JOHANNA BELL Department of the Vanishing. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Winner of a Tasmanian Literary Award, Johanna Bell’s novel is set in the near future and tallies Australia’s vanishing species.

It is tempting to describe Johanna Bell’s new novel Department of the Vanishing as a verse novel, slotting into the tradition of Dorothy Porter (The Monkey’s Mask, Wild Surmise). And there is a fair amount of verse here. But Bell herself has described this book as a ‘bricolage’, more like a scrapbook of thoughts, pictures, notes and ideas that is held together by a story told partially through blank verse. And that story is the story of our time – one of extinction and loss.

Readers will get an idea of what they are in for from the very beginning. The first page is a photograph of boxes full of dead, tagged birds. Next is a page with a note sticky-taped in the middle containing a quote from DH Lawrence:

In the beginning,
it was not a word
but a chirrup

Then there is a double page of text in different sizes representing bird calls: ‘chip-pee-tee’, ‘seepseep’, ‘tik-tik-tik’. After another quote and the picture of a door, readers come to the first part of a partially redacted police interview with a woman called Ava Wilde, recorded in November 2029. That interview is the closest this book gets to a framing device, with Bell returning to it at the beginning of each section.

The story revolves around Ava, who has worked as an archivist for the Department of the Vanishing since 2007. The job of this government department is to keep records of species that are going or have gone extinct. Its work is secret, but readers know from the start that Ava has been stealing information and pinning it around her home:

It’s not difficult to nick a sheet
or three

as photocopied skin
sticky-taped around a thigh

or tucked inside my business shirt
I smile and wave to Steve …

I can feel the papers taking flight
against my belly

soon to be pinned above my bed
I smile

Some of the pages Ava has stolen appear through the book. Initially, they contain general information about birds and their extinction:

• Since 1500 AD, 187 species of birds, now extinct, and 22 of them, or 12% vanished here …
  
• Scientists have calculated extinction at six stimes higher than historic rates and global biodiversity loss at least one hundred times pre-human rates and that’s an optimistic estimate.

There are also obituaries for other species:

Lorikeets – died August 1st, 2027 – falling from the sky, their rainbow wings unable to lift, clumsy hops like circus clowns drunk on single malt …

The magpie’s chortle – died August 31st, 2027 – in an inner-city car park as people packed cling-wrapped fruit into the boots of hungry cars …

Later, when Ava is directed to archive ‘all scientific and cultural materials’ related to the Menura novaehollandiae, also known as the superb lyrebird, the information pages are specifically about that species. Notes in the second half of the book are devoted to lyrebirds: how they look, their mating rituals, how they are known by different Aboriginal communities, their capacity to mimic and their role in the ecosystem, are all touched on:

• Lyrebirds move more dirt than any other digging vertebrate. 155 tonnes per hectare on average …

• Scientists call them ecosystem engineers, shaping the landscape for tens of thousands of years, disturbing soil, exposing earth, altering time and place.

But there is much more going on in this book than the archiving of extinct birds. Ava’s ornithologist father disappeared in the Blue Mountains when she was a child, and his body has never been found. She is still living with the trauma of that event. Ava visits her mother, who is in a hospice with dementia and seems to drop hints about what might have happened to Ava’s father. And then there is the relationship that Ava falls into with Luke. That relationship is highly sexually charged and becomes a little bit obsessive on Ava’s side:

I know it’s ridiculous
and way too much like primary school

but I can’t stop composing
page-long lists

documenting all the things
I like about Luke

This is, of course, above another sticky-taped note listing some of those things:

the way your teeth aren’t entirely straight
the rapid pace at which you speak
your fingernails chewed down to the wick

Despite herself, Ava agrees to copy and steal sound files for him from the archives. Luke uses the sounds of birdcalls that Ava steals for him to create his own soundscapes. Bell charts their relationship as Luke becomes more controlling and Ava becomes increasingly in his thrall.

Bell follows Ava as her world begins to unravel, and how she gains some clarity about the nature of her relationship with Luke and the work her father was doing.

There is a lot going on in Department of the Vanishing but Bell does not put everything front and centre. Instead, readers have to build the picture up from the diverse collection of first-person verse narrative, photos, transcripts, headlines, facts, lists, quotes, stamps and other assorted ephemera. But from that collection emerges a picture of the fragility of our planet, of the pressures on our threatened species, and of the way information is controlled to hide this despoilation. But also what emerges is the beauty and complexity of our natural world. Of the role of birds not only as an essential part of the environment, but also as contributors to our own wellbeing.

Department of the Vanishing is a grand experiment in multi-media storytelling. It is dense with information about the extinction threat to Australia’s birds, and deals with difficult issues of sexual control, abandonment and dementia, so it can be dark and confronting. Bell does nothing to guarantee that everything will be OK, but she does bring Ava (and readers) to a kind of catharsis, and that in the end has to be enough.

Johanna Bell Department of the Vanishing Transit Lounge 2026 PB 320pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He was a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards for many years and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: archivists, Australian birds, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, climate fiction, extinction, lorikeets, lyrebirds, verse novel