BOOKS: Best of 2017.
In Mirror Sydney, inspired by psychogeography, Vanessa Berry embarks on “drifts” through inauspicious Sydney – hollowed-out factory districts, heedless highways and all-butforgotten suburban arcades. She anatomises the contents of a lost-property office, and visits sites associated with elephants. The dreamy, daggy landmarks are features of a more “introspective” city than you’d find in the travel guides – or even on the street, unless tipped off by Berry’s slightly cockeyed curiosity. She also creates hand-drawn mumblecore maps that she likens to star charts, “revealing places as constellations rather than the linear pathways of the written word”.
A ziner, blogger and op-shop aficionado, Berry draws on, and even anticipates, personal memory and nostalgia, seeking to memorialise a city that is lost or disappearing in the “rapacious” pursuit of reinvention and profit. “The city as I knew it,” she writes, “was being overwritten as fast as I could chronicle it.” And for the rest of us, Berry’s off-kilter chronicle pre-empts the disorienting rack of “progress” by making the familiar city strange, but wonderfully so.
Alfred Deakin, long my favourite Victorian, was truly the full package: polymath, progressive, idealist, spiritualist, man of action. And he had a fantastic beard. All he lacked was a good biography – but not anymore.
“This book is a life, not a life-and-times,” writes Judith Brett at the outset of The
Enigmatic Mr Deakin. She dives deep into Deakin’s own writings, many of which he kept private during his lifetime.