commentator, Alan Kohler, on how, for example, the Hope Downs iron ore deposit will produce ‘a royalties income stream of $45 million … a week’ for Rinehart from Rio Tinto.  The Roy Hill iron ore deposit will also funnel $2 billion a year in royalties to Rinehart and make her the richest person in the world.

Rinehart is devoutly right wing, inheriting Hancock’s Thatcherite conservatism as well as his wealth.  She shares Hancock’s disregard for the health dangers of asbestos mining, his promotion of nuclear power (and nuclear explosions to mine iron ore), and his contempt for trade unionists, ‘eco-nuts’, welfare recipients and Aboriginal land rights.  Rinehart, like Hancock, believes that “meddlesome governments” with their ‘red and green tape’ are a threat to the capitalist religion of free enterprise. 

Rinehart funds climate change denialists and puts them on company boards.  She believes that all journalists are card-carrying communists and, whilst her wealth “ensures the ear of those in power”, she seeks to further her agenda through media share ownership.  Rinehart has bought governing board positions at Fairfax Media and Network Ten, with the aim of publicly influencing politicians who are sensitive to right wing pressure from traditional media.

Although Rinehart cooperated with neither biographer (she could not ensure they would echo the Gospel according to Gina), both books usefully add visibility to the reclusive Rinehart, showing, between heavy fillings of dynastic saga and ‘human interest’ padding, Rinehart as having the lavish lifestyle, selfish arrogance and demanding nature of the spoilt, born-to-rule aristocrat of money.

Both books, however, also share an almost fond fascination, and a business reporters’ awe, for a super-wealthy business woman, with Ferguson justifying it as catering to the “public’s insatiable appetite to know everything about the rich and famous”, a hunger more manufactured than real.

Although both books tread lightly around the political issue of whether Rinehart, as symbol of capitalist success, is a good thing for society, they concur that, on a personal level, Rinehart, surrounded by “scheming business rivals” and bought or ideologically slavish politicians, is “a lonely figure”, virtually friendless.  If Rinehart, for whom ‘beauty is an iron mine’, were ever to stop living and breathing money and power, what would be revealed would be the massive emptiness at the heart of the billionaire capitalist.

OVERDRESSED: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by ELIZABETH L. CLINE

OVERDRESSED: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

By ELIZABETH L. CLINE
Penguin, 2012, 244 pages, $37.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Every year, Americans buy 20 billion garments, mostly from mass market clothes-makers such as Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Wal-Mart and Target, and then throw away 13 million tons of it says a reformed clothing-addict, Elizabeth Cline, in Overdressed.

Charity shops can’t soak up the excess with less than 20% of thrift-shop clothing donations on-sold and most of the rest going to landfill, where, with half our clothes made out of plastic in the form of polyester and other oil-based synthetics, half of it will sit for hundreds of years before degrading.  This waste of a non-renewable fossil fuel resource is just one of the environmental costs of budget fashion.

Water is also wasted (2 trillion gallons globally), global warming is fuelled by the greenhouse gas emissions from fibre production (which requires 145 million tons of coal a year), pollution from toxic chemicals used in bleaching, dyeing, water-proofing and wrinkle-proofing is endemic, arable land for food is lost to cotton-growing, and sheep farming for wool causes soil erosion and biodiversity loss.

This ecological burden is the result of a competitive race by clothing capitalists to produce cheap and to sell the low price garments in high volume to maximise profits.  To assist this, the “continuous consumption” of ‘must-have’ fashion trends is “industry determined, created and destroyed arbitrarily in the interest of turning a profit”.  Quality is also reduced to pad profit.  The cheaper the garment or shoe, the quicker it falls apart and needs replacing whilst, to further shave costs, natural fibres have been replaced by cheaper polyester and all fabrics have become thinner and lighter with durability and reparability sacrificed.

Domestic economic costs, too, are high with apparel manufacturing one of the fastest dying industries in America, losing 650,000 jobs in the last decade and the textile industry shedding a further half million jobs.

The human rights costs of budget fashion are also steep as cheap foreign labour is almost universal with 98% of America’s clothing imported (41% from China and the rest from other low wage countries).  A Chinese garment worker earns only one quarter of what an already lowly-paid US garment worker gets, a Dominican one eleventh, a Bangladeshi one thirty-eighth.  The overseas garment worker’s wage makes up just 1% of the US retail price of the clothing they produce.  Child labour and sweatshops, sardine-living in factory worker dorms, fire-trap factories and jailing of union activists have blighted the countries contracted by US clothiers to make their clothes.

To counter the bad public relations, and to end the boycotts by the US college fashion market, US clothing companies announce voluntary codes of conduct and factory audits for its overseas suppliers and then dishonour them by pre-announcing inspections, or setting up model ‘demonstration’ factories to reassure nosy Western investigators like Cline. 

The grim cost of looking trendy is well-documented by Cline but she attributes blame not just to the “profit-hungry producers” but also to consumers who demand cheap clothes.  Cline’s solution is ‘ethical fashion’ with people willing to pay much more for fair-trade certified clothing which meets international labour standards, plus a revival of home sewing, mending and alteration skills.

Consumers, however, shouldn’t have to wear the economic, moral or skills burden of good clothes.  The right to wear good clothes needs to break from market logic including the expensive niche sector of fair trade clothes.  This does not mean fashion being reduced to a universal scruffy socialist look, rather it means a socialist reorganisation of the clothing industry to ensure that the basic human right to affordable, quality clothing doesn’t get stitched up by clothing capitalists making money.

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA by RICHARD BROINOWSKI

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA

By RICHARD BROINOWSKI
Scribe, 2012, 273 pages, $27.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011 was no accident, says Richard Broinowski in Fallout from Fukushima.  Siting a nuclear reactor on an “active geological fault line where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide” was courting catastrophe from an earthquake and tsunami like the one that duly happened in the Pacific in March that year.

As official Japanese reports added after the disaster, the powerful Japanese nuclear industry, immunised from critical scrutiny by the “cozy ranks of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and their media acolytes”, ensured that the Fukushima plant was under-prepared for foreseeable risks.  The reactor core meltdowns in Units 1, 2 and 3, and damage to Units 4, 5 and 6, which all released a “toxic stew of radioactive isotopes”, were therefore no accident.

Before the tsunami swept aside inadequate protective concrete walls and knocked out the emergency generators, the earthquake itself had resulted in radiation leaks and critical damage to reactor core cooling systems.  The desperate attempt to cool the cores by pumping in millions of litres of seawater was unsuccessful and the freshly irradiated seawater wound up back in the sea, contaminating fish stocks.  Dangerous levels of radiation were detected as far away as Tokyo.

All of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors pose the risks of Fukushima.  In an earthquake and tsunami prone country, they share the same “supposedly quake-resistant design” of Fukushima and human error in complex technological systems is almost inevitable.  Nuclear calamity is the predictable consequence.

Also predictable was the response to Fukushima by the nuclear establishment - denial of meltdown or radiation release, delay in providing information, suppression of bad news, and downplaying of the health risks.

When the Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, eventually cancelled plans to build an extra 14 reactors (taking nuclear from 29% to 50% of total energy supply) and announced a policy to subsidise renewables (which comprise just 1%), his own “apparently progressive” Democratic Party of Japan forced his resignation and replacement by a more nuclear-compliant Yoshihido Noda.

Whilst the ostrich response, head-in-sand, may have been the preferred position of Fukushima’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (the largest energy company in the world), and of the other nine big Japanese energy companies and their government protectors, the Japanese people spoke up.  Huge anti-nuclear rallies forced the shutting down of all Japan’s existing reactors for safety checks and few have come back on line against strong local opposition.

Construction of new reactors has also been suspended in response to “deep public suspicion and concern” (80% of Japanese voters support ending nuclear power) coupled with the financial realities of escalating capital costs, wary insurance providers, and repair, clean-up and compensation costs (compensation alone from Fukushima is estimated at between US$74-260 billion).

Broinowski sees a future of “terminal decline” for the nuclear industry in Japan, and an increasingly fragile official pro-nuclear consensus in the rest of the world, with at least some states, such as Germany, keen to steal a march on emerging renewable energy business opportunities.  Broinowski’s solution, however, also depends on “commercial engagement” with a renewables future rather than the publicly-owned and run renewables enterprise needed to switch from nuclear and fossil fuels to clean, green energy.

If some of Broinowski’s book has the measured tone of a diplomatic briefing (Broinowski was a long-time Australian government diplomat) it makes for a very handy pocket reference guide to the déjà vu history of nuclear folly, including the long saga of official denialism and myopia about the health dangers of the nuclear cycle.

Here Broinowski sheds his bureaucratic cool, especially when he turns his gaze on Australian uranium mining.  Japan is the second largest market for Australia’s uranium (which comprises 40% of the world’s uranium deposits) and Australian uranium mining companies including the big two, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, and their Labor and Liberal government flunkeys, must wear some moral stain for Fukushima, for the global nuclear energy industry, and, courtesy of colander-like ‘safeguards’, nuclear weapons proliferation.

The conservative, pro-nuclear media, in particular, goad Broinowski.  In response to Fukushima, the Murdoch press supplied the sneering Andrew Bolt and a bizarre Greg Sheridan, who accuses nuclear opponents of being ‘Greens/Taliban fundamentalists seeking to de-industrialise the West’.  With the less rabid but equally pro-nuclear think-tank, the Lowy Institute, providing ‘respectable’ cover, this cheer squad provided the vocal accompaniment to the main game - making nuclear energy someone else’s problem whilst selling them the deadly raw material and cashing the cheques.  Ethics never has been the strong suit for Australian capitalism.

DANCING WITH EMPTY POCKETS: Australia’s Bohemians by TONY MOORE

DANCING WITH EMPTY POCKETS: Australia’s Bohemians

By TONY MOORE
Pier 9, 2012, 378 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Their pockets may have been empty but Australia’s bohemians have been rich with desire to shake up bourgeois dignity and social conformity through cultural revolution.  As Tony Moore recounts in his splendid Dancing with Empty Pockets, Australia has had a vibrant, dissenting subculture of bohemians from its earliest days.

Marcus Clarke, the author of the first great Australian novel, For The Term Of His Natural Life, “ate, drank and scandalised his way about Melbourne in the 1860s and 1870s, setting up a string of underground literary clubs, mocking respectable society and keeping one step ahead of his creditors”. 

Following Clarke were the writer, Henry Lawson, who embraced a radical nationalism built on “disrespect for authority, irreverence, and unease with respectability”, and the painter, Norman Lindsay, whose “art of pagan pleasure” was “libertine, earthy, humorous, immature, cheeky, sexual, anti-clerical”.

In the 1920s and 1930s, ‘The Noble Order of the Happy, Literary, Wise and Mad’ in Sydney set the tone of the bohemian clubs, to which women at last gained entry to the all-male bohemian world although often “on men’s terms” as promiscuous, sexual playthings.  Mass unemployment, war and fascism prompted a new wave of politically-engaged bohemians from the late 1930s such as the Adelaide University’s cape-wearing communist and artistic modernist, Max Harris.

In the 1950s, the bohemia of the ‘Sydney Push’ intelligentsia flourished with paperbacks of Kafka and Camus, black sweaters and advocacy of free love marking out the artists and inner city non-conformists who made up the Push’s small galaxy whose stars included Robert Hughes, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Wendy Bacon, Bob Ellis and Barry Humphries.

In the 1960s and 70s, the counter-cultural hippies, the New Left and other protest movements flew the subversive bohemian flag whilst punk and ‘Indie’ musicians and cyberpunk hackers have waved the contemporary bohemian banner, with The Chaser ensemble excelling with an “anarchic anti-authoritarianism, Dadaesque stunts … and flirtation with obscenity and offences against good taste”.

Australian bohemianism, whatever its historical manifestations, has some features in common - aesthetic flamboyance, eccentric lifestyle, avant-garde art, and experimentation with cultural, sexual and other freedoms beyond the pale of bourgeois morality.

Politically, too, bohemians have had a shared liking for anarchism, delivering an apolitical cynical detachment from the non-committal comfort of the bar-stool.  Bohemians who embraced the left were prone to divorce - Lawson became a patriotic militarist, a middle-aged Max  Harris “dispensed conservative contrarian opinion in the [once-loathed] Murdoch press” and an anti-socialist Barry Humphries joined the board of the CIA-funded magazine, Quadrant.

Political elitism was also a shared bohemian trait with many bohemians regarding themselves as a “natural aristocracy” above the wasteland of the suburbs whose working class residents they saw as artistic philistines good only for a sneering condescension as conformist ‘Alf and Daphnes’.

Many bohemians would also shoulder their subversive cultural arms to seek “personal elevation within the bourgeois society they denounced”.  As Honore Balzac observed of the ancestral 1840s Parisian bohemians, their enclaves were ‘a vast nursery for bourgeois ambition’ and Australia’s bohemians have displayed a similar “talent for self-promotion”, exploiting the bohemia brand to carve out a space for the bohemian avant-garde in the capitalist cultural market which is perpetually in search for next big thing no matter how rhetorically hostile to capitalism.

The political limitations of bohemianism stem largely from the class position of its practitioners – as Moore explains, bohemianism is a “rebellion undertaken mainly by the young bourgeois in a period of their career when they feel free from the restrictions of the social class they were born into or in which they might end up”.  Cultural playtime under capitalism has definite time limits before the logic of the market kicks in.

Some bohemians have tried to retain their oppositional principles as they began their long march through the institutions of media, politics and academia.  Wendy Bacon practices progressive journalism, Bob Ellis became the “eccentric artist-in-residence to the Labor tribe” and the “free-floating cultural socialism” of Phillip Adams coexisted with his membership of the Commonwealth film and arts bureaucracy.

Red-blooded socialism was rarely a long-term option for most bohemians, however.  Most believe only in ‘epater les bourgeois’ (‘shocking the bourgeois’) rather than its overthrow.  Not only did socialist activism ‘take up too many evenings’ (as the bohemian aesthete, Oscar Wilde, put it) but its collectivism, discipline and structure was too antagonistic to the hedonistic and individualistic bohemians with their penchant for “partying over party”.

Although Moore acknowledges that bohemianism is “a safety valve for discontent rather than promoting focused political change”, he celebrates bohemianism’s subversive potential to push against “capitalism’s demands for work discipline, social order and the sovereignty of market forces”, whose cultural settings under the “conservatism of John Howard, and the narrow managerial materialism of Labor’s new generation of leaders” has ensured a strong future for bohemian dissent in Australia.

Although Moore struggles to pin the “dynamic, ever-changing tradition” of bohemianism down definitionally, his analytically sharp and narratively bright book shows that Australia’s bohemians, although they may not have had too many answers, have asked some very good questions.

NAZIS ON THE RUN by Gerald Steinacher

NAZIS ON THE RUN: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice

By GERALD STEINACHER
Oxford University Press, 2011, 382 pages, $20.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Odessa File,  Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel, popularised the idea of the ‘Nazi-hunter’, Simon Wiesenthal, that a powerful, secret organisation of the Nazi elite, Odessa, organised the escape from Europe of prominent Nazis after World War 11, primarily to Argentina, where they plotted to revive global Nazism.  This, says Professor Gerald Steinacher in Nazis on the Run, is a myth.

The devoted escape managers of the defeated Nazis were actually to be found in the Vatican, the Allied intelligence services and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  With communism the new, official, post-war enemy, a “Cold War political shield” protected from justice tens of thousands of prominent SS officers and other war criminals who were responsible for the Nazi machinery of Jewish genocide but who possessed the redeeming virtue of being zealous anti-communists.

Nazi war criminals hid amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons in the chaos of post-war Europe as they exploited an overburdened Red Cross refugee service to escape.  The Red Cross was the reluctant, de facto post-war authority for issuing overseas travel documents and identity cards.  With just the testimony of two witnesses sufficient to establish identity, escaping fascists clubbed together in massive, easily perpetrated, identity fraud.  Red Cross field workers did not deliberately help the Nazis to escape but Red Cross senior echelons bore moral responsibility, or at the very least were guilty of gross negligence, argues Steinacher, for collusion.

Paul Ruegger (ICRC President from 1948), for example, was aware of the scandal but chose not to intervene.  Ruegger was of aristocratic background, a conservative Catholic and an admirer of Mussolini whilst his wartime predecessor had pro-German sympathies, was latently anti-Semitic and shared the strong anti-communist convictions of Ruegger.  Their politics allowed a wave of war criminals to escape with Red Cross transit papers, amongst them Adolf Eichmann (the “bureaucrat of mass murder”) and Josef Mengele (the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’).

The ICRC covered its backside by arguing that its moral standing as a neutral humanitarian intermediary mandated assistance to all regardless of nationality, race, religion or political opinion.  Or, apparently, war crimes, it could be added.  The Red Cross had never been strictly neutral - its infamous failure to speak out against the Holocaust (for fear of endangering its ability to carry on aid work in German-occupied Europe) was outdone in moral failure by its eyes-open assistance to fleeing Nazis.  The Red Cross, concludes Steinacher, “allowed itself to be used as a weapon in the Cold War”.

The Catholic Church also another Nazi-friendly Cold War enlistee.  Whilst Catholic monasteries hid tens of thousands of war criminals from Nazi Germany and its fascist European satellite states, the Vatican’s refugee relief commission procured visas.  Thousands were provided by President Juan Peron’s fascist groupie regime in Argentina, sold on the Vatican’s character reference that the escaping fascists were ‘anti-Bolshevik fighters’.

The Vatican’s fear of socialism, which had seen unproblematic Church relations with the anti-socialist Mussolini, saw it unite with escaping Nazis to oppose the threat of post-war communism in Roman Catholic heartland, Italy, which had the strongest post-war communist party in Western Europe.  Religious anti-Judaism also eased the Church’s conscience about its failure to assist Holocaust victims.

The final plank in the post-war, anti-communist redemption of Nazis was US military and civilian intelligence.  Swiftly abandoning the tracing and arrest of fascists and Nazis under war-time accords, the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps used Vatican Nazi-escape ‘ratlines’ to smuggle out those it deemed useful for the new Cold War.  Agents from German military counter-intelligence and the Gestapo were in great demand as were Nazis with technical and scientific expertise.  One beneficiary was Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V2 rocket which terrorised Britain and Holland, who was an SS officer in charge of a missile factory that starved were worked to death thousands of forced labourers and concentration camp inmates.  Von Braun helped Americans to be the first on the moon and that is what mattered.

Steinacher’s painstaking documentation of dozens of detailed case studies of fascist war criminals saved by US intelligence, the Catholic Church and the Red Cross justifies his portrait of the West’s anti-communist Nazi rescue operation as a “story of expediency and hypocrisy in service of the Cold War”.

ALL THAT I AM by Anna Funder

ALL THAT I AM

By ANNA FUNDER
Hamish Hamilton, 2011, 369 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Hitler’s hatred began with us’, says the German playwright, Ernst Toller (in Anna Funder’s historical novel, All That I Am) of the revolutionary socialists and pacifists who, through mutiny and general strike brought the first world war to an end for Germany in 1918.

Toller (writer, socialist leader and Jew), Dora Fabian (feminist and Toller’s lover), Ruth Wesemann (Dora’s cousin) and Hans Wesemann (Ruth’s husband and journalist) were all radicals, members of Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party, a left-wing split from the formerly Marxist but now safely respectable Social Democratic Party).  They believed their post-war revolution ‘would change autocratic, war-mongering Germany forever’ and usher in ‘freedoms of every kind’.

Hope remained even after the Social Democrats had mobilised troops, disaffected war veterans and the Nazi Frei Korps to bloodily crush the revolt, and even endured after Hitler took power in 1933.  Full comprehension of what Hitler had in store for his opponents, however, eventually dawned on them and arrest, interrogation, jail and exile followed.

Troubles dogged the exiles in their London flat where they trod the fine line between anti-fascist resistance and the British government’s shameful prohibition on refugees engaging in political activities under the threat of sending them back to Nazi Germany and certain death.  Nazi political police hit-squads also stalked them and, under pressure of harm to themselves or family, betrayal looms.  One betrays ‘for money and protection’, one suicides and others are murdered by the Gestapo.  Ruth escapes, winding up in Bondi Junction, Australia.

Based closely on real characters and events, Funder’s debut, Miles Franklin Award-winning novel was sparked by an oral history she recorded with the real Ruth (Ruth Blatt), who taught Funder’s German teacher the German language.  Funder’s novel resurrects the courage of those who fought for the ‘Other Germany’ and it wraps their undoubted bravery (and occasional failure) in  steadily building dramatic tension.

As with Funder’s book on East Germany (Stasiland), however, the political fails to reach the same high standards as the literary.  Politics was crucial to stopping the rise of Hitler but the reasons for the failure of what Funder’s characters want (an anti-Nazi ‘Three-Fold Red Front’ of ‘the Social Democrats, the Communists and us’) are not explored and are contradicted by facile, throw-away lines which equate revolutionary left with reactionary right (all are repressive jailers, all are anti-democrats, all are ‘deceivers of the working class’).  This literary glibness gives no right of reply to Germany’s Marxists, does not offer any analysis of how Stalinism perverted their choices, and misses the chance to tease out the ideological and strategic turmoil, and final tragic disunity, of the German anti-Nazi left.

Funder’s political preference is for the left-liberal radical reformism of her main characters.  Her social ideal is Australian ‘decency’.  There might be room for questioning that ‘decency’, however, as Funder herself deplored, in an interview, the context that “I was writing this as children seeking refuge here were being locked up indefinitely in prison camps in our suburbs”, the victims of a ‘moral blindness’ which is the crux of Funder’s novel.

Although All That I Am veers more towards the psychological thriller than the artistic interweaving of the political and the personal, Funder’s literary honouring of the “extraordinary courage” of “otherwise forgotten” people “who bravely resist authoritarian powers” is well served by her most worthy novel.