Fiction galore

When entries closed in July, we had received 1300 entries in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Our three voracious judges are now finalising the shortlist. The four nominated short stories will appear in our Fiction issue in October. We will name the winner at an event in Melbourne later that month.

High talk in Canberra

Late October will be a fine time to be in Canberra. ABR is associated with two major public lectures at the National Library of Australia. On Monday, 24 October, Robert Dessaix will deliver the Seymour Biography Lecture 2011 (which is supported by John and Heather Seymour, ABR, and the National Library). Dr Dessaix’s paper is titled ‘Pushing against the Dark: Writings about the Hidden Self’. Previous Seymour Lecturers have included Richard Holmes, Brenda Niall, and Frances Spalding. The following evening (25 October), Professor Ian Donaldson will deliver the Australian Book Review Fiftieth Birthday Lecture. His theme is ‘Ben Jonson’s Double Life’. This lecture coincides with the publication of Professor Donaldson’s long-awaited biography of Ben Jonson (OUP). Both lectures will commence at 6 p.m.. These are free events, but you should reserve seats on (02) 6262 1271 or at www.nla.eventbrite.com. Don’t leave it too late!

Enter the Calibre Prize

We have tweaked the prize money for the Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, which is now open for the sixth year in a row. Instead of a single prize, we now have three, worth $7000, $2000, and $1000 (single winners only in each category). Entries close on 1 December 2011. The entry form is available from our website. ABR again thanks Copyright Agency Limited for its long and inspired support for Australia’s premier essay prize. The Calibre page on our website will give you a good idea of the range, and quality, of the nine winning essays to date, of which seven now appear online.

Loyalty program

ABR is mightily grateful to its long-term subscribers, many of whom have been with us for decades. To reward those who have subscribed for five years or longer, we now invite them to select a new or recent publication from our vast library when they renew. We will email those who are due to renew and append a list of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from which they can choose. If you haven’t given us your email address, please forward it to Gail Southwell (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). If you don’t use email but wish to participate in the loyalty program, phone Ms Southwell on (03) 9429 6700.

New poetry journal

It has been an auspicious year for Australian poetry, with the creation of the online Australian Poetry Library and the imminent publication of Australian Poetry since 1788, edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray (noted poet–translator Michael Hofmann will review it for ABR). Now we have a new poetry magazine, Australian Poetry Journal, created by Australian Poetry Ltd. Fittingly, the theme of the first issue is ‘Beginnings’. Advances spoke to Bronwyn Lea, the Editor, when she came to Melbourne to finalise the initial selection – from about 2500 poems. Local poets include three past winners of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize: Anthony Lawrence, Tracy Ryan, and Alex Skovron. Overseas poets include Christian Bok, Paul Kane, and Clive James. APJ also includes reviews, criticism, and a laudable feature on late poets (first up, Judith Beveridge on Robert Harris). The inaugural issue will be launched in October. A subscription to APJ is included in the annual membership to Australian Poetry Ltd. APJ can also be purchased direct from www.australianpoetry.org.

Fridays at Flinders

On 16 September, 3:30 p.m., ABR and our sponsor, Flinders University, co-present author Amy T. Matthews in conversation with Gillian Dooley in the latest of Flinders’ ‘Fridays at the Library’ events. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night: Writing the Holocaust in End of the Night Girl’ will address the challenges Matthews encountered in writing her Best Unpublished Manuscript Award-winning novel (2010 Adelaide Festival Award), and take place in Flinders University’s Central Library. For enquiries call (08) 8201 5238, or email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Prizes troika

Prompt new and renewing subscribers this month will receive one of three terrific prizes. Ten people will receive signed copies of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (now a major television drama); a further ten will receive tickets to one of three performances of Viennese Serenade by the Australian Chamber Orchestra; and ten renewing subscribers will receive copies of William S. Burroughs: A Man Within on DVD, thanks to Madman. Call us now on (03) 9429 6700 or subscribe online to claim your special prize.

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2011

Mitchell revealed

Dear Editor,

Your reviewer of my publication Book Life: The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell (July–August 2011) has not properly understood the book and its central arguments. Mitchell poses an historiographical challenge due to the scarcity of conventional biographical sources. Typical and superficial understandings of him stem largely from a few reports, mostly posthumous, about Mitchell in his later years. My book presents and interprets previously untapped material and includes an extensive examination of items from Mitchell’s collection, together with other historical evidence. This allows us to understand Mitchell’s milieu, dispels the conventional view of Mitchell as a reclusive and enigmatic figure in his own time, and furnishes the context in which we can understand his importance. Paul Brunton’s review illustrates precisely the need for such an approach. His preference for well-worn accounts (as for example about Mitchell’s cockatoo) only perpetuates myths about him.

Mr Brunton critiques the technique of interpreting Mitchell on the basis of his collecting choices, suggesting that Mitchell collected ‘irrespective of subject’. Mitchell was a discerning collector. Receipts for Mitchell’s purchases, when matched to booksellers’ catalogues listing titles which he did not buy, reveal Mitchell’s selectivity. I document Mitchell’s personal connections with items he chose, with many titles by authors with whom Mitchell or his family were personally acquainted. Mr Brunton ignores this and dismisses patterns that this detail reveals.

Mr Brunton expresses the view that the book provides inadequate evidence outside the consideration of Mitchell’s ownership. Perhaps Mr Brunton missed the sixty-two pages of footnotes citing evidentiary sources. Through the book I present previously unpublished information about Mitchell’s family and its background and connections, including their collecting and philanthropic activities. This detail provides insights into Mitchell’s inherited outlook and his life and experiences, corroborating the insights drawn from an analysis of his collected items. Moreover, in his review Mr Brunton himself cites two books in Mitchell’s collection as evidence of his school attendance – without naming their titles.

Australian Book Review has failed to sufficiently identify Mr Brunton. He is described simply as a ‘Sydney-based archivist and librarian’. Paul Brunton is in fact Exhibitions Curator at Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Mr Brunton knows me as the State Library of New South Wales’s C.H. Currey Fellow (2007–08), and is familiar with my subsequent research into Mitchell’s milieu and his collecting.

Eileen Chanin, Sydney, NSW

Paul Brunton replies:

Ms Chanin answers none of my specific criticisms of her book because she cannot. She has no evidence for the events she describes in the first chapter; what she asserts to be D.S. Mitchell’s school primer is not, which thereby invalidates the conclusions she draws from it; there is no evidence that Mitchell read Bonwick’s Geography as a child; there is no evidence that Rev. John Grylls tutored Mitchell, and so on. I challenge Ms Chanin to demonstrate that just one of these criticisms is invalid.

She asserts that I do not ‘properly understand the book and its central argument’. Readers will make up their own minds whether, without other evidence, it is prudent to assert that the ownership of a book indicates approval of its contents by a man who was a professional book collector. ‘Sixty-two pages of footnotes citing evidentiary sources’ prove nothing if the sources are not evidentiary at all. I challenge Ms Chanin to tell us where in these many footnotes is the evidence for her thesis.

Mitchell did collect irrespective of subject when it came to Australiana, which was three-quarters of his collection. Of course, he was more selective in other areas. The number of extant receipts for purchases is so minimal as to invalidate any argument based on them.

The two books which prove Mitchell went to St Philip’s Grammar School are John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy (1849) and A. Bell’s Algebra: Theoretical and Practical (1848).Ms Chanin’s ‘extensive examination of items from Mitchell’s collection’ must have overlooked these, as she also overlooked the fact that his attendance at St Philip’s has been noted in at least two books, both of which appear in Ms Chanin’s bibliography.

Ms Chanin says she ‘dispels the conventional view of Mitchell as a reclusive’ and ‘present[s] previously unpublished information about Mitchell’s family and its background and connections’. I agree, and said so in my review.

The cockatoo is not a myth; Mitchell did have one (there is a photo of it at Mitchell’s home), and he did ask Cayley to paint its portrait (an evidentiary letter survives). And on the matter of accuracy, I am not now, nor have I ever been, ‘Exhibitions Curator at Sydney’s Mitchell Library’ – a fact so easily checked.

Outside the off stump

Dear Editor,

Alison Carroll is quite right to rebuke me for not defining my terms correctly in my piece ‘Native Grounds and Foreign Fields’ (June 2011). My experience is limited to north-eastern America and Western Europe as regards the exhibition of Australian art internationally. But good may yet come from my error. I am sure that many of your readers are as ignorant, too, of the Schweitzer-like job that Alison Carroll and Asialink are doing for Australian art in Asia. (Everybody knew Albert Schweitzer was doing great work in Darkest Africa, but nobody ever actually saw it.) As for the challenge as to whether I think the audience of the United States or Japan, Tokyo or New York, is more significant, I sense a short-pitched delivery outside the off stump. If I offer a shot, I shall surely be caught in the gully. So I shall just lift my bat and let it pass harmlessly through to the keeper.

Patrick McCaughey, Connecticut, USA

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2011

There are two sorts of carelessness that a reviewer of history books will regularly see. The first is a minor marring of virtue: a small blot on a show of swashbuckling confidence and command over grand themes, a lack of care for what lesser men may think, arrogance even. We often call this being carefree rather than careless. The critic can correct and admire and move on. The second sort of carelessness is unsettling, almost a vice: a show of unconcern and shallow understanding, an arrogance of a different kind, a lack of care of any kind. In his lengthy account of the history of Rome, Robert Hughes is doubly, gloriously, and disgracefully careless.

Modern travellers can hardly conceive the perils of the sea in the age of sail. Merchant seamen excepted, today’s average seafarer rides a massive cruise ship warned by radar to skirt round storms and stabilised against the rolling of all but the most powerful swells. The terrors of the deep do not extend far beyond poor maintenance, food poisoning, bad company, and illicit drugs administered by persons of interest to the police. Global positioning devices make navigation a breeze. Fifteen-year-old girls single-handedly circumnavigate the globe, and Antarctica is a fun destination for seniors.

Henry Kissinger has never seemed at home in the United States, although he has served in its highest councils and received its richest rewards. When I was one of his students at Harvard, we called him Henry, to distinguish him from professorial luminaries such as Galbraith, Riesman, and Schlesinger. He did not fit the insistent reasonableness of the Harvard faculty. His guttural voice, anxiety to please, mischievous, self-deprecating humour, and fearsome views on nuclear warfare made him an almost unbelievable figure of playful profundity.

In her short memoir of Susan Sontag, novelist Sigrid Nunez claims that she did not read the obituaries and commentaries after her death in 2004, and that she was never much interested in what other people said about Sontag. If it’s true, she is indeed a rara avis. Susan Sontag, in death as in life, generates enormous interest and a growing literature, one that promises to burgeon and diversify biographically in the next decade. How long before we hear from the concierge, the oncologist, the tamer of the famous mane?

Three years ago, Sontag’s only child, David Rieff, published a short book about his mother’s final illness. (Earlier this year MUP, which published the Australian edition of Swimming in a Sea of Death, was solely responsible for Rieff’s cogent meditation on the dubiety and sentimentality of collective memory, ironically titled Against Remembrance.) Books about the loss of parents are legion, and Rieff’s book is one of the more affecting, comparable to Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (Une mort très douce, 1964), perhaps the finest of filial memoirs.

Rieff, who attests on every page to his profound love and respect for his mother – and, self-excoriatingly, to his profound sense of guilt – concentrates on the few months between her diagnosis with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a particularly lethal form of blood cancer, and her agonising death at the age of seventy-one. Almost incomprehensible to him is Sontag’s ‘deep refusal of death itself’ – her terror, her incredulity. This denial persisted until the end, despite the fact that, or perhaps because, she had twice survived cancer before. Shockingly ill and wasted, Sontag talked only of more treatment – never mortality. Often she spoke of wanting to live to be one hundred. Thirty years earlier, in a hospital journal, Sontag had written: ‘With daggers lying at the end of my dreams, I [don’t] sleep much.’ One thinks of other active nightlong dreaders of death, including Peter Porter, who reminds us in the poem ‘Alcestis and the Poet’ that ‘it is not a small thing to die’.

Now the Sontag literature extends to a book written by one of Rieff’s former girlfriends. Sigrid Nunez has titled her memoir Sempre Susan because that is how Sontag preferred to be known. She was always ‘Susan’, even to David as a boy. Nunez, a twenty-five-year-old Columbia graduate, joined the Sontag household in 1976. Sontag, who was recovering from advanced breast cancer and the gruesome radical mastectomy known as a ‘Halsted’ (rarely practised nowadays), needed help with her correspondence, and her friends at the New York Review of Books recommended Nunez, a sometime intern. (Nunez is rather cool about the vaunted editors at NYRB.)

The young novelist was quickly charmed by her famous employer. ‘It’s always good to start off anything by breaking a rule,’ Sontag advised her, forever eschewing what Henry James called ‘the dull desert of the conventional’. Sontag’s intimacy, confessions, needfulness, and sheer egoism overwhelmed Nunez. The famously unsatisfactory childhood was like a mantra in the apartment overlooking the Hudson River. ‘Over and over we heard it: My Mother never cared what happened to me. My mother was never there for me. It might as well have been yesterday. A wound that never healed.’ Time and again Nunez heard about the lost father, the daily glasses of blood her mother fed her for her anaemia, the hasty teenage marriage that produced David.

Before long Sontag – culturally ravenous and an instinctive mentor – was listing all the books that Nunez should read, and escorting her to the Japanese films and Mozart operas she urgently needed to see. When David expressed interest in the young intern, Sontag made some calls and soon Nunez was ensconced with David in the maid’s room, next to Susan’s bedroom. The three of them became inseparable. Sontag referred to them as the duke and duchess and duckling of Riverside Drive. ‘I knew that wasn’t good’, notes Nunez with decided understatement.

Nunez was aware – as all of New York seems to have been – of the rumours about David and Susan’s relationship. ‘Now people came out and asked … Have they had sex together?’ Dining with the young couple, a professorial friend asked David quite openly if it was true. Impressively, Sontag never mentioned the innuendoes. Nunez was always amazed by the animus towards Sontag.

Around the time Nunez moved in with Rieff, Sontag began dating Joseph Brodsky, newly settled in America. Susan adored the paunchy, garrulous, chain-smoking, opinionated Russian (‘Susan, Susan, wait now, shut up, please, I am talking’). The four of them would drive around Manhattan, ‘four cigarettes going, the car filled with smoke and Joseph’s deep, rumbling voice’. (Of Brodsky, in Rieff’s memoir, we learn only this: as Sontag lay incoherently dying, she spoke mostly of Brodsky and her detested mother.)

Sontag’s reverence for (and deep immersion in) European writers, so surprising to Nunez, is everywhere apparent in her writings. The essays ring with quotes from Mann and Kafka and Gautier and Machiavelli – but not Dickinson or Emerson or any of the Jameses. Sontag informed Nunez that the last first-rate American novel was Faulkner’s Light in August, which was published in 1932. The status of her own fiction – the two early, disregarded novels, and the later ones, The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999) – was a source of endless disquiet. To the young Nunez she seemed ‘mortally malcontented’. Despite the fame, the travel, the honours, the many lovers, ‘a sense of failure clung to her like widow’s weeds’. In both of these memoirs, we get a sense of a perpetually anxious and insecure woman. Sontag was rarely witty, but somewhere in the recently published journals she writes: ‘Too often I sink to the occasion.’ (This lack of humour may explain why, until her late rehabilitation, she was never in vogue at the New Yorker – the magazine with the statutory comic zinger in every third sentence.)

The contradictions were intense, like the demands Sontag made on people, often fuelled by her loathing of solitude. Rieff has written about his mother’s ‘meteor showers of verbiage’. Notoriously difficult with friends, she seemed to think it was her right to berate people. Nunez was repelled by her treatment of strangers (the waiters and hotel clerks who were not paid to answer back). Once, tellingly, Sontag was asked not to go back to a coffee shop in SoHo. Nunez remarks: ‘She was outraged to be thought of as a monster, but, when speaking of her rivals, she enjoyed quoting a saying that had been popular when she was growing up: “It’s like putting a baby in the ring with Joe Louis.”’

After a few years, Nunez’s relationship with Rieff began to falter, not helped by his mother’s ubiquity (those lonely nocturnal visits to their bedroom, always needing to talk, to postpone the night) or by Sontag’s revulsion at the idea of their leaving Riverside Drive. Eventually the couple parted. (Here,  Nunez is fairly discreet about their relationship.) Subsequent contact between Susan and Sigrid was fleeting. Nunez confides that Sontag reminded her of her own difficult mother. Less plausible is a belated confession of Nunez’s, which seems wishful and gratuitous: ‘to be honest, I often played dumb with Susan, and if there was one thing that could drive her insane, it was that.’ Nunez, a little vengefully, begins to turn on her old mentor (‘A more confident writer would not have been as addicted as she was to the thesaurus’).

Rieff (who doesn’t mention Nunez in Swimming in a Sea of Death) remarks that he decided not to take any notes during Sontag’s illness. ‘Perhaps no writer can escape the sliver of ice in the heart that is one of the professional deformations of their craft,’ he tells us, ‘but to the extent I could, I wanted no “writerly” distance to separate or protect me emotionally from the reality of what was going on.’

Nunez, early in Sempre Susan, is coy to the point of caginess as to whether she kept a journal during her years chez Sontag. Her recall is impressive, and there is no doubt her famous subject has always obsessed her. It would be curious to know when Nunez first contemplated writing this memoir (just as it would be fascinating to know when Joyce Carol Oates began to conceive and jot down notes for her eerie, forensic book about another death: that of her husband).

We memorialise the dead – as we befriend the living – for complicated moral and practical reasons, reasons that are not always consummately clear to us.

Susan Sontag’s two classic essays on illness (Illness as Metaphor [1979] and Aids and Its Metaphors [1989]) are impressively austere and impersonal. The former, though written shortly after Sontag’s first catastrophic illness, is, as Rieff remarks, ‘almost anti-autobiographical, intentionally so’. Sontag, in some ways, has much in common with Janet Malcolm. Technically, they are so alike, both armed with potent empirical and deductive skills. But Sontag, in these two brilliant summaries of our chronic need to stigmatise and euphemise illness, seems admirably neutral compared with Malcolm, who can be arch and in-your-face and idly disdainful, especially in the new book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011).

There is nothing remotely guarded about another portrait of Susan Sontag: Terry Castle’s withering essay on her ex-friend, which first appeared in the London Review of Books soon after Sontag’s death. Castle includes it in her hilarious new collection, The Professor and Other Writings (Tuskar Rock Press, $39.99 hb, 340 pp, 9781848877405).

‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ is an affectionate portrait of Sontag as monster or dragon. The pair knew each other for ten years, ‘an on-again, off-again semi-friendship, constricted by role playing and shot through in the end with mutual irritation’. Castle likens their relationship to the one between Dame Edna and Madge Allsop. Having idolised Sontag since reading ‘Notes on Camp’ as ‘an exceedingly arch nine-year-old’, Castle is conscious of the brevity of their ‘honeymoon phase’. Nothing she does, however slavish, assuages Sontag, who seems vain, bored, injured, querulous, pompous, ungrateful, and often preposterous (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). Sontag is also erotically charismatic – ‘quite fabulously butch – perhaps the Butchest One of All’. Finally, Castle goes too far, commits a minor faux pas and is spat out like many before her. Yet Castle the caricaturist is magnanimous, and opines that the real reckoning has yet to begin. Jaundiced but still intrigued, she anticipates ‘a better and less routine accounting of [Sontag’s] extraordinary cultural significance’.

They will never leave this consuming and conflicted woman alone.

It is a mark perhaps of her publisher’s confidence and her own bestselling status that the cover of Alice Pung’s second book has her name in large print, dwarfing even the title itself. Her Father’s Daughter is the sequel to Pung’s Unpolished Gem (2006), and the memoir picks up a couple of years later with the author having dusted away adolescence and now being in the midst of the equally bewildering twenty-something years.

Charles Drazin tells us that his interest in French cinema began as a student at Oxford in the early 1980s, when he attended screenings at the Maison Française, an institution established after World War II to encourage cultural exchange between Britain and France. Some of the films were obscure, some better known; the audience comprised devotees and newcomers who never quite knew what they were going to see. The free admission, the 16 mm projector, the portable screen fixed to a tripod, even the scraping of chairs on wooden floors contributed to the sense of occasion for the young cinéastes.

Why do you write?

I’m actually answering this question last because it’s had me stumped for days. The most important reason I can come up with is, because it’s fun. When I wrote The Art of the Engine Driver, I wanted it to have some of the compression and charge of a great pop song – like Please Please Me.Writing should feel like that.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I can be. The idea for The Art of the Engine Driver came from a dream of my old street. It was so vivid – virtual, you might say – that I abandoned the project I had in mind and followed the dream.

The heroes and villains in Nick Dyrenfurth’s account of the early Labor Party are the cartoon figures in the labour press that he uses to explore its political rhetoric. The heroes are sturdy working men, sometimes in bush garb, sometimes industrial labourers. The villains take various forms: serpents, harpies, bloodsucking insects, menacing aliens, but above all the Fat Man, the swollen, grotesque embodiment of capitalist greed. Dyrenfurth observes that Mr Fat is a far more ubiquitous device in Australian radical iconography than its counterparts elsewhere. British cartoons used a variety of villains: aristocratic loafers, rapacious landlords, ruthless sweaters, mendacious press barons. Those in the United States were less likely to personify capitalism with a generic capitalist villain than to depict combines and trusts.

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ said historian David Lowenthal in 1985, adopting L.P. Hartley’s famous opening line from The Go-Between. Most historians agree, proceeding from the premise that the past is remote and in need of discovery, and that there is no automatic link between people in the present and those in the past. It is a supposition in complete contradistinction to non-professionals’ ideas about the past, according to historians Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, directors of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. For most Australians, history takes place where they ‘feel at home’. That is, it is a domesticated pursuit, consumed in familiar surrounds, and more often than not related most intimately to family and genealogy.

Christine Nixon belongs to the postwar generation of women who were not content to be passed over in favour of men when they entered the workforce, and who refused to accept the notion of a glass ceiling. Germaine Greer changed all our lives; empowered us as second-wave feminists. Nixon rose to the top in two of the most masculine organisations in Australia, the New South Wales and Victorian police forces. She became the first female chief commissioner in Australia, one of a handful around the world. Sadly, her legacy is now compromised. Fair Cop explores how this happened, and why.

At the beginning of Steven Carroll’s new novel, Spirit of Progress, Michael stands on a platform of the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. Readers of Carroll’s ‘Glenroy’ trilogy will remember that Michael is Vic and Rita’s son – a boy who grew up with an unblinking grasp of his parents’ fractured marriage and who learned early to fend for himself. Now a man, Michael observes the foreign trains and reminisces about his father’s love of engine driving. He realises then that his home suburb ‘will always claim him’ and that he has ‘a whole world inside his head … complete and vast, going about its daily life, constantly moving as if alive and still evolving’ (ellipsis in original).

A book’s epigraph doesn’t often feel like a direct personal statement to the reader, but the one in Thought Crimes, drawn from Ionesco, is just that: ‘You got stuck in the mud of life. You felt warm and cosy. (Sharply) Now you’re going to freeze.’ Imagine the world as a jigsaw from which the author has removed some pieces, substituting them with his own pieces – but which ones are they?

Any attempt to write a novel that covers three generations, two centuries, and two continents is undeniably ambitious. Include subject matter that ranges from Jewishness and gemstones to the occult, and set the story in a vibrant and sometimes turbulent time in the history of Melbourne and Victoria, from the 1850s gold rushes to the early 1900s, and the possibilities are exciting. Whether A Break in the Chain is also the ‘brilliant imagining’ it purports to be is another question entirely.

Diego Maradona is the greatest football player I have ever seen, but as a coach he sits somewhere between a comic opera and a train wreck. Philip Larkin was one of Britain’s finest poets, but to read his music criticism is to wish someone had heaved his typewriter into the nearest river. Ronald Reagan qualified as an A-grade B-movie actor, yet as president – the biggest acting role on the planet – he proved decidedly C-grade. Switching genres can be tough.

Melanie Joosten’s first novel, Berlin Syndrome, is a compelling literary thriller. Clare, an Australian travelling alone in Europe, meets a charming Berlin local, Andi. The novel centres on their relationship, which soon becomes something quite different from what either had intended.

The premise of Jam Dreaming is worthwhile; three cultures and generations meet over food. Eileen is an Aboriginal girl who lives in a squat. She is grieving for her mother, who died of alcoholism. Trying to find warmth beside a restaurant at night, she stumbles into the life of Mama Jocsdi, who cooks traditional European food. Mama’s sister, Nellie, with whom she escaped the Nazis, remains an elusive character. Eileen also makes friends with two other elderly women; Aboriginal matriarch Aunty Lois, and her sister. Eileen begins to learn skills and identity from these women.

Australians are suckers for a day at the races, and may be suckers for novels and poems about a day at the races. Consider Gerald Murnane’s metaphysics of racing, Peter Temple’s grim Melbourne in which stresses are relieved by a bottle of Bolly or some such beverage after a successful day at the track. The term ‘Turf’ is granted three-and-a-half columns in the 1985 edition of the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Frank Hardy and Dal Stivens, ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Vincent Buckley, are cited as having ambivalent relations with the ‘sport of kings’. Adam Lindsay Gordon was a champion steeplechase jockey, and, ‘despite the attacks of A.D. Hope and others, including Joseph Furphy, Henry Lawson, and Patrick White, many Australian writers have had a personal commitment to the turf’. The Australian Jockey Club has returned the compliment: at its annual Expressway Stakes meeting, minor races are named after Australian poets, including Dorothea Mackellar and Mary Gilmore.

In contemporary crime fiction, first-person narrators can often sound irritatingly implausible, either too much the Marlovian stoic or too much the Holmesian savant. This is not the case with The Fix, Nick Earls’s latest offering, in which the narratorial voice is convincing from the first page. Then again, The Fix is hardly a conventional work of crime fiction; it has some ingredients of the genre (a death, a cover-up, a bit of gunplay), but also a good deal of comedy and single-guy angst. Even more surprisingly, the reliable narrator doing the detective work is not some gumshoe or forensics-lab genius, but – of all things – a lifestyle blogger and part-time spin doctor.

The reception of SBS’s documentary Go Back to Where You Came From held out the promise that Australians’ antagonism towards asylum seekers was softening. But old certainties shift in unpredictable ways. In an essay in the September 2010 issue of The Monthly, Robert Manne, a long-standing critic of the Howard government’s asylum seeker policy, asked some uncomfortable questions of the left: Didn’t Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’ actually work? What if the Australians who are hostile to asylum seekers can’t be dismissed as a racist redneck minority, but are instead the ‘overwhelming majority of the Australian mainstream’? What, then, of the mythical Australian values of mateship, equality, and the fair go? Arnold Zable’s latest book, Violin Lessons, situates itself within this, the most disturbing moral debate Australia has engaged in since 1992, when the Keating government introduced mandatory immigration detention.

Martha Nussbaum has been attracting attention in the Australian press recently for her views on the importance of the humanities in university education. As the British government prepares to cut all public funding for the teaching of the humanities, social sciences, and much else besides, Nussbaum’s last book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), has been widely cited by those espousing the public benefit attached to the teaching of the humanities.

Gwen Good’s migration to Perth in 1963 turned out well. She loved Australia, the climate that turned life into one long summer holiday, and the house that she and her family soon acquired. She was an active member of her church, and a contented wife and mother who revelled in her children. By the 1980s she was ready to give away the bundle of reel-to-reel tapes on which, decades before, the family had conveyed its early impressions of Perth in audio letters to be sent home to England. The letters had come back to her when, in turn, her parents migrated to join the Goods in Perth. They held a past that had blended so seamlessly into the present that it no longer seemed particularly interesting.

Literary biography is an often derided genre. Writers, in particular, tend to be suspicious, if not openly hostile, toward what they are apt to regard as a secondary or parasitic form. And there are valid reasons for this wariness. The assumption behind a biography is, reasonably enough, that the writer’s life informs the work, but establishing the precise relevance of the life to the work is a treacherous business. Because it is possible to argue that anything a creative writer experiences is at least potentially significant, there is no obvious line between a legitimate and a trivial, or even a prurient, interest in the details of a writer’s personal life. Furthermore, the biographical approach would seem to have a natural bias toward a view of the work of art as symptomatic. In granting priority to the material facts of the writer’s existence, it preferences, and in some cases openly pursues, interpretations that are either narrowly literal, reductively sociological, or dubiously psychological.

In 1629, Charles I of England sent Daniel Nys to Europe to buy art. Along with works by Titian and Rubens, Nys bought Mantegna’s masterpiece, The Triumphs of Caesar (1486–92). This work on nine large panels is at once sombre and full of wonders. Of its time the most accurate representation of Roman customs and costumes, it is also a work in which precision has a strange effect, almost of tenderness. Still hung at Hampton Court, it was one of only a few works that Cromwell kept after the regicide.

In the autumn of 1962, as a student in Paris, I went to watch Edith Piaf perform atop the Eiffel Tower. My memory is of being in a thick crowd at ground level, straining to see a tiny floodlit figure while a huge metallic voice resounded across the night sky: ‘Non, je ne regrette rien …’ In this new biography of Piaf, Carolyn Burke reminds us that this was a publicity event for the launch of Daryl Zanuck’s film about D-Day, The Longest Day. Piaf, at forty-six, her health ruined, had only a year to live, but still managed to overcome her frailty and her fear of heights to project her whole being into the iconic image that the world had of her.

On 18 January 1773, less than twenty-four hours after first entering Antarctic waters and concerned by the ice gathering around the Resolution, Commander James Cook surveyed the waters. A few hours later he wrote in his journal: ‘From the mast head I could see nothing to the Southward but Ice, in the Whole extent from East to WSW without the least appearance of any partition.’

Literary critics used to adopt a persona claiming disinterested separation from the text being analysed. Critical theory, in particular post-colonial and gender studies, eroded this stance, showing that criticism is always self-interested, concealing or inadvertently revealing tacit assumptions stemming from the critic’s biography, class, gender, and political persuasions. As a result, it is common nowadays for critics to be more self-aware about their own value systems. In some ways, this returns us to a Romantic understanding of interpretation reflected in Hazlitt’s ‘It is we who are Hamlet’, Coleridge’s ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so’, and Keats’s ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved on the pulses ... you will know exactly my meaning when I say, that now I shall relish Hamlet more than I ever have done’.

In 1956, when this fourth volume of his collected prose begins, W.H. Auden (1907–73) was forty-nine and widely recognised as one of the most important English-language poets. He had been in the United States for seventeen years, having left, or, as some back home had seen it, abandoned England shortly before the outbreak of World War II; and he had been an American citizen since 1946. To me, he always remained an English poet, and the lexical flourishes such as ‘dives’ and ‘congress’ found in the second half of his oeuvre do little to hide a European sensibility.

It is a measure of the stature of William Wordsworth among his younger contemporaries that he would find himself subject to innumerable challenges over the early years of the nineteenth century. What upset the second generation of Romantic poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and, to some extent, John Keats – was the contrast between Wordsworth’s middle-aged political conservatism and his earlier democratic beliefs, expressed in and through the bold poetic experiments in his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). It was a contrast the younger generation took personally and publicly as a form of betrayal, and one such challenge was Shelley’s ‘To Wordsworth’:

POET of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, –
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

The decision to use Ned Kelly’s last words as the subtitle of Griffith Review 33 was most unwise. This well-worn line threatens to overshadow the journal’s contents, which are otherwise fresh and intelligent.

This fabulous-looking fiftieth issue of the National Gallery of Victoria’s more or less annual art journal, with its traffic-stopping Rosalie Gascoigne cover, is a birthday package. This year marks the Gallery’s 150^th anniversary, and the essays in this Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria together reveal much about what the institution has been doing since its foundation in 1861. There are twenty-six articles by twenty-seven authors; twenty-two of them current NGV staff members, including the current director and his deputy. It is a great team effort and a beautifully produced volume, with excellent spot-gloss-varnished illustrations throughout, presenting original scholarly research in an enjoyably accessible format.

Wolfgang Sievers was a complex person with a clear vision. The major dimensions of his life included photography and an abiding sense of the dignity of man. Helen Ennis, one of the foremost authorities on Sievers, has produced a book that is at once satisfying and teasing.

A cluttered portrait inevitably diminishes its subject. I am thinking, in particular, of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his gallery in Brussels, by David Teniers the Younger, in which the Habsburg aristocrat is like an ant among his scores of pictures. This happens with biographies, too. A satisfying example is far more than an expansion of the subject’s curriculum vitae or a thorough examination of his appointment diary. When the author has strong feelings (as a widow inevitably does), the problem is aggravated. This new biography – of an extraordinary musician who might, in different circumstances, have contributed far more to Australia than he was allowed to do – is both partisan and prolix, and is as littered with quotidian details as the Teniers painting is with canvases. In both cases, these objects and details are too small to engage our attention usefully or thoroughly.

The Sydney crime scene of the 1970s and 1980s – made famous by television’s Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities – is a familiar and popular subject, so it was ambitious on Tony Reeves’s part to set out to offer The Real George Freeman. Ultimately, he fails to do so.

A book’s title should indicate its subject and, even better, its approach to its subject. Basic dictionaries define a companion as one who ‘accompanies another’, is an ‘associate in’, or a ‘sharer of’. A secondary definition is a ‘handbook or reference book’; a thing that ‘matches another’. I anticipate that a book called a ‘Companion’ will be company, will allow me to associate, to share, refer, and be matched as though with a real-life companion; a partner. Given that the book is published by a major university press, it is expected that the companion may be more of a mentor than a guide, but still present information in a lively, accessible style.

A Context for Intensity

Clive James

Mark Tredinnick’s much-anticipated first collection of poetry, Fire Diary, is an examination of place and how to respond to it. The title provides a clue to the form of the book; many poems chart the daily exigencies of living within nature. More importantly, the collection explores the moods and aspirations of the self, of a person grappling with meaning in life, and with language itself. In the title poem, Tredinnick argues, ‘Fire is the madness / in us all’, a Heraclitan take on the element; fire becomes the metaphor for creativity, passion, and contradiction. Yet Tredinnick’s motives are not wholly earnest. His intent is often playful and suggestive, as when he says in ‘Song of (Someone Like) My Self’, a riposte to Whitman’s grandiose ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I’m just a small metaphor / for the world hereabouts.’ Informality is a key element in Tredinnick’s use of language; ‘hereabouts’ strikes just the right note in its implication of place that is both personal and general enough to be any place.

joanne burns has long been a force in Australian poetry. amphora, her thirteenth collection, builds on that legacy with the energy and vital idiosyncrasy with which readers have come to associate her work. The collection’s title – one of the sections of poetry – gives us a clue as to what we will find here. burns offers her reader an amphora, and thereby casts her book as a beautiful jar brimming with words and insights, stories from the past, sustenance for the present. William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘… men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found [in poems].’ Drink deeply, amphora urges us, because poetry contains the very stuff of life.

The way nostalgia works, according to theorists, is that we pine for the era just before our own. This may be why the twenty-something musicians of today mine the sounds of the 1980s. But does this pattern succeed in Young Adult fiction? What does an author gain by setting his or her story in the ‘nostalgia zone’ of potential readers?

Richard Harland’s Liberator begins three months after its predecessor, Worldshaker (2009), left off. The optimism and exuberance that marked the success of the revolution has dimmed as the inhabitants of the newly renamed Liberator struggle with the realities of running the mobile juggernaut. A saboteur breeds havoc and mistrust between the governing council of Filthies and the remaining Upper Decks folk (the Swanks), and conflicting factions vie for control. Meanwhile, the Liberator is running out of coal, and the only place where the revolutionaries can replenish their stock exposes them to direct conflict with the remaining Imperialist juggernauts.

To make Ernest Giles’s trek across the scrub and desert of southern Australia interesting to younger readers, relate it through the eyes of a young protagonist. It was an inspired choice to invent Taj, twelve-year-old son of the historical figure Saleh Mohamed, Afghan cameleer, and an equally inspired choice to invent Taj’s beloved young camel, Mustara. The love and respect between camel and boy lie at the heart of the novel, and symbolise the expedition’s ultimate success.