A DIRECTOR, A PHOTOGRAPHER, A FINAL IMAGE

For ten years, Ilias Bourgiotis recorded life on the set with Greece’s greatest film director – until minutes before Theo Angelopoulos’ tragic death. A travelling exhibition and new book celebrate their strange, intuitive and largely silent collaboration.

Head On Interactional’s Features Editor Tony Maniaty sat down with Ilias Bourgiotis in Athens to find out more…

Piraeus, Greece / ‘The Other Sea’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

It was a moment he didn’t capture, but can never forget.  

In 2012, Ilias Bourgiotis, the acclaimed Greek photographer, was standing right behind Theo Angelopoulos, the director hailed by Martin Scorsese as a master of modern cinema, in the port of Piraeus. On location, Angelopoulos had barely started shooting The Other Sea, the last film in a sweeping trilogy that included The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time.  

Night was coming down. Just minutes earlier, Bourgiotis had taken what would be the final image of Angelopoulos alive. As he lowered his Leica, he watched the director stepping off the sidewalk – and into the path of an oncoming motorcycle. Bourgiotis witnessed the terrible impact.  

A few hours later, Angelopoulos was pronounced dead. 

Keratsini, Greece / ‘The Other Sea’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

Their collaboration had begun as oddly as it ended. Bourgiotis, by 2002 well established in Greece for his photography of a rapidly changing society and of the southern Mediterranean countries, was searching for a new project. “What happened with me and Angelopoulos?” he asks reflectively, sitting with his partner and translator Allegri Voulgaraki in a noisy café. 

“What attracted me initially was the philosophical and poetic nature of his films. I’d heard he was going to start shooting the first film in a trilogy, so asked for permission to photograph him at work. Then I travelled to the north of Greece, on a big lake where they were filming. It was six o’clock in the morning and everything was covered in mist, and blurry.” 

Lake Kerkini, Greece / ‘The Weeping Meadow’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

“And you’d never met him before this?” 

“Never. I started taking photographs of him and Angelopoulos turned around and said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ And instead of explaining anything, I handed him a copy of my book, Unseen Greece. In some ways that book has the aura of Angelopoulos’ work too, so it was my visiting card, and he saw instantly what I was about. He said nothing, absolutely nothing. And I just started shooting. That’s how our collaboration began.” 

Soon after, Bourgiotis took a photo of the film’s clapper board, then the same shot without the board. “And Angelopoulos, who was curious about everything, said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I told him one of my favourite poets was T.S. Elliot, and there’s an opening line where he says, ‘In the beginning is my end.’ Angelopoulos said, ‘That’s one of my favourite quotes too.’ And that sealed it, we were brought together by T.S. Elliot.”  

Lake Kerkini, Greece / ‘The Weeping Meadow’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

Lake Kerkini, Greece / ‘The Weeping Meadow’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

What sort of man was Theo Angelopoulos? 

Bourgiotis ponders a moment. “He was a slow talker. He used his hands a lot when he was explaining, always drinking coffee and smoking. He knew modern Greek history profoundly, and about the Balkans. He’d found a method of telling these complex stories, in ways that were political but also very profound.” (‘Maybe it’s sad,’ Angelopoulos declared at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, ‘but my ancestor Aristotle said that melancholy is the source of creation.’) 

The Other Sea – the director’s 14th film – was to be set around the port of Piraeus, with its constant arrivals and departures of ships, ‘like a perpetual migration, internal and external’, themes which drove his cinematic output. Critics also focus on Angelopoulos’ slow rhythms, and wide shots held for minutes while actors move like marionettes around the brooding landscape. Bourgiotis found that level of intensity matched his own approach.  

Lake Kerkini, Greece / ‘The Weeping Meadow’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

“In all forms of art, easiness can be destructive. We see it now with digital production – but that’s how things happen in these times: everything is fast, and all happening at once. A more monastic behaviour is perhaps necessary so that you don’t lose the ability to grow and develop your art. What I am trying to do is photography that lasts in time. It’s not something you forget the next day, it’s not meant to be popular.”  

Now, ten years after the director’s death, Bourgiotis reflects on their time together. “I ask myself, what was I really doing there? Certainly, I was not trying to record what Angelopoulos was actually doing. I wasn’t doing publicity stills. What I was doing was my interpretation of what he was doing – creating a kind of passport to allow people to enter that special film environment as I saw it.” 

National Theater, Athens / ‘The Other Sea’ © Ilias Bourgiotis

And what did Angelopoulos think of Bourgiotis’ images? 

“He was often travelling between films, so we never really saw each other to discuss the photos. He saw only a few. And he didn’t live to see my book, of course. Out of respect for what happened, there was no question of me selling the final photograph of him to the newspapers, to make money out of it. That image is both tragic and important to me. And to his wife – she said publicly the photo was chilling, because in it Theodoros seems to be looking at his own death…” 

The resulting book is The Gaze of Eternity, blending the titles of two Angelopoulos films, Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day. The photos seem immutable. “In a way, they’re like Angelopoulos’s films,” says Bourgiotis. “At an exhibition of Wim Wenders photographs in Berlin, I told Wenders that I’d taken photographs of Angelopoulos on the set. And he grabbed my arm, and said, ‘Tell me everything about Angelopoulos.’ That was the impact he had on other great filmmakers.” 

“Could The Other Sea be completed, by another director?” 

“A couple, including Wenders, considered it,” Bourgiotis  says. “But they realised it’s not possible. Angelopoulos was unique.” 

Born in Athens, Ilias Bourgiotis is a freelance photographer who work appears regularly in Greek magazines and newspapers. His photographs have featured in museums, galleries, and photography festivals in Greece as well as the United States, Italy, France, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, Denmark, Slovakia, Croatia, and Spain. A selection of his photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.  [Photo © Tony Maniaty, 2022]

This article first appeared in Head On Interactional magazine, 8 December 2022.

SOMWHERE BEYOND REALITY: NIKOS ECONOMPOULOS

What’s going on when you’re almost 70, but the majority of your 65,000 Instagram followers are 25-34? For Nikos Economopoulos, the probable answer has a lot to do with the feelings evoked by his strange, unsettling images. The element that’s too often missing in contemporary photography, he says, is human emotion.

Head On Interactional’s Feature Editor Tony Maniaty caught up with him in Athens.

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

Sitting in his crowded apartment with his dog Chico, Nikos Economopoulos – Greece’s pre-eminent photographer, a full member of the Magnum agency since 1994 – tells me he has one career ambition left. He doesn’t care for conceptual photography, or shooting ‘reality’ in a conventional sense. At 69, he’s burly and wears his greying hair in a bun.

“The only thing I want from photography now is to go on photographing for the rest of my life; that’s my goal. It’s not difficult; I mean, it depends on what you’re looking for. If you don’t want to become famous or make a lot of money, when you’re free, you can do a lot of things. I’m very happy that I can do this.”

For more than 40 years, photography has shaped his life and how he sees the world, and chance encounters have played their part. “In 1977, when I was a young journalist, I picked up a book of about 40 pictures by Cartier-Bresson. And that became my new window on the world.” He began photographing the streets of Athens in his free time. “I used an M4 Leica with 35mm lens, the perfect combination.” A major push came in a village in northern Greece when he encountered Czech photographer Josef Koudelka; they became close friends. “From the beginning, Koudelka’s critiques of my prints were very important.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

In 1987, Economopoulos quit work and began travelling alone – “by car, by camper, by motorcycle” – across Turkey. “It was still very primitive, but it was nice getting around alone.” Gradually he developed what would become his trademark style of peasant life in the Balkans in black-and-white, marked by often strange juxtapositions of forms. “I never thought about creating a style; I just reacted to what I saw. But slowly, I tried to understand it…”

“And have you found the answer?” I ask.

“I found part of the answer. The full answer, I don’t think it’s possible to find. For me, what’s important in photography is to follow your instinct. You know, I’m not a thinking photographer. I follow my instincts not only in terms of content but even in composition.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

“This, for example.” He shows me a print of some villagers and a dog’s tail. “When I saw it, I amazed myself; I said, ‘Fuck, what’s this?’ Because it’s a completely wrong picture. It’s in Karpathos, Greece, I noticed these people watching a dance and saw the dog and decided I didn’t want the dog’s whole face, because all attention would go to the face. So I waited until I got his head out of the picture – a very radical thing to do in 1988! It’s not the ‘correct’ place to put a dog, but if you put the dog in the middle, it becomes very conventional. And it’s this small or big mistake that makes me excited.” He laughs. “It’s interesting to find these kinds of things, you know.”

“And this became a signature of your style?”

“In a way, yes. But not only that. Also, what I’m looking for is about not staying in the reality, which is boring to me, but going beyond reality. A kind of surrealism can be a part of the solution. What’s important for me is not to photograph reality. That’s my approach, not to think much and just follow my instincts. I found I was very happy trying to transform reality and turn it into a lie. It’s not really what I saw, it’s correcting reality in a way, it’s a game I play with reality. It’s a different option from what you see.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

The career turning point came in 1988 when he met the Magnum photographer Constantine Manos in Athens. “And Costa said, when you’ve finished your project on Greece and Turkey, send it to me. So, I sent him my prints, and he was so excited, he proposed me to Magnum.”

Unlike others, Economopoulos didn’t embrace the global opportunities that Magnum membership offered. “My English then was not very good; my French was zero. I’d just had my son in 1990 here in Greece, so I decided to work from Athens. I’m still happy that I stayed here, even if I didn’t become as well known or make as much money. That’s not very important to me. What matters is that I get the money I want and that I’m very happy with my life.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

He doesn’t take what could be lucrative assignments. “Never,” he says firmly. “I don’t like assignments.” Instead, he conducts his regular ‘On the Road’ courses in Greece, Turkey, Mexico, and Cuba. “I meet with the students in the evenings, and I do my own stuff during the day. In some ways, I don’t feel like a professional photographer. I’ve lived from photography now for many years, but like a kind of amateur because I get my money in other ways.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

What secured his high reputation was the endless chaos of the Balkans. “When I went there in 1990, I was photographing in a way that wasn’t journalistic, which was good because everyone else was doing the news story.” The result was a book of 72 now-iconic images, ‘In the Balkans’. (Currently out of print, but Economopoulos is planning an expanded version.) The photos speak not only of village life but also of conflicts and borders, migration and displacement, and nationalism – all seen through his unique compositional eye. The impact, we agree, is less surreal than paradoxical.

“The way they look at history in the Balkans, at each other and themselves, well, there’s this special paradox. They don’t react in the way that Western civilisations are supposed to do. In the Balkans, there are paradoxes everywhere – in political choices, in personal choices, in family choices. And that was good for me because you can find this paradox in my pictures. It’s how I see the world too.”

© Nikos Economopoulos-Magnum

In recent years, the big shift has been from monochrome to colour. “Ten years ago, I changed my idea of photography completely. I’d never done colour before, it was too complicated. Then I bought a digital Leica M9, and moved to colour.” (Now he’s using an M10 with the 35 mm Summicron. “No other lenses, always the 35mm.”)

“With black-and-white, I was sure of what I was doing. It was easy for me to produce good pictures. So, I decided I needed something else, something new. To put some colour in my life. I think it was something like that, not so serious. Just the emotion of doing something else. And maybe make mistakes and try to correct them…”

Wrapping up, I ask if he thinks his work has impacted society.

“Sometimes I meet people who tell me how a certain photograph of mine has been very important to them, that it changed their life. I never ask why, because maybe they can’t even answer that. Probably they experienced a new way to see the world, to see reality – the same way I saw the world differently through the photographs of Cartier-Bresson many years ago. And this is the maximum that I can hope for with my photography. This is the maximum.”

This article first appeared in Head On Interactional magazine, 11 October 2022

THE PLANET OF POSSIBILITIES: Images of beauty and fragility

Text by Tony Maniaty accompanying the photographic exhibition, ‘The Planet of Possibilities’, at the Kirribilli Centre Gallery, Sydney, 18 November - 9 December 2023.

Freud’s Garden, Hampstead, London © Tony Maniaty 2022

It seems odd in these uncertain times to talk of an appreciation of beauty, but perhaps that’s our only hope of survival. The current interplay of economics, technology and politics is not sufficient to ensure our long-term future on planet Earth: war, poverty and inequality remain constants, and the planet itself is suffering terrible environmental damage. Anxiety is rising about how these problems can be reversed in whatever time we have left.  

I’ve called this photographic series ‘The Planet of Possibilities’ because I believe humanity will survive only if we open our eyes to the various forms of beauty that exist around us, including our complex interactions with each other, and in the possibilities that come with heightened creativity. The architect Jørn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House, spoke of working and thinking ‘at the edge of the possible’: of having the vision to explore ideas beyond the obvious. And reflecting on the ancient Greeks (distant ancestors on my father’s side), English writer Adam Nicholson ascribed their genius to ‘the harbour mind’; spaces both real and abstract that generated advanced levels of creativity. “Possibility and inquiry,” Nicholson wrote, “the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.”

This curiosity, a willingness to stop and consider alternatives, an awareness and openness to possibilities - these drive my photography, by attempting to capture time and space in ways that are both temporal and timeless, without boundaries, juxtaposing the natural and human worlds through the ever-mysterious prism of sunlight and shadows. Can photography save humanity? Hardly, but it can point us in directions that may not be obvious, towards solutions emerging from our collective, creative imaginations. I recognise within my own work a kind of alchemy that links one photograph to the next, a river of imagination that may lead to a revelation or at least a clearer understanding of where I’m going - even if it’s a river without banks, because the answers we need will certainly be found away from conventional paths.

 The images in ‘The Planet of Possibilities’ are mainly black-and-white. In the words of arguably the most influential photographer of the last century, Robert Frank, ‘Black and white are the colours of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.’ Hope, born out of despair; isn’t that what the world needs now? Monochrome reveals a level of truth that colour often hides. (It’s no accident that we say ‘to see things in black-and-white’, meaning to see them very clearly.) Perhaps the greatest influence on my photographic eye are the great paintings of Goya and Caravaggio, which - for all their blood-rich colour - are loaded with deep black zones. The key factors guiding my photographic intuition are composition and shadows, the power found in negative spaces. Again, hope arising out of extreme darkness.

A sense of beauty can be immediate or arise from a captured image over time. A sunset might have instant appeal, but a photograph of a girl in a Greek church may carry far more meaning and richness to us the longer we spend time with it. The intersection of human and natural beauty all around us is immeasurable, and unique - the possibilities of what we might find beautiful, and what we can do with that discovery, are endless. That’s why we continue to make art in these troubled times, why we embrace it: to broaden our imagination about what life on Earth is, and still can be, on this tiny speck of rock and water. Those who, under all the pressures that besiege us, have abandoned art, have in some way abandoned life.

To capture these moments is photography’s gift to the world, to this fragile planet we live on. The more we see of beauty, the more we’re inclined to appreciate it, to revere rather than damage it. We need to open our eyes to the beauty of the planet in order to save it. I’ve tried to message these emotions in my images.

© Tony Maniaty 2023

First published in L’Œil de la Photographie / The Eye of Photography, Paris, 28 November 2023

FIFTEEN YEARS ON THE FRONTLINE: IVOR PRICKETT

He cut his teeth in the aftermath of the bloody Balkan wars, went on to cover the Arab Spring uprisings, found himself on frontline hell in Libya, and gained international recognition for his coverage in Iraq of the ISIS campaign and the struggle for Mosul. Ivor Prickett’s work has been acclaimed in awards including World Press Photo, the Pulitzer Prizes, the Overseas Press Club Awards, and Pictures of the Year International. Now the 40-year-old, soft-spoken Irishman is covering the gruelling conflict in Ukraine, the first major war in Europe for half a century. On a break from the battlefield, from his home base in Istanbul, Turkey, he spoke with Head On Features Editor Tony Maniaty.

[Warning: this article contains war and conflict imagery that some readers may find confronting.]

Volunteers collect unclaimed bodies, most suspected of being those of ISIS members, from the ruins where militants made their last stand. Iraq, February 2018 © Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: What’s the difference between covering ISIS in Iraq and covering Ukraine?

IP: Ukraine is a much higher level of risk. War zones like Mosul were dangerous for sure, you could get into quite difficult situations going in with assaulting units, but you were with a much better-armed side, and with American planes overhead. I felt much more comfortable covering Mosul than I do in the Ukraine conflict. It’s a brutal war with two very well-armed forces going up against each other. That makes it entirely different from anything my generation of conflict photographers has covered in the last 20 or 30 years. Plus, we’re on the less well-armed side, which makes it really tricky on the frontline.

Members of Ukraine’s Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit pray together before going on a night operation near the Dnipro River. November 2022 ©Ivor Pricket/The New York Times

TM: Does it take any readjustment in thinking about how you get the shots?

IP: It comes down to the same things you’re looking for, but I’d say it’s harder to get to that critical point on the frontline where you can see the fighting going on, or seeing the effect the war is having on civilians in places like Bakhmut, where it’s just too dangerous to go in. Your decision-making as a war photographer is always limited by access and security

Ukrainian police officers covering the bodies of two men shortly after they were killed in a Russian artillery strike on a residential neighborhood of Kherson, on 10 Feb. 2023 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: What was your first reaction when you heard the Russians had invaded Ukraine? Was it, ‘Great, here’s another story I can do’, or ‘Oh god, here we go again, more war…’

IP: I wasn’t that taken aback by the invasion. There’d already been a lot going on in eastern Ukraine in the previous six months or so before. And as an organisation (The New York Times) we were already accredited with the military and poised to go. I was ready to go in. I didn’t know what to expect, I don’t think anyone knew to what extent the Russians were going to invade. But it became quickly apparent it was a full-scale invasion. I was going somewhere I hadn’t worked before, so I was more nervous than I’d been for a while. Wading into an armed conflict in its first few days is unnerving. There’s always an exodus of people going out, and you’re going in, so it’s very disconcerting.

TM: What about your kit? What did you take into this war, other than the usual?

IP: For Ukraine, I basically had everything I needed and ready to go for a couple of weeks. The usual Canon 5D’s of course. Plus, I bought a few pairs of warmer socks! Made sure I had a lot of batteries and charges because the electricity supply could have been an issue. And a lot of dried food because we didn’t know what was going to happen, if there might be a siege-type situation in Kiev for example.

TM: And getting the images out to New York, is that difficult?

IP: If there’s no wi-fi in your hotel you can still hook up a hot spot to your cell phone and use that to send pictures. The connectivity has stayed pretty good, which is remarkable.

“The usual Canon 5D’s of course. Plus, I bought a few pairs of warmer socks!”

Destroyed Russian T-72 tank at the Bilohorivka River crossing. May 2022 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: Being with The New York Times, which is editorially pro-Ukraine in this conflict, are you in any way trying to show a side of the war that promotes Ukraine’s position?

IP: Inevitably I think we’re going to be aiding Ukraine by covering the war on their side. We have some people still working in Russia, but largely that’s gone. I would love to be covering this from the Russian side, I think it’s important if you can access things from both sides of the story. But that would be fraught, and difficult, and probably controlled, and your work would end up being propaganda. Of course, you can worry about that happening too with the Ukrainians. People in all wars complain about not getting access to the frontline, but when you get it, good luck – because you’re probably going to shit your pants! Access feels to me like you’re being forced into getting propaganda, whether you’re willingly doing it or not, because that’s what can happen in conflict reporting. Western militaries do this too, they show you only what they want you to see, and that doesn’t give the full picture. But I never feel like that’s really happening in Ukraine.

Firefighters working to extinguish a blaze at a shopping mall destroyed by Russian forces in Kherson, Ukraine, in February 2023 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: There’s a strong civilian side to the Ukrainian story. Has anyone ever tried to stop you working in that civilian environment, maybe suggesting you’re a spy?

IP: Yeah, I’ve had that situation, especially in the beginning. There was a lot more paranoia, uncertainty, and there were Russian saboteurs running around in Kiev.

A Russian shell explodes in Kherson, Ukraine, 10 February 2023 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: Now that you’re in almost constant contact with your office in New York, as compared say to those reporting and photographing the war in Vietnam in the 1960s – do you feel you can still be free to make your own decisions about where to go, what stories to cover, how to operate?

IP: We don’t get much direction from editors in The Times’ photo department. But the correspondents are more involved in directing coverage and coming up with the stories we’ll photograph. This war in Ukraine has been different for us as photographers in that there’s been constant updating on The Times’ website, and there’s obviously an endless need for content for that. So, as well as working on bigger stories which I want to do and have been able to do, we’re also being asked to file on a daily basis for live briefings, and that’s completely different from any big story I’ve worked on before with The New York Times. In Mosul I was on my own and I was writing, and I’d do the pictures and go off the grid for two or three weeks while I was working on my story, and then I would come back and say to New York, ‘I think I’ve got something,’ and then I’d put it all together.

Sheko, 25, feeds his friend and comrade, Salah al-Raqawi, 18, at a hospital in Raqqa, Syria, on Oct. 13, 2017. The men fought with a Kurdish-dominated militia backed by the United States ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: Did you ever think you’d be doing this work when you were studying photography in Newport, Wales? Is that what you wanted to do? Did you have war photographer heroes like Don McCullin?

IP: At the start in Dublin I was pretty raw and green. Once I began to study photography, I realised my interest was in conflict, not so much as a war photojournalist but more about the covering of the aftermath. And that’s where I went – to Serbia, Croatia – working with displaced people, and gradually I started to get closer to the actual conflict. And then in 2007 when the Arab Spring started and I was based in Beirut, it was just automatic. That’s when I started covering actual conflict.

Civilians flee heavy clashes between Iraqi special forces and ISIS militants early in the morning in west Mosul. Iraq, March 2017 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: Your first real taste of war was in Libya. How did it feel being shot at?

IP: [Laughs] Looking back, crazy – driving down a highway with a ragtag group of rebels who’d started the uprising, and we were on the poorly armed side going up against a fully mechanised army. In the middle of the desert in open ground, we were getting shot at by tanks and planes. There was a degree of naivety in not understanding the dangers involved. Maybe that helps when you’re younger, I was only 27 then. But it’s the sort of bravery that’s not healthy.

Iraqi special forces soldiers surveying the aftermath of an ISIS suicide car bomb that managed to reach their lines in east Mosul. Iraq, January 2017 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: What’s your formula for ‘when to stay, and when to pull out.’? Has it changed?

IP: It’s changing all the time. The frontline is changing, and the risks are changing, the level of fighting is changing, so you have to remain very capable of pivoting and reassessing everything on a daily basis. It’s always a team decision, with the photographer and the correspondent, the fixers and drivers – everyone has to be comfortable with being where you want to be to get the images. The main thing is letting everyone know that they have a voice, they can speak up and say ‘I’m not comfortable here.’ That’s really important because there’s a tendency to be scared to speak up because you don’t want to be the one to say you’re afraid and then feel like you’re ruining the job for everyone else. That doesn’t matter – because if you’re not sure and you’re nervous, that will cause you to make bad decisions. You always have to be switched on, to be ready, you’ve got to be up for it.

A strike from a coalition warplane explodes an Islamic State car bomb in Mosul, Iraq, on March 9, 2018 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: You’ve covered a lot of conflict. What do you think it’s doing to you as a person?

IP: I think about it more the older I get and realise it’s taking something from me. And I’m constantly trying to keep an eye on that because I don’t want it to take away my chance at having a normal life, whatever that means. I do have a pretty normal life when I come off the story. I don’t have any children but I have a partner, and I have a really close relationship with my family and sisters back in Ireland, they’re incredibly supportive but they know the dangers involved and worry about me a lot. And I think that helps because if you don’t have contact with your family or they don’t give a shit about you, then there’s nothing to keep you in check. And that’s when people can go too far. I’ve definitely moved to the cautious end of the spectrum – having my family and my partner worrying about me, that helps keep me in check.

A mother screams for her dead son – his blood streaked across the stairs, his tattered scarf left behind – after an Islamic State mortar attack, in western Mosul on March 22, 2017 ©Ivor Prickett/ The New York Times

TM: The fact that Ukraine’s a war of attrition makes it hard to keep up not only your energy levels but also public interest in your work. Is there already a loss of interest?

IP: Yes, I’m sure there is, and I worry about that. It’s definitely getting harder to come up with new stories to tell, we’re left waiting for new breakthroughs, new areas to be liberated, and it’s very hard to time that, I don’t have much choice in where and when to go. I’ve found it getting more repetitive from a personal point of view, and if I start to feel that, as someone who’s engaged and interested in the story, then I know it’s ten times worse for the public.

Nadhira Aziz watches as Iraqi Civil Defense recover the bodies of her sister and niece from the ruins of her house in the Old City of Mosul on Sept. 16, 2017 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

TM: What about your view of humanity? It must be depressing to think this cycle of war you’ve covering is never going to end…

IP: It is depressing, and hard to maintain hope for us as a race. At the same time, you do see those moments of humanity, and maybe you hang on to them more than you would in other situations. With Ukraine for example, I’ve hated every moment of it because it’s such a stupid war and you want it to be over, but at the same time, I realise it’s again opened up this whole new place for me that I didn’t know. It’s an incredible country. As with any conflict, you get to see the worst and best in people. The Ukrainians are incredibly tough, there’s so much potential there, and that gives me hope. If they can get through this, I believe Ukraine is going to be a powerful country in the region, and in Europe.

TM: Do you have a plan for the future, beyond covering war? Or is it just one conflict after another?

IP: You go into the warzone for six weeks or two months and then you come home, and you don’t want to do anything else, to be honest for a month or so until you go back again. I’ve given it all my energy and attention, and I think it will be that way for the foreseeable. I’m not just a war photographer, I’ve always said that. I’m essentially concerned with human life, stories about people, the environment, I can throw myself into anything. I want to be involved in covering the biggest stories we’re facing. I hope it’s not only that I’ll be covering conflict and jumping from one conflict to the other.

An unidentified young boy carried out of the last ISIS controlled area by a man suspected of being a militant being cared for by Iraqi Special Forces soldiers. Iraq, July 2017 ©Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

Ivor Prickett, Amsterdam, 2019 / Photo: Rob Becker

Growing up in Ireland, Ivor Prickett gained his degree in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales Newport, and freelanced for three years in London before heading off to the Balkans to photograph the aftermath of conflicts there.

Based in Middle East since 2009, he documented the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Egypt and Libya, working simultaneously on editorial assignments and his own long-term projects. On the road between 2012 and 2015, he photographed the Syrian refugee crisis, working closely with UNHCR to produce a comprehensive study of the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history. He’s currently covering the Ukraine conflict for The New York Times.

Prickett’s photography has appeared in other major magazines and newspapers including The Sunday Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, Stern, GEO, and National Geographic. His conflict work in Iraq and Syria has earned him multiple World Press Photo Awards and in 2018 he was named as a Pulitzer finalist. The entire body of work titled ‘End of the Caliphate’ was released as a book by renowned German publisher Steidl in June 2019.

Ivor Prickett’s images have been exhibited widely at institutions such as The Victoria and Albert Museum, Sothebys, Foam Gallery and The National Portrait Gallery London. He is represented by Panos Pictures in London and is a European Canon Ambassador

This article first appeared in Head On Interactional magazine, 23 June 2023

OVERLAPPING WORLDS

Raimond Gaita isn’t running out of things to say. But he may be running out of time.

Story and photography by Tony Maniaty

In his 1998 memoir, Romulus, My Father, Raimond Gaita laid bare his struggles growing up in a shack in central Victoria with troubled parents. Now 76, the philosopher is coming to terms with a different challenge: Parkinson’s disease.

Raimond Gaita: “Having a degenerative disease has made my sense of being mortal inseparable from my being a creature of the earth.” Photo: TONY MANIATY

Driving into Melbourne from Sydney, I realise that after 50 years in journalism, I’ve never actually met a philosopher. Celebrities by the dozen, politicians by the score, but philosophers, none. Having negotiated a narrow St Kilda street, I’m barely out of the car when Raimond Gaita walks up, smiling, opens his arms wide and gives me a bear-hug.

 “Welcome!”

 I know a lot already about him: both in our 70s, we’re mates even though we’ve never laid eyes on each other. Our first phone call, eight months earlier, stretched more than three hours, after which his wife Yael apparently remarked, “I see you’ve found a new friend.” Developing a deep connection so late in life is unusual, between men especially, but our odyssey began further back, not even in this century.

 Two books – one his, the other mine – brought us together.

 

A childhood with enough trauma to send you crazy (which didn’t happen) or suck you into adolescent delinquency (which did), then turning all that around and using the pain, deprivations and lessons learnt to become an internationally acclaimed philosopher: Rai Gaita’s extraordinary story is familiar to thousands of readers.

 Romulus, My Father – the 1998 memoir which, as Helen Garner noted, “changed the quality of the literary air in this country” – relates Gaita’s boyhood as an immigrant kid in the 1950s, living in a century-old shack on central Victoria’s windy Moolort Plains. Romulus became a bestseller, translated into seven languages, then in 2007 was made into a feature film directed by Richard Roxburgh and starring Eric Bana.

 The isolated setting provided a growing boy with time to think, to weigh up all that harshness and beauty. It was freezing in winter, with no running water, a single kerosene lamp and mice in abundance; the nearest town, Baringhup, had just a handful of houses, a church, a school. And more so, the dark threads of insanity. First in Gaita’s haunted German mother Christine; then in Romulus, the Romanian father with a talent for hammering hot metal, whose friend Hora would become Rai Gaita’s guiding light in harrowing times.

Christine’s adultery with Hora’s mentally disturbed brother, Mitru, led both lovers to suicide – Christine shortly before her 30th birthday, Mitru tormented by her other affairs. Gaita recalls his father later saying, in a resigned, sorrowful tone, “She was a woman who liked men ...”

Stripped of all sentimentality, Romulus was written in three weeks. “I went to where our house stood and sat there for a couple of hours, wondering what I might write,” Gaita tells me. “It was late afternoon, the hills nearby were covered in high, golden grass swaying in the wind. And suddenly I thought, ‘This is utterly exquisite.’ I was knocked out by the place, the landscape.” As he relates in Romulus of an earlier epiphany, it was as though “God had taken me to the back of his workshop and shown me something really special.”

Gaita at the site of his childhood home. Photo: TONY MANIATY

When the book landed on my reviewer’s desk at The Australian, I’d never heard of Raimond Gaita. But after a few pages, I was as spellbound by the truth and rhythm of the prose as Gaita had been by his surroundings. Naming it my book of the year, I received a letter of appreciation from the author.

I put that letter aside for 20 years. Then, after assembling a photo book capturing Parisian life during the pandemic lockdowns, sans tourists, sans traffic – the City of Light at its most fundamental, human level – I wondered whether Gaita would recall my glowing review and knock off a concise preface for me. Taken by the book’s title, Our Hearts Are Still Open, and by our mutual regard for the great French writer Albert Camus, he said he’d be honoured to do it.


We’re sipping scotches in the afternoon light in Rai Gaita’s Victorian-era home, with its elaborate light fittings and marble fireplaces. This is a house that resists renovation. “We’ve done almost nothing to it since we bought it years ago,” Gaita declares, with a mix of defiance and pleasure.

It’s an urban oasis, with a perfect view from the living room down the street to the darkening sea. I imagine he loves this city, but he says only his student years at Melbourne University had any real impact. “Some of the best minds there would sit and talk with us in the cafeteria for hours, with genuine intellectual passion.”

Like so many others at the time, Gaita headed ambitiously off to England. “When I got to London, I realised what a real city is,” he recalls. His appointment as lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London offered intellectual freedom. “It completely changed my life.”

Less an academic at heart than a teacher, Gaita describes “teaching with love” as the most important thing any lecturer can offer their students. “It goes back to Plato – ‘We become what we love’ – but also to Romulus and his friend Hora, the intensity with which they lived their moral lives, the belief that nothing matters so much in life as to live it decently.”

That sense of “elementary decency” – deciding what is right, and wrong – drew him first to psychology, then to moral philosophy. (Among other roles, he would go on to become professor of moral philosophy at King’s, and professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.) “I’m still the only philosopher I know who speaks of the inalienable preciousness of every human being,” he says. So much of his life’s work is rooted in the trauma of his early struggles.

Even so, he acknowledges the father never understood the son’s commitment to “the life of the mind”. Only when Raimond had made a fully detailed dolls’ house for his daughters did Romulus express some admiration: “I see that you have some brains after all.”

Rai Gaita isn’t running out of things to say, he’s running out of time. Until now, few beyond family and close friends have known of his worsening condition. “Several years ago, I developed a tremor in my hand. And last year I began having dizzy spells and suffering bad headaches.” He was losing his balance, falling over, too. “Yael insisted I see a neurologist, and he confirmed it.”

Gaita’s father Romulus, at right, in 1981, with his friend Hora, who was a guiding light for Gaita in dark times.

The diagnosis was Parkinson’s. A degenerative disease attacking the central nervous system, affecting the body’s movements and the nature of the brain itself. Cognitive and behavioural problems are typical, including depression and anxiety. Dementia is common in the advanced stages. For a man who’s devoted his adult life to thinking profoundly, this is bad news. He feels the need to share it.

“I reckon I’ve had Parkinson’s for five years or more,” he says. “I get much more tired, your legs stiffen up. Medication reduces it, but with negative side effects, and eventually the medication loses out to the disease. In the end, the legs and much else become immobile, and almost everything atrophies.”

He’s surrounded by family, with Yael, four adult daughters and six grandchildren now, but the past and the shadow of Shakespeare’s Lear (“Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” ) is a constant. “I don’t have much time for the muscular stuff about self-made people,” he says. “I’ve always felt that at any moment you could lose everything, whatever gives your life sense. Someone as strong as my father was broken by his mental illness. He never fully recovered …”

We’re heading out of Melbourne into the bush. In 2000, eager to reconnect with the landscape of his youth, Gaita and Yael bought 60 hectares of farmland between Bendigo and Ballarat and built a straw-bale house on a slope dotted with huge granite boulders. They call the place Shalvah, Hebrew for tranquillity. (Born in Tel Aviv, Yael taught Hebrew and Jewish studies for years at Melbourne’s The King David School.)

Gaita and his wife Yael’s straw-bale house in the bush, which they named Shalvah, a Hebrew word for “tranquillity”. Photo: TONY MANIATY

When the devastating fires swept through Victoria in 2019, Gaita was flying home from London. Upon arrival, he went straight to Shalvah. “You couldn’t see for smoke. I felt a need to express sorrow for the earth, the stuff from which things grow and into which everything eventually crumbles, even the noble granite boulders.”

Those grey monoliths, the eagles circling high above: to the philosopher all this matters. “Mortality from one perspective is just that you die. But having a degenerative disease has made my sense of being mortal inseparable from my being a creature of the earth.”

Shafts of bronze sun brush the plains below as we head inside. From his study window, he points to a tall gum. “I think of it as my friend in mortality because it’s dying. I wonder which of us will go first?” He pauses. “Lately, I’ve been thinking I will.”

That afternoon, we drive out to where his childhood shack used to be. At the end of a red-earth track, the only clues to its habitation 60 years ago are a collapsed dairy shed, iron sheets and old timber beams. Romulus came here initially to work on the vast Cairn Curran Reservoir, among scores of nation-building projects that relied on post-war immigrants.

Gaita stares at the dirt spaces where he ate, slept, did his homework; where Romulus did his best in tough circumstances to keep the boy going, and not fall into disrepair like the world around him. Silently we sift through shards of pottery, bent utensils. I find a Bushells Turkish Coffee jar, the same as my father used. Greeks and Romanians; all were dubbed “New Australians” without cultural distinction, with all the baggage and subtle contempt that implied. “Come on,” says Gaita, pointing up a slope. “I’ll show you the Lillies’ place. They owned the property.”

We trudge for 20 minutes through wheat stubble and reach the once-glorious house, now a stone wreck, and break into a sun-filled kitchen, strewn with rat faeces and cobwebs. The décor is 1950s modern, pink and lime, the latest in steel sinks filled now with filthy plates and cups. Back then, the kitchen and the Lillie women offered a generous refuge. Now the floorboards creak and break under our feet; time abandoned the place years ago. Gaita looks around, searching for memories. “It seemed much bigger as a kid,” he says, finally.

We find the key and enter his old school, Baringhup Primary, no longer in use. Abandoned textbooks sit on desks, covered in veils of dust. “Write something on the blackboard, Rai,” I suggest, hoping a phrase as deep as “To be, or not to be” might result. Instead, in chalk he scrawls: “Elvis: Hero or Devil?”

Inevitably, it was sexual awakening that led Gaita to rock ‘n’ roll. “There was a girl, I was about 10, and she was about 11. She pulled me to the ground and lay on top of me, rubbing her groin into mine.” She had a little transistor radio and Elvis was singing Baby Let’s Play House. “I was completely electrified. I took her Elvis fan pictures, stuck them in an exercise pad and gave it a provocative title: Elvis Presley, Hero or Devil? My first book, a minor revolt against the adult world.”

 The rebellious streak took on more serious tones: riding his father’s Bantam motorbike down country roads at 11, driving without a licence, attempted car theft. The kid was heading for trouble. Busted by a local cop, the young Gaita ended up before the children’s court: fined, but with no conviction recorded. Saved by literature, the force of big ideas. Traces of the rebel remain. In the ute, he’s playing early Elvis: All Shook Up.

Gaita visits his old school, Baringhup Primary. He recalls his first sexual awakening, aged about 10, while listening to Elvis’ Baby Let’s Play House. Photo: TONY MANIATY

 Cartoons portray philosophers as big brains on puny bodies, but roaming Shalvah under thinning blue skies, wielding a machete with accuracy on saplings of wattle considered a weed around these parts, Gaita displays the strength of an ox, his silver mane blowing in the high-country wind. He’s still muscular, proud of his looks and happy to be photographed in action. I’m not surprised when he tells me he once seriously considered a career as a mountain guide. (Climbing was an early passion; his conquests included Europe’s highest peak, Mont Blanc.) But the years have wings, he knows.

The wind whistles around us as kangaroos gather in shady corners. Here they are multiplying fast, and he can’t get rid of them, or the cactus growing from boulders, or the flocks of mynah birds scaring off the native species. To these and other annoyances, he’s resigned. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” he says. “I never feel lonely. I can be here at Shalvah for weeks without talking to anybody, except Yael.” He nods. “That’s how I grew up, of course.”

Perhaps because his mother was largely absent in his life, he still longs for her, a longing so deep, he wrote in After Romulus, published in 2010, “I cannot think of myself without it.” He shows me something he scribbled as a boy: Dear Mummy, How are you? Do you know when you are coming home? I am sitting in the sheering shed, riting this letter. It is very hot in the sun. Xx Raimond xxx.

Christine, Gaita’s mother, who was largely absent from his life.

The dread now is becoming an “angry old man”. Rare bouts of crankiness are directed at life’s mundane frustrations. In nearby Maryborough, served coffee that looks and tastes like watery mud, he fumes. It’s the only time I see Gaita angry. “I know I have deep failures,” he confesses. “In that sense, I’m not happy with myself. I wish I was a better person – kinder, more thoughtful, sometimes less selfish …”

Should we as humans be fearless in our thoughts, able to think anything, no matter how bad? Is there good in every human being, even those who do evil? Reflecting on questions like these is the stuff of Gaita’s often provocative writings, and the public lectures he organised in Melbourne for 20 years. “What one should affirm,” he declares as he cooks a country dinner at Shalvah, “is that no human should ever, no matter how terrible their deeds, be treated like vermin. I mean, every human being is owed unconditional respect.”

High among his concerns is the plight of Indigenous Australians (the idea of even linking the two words is problematic for him). With moves towards an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, I wonder if he believes any agreement is likely. His response is delivered as formally and precisely as if he’s giving a speech, out here in the bush. “If non-Indigenous Australians are to fully understand the significance of the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of their lands, they might have to recognise that, if there’s to be some expression of a political fellowship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, it might not take the form of ‘we Australians’.”

You mean about agreeing on the name “Australia”?

“You can see how far away from that we are if you just try to debate Australia Day,” he says. “If treaties were to be negotiated now, they’d be so far from a full recognition of any significance of the dispossession that they could hardly be adequate treaties.”

A cultural bridge that could be impossible?

“It’s a conversation with outcomes nobody can foresee, that might deploy concepts that at the moment don’t exist. People will say, ‘We gave you the Treaty. What more do you want? Now take your place …’ But it seems to me utterly absurd, for example, that Indigenous peoples are not consulted on who comes to this country.

“If there was a Treaty, a Voice to Parliament, one of the main things would be for them to be able to say, ‘We have a distinctive voice in determining who comes to this country.’ About refugees, for example. The idea that Indigenous people should have no greater say on immigration policy than some powerful lobby group or bureaucrats in Canberra strikes me as absurd.”

He pauses. “Yes, I’d be very sympathetic to the idea that Aboriginal peoples have certain vetoes in regard to immigration policies.”

“No human should ever, no matter how terrible their deeds, be treated like vermin,” says Gaita. “I mean, every human being is owed unconditional respect.” Photo: TONY MANIATY

 Sunrise at Shalvah: before us is rolling landscape, Gaita’s “country” that needs caring for. I wonder if the Parkinson’s is affecting his ability to run the property. “Not yet, and recently in a moment of exuberant optimism, I bought a generator with a four-year guarantee.”

He shrugs. “People can have Parkinson’s for 10 or 15, even 20 years. But I think it’s progressing quickly in me. Some days I feel okay, other times not.” With further probing, it turns out Gaita has a string of life-threatening ailments, all of which he regards with detached amusement. “I had a heart attack in early 2019. It had its comic aspects actually – I got up feeling crook, but I had an optometrist’s appointment, and I said to Yael that after that I’d drive to Shalvah to gather firewood.

“She said, ‘Go and see a doctor!’ So, outside the optometrist’s, I phoned my cardiologist, who said: ‘Get straight into Emergency.’ And I thought, ‘Well, shit, I’m here, I might as well get my glasses.’ And the optometrist said, ‘How are you?’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay, but I’ve got to go to Emergency with my heart.’ He said, ‘You must be joking,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not joking. Let’s get on with it, I haven’t got much time.’ And I went to Emergency and they said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’ ”

He delights in telling me this story, if only to illustrate his down-to-earth credentials as mortality approaches. “One artery was 100 per cent blocked, another one 90 per cent blocked. But the one that was 100 per cent had established a bypass of its own, which is why I’m not dead. I have a benign attitude to my heart.”

Earlier he suffered a stroke; more recently a pacemaker was installed. “Because Parkinson’s has a nasty end, I’m hoping my heart might come to the rescue.”

And on the mental side? Writing, and thinking?

“Yes, the writing’s slowed down. For my birthday last year, I let it be known to my family that I would quite like a really good fountain pen. I needed something thick to grip just so I can write.” They all chipped in and bought him a Montblanc, the size of a Cuban cigar. Gaita laughs at the comparison. “It’s so expensive, you have to work out who you’re going to leave it to in your will.”

Above all, it’s the psychological effect of Parkinson’s that he fears: its impact on his mind, his ability to make clear judgments. He accepts his “marbles” will progressively lose their edge. “I’ll need to increase the medication; the side effects can make me anxious, and then perhaps I won’t be able to trust my judgment, or my ear for tone. Instead of writing with an authentic voice, I’ll just become kitschy – or yield to pathos, have a tin ear for irony. If that happens, I may as well just stop writing.”

In the grip of friendship, we’re talking about Camus and the “cruel mathematics” of death, the unavoidable outcome for us all. But our lives are all about talking, our curiosity about what makes people behave the way they do. Tell me, I ask, was Romulus a believer?

“My father believed in a God to whom he prayed,” Gaita says. “I don’t think he thought much about the complexities of it. He was prone to superstition but he didn’t see an afterlife as in Heaven and Hell. Or coming back as a grasshopper ...”

Does he think he’ll come back as a grasshopper? He laughs heartily. “Socrates told the judges who condemned him to death that he hoped to be doing in the next life exactly what he did in this one – putting himself and others to the question concerning how one should live. For me, there is no afterlife …”

It’s a view forged by decades of observing, reflecting on and writing acutely about the human experience. Will he keep going, clutching that chunky new pen? With another two books in the pipeline – a volume of essays, and portraits of people who’ve mattered greatly to him – he’s asked his friend, La Trobe emeritus professor and vice-chancellor’s fellow Robert Manne, to look out for any loss of capacity for judgment in his writing. “I’ve told him to be ruthless and not spare me his opinion. And if my judgment goes, I’ll stop, absolutely.”

In all my conversations with Gaita, fallibility is a big theme. Right now, he’s a climber on a rock-face, clinging to the time he has left; thinking about when that inevitable moment comes, when the words in his head stop making sense. “I mean,” he says, “it’s not as if I can lower my sights.”

Even a phrase as simple as that carries his philosophy. You only live once, Rai Gaita is telling me, but if you do it well, with truth and dignity, with faith in a common humanity and a deep love of the world, once is more than enough.

* * *

This article first appeared in The Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, 16 December 2022.

All images © Tony Maniaty 2022

IAN BERRY: STILL SHOOTING

English photographer Ian Berry has won prestigious awards, been shot at and risked his life on countless occasions, and for years was a leading choice of colour magazine editors. You name it, he’s been there and done it. Interviewed by Head On Interactional’s Features Editor Tony Maniaty, Berry reflects on a momentous life in photography and discusses his latest book, his ninth.

South Africa. Transvaal. A young black girl, scarcely more than a child herself, looks after a baby girl for a white family, 1968 © Ian Berry/Magnum

In 1962, the year The Rolling Stones were formed, Ian Berry was invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum, which was back then – like The Stones – just a fledgling outfit. Now, 60 years later, having stuck with his game as long as Mick Jagger has, Ian Berry is a certified legend. Born in England in 1934, at 88 he’s the oldest and longest-serving full member of arguably the world’s best-known and most prestigious photo agency.

When we connect on a Zoom call – Berry in the UK, me halfway around the globe in Sydney – he’s about to head off to Egypt on a holiday with his wife, but it’s impossible to imagine a pro like Ian Berry lounging around the pool when there are photographs to be had. One thing’s certain: he won’t be heading off to Ukraine. “No more war zones,” he insists, “I’m too old for that, I can’t run fast enough.” Fair enough, but his voluminous photographic output includes plenty of life-threatening, ‘incoming’ danger.

South Africa. Northern Transvaal. Nr Pietersburg. Annual meeting of members of the Zion Christian Church. Just prior to the elections leaders of the main parties including whites attended attempting to influence the outcome, 1994 © Ian Berry/Magnum

That’s where the story starts: on 21st March 1960, a young Ian Berry was the only photographer at the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, when police opened fire on black protesters, killing 69. Those shots launched an endlessly roving career. Moving to Paris, he hooked up with Magnum and followed the conflicts of that troubled era: Vietnam, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, apartheid-era South Africa. About the difficulties of life on the road, he’s sanguine. “You learn to adjust, of course. One night you’re in a five-star hotel, the next you’re in a doss-house.”

“I do have some regrets about not going to Ukraine,” he adds, wistfully. “But it’s not an easy war to cover. Unless you have a backer it’s difficult to operate there as a photographer. You need an interpreter, a hundred bucks a day. You can’t even hire a vehicle because nobody wants their cars smashed up. I don’t envy the guys working in Ukraine.” Back in 1968, Berry recalls, for about four days he had the Soviet occupation of Prague all to himself. I mention the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was there too, and he laughs. “Oh, that’s right. I saw this lunatic with his camera climbing onto Russian tanks and I thought, ‘Well, good luck to him because the Russians won’t like that!’ I met him years later when he came to Paris and joined Magnum. Great guy, Josef. Very eccentric.” 

So how did the rookie Ian Berry get into Magnum? “They invited me to join and I was flattered.” To enter Magnum back then was easier than now, but you still needed the okay from Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I arrived with all my prints and showed them to Henri. I didn’t tell him I thought he was a great photographer because we English don’t do that, it’s not the right thing.” The first encounter went rather badly. “The Paris bureau chief said, ‘Henri hates you!’ Why, I asked? ‘He didn’t want to see prints – he wants to look at your contact sheets, so he can see how you think.’ Henri was an Anglophile, and after that we became the best of friends.” 

Over the decades, Magnum has grown into a complex enterprise. Berry wishes it wasn’t so. “It’s not the group I joined. When I signed up, I think I was member number 13, and now there are close to a hundred members. It’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t know most members on the street if I passed them.” Back in 1962, the Magnum co-op included some of the great names of post-war photojournalism. “Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Haas and Eric Lessing, Denis Stock, and Brian Brake.” When I mention Brake’s famous 1960 photo-essay for Life magazine, ‘Monsoon’, shot in India, Berry seizes on what he really wants to talk about: water. “My big passion for many years now. Water and climate change.” 

India, Maharashtra, near Lonavia. Field workers shelter from the monsoon rains in basket work capes © Ian Berry/Magnum

His latest book – working title, Water: Source of Life – is due out later this year from GOST Publishers in London. “On this journey I’ve been to Alaska and Greenland, Bangladesh, India, the Congo with NGOs installing water pumps, and with refugees in Central America. I’ve sailed up and down the world’s greatest rivers – the Yangtse, the Mekong, the Nile, the Mississippi, even the Thames. And even when I’m shooting other stories,” he adds, “there’s usually a water element too.” 

Berry sees water as the key link in critical global issues. “In Bangladesh, for example, where dam building had changed the water table, they were pulling up water with arsenic in it – the government painted the pumps red to show people not to use it, but they do because it’s their only source of water. Their hands are covered in sores you get from arsenic. Bangladesh used to be an exporter of rice, and now it’s an importer of rice, because the sea water is rising and of course you can’t grow rice in sea water. So they’re building levees by hand – no help from the government, nobody helps them at all.” Mexico City, he says, will be importing water because the water table has almost disappeared. And in Britain, a lot of towns on the Thames estuary are going to be flooded.

Bangladesh, Sylhet, Itna village. Wooden boats ferry people from one part of the village to another when flooded each year. Here, in the monsoon rains, a man returns from the bazaar with the family’s shopping. © Ian Berry/Magnum

When I ask him to estimate how many ‘water’ photographs he’s taken, he says matter-of-factly, “I gave the publisher 1,000 images, and he said, ‘Where are the rest?’ I ended up giving him 5,000. He’s a glutton for punishment.” So too it seems is Berry himself. “When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I was all ready to go. Then I fell off my motorbike in England and broke my leg. I was riding until I was 80, before my wife stopped me. A broken ankle still gives me trouble.” 

A few years ago, when I first met him at a Head On/Magnum workshop in Sydney, I saw what I’d long suspected: calm, never drawing attention to himself, Ian Berry is someone who can’t stop doing what he loves, taking great pictures. It’s been like that since the start. As he approaches 90, any regrets? “None personally. But I’m sad about the decline of the great colour magazines. I was lucky to be around at their peak. I spent five years at The Observer on a contract for 100 days’ work a year. In the year before Covid hit, I did one assignment for The Daily Telegraph magazine in Colombia, and one for The Observer in Uganda. That was it. And in the past two years, because of Covid, nothing…” 

For Ian Berry, photography has been the longest road, a road still without end: he’s adamant he’ll never retire. “I’ll keep shooting until I drop,” he says. He’s got more packing to do. 

Ian Berry is a British photojournalist with Magnum Photos.

This article first appeared in Head On Interactional magazine, 14 June 2022

ZÉPHYROS CINEMA, PETRALONA, ATHENS

Every summer, Athenians enjoy watching movies 'under the stars' at one of the Greek capital’s sixty therina sinema (open-air cinemas). The Zéphyros, in Petralona, began life in 1932 and shows mainly art-house films. This summer the program includes Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, and Elia Kazan’s East of Eden with James Dean.

Heaven for cineastes.

Tony Maniaty

First published in L’Œil de la Photographie / The Eye of Photography, Paris, 12 August 2022

IN ISTANBUL: ARA GÜLER’S KAFE

“The history of the world is the sum of the lives of everyday people, the atoms of this world. It was this magnificent world that Ara Güler sought to preserve.” Bishop Sahak Maşalyan, at Ara Güler’s funeral on October 20th 2018, in Istanbul…

The day after I arrived, a terrorist attack killed six people. Istanbul: East and West, Asia meets Europe, the clash and blending of cultures. And the beloved home of Ara Güler, the legendary Turkish/Magnum photographer who documented this fabulous city over a lifetime, and died four years ago at 90. (Kidney failure and on dialysis, but he kept going.) The locals called him ‘The Eye of Istanbul’ because his focus was on the city he was born in and captured with absolute devotion. And what photographs! Even the word ‘timeless’ seems too short, too brief: these were eternal images. The cobbled streets, the smoking workers and street kids, the ferries plying across the Bosporus. All captured in monochromatic magic with a battered Leica and a pocket full of film. The pure joy of it.

And what remains? A body of incomparable work, without which Istanbul – as we know it, imagine it, dream it – might not exist; for so much has changed here, even between visits. Now it’s all big brands, fashion labels, design; seven years ago, my last stay, it wasn’t so globalised but expanding rapidly. When I first came in 1984, it was a city locked in some enigmatic past, a strange blend of Orientalism and Modernism, the ideals of Atatürk buoyed by hopes for greatness.

And now bomb blasts, uncertainty.

The times are fragile but Güler gave us permanence, a set of images so strong they defy the passing of time, the terrorists, even the passing of Güler. (He who hated being called an artist – ‘I don’t do art’ – preferring ‘photojournalist’, an archivist recording life as it exists.)

Today I make my way uphill – this district, Beyoğlu, is nothing but hills – to the Ara Kafe, which Güler opened long ago and where his photographs adorn the walls, and his memory lingers. At three in the afternoon, it’s almost empty, allowing me to reflect on Güler’s graphic images, always of this city. The shooter who captured celebrities – Picasso, Churchill, Hitchcock, Dali, for Life, Time, Paris-Match, Stern – invariably returned to these crowded, muddy streets. I sip my Turkish coffee, eat lokum. Every image triggers memories of others; his documentation of Istanbul is seamless and never-ending. A passion, an obsession, or both? Güler was no Proust in search of lost time, of nostalgia. Here, his work becomes image-time itself.

How many great photographers open a café, a meeting place? Maybe only one.

Güler and Istanbul, inseparable.

Tony Maniaty

First published in L’Œil de la Photographie / The Eye of Photography, Paris, 19 November 2022

All images © Tony Maniaty / For full frame, click on any image

NEW ATHENIANS

The project: two months on the streets every day, shooting full-length portraits ‘in situ’ of an unexpected Greece – foreigners who’ve migrated here, coping with relocation and a strange language, sending their kids to Greek schools; along with Greeks who don’t conform to traditional visions of what the society should be.

The focus is on younger Athenians transforming the capital – beyond the financial crisis, Covid, and flood of refugees. The change is dramatic: a spirit of rejuvenation is lifting rundown areas out of malaise with new bars full of grunge, neon and disregard for convention. And always the graffiti, often tongue-in-cheek: ‘Berlin is the new Athens…’

What makes a ‘new Athenian’ in 2022? In a word, diversity. In the backstreets you’ll see Indian and Middle Eastern stores, many started by refugees, while Chinese unbundle huge cartons of imported clothes – bound not only for Greece but all of Europe – and street vendors from Nigeria and Somalia and Pakistan and Sri Lanka sell everything from shoes to watermelons to kids’ balloons. You’ll hear them speaking not only Greek but Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil and Arabic. Humanity on full display. There’s always something if you keep your radar on…

Athens isn’t a pretty city. Sidewalks are broken, buildings are half-finished (the money ran out) or need total renovation, pedestrians and cars compete lethally. But it remains an amazing, sprawling metropolis of three-million, the classical past at every turn and side-streets filled with exotic flavours and new arrivals. People make a city, and Athens is alive with humanity. What more could a photographer ask for?

Now begins the task of editing the work – 150 portraits – down to exhibition/book dimensions, finding a publisher and a gallery. It’s been an illuminating journey, meeting people with so many backgrounds and stories to tell. To all who were happy to pose, and to Athens itself, my thanks. Ancient or this century, it’s still one of the great cities of the world…

Tony Maniaty

First published in L’Œil de la Photographie / The Eye of Photography, Paris, 21 September 2022

All images © Tony Maniaty / For full frame, click on any image

BRIGHTON NOIR

On the pebbly southern coast of the United Kingdom, Brighton has two piers. One of faded glory, the other a wreck. The pier that is still open – scattered with joyrides, video games and fast-food outlets – stretches half-a-kilometre into the Atlantic. What lies beyond is the rest of the world, much of which an expansionary Great Britain once conquered and ruled. The other pier, or what remains of it – just a skeleton of rusting iron – sits forlorn in the sea, a reminder that all things, not only empires but even Industrial Age icons, must pass.

Both piers are easily portrayed as metaphors for the parlous state that once-mighty Britannia finds herself in, and of course one must resist any temptation to portray them as such. They are just piers, after all, hammered by the sea and largely ignored by the modern populace, while the grand dame behind them, Brighton by the sea, survives.

A relic of ornate Victorian times, buffered by crisis after crisis in the capital, Brighton keeps gazing outwards to the waves, refusing to be overwhelmed by tumultuous matters of state and sleaze in London. Here many liberal-minded souls, escapees from Establishment culture, have found new lives in the cobbled lanes of a classic English seaside town. Historically a stronghold of Conservative voters, now it’s the only constituency in Britain held by the Greens. These days Brighton celebrates diversity, non-conformity, with splashes of madness and plenty of booze.

But none of that can erase the darkness, the noir of Brighton. It’s a flaky, seat-of-the-pants town where almost anything could happen, and almost certainly has. (‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him,’ begins Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock.) There’s a touch of uncertainty around every corner.

Shooting in colour, you can easily produce a smile in Brighton-by-sea. But if your choice is monochrome, the images and the place are doomed as soon as you press the shutter. In some inexplicable way, Brighton encourages those juices and claims them as its own: the darker the better. That’s me, she seems to be saying. That inkiness, the deep blacks. That’s really who I am, she says. I survive because, unlike London, I don’t chase fashions, trends. I don’t chase rainbows. I can’t be bothered lying, my holiday veneers have peeled away over time.

I keep watching the sea, the only truth.

Tony Maniaty

First published in L’Œil de la Photographie / The Eye of Photography, Paris, 10 November 2022

All images © Tony Maniaty / For full frame, click on any image

A MANIA FOR WRITING: HONORE DE BALZAC, LITERARY GENIUS

In Paris, a small museum that tells a big story.

La Maison de Balzac in Passy is where the great 19th century novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) lived towards the end of his life and created memorable works, including 'La Cousine Bette'. On display are the famous bust by Rodin and other representations of his unmistakable burly face and figure - including the only known photograph, a Daguerreotype taken in 1842.

Pumped with coffee (his pot and cup are also on display) and often dressed in monks’ robes, Balzac wrote for up to 15-20 hours a day - starting always at midnight. The desk in his office witnessed, as he put it, 'my thoughts, my anxieties, my miseries, my distresses, my joys, everything!’ So central to his creative process was this small piece of furniture that Balzac bequeathed it to his lover Ève Hanska, who became Mme de Balzac only a few months before his death…

Balzac was a pen-and-ink literary machine, writing dozens of novels and numerous plays. Once he completed his drafts, they were typeset and returned for corrections, which he scrawled in handwriting almost unreadable - some novels went through as many as 30 drafts in this near-obsessive process. ‘Perpetual work,’ he wrote, ‘is the law of art, as it is the law of life… great artists and perfect poets wait neither for commissions nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating - today, tomorrow, always.’

Currently the museum features quirky illustrations of Balzac by the Spanish artist Eduardo Arroyo (1937-2018). Click on the images for full-frame view.

Q&A: passing the TIME

After a one-day workshop conducted for the New England Writers’ Centre in northern New South Wales, I agreed to answer a few probing questions about my life and writing methods. The results were published in the Autumn 2019 edition of the NEWC newsletter, The New England Muse.

Can you tell us about yourself?

I was born and grew up in Brisbane, in sub-tropical Australia. My Greek father and Anglo-Australian mother ran corner shops where, incredibly, people bought all their weekly groceries and fruit and vegetables. (Supermarkets didn’t exist.) Every week my brother and I went to the Saturday matinee at the movies, two movies, then we returned for the night double with my parents – four films a week, 200 a year, roughly 2000 over my childhood. I didn’t read novels until I was about fourteen, then I started with Grahame Green’s The End of the Affair. The librarian was a bit stunned. That’s when I decided to be a writer. Leaving high school I scored a journalism cadetship with the ABC and, one way or another, I’ve made a living since as a storyteller, in fact and fiction. I love it, though part of me still wishes I’d been an architect.

Can you tell us about your style of writing?

I’m big on structure, on the possibilities of structure: sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books. (An architect with words.) Sometimes I play with time. My writing tends to be simple (probably reflecting my years as a radio journalist) but occasionally I’m prone to poetry. It’s impossible for any writer to describe their own style, it’s like asking ‘What sort of person are you?’ Best left to others to decide. I do have my writing quirks: one of my best (or worst) is trying never to end a sentence on a capitalized letter. For instance, I would avoid writing, ‘After a week, he went to Berlin.’ Which is a perfectly good sentence. I accept it’s insane. This probably explains why my novels take so long to write.

Is your personality reflected in your work?

I guess there’s a template with my name on it. From first draft to last the text changes, often dramatically, but there’s always a remnant in there that I know could only come from my head. But where inside that head it comes from I have no idea. It’s not uncommon for me to re-read my work and say, ‘Did I actually write that?’ Because I have no memory of doing it. I’ve changed in the interval between when I wrote it and now, I’m not the same person who wrote that.

How do you overcome creative blocks?

I don’t really suffer creative blocks, I just write. I’ve got maybe fifty outlines for different novels and movies on my laptop, and more material than I know what to do with. Like most writers I get restless at the keyboard after a while and find some excuse not to write, usually cooking or catching up on journalism - The New York Times, the BBC. I can be at the desk for four or five hours if I’m in the zone. For a break I work out with weights or go for a swim. Q: Is writing physically demanding? A: Only if you’re doing it right.

Can you briefly explain your creative process?

In my thirties I began collecting concepts and ideas for books. Now that they’re on the computer, I keep folders for each project and add material whenever I see something relevant. I’m forever cutting and pasting articles, interviews, images. I spend maybe 20 per cent of my working day on this, even though most of the projects will never be realized. (I figure there has to be a spill-over effect on current projects.) My writing begins as a core idea surrounded by a collage of raw material, which I gradually shape into what’s needed to bring the idea to life. I also keep paper scraps on my bedside table and scribble ideas in the dark hours. My record was 23 scrawled-on scraps in a creative burst one night. (About 60% intelligible in the morning.) It sounds pretty chaotic but it’s a process I’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

Lastly, any words of wisdom you would like to share?

I burned my pile of ‘how to write’ books long ago, but keep a few core mantras in my head. The first is Maupassant’s advice: ‘Put black on white.’ Get something, anything down. Don’t wait for perfection or you’ll be waiting forever. (That applies to almost everything in life.) The extension of that is, ‘All writing is rewriting,’ because rarely is the first draft there. The biggest ‘trick’ (and let’s face it, all writing is the creation of illusion) comes from the late, great Philip Roth: ‘The slow release of vital information.’ Or as the screenwriter William Goldman said, ‘Make ’em wait, make ’em wait, make ’em wait!’ The reveal is at the core of all great storytelling.

THE LIVING ROOM WAR

Fifty years ago, the United States - plus several of its military allies, including Australia - was embroiled in a war in Indo-China that seemed without end. The conflict in Vietnam - and its exhaustive nightly coverage on television news - came to haunt the American body politic, and America’s first-ever military defeat launched a post-postwar era of political division that has played out to this day. This essay is drawn from a range of sources including my primary research, interviewing former TV war correspondents. Over two decades of conflict, more than 60 reporters were killed.

CBS camera crew interviewing American troops in Vietnam, 1967. (Photo by Tim Page/Corbis)

CBS camera crew interviewing American troops in Vietnam, 1967. (Photo by Tim Page/Corbis)

Two stories.

In 1951, en route to Korea, CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow is confronted at Tokyo Airport by a World War Two media veteran, who runs across the tarmac yelling: “Go back, go back, you silly son of a bitch! This isn’t our kind of war!”

Three years later, the legendary photojournalist Robert Capa steps on a mine in Indo-China and dies clutching his camera. The attending doctor asks, “Is this the first American correspondent killed in Indochina?” When told it is, he replies, “It is a harsh way for America to learn.” The very nature of war had changed, and in Vietnam new lessons would be learned the hard way.

In the early 1960s, in what the Vietnamese would call the ‘American War’, newsreel cameramen and print and radio reporters moved into television news, and, with a dynamic new medium at their disposal and free of the burden of censorship, they began to capture monumental changes in the conduct of war, and in coverage of human suffering.

In 1962, Walter Cronkite started hosting CBS Evening News, the first half-hour nightly bulletin; as concern over the Vietnam War grew, he would ultimately plunge the sword of television into the heart of the American presidency. But for now, the relentless eye of the TV news camera gave viewers compelling evidence not only of U.S. successes but also failures, and left officials floundering.

Barry Zorthian, head of U.S. public affairs in Saigon, the original master of ‘spin’, countered by feeding television crews with upbeat film clips. Some took his tainted offerings, an easier option than flying into conflict zones and being shot at. But most TV correspondents opted to learn their new craft through the classroom of war.

A young Dan Rather, CBS News, honing his field reporting skills.

A young Dan Rather, CBS News, honing his field reporting skills.

Rising broadcast talents like Peter Jennings, Morley Safer and Dan Rather risked their lives to get footage of American troops in action against Communist forces. The equipment was bulky, but what it produced could be gripping, even spectacular - edge-of-seat accounts of young men, many still teenagers, under fire from a skilled and unforgiving enemy.

For these pioneers, a critical factor was the difficulty of contact between network headquarters in New York and London and the bureaus in Saigon - in a world without satellites, mobile phones or email, correspondents could easily ignore directions from above and chase more newsworthy stories on their own initiative. This ‘renegade’ factor - the inverse of today’s homogenized, heavily-directed coverage - produced some of the most critically acclaimed stories, and set the standard for war coverage to come.

Television reporters began peeling back the heroic façade of war, showing to home viewers - for the first time - not a ‘gallant venture’ but a game of dice in which there were really no winners. Nightly news stories from Vietnam became grittier, darker, and more challenging of the official version of events. Soon there were rumblings, not only from the new president in Washington, Lyndon Johnson, who loathed and distrusted TV as a news medium, but from inside the television industry as well - a foretaste of bitter struggles to come. The controversial realm of televised warfare was under way.

Barely six months after U.S. troops land at Da Nang in 1965, CBS’s Morley Safer, with a single location report, would negatively reshape impressions of the Vietnam War around the world - and bring to the surface tensions between TV correspondents in the field, their New York masters, and the White House.

CBS’s Morley Safer reporting from the burning village of Cam Ne.

CBS’s Morley Safer reporting from the burning village of Cam Ne.

On August 5, Safer accompanied U.S. Marines whose mission, he was told, was to “punish a village”. After several Marines were wounded, most likely by friendly fire, soldiers shot into the village of Cam Ne, and, facing no resistance, held their Zippo lighters to thatched roofs and proceeded to ‘waste’ the hamlet. Safer’s report was unflinching:

This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.  The old and the very young. The Marines have burned this old couple’s cottage because fire was coming from here. A hundred and fifty homes were leveled in retaliation for a burst of gunfire. In Vietnam, like everywhere else in Asia, property, a home, is everything. […] If there were Viet Cong in the hamlet, they were long gone. The women and the old men who remained will never forget this August afternoon.

After fierce debate at CBS headquarters in New York, Safer’s “incendiary” report was screened two nights later, igniting, in Safer’s own words, “a powder keg of suspicion, even hatred”. The next morning CBS president Frank Stanton was phoned by a fuming President Johnson, accusing the network of a “lack of patriotism”. Safer recounted:

The president said, “Frank?” “Yeah, who is this?” He said, “This is your president.” “Yes, Mr. President?” “Frank, you trying to fuck me? You know what you did to me last night?” “What did I do, sir?” “You shat on the American flag.”

Safer’s report had infuriated the Commander-in-Chief, disturbed loyal CBS viewers and challenged the Pentagon. “I spent a decade reporting from Vietnam to become a pariah within the U.S. military establishment,” observed Peter Arnett. “Morley Safer achieved similar status in just one afternoon.”

TV coverage of the Vietnam War ultimately defeated Lyndon Baines Johnson.

TV coverage of the Vietnam War ultimately defeated Lyndon Baines Johnson.

A new rigor had been set. Television would henceforth be an independent critic, rather than a subservient tool, of the military, of the White House, and of the war itself. That in turn would make the job of reporting Vietnam for television a whole lot harder.

As the war effort soured and morale slumped, so did relations between TV war correspondents and American troops. Where previously the media had been welcome, television crews were now ‘the enemy’. Said one soldier assigned to look after a CBS outfit, “They would come by helicopter or truck, stay a few hours, then go back to places with drinks and clean sheets, leaving us to our misery. They did not carry weapons and did not fight and therefore could not defend you.” TV correspondents and cameramen were seen as parasites, but they kept on reporting and filming.  

Across America, anti-war taunts grew strident: “Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” U.S. networks were each spending more than $US1 million annually on covering the war, showing the American forces in action. Television itself had created an insatiable appetite for battle images. One correspondent noted New York producers wanted “bang-bang stuff”, not complexities. “They wanted bodies. Air strikes. They wanted napalm going off.” Increasingly, the conflict was also between network correspondents and their employers.

Meanwhile, Communist forces were planning a masterstroke that would elevate dramatically the role of television reporting. On the night of 30 January 1968, launching the Tet Offensive, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops attacked targets in fourteen major centers across the country. The impact as shown on nightly television news was devastating.

When Walter Cronkite told Americans there was no way the war could now be justified, “The president flipped off the set and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’” Bankrupted politically, bereft personally, LBJ announced he would not contest the elections later that year. Television had not lost the war, but it had destroyed his presidency.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect, Saigon, 1968.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong suspect, Saigon, 1968.

In this crucial phase of the war, three media events had phenomenal effect. During Tet, Vietnamese cameraman Vo Suu, working for NBC, filmed a Viet Cong suspect being shot in cold blood by Saigon’s police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Later, the indelible image of Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc - running naked from a napalm attack - haunted viewers worldwide, and stifled America’s mission in Vietnam. Her plight, filmed by NBC’s Le Phuc Dinh, offered a searing metaphor for the war’s insanity.

Conversely, in 1968, the My Lai massacre, in which Vietnamese peasants were raped, mutilated, and had their throats slit by U.S. Marines, was not television news’ finest hour. It reacted far too slowly to this horror, a chilling indication of how inured America - and the TV medium - was becoming to the violence being perpetrated.

By 1970, thousands of American troops were refusing to follow orders. CBS filmed disillusioned GIs smoking marijuana from a rifle barrel. The war had started taking its toll: by 1975, more than sixty correspondents would be killed in action, many from television networks. But to its bitter end, the Vietnam War remained a magnet for TV journalists.

In March 1975, amid big Communist advances, South Vietnamese troops retreated; many units were disbanding and refusing to fight. On the morning of 29 April, 1975, CIA operatives in Saigon instigated the evacuation plan, ‘Frequent Wind’. Panic set in as Westerners fled the capital. One stayed put, to capture on film the ‘decisive moment’ of America’s stupendous defeat.

Arriving in Vietnam from Australia in 1964, Neil Davis was already a top-flight news cameraman, albeit with a penchant for brown suede boots and “trousers in varying pastel shades”. Quickly the handsome Davis acquired a dual reputation - as a fearless operator, filming war “at the extreme front line” for the international agency Visnews, and as a man of the night: drinker and gambler, relentless lady killer, opium smoker.

Australian cameraman Neil David aboard a chopper in Vietnam.

Australian cameraman Neil David aboard a chopper in Vietnam.

Now, after eleven years of war and countless injuries, once nearly losing a leg, Davis faced the greatest challenge - and danger - of his career. As hysterical Vietnamese begged to be choppered out, Davis went to Saigon’s Presidential Palace and found the President of South Vietnam, General ‘Big’ Minh, unshaven. “The other side will be here shortly,” said Minh, eyes red with tears. Davis went downstairs with his camera, and waited.  

The end, caught on camera: the final moments of the war, 1975.

The end, caught on camera: the final moments of the war, 1975.

Just after midday, North Vietnamese tank 843 rumbled from a side street, fired, and tracked towards the palace’s massive iron gates. Davis started filming. The T-54 tank crushed through the gates and kept coming, and Davis kept filming. A Communist fighter leapt from the tank, angrily pointed his rifle at Davis and warned, “Stop! Hands up.” But filming “the greatest scoop one could imagine”, he kept rolling and waited for the bullet.

“Stop! Are you American?”

Davis finally lowered his hefty Auricon camera. “No, I’m an Australian.” The soldier was baffled. Then Davis said in perfect Vietnamese, “Welcome to Saigon, comrade. I’ve been waiting for you.”

With these words, the Vietnam War was over.

INTO THE WILD

The land of my father's ancestors, Greece’s rugged Mani peninsula was once a no-go zone for strangers - even Greek strangers. I first went down there from Athens in 1984 as a young traveller. In 2009, with photographer Julian Kingma, I returned to the Mani to find that, while the Maniots may be seducing more travellers these days, they've lost none of their famed pride and passion.

~ ~ ~ ~

Shimmering in summer, ice-clad in winter, the grey-green Taygetus mountains rise off olive-strewn plains, shutting out progress and warning of what's to come - the barren, southern-most finger of the Peloponnese, battered by the howling tramontana winds and inhabited by black-draped villagers with stern codes of honour. As much blood-stained opera as geography, the Mani peninsula has long been a destination approached by foreigners, even other Greeks, with high anxiety.

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"You're mad," said an Athenian friend when I first came here. "If you look the wrong way at a Maniot, he'll slit your throat." That was 1984: she'd never been to the Mani, not even to its more hospitable edges. "But I'm a Maniot," I protested. "That's how we got our family name." My Greek father was born in Turkey and had never been to the Mani either, but some ancestors had fled from here, and he'd certainly inherited their qualities of resilience and authority. As a lumbering bus carried me deeper into the Mani on that opening journey, I looked out a dusty window and saw, crudely painted in metre-high letters: "Stop! Communists go back!" They were unswerving supporters of royalty and right-wing politics. Now, four hours from Athens and a quarter of a century on, I'm wondering if "Long Live the King" and "Death to All Traitors" still hold sway.

The fishing town of Gythio is a useful start, though hardly the Mani in extremis; that comes later. It's a short drive south-east of Sparta and handy, if you're coming from the capital, for an early lunch: the sight of raw octopus drying in the morning sun might not stir your appetite, but marinated anchovies (gavros) and deep-fried whitebait (marides) - hyper-fresh off the boat and stacked like bullets on the plate - are difficult to resist, especially if you add a glass of pungent Maniatiko ouzo and ice. Across a causeway sits Marathonisi (fennel island) - called Kranae by Homer - where mythical elopers Paris and Helen spent their first night of bliss. Today it hosts a shabby but hard-working boatyard; in the Mani, practicality always wins over looks. The typical Maniot has no interest in out-styling those around him, just as his great-grandfather's primary interest was in out-gunning the neighbours. Today's warning sign is more likely to be, "Stop! Fashionistas go back!"

But they come. Both coasts of the Mani - the Aegean in the east, the Ionian in the west - are dotted now with substantial stone houses, bloated replicas of the villas of the past, and most of the owners are wealthy outsiders. I spot a blazing red Ferrari, with Athenian plates of course. In 1984, Gythio seemed - like most of the Mani - a backwater, its charms buried under grime. Today it sparkles with Euro-cash. So great is the construction boom that Albanian stonemasons have been imported to erect the faux fortresses; the locals have long forgotten how to carve the deep-grey rocks that shaped their own architecture.

"What's changed most?" I ask 80-year-old Mitsos, sitting patiently at his family-run taverna, watching the fishing boats come in. "Tourismos," tourism, he unravels in a shaky voice. "They changed everything. Foreigners came, they know the place now." The first wave appeared a decade ago and saved the Mani from deeper penury. "I was a poor boy, one of eight," Mitsos declares. "We didn't bother anybody. But if anybody bothered us, we soon knocked them down." He quickly warms to the Mani's us-versus-them ethos. "We fought the Italians in the war and chased them out, and before that, Greece was occupied for four centuries - but no Ottoman Turk set foot here." The Mani is famed for producing the country's toughest sea captains, police chiefs and army officers, a source of local pride and beyond challenge. ("In Athens," a waiter boasts, "those who protect nightclubs are all Maniots too.") Does old Mitsos see himself as Greek first, or a Manioti?

He laughs, at the idiocy of my question. "Manioti!"

The rudiments of Mani life and rejection of external influences ("we don't use spices in our cooking," says another local, "because the Turks did") emerge the deeper south you go, well beyond the clichéd Greece of classical ruins, whitewashed houses and plate-smashing Zorbas. None of that here: crumbling stone walls still delineate who owns to a centimetre exactly what, and empty shotgun cartridges from the hunting season (migratory birds from Africa, quail, wild boar) hint at a deeply embedded culture of vendettas that survived into the 1970s. "A hard life makes hard people," says George Rostandis, my guide. "This is the life they live, and love."

Coming off the winding, rock-strewn road into Kotronas Bay, we stop to absorb the view, a panorama of cloud-churned peaks and water so blue it seems out of place, too pretty for the Mani's intrigues and darkness of spirit. If this is hell, it's set against heaven. That night at En Plo, the eatery of Greek celebrity chef Mary Panagakos, we'll feast on Maniot specialties - pork sausages called loukanika, laced with chunks of orange and lemon peel, wild thyme and oregano; a salad of dried figs, lettuce, walnuts in grape juice and pomegranate seeds; and a roast of goat, potatoes and artichokes cooked on a bed of fennel, flavoured with salt, lemon juice, olive oil and oregano, and slowly oven-baked in its own juices. The meat is robust in flavour. Even goats here thrive on hardship, drinking sea water and feeding on thistles.

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Down on the wharf, Petros Perinarkos coolly displays his catch: a three-kilo snapper. "I've worked since I was five years old. Every day we ate fish, it was the poor cousin of beef. Now it's just for the rich." Poverty sent a lot of Maniots away to Germany, to Australia, everywhere. "They worked in the frost and sun, and went to bed hungry." Since curses and the evil eye still count in the Mani, I'm curious if he knows any superstitions about the sea. Perinarkos nods solemnly: "But they are secret. If I told you, they might come true. About the sea you don't joke." Another fisherman, Aris, waves dismissively and laughs. "All rubbish. I don't believe in paradise or hell - life is only what we eat and drink." Deftly gutting a pink-red barbounia, much prized in the tavernas, he smiles cheekily.

"And no need for Viagra - here we eat eels!"

If summer is devoted largely to fishing, winter is the season of olives. The harvest starts in November and runs until February, and picking and pressing go on across the coldest months. Olives are the Mani's big cash crop, grown on steep terraces carved into the hills centuries ago. I spot groves filled with olive trees, unharvested. "The owners have given them up to rot," says Alexi, one of the young pickers. "Nobody collects them. You only touch what is yours." Driving uphill, we spy an old woman going our way. She's bent, impossibly tiny, all in black with a white sack on her back. Where is she headed? Her eyes narrow. "To collect olives." Can we take her photo? "Oxi," no. Would she like a lift? "Oxi." She proceeds as if the exchange had never taken place. "That's how all the Maniots used to be," says Rostandis, shaking his head. "Believe me, these are very difficult people."

The land is harsh, and prone to earth tremors and quakes. The shifting plates under the Maniots' feet - a constant reminder of their tenuous grip on the land - surely added to their troubled psyche. Yet in spring the peninsula hosts Europe's most stunning wildflower display, with over 600 species, while roadsides yield herbal treasures in abundance.

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Ahead waits the lighthouse at Cape Tenaron, where the escarpment falls hard to the sea; a terror for shipping, perfect for pirates. In the absence of fertile soil, piracy kept a lot of Maniots alive, and this was the ideal point of attack; ships rounding the southern-most tip of mainland Europe were laden with bounty and exposed to jagged rocks. When a French ship came to grief in 1786, locals plundered its cargo, its rigging and its timbers. An observer of the Mani pirates wrote, "They cannot resist, they say, the alluring spectacle of so many European vessels continually passing before their eyes..."

Graveyards cling desperately to the windswept hills as hawks and eagles wheel overhead, looking for insects and lesser birds. "This is the entry to the underworld," Rostandis declares. "The Death Oracle, the Gates of Hades." A small crypt-like stone structure rises from a field sprinkled with bright purple crocuses. In pre-Christian times, worried Greeks came here to consult priests about the afterlife. The Maniots were the last Europeans to convert to Christianity, in the 10th century; as befits extremists, the ferocity of their resistance gave way to profound conversion, and some villages boasted up to 30 churches, with family-appointed priests.

As we drive north again, up the west coast, rows of turquoise beehives suggest order and industry. Then an apparition rises off the hilltop like medieval Lego, a series of massive stone boxes piled on boxes to create disturbing shapes and a sense of foreboding. It was here - in the village of Vathia - that Maniot family feuds reached their pinnacle, an English traveller in 1805 noting the community had been "divided into two parties for the last 40 years, in which time they reckon that about 100 men have been killed." Today the austere towers are just as they were when I clambered through them 25 years ago, except for one telltale sign; on doors are numbers, evidence of a doomed effort in the 1990s to convert them into tourist lodgings.

The rooms are again empty, wrecked, splattered with bird droppings.

"Why would anyone pay to stay here in the heat of summer when they could holiday at the beach?" asks Rostandis. He's right; why reside in a labyrinth of cells an hour's walk up from the crystalline sea? Yet the towers of Vathia retain an eerie fascination. Reflections of power, much as skyscrapers are today, they were instruments of revenge too - "spite architecture", built ever-higher to block their neighbour's view. As battles raged and shots were exchanged, the towers rose, each side vying for vertical supremacy. Now only the wind hisses through the ruins, and wild fig trees threaten to engulf the place.

We retreat to Areopoli, a bustling market centre that hosts, behind a simple façade, one of Greece's best traditional bakeries. Presiding at Artos is Melia Tsatsouli, as authentic and crusty as the country bread (psomi horiatiko) that emerges from the 200-year-old wood-fuelled oven. "Sugar, flour, sunflower oil, cream," she calls, mixing up sweet bread, "and ground oriental seed called mahlepi, to give flavour." And then, the magic ingredient: ouzo. "You'll honour me if you drink one, and I won't take no for an answer." She sloshes out a generous shot. "You must learn how to do business with the Maniots." It's eleven in the morning, but time for Tsatsouli is obviously flexible. We clink glasses: "Yia mas!"

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The shop is packed. One man buys 10 aromatic loaves for family and friends. Some have come far for the delicious tiropites (cheese pies), and koulourakia Smyrneika (sweet biscuits), others for the hard-baked paksimadia that Greeks dip in their morning coffee.

Tsatsouli knows all about elopements and vendettas. "Only these days we're civilised," she says. "The children know each other, so the matchmakers have nothing to do. By the 1990s, the 'old minds' of the Mani had emigrated to the Lord - and young Maniots went to Athens to study and found a different life." The photos of Tsatsouli as a young woman, coated in a veil of flour, offer a classic Greek beauty, windblown in a floral dress, legs on show. Widowed in her twenties, she raised six children and remains optimistic. "When I retire," she tells her customers, "I will find myself a rich American, or even an Australian, and live my life!"

A few steps away, in the fresco-filled Orthodox church of the archangels Gabriel and Michael, Patir Yiorgis oversees a dwindling congregation. "Once it was an incredibly religious part of Greece," he reflects, opening his palms. "A double problem faces us - the young men don't want to be priests any more, and those who do can't find women eager to be priests' wives." Does he have this problem? Father George laughs. "I have three teenage boys who make my life difficult. It's a war. A daily war in the house."

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It's hard to imagine any priest having the power to stop Maniots from warring; in the words of one early observer, it was customary "for priests to wear a brace of pistols" as they pursued their religious duties. "It was difficult," Father George agrees, "but a priest's opinion carried weight. To have an idea of the distrust between the Mani families, imagine this - you see a wall, you think the wall is solid, you see no window, no opening, only the barrel of a gun. You see no person, and then you feel the bullet, and that's it."

Our journey closes before a glistening bay. The fishing village of Limeni once served as the sheltered port for Areopoli, although in the wild winter it's said to be anything but safe. These days a culinary drawcard puts Limeni firmly on the map: Takis Fish Taverna, hailed as one of Greece's finest and frequented by presidents of the republic, business tycoons and actors. "The queen of Denmark also," says owner Takis Kalapothaki. Opened for business in 1986, shortly after I first trekked along these shores, the taverna keeps expanding.

Kalapothaki has no trouble naming the house specialty: "Fresh fish." In the modern world, nothing could be simpler or more complicated. "By the traditional Mani way of preparing it; we cook the fish slowly over hot charcoal, with salt on the fish." And not any salt. "It's from very old salt fields near here. There are rocks, with deep holes, and they fill them with buckets of salt water and it evaporates." Sounds easy enough, but I've discovered nothing here is easy. "One single rainy day in August," says Kalapothaki, "and you don't get any salt for another year."

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The long tides of history lap at our feet, blue and white tablecloths flutter in the breeze, lunch customers are settling in, overlooking waters so pristine we can spot schools of bream two metres down. The undersea world of the Mani constantly re-creates itself, every day and every hour - unlike the land behind us, strong and stubborn yet worn by the centuries. "What makes this place different from the rest of Greece," he reflects, "is the people. We had nothing and we fought for everything." Outsiders may arrive with bulging pockets, the kids might depart for Athens and beyond, the vendettas are fading into legend, but Takis Kalapothaki and his fellow Maniots remain a breed apart - those stone walls are still in place.

"We consider ourselves the toughest of all," he says with a broad smile, and just a hint of danger.

~ ~ ~ ~

This article first appeared in Australian Gourmet Traveller in March 2010.

REVISITING MICHAEL HERR'S 'DISPATCHES'

The death in 2016 of author and screenwriter Michael Herr focused attention on his greatest achievement - Dispatches - and its stellar place in the realm of creative writing. Arguably the Vietnam War’s most enduring literary legacy, it was described by John Le Carre as 'the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.' Dispatches is indeed an enduring anthem to a conflict that shaped and defined a generation: a cultural reflection of heady times, a literary spectacle that conveys the energy of a rock concert, the speed of an action movie, the deluded insights of a drug trip and the questioning and suspicion of the Establishment. But is Dispatches a vibrant example of war reportage gone feral, or a deft work of the imagination, a novel posing as journalism? In numerous conflicting statements, Michael Herr only muddied the issue.

In the four decades since its 1977 publication, the reputation of Dispatches has solidified (and one might argue, calcified) within the New Journalism pantheon. Feted for its radical departure from war reporting norms, and stylistic innovations, it’s held by many to be the authentic account of what ‘being there’ was like; only writing of such unconventional nature, the argument goes, could sum up such an ‘unconventional’ war. Herr based his 200-page account on his year-long experience in the hellhole of Vietnam, in 1967-68, when he filed for Esquire, Rolling Stone and other magazines. Free to roam the battlefield without daily deadlines, he wasn't beholden to values historically instilled into, and expected of, daily news reporters, including the treasured concept of ‘objectivity’.

In an interview in 2000 with The Observer newspaper, Herr described his mission as 'part of the [1960s] decade thing. I had done the decade, and it had to end in Vietnam’. Yet unlike many artefacts of that tumultuous era, Dispatches hasn't dated. Re-reading Herr's pyrotechnic text reveals a journey imbued with contemporary, universal and timeless relevance. Moving across its jagged landscape, the reader is taken, as in a game of chance, on a random route without the comfort of narrative coherence or even a clear overarching argument. The book becomes a reflection of the war itself, one which the American nation has stumbled into, become hopelessly lost in, and from which there's no way out other than withdrawal and defeat.

From the outset, Herr establishes the hallucinatory quality that hovers over the story, describing a map of Vietnam posted on his wall depicting the country's French colonial-era territories, all of which have dissolved into history:

It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much any more; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind.

The signal here is clear: we’re heading into vaporous, shifting, and unknowable space. The Vietnam we’re familiar with from television news and magazine spreads, he suggests, the one that the media in what the grunts call ‘the World’ has imbued with currency, isn't the same Vietnam we'll encounter in Dispatches, which is a world turned upside down, filled with fantasies, lies, insanities, a constant sub-stream of absurdity, a world of delusions and darkness. Herr quickly shifts the reader to the battlefield where he encounters an American soldier hyped up on pills ‘like dead snakes kept too long a in a jar.’ Fellow soldiers describe the grunt as crazy, and, if Herr cares to look into his eyes, ‘that’s the whole fucking story right there.’

I think he slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway. All I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like looking at the floor of an ocean.

In just a few pages, Herr manages to convey his key intentions: to defy the conventional view of the war; to establish its ‘unknowability’; to position himself as an innocent abroad, moving into the war’s darker corners with a blend of anxiety, curiosity and courage; and to attach his perspective, and his fate - unlike many correspondents in Vietnam - to the ground soldiers pursuing an elusive enemy and prosecuting an unwinnable war. Confessing that he always went to sleep stoned in Saigon, Herr also unsettles the professional expectations, and literary conventions, of ‘reliable’ war reporting.

This isn't a battlefield of confident commanders and patriotic, polished troops lined up in rows with visions of victory; in Herr’s eyes, and in his narrative, there will be no shiny medals or songs of men marching off to war. They’re replaced with disillusioned, hollow-eyed, drug-addled recruits and draftees flown on Pan American shuttles to Saigon, and their songs will be The Rolling Stones’ ‘Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows’, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, and The Animals' ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’. In earlier wars, correspondents packed whiskey; ‘We packed grass and tape.’ Yet, as Herr later acknowledged, some elements never change:

Young men are expected to go, to fight, to kill, to die. And with young men, it’s always fascinating, I mean it’s one of great clichés of war literature - the young man full of piss and vinegar and ready to get into combat to prove his gallantry and his courage, make his family proud and his community proud. And they go and they see what it is, and it’s too late.

Herr has no illusions about the men he’s mixing with, and whom he admires. For all their brutal honesty, they were also victims of Vietnam, of what the war was doing to them. ‘They were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?’ The narrative is shadowed by an almost constant intertwining of twin anxieties: the soldiers’ quest for vaguely rational explanations of their mission, which never come, and Herr’s fascination with his equal failure to fully understand why he is there. (At one point he offers a trite explanation: ‘I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.’)

In his attempt to make it ‘less real’, Herr ironically imbued the Vietnam conflict with a degree of authenticity that other media representatives could not, or would not, replicate. In one of the book’s most cited lines he declares, ‘Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it…’ yet he also acknowledges the difficulties faced by correspondents reporting the war for daily outlets (and ‘the incredible demands put on them from offices thousands of miles away’) and by journalists for news magazines like Time, whose reportage is worked up into ‘uni-prose’; against this, Herr acknowledges his comparative freedom to write and file at a more leisurely pace (a piece he’s written for Esquire appears ‘like some lost dispatch from the Crimea.’). Yet, as he observed, mainstream journalists knew that no matter how honestly they reported the war, ‘their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories.’ Herr sites himself in the media pack even as he leans away from it, adopting in Dispatches the role of a lone operator, the existential observer/journalist who approaches his subject with a sense of moral engagement.

As his jagged narrative draws to a close, Herr is back in ‘the World’, reflecting on his Vietnam experience and the value of not having stayed too long: ‘We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out’, though not without scars, including dreams of dead Marines in his living room. Herr - like many - suffered trauma-induced depression, as he revealed in his interview with The Observer newspaper:

I did go crazy. The problem with Vietnam is that if your body came back, your mind came back too. Within 18 months of coming back, I was on the edge of a major breakdown. It hit in 1971 and it was very serious. Real despair for three or four years; deep paralysis. I split up with my wife for a year. I didn't see anybody because I didn't want anybody to see me. It's part of the attachment. You get attached to good things; you get attached to bad things. Then I decided to look the other way. Suddenly I had a child. I went back to my book.

Although Herr claimed it took ‘about six years’ to write the book, it reads as if penned in the heat of battle, with an often-frenetic sense of urgency carried to the page. Publishers asked him to write more about Vietnam, about war. 'I say: “Haven’t you read my fucking book? What the fuck would I want to go and do that for?” […] I’m not interested in Vietnam. It has passed clean through me.’ In 1978, he worked on the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, ‘But after that, that was it. No more Vietnam.’ When the American effort collapsed in 1975, he'd seen the coverage on TV news:

I watched the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea as their Vietnamese pilots jumped clear, and one last chopper revved it up, lifted off and flew out of my chest.

With this nod to the genre of magical realism then in vogue (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude had appeared in English in 1970), Herr lays open the question of whether Dispatches is a work of non-fiction or something else: a reality-based novel, a fictionalised memoir, an amalgam of genres beyond any one? ‘Even if we read it as fiction’, asks Connie Schultz in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘Dispatches is a work of enormous power, but would its sense of urgency and loss be diminished?’ She partly answers her own question: ‘Thirty years after reading the book for the first time, I still have the same gut response: at least I understand why I will never understand what happened to our boys in Vietnam.’

Herr remained evasive on the subject of whether Dispatches was a work fiction or not. Parts of it were, he admitted, what is labeled, in the context of television news, ‘produced reality’. In 1978, one year after its publication, Dispatches was recommended for the U.S. National Book Award in the non-fiction category; yet in a 1992 interview with Eric Schroeder, Herr referred to the book as a novel, adding, ‘I don’t think it’s any secret that there is talk in the book that’s invented.’

But it's invented out of that voice that I heard so often and that made such penetration into my head… I don’t really want to go into that no-man’s-land about what really happened and what didn’t happen and where you draw the line. Everything in Dispatches happened for me, even if it didn’t necessarily happen to me.

A decade later, in a filmed interview, he was again asked if Dispatches was fiction or non-fiction, and was again elusive:

I have no idea, I don’t know the difference. I’ve never known the difference. I have to tell you that I have no idea what that difference really consists of, between fact and fiction. […] I’m confused, I’m really confused. Like, you read a memoir, you read an autobiography, I have no idea what’s real and what’s invented and what’s wish fulfilment and what’s confession.

Where does creativity end and invention begin? In contemplating what he’d created, Herr’s response in 1992 offers an insight: ‘I would say that the secret subject of Dispatches was not Vietnam, but that it was a book about writing a book. I think that all good books are about writing.’

His comments suggest an unwillingness to be linked to any particular literary frame, any more than he’d wished in Vietnam to be labelled a particular species of war observer. Yet his combat features filed in 1968-69 were received by his editors and published as journalism, in magazines that clearly delineated to their readers whether they were reading fiction or non-fiction, throwing into doubt the question of authenticity. In the same 1992 interview, Herr confessed ‘there are errors of fact in the book’, explaining:

When the Khe Sanh piece was published [as an essay before the book], I had a really beautiful letter from a colonel who had been stationed there; he corrected me on various points of fact. I lost the letter, and it didn’t turn up again until after the book was in print… I couldn’t bear to go in and make the revisions myself. I was tapped out. I was exhausted from the project. Including the year in the war, I had spent eight years working on it, and I just couldn’t do any more.

In subsequent editions of Dispatches, Herr did nothing to correct these apparent errors. Rather, he seemed to suggest that the fiction/non-fiction debate wasn't his problem, but a conundrum that had grown out of historical precedent. The ethos of the New Journalism argues that ‘fact-based’ journalism denies the possibility of alternative versions of ‘the truth’. Like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe before him, Herr had thrown himself into the ring of raw experience, a literary pugilist ready for a fight, with no hope of, or desire for, objectivity, to write as much from the heart as the head, a heart that he wore defiantly on his sleeve.

Herr redefined the war reporting memoir: what mattered to him was less about the accuracy of a quote or description, and more about how it was received by the reader, and perceived by the reader as being authentic or not. To achieve that objective, the difference between fact and fiction matters less than the outcome. While the issue is left unresolved, or at least unanswered in conventional literary terms, Herr’s work in Dispatches, marked by its freewheeling style and self-referential perspective, opened the way for more interpretative and personalised forms of war reporting, and war reporting memoirs. Its value in that regard alone is enormous and enduring.

As a literary artefact and legacy, it remains unique. As one observer noted,

Somehow, a young journalist whose previous experience consisted mostly of travel pieces and film criticism managed to transform himself into a wild new kind of war correspondent capable of comprehending a disturbing new kind of war.[1]

 

[1] Smith, Wendy, ‘War Weary’, The American Scholar, Spring 2007.

IN A TIMELESS LAND

Blistered by centuries of heat, the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide form one of the world's most spectacular landscapes. Temperatures in December exceed 40 Centigrade, and rise higher as summer advances. Fortunately, when I ventured into the Ranges a few years back for Australian Gourmet Traveller with photographer Julian Kingma, the weather was considerably cooler…

~  ~  ~  ~

Oncoming vehicles, of which there are few, shimmer off the highway like mirages. The radio, idle chatter, the dull roar of tyres on the blacktop - one by one they're erased from our consciousness, replaced by awareness of the looming peaks and a deepening silence. We're a few hours north of Adelaide, yet even as we draw closer, the ranges seem distant, layered across the horizon, each layer projecting its own shade of mauve, blue, olive, pink - the dusted colours of the heart.

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Twenty-seven years ago I came up this route in the wake of 19th-century explorers and pastoralists who attempted to conquer a vast continent. Now I'm returning, wiser, too, about the Aborigines and their struggle to survive and how this great mass of earth itself came to be.

Time has passed yet the journey remains the same.

Soon enough, the geology of the Flinders is brutally exposed - low peaks devoid of flesh or dressing, their red-rock insides spilling out, staggeringly beautiful forms that overwhelm a deep blue sky. Eight hundred million years ago, the earth's crust here stretched to create a deep hollow, allowing the sea to flood in and deposit massive rocks and debris. The world's oldest known vertebrate fossil, dated at 560 million years and resembling a tadpole, was discovered nearby in 1999. Today the ranges have stabilised, more or less: a few kilometres underground, geothermal energy bubbles away off hot rocks, and earth tremors occasionally shake and rattle the crockery.

The first European to see these peaks, in 1802, was Matthew Flinders, the great navigator of Australia's past, who called them a "ridge of high, rocky and barren mountains". They were named in his honour. Forty years later, Edward John Eyre passed by on his doomed attempt to reach Australia's mythical inland sea. "In the midst of these barren, miserable plains," he wrote, "I met with four natives, as impoverished and wretched looking as the country they inhabited." These were the Adnyamathanha who'd occupied the hills for maybe 10,000 years, creating their Dreamtime, and whose descendants survive today.

The early Europeans, eager for new pastures, brought their families and strange animals - not only horses but Afghan camels to beat the waterless distances, and rabbits that would eventually rip their paddocks apart. The rain will follow the plough, they swore, and for a while it did. Every few kilometres, we pass another abandoned pile of stones, an isolated chimney, frustrated oaths to progress that map the broken hopes of dreamers who bared their souls to the winds of opportunity. On a scrub-dotted plain is the grave of Harriet Anna Salmon - died 30 October 1885, aged 28 years - with its humble script: "Weep not for me, my children dear, I am not alone but sleeping here. My debt is paid, my grave you see, so all prepare to follow me." The sun beats down fiercely on a lonely life and a lonely death.

By lunch we reach Quorn, born in 1878 and once the thriving junction of the Sydney-Perth and Adelaide-Alice Springs rail systems. In 1888, reported the Register, the town was "often subjected to an influx of strangers of diverse nationality, languages and tongues; and, of course, some with morals as mixed…" Today a warning notice says, almost wistfully, "Look out for trains". The Ghan changed route in 1980, the ornate station is deserted, and stockyards once filled with bleating sheep and barking kelpies are scattered with rusty wagons and wheat growing from seed spilled long ago.

Survival here takes a tenacity of spirit and hard work, but also luck; when that runs out, all the persistence in the world isn't enough. On a rise north of Quorn we spot a deserted farmhouse; the gates are locked, the windmill broken, the well dry, the track up to the residence erased by nature. Stranded like a shipwreck, its Victorian-era rooms are now the grand home of stray sheep - with frayed curtains, electric lamps dangling without power, wasp nests on its doorways. A ghost house surrounded by a thousand empty hectares. Thriving communities just a few generations ago, broken estates like these stand as noble and tragic as any ancient monuments, while surviving properties have found a new life catering to worldly travellers.

Even before we park at Arkaba homestead, on the southern tip of Flinders National Park, Pat Kent bounds out to greet us, a champion of "down to earth" luxury tourism in the region. With his partner Sally, and New Zealand-born chef Scott Hannan, he's turned an iconic Flinders property into a haven for well-heeled guests, its four-bedroom homestead and one-bedroom coachman's cottage now a resort overlooking the sun-drenched Elder Range.

Overseas visitors come from the United States, Britain and Germany. Italian honeymooners love the space; they're not likely to bump into relatives. "Or any Vespas," Kent quips. "People always talk about places being unspoiled, like they were years ago. But this place is unspoiled since the beginning of time. The dinosaurs walked out of town 65 million years ago. You can pour yourself a Coopers, sit back and stare at the ranges, and 600 million years of Earth's existence stares right back at you."

The property's name comes from the Aboriginal "akapa" ("underground water"). The swimming pool overlooks a creek where sunlight filters through giant river red gums. Recent rains have brightened the leaves. How old are these behemoths? "Up to a thousand years," says our guide, Kat Mee, "but it's difficult to tell. They grow when it's damp and don't when it's dry." The struggle with the elements never ends.

We spot two western grey kangaroos, resting in the heat, conserving energy. High from the gum branches comes the screeching of corellas. "Smaller of the white cockatoos," Mee explains. She points to an Elegant Wattle, its seeds ground by Aborigines for bush damper, and the Spiky Acacia, its other name filled with grim humour. "They call it Dead Finish - if your sheep are eating this in the drought, you know you're finished." Kestrels float on air currents, along with a whistling kite, its long wings tipped in black; the birds circle over porcupine spinifex, spotting for reptiles, rodents and small marsupials.

Deeper into the gorges we drive, on rutted "two-tracks" bordered with the intense yellow of native daisies, shaded by black oaks and casuarinas, the earth here a powdery white, the gully walls rich with red ochre. The ochre - prized as body paint by Aborigines, the mica it contains dancing in firelight - was traded across different language groups as far away as Queensland. Above, the sky suddenly swarms with pink and grey cockatoos, flapping to perch on the long spindly branches of river red gums.

That night we relax outdoors and enjoy Arkaba's cuisine: saltbush lamb loin with goat's cheese gnocchi, sautéed chanterelles, truffles and pea purée. "Sitting around this table," says Kent, "I get a front-row seat into people's lives. Most of our guests are successful people who've had a crack at life and made something big happen. The locals understand that attitude. It takes a special kind of person to make it here - courage and grit, drive and determination. People are used to toughing it out. The only things bigger than people's hats in the Flinders is the size of their hearts."

The next morning we drive north, avoiding emus bouncing their strange hard feathers beneath curious eyes. Up the highway a little is the Blinman Hotel, where I stood decades earlier. Nothing has changed, except there's a new licensee, Italian-born Tony Cutri. He's been wiping the bar here for the past 25 years, surrounded by stone walls and mementoes that stretch back to 1869 when copper mining put Blinman on the map. Back then it was a far rougher place; now, says Cutri, "Any trouble I sort out myself." What's the current population? "Twenty-five." (Later, I tell a local farmer this. "Thought it was eighteen," he says dryly. "Must have grown.")

A short drive away is Angorichina Station. Spread over 520 square kilometres, it's been in the Fargher family for four generations. Guests arrive on an aircraft piloted by Ian Fargher, who took over the property with his wife Di in 1981 when wool was still the backbone of Australia's bush economy. Twenty years ago, they turned to tourist accommodation. The 1860s stone homestead is classic outback vernacular - the place grew, says Fargher, as necessity dictated and wealth allowed.

With piercing green eyes and leathered skin, Ian Fargher sums up the character of the Flinders in a single word - resilience. "Not too many families have walked off the land, despite the drought. We're still here. Even as a kid, I never thought about a life away from this property." His mate Grant "Pud" Reschke grew up here too. "It's where we want to be."

On his bike, Pud rumbles along as Diesel rounds up twenty strays with a canny understanding of sheep psychology. "Nothing beats a well-trained dog," says Pud, explaining why a good pup fetches up to $4000. "Worth every cent," he adds, as Diesel leaps on the bike with acrobatic precision. Once the property carried 10,000 sheep; today it's down to 3000. "Most people are in the same boat," says Fargher. "Nobody's fully stocked. And shearers are hard to get."

By mid-afternoon, the shearing shed throbs with activity. Built in the 1850s of native pine ("much cooler than iron"), it's one of the oldest operating in Australia, and retains its original galvanised roofing, shipped from England as ballast on the clippers that returned with Australian merino wool. The shearers are still a tough lot, keeping largely to themselves, men whose tattoos do most of the talking. Over the din of electric shears they play rock music to take their minds off the monotony and pain of backbreaking work, their muscled forearms sweeping the combs expertly under the fleece. The burly contractor Neville Clarke lifts his battered hat and counts as the animals emerge in near-naked shock. How many are they shearing? "We'll know when we stop."

As the sun settles, Fargher drives us to John's Hill, 800m above sea level, commanding a 360-degree panorama of the entire ranges. Buffeted by winds that suspend wedge-tailed eagles high above, we steady ourselves while Fargher explains the cycle of mountain upheavals and endless erosion that slowly created this pastel-hued vista of immense curves and shadows. "How slowly?" He takes his notepad and feels the thickness of a sheet of paper. "That's how much the Flinders are worn down in a single year. To create this has taken 800 million years."

Later, over the gourmet dinner she's prepared, Di Fargher describes her Flinders vision built on high-end tourism and technology. "Before, we were isolated. Six local farms relied on a party phone line until the 1980s. Now we're hooked to the world via the Internet." And the young women of the Flinders are returning, she says, armed with university degrees and looking for bush husbands. "'Must have country interests'," she laughs. "The next generation of daughters will run the Flinders, you'll see. Check out the Prairie tomorrow…"

Straight out of a Russell Drysdale canvas, the Prairie Hotel at Parachilna confronts a main street that seems to go nowhere and, beyond that, the wide, dead-flat emptiness of the outback. Inside, it's a lively jumble of traditional hotel rooms and newer suites where some big names have stayed while shooting movies, including Holy Smoke stars Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel. The Prairie's culinary reputation rests on its "feral food" - kangaroo and emu, yabbies, quandongs, native limes and bush tomatoes. Gelato of wild berry and rosella flower rounds out a unique meal. "We've only got one bar," says licensee Jane Fargher, "so station hands and truckies drink with Parisians." On cue, a busload of French tourists rolls in. "It's all pretty amazing."

After lunch we head along the rough and recently flooded Brachina Gorge Geological Trail into Wilpena Pound, the giant natural amphitheatre that's the hub of the Flinders Ranges National Park. At its southern edge sits Rawnsley Park Station, transformed by Tony Smith and his wife Julieanne into an eco-tourism centre. "I grew up here as a farmer," Tony reflects, "but the glory days of sheep and cattle grazing are gone forever."
 
Rawnsley Park boasts eight villas designed by Adelaide architects Ecopolis, featuring recycled timbers, natural ventilation systems, and concrete floors to maximise thermal mass. Each villa has a tiny glass panel in the living room wall showing the rendered straw-bale construction, and bedroom skylights for star-gazing.

On our last evening, we turn off the highway and bounce down a 12km track. Tourism has come far in the Flinders since the early 1980s, but in the place where I camped all those years ago, nothing has changed for eternities. We walk between high boulders along a tree-lined creek bed and into Sacred Canyon, one of the few Aboriginal sites open to travellers. On the canyon walls are age-old engravings, or petroglyphs: circles and other symbols that represent springs, camp sites, animal tracks and human figures. From these markings are drawn legends of the Dreamtime.

As the sun drops, I make out the faintest stars, beginning their transit across what will soon be darkness. The sense of infinity here has always been profound, for the original inhabitants and those who came later - and for those still to come. In a timeless land, a suitable place for dreaming.

~ ~ ~ ~

This article first appeared in the February 2011 edition of Australian Gourmet Traveller.

iPhone: the new Leica?

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We're spinning through certainties faster than a speeding bullet.

It seems almost every day another long-held, cherished concept or technology is challenged and shattered on grounds of price, availability, ease of operation, miniaturisation and portability - and even cachet.

Twenty years ago any serious street photographer was clutching, with Magnum-stamped credibility and Lee Friedlander attitude and anonymity, her or his well-worn Leica M-series (2,3,4,6 - the 5 was a sad aberration), confident they were holding the world's finest 35mm rangefinder film camera with unparalleled functionality and quality of image. The movement was silk and the lenses pin-sharp.

I bought my first Leica (M3) in 1974 for a song and then my treasured M2 in 1981, and shot the hell out of them around the mean backstreets of Sydney, London, New York, Athens and Asia. Decades of improvement had brought this rare species to a peak of performance (with a hefty price to match), a tech-and-art pinnacle that none imagined could be surpassed: the camera as pure extension of the human eye. I lost both cameras in Rio to a couple of knife-wielding slum kids, and replaced them with a solid Nikon F2 - my sleek German handgun superseded by a huge but reliable Japanese brick.

Dreams of again owning a Leica receded but never went away. The world was turning anyway...

Digital burst onto the scene and Leica didn't know how to react - holding back, then stumbling reluctantly through various clunky iterations of a digitised M series towards today's M10, a beautiful piece of machinery (at last) if you have a spare $10K to invest - and we're talking body only, not matching Leica lenses, for which add another $10K for a decent kit. Germany did it best, as always. What certainty could be more certain than German camera engineering? Precision plus. For those who could still afford it, their investment, both financial and psychological, was secure. 

Meanwhile, across the planet in a cave in Silicon Valley (also known as the Valley of Analog Death), some university dropouts in jeans and tees were developing a product that would conquer the world. Steve Jobs, Uber-Nerd of the 21st century, flipped the telecoms industry on its back with the iPhone, a smartphone that was also a beautiful thing. A mobile phone, messaging system, a music machine, apps conveyer, a whole lot of things we never thought we needed. Oh, yes, and a camera.

Not that cameras hadn't been stuffed and squeezed into mobile phones before, providing an entire generation with family photos that reduced kids in the pool and partying adults to pixilated Martians. But the iPhone camera spoke a different language, from the very outset: the potential for serious photography. And it got better, and better. To the point where, this 2017 summer, heading for Greece, I left my Sony Nex-7 with Nikon lenses, a combo I'd sworn by for the past five years - the Leica I was having when I couldn't afford a Leica - lying on the bench in Sydney. 

In a life-changing moment, I decided to leave it at home and use my iPhone 6S...

First things first. I switched the iPhone over to 'noir' mode. This put me in a Lecia mood, with the additional boost that everything I saw before I pressed the shutter was in black-and-white. Don't forget, getting that Cartier-Bresson monochrome tone with the Leica M-series meant peering through a less-than-brilliant viewfinder, seeing the subject in its natural colour, framing a composition while waiting for the Decisive Moment, and simultaneously 'seeing' in your head the result in black-and-white.

With the iPhone it was already there in black-and-white; the whole world was monochrome, and that made a stunning difference to what I was doing. The final tonal range - the highlights, the contrast, the blacks - were there before my eyes. Which meant I could focus on the composition more, and the moment. Or moments. Because that was the other breakthrough.

The speed at which I could shoot three or four frames in a row was spectacular. In a bracket of four shots, grabbed in a second, I could almost always be assured of capturing the Decisive Moment. This happened repeatedly to start with, to the point where I questioned how good my photography would be without it. But gradually it settled, and I was again shooting only one image or perhaps two of every subject. The iPhone button, highly sensitive to the touch, had itself trained me to be decisive.

So, framing, seeing the contrast levels, grabbing the right moment - all this quickly became natural, a wonderful reversion to the great days of Leica photography. And where the Leica was relatively small and unobtrusive, the even smaller iPhone to its benefit was totally obvious - everyone assumed I was just another tourist taking snaps of the scenery. With the ubiquitous iPhone you can be half a metre from the subject and still not appear to be shooting their photograph so much as the wider scene. Nobody seems to care.

IMG_3960.jpg

Okay, there were downsides.

Firstly, the iPhone weighs a fraction of a Leica. You could kill someone with a Leica (and I'll bet someone, somewhere has) but whacking someone with an iPhone won't save your life. That means if you drop one on the sidewalk, it's as good as useless. You could drop a Leica in a rice paddy (and many photographers in the Vietnam War did) or have it fall off the roof of your moving car (as a friend once did) and it would still keep going. The iPhone isn't a toy, but nor is it a heavyweight tool.

But there'a a more common and constant side to the body weight issue: camera shake from such a light frame. For this I developed a simple and very effective solution: holding the camera horizontally with two hands, the right hand little finger under the frame as a stabilising base, and 'twisting' the body in opposite directions with the hands while shooting decisively on the screen button with the thumb. Very sharp. (I don't recommend the other option - using the side volume button as a shutter release - which tends to move the iPhone and lens when you really want stillness...)

The results were surprising in the iPhone, and even more surprising on the Mac Pro laptop. On the 15" screen, the images were strong enough and sharp enough to publish in a book. (I'm hoping they will be shortly.) Doubling the image size still gave acceptable quality, and thereafter the image breaks down quite rapidly. But who takes street images to blow up to poster size anyway?

I took maybe a thousand images in three weeks in Greece, and my excitement grew every day. I was back in Leica-land. I send a dozen or so images to my great photographic mentor Ed Douglas (he who worked on the West Coast with the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater and Jack Welpott), who quickly wrote back: 'I think I hate the idea of iPhone photography but your work does look like it was created with a Leica and carries the feeling of a photographic tradition with it. Beautiful work.'  

The iPhone 7 claims to be better than the 6S, but reviews suggest not to any remarkable degree. Either way the results are pretty stunning. And in the not distant future, another contender is due to hit the market. RED, the Hollywood digital movie camera maker than slayed giants like Panavision and Arriflex, has announced its first-ever smartphone, the RED Titanium, with a miniature lens that will potentially get close to Leica performance. It won't be cheap (tipped at $1600+), but a lot cheaper than a Leica. And you can slip it into your shirt pocket. Meanwhile, Huawei's new P10 smartphone carries a Leica-branded so-called 'Summarit' lens - a marketing ploy, or a hint of greater things to come?

Perhaps it's too early to announce the death of the legendary Leica M-series. Or maybe the Wizards of Wetzlar are working on a smartphone that will shatter all before it. We all know about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Now, with smartphone cameras, we're into the realm of certain uncertainties. For serious street photographers, that's a positive waiting to happen.

All images copyright Tony Maniaty 2017

All images copyright Tony Maniaty 2017

OUCH! GREAT WORKS, TERRIBLE REVIEWS

The nail biting starts early, and never stops. Writers and filmmakers alike crave attention and praise, while bad reviews tend to induce panic, rage or despair. Most of us have suffered a few critical knocks (my worst was 'Oh, why was I reading this dreadful book?') and taken a drink or several, and moved on. Remember, you're never alone - others have been slaughtered too. If the critics have you in a funk, don't despair - take a look at these early damning reviews of now-classic works. Ouch indeed.

"Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.”Le Figaro, 1857, on Madame Bovary.

"Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.”

Le Figaro, 1857, on Madame Bovary.

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"The old master has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares."

Time, 1958.

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“The arguments are selected from the customary communistic sources and arguments... Consistency is not, and any informed reader knows that it cannot be, a quality either of the Communistic mind or Communist propaganda.”

San Francisco Examiner, 1936.

“[American Psycho] is throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author so…

“[American Psycho] is throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety.”

Andrew Motion, The Observer, 1991.

"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847.

"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”

James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847.

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“This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap…”

Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1967.

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“There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive...”

Orville Prescott, The New York Times, 1958.

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“No better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population…’

The Springfield Republican, 1885.

“The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.”Richard G. Stern, The New York Times Book Review, 1961.

“The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.”

Richard G. Stern, The New York Times Book Review, 1961.

“Sentimental rubbish...&nbsp;Show me one page that contains an idea.”The Odessa Courier, 1877, on Anna Karenina.

“Sentimental rubbish... Show me one page that contains an idea.”

The Odessa Courier, 1877, on Anna Karenina.

“The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was…Part II's dialogue often sounds like cartoon captions... its insights are fairly lame....…

“The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was…Part II's dialogue often sounds like cartoon captions... its insights are fairly lame.... It’s not really much of anything that can be easily defined.”

Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 1974.

“[Ulysses] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine… There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it…

“[Ulysses] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine… There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity [sic] intended for humour.” 

The Sporting Times, 1922.

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“For all [Lowry’s] earnestness he has succeeded only in writing a rather good imitation of an important novel.”

The New Yorker, 1947.

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"Mad Max is ugly and incoherent, and aimed, probably accurately, at the most uncritical of moviegoers."

Tom Buckley, New York Times, 1980.

“Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”L.P.…

“Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”

L.P. Hartley, The Saturday Review, 1925.

"What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only..." 

New York Herald Tribune, 1925.

 

“Simultaneously fascinating and repellent, Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese’s colorful but dramatically unsatisfying inside look at Mafia life in 1955-80 New York City.”Joseph McBride, Variety, 1990.

“Simultaneously fascinating and repellent, Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese’s colorful but dramatically unsatisfying inside look at Mafia life in 1955-80 New York City.”

Joseph McBride, Variety, 1990.

“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.”&nbsp;Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic,&nbsp;1867.

“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” 

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic, 1867.

“Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca.”Time, 1942.

“Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca.”

Time, 1942.

THE MEAT SHIELD

DIGGERS AND GREEKS by Maria Hill (UNSW Press), reviewed by Tony Maniaty

In the greatest conflict ever, failed Allied operations were subsumed into the thrust for absolute victory: Dunkirk might have been a dud, but D-Day was a bold success and Hiroshima the atomic coup de grace. Winning was everything, and wasted feints, pouring men into suicidal battles and hopeless rear-guard actions were all part of the cruel mix; thousands must die so that millions might survive, and victory be assured. Such grim logic, unassailable at the height of total war, breaks down over time. How vital were those losses to the outcome, how many staggering errors were glossed over in official and popular histories, and why, half a century later, are some of the worst still unchallenged?

AUTRALIAN TROOPS IN GREECE, 1941 (AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL)

AUTRALIAN TROOPS IN GREECE, 1941 (AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL)

Maria Hill’s study of the doomed Australian campaigns in mainland Greece and Crete in the spring of 1941 goes to the philosophical heart of the matter: do individual lives, even individual nations, matter when everything is at stake? Did the War Cabinet in London, faced with the greatest conflagration the world had seen, and planning their military responses against Nazism on an equally historic scale, bear any responsibility to the fate of the Greek people, to Greek soldiers and partisans or to thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops despatched into near-certain defeat, with the high risk of death or capture? The meat shield, 'cannon fodder' in World War One parlance. How much of what transpired in those dark weeks was sacrifice, and how much was high-level ineptitude? And worse: how much was outright deceit? Exploring this contentious ground with substantial research, Hill - a Greek-born immigrant to Australia - delivers harsh verdicts against the British and Greek leaderships.

By late 1940, it was clear that the Italians alone could not conquer Greece. Hitler was furious that Mussolini had tried, fearing the outcome that soon transpired: Germany would have to deploy scarce divisions to finish the blotched job. The Greeks had fought hard for six freezing months, but they had not chosen to fight Italy and didn't want war with Germany, yet such were the convoluted times, and mess they found themselves in. On 6 April 1941, German forces swept into northern Greece - ten divisions, 100,000 men, nearly 1400 aircraft - and Greek resistance proved futile.

Why then did Churchill insist, eight weeks earlier, that more than 60,000 Allied troops - including 17,000-plus Australians - be shipped urgently from North Africa to mainland Greece to help defend the indefensible? Code-named ‘Lustreforce’, the British-led campaign carried an air of unreality from the outset. When the Australians stepped ashore in Athens in March, weeks before the Germans invaded, they found the German legation in the Greek capital still open for business, its swastika flag flying in the breeze. ‘This situation,’ Hill observes, ‘must have appeared ludicrous to the troops deployed to Greece to fight the Germans.’

Britain believed it carried more weight in Greece than it did, and sought to expand its political and commercial influence through the link between the British and Greek royal families, to a point where ‘the cornerstone of British policy in Greece was the monarchy’. Implying support in war proved unwise, a point noted by the British Chiefs of Staff committee as early as 1939: ‘It will be to our advantage for Greece to remain neutral as long as possible, even if Italy declares war against us. As a belligerent she will undoubtedly prove to be a liability...’ Churchill was undeterred: he wanted Greece dragged into a Balkan front, a base for air attacks on Rumanian oil fields supplying the Nazi war effort. The Greeks, like the neighbouring Turks and Yugoslavs, feared the consequences of a German invasion, and boldly attempted to play three cards - pushing London to provide military supplies to fight the Italians on the Albanian front; resisting British pressure to allow an Allied expedition to enter Greek territory; and hoping to keep a supercharged Germany at bay.

ALLIED FORCES MOVE NORTH IN GREECE , 1941 (AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL)

ALLIED FORCES MOVE NORTH IN GREECE , 1941 (AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL)

This frantic stir of wheeling, dealing, and duplicity is well caught by Hill: the sense of foreboding in Athens is immense as a Nazi assault, bigger than anything the Allies can counter, becomes inevitable; the lethal consequences for not only Greece but also for the Allied expedition are obvious. Britain, as Hill suggests, was hoisted on its own petard: the government in Athens, fearing the worst, caved in and agreed to allow the Allies on its soil, and political frenzy soon turned to military disaster.

In all this, Australia was kept largely in the dark. Canberra relied heavily on cables from London regarding events in the Balkans but these, says Hill, omitted what British intelligence really knew. Attending talks in London on the Greek campaign, Prime Minister Robert Menzies cabled his deputy Artie Fadden that ‘the overwhelming moral and political repercussions of abandoning Greece’ (this was Churchill’s public stance) along with ‘the estimate made on the spot by our military advisers’ (dubious) had secured his vote.  Menzies more likely was playing politics, clinging desperately to his hopes of reciprocal British support in the likelihood of Pacific war with Japan. Canberra was worried about fortress Singapore, not outpost Athens.

Greece, as Australian military intelligence soon discovered, was crawling with fifth columnists, the result of Berlin’s open courting before the war. The Germans knew the country well and had support within key elements of the Athenian political class and military leadership - information and contacts that would help enormously in both the invasion and occupation. The Athens phone exchange was German-built and about 50 Germans were still working there. (Since most telephone communication went through the exchange, noted an Australian officer, ‘security was quite a problem.’) By contrast, Greece was largely a mystery to the Allies. They had no decent maps, only a handful could speak the language, the Allies had almost no experience of mountain warfare nor adequate clothing for it, and the Greek Army was exhausted and torn by divided loyalties. Many of its commanders, Hill claims, were defeatist: ‘The myth of German invincibility had affected Greek morale, as had their pro-German inclinations.’ 

As the Australian forces pressed north, the situation grew increasingly bleak. Entire regions were collapsing in the face of the Nazi assault. One Greek general signed an unauthorised armistice with German commanders, other units ‘packed up without reference to their GHQ’, the capitulation of the Greek army was imminent. Greek refugees, some close to starvation, were choking the roads. Yet many Greek troops fought bravely, in some cases ‘dying to the last’; militias and civilians supported the besieged Allies as the Luftwaffe strafed relentlessly in the absence of Allied air cover, rattling even battle-hardened Anzacs. ‘Thebes was badly plastered, Larissa was a pancake and Lamia in shambles,’ wrote a sergeant. The campaign had become a rout. Australia’s commander, General Thomas Blamey, was said to be almost in tears as he gave the order to retreat and evacuate.  

On Anzac Day, as Allied forces fled south to the Peloponnese, scrambling onto whatever craft they could find, the British Ministry of Information issued a message informing the dominion populations that all was going well. ‘(1) Excellent collaboration and harmonious relations between British and Greek people. (2) Admiration for Greece which her heroic resistance has evoked on the part of the British public.’  Three days later, Menzies wrote in his War Cabinet diary, ‘Winston says “We will lose only 5,000 in Greece”. We will in fact lose at least 15,000. W. is a great man, but he is more addicted to wishful thinking every day.’ A day later the campaign was over; the Germans had captured 7,000 men, and the vengeful Nazi occupation of Greece had begun. Hitler had triumphed.

GERMAN PARATROOPERS LANDING IN CRETE, APRIL 1941

Crete, and the forces sent to hold and defend it, would suffer the same fate. At sunrise on 20 May 1941, an armada of German planes flew over the island, dropping 10,000 paratroopers ahead of a major amphibious landing of German forces. Once again Australian forces, under British command, found themselves in the frontline without having been part of the planning. So too were the Greek forces and Cretan civilians; all, says Hill, ‘victims of British deception’, led to believe that adequate defences had been constructed when few had been put into place. On Churchill’s orders, Crete was to be a bastion against German advances into North Africa. In the evacuation of mainland Greece, 45,000 troops had fled to Crete, turning it into an operational zone and a prime German target. The stage was set for disaster, in Hill’s view, because of ‘British ineptitude and mismanagement’. (Even as Germany’s airborne invasion approached, ‘from 1300 to 1730 hours a siesta or rest period was indulged in by all officers...’) On the ground, German forces were outnumbered - but their air superiority gave them victory in just ten days. One Greek defeat had quickly followed another.

There were rare moments of glory. Hill singles out the Australian defence of Rethymnon airfield, valiantly held until surrender was inevitable, but everywhere German Stuka dive-bombers created hell for Allied troops already suffering ‘war neurosis’ - and for Cretan civilians, seemingly fearless as they hunted for Nazis, said one observer, ‘like Daniel Boon stalking Red Indians’. Desperation set in: to ward off hunger, Cretan women gathered ‘weeds by day and snails by night’, and in places the Allied evacuation was accompanied by the stench of rotting bodies and broken sewers.

Of the forces left behind in Greece and Crete, nearly 4000 Australians became POWs, but several hundred escaped in Crete, some joining partisan groups for the war’s duration and others working on behalf of British intelligence. These ‘stragglers’, officially listed as ‘missing in action’, found a new role among guerrilla fighters and the rural poor, and helped to generate a heroic legend in contrast to the bleak images of defeat framing their initial involvements in Greece.     

‘Debacle’ is a term too easily used in military history, but the Allied campaigns in Greece more than qualify. The obstacles were as obvious as the outcome; soldiers were despatched into zones of defeat where almost nothing of strategic value could be achieved. Some historians still argue that the Allied resistance in Greece, albeit inadequate, critically delayed Hitler’s assault on Russia in the bleak winter, a view endorsed by Stalin himself. But the trade-off, notes Hill, was a massive weakening of the Allied position in North Africa. Post-war, British commander General Archibald Wavell took the ‘grand design’ rationale, admitting ‘it may have been psychological and political considerations that tilted the balance in the end over military matters. To have withdrawn... would have been disastrous to our reputations in the USA and with other neutrals’. The official Greek history painfully underlines this cold stance: ‘...it was agreed that a British Expeditionary Force be sent to Greece, for the prestige of the British with little hope of a successful outcome of the operation.’

Diggers and Greeks is strong on information, but short on style. Hill is certainly no Antony Beevor, seamlessly weaving telling moments of conflict into a grand portrayal of the human condition. Her strength is research, and her telling of this extraordinary episode - as the campaigns turn to tragedy not only for the hapless Anzacs but also for the doomed Greeks they were sent to defend - is often as blunt as the Greek earth itself. But her view that Australia officially ‘neglected’ the Greek campaigns because they were failures (unlike, as she puts it, ‘the inspiration to Australian war mythology’ that Gallipoli has been) has echoes in the swift engulfment of Singapore and the capture of thousands of Allied troops barely one year later. The war was ultimately won, but the levels of mismanagement, delusion and deceit that created these catastrophes has defeated even the mythmakers.

This review first appeared in The Weekend Australian, April, 2010.

ENTRÉE: six months in a paris writing studio

In 2016, French-Australian author Sophie Masson asked me to answer a few questions about my 1989 residency in the Keesing Studio in Paris, as a visiting writer sponsored by the Australian Council for the Arts. My answers run below, along with a few images from the era. The Keesing Studio, funded by a bequest from the author Nancy Keesing, has been home - six months at a time - to dozens of Australian creative writers eager to experience the ‘Paris factor’. I encourage authors to apply.

TONY MANIATY, 'SELFIE' IN MIRROR, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

TONY MANIATY, 'SELFIE' IN MIRROR, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

When were you the Keesing Studio resident? And why did you decide to apply for it?

I was the studio occupant for the first six months of 1989. I always wanted to spend time in Paris writing a novel, a long-held dream, so I figured six months would cure me. I ended up staying in Paris for three years. I didn’t get the residency first time around, I applied but missed out - the person who was chosen pulled out, and the Australia Council rang and said, ‘Can you go in her place?’ I was on the next plane, although the flight itself turned into a nightmare. As we approached Europe, the captain informed us that violent snowstorms were blanketing all major airports. We’d have to divert to either Brussels or London; in line with French democracy, the passengers were given a vote, and Brussels won. We took a bus through blizzard conditions down to Paris, where I discovered my luggage was lost. I spent my first days in Paris buying fresh underwear. But I was in Paris and that was all that mattered.

What did you work on when you were there, and did it change from your original vision as a result of the residency?

I had two concurrent projects. I was editing my second novel ‘Smyrna’, so had the very enjoyable task of sitting with my Penguin editor Bruce Sims in the studio fixing the book line by line. Since it was Paris, we also consumed a fair amount of wine. (I maintain the novel was the better for it, and I’m sure Bruce agrees.) Then I moved onto what was to be my third novel, titled ‘The Conduct of Arrows’, set in Brazil in the early 1960s. I’d been to Brazil for research a few years earlier and brought copious notes and files to Paris, ready to crack 'the big one’, the novel that would cement my career. I began writing about the tropics of Brazil in the depths of a miserable European winter, and by spring I had the first draft. Penguin wanted to publish it but I wasn’t happy with the result. My six months was up, and, out of cash, I returned to Sydney to work as a producer on the SBS World News desk, which quickly saw me sent back to Paris as their European correspondent, a gig that lasted until 1992. Paris again had me in its wonderful grip. I spent two years running around Europe, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Little did I know that the Brazilian novel would sit in a drawer for another twenty years before I tackled it again. 

KITCHEN, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

KITCHEN, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

What were your first impressions of the Keesing studio itself, and its neighbourhood, and how did that evolve over the course of your residency?

When I walked into the studio it was pretty bare, with no kitchen bench space. Being of a practical bent, I immediately took the metro to the nearest timber yard, bought some wooden planks, found the location of the nearest BHV store (a French hardware chain) and bought nails and cheap tools and got to work. For the first day or so I was building, not writing. I prowled the surrounding Marais streets by night and found leftover furniture and set myself up in the studio as a second-hand king. I built a folding screen to create a separate office space. The only thing that irked me was the lumpy single bed (since I was single) but the notorious Madame Bruneau - fierce moral guardian of the Cite des Arts, where the studio was situated - would not countenance swapping the single for a double. There was a tiny TV set, black and white. Once I’d set up the kitchen I was cooking pasta and was as happy as Larry.

Did you go alone, or with a partner? In either case, what were your favourite things about living in Paris for six months,and your least favourite things?

I went alone but a strange thing happened: I met a French woman. This turned into a torrid affair, complicated by the fact that (a) she was married to an Englishman, and (b) she had an eighteen-month-old daughter. It was further complicated by the fact that their best friends in Australia had asked me to deliver a present for the baby girl, which I duly did. One thing led to another and I had to write back to my Australian friends to inform them that not only had I delivered the present for the baby girl but that I'd run off with the mother. (The husband, I discovered to my relief, had left her.) So my Paris sojourn began to resemble a Feydeau farce. As spring came, Paris turned into the great outdoor city it was, and still is, and I came to love everything about it. The food, the markets, the bookstores, art stores, cafes, even now I struggle to think of anything I didn’t like in that city. 

BED AND LIVING SPACE, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

What did you think about it as a writing/ideas environment?

The Keesing studio was a good place to work at night, but by day I found it gloomy; it was a new concrete building in a wonderful old neighbourhood, the worst possible combination, and whenever I could I escaped to write in libraries and cafes, or along the quays if the weather was fine. But I wasn’t complaining; the studio was in perhaps the best location in Paris, it was clean and rat-free, and best of all, it was free. I did all my manuscript typing there. (This was in an era where typewriters were still considered practical tools, not curiosities.) I should mention that when I was awarded the residency, there was no living stipend attached; I explained to the Australia Council that one couldn’t live in Paris on love alone, they agreed and came up with $10,000 for six months - which thereafter became a fixture of the residency. 

Tell us about your favourite Paris places - sites, culture, food…

I loved the Jewish restaurants in the Marais, which back then was not trendy by any means; there were still plenty of trades and working class people around, and the odd ‘derro’ lying on the footpath, although by the time I returned to Paris in 1991, it was already showing signs of gentrification, and now I find the area insufferably self-conscious. Bars and cafes: my regular haunts were the La Tartine on rue de Rivoli in the Marais, said to be where Trotsky had written his radical texts (and where the toilets had not been renovated since) and La Palette on rue de Seine, filled with the bartered artworks of students from the the Beaux-Arts across the street. Food: my favourite restaurant when I could afford it was the Balzar, in rue des Ecoles near the Sorbonne, where the dry old waiter got to know my order: cold lamb with endive salad and fresh mayonnaise, and a glass of Morgon rouge. I loved the Paris metro too, and prided myself on knowing the shortest ‘correspondences’ between stations. Notre Dame did nothing for me, nor the Louvre, but the Musee Quay d’Osay housed my favourite painting in the world, Van Gogh’s 'Portrait of Doctor Gachet'. It was always incredible to see it hanging there.

WRITING DESK, KEESING STUDIO, PARIS, 1989

What experiences stand out for you in the time you spent in Paris?

I was invited by a friend to her parent’s place one day, they were ‘having a few people over’ for drinks. The ‘place’ turned out to be the entire top floor of a building in Saint Germain du Pres, an apartment of twenty or more rooms, and the 200 people there quaffing Bollinger were attending the Paris Air Show, and were aircraft dealers - people who bought and sold Jumbos to airlines and fighter planes to African dictatorships. For a boy from Australia, even for a journalist and author from Sydney, this was a heavy crowd. Paris, behind its historic laneways and facades, was home to some of the richest people on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, I loved sharpening my pencils in the Cafe Select and drinking my coffee and being left alone to create for hours on end. The fact that everyone in Paris saw this as perfectly normal adult behaviour was enlightening.

Do you think the residency has had a lasting impact on your work, and in what way?

Paris taught me the value of literature, and its place in a civilised society. In early 1989 I’d had one novel published by Penguin, with another about to be released, but the words ‘Penguin’ and ‘novel’ seemed to create some magical ether that opened doors at all levels. One night I met the head of the French equivalent of my principal funders, the Australia Council Literature Board, and asked him if they had negative front-page stories in France about writers getting grants from the taxpayers' funds - as we did at the time in Australia. He looked at me, more than a little baffled, and asked how much money was involved. I had no idea, but I said something wildly extravagant like five-million dollars a year, hoping at least to impress him. He shook his head, unbelieving. ‘Merde,’ he said, searching for the right metaphor. ‘But that’s, that's just... the wing tip of a fighter plane!’ My time among the Parisiennes gave me enormous respect for French cultural values, not to mention their sense of theatre.

All images copyright Tony Maniaty 2017