Molly Ringwald

I’m very excited to be interviewing Molly Ringwald and Sylvia Nasar at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this month. Two very different writers – one the star of 80s cult movies Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink directed by the legendary John Hughes; the other a journalist with degrees in literature and economics and author of the award winning biography A Beautiful Mind, which became the Hollywood film starring Russell Crowe – and two very different books.

I’ll be talking to Molly Ringwald about writing and her acclaimed first novel When it Happens to You, a series of short stories which explore love, loss and betrayal, at the Sydney Town Hall on Saturday 25 May from 6-7 pm.

Here’s how the first story, ‘The Harvest Moon’, opens:

‘As far as Greta knew, there was nothing in the sky that night.

‘Lying on her back in the bathroom on the cool of the white marble tiles, she heard the summons again. Her husband tapped the horn of the car: one long, noisy beep followed by two shorter taps, as if in apology. She strained to close the zipper on a pair of jeans without pinching the soft flesh of her midsection. It was a task she found both onerous and humiliating, primarily since she had purchased the pair less than a month ago, having gone through the same depressing experience with every other pair that lay folded in her dresser. Another short beep to remind her (in case she had forgotten) that her husband and daughter were waiting in the idling car, but this really had been sprung on her, and there might be photos. She wanted to at least make an attempt at presentability.’

And I’ll be talking to Sylvia Nasar about economics and her latest book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, which traces the development of economics through the men and women who created the discipline from Karl Marx to Joan Robinson and Amartya Sen, at the Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay on Sunday 26 May from 10-11 am.

Here’s what Nasar writes about the lesson British economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) learnt from his extensive travels across America, which became the chief insight of his Principles of Economics published in 1890:

‘Under a system of private property and competition, business firms are under constant pressure to achieve more with the same or fewer resources. From society’s standpoint, the corporation’s function is to raise productivity and hence, living standards.

‘Of all social institutions, the business firm was more central, enjoyed a higher status, and did more to shape the American mind and civilisation than elsewhere. The company was not only the principal creator of wealth in America but also the most important agent of social change and the biggest magnet for talented individuals.’

Plus ça change …

I’ll write more about each of these books before the festival starts – but for the moment I’m in Paris …

… under cover at an accounting conference (EAA 2013).

Captain S, after Afghanistan, Ben Quilty

And I wasn’t planning to write about the exhibition here. But then I read the comments of one of Quilty’s subjects, Air Commodore John Oddie, and changed my mind. Beside his portraits Oddie had made these observations:

‘You can’t take the experiences out of your head / You can’t take the damages out of your heart’

‘Either through a lack of insight or through an unwillingness … I wasn’t admitting the truth to myself about my life. Ben really took that out and put it on a table in front of me like a three-course dinner and said, well how about that? And you know, I sort of thought well, I’m not going to come to this restaurant again in a hurry!’

John Oddie

Quilty had initially planned to paint from photographs he’d taken in Afghanistan of the soldiers staring into the sun – dazzled, exposed, shocked. But when he returned to his studio in Australia, he found this approach didn’t work. It lacked immediacy. So he invited some of the soldiers to his studio to sit for him, naked. The result are these raw, vulnerable portraits.

Which took me straight to the battlefields of Troy and of ancient Italy. To Hector’s death at the hand of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad:

‘Death cut him short. The end closed in around him. / Flying free of his limbs / his soul went winging down to the House of Death, / wailing his fate, leaving his manhood far behind, / his young and supple strength. But brilliant Achilles / taunted Hector’s body, dead as he was, “Die, die! / For my own death, I’ll meet it freely – whenever Zeus / and the other deathless gods would like to bring it on!”

With that he wrenched his bronze spear from the corpse, / laid it aside and ripped the bloody armor off the back. / And the other sons of Achaea, running up around him, / crowded closer, all of them gazing wonder-struck / at the build and marvellous, lithe beauty of Hector.’

And the death of the Trojan soldier Euryalus in Virgil’s Aeneid:

‘But while he begged / the sword goes plunging clean through Euryalus’ ribs, / cleaving open his white chest. He writhes in death / as blood flows over his shapely limbs, his neck droops, / sinking over a shoulder, limp as a crimson flower / cut off by a passing plow, that droops as it dies / or frail as poppies, their necks weary, bending / their heads when a sudden shower weighs them down.’

(Both passages are taken from translations by Robert Fagles.)

‘After Afghanistan’ also reminded me of Nadeem Aslam‘s beautiful, brutal novel The Wasted Vigil (2008) set in present day Afghanistan:

‘For a long time before Lara came to the house the kitchen was Marcus’s living quarters. There was no electricity so the refrigerator was used as a clean white cupboard to store clothes. He seldom visited the other interiors, the doors fastened, a muffled thud indicating that a book had detached itself from the ceiling. Qatrina and he had built up this collection over the decades and it contained the known and unknown masterpieces in several languages. Up there Priam begged Achilles for the mutilated body of his son Hector. And Antigone wished to give her brother the correct burial, finding unbearable the thought of him being left unwept, unsepulchred.

‘He went on a journey whenever he received word about a young man somewhere who could possibly be his lost grandson. Though he feared there was no hope of locating someone whose face you had never seen, whose face you didn’t know. The last excursion was to a city in the south of the country during the Taliban regime, and like the other times it was fruitless. There he saw an abandoned and locked-up school for girls into which, he was told, every book to be found in the city had been thrown on Taliban orders. When he put his ear to the keyhole he could hear the sound of worms eating the millions of pages.’

Bushmaster, Ben Quilty

Jemma Birrell launches the Sydney Writers Festival 2013

I’ll be writing more about the festival here soon, but for the moment I’m very excited to be on a panel with two of the world’s great readers, critics and writers – Geordie Williamson and James Wood – speaking on a panel chaired by Tegan Bennett Daylight called The Uncommon Reader. We’ll be talking about what makes a good reader – and sharing some of the books which have inspired and compelled us. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot will be among the books I’ll be talking about. It’s sometimes my favourite novel of all time, always in my top 10.

The Idiot is the story of Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young Russian so honest and ingenuous that on first sight he’s taken for an idiot. His open demeanour draws people to him and friends feel compelled to confide in him, yet they are never quite sure if the prince’s peculiar, penetrating perceptions are the fruit of profound wisdom or madness.

As one friend says to him: ‘Why, Prince, your simplicity and innocence are such as were never heard of in the golden age, and then, all of a sudden, you pierce a fellow through and through, like an arrow, with such profound psychological insight!’

While Dostoyevsky was struggling with the manuscript of the novel, trying to focus his vision of the idiot Prince, whom he wanted to be a convincing, perfectly good man, he wrote to himself on 8 April 1868: ‘NB The prince – Christ’.

Shortly after marrying for the second time, in 1867, Dostoyevsky travelled with his wife to Europe. In Basel he saw a painting of Jesus by Hans Holbein which he found so confronting that he stood frozen before it for 20 minutes. His wife recalled that ‘the figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a horrible nightmare. In his notes to The Idiot and in the novel itself he returns again and again to this theme.’

Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

Wracked by debt and debilitating epileptic fits that recurred almost every ten days, and grief-stricken following the death of his baby girl in 1868, Dostoyevsky wrote: ‘After all this they demand from me a work of pure art and poetry, without strain, without tearing passions, and point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them remember under what conditions I do my work.’

Under these excruciating conditions, Dostoyevsky wrote The Idiot, working and working at his new novel, tearing up pages and starting again. At the time he was preoccupied by the Gospels, the work of Ernest Renan (whose bestselling Life of Jesus - which depicted Jesus as a mortal man and not the son of God – had been published in France in 1863) and Shakespeare’s Othello, with its themes of jealousy and passion. He wrote:

‘I thought from 4 December to 18 December inclusive. On the average I made six different plans (no less) daily. My head was turned into a windmill. How I did not go mad, I don’t understand. At last on 18 December I sat down to write a new novel and on 5 January I had already sent off five chapters of the first part to Moscow.’

Unlike his compatriots Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dostoyevsky had no independent income and was forced to earn his living from writing to deadline, so he was forever writing in haste, desperate to earn his next payment.

The Idiot opens with the meeting of two extraordinary young men, Prince Leo Myshkin and Parfyon Rogozhin, on a cold November morning in a carriage of the Warsaw train as it approaches St Petersburg at full speed. These two bizarre men are immediately drawn to each other. Their strange passions, and their love for the same woman, ignite Dostoyevsky’s intense, explosive novel about love, desire and jealousy, suffering and madness.

The novel races along as swiftly as the trains Dostoyevsky’s loquacious character Lebedev so abhors, its action consisting predominantly of conversations – heated discussions, intimate confessions, fierce pronouncements – that erupt in set pieces in houses, salons and drawing rooms across Petersburg and the country town of Pavlovsk.

St Petersburg

Soon after his arrival in Petersburg from a clinic in Switzerland the prince visits a distant relative, a Princess Myshkin married to the prominent General Yepanchin. The Yepanchins have three beautiful, accomplished daughters, but the beauty of their youngest daughter Aglaya is matched by only one other woman in Petersburg: Nastasya Filippovna. Through the prince the lives of these two beautiful women become inextricably linked: Aglaya forms a perverse, ambivalent attachment to the prince, but his heart has already been stricken by Nastasya Filippovna.

When the prince first sees Nastasya in a portrait, her dazzling beauty pierces him to the depths of his soul. He finds her beauty ‘quite unbearable – the beauty of that pale face, those almost hollow cheeks and burning eyes – a strange beauty!’ and falls into a peculiar, bold species of love with her.

The prince has been treated in Switzerland by a doctor renowned for his work with idiocy and insanity. Like Dostoyevsky, the prince is an epileptic, and the novel includes a vivid description of the onset of an epileptic fit. The prince’s detailed story of a man who faces execution, only to be given a last-minute reprieve, is also based on Dostoyevsky’s own life.

Dostoyevsky

Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoyevsky was the second son of a surgeon and a cultured woman from a merchant family. His father expected him to become a military engineer, and he was sent to the Academy of Military Engineering in St Petersburg. But after his father’s death in 1839 – he was rumoured to have been murdered by the serfs on his small estate – Dostoyevsky left the army in 1844 to become a writer. His first published work was a translation of one of his favourite authors, Balzac‘s Eugenie Grandet.

He then wrote a novella, Poor Folk, which so impressed two of his friends that they rushed over to Dostoyevsky’s house at 4 am to tell him it was a masterpiece. By his mid 20s Dostoyevsky had become a prominent literary figure in St Petersburg.

In April 1849, Dostoyevsky and other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of socialist intellectuals dedicated to illegal terrorist agitation with whom he mixed, were arrested and imprisoned. Dostoyevsky’s first epileptic fit followed soon after. Eight months later, on 22 December, Dostoyevsky and the other prisoners were led into a square and sentenced to death by firing squad. Only at the very last moment were they told that Tsar Nicholas I had spared their lives. It turned out the mock execution was part of their punishment.

The experience of imminent death sent one prisoner mad on the spot – and marked Dostoyevsky for the rest of his life. Instead of execution Dostoyevsky was sent to Siberia for four years of hard labour. Here he spent many hours reading the Bible, which convinced him of the power of the beliefs of ordinary Russians and confirmed his faith in the Russian Orthodox Church. So passionately did Dostoyevsky value his faith in Christ that he later wrote that he would ‘prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth’.

While in Siberia Dostoyevsky married, in 1957, and two years later he was permitted to return to St Petersburg, where his wife died in 1864. His beloved brother died soon after and Dostoyevsky became addicted to gambling, and was plagued by debt and epileptic seizures.

After accepting an advance on a new novel, he had still not begun writing it less than a month before the deadline. So he hired a stenographer and, remarkably, dictated The Gambler in the remaining few weeks. It was published in 1866. The stenographer was 22 year old Anna Snitkina – and she and Dostoyevsky were married the following year. They left Russia soon after.

When he returned to Russia in 1873 Dostoyevsky had become famous throughout the world for his novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot and The Possessed (1871-72). His last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, was completed not long before his death in 1881, by which time he had come to be seen in Russia as a prophet. Like the funeral of his contemporary Tolstoy (whom he never met), Dostoyevsky’s funeral was a national event, thronged by 30,000 mourners.

Dostoyevsky was writing during a time of great ferment and upheaval in Russia, a time of modernisation and westernisation of which he was deeply suspicious. In The Idiot the onrush of change is symbolised by the ominous presence of the railway – ‘this network in which men are entangled’ – which is spreading across Europe and Russia. Lebedev sees the railway as the sign of humanity’s ruin, and is mocked for his belief:

‘Not the railways – no, sir!’ retorted Lebedev, losing his temper and at the same time enjoying himself immensely. ‘The railways will not pollute the waters of life by themselves alone; but the whole thing, sir, is damned, the whole spirit of the last few centuries, taken as a whole, sir, in its scientific and practical application, is perhaps really damned, sir!’

The Idiot is remarkable for Dostoyevsky’s profound and unnerving understanding of the human soul. Nietzsche called him ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.’

Two of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers were haunted by The Idiot - Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky. Kurosawa’s 1951 film Hakuchi is based on The Idiot. Set in Hokkaido in the snow and blizzards of northern Japan, the story takes place following the Second World War and the central Prince Myshkin character is a war veteran.

Unfortunately Tarkovsky’s dreams of interpreting The Idiot for cinema were never realised: the Soviet film authorities rejected his proposal. Instead, the devastated Tarkovsky accepted an invitation to work in Italy and died in Paris four years later, in 1986. A Russian miniseries made for television in 2002 and screened in 2003 was the first screen version of the complete novel.

Iggy Pop’s debut solo album, The Idiot, was also inspired by Dostoyevsky’s novel.

Wertheim (left) with the coral reef project in the UK

Now for Part II of Margaret Wertheim’s Templeton Lecture, ‘We are all corals now‘, given at the University of Sydney on Monday 18 March.

After talking broadly about her coral reef crochet project (including an exposition of the hyperbolic geometry it manifests) and the growing complexity of its crocheted coral forms as it evolved over the years since its inception in 2005, Wertheim turned to some of the more striking corals crocheted by individual contributors around the world. (All the contributors are listed on the crochet coral reef website.)

One of these is Helen Bernasconi, who lives on 80 acres in Bonnie Boon, Victoria, Australia, and keeps a small flock of sheep. She shears, spins and dyes their wool herself, crocheting it into coral forms for the project. Bernasconi was the very first international contributor to the project and has invented a whole genre of crochet sea creatures, including a crochet octopus.

Helen Bernasconi’s crochet octopus

As the website says, ‘Helen is a master of both technique and form and over the past 2 years has produced an extraordinary variety of complex, multifaceted shapes. Every time a box arrives from her we marvel again at the diversity of her imagination – she seems to be single-handedly creating several major new branches on the crochet tree of life.’

Wertheim said that when people are let loose, they not only experiment with new forms but also with new materials, like fluff and electronic wire. She showed images of the electronic wire reef creatures, which are extraordinarily beautiful … but they’re neither crocheted nor hyperbolic.

‘In most cases when we get requests to include items that fall into neither category our answer is no, but in the remarkable case of Anita Bruce we knew that all rules are made to be broken. Anita knits sea creatures from scientific wire and when we first encountered her work we knew the Reef should be populated by some of these astonishing knitted specimens.’

Anita Bruce’s knitted reef creature

One thing that fascinates Wertheim about the project is that it’s a metaphor for understanding the evolution of life on earth. To those who challenge the idea of evolution by asking how so much complexity could come from something so simple, the DNA code, Wertheim says that if the coral reef project can accomplish what it has – its astonishing variety and complexity – in almost 10 years, then surely 3 to 4 billion years of evolution could achieve the complexity of life we find on earth.

Wertheim has travelled widely with the coral reef project, initiating new reefs around the world. As she said, the project has sent out spawn to propagate new reefs just as real coral reefs do. Hundreds and sometimes 1000s of local people participate in creating a community reef. Wertheim said participants come from across race, income, age and class spectrums – but curiously (or not, according to one vocal man in the audience who said it was ‘right’) 99 percent of participants have been women.

And through their involvement in the project, people start relating on new terms, they bond. Wertheim said she was about to go to Abu Dhabi (she’s probably there now) with the coral reef project. She was invited there by the organisers in the hope that her project would help to deal with ethnic tensions in the Middle East. They hope that the prospect of crocheting a coral reef might bring together people who would never ordinarily meet – in particular, that it might bring out Emirati women from their homes and bridge a deep ethnic divide.

Wertheim said the message of the project has been unexpectedly profound. It has become a metaphor for what we humans can do when we work together.

The largest reef – which is at the Smithsonian – is made of 10,000 pieces. It’s 10 feet high and involved some 900 people. It could never have been made by an individual.

The Smithsonian community reef

For Wertheim, the deeper metaphor of the project is this: just as we see tiny coral polyps that individually have no significance, collectively they build a coral reef, which then becomes home to some 9 million other species – so too we humans are like these coral polyps. Individually we are small and insignificant. But if we act collectively to build structures together we can do the extraordinary.

Hence the title of Wertheim’s lecture, which is the moral of her project: ‘We are all corals now.’

Wertheim concluded by saying that the coral reef project suggests to her that through the strength of our interconnectivity and our inter-relational power we can save the planet and ourselves.

There’s never been any advertising for the projects. People just come. And the various coral reef projects around the world have bonded communities together. Communities which have wanted to continue to exist beyond the project, but have found there are no channels for them to do so, for all their skills, talents, enthusiasm and creativity.

All of which suggests to Wertheim that we have vast untapped human resources that society is not making use of. Vast untapped human resources that WE are not making use of.

And she left that thought hanging in the air …

Coral by Christine Wertheim, Margaret’s twin sister

Margaret Wertheim

How apt (or NOT) that I should have planned to blog about Margaret Wertheim’s intriguing, inspiring, provocative 2013 Templeton Lecture We are all corals now: A meditation on art, science and hope in an age of global warming just moments after reading about a renowned rocket scientist whose New York Times obituary opens ‘She made a mean beef stroganoff …‘ GRRR.

Moving right along, to the world where women are brilliant scientists and mathematicians and are heralded for these gifts and talents …

On Monday 18 March I went to hear renowned mathematician, physicist and writer Margaret Wertheim give the 23rd Templeton Lecture at the University of Sydney. The Templeton Lectures were founded by Professor Charles Birch, one of the first scientists to win the Templeton Prize for ‘entrepreneurs of the spirit’.

Wertheim began by paying tribute to Charles Birch, one of her teachers at the University of Sydney and a founder of ecological science in Australia. She said that Birch’s landmark book On Purpose had been ‘meaningful’ to her, especially when she was writing her cultural history of physics, Pythagoras’s Trousers, which looked at why and how science and religion have interacted over the centuries. She said Birch was one of the first to write on the subject of science and religion from the point of view of a scientific practitioner, and one of the very first people to write philosophically on the relationship between humans and the environment.

In On Purpose Birch sets out a view of the world not as a place of things, of objects, but of events and processes. His world was not mechanistic but influenced by process thinking and by mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

Wertheim said she concurred with Birch’s view of the world: she believes the world is presented incorrectly as a place of things, not of relationships – just as science is incorrectly presented to us as a study of things, of objects, not of relationships.

Ten years ago Wertheim realised that it’s better to present science not as a body of facts but as a process. And the institute she’s founded with her twin sister, an artist and Professor of Art – the Institute for Figuring (IFF) – is about understanding interrelations and interconnections in our world. She considers the IFF as a ‘Play Tank’, as against a ‘Think Tank’ – it’s a place for playful activities that get bodies working and learning, not just minds. It generates participatory programmes which involve large numbers of people around the planet. Her lecture was on one of these projects, the biggest participatory art and science project in the world: crocheting a coral reef.

Crocheted coral reef

The ‘coral reef project’ was conceived California in 2005, inspired by this fantastic quote from Lorenz Oken: ‘Everything has been created out of sea mucus for love arises from the foam’. (Sigh. Such is the poetry of science. Its mythos: the birth of love – Aphrodite – from the foam, aka Ouranos’s testicles, castrated and tossed into the sea by his son Cronos.)

When Wertheim and her sister began the project she thought two to three dozen people around the world might want to participate – instead more than 7,000 people have taken part in it. It has been called the ‘AIDS quilt project of global warming’.

Great Barrier Reef

One of its main aims is to respond to global warming. Coral reefs are one of the leading indicators that global warming is not in our future but is here and now. The rising levels of CO2 cause ocean warming and acidification – or ‘CocoCola ocean’ – which destroy corals. So the coral reef project was started as a positive, creative response to global warming. They joked that if the Great Barrier Reef died out, there’d be something to remember it by.

OK, but why make a coral reef out of wool? The two substances don’t immediately go together: yarn and water.

But it turns out, Wertheim said, that yarn is the logically necessary medium – because the best way for humans to make models of hyperbolic geometry is through crochet.

Wertheim then gave a brilliant exposition of hyperbolic geometry and its history.

Hyperbolic geometry – frilly, crenellated forms – is present throughout the marine world. Or, as Wertheim said: ‘Nature has a love affair with hyperbolic geometry.’ And yet for hundreds of years mathematicians tried to prove that hyperbolic geometry was impossible in theory and in nature. Wertheim said she likes to claim that a sea slug knows hyperbolic geometry in the structure of its being – and knew it long before humans did.

But even after mathematicians understood the theoretical existence of hyperbolic space in the early 19th century, not until 1997 did any human work out how model it. In that year Dr Daina Taimina discovered that crochet was the best way of making mathematical models of hyperbolic geometry. Before then, it couldn’t be modelled; even when scientists knew it existed, they couldn’t create models of it.

Dr Taimina with her crocheted hyperbolic space

Euclidean space, long known by humans, has zero curvature.

Spherical space, long known by humans, has positive curvature.

Hyperbolic space – one of the most important scientific discoveries of the early 19th century – has negative curvature.

The greatest mathematicians of our culture spent hundreds of years wrestling with this question of hyperbolic space and resisting its possibility. But eventually they realised that just as there are positive and negative numbers, so there are positive and negative spaces.

In the 1820s mathematicians understood hyperbolic space existed – but only found a way of modelling it in 1997. (Wertheim enjoyed repeating this fact, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it repeated.) This was a revolution in representation. (Through crochet!)

Dr Taimira uses these crochet models of hyperbolic space to teach non-Euclidean geometry to her university students – and she was soon inundated with requests by universities around the world for versions of her embodied models, which enable you very quickly to learn the mathematics of negative space and have led to the development of entire fields of non-Euclidean geometry.

The mathematics involved is the same as that used by Einstein to formulate his Theory of General Relativity – and will, Wertheim said, ultimately tell us about the structure of the universe.

‘Here we have a link between feminine handicraft – crocheting – and the architecture of the universe.’

Wertheim said that this relationship, between crochet and the architecture of the universe, was a ‘beautiful lesson’ she learnt from the coral reef project.

She described the coral reef project as ‘A woolly taxonomy of crochet coral species’. Over the life of the project – which is ongoing – an ever evolving crochet tree of life has been created. And unexpectedly, the woolly reef has mimicked the process of evolution, which is founded on ‘geometric aberrancy’.

‘Geometric aberrancy leads to natural forms.’

The crocheted corals started out being based on very simple mathematically perfect models – crochet n stitches, increase 1 – but once you start branching out and creating embellishments, you get increasing complexity and form. This increasing complexity was completely unexpected.

Wertheim then discussed some of the more striking corals crocheted by individual contributors … and meditated suggestively on the nature of this vast crochet coral reef project. I’ll be writing Part II of Wertheim’s Templeton Lecture later this week.

As you can see, when you mix physics, maths, art and global warming, the results are fascinating … endlessly!

When I read I usually mark pages that capture my imagination, provoke thoughts, connect with other things I’ve been reading, ideas I’ve been pondering. In most books I mark 20 or so pages at the most. I marked more than 50 of Soil and Soul‘s 284 pages. There is just so much in it. And it is so richly woven and idiosyncratic, so much spun from the life and soil and soul of its author and his place, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, that it would be impossible to do its depth and breadth of vision justice here. But I will try to evoke its range … and I urge anyone interested in the power and importance of place – for itself, for its ability to bond people and communities, for its spiritual significance, its soul connections – and who believes in preserving the natural world against the interests of corporate capital, to read this book.

Among many other things, Soil and Soul shows that when the heartlands of large corporations can be broken open and penetrated by people such as McIntosh, their managers are capable of restraint, of deciding against the short-term interests of capital (profit) – and deciding FOR the preservation of the natural world.

Alastair McIntosh

McIntosh tells his story in two parts.

PART ONE Indigenous Childhood; Colonial World is about McIntosh’s childhood on Lewis. The first chapter, ‘Digging Where We Stand’, begins:

‘I must start where I stand. As children, we used to be told that if you dug a really deep hole, you’d come out in Australia. I think in some ways this is very true. If any of us dig deep enough where we stand, we will find ourselves connected to all other parts of the world.’

This truth – of our (potentially) deep connection to our immediate place and the way this connects us to our wider world, to the entire planet, to all life, to all forms – guides McIntosh’s story, which becomes in its second half the tale of a twin mission: to return the Isle of Eigg to its indigenous people and to save a mountain.

The Isle of Eigg

PART TWO The French Revolution on Eigg and the Gravel-pit of Europe is the story of people standing together for their place against the outside interests of landlords and corporate power. This people power works slowly, accruing over a decade, using passion, faith, patience, humour, daring, determination, intelligence, intuition, imagination, mischief, folklore and legend, guided by the heart and always by some greater force to which McIntosh gives the name God but which could just as well be called love.

Part two opens with a chapter called ‘Well of the Holy Women’ and a visit to McIntosh in 1990 from a crofter from Scoraig called Tom Forsyth:

‘A fine, strong, white-haired man he was, of mystical and sometimes outrageous disposition … Tom had suffered enough of landlordism. He was sick of Scotland’s feudal system, which had endured since the eleventh century. He’d seen too much of ordinary folks needing the big man’s permission to plant a few trees; to shoot something for the pot; to extend a house. Rarely a week went by in rural Scotland without some story emerging of a laird pulling down a home because he didn’t want people living near ‘his’ river, charging fees for the ancient right of cutting peat as winter fuel, or blocking walkers’ access to a remote but beautiful glen.’

Soil and Soul is truly an extra-ordinary story, told in an uncommon way. McIntosh takes his time. He weaves a complex tapestry, inviting readers deep into his world, into its past, telling of its terrible losses, its people, its beliefs, its saints and legends, its landscape of rock and water and ocean and vast skies. It is, as George Monbiot says in his Foreword, ’an extraordinary adventure in theology, economics, ecology, history and politics’ – thrilling, exhilarating and incredibly inspiring.

Monbiot writes: ’It is the first step towards the decolonisation of the soul: the essential imaginative process we have to undergo if we are to save the world from the political and environmental catastrophes that threaten it.’

I recommend Soil and Soul as strongly as I do Tony Juniper’s What has nature ever done for us? – but it is a completely different reading experience, it is like reading a spiritual text, or a poem.

As McIntosh says of his book:

‘It is about the Earth – soil, in a metaphorical sense – and people, which is to say, soul. It is about the interrelationships between natural ecology, social community and the human spirit. It moves away from the mainstream trunk of western culture and goes out on a limb, where the blossom is.’

Monbiot writes: ‘Make no claim to know the world if you have not read this book.’ I think he could be right

The Isle of Lewis

Why? Because he expresses clearly and comprehensively what I believe is the key challenge facing human beings in the 21st century:

‘The simple conclusion I reach is that we need to take a different approach to how we look at nature and the Earth … Key to making this happen is the realisation that nature is not separate from the economy, a drag on growth or an expensive distraction.’

Given the power of the language of economics, money and numbers, realising that nature is not separate from the economy really is KEY. It is also an idea which seems obvious to most non-economists – and utterly heretical to most economists.

In 11 chapters and 296 pages environmental activist Tony Juniper sets out just how valuable the Earth – ‘Biosphere 1′ – is for human life. The chapters move from soil (‘probably the least appreciated source of human welfare and security’), to light, plants and animals, pollination, water, oceans, human health (mental and physical). In the process he builds a picture of the rich and complex interrelationship of the many elements that compose and sustain life on earth. And of the many things nature does which cannot be replaced by technology, including ‘the carbon storage functions of natural forests and soils; the productivity of the oceans; the work done by microorganisms in soils; the primary production carried out through photosynthesis; the protection of property by coral reefs; and the design solutions created by natural evolutionary processes’.

And as Juniper says, these invaluable services provided by nature are ‘beginning to attract the attention of not only academic economists and ecologists, but also governments, companies and international agencies. And that is what this book is all about – an explanation of what nature does for us, why it is so important, and what we can do to ensure nature keeps on doing it.’

Juniper believes that this vast and rapidly accumulating body of research ‘signals an emerging new era of debate’. I agree.

As he says, while much recent environmental discussion has been about climate change and carbon emissions, a new ‘wave of attention’ is breaking which focuses on ‘what nature does for us (and, crucially, finding ways to keep it doing what it does)’.

‘From the coral reefs that protect many coasts to the pollinating insects that help enable much of our food to grow, awareness and attention is switching to the economic value of nature, and crucially how to protect that value.’

Chapter by chapter Juniper examines the work nature does and makes clear its economic value – or, its value in the most powerful language of our day, money. Costa Rica’s former energy and environment minister Carlos Manuel Rodriguez discovered the power of this language when working to conserve his nation’s forests. When the finance minister told him that nature was not a priority, he found a way to value the forests in economic terms. Here’s what happened when he returned with this new information:

‘When we had this work completed I went back to the finance minister, but this time with some economists. When he saw these guys with me, he began to talk to them and they were speaking the same language. This was a turning point, and now the economics of nature is institutionalised in Costa Rica.’ Not only were natural areas protected, but degraded land was restored.

Biosphere 2

Juniper starts his book with a discussion of the ambitious experiment Biosphere 2, dreamt up by the remarkable John Allen – and it’s worth reading for the lessons of this story alone. Biosphere 2 was built between 1987 and 1991, constructed to study ‘the complex web of relationships and interactions that sustain the Earth’s life systems, while at the same time supporting eight humans’.

‘It was a project that threw into perspective just how complex, elaborate and linked is our own natural biosphere – and just what it would take if we had to try and replicate or recreate it.’

The scientific knowledge and technical expertise required for this experiment were vast. And fascinating. For example, the glass complex had to be totally airtight: it was 30 times more more tightly sealed than the Space Shuttles then being sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere by NASA. It set records as the most tightly sealed large-scale system ever constructed.

The lessons learnt from this experiment inform Juniper’s book. He quotes ‘Biospherian’ Mark Nelson about his experience of spending two years in Biosphere 2:

‘One of our tasks was to intervene when the natural diversity was threatened. The interventions were quite satisfying because it wasn’t us and the environment it was us in the environment. We had a role in looking after it. Once we were in there we realised we were in the same lifeboat.’

As Juniper argues, this is what we must now do with our economies (and ourselves): place them in nature. Which will require new institutions, laws, policies and culture. And new long-term thinking, which is foreign to the major players in modern economies: governments and corporations.

Juniper quotes Indian economist, former banker and green economist Pavan Sukhdev on the power of economics, which has arguably become a religion, ‘economism’. Sukdev says: ‘There is an unstated religion in economics, to the point where it is believed that everything can be resolved with free markets. The ghost of neoclassical economics and a few leading thinkers in that field continue to exert their influence on generations of young economists who go to work in national treasuries and who don’t understand what natural capital is all about. The question is, how do we address this legacy?’

A good question, as Juniper says – ‘and one that begs another, which is about where our values come from, especially those that have the potential to generate longer-term perspectives’.

The Earth, economics and where our values come from. This is what Juniper’s What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? is about. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Biosphere 1

So life seems to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, of whom he said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ And like his most famous creation, Flaubert longed for the exotic and unattainable. He found life in 19th century provincial France utterly banal. As early as the age of 13 the truculent Flaubert decided that literature would be the means by which he’d endure the boredom and vulgarity of life:

‘The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.’

In 1851, following an 18-month tour of the Orient he had long dreamt of, Flaubert returned to his mother’s house on the Seine near Rouen and began work on a novel about the provincial life he so despised. For five years he laboured, his finger drumming out the rhythms of his prose on his writing desk, producing an agonised 500 words a week. These words became Madame Bovary. So slowly did Flaubert work that he wrote to his lover poet Louise Colet that he was ‘like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles’.

In 1856 Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp published the first six instalments of Madame Bovary in his periodical Revue de Paris. The novel sold well but the audacious carnality of Emma Bovary’s behaviour so shocked readers that Flaubert was arrested and tried under the repressive censorship of the regime of Louis Bonaparte, on grounds of defending public morality, religion and decency. Flaubert was lucky to escape conviction. But six months later poet Charles Baudelaire was found guilty of the same charges for Les Fleurs du Mal.

What so shocked contemporary readers of Madame Bovary was Emma’s rebellion against her marriage and her role as the wife of a dutiful provincial doctor. Emma loves words and literature – and she’s married to a man whose conversation is ‘as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams’.

So the restless Emma makes her own dreams. She longs ‘to travel – or to go back to the convent. She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.’ She buys a guide to Paris to imagine herself in its boulevards, subscribes to women’s papers to immerse herself in the latest fashions and gossip, and loses herself in the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, Balzac and George Sand.

Unable – and unwilling – to reconcile herself to her lot, Emma allows herself to be seduced. She remembers ‘the heroines of the books she had read and that lyrical legion of adulteresses began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her’. Like Don Quixote, Emma has lost herself to romantic literature and attempts to live her life by its conventions. And, like Don Quixote’s friends, Emma’s husband and mother-in-law believe the cure for her malaise is to prevent her from reading novels. (Flaubert was reading Don Quixote while writing Madame Bovary.)

The story of an adulterous wife was suggested to Flaubert by his friend the poet Louis Bouilhet, who’d read Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1849 and panned it, urging him instead to write a down-to-earth novel like Balzac’s Parents Pauvres. Bouilhet suggested a novel based on the tragic true story of Eugene Delamare, a country doctor in Normandy who died of grief after being betrayed and ruined by his wife Delphine. This story was one source of Madame Bovary. Flaubert may also have been influenced by the Memoires de Madame Ludovica, the autobiographical adventures of his friend Louise Pradier, the wife of the Swiss sculptor James Pradier at whose studio Flaubert first met his lover Louise Colet in 1846.

Flaubert set Madame Bovary in the 1830s, a decade governed by Louise-Philippe and the rise of the bourgeoisie in France. The July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe was installed after the revolution of 1830 and lasted until the revolution of 1848. He was called ‘Louis-Philippe, King of the French’ rather than ‘Philip VII, King of France’ to denote that he was a (so-called) man of the people. During the 1830s French literature flourished and for the first time novels, including those of Stendhal and Balzac, began to compete with the work of Romantic poets for a mass readership.

Flaubert was the first writer to treat the novel as a work of art, to aspire to lift it to the lofty heights and import of poetry, and Madame Bovary is known for the power of its language, its rhythms, and the precision and compactness of its metaphors, even in translation. As he wrote to Colet, Flaubert wanted his style to be ‘as rhythmical as verse and as precise as the language of science’.

And yet the novel contains one of the most poignant expressions of the inability to express in words our deepest and most intimate feelings. When Emma’s jaded lover mentally dismisses her protestations of love (which she expresses in cliche despite the depths of her feeling) with the thought ‘High flown language concealing tepid affection must be discounted’, the narrator – in a rare intrusion – counters:

‘as though the full heart may not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts, or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity’.

Flaubert

Flaubert was born in Rouen, west of Paris, in 1821. His father was the chief surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Rouen, and his mother was a doctor’s daughter. He was destined, like all good bourgeois men of his day, to become a lawyer, but the onset of a nervous illness (probably epilepsy) at the age of 22 forced him to abandon his legal studies in Paris. After his father’s death in 1846, followed by the death of his beloved sister Caroline the following March, Flaubert retired to an estate in Croisset, on the Seine just south of Rouen, with his mother and niece. There he found the perfect conditions for writing:

‘I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.’

Here he spent most of the rest of his life cloistered in his room overlooking the Seine, writing, living by his maxim: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’

Flaubert travelled to Paris in February 1848 to witness the ‘beautiful revolution’ – the overthrow of the regime of Louis-Philippe – and, with his friend Maxime Du Camp, was one of the first to tour the liberated Tuileries. And in November 1849 he journeyed with Du Camp through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Italy and Greece. His travels fuelled his imagination (according to Du Camp, Flaubert thought of the name ‘Emma Bovary’ while they were walking above the Nile) and allowed him to indulge his passion for prostitutes male and female.

Flaubert never married, but had an intense affair with Louise Colet from 1846 until their breakup in 1855, conducted mostly by correspondence with the occasional ‘big fuck’, as Flaubert put it, in a railway hotel midway between Croisset and Paris, where Colet lived.

Salammbo by Alphonse Mucha

In 1866 Flaubert was awarded the prestigious French medal the Legion of Honour for his novel Salammbo. He celebrated the near completion of that manuscript with a reading and an exotic Oriental dinner for his friends. According to his handwritten menu, the dinner included ‘human flesh, brain of bourgeois and tigress clitorises sautéed in rhinoceros butter’. Flaubert managed to combine his monkish existence outside Paris with a busy social life in the capital, where he was feted in literary circles and had many friends. He had a deep and abiding friendship with George Sand and was like a father to Guy de Maupassant, who saw himself as Flaubert’s disciple. Flaubert died suddenly of an apoplectic stroke in 1880 aged 58, with an unfinished page on his table.

Vladimir Nabokov revered Flaubert for his ‘clinically accurate style’ and objectivity, and included Madame Bovary in his short list of eight to ten great European novels. He believed that ‘Without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland, Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov.’ Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave (published in English in 1968) was inspired by Madame Bovary (and Anna Karenina).

Flaubert also influenced Oscar Wilde, TS Eliot and Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot). Sartre, on the other hand, hated Flaubert – and dedicated just over ten years of his life, from 1960 to 1971, to writing a 4-volume biography damning him, called L’Idiot de la Famille. He never finished it.

Writer Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a book in praise of Madame Bovary – The Perpetual Orgy (1975) – in which he attempts to diagnose its enduring power and modernity:

‘In Madame Bovary we see the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies … Emma’s drama is the gap between illusion and reality.’

Isabelle Huppert as Madame Bovary

And the instrument of Emma’s undoing, the magic wand she uses to realise her dreams, however temporarily and ultimately unsatisfactorily, is also eerily modern: financial credit. The shopkeeper Monsieur Lheureux insinuates himself into Emma’s life, teaching her that far from wanting nothing, as she’d believed, her need for trifles and fripperies is without bounds. As is, apparently, the credit he will extend to her.

The continuing resonance of Madame Bovary is reflected in its many screen adaptations, including Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 cinema adaptation starring Jennifer Jones as Emma, Louis Jourdan as Rodolphe Boulanger, and James Mason, who plays Flaubert defending himself against charges of obscenity. In Claude Chabrol’s sumptuous 1991 adaptation Madame Bovary is played by Isabelle Huppert (who’s starring in Jean Genet’s The Maids with Cate Blanchett at the Sydney Theatre Company this winter). The 2000 BBC television adaptation of Madame Bovary starred Australian actress Frances O’Connor as Emma. A new cinema adaptation of Flaubert’s novel is due for release this year, directed by Sophie Barthes and starring Mia Wasikowska as Emma, Paul Giamatti and Ezra Miller.

Richard Wagner

I have music on my mind, again. Nick Cave (courtesy of his concert at the Opera House last week and one at the Enmore Theatre this weekend), Puccini (La Boheme), Schubert (Anna Goldsworthy’s excellent essay on pianist and Schubert interpreter Paul Lewis in The Monthly) and Wagner, thanks to a lecture given last December at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia by Fredric Jameson on ‘Allegory and Dramaturgy in Wagner’s Ring’.

Reading my great-aunt Cicely Gleeson-White‘s ‘Memories of an 1896 Student’ this week about her days as an opera student in London reminded me of my intention to write about Jameson’s lecture here (where she said: ‘My father [Joseph Gleeson White] was one of the earliest devotees of Wagner’s works and I was literally brought up from the cradle with his music … I was the first soprano to sing Isolde in English at Covent Garden.’ in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde)

The abstract for Jameson’s talk was:

‘Aside from its musical genius, Wagner’s Ring cycle remains one of the most staggering achievements of the 19th-century stage, and has continued to stimulate innovative dramaturgy amidst the present Wagner revival. This lecture will focus on two interrelated topics: the relationship between the figure of Wotan and political fields of force; and the role of Siegfried as a way into Wagnerian theatrical psychology – the composer/dramatist’s specific ‘system’ of thinking psychological motivation.’

Fredric Jameson

As he acknowledged, Jameson didn’t quite stick to his plan, but his lecture was thrillingly wide ranging and provocative. You can listen to the whole lecture online, but here are some fragments to give you an idea of where his thinking on Wagner and modernity went.

Jameson began by saying he was interested in the hot topic of ‘affect‘, sourced in the work of Eve Sedgwick and Deleuze; and wondered if there was a ‘third possible source’ of affect theory: in Heidegger and phenomenology, in ‘mood’.

He said Freudian and Lacanian psychologies are very far from the source of affect. He’s interested in ‘emotion’ versus ‘affect’ – which he called a ‘new dualism’; and suggested this raised a possible distinction between two sorts of temporality: one of past, present and future, the other of the eternal present (modernism).

Emotions: as theorised by Aristotle, Descartes (Passions of the Soul), among others, where emotions are arranged in pairs and named. Their naming confers an essence on them and – in a process of objectivisation or reification – makes this inner emotional landscape appear for the first time.

The aesthetic of emotion, along with this taxonomic naming, is a very different logic from affect.

Kant distinguished emotions from feelings (which are bodily states). We can use this distinction to think of affects as nameless states. The system of the humours is the closest system of emotions to affect. Affects are ‘multiple, shimmer in perpetual mutability’.

Before the mid 19th century the body is scarcely registered in literature: Flaubert and Baudelaire are markers for the emergence of the body into literature. For example, Baudelaire’s ‘green so delicious it hurts’.

Balzac proves his point. For example in Pere Goriot the pension where the protagonist Rastignanc lives is not described with ‘affects’ but with ‘meanings’, allegories for poverty.

The two temporalities which relate to these different states: with a named emotion, there is past, present and future; whereas the temporality of affect is an eternal present, like modernism.

The Tristan prelude (premiered in 1865) marks the beginning of modernity, its theme song the first full blown emergence of affect on the world stage.

A similar thing happened in the work of Manet, a shift from storytelling painting to the materiality of paint itself.

Manet

A new type of content emerged. The Wagnerian endless melody versus the aria of Italian opera.

Sexual desire (as the source of fear which he’s not yet known), Siegfried comes to learn, is an affect.

The brilliance of Tolstoy is in his interweaving of multiple affects – the multiple, changeable inner mood swings of his characters.

‘Destiny’ is the subject of The Ring and is its formal shaping power.

Thomas Mann was the ‘perfect Wagnerite’.

Stripped of their immortal skin, ALL of Wagner’s heroines could be Madame Bovary. (By chance, Madame Bovary is the subject of my next classics post, up this weekend.)

Isabelle Huppert as Madame Bovary

‘Why is the once powerful idea of decadence no longer meaningful to us? Because we’re so obviously decadent.’

The romantic motif in Wagner could be read in contemporary terms: the overturning of values in the 1960s and then in queer theory, versus the ever narrowing circles of consanguinity (which produces a dialectic, of which Jameson is so fond).

Jameson mused on Shaw, his ‘The Perfect Wagnerite‘ and his account of Wagnerian capital.

He concluded by saying the two big unsolved questions in the Ring are: the nature of the ending, and the character of Siegfried (who’s supposed to be the saviour of humanity), which is ultimately a question of the nature of the potion he drinks: is it a love potion – or a potion of forgetfulness?

Siegfried

In a report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Amy McNeilage writes:

‘In 2001, 7.5 per cent of female students eligible for an ATAR [Australian Tertiary Admission Rank] did not study any maths, a new report from the University of Sydney says. A decade later this had jumped to 21.5 per cent. Over the same period, the rate of male students in NSW not studying maths increased from 3.1 per cent to 9.8 per cent.’

The gender disparity is now GREATER than it was in the 1980s. And this is despite campaigns to increase the participation of girls in maths and science.

Needless to say, the University of Sydney’s Dr Rachel Wilson called the findings ‘deeply disturbing’ – and suggested that gender stereotyping could be partly to blame. She said ‘We need a kind of public education program to shift the image of maths.’

Hypatia – cool mathematician

So, maths needs to be seen as cool. (Maths IS cool – and it’s one of the most powerful intellectual and political languages of the modern world.)

With that in mind, here are three brilliant, successful, inspiring, COOL mathematicians who went to school in Australia – and who also happen to be women.

Margaret Wertheim

1. Margaret Wertheim is a mathematician, physicist and writer. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she and her twin sister Christine founded the Institute for Figuring in 2003 to showcase the ‘aesthetic and enchanted’ constructs of science, mathematics and technology.

Her books include the bestselling Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, physics and the gender wars (1996), a radical rereading of the history of physics, maths and religion; The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A history of space from Dante to the Internet (1999), which tracks western conceptions of space, physical, virtual and spiritual, from medieval times; and Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything (2011).

In the opening paragraph of Pythagoras’ Trousers, Wertheim refers to a mystical experience she had in a maths class aged 10. This is so tantalising that when I spoke to her my first question was about her early experience of maths.

One day when she was in Grade 6 her teacher (Mr Marshall) gave a lesson on circles. He told his students about ‘a number hidden in the circle which is the secret of its properties’, then conducted some exercises so they could discover pi for themselves. Some did – and Wertheim was one of them.

‘It was an extraordinary experience. I remember being struck forcefully by what we call Platonism [the belief that there is a transcendent mathematical reality beyond the physical world] – that hidden in the physical circles which we see manifested in physical objects around us, there was this transcendent mathematical entity called pi.’

When she left school Wertheim completed degrees in physics (University of Queensland), and maths and computing (University of Sydney). But she began to feel she was living one life at university and  another life beyond it, and these two lives became increasingly difficult to reconcile. So after university Wertheim worked as an assistant film editor for a year.

Then she read Chaos: Making a new science by James Gleick, which inspired her to become a science writer. Her articles have since appeared in a range of journals, from The New York Times to Vogue. When Wertheim moved to LA she decided to write the accessible book on physics she’d been planning to write to explain to her friends the esoteric world that enthralled her.

Four years later, she completed Pythagoras’ Trousers, a very different book from the one she’d set out to write. Like many people, Wertheim had believed that science and religion were ancient adversaries. But quite unexpectedly her research uncovered a western mystical tradition that dated back to Pythagoras, a fusion of religion, mathematics and mathematically-based science that contradicted this belief – and which had been incorporated into Christianity during the Middle Ages and subsequently woven into Christian thinking.

According to Wertheim, this is why physicists like Stephen Hawking can talk so freely about the mind of God. As she points out, ‘when scientists talk about God, a lot of people who wouldn’t dream of hearing a priest talk about God will pay attention. Why? Because I think our culture has been very receptive to the conception that the mathematical relations in the world around us are transcendent, divine, eternal truths.’

Wertheim’s discovery of this connection between maths, physics and God led her to another unexpected insight: that women’s absence from physics has been profoundly shaped by their exclusion from the Church. ‘I stumbled across something that I think was a real insight into why it has been so difficult for women to break into this field.’

The role of the imagination in theoretical physics is one of Wertheim’s great fascinations. She believes Hawking’s brilliant imagination is what has made him ‘the most famous living scientist on the planet’. As she says, the imaginative universe Hawking presents ‘gives us the power to dream’ – and physics has become ‘in some sense a new form of fiction. Through the language of mathematics we bring fabulous worlds into being.’

Robyn Arianrhod

2. Which is just how Robyn Arianrhod sees mathematics – as an ‘amazing and elegant’ language. Arianrhod’s first book, Einstein’s Heroes: imagining the world through the language of mathematics (2003), tells the story of maths through the life and revolutionary work of legendary 19th-century mathematical physicist Robert Clerk Maxwell.

Arianrhod’s second book, Seduced by Logic: Emilie du Chatelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution (2011) is a devastating, fascinating story about two remarkable women mathematicians who against extraordinary odds made major contributions to our understanding of the physics of Isaac Newton.

Emilie du Chatelet was among the very few Europeans who understood the significance of Newton’s work and she became one of his Principia Mathematica‘s earliest champions and interpreters. In the 1740s she made the first and still most comprehensive French translation of Newton’s 510-page Latin original.

And Mary Somerville translated into English the first two volumes of the 5-volume Celestial Mechanics by Newton’s French disciple Pierre-Simon Laplace, a work of such complexity that it was understood by a mere handful of men in Britain. On its publication in 1831 Somerville’s translation became the standard text for higher astronomy at Cambridge University and would remain so for the next 100 years.

And yet Somerville herself, as a woman, was not permitted to study at Cambridge. Like du Chatelet, she was not free to pursue the flights of her intellect unhindered. Instead, she squeezed her mathematics into the cracks between her domestic chores.

She wrote: ‘I rose early and made such arrangements with regard to my children and family affairs that I had time to write afterwards, not however without many interruptions. A man can always command his time under the plea of business, a woman has no such excuse.’

In Somerville’s 19th century intellectual study was considered unnatural for women and damaging to their health. When her father discovered Mary’s secret interest in geometry and algebra he said: ‘We must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a straitjacket one of these days.’

I’ve already written about Arianrhod, Einstein’s Heroes and Seduced by Logic here, so I won’t repeat myself except to say that Arianrhod is a supremely gifted mathematician with a passion for physics – she works at Monash University on Einstein’s equations – and for promoting understanding of both maths and physics, especially among women.

Clio Cresswell

3. Clio Cresswell struggled with maths at her school in the south of France. Born in England, Cresswell grew up in Greece and France before moving to Sydney. When I asked her if she was drawn to maths because it was the one constant language of her school years she laughed and said: ‘No! I was hopeless at maths!’ Which is hard to believe, given she’s now a senior lecturer in mathematics and statistics at the University of Sydney.

Cresswell is devoted to communicating the liberating power and beauty of mathematics – and to exploding the popular stereotype of the mathematician as nerd or misfit. Nothing else gives her the adrenaline rush that maths does. She says:

‘For me, it’s the multiplicity of maths that’s so wonderful. Mathematics captures this amazing tapestry that you can’t express with words.’

Cresswell wrote her first book, Mathematics and Sex (2003), after telling a friend about the equations for marriage she’d use in her public speaking, ‘just for a laugh’. He told her she should write a book called ‘maths and sex’ and she said: ‘That study was a fluke, there’s never going to be anything else on maths and sex.’ But when she went to the library to look into it, she found she was wrong. There was a ‘whole host of material’ on maths and sex.

So how did Cresswell, who struggled with maths at school, end up as a mathematician? One year, when she was about 14, she unexpectedly did well in maths. The following year she topped maths. But she continued to prepare for a Baccalaureate in painting, sculpture and ceramics. It was only when she moved to Sydney and found high school art uninspiring that Cresswell began to focus on maths.

She studied mathematics at university and won the University Medal. So she decided to take a PhD in maths: ‘I thought it would be a fun way to spend three years’. Apparently there are about 10 people in the world who could read her PhD and understand it.

Creswell believes maths is the best way to exercise our minds and open them beyond the dualistic limitations of our verbal perceptions. Arianrhod believes an understanding of mathematical science is essential if we’re to engage responsibly in future decisions about its powerful applications (which last century included atomic power, cloning and the microchip). And as Wertheim says, mathematical physics does not just shape our physical world, it ‘powerfully shapes the socially acceptable territory of the modern imagination’.

So, Girls of Australia: stand up and count!

Emilie du Chatelet