Australian writers take a bold stand for Evan Gershkovich
Australian writers pen heartfelt letters to a young Wall Street Journal reporter trapped behind bars in Russia.
Dear Evan,
I hope you got my last letter, and that this will reach you ...
So begins a beautiful letter from the remarkable Cheng Lei, a Chinese-Australian television journalist who returned to Australia last October after being imprisoned in China for more than three years.
She’s writing to Evan Gershkovich, a vibrant young journalist from the Wall Street Journal, who was arrested in Russia while on a reporting trip, and jailed, a year ago.
He remains in solitary confinement, on cruel and false charges.
His parents and his colleagues, including all of us here in Australia, are hoping for his release. The Russians have had him for a year. He turns up for court in a cage. I was moved to tears to see three brave Australians - Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Professor Sean Turnell and Cheng Lei stepping up to join the “Dear Evan” campaign to try to lift his spirits. It’s the kind of campaign all writers should be joining.
As many readers will know, Kylie was held in Iran, for three years.
Sean was held in Myanmar, for three years.
Cheng was held in China, for three years.
Kylie and Sean have both written books about their experiences, and it is magic to see them campaigning for somebody they haven’t met, simply because it’s the right thing to do.
In her letter to Evan, Cheng said: “Reading about you gets me feeling a bit hollow-bellied. There are so many similarities. We are both children of parents who escaped the regime, we both speak the mother tongue and wanted to return to use our understanding of the native land, we both thought we were allowed to do what we did and it was A-OK.
“Then we both got charged with espionage and locked up in isolation.
“Time in incarceration is an eternity and a blink ... There is no easy milestone - be it one day, one week, or one year.
“It may be presumptuous of me, but judging by what I’ve read, you are finding strength you didn’t know you had. Kudos for doing the prisoner’s exercises, (I used to chant to myself “we don’t lift weights, we lift ourselves”), and keeping your mind sharp through letters and chess.
“As long as we’re alive, they can’t take away our will and ability to strengthen our bodies and minds.
“My fellow detainees Kylie Moore Gilbert, Sean Turnell and myself have launched the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance. We want more people to know, to care, to help.
“This is about so much more than just you and me. We will be your voice because they won’t let you speak. We will tell the world that taking someone hostage to extract political leverage is not acceptable. That it ought to carry consequences. That it should be deterred and prevented.
“When you get out, you will see life in brilliant colour.
“You will meet people who have also suffered and made meaning out of it.
“You will heal.
“Even if this letter doesn’t get to you, our collective voices of hope will ring out in the world, duel with the repression tactics borne out of power-hunger. Somewhere, somehow, it will make a difference.
“I know, because I am free thanks to the butterfly effect of so many voices that spoke for me when I was silenced.
“Fellow prisoner’s salute - Cheng Lei.”
It’s a gorgeous letter and I want Evan to read it, now, and over and over again, after he gets out. Please show your support for the Dear Evan campaign if you can.
Heartening news out of Paris
France’s new culture minister, Rachida Dati, says she won’t support the editing and re-writing of old books to remove what have been described as “offensive” terms.
Books under threat in France include those by Agatha Christie.
Dati told the National Assembly in her first session that the trend toward “censorship” of old books is “unhealthy.”
“We know where censorship leads. We have to respect the freedom of creation,” Dati said. “I was shocked by the rewriting of the Agatha Christie books. I am shocked.”
She said “woke” culture was threatening all great literary works, with even Victor Hugo now at risk. She said France must be faithful to the original and “not bow to the American-led fashion for purging past texts to avoid offence.”
Many of Christie’s mysteries have already been stripped of “offensive” words, with the publisher saying it was abiding by the wishes of her estate.
Enid Blyton and her Famous Five have also been edited in France; in the US, it’s a free-for-all on the classics, which is something I think we might, with hindsight, come to regret.
On Ethel Campbell
I received a great deal of mail in response to Peter Goldsworthy’s poems, two of which we published here earlier this month. They were inspired by the cancer that left him looking like a lean and naked sea creature.
I was scolded by one reader for running a near-nude portrait of him, but that’s okay. I don’t mind being scolded.
I heard from Judith Crabb of South Australia, who said that one of the poems reminded her of Ethel Campbell ... and I’m ashamed to say that I’d never heard of Ethel Campbell, so I turned to the internet, which informs me, via the Australian War Memorial site, that she was adored in her day.
Born in Scotland, and raised in South Africa, Ethel’s family was descended from great wealth, and while Ethel apparently tried her hand for a while at being a Durban socialite, she soon grew bored.
When the First World War broke out, she devoted her time to taking care of sick, lonely and frightened soldiers instead.
According to the biography online, “Miss Campbell greeted and farewelled every troopship that arrived and departed from Durban port from 1915 until 1920, signalling to the ships with semaphore flags.”
She would distribute fruit, poems and newspapers, “arriving with baskets brimming with oranges, jams cooked in her kitchen, books, magazines and tobacco. The gifts were thrown up on the decks of the transports and men made sport of catching them.”
She opened her home to soldiers, and “hundreds called at the grand homestead ... they took tea on the verandah or enjoyed a cool drink in the shade of the jacarandas. And when they left Durban for the front, Ethel was there to farewell them, with her sweet voice.”
Those Anzacs never forgot her: when Ethel and her parents visited Australia in 1923, lights from the shoreline flashed a message: “A digger welcomes Miss Campbell.”
She travelled across this fine country over several weeks, and “hundreds, sometimes thousands, of troops would gather at wharves and train stations hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The newspapers compared her welcomes with that of the Prince of Wales— Ethel was received by politicians, authors, poets. But most of her time she spent with her ‘digger pals’ attending veteran fundraisers and unveiling soldier memorials.”
One newspaper said she was “the best loved woman in Australia’, every Digger’s sweetheart ... Not once on her tour did the enthusiasm wane or the crowds dwindle. Why did she cause such a sensation? Most who greeted Ethel had met her before. She was the girl of the wharf who threw them fruit or cigarettes .. a few, no doubt, admired her handsome figure.”
Ethel’s commitment to the wellbeing of young men headed to the front had a personal dimension: her own fiancé had been killed at the beginning of the conflict.
During her Australian tour, many hoped romance would blossom with an Anzac.
“Aren’t you going to take an Aussie back with you?” someone yelled from one of the crowds. Ethel laughed off the suggestion, replying: “There are too many. I love you all.”
Like many women of her generation whose sweethearts were killed in the war, Ethel never married.
She wrote lovely verse, including this:
‘Hail! Faultless Diggers! Hail! Wild Ginger Micks,
If they go down to Hades via the Styx
They’ll find me there to welcome them to shore
Because I’m gingermickish to the core!
Reader Judith said: She deserves a biography. To which I said: How can there not already be a biography??
Biggest ever book tour?
Graeme Simsion (author of The Rosie Project) and Professor Anne Buist (chair of Women’s Mental Health at the University of Melbourne) are undertaking what may be the nation’s biggest book tour.
Their new book - they are married, and collaborate on some projects - is The Glass House, and it’s set in an acute psychiatric ward. It follows a trainee psychiatrist as she learns on the job, meeting new patients every day as they both navigate issues such as depression, bipolar, anxiety and postpartum psychosis.
Anne says: “Mental health is an issue for all of us - if not directly then through friends, family and colleagues. As a novelist and psychiatrist, I believe in the power of stories to help us see past the diagnosis to the person and the challenges they face.”
The tour will take them from Brisbane to Broome, with 400 stops at bookshops across Australia on the way. Look out for them as they pass through your ‘hood.
Hope and renewal
Today’s pages: I’m a bit thrilled with today’s extract, which comes from a new Australian book about the rescue of Vietnamese boat people ... in the 2020s!
Yes, I know, many people think the boats stopped coming from Vietnam in the 1970s, but that is not so.
Australia was turning some of them away as recently as 2020, and some of the passengers, upon landing back in Hanoi, were put in prison.
My old friend and colleague, Amanda Hodge, did a terrific story on the plight of three children impacted by the “turn-around” policy. A fabulously committed human rights lawyer in Sydney saw the headline and the picture, and decided that she couldn’t stand by and do nothing, so she launched a campaign to assist those children.
The extract on p.13 tells the whole story, and it’s ace.
Also today: a feast of Charmian Clift.
Many readers will know that she was married to George Johnston (My Brother Jack) and perhaps also that Gina Chick, the barefoot, fishy-fishy dancing winner of Alone Australia, is her granddaughter.
A new novel has been found, and published, and Lucy Sussex has reviewed it for you.
We also have some Notable Books.
Enjoy it all and the Easter break. I hope the bunny finds you. I hope he finds me, because I do like chocolate. As my old Opi used to say, it’s good for you! Full of zinc! And so it is.
All being well I’ll see you on the other side of the Christian festival of hope and renewal.
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