The two leading parliamentary opponents of wind turbines, David Leyonhjelm and John Madigan, have novelists in their employ. Madigan’s chief of staff is one Brendan Gullifer, the author of Sold, a satirical novel published by Melbourne publishers Sleepers. Leyonhjelm is advised by Helen Dale, aka Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, author of The Hand that Signed the Paper.



Dale’s involvement in the wind turbine “debate” is of particular interest, given her centrality to one of the defining culture wars of the 1990s. A re-examination of that episode illustrates the fascinating, albeit somewhat depressing, evolution of Australian politics over the last few decades.

In 1993, the manuscript that became The Hand that Signed the Paper won the Vogel Award, a prestigious prize for unpublished young writers. The novel centres on a Ukrainian family, members of which participate in the Holocaust. The characters justify their atrocities as revenge against the “Jewish Bolsheviks” supposedly responsible for repression in Ukraine.

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As per the terms of the competition, Allen & Unwin published the book the following year, giving the author’s name as Helen Demidenko. It went on to win the Australian Society for the Study of Australian Literature’s gold medal and the Miles Franklin Award, an astonishing achievement for such a young writer.

The initial controversy over the book stemmed from allegations of antisemitism – claims that, in essence, the novel itself shares the attitudes it describes. As one critic argued, “the Ukrainians are thinly drawn characters hard to tell apart and the Jews are cartoon baddies, straight out of a Ukrainian update of The Protocols of Zion”.

The second controversy, which overlapped the first, pertained less to the book than its author. The book’s publicity stressed Demidenko’s Ukrainian ancestry, supposedly the source for her controversial material. In interviews, the novelist spoke at length about her family and their connection to the Holocaust.

“I depended very heavily on my dad’s memories of what the famine was like,” she explained, “and his brother and some of my other relatives as well”.

None of that was true. Demidenko was, in fact, born Helen Darville, the daughter of English parents – and the revelations about her extraordinary deception embarrassed the book’s supporters, many of whom had relied on claims about “authenticity” in their defences of it.

In 2006, Dale (her married name) wrote her fullest account of the Demidenko affair, in an article republished in the conservative magazine Quadrant. Quadrant’s interest in the story reflected Dale’s growing prominence in conservative circles, after she’d taken to blogging both on her own page and for the right-wing group blog, Catallaxy Files.

In the Quadrant piece, Dale claims that she’d written under a pseudonym to protect her source, an elderly Ukrainian war criminal with “terminal bone marrow cancer and six months to live”. Though she’d been on the verge of revealing her true identity to her publishers, she’d changed her mind after receiving a negative editorial report.

“I tore up my half-written letter and binned it,” she says. “If a custard pie hits me in the face, I figured, it’ll get you lot [ie her publisher] as well.”

But she also says – rather contradictorily – that she intended the hoax as a blow against the left.

Australian literature was, she argues, “burdened with a level of ideological conformity that would do East Germany proud”. She was appalled by the “ridiculous pretension and self-importance” of the intellectual world, especially when critics “tried to prove that I must have had some sort of sneaking association with the League of Rights”.

The response “made me determined to humiliate a group I considered spineless, and my invented persona became ever more over the top”.

She decries her treatment at the hands of journalists who thought “Australia is populated by a mob of racist dills” and makes particular reference to Robert Manne’s book The Culture of Forgetting, which she says is “riddled with errors and laced with bile”.

This story of a plain-speaking, knockabout author undone by the political correctness of the literary left obviously resonates with key themes of the contemporary right.

Naturally, it’s not true. The most damaging attacks on Demidenko came from the right particularly first.

It was the conservative commentator Gerard Henderson, more than anyone else, who burst the Demidenko bubble. In his Fairfax column of 27 June 1995, Henderson wrote:

Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper is a loathsome book – all the more so because the author insists that her first novel is not just a work of fiction. Regrettable (and no doubt unintentionally) this book will give comfort to racists and antisemites – from Australia’s Lunar Right League of Rights to the fascist wing of Russia’s Pamyat movement.

That night, Henderson and Demidenko went head to head on the 7.30 Report. “You seem to be speaking on behalf of Jews”, she told Henderson, an extraordinary remark that gave further fuel to the accusations of antisemitism.

When Demidenko’s lies about her family were exposed, it was Henderson whom the media called upon on for comment. He gave multiple radio interviews on the day the story broke. In those appearances, Henderson was usually contending with liberal defenders of the book, such as broadcaster Jill Kitson (one of the Miles Franklin judges) and journalist David Marr (who had presented Demidenko with the Vogel prize).

(In an anticipation of more recent antagonisms, Marr complained that those attacking Demidenko were “drones … like the political commentator Gerard Henderson”.)

It was Henderson who linked Demidenko with the League of Rights – which means her claim to have intended her persona to humiliate her accusers makes no sense at all. Rather than being humiliated, Henderson saw (with some justification) the collapse of her story as a complete vindication.

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Furthermore, while Robert Manne also attacked Demidenko, he did so as a conservative, an ally of Henderson. He wasn’t denouncing her (as she implies) on the basis of a politically correct liberalism; rather he – like Henderson – blamed the fashionable liberalism of the literary scene for the willingness of many intellectuals to embrace such an unsavoury text.

That was the most common takeaway from the whole affair: that leftwingers had disgraced themselves by supporting Demidenko, not by attacking her.

“[W]e have been desperate for the authentic authorial voice of contemporary multiculturalism,” wrote Luke Slattery in the Australian. “The early players in the Demidenko affair were easily duped because, for various reasons, they wanted to be seduced by the siren voices of multiculturalism.”



“There are two stories here,” editorialised the Age, “and neither has reached its end. One is about a young woman who seems to have no meaningful notion of the truth, dubious motives and a pronounced instinct for what her family chooses to call ‘marketing’. The other is about a poverty of intellect and feeling at the core of the Australian literary culture which is truly shocking.”

The reference to Manne helps explain Dale’s strange, retrospective inversion of the affair’s politics.

The Demidenko episode took place in the brief interregnum between the end of the cold war and the beginning of the war on terror. It was a period of recalibration, in which both the traditional right and the traditional left adjusted to the collapse of the Communism against which they had both been defined, and to the sudden ubiquity of free market capitalism.

The transition allowed for a degree of fluidity in culture war skirmishes.

Alongside the liberals who backed Demidenko, there were also some rightwingers – most notably, the Miles Franklin judge Dame Leonie Kramer, a conservative educationalist.

Others spoke up after her exposure, hinting that she’d been the victim of a sinister Jewish lobby. The Australian, for instance, published an extraordinary cartoon showing a Demidenko figure impaled on a Menorah, the traditional Jewish candelabrum.

2GB broadcaster Ron Casey told his listenership that the response to Demidenko showed “once again how susceptible we are to these pressure groups, the ethnic groups and also the political groups”.

The journalist Frank Devine denounced Isi Liebler, president of the Council of Australian Jewry, for exulting over Demidenko’s unmasking.

“Leibler acted before the TV cameras as if he were celebrating the downfall of an enemy,” he wrote. “To me, at that moment, he represented the unacceptable bullyboy face of anti-anti-Semitism.”

Les Murray ran a similar line. Demidenko had been punished, he argued, because she talked “about dangerous material, the Holocaust and, more dangerous still, the immense slaughter, the killing fields, of the Communists – you’re just not allowed to mention that stuff”. He wrote a poem in her honour.

Murray, of course, was the literary editor of Quadrant. At the time it was edited by Robert Manne, featured Leonie Kramer on its committee of management and had Devine as a regular contributor.

Quadrant had been founded by one of the CIA’s cultural fronts as part of the agency’s efforts to foster anti-communism within Western intellectual circles. Not surprisingly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the journal went through something of an upheaval.

Manne’s conservatism was that of a cold war liberal – and, with the end of the cold war, that liberalism slowly reasserted itself in the form of an increasing preoccupation with justice for Indigenous people.

Most of the other Quadrant personnel were moving in a different direction, embracing the emerging rightwing consensus that was economically neoliberal and socially neoconservative. For them, Manne’s anti-racism was dangerous, liable to undermine the national mythologies necessary for a free market to function.

The Demidenko affair was the beginning of the process by which Manne was ousted from Quadrant (in favour of Padraic McGuinness, another Demidenko supporter) and became persona non grata on the right.

It’s worth recalling that history, simply because it’s increasingly being whitewashed.

When Dale took the job with Leyonhjelm, Paul Sheehan wrote an admiring piece explaining how, back in the day, she had “extended the fiction of ‘Helen Demidenko’ beyond pseudonym and into role play”.

Well, that’s one way of putting it – except, of course, the “play” involved some of the most horrific events of the 20th century.

As Guy Rundle said at the time, “[Demidenko’s conduct] is perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times, a shameful use of the tragedy of lived history for self-advancement.

“It has revived discredited and mendacious hypotheses about the background to eastern European antisemitism and complicity in the Holocaust, and caused unimaginable pain to the survivors of the Shoah, their families and communities.”

So, yeah. Role play.

It’s worth continuing with Rundle’s article (probably one of the best pieces published in the midst of the debate).

“More disgraceful than the celebration of this antisemitic tract,” he argues, “has been the hypocrisy and bad faith with which the literary community have attempted to cover their tracks …”

You can see how The Hand that Signed the Paper fit with the vulgar post-modernism prejudices in the literary world at that time.

“There is a story,” said Demidenko, “it has many sides; I have adopted a speaking position that has not been adopted before”.

Her rhetoric was that of academic identity politics: a rejection of absolutes and universalisms; a celebration of a multiplicity of equally valid discourses.

Within that framework, if Demidenko wanted to present a narrative of the Holocaust from the perspective of its perpetrators, well, that was just her particular speaking position. To question her history would be to impose a totalising model of truth upon the fluidity of her text.

Today, a version of this postmodern relativism – a tendency once associated with the liberal left – has been adopted by the neoliberal right.

In their book The Times Will Suit Them, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe identify two key features of what they call “postmodern conservatism”.

The first is an abandonment of universal aspects of the western tradition in favour of a ferocious defence of particular values, not because they’re objectively valid but rather because they’re “ours”. Think of Tony Abbott’s willingness to jettison the rule of law in the name of Team Australia. Which side are you on, he asks, in an echo of that old rhetoric about “speaking positions”.

The second feature of postmodern conservatism, say Boucher and Sharpe, is what they call the “socially constructivist” conviction:

[T]hat the population can be brought over to your particular worldview through top-down political manipulation. The message needs only to be repeated enough, and packaged in the right ways, including the use of populist buzzwords: elites, battlers, mainstream, mateship, diggers, aspirational nationalism, and so on.

The campaign against wind farms, with its astro-turf lobby groups, provides a perfect example. The claims made about the damaging effects of turbines are entirely bogus, with study after study finding no evidence of any adverse health impacts caused by wind farms.

But that’s not the point. The politicians driving the campaign against renewable energy are free market ideologues, mostly connected with the Institute for Public Affairs. In the Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe documents the trail linking such figures with the fossil fuel industry and its various fronts. They want to curtail alternative energy – and any argument will do. Wind farms are noisy. Wind farms are dangerous. Wind farms are, God help us, ugly.

Not surprisingly, it’s reminiscent of the strategy employed in respect of climate change by the same kinds of people, who offer an array of mutually contradictory arguments. Climate change isn’t happening – but if it is, humans aren’t causing it. Oh, and if they are causing it, it’s actually a good thing.

The suitability of a novelist for this kind of politics is obvious.

“[Dale’s] achievements are superb; she’s the youngest ever winner of the Miles Franklin literary award at the age of 20,” Leyonhjelm told the ABC, when he hired her.

“The controversy at the time was that she extended the fiction into her authorship. I recall at the time thinking it was hilarious, it was all a big joke, but she kept up the fiction for quite a while.”

In that passage, Leyonhjelm sounds disconcertingly like a leftist academic postmodernist of the late 1980s or early 1990s, celebrating postmodern play, free floating signifiers and the death of the author.

Re-reading the debates about The Hand that Signed the Paper is like looking into a distorting mirror, at a view that’s both familiar and utterly strange. Aside from anything else, the newspapers in the early 1990s devoted far more column inches to the novel than media outlets would today. Back then, literary culture was still widely considered a good thing, in and of itself.

Since then, the neoliberal turn has forced literature, like everything else, to justify its social value in market terms – which, of course, it can’t do. As a result, few editors today would allocate similar space to an argument about a book. Where’s the money in that?

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Senator George Brandis’ raid on the Australia Council’s budget provides a good illustration of the importance currently accorded to novelists – which is to say, not very much at all. Yet as one door closes, another opens, as they say.

In his Saturday Paper piece, Seccombe quotes what he calls “an incoherent diatribe” from Dale, in which she boasts about how she and Leyonhjelm will have public health expert Simon Chapman “minced” for his attitude to wind farms.

She seems, on the face of it, to be threatening precisely the kind of campaign her supporters decried back in the 1990s – except that she wants to unleash it on someone who has done nothing other than support objective reality when it comes to the health impacts of wind power.

Free market libertarianism prizes freedom, understood primarily as the freedom to buy or sell. It puts no particular value on truth. Thus, in our neoliberal age, there will always be opportunities for people prepared to make stuff up.