Question 7, page 18
Some years ago I was sent a remarkable essay by a then eighteen-year-old Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language. It was, in its own way, the equivalent of Szilard’s traffic lights for my thinking, and it informs this book deeply. I am grateful to Siena, as I am to Greg Lehman for his insights into Aboriginal history and identity. My thanks also to Mary Voss, Majda Flanagan, Don Tonkin, Simon Bower, and to Catherine Hill for being a keen set of second editorial eyes. I am, as ever, indebted to my consummate editor and publisher, Nikki Christer.
Parts of this book have appeared in different forms over many years as articles, essays, and speeches published variously in the Good Weekend, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, The Monthly, the New Statesman and my own Out of a Wild Sea (Sydney, 2013).
The known facts of H. G. Wells’s and Rebecca West’s relationship I have adhered to; their conversations and thoughts are though my own invention. I have sometimes used words of theirs, sometimes made them up and occasionally combined both. On their protean lives there is a library of material. Primary among my sources were Victoria Glendinning’s Rebecca West (London, 1987), Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages in Literary London 1910–1939 (New York, 2007) and H. G. Wells’s H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography (London, 2008), the latter a fascinating memoir of Wells’s sexual life at once transparent and opaque, unreliable and truthful, as revealing in its own way as is Rebecca West’s magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (rep. Edinburgh, 2006). The remarkable writings that first made West’s adopted name while still a teenager can be found in the pages of The Freewoman, a radical feminist journal of the late Edwardian era, and reward reading.
Unless otherwise stated, all references to Leo Szilard are taken from William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (New York, 2013). It seems necessary to add that while his vision of a chain reaction at the Southampton Row lights is attested to by Szilard himself, his bath before it is pure fancy on my part. István Hargittai’s Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century was also useful (Oxford, 2006).
On the development of the atomic bomb and the Hiroshima bombing I have relied above all on Richard Rhodes’s definitive The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986). If definitive it is also disputed: on this subject no book can be otherwise. My account of Szilard’s influence on Sakharov I also drew from Rhodes, this time his Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York, 1995). The fullest account of the Enola Gay crew’s reactions to the bomb that I have found is the one given by Peter J. Kuznick, ‘Defending the Indefensible: A Meditation on the Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr.’ (Asia Pacific Journal, 1 January 2008, Vol. 6).
Of the end of the Pacific war, which some Japanese date starting from 1931 and Allied countries from 1941, there can be no agreement and only proliferating accounts. My principal references were Richard B. Frank’s Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999), which posits one long-held argument, and Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931–1945 (London, 2021), which invents several new ones.
On the Tasmanian genocide, there is a fascinating historiography, but for an introduction Henry Reynolds’s work, especially Fate of a Free People (Melbourne, 1995) remains invaluable. (Reynolds, it should be noted, disagrees with the use of the word genocide in the context of the Van Diemonian war of extermination.) James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, 2010) reimagines the invasion then and with it Australia now. Tom Lawson’s The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London, 2014) makes clear British responsibility. Raphael Lemkin’s own illuminating chapters on the Tasmanian genocide from his unfinished and unpublished history of genocide were edited by Ann Curthoys and finally published as ‘Tasmania’ in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds), Colonialism and Genocide (London, 2007).
Collioure—Hobart—Moulting Bay, April 2022–July 2023
ENDNOTES
1 Yuki Kitazawa and Matthew Allen, ‘A Story That Won’t Fade Away: Compulsory Mass Suicide in the Battle of Okinawa’, Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 5, Issue 7, 12 July 2007; see also Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York, 1992), pp. 354–72
2 Jeremy Bernstein, ‘The Farm Hall Transcripts: The German Scientists and the Bomb’, New York Review of Books, 13 August 1992
3 Anton Chekhov, ‘Questions Posed By a Mad Mathematician’, The Undiscovered Chekhov. Thirty-Eight New Stories, (trans. Peter Constantine) (New York, 1998), p. 180
4 Pat Feeley, ‘Whiteboys and Ribbonmen’, City of Limerick Public Library, undated, limerickcity.ie/media/whiteboys%20and%20ribbonmen.pdf
5 Rebecca West, ‘English Literature, 1880-1905’, The Freewoman. A Weekly Humanist Review, Vol. II, No. 36, 25 July 1912, p. 187
6 Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium, (London, 1909), p. 239
7 Shaun Usher (ed.) Letters of Note, Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Edinburgh, 2021), pp. 277–78
8 Stephen Bourque, ‘Rouen: La Semaine Rouge,’ Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 14, issues 3 and 4, 2012, ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/jomass/v14i3/f_0027476_22450.pdf
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Richard Flanagan, Question 7
