Critical minds

Fifty years ago this month, Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton published the first issue of Australian Book Review, a stylish, mono, three-column, tabloid-sized magazine of sixteen pages, costing one shilling and nine pence. Auspiciously, the contributors included Robert Hughes (on Sidney Nolan), Randolph Stow (Nene Gare), and Dutton himself on Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot.

Geoffrey Blainey, too, appeared in that first issue of ABR; he reviewed L.F. Crisp’s biography of Ben Chifley. Professor Blainey has written for the magazine from time to time since 1961. This month – fittingly – he reviews another potentially highly influential work of history: Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Geoffrey Blainey is one of dozens of notable writers who have contributed to the magazine for four or five decades. We thank them all; just as we always welcome new contributors to each issue – an enduring feature of this many-voiced magazine. Of this month’s forty writers, twelve are making their first appearance in ABR.

The first series ran until 1974, when the magazine lapsed. John McLaren and others revived it in 1978, and it has appeared monthly ever since. ABR in 2011 is very different from those first pioneering issues, and so it should be. But some things have not altered. The inaugural editorial began thus: ‘There is an imperative need for a publication such as Australian Book Review.’ Plus ça change ... The Editors went on: ‘Fortunately, there is no shortage of critical intellect in Australia. Amongst writers, high-level journalists, and University staff there are critical minds sufficient to sustain the highest standards of Australian Book Review.’ There is no shortage now, either.

Advances thanks all past and present contributors, editors, staff, board members, advisers, subscribers, sponsors, donors, and Patrons; and hopes readers enjoy this birthday issue.

Ian Dickson, Carrie Tiffany, and Gregory Day (photograph by Amy Baillieu)

Sharing the Jolley Prize

There was a terrific mood at Readings Carlton on 12 October when we launched the Fiction issue and declared Gregory Day and Carrie Tiffany joint winners of the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (they are pictured above, with Ian Dickson, the ABR Patron who has generously made this prize possible). Each of them received $3000, while the two other shortlisted writers, Claire Aman and Gaylene Carbis, each received $1000.

Our winners were honoured to share the Prize. Carrie Tiffany remarked: ‘It is wonderful to share a writing prize in the name of Elizabeth Jolley. I read Jolley’s first novel, Palomino, when I was sixteen, girlishly assuming it would be about pretty horses. It shocked me senseless, but also gave me a taste for sentences – how dangerous and how beguiling they can be.’

Gregory Day told Advances: ‘To win the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize is a delicious honour. The short story form encourages an intense display of the writer’s craft whilst being a potent vehicle for the compression of emotion. In this it is akin to poetry, and its relationship to language and events is likewise alchemical. I am extremely grateful that the importance of the short story in our national literature has been acknowledged with the creation of the Jolley Prize, and am sure it will foster new work for many years to come.’

ABR has big plans for the Jolley Prize in 2012. Meanwhile, this month we publish the first of the commended stories: Meg Mundell’s ‘Narcosis’. Others will follow in coming months.

John Ashbery in Oz

It is a red-letter day for any literary magazine when John Ashbery sends them a new poem, and ABR has great pleasure in publishing his ‘Feel Free’. Mr Ashbery, ever-prolific and a commanding figure in world poetry, has only been to Australia once, back in September 1992, but it was a memorable visit for local poets and audiences. After taking part in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, he gave a bravura reading from Hotel Lautréamont for Monash University. He even visited Ballarat, with rather too many other MWF guests (were there really eleven on the program?). Closing the epic Myer literary lunch, Mr Ashbery chose to read his poem ‘We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics’ – which consists of one line.

John Tranter, whose latest collection, Starlight: 150 Poems, has won several prizes, has had a long friendship and association with John Ashbery, who launched his book The Floor of Heaven during that Melbourne visit. We publish Mr Tranter’s ‘version’ of ‘Feel Free’ in this issue also. These versions repeat certain features of the original poems, as will be obvious to ABR readers. The title, ‘Least Said’, refers to Ashbery’s poem ‘Soonest Mended’. One other clue: ‘Joy H. Breshan’ is an anagrammatical twin sister of ‘John Ashbery’. Advances is sure she will land some credulous editor in trouble one day.

The Best Australian Poems 2011 (Black Inc.), edited by John Tranter, is published this month; a review will follow.

A new poetry anthology

Australian Poetry Since 1788 – edited by poets Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray – was launched in Sydney early last month. It is unusual in its length (almost 1100 pages) and the relatively small number of poets (174). Notable, too, is the excellent price: $69.95. UNSW Press is the adventurous publisher.

While noted poet–translator Michael Hofmann completes his review of the anthology for our summer issue, we offer Geoffrey Lehmann’s candid account of its long gestation and of the editor’s various agonisings and discoveries. Courtesy of the publisher, we have signed copies of the book for the first three people to take out five-year subscriptions to ABR. Please phone us on (03) 9429 6700 for more details.

Vale Diana Gribble

Australia lost one of its visionary publishers on 4 October when Diana Gribble – co-creator of McPhee Gribble, Text Publishing, and Private Media – died after a brief illness, aged sixty-nine. The tributes and obituaries were prompt and fond, none more so than W.H. Chong’s, which we publish here. Chong, who worked with Diana Gribble for many years, took the luminous photograph that appears on our cover this month.

Diana Gribble’s generous stamp is all over modern Australian publishing and the careers of myriad writers and editors. Irrespective of its ultimate financial fate, McPhee Gribble’s contribution to Australian literature was inestimable. That she went on to co-found another major publishing house and to embrace new media with such success is a measure of her entrepreneurial flair.

Advances always enjoyed talking to Diana Gribble, whose shrewd, fringed gaze will be much missed in literary and journalistic circles.

Transformative stories

Kim Scott has had a busy year. After winning his second Miles Franklin Literary Award for That Deadman Dance (Picador) – described by the judges as ‘an astonishingly original work’ and ‘a grand feat of transformative storytelling’ – he was also involved in the creation of two striking and innovative books published recently by UWA Publishing: Noongar Mambara Bakitjand Mamang. Created as part of an Indigenous language recovery project led by Scott and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, the tales are based on ‘creation stories’ recorded in Albany in 1931 by American linguist Gerhardt Laves, and returned to the Wirlomin Noongar people by his family following his death in 1993. The stories were discussed and reworked in a series of community meetings, and are presented in Noongar and English.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2011

Sidestepping the ‘product’

Dear Editor,

Chris Flynn’s commentary (‘Claws out for a Writing Career’, October 2011) discusses the idea that some authors of literary fiction may be considering more commercially viable practices in order to remain relevant. I am a writer, but have also practised as a visual artist for many years. Some thirty years ago, I watched the arts move from a pursuit appreciated by a selective audience towards a large and lucrative industry, employing thousands and eventually becoming a major part of the economy. While that may be good, in many ways it seems to have sidelined the creators; more central now are the organisations and industry professionals who present and promote a particular kind of product.

Unlike the literary world, many visual artists adopted other strategies, sidestepping the Establishment, organising and funding their own events and exhibitions. (They recognised that there is no pot of gold – nor is that what art is about.) But authors of literary fiction hardly have this option. Alarmingly, funding one’s own practice, even if it is commercially successful, is called ‘vanity publishing’. Which sanctimonious bureaucrat thought that up, and how did writers come to accept it? There is nothing vain about sidestepping an industry that has hijacked creative output to the point where writers such as Glen Duncan and Nick Earls must redirect their craft if they wish to continue being published.

Perhaps it is time to question this industry which is clearly failing them, and which may not even have the idea of supporting the best literature as its primary aim. Some literary fiction may very well not be ‘relevant’ to a mass audience. Should writers lose faith, dump it, and try for something more ‘viable’? Or is it time for authors to reconsider their priorities and stay with it? To my eye, independent press, online, and digital are gathering momentum, and a robust alternative scene may be just around the corner.

Robert Hollingworth, Fitzroy North, Vic.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2011

Admirers of the first two volumes in Frank Moorhouse’s ‘Edith Trilogy’, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000), will remember the gripping and heartbreaking scene at the end of Dark Palace in which Edith Campbell Berry, her British husband, Ambrose, and several of their senior colleagues are humiliatingly informed, in the cruellest possible way, that after two decades of hard work for the now-defunct League of Nations, their presence is neither required nor welcome in the ranks of the new United Nations.

Isaiah Berlin famously divided people into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. The former know one big thing with absolute certainty; the latter know many small things. When it comes to writers of fiction, a parallel distinction might be made on stylistic grounds. There are some writers who cultivate a finely attuned personal style – a style that becomes unmistakably their own. Others prove to be gifted mimics who can write in any style they please and freely adapt their mode of expression to reflect their fictional contexts. Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and Gail Jones are all hedgehogs; David Mitchell, Jennifer Egan, and Nam Le are foxes. In rare cases – James Joyce, David Foster Wallace – a writer can be both. J.M. Coetzee and Philip Roth are often assumed to be hedgehogs, but they are in fact cleverly disguised foxes. Martin Amis would probably like to be a fox, but he is pure hedgehog.

Were I Editor in Chief of The Australian for a day, the first thing I would do is can the ‘Cut and Paste’ section on the Letters page. Its schoolyard bullying of the fools and knaves idiotic enough to oppose the paper’s line – usual suspects include Fairfax journalists, the ABC, Greens politicians, Tim Flannery, and Robert Manne – lies at the heart of what stops The Australian from being a great newspaper. A favourite game is quoting a commentator saying discordant things at different times. As an argument, this is right up there with great moments in adolescent wit like, ‘You said Chanelle was a slag last week, and now you are going out with her!’

Don Watson sits low in his chair, shy and silent when faced with a group of university administrators gathered to hear him talk about management speak – those weasel words that Watson has hunted down with grim enthusiasm. He speaks hesitantly at first, struggling to recall examples of misleading expression, evasive phrases, dishonest communication. Soon the rhythm quickens. There is indignation now in the voice, derision anew at the decay of public language. The speaker rocks forward, ranging more widely as he explains the link between thought and expression. Jargon hides intentions. Clichés abandon serious engagement with an issue. This is not the pedant’s obsession with grammar, but anger when the contest of ideas is undermined by impenetrable language.

With 1086 pages of poems and critical biographies, Australian Poetry Since 1788 – the third anthology co-edited by Robert Gray and myself – is by far the largest anthology of Australian poetry to date, and at least twice the size of its predecessors. Perhaps controversially, it has fewer poets than many earlier anthologies, with only 174 named poets. But it covers the gamut of Australian poetry, including convict and bush ballads, translations of Aboriginal songs, humorous verse, concrete poetry, and generous selections of Australia’s major poets and of the younger contemporary poets. We have tried to be catholic, rigorous, and objective, while listening carefully (with our very subjective ears) to the many different voices from which we had to choose.

Our competing lifestyles lost us the Australian double
that semester. And couldn’t we then arrange
to do the other, and was the desert that limitless,
and why not say so? You see, griping comes naturally
to me and to all mankind. Once, when shut up
at the bottom of a shaft of some kind, I
assumed that the world would just trickle naturally
around whatever feet I was wearing, and increased
morbid curiosity would result. Hold on there!
No, I meant it, plangently, like small waves rubbing
against a reef, or the sighing of mice behind a grill.
This is yours to manipulate, they said,
yours to live on. That’s only what they said.
I’m guessing that she told you the same,
and idlers copied it to their remotest constituency
and to a whole lot of other things, belike.

The coffin sat on a chrome trolley at the front of the pews. In the end we only need a box six feet by two, and how small it looks ... the imagination falters.

Helen Garner, in her eulogy for Diana Gribble, delivered at Christ Church, South Yarra, spoke of finding out what ‘publishers’ were like. In 1976 she pedalled over to the new McPhee Gribble offices in Jolimont bearing the manuscript of Monkey Grip. Helen described what it was like working with Diana, and how loosely cut linen trousers recall her: the first person she met who dressed that way. The day before the funeral, Helen had remarked that she was surprised to find that she had enjoyed writing the tribute: ‘Telling the world I loved her.’

With the likes of Helen Garner, Arnold Zable, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the contents page of this essay collection reads like a who’s who of Australian literature. The editor–contributors are the poet Alex Skovron, philosopher Raimond Gaita, and novelist Alex Miller. The publisher is Picador. The man honoured in these essays is Jacob Rosenberg.

JOAN If you tear me limb from limb until you separate my soul from my body you will get nothing out of me beyond what I have told you […] Besides, I cannot bear to be hurt; and if you hurt me I will say anything you like to stop the pain. But I will take it all back afterwards; so what is the use of it?
LADVENU There is much in that. We should proceed mercifully […]
THE INQUISITOR It must not be applied wantonly. If the accused will confess voluntarily, then its use cannot be justified.
COURCELLES But this is unusual and irregular. She refuses to take the oath.
LADVENU [disgusted] Do you want to torture the girl for the mere pleasure of it?
COURCELLES [bewildered] But it is not a pleasure. It is the law. It is customary. It is always done.
THE INQUISITOR That is not so, Master, except when the inquiries are carried on by people who do not know their legal business.
(George Bernard Shaw, St Joan, 1923)

Many of us would find it as hard as Shaw’s Ladvenu does to think of any good reason for torture. It seems medieval, it is abhorrent, it is internationally illegal, and it doesn’t work. Statements made under torture are legally useless, and their value as intelligence is not much better. Democratic governments achieve nothing by randomly capturing and detaining without trial people who are innocent or whose testimony is tainted by torture. Contracting torture out to co-opted dictatorships reduces the democracies that do it to their level. Insurgents who have recently overthrown Arab dictators will be wary of all their former friends. And people released from detention are less likely to forgive their torturers than to support terrorism against them. So why do it?

Many Australians are hungry for answers to Indigenous disadvantage. In recent years, anthropologists have been among those who have proposed solutions. This latest offering is from Diane Austin-Broos, professor emerita at the University of Sydney and long-time ethnographer of the Ntaria (Hermannsburg) community in Central Australia. In it she attempts to outline the debates about Indigenous people both inside and outside the academy over the last two decades. She presents these debates through the prism of anthropology, the discipline that has the longest association with Indigenous Australians, but one that some would suggest has had little influence on Indigenous policy-making in recent years. In fact, Austin-Broos attributes the fierce and sometimes bitter debates in the last decade to the vacuum created by the discipline’s silence in the public sphere, a void readily filled by ‘shock jocks’ and right-wing think tanks eager to criticise the guiding principles of the self-determination era.

Climate change is often framed as a number of battles: between science and opinion, sustainable development and economic growth, government control and individual freedom, or environmentalists and business leaders. All of these are simplifications of the complexity involved in our modern world’s developing adequate responses to human-caused climate change.

This bold book, with its lucid prose and vivid illustrations, will be discussed for years to come. It is not original in the narrow sense of the word, but it takes an important idea to new heights because of the author’s persistence and skill. Bill Gammage, an oldish and experienced historian of rural background, looks at nearly every region of Australia, its surface landscape and vegetation. His conclusion is that the Aborigines ‘made Australia’ largely by their knowledge of ecology and their repeated and alert use of fire. He argues in detail that in 1788 even the vegetation of what became our capital cities was determined largely by persistent Aboriginal burnings. The positioning of the trees and the type of trees, the pattern of the grasses and shrubs, and whether the surrounding countryside was park-like or heavily timbered – all were influenced by the Aborigines and their practices. He almost says that Australia, botanically and visually, is a deliberate work of art: that a black Capability Brown and his descendants lived here.

In 1848 Ludwig Leichhardt and half a dozen companions set out from Queensland’s Darling Downs, intending to cross the continent to the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. The entire expedition disappeared, virtually without trace. Since then at least fifteen government and private expeditions have tried to determine what happened to them. Innumerable magazine and newspaper articles have appeared, and many theories have been proposed, yet the fate of the expedition remains as mysterious now as it was in 1850. It is this mystery that has enshrined Leichhardt in the Australian consciousness – how could an entire expedition disappear so utterly? Where in the great outback did it come to grief? Indeed, for many, Leichhardt and the outback have become mostly synonymous.

Novelist Janette Turner Hospital’s recent essay in praise of New York’s Central Park remarked on its visibility from outer space. No doubt Adelaide’s Park Lands, an integral part of the 1837 vision of founding surveyor Colonel William Light’s plan for the city, can also be seen from outer space.

In 1988 the Hawke government put a constitutional amendment to a referendum. On the recommendation of the government’s Constitution Commission, we were invited to vote to enshrine guarantees of trial by jury, property rights, and freedom of religion. The proposition was rejected by all states. There is nothing surprising in that. We almost always do vote against constitutional amendment because the politicians of the right have always succeeded in persuading us that the original document (a free trade agreement between the federating colonies) is perfect and, in any case, any proposal for change is a left-wing plot to deprive her majesty’s loyal subjects of their common law freedoms.

In 1902 the New Zealander William Pember Reeves published a pioneering study of social innovations in Australia and New Zealand. He wrote it, he said, for the ‘increasing number of students in England, on the Continent, and in America who are sincerely interested in them’. Neville Kirk wants us to remember that British interest in innovation down under continued well beyond Federation. Almost a century later, he reminds us, Tony Blair shaped New Labour around what he learned from the great antipodean modernisers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. ‘What people in Britain don’t understand about Tony Blair,’ he quotes from the Australian cleric and social entrepreneur Peter Thomson, ‘is that basically he’s an Australian.’ Kirk, an historian at Manchester Metropolitan University, has written extensively in what he calls transnational and cross-national comparative labour history, so that he is on familiar ground. Three of the four photographs in his new book, published in a series called Studies in Imperialism, depict British Labour leaders in Australia, the last taken in 1926 (of the avuncular Arthur Henderson and seven of his parliamentary colleagues). All were here, Kirk would like us to think, because Australia continued to be a beacon for working-class politicians and radical social reformers.

The historical novel has always been characterised by a formative tension – the demands of history versus the demands of story. The author is caught between relegating the past to a prettified background, or the characters to merely personified social forces. Michelle Aung Thin’s début novel tends more towards the former than the latter, illustrating both the dangers and the pleasure to be found in negotiating between these poles.

Gillian Mears has been to death’s door and back. Her wonderful essay ‘Alive in Ant and Bee’ (2007) recounts the journey and the exquisite pleasures of her life as a survivor. Writing has taken a back seat, understandably, over the past decade or so. There has been a short story collection, A Map of the Gardens (2002), but a novel from Mears is quite an event, sixteen years after her last, The Grass Sister (1995), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It has been worth the wait. Foal’s Bread is a big and generous novel, set on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales in the mid-twentieth century: hard and often bitter times. In Mears’s world there is magic in the everyday, and portents everywhere.

Here is a cliché to start your day: superhuman feats of strength. You find them in disaster stories and war epics, where desperate, adrenalised men push beyond the limits of human ability. Rescuers lift impossibly heavy rubble off earthquake victims; soldiers carry wounded comrades miles to safety. Such feats crop up in more imaginative forms in comic books, where the need to fight crime or save the world spawns the ability to fly or dodge bullets. In Steven Amsterdam’s ingenious What the Family Needed, the idea of exceptional abilities for exceptional times is applied to the family. Amsterdam seems to have posed the question: ‘what super powers would a family develop to cope with the emotional crises of everyday life?’ The answer is best summed up as superhuman feats of empathy.

Declarations of loathing for the other members of one’s species tend to be tedious in reality but hilarious in fiction. The characters in Michael Wilding’s latest novel repeatedly prove this point with their mock-serious diatribes against, among others, the habitués of Sydney coffee shops (‘black-clad, metal-pierced creatures’), the patrons of English pubs (‘maggots … a rabble’), and virtually every kind of male university academic imaginable, from the caddish to the cadaverous. None of this ranting, however, has much effect on the novel’s straight man, the private detective Keith Plant (or ‘Research Assistant’, as his business card coyly puts it). For Plant – someone who has to deal with ratbags for a living – misanthropy is clearly no laughing matter.

‘A writer is writing even when he’s not writing, maybe even more then, even if he never writes again.
Got it?
Class dismissed.’
(Morris Lurie, ‘On Not Writing’, in Hergesheimer Hangs In)

In Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir (2011), Michael Wilding recalls: ‘Morris Lurie sent us a collection, too. I think if he had sent it eighteen months later I would have published it. But when he sent it, right at the beginning, I was narrowly committed to a particular experimental, innovative, new writing … Not publishing Lurie was a decision I later regretted. Over the years I continued to read him, and was increasingly taken by the wit and economy and human observation of his writing.’

Hergesheimer Hangs In bears the prefatory line ‘Commissioned by Michael Wilding’, showing him to be true to his reconsiderations. I nervously checked the details of Contemporary Classics, an anthology of ‘The Best Australian Short Fiction 1965–1995’, which I edited in 1996. To my relief, it includes a story by Lurie: ‘Camille Pissarro 1830–1903’, from The Night We Ate the Sparrow (1985). The story’s title inevitably reminds one of Donald Barthelme, the pre-eminent American short fiction writer of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the pages of the New Yorker. We should perhaps recall the bitter words of a character in a Frank Moorhouse story: ‘Meanjin. That’s Aboriginal for “Rejected by the New Yorker.”’

Lurie, born in Melbourne in 1938, who has published in both the New Yorker and Meanjin, is the author of at least twenty-five books. His 1978 novel Flying Home was named by the National Book Council as one of the ten best Australian books of the decade. In 2006 he received the Patrick White Award for under-recognised, lifetime achievement in literature. To persevere with the American connection, there was, as Lurie points out in the twenty-fourth (of twenty-six) ‘chapter’ of this book, an actual American Hergesheimer (Joseph), ‘an American writer of great popularity who fell from favour, couldn’t understand it, didn’t know why, bellyached about it endlessly to his pal Mencken, refused to go gently, if you like, into that good night, is quite forgotten now. I appropriated his name to pass unnoticed, as it were, among you.’ Only to point it out, to underscore it so to speak, thus defeating its initial purpose.

The historical Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia (W.C. Fields: ‘I went to Philadelphia once. It was closed’) and initially studied as a painter, but turned to writing. Hergesheimer Hangs In is illustrated by Lurie with cuts and crayons. Hergesheimer’s reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death in 1954. Yet Samuel Beckett, when asked in 1962 what was his favourite American novel, replied: ‘one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer’s Java Head.’ Lurie and his Hergesheimer understand and sympathise with the highs and lows of Joseph H.’s career.

Those interested in classifying fiction under Themes or Topics will find in this book: Writers and Real Estate; the Venality of Architects; Forgers; Writers and Benefactors; Loss; How to Write about a Child Who Died; Adultery; Glenn Gould; The Slap (not to be confused with Christos Tsiolkas’s version); Writers and $; Not Writing; the Writer’s Life; Metaphor (‘Metaphor will only get you so far’; ‘Isn’t the story told in a nutshell often the hardest to crack’; of a man painting a nude model: ‘To kiss the canvas with his gushing brush’; or, as Beckett has it: ‘No symbols where none intended’).

But Themes and Topics in fiction are of primary concern only to those ‘deficient in mere brain-power’. What is really of significance, of importance, is style. The Writing. The Geography of the Sentence as William H. Gass (another American!) hath it. Consider, for example:

Slumped in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days, then it is true that a tiny tendril of contempt – strike that, content – might curl up from the storehouse where the world’s content is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the fruit of all your labors …

That is from Donald Barthelme’s ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ collected in his Sadness (1972). This is from Lurie’s ‘Letter to a Silent Son’:

Well we secured the perimeter and sent up our smoke and in due course of imminent expectation those of us who were watching the sky which I’d have to say with no disregard of duty attached and I want to stress that in plainest language without qualification or exception as I hope and trust by now to be made perfectly clear …

Ah! those sentences, those rhythms, those riffs! Lurie is, to borrow a title from Barthelme’s Great Days (1979), ‘The King of Jazz’.

Ryle Winn was a rural valuer and jack of all trades before being laid low by a brain tumour in the mid-1990s. He turned to writing and produced a string of successful titles, including a memoir of his illness, Out of the Blue (2009), and numerous collections of bush yarns and personal anecdotes.

Jessica Au’s first novel, Cargo, is an arresting look at what it means to be young.

Au moves her story beyond the category of Young Adult fiction by not simply showing youth, but also interrogating it. Her characters are unsure of their new, almost adult selves. Readers will feel pity and compassion for these characters on the cusp.

The voices of Subhash Jaireth’s three fictional autobiographies within To Silence are those of historical figures. Kabir (1440–1518) was a mystic poet associated with the reformist Bhakti or Devotional Movement in medieval India. An illiterate weaver, he rejected idolatry and caste, and his principally Hindu philosophy showed significant Islamic influence. Maria Chekhova (1863–1957), the clever and well-educated sister of Anton Chekhov, selflessly devoted more than half her long life to running the Chekhov House–Museum at Yalta. The third voice is that of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), an Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet whose brave, unorthodox views earned him almost thirty years in prison.

Marion Mahony (1870–1961) was that rare commodity in late nineteenth-century American society: a woman functioning as an equal in a professional world dominated by men. Born to progressive parents, and a household and wider circle of strong and socially engaged women, Marion Lucy Mahony was only the second woman to graduate from an American university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1894) with a full degree in architecture, and the first to be licensed to practise under any state regulatory structure anywhere in the world (Illinois, 1898).

We fell into the ocean backwards, making the OK signal for the camera. Later I replayed that footage several times, but it never seemed accurate: all flailing flippers and ungainly limbs, smiles stretched around the mouthpiece, that messy shattering of the surface. Nothing like the slow, deadly grace of being underwater.

A thirty-year correspondence between two Australian artists is notable, but when the artists are father and daughter it is doubly interesting. Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen corresponded regularly throughout their lives: Hans writing from The Cedars, the family house near Hahndorf, in the Adelaide Hills; and Nora from Sydney, London, New Guinea, Pacific Islands, or wherever she happened to be. Hans Heysen is celebrated for his landscape paintings – those South Australian views of eucalypts in a landscape, which changed the way generations looked at the Australian countryside – and for his desert landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Nora, the only one of his nine children to become an artist, is known for her still lifes and portraits. Their work is well represented in Australian public collections. Hans was unquestionably the better artist, and always had the greater reputation. Nora, however, won major prizes (including, somewhat controversially, the 1938 Archibald Prize) and managed to forge an independent career for herself; she by no means lived in her father’s shadow.

One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of the seven photographers Jones has selected was professionally trained. All were keen amateur photographers who produced substantial bodies of work during the time they lived and worked in Central Australia. The book deals with an epoch of dramatic change, beginning in the 1890s with some of the earliest European photographs of the Centre, and concluding in the 1940s.

Frank Hinder’s abstractions, light works, and kinetic art have appeared in several recent survey exhibitions and publications, arousing renewed interest in the Sydney modernist (1906–92). It is thus timely for the first Hinder monograph, written by the curator Renee Free, with a chapter by the artist and teacher John Henshaw. No revisionary account, it began decades ago as a collaboration between the authors and the artist following the retrospective on Hinder and his wife, Margel, that Free curated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1980. After Frank Hinder’s death, Free continued working with his family. This self-published book – accompanied by an online catalogue of works of art, compiled by Adam Free, her son – is a labour of love by both families.

‘The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours we live …’
(Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields, 1884)

Britain in the later nineteenth century witnessed a radical rethinking of the role of art and design in society, one in which the earlier generation’s enthusiasm for industrial innovation and material betterment was replaced by a growing recognition of the necessity of beauty – in art, in literature, in furnishings, and in fashion – as the foundation stone of modern living. Emerging from bohemian artistic circles and avant-garde design, a new concept of beauty developed that was expressed in a variety of forms. These ranged from pictures whose meaning no longer resided in their narrative or moral content, but in the decorative balance of colour and line (summed up by the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and epitomised by the exquisite paintings of Albert Moore and James McNeill Whistler); to books of verse by William Morris or Algernon Swinburne, in which the elegance of the metrical form was matched by the stylishness of the type and cover design; to the ideal of the ‘House Beautiful’, where the subtlety and harmony of one’s arrangement of wallpaper, furniture, and objets d’art were now recognised as valid expressions of refinement and individuality.

As the dust settles on twentieth-century acting giants, and reputations are appraised, it is at least arguable that John Gielgud emerges as the greatest. Certainly his was the longest and most varied career, spanning nearly eighty years, only death itself, when he was ninety-six, causing him to slow down. Since then his pre-eminence has seemed confirmed as one reads about him and his distinguished contemporaries.

In 1963, ASIO opened a file on a disreputable fellow named Laurie Oakes, who was then living with Alex Mitchell, another Daily Mirror reporter. The two men came to the spooks’ attention when Mitchell suggested hiding unionist Pat Mackie from the police.

It is a brave editor who compiles a paper-based anthology of science writing in the age of the Internet. Electronic publishing allows the skilful juxtaposition of text and image, with the added value of links that lead the viewer to instantly available extra information. With Stephen Pincock’s print anthology The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, I am nostalgically transported to the nineteenth century, where Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley brought their science to the people in discursive essay form.

Henry Hitchings has written a number of well-received books on aspects of the English language, including Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World (2005) and The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (2008), which focuses on the numerous borrowings that English has made from other languages.

This book of essays by the vegan-anarchist-pacifist poet John Kinsella on the relationship between political activism and poetry raises two big questions: how do we live in modernity? and what is it like to live beyond the mainstream? The first question lies behind the great cultural movements of the West, from Romanticism to postmodernism. Whether writers have embraced modernity or rejected it, they have long struggled with the very conditions that brought literary culture into existence. The utopian possibilities of modernity have always been in conflict with modernity’s material realities.

Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (2005), was an impressive début and won the New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry in 2006. Surface to Air is a more varied, equally impressive, volume. Savige meditates on the poet Tasso’s oak tree (inspired by Peter Porter’s ‘Tasso’s Oak’), a survivor of Hiroshima, the Big Brother television show, and, as this book’s epigraph by W.S. Merwin might predict, the loss of an uncontaminated natural world, or Eden: ‘kneel by the sky-blue bic that nests / in the shallow bowels of an albatross carcass’ (‘Recycling Night’).

Rings unknown

Francesca Sasnaitis

6 am in the Universe: Selected Poems
by Benjamin Frater
Grand Parade Poets, $27.95 pb (plus DVD), 140 pp, 9780987129109

Perrier Fever
by Pete Spence
Grand Parade Poets, $24.95 pb, 160 pp, 9780987129116

In ‘Avant-garde in the Antipodes’, Ali Alizadeh wrote that the abandonment of poetry by commercial publishers in Australia at the end of the 1990s contributed to the current ‘burgeoning small presses, magazines and anthologies’ dedicated to publishing ‘work by inventive and in many cases openly experimental, post-avant Australian poets’. Grand Parade Poets (GPP) can now be added to this cohort. The brainchild of poet Alan Wearne, GPP’s first two publications exemplify his mission statement ‘to promote people who are not part of ... the mainstream poetry scene’ and who are ‘poets of music, passion and intelligence’. What Benjamin Frater and Pete Spence have in common is the kind of outsider status generally conferred on poets whose work is deemed too difficult, their structural and linguistic experiments being complex; and inaccessible, in that their poetic references do not correspond to an easily apprehended prosaic narrative. For those willing to immerse themselves in their inventive, phonic worlds, 6 am in the Universe and Perrier Fever offer astonishing voyages into two idiosyncratic minds.

Special issues are difficult and delicate, given the burden of representation. Editor David Brooks confesses to providing only a glimpse of the rich field that might constitute Indian–Australian literary relations. He offers ‘that very Australian thing – a showbag, a sampler, full of enticements to explore further’. Given the slow but steady realisation in Australia that India should be a focus of attention for its scholars and students, this is a timely attempt.

A common theme in picture books for children is the pivotal role of family and friends. Bee, the main protagonist in Good Morning Mr Pancakes (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742377193), has a bevy of animal friends, all of whom must be catered for before she heads off for a week’s holiday with her family. Chris McKimmie’s idiosyncratic book explores the world from the child’s point of view. After saying goodbye to the pancakes she has for breakfast, her cat, her caterpillar, her chickens, her dog, her fish, and her pet ‘leopard’, Bee escapes to a wonderful island inhabited by turkeys, spiders, dolphins, fish, and stardust.

Beatrice May Ross (Bee) is a list-maker, an amateur detective, a taxidermy assistant, and a regular teenage girl. She falls in love, fights with her best friend, and hates her mother’s new boyfriend, like plenty of adolescents. But she does so while stitching together a dead koala and trying to solve the ever-developing mystery surrounding the death of her mentor.