by Peter Rose

January 6

Such high standards the American magazines maintain, with their enviable resources. Fine valedictory article in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates on the death of her husband of four decades. Slightly uneasy, though, to realise that Oates, in her forensic way, was gathering data for such an article while he was failing.

But the magazines can still terrify. Harper’s Index, which I love reading each month, reveals that two out of every five Americans believe that Jesus Christ will reappear before 2050. What a country! I may still be alive to watch his arrival on television.

Complimented Anna Goldsworthy on her review of Paul Kelly’s memoirs. I like the way Anna listens to a book, a feat of attention of which not all reviewers are capable.

January 7

Listening to Gertrude Stein on a new BBC CD of American poets, I was struck by John Ashbery’s debt to her. Could he have written as he did without Stein’s influence? Then Wallace Stevens’s incomparable, somnolent reading of ‘Credences of Summer’. Plath, always seemingly on the verge of tears, reads ‘Candles’; Roethke ‘The Waking’, which Robert Gray read at Philip Hodgins’s funeral at the little cemetery in Timor. Ashbery, too hokey, is not at his best, but I recall his beautiful reading of my favourite poem of his, ‘At North Farm’, in Melbourne in 1992.

Lord, the power of ABR. In the current issue I editorialise about the PM’s Award and call for a consolation prize of $5000 for the non-winners. Lo and behold, it has just been announced. But not, sadly, a poetry prize.

A day at the office on my own, as I rarely am these days. In the early years I often had the place to myself. One functions quite differently. Interesting that Kafka thought of the office as a human being watching him.

I first saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1957 in London, of all places. I remember feeling some pride in seeing the symbolic kewpie doll presiding over the New Theatre in the heart of the West End. June Jago’s performance as Olive has stayed with me over the years; Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian reviewer, described her as ‘all chin and elbows, but as genuine a dramatic actress as you could find’, which suggested an element of surprise that she should be ‘found’ in Australia. Jago had been in the original 1955 Union Rep production and placed her stamp on Olive: she was to be a hard act to follow. When The Doll came to London it had already won itself a unique place in Australian drama, but there had been some concern about how the Brits would receive a play about rough canecutters and free-and-easy barmaids. But critics like Hope-Wallace hailed ‘this harsh, cawing, strongly felt play’. The imperial imprimatur sealed the success of The Doll. Its later failure on Broadway could be dismissed as a judgement on American audiences rather than the play.

ABR Fellowship news

Our largest and strongest field to date vied for the latest Australian Book Review Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship, worth $5000. The four judges – Tony Birch, Helen Brack, Colin Golvan, and Peter Rose – chose Sydney writer, critic, and anthologist Felicity Plunkett. Dr Plunkett will examine the music of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and its reception. Her profile of this charismatic artist will form the centrepiece of our Performing Arts issue in June.

Writers now have until 20 March to apply for the fourth ABR Fellowship, also worth $5000. The new one – the ABR Copyright Agency Fellowship – is for an article or profile with an Asian theme, part of ABR’s new Asian project, which is being generously supported by the Copyright Agency, and details of which will follow in coming issues. Full details of this Fellowship (which is funded by ABR’s generous Patrons) are now available here. Applicants are encouraged to discuss their projects with the Editor before submitting their proposals.

Funded by ABR Patrons and philanthropic foundations such as the Sidney Myer Fund and The Ian Potter Foundation, the ABR Fellowship program is intended to reward outstanding Australian writers and to advance the magazine’s commitment to critical debate and literary values. We welcome approaches from readers and donors interested in helping us to extend this creative program.

Poetry rising in NSW

George Bernard Shaw once joined a gymnasium that boasted a Professor of Boxing. We don’t know about its pugilistic program, but the University of Technology, Sydney now has its own Professor of Poetry. Robert Adamson, the distinguished Sydney poet who last year won the Patrick White Award, takes up the post this month. The CAL Chair in Australian Poetry – funded by the Copyright Agency for three years – is the first of its kind in Australia and is based on the famous, and often entertainingly contentious, Oxford professorship.

On his appointment Robert Adamson remarked: ‘When Seamus Heaney took up the Oxford Chair he lifted the profile of poetry in the UK and was tremendously popular. I intend to follow this example and inspire more people to read, write, and enjoy poetry.’

New South Wales has clearly stolen a march on the other states. Robert Adamson will work closely with the first City of Sydney Poet, Kate Middleton (who reviews The Best Australian Poems 2011 for us in this issue).

Bracing times

If the publishing industry faces unique challenges, lexicography is a minefield, with sharp decreases in sales (those hefty, lucrative sales of yore) in some markets, and the proliferation of free online dictionary websites (often just old, out-of-print dictionaries, innocent of current usage). Sarah Ogilvie, the new Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU, and Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries, Australia, clearly welcomes these technological and intellectual challenges, as she makes clear in her article in this issue, in which she reflects on the future of dictionaries in the digital age. Dr Ogilvie, who succeeds our resident grammarian and regular contributor, Bruce Moore, will write for us each month.

Seymour Biography Lecture

Montaigne-like, Robert Dessaix may be fond of ‘sitting in [his] tower, cogitating’, as he writes at the beginning of his new ‘collection of musings’, As I Was Saying (Vintage, March); but on song he is one of our most compelling public speakers. After he delivered the 2011 Seymour Biography Lecture at the National Library of Australia last October, many people remarked that this was the finest thing they had heard from him: funny, naughty, erudite, uniquely performative; but also quite intensely moving as the author of books such as A Mother’s Disgrace and Night Letters meditated on his deeper reasons for writing and on the artist’s mortality.

Happily, Robert Dessaix will repeat this extraordinary lecture (‘Pushing against the Dark: Writing about the Hidden Self’) during Adelaide Writers’ Week. This free event, which will close Writers’ Week, is scheduled for Thursday, 8 March, at 3.45 p.m. ABR will publish the lecture in a forthcoming issue, to complement earlier Seymour Biography Lectures. Jane Goodall reviews As I Was Saying for us in the March issue.

ABR Online Edition

ABR Online Edition, launched last April, has proved a big success, especially with institutions. We’re delighted that hundreds of thousands of students and academics now have daily access to ABR via their campus computers. Online users now have immediate access to ABR stretching back to November 2010. Pleasingly, overseas universities are starting to subscribe, as well as many Australian ones.

We want to make ABR Online Edition more attractive to individuals who like to read magazines online, or who like the idea of a complementary electronic version of their print edition. Accordingly, we have reduced the ABR Online Edition annual subscription rate to $40 – cheap as microchips. Print subscribers can also subscribe to the online edition for an extra $20 a year. Those wanting thirty-day access pay $6. In addition, we have dropped the annual subscription rate for schools and public libraries to $150.

Prizes galore

The number of entries in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize went on rising. When we finished counting we had just under 800 entries – almost twice as many as last year. In March we will publish the five shortlisted poems. The winner, who will receive $4000, will be named in our April issue.

Next month, too, we will announce details of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which generated so much interest last year, and which was shared by Gregory Day and Carrie Tiffany.

Sound and vision

Subscribe or renew your print subscription this month to receive a book – an audio book. Bolinda Publishing has supplied ten for us to give to prompt new subscribers. Authors include Christos Tsiolkas, Kim Scott, and Jodi Picoult (reading herself). Twenty-five new or renewing subscribers will receive a copy of the documentary The Tall Man – adapted from the award-winning book by Chloe Hooper – courtesy of Madman. Subscribe or renew now by calling (03) 9429 6700, or visit the subscription page on ABR’s website. Please note that, such is demand, all our special offers are limited to one per subscriber.

Before Manning Clark

Dear Editor,

Norman Etherington’s lively review of Mark McKenna’s book on Manning Clark repeats the claim that Clark was ‘the first academic (in 1946) to offer a full-length course in Australian history’ (December 2011–January 2012). R.M. Crawford, the professor who appointed Clark to give the 1946 course, had himself done so in the previous year to twenty or so students, of whom I was one. I wonder whether Clark, whom I did not know at that time, since he was then attached to the Politics and History department, might also have been present, taking notes and garnering ideas. Certainly Crawford, whose main interest was in European history and the theory and philosophy of history, only gave an Australian course for the one year, but he did so before Clark took it over. In 1952, Crawford published a short history of Australia, no doubt drawing on Clark’s, as well as his own lectures. And before Crawford, his predecessor as Professor of History at Melbourne, Ernest Scott, had for many years given comparable courses.

Crawford also ‘engaged with Asia’ before Clark ever did so, through his school textbook, Ourselves and the Pacific, first published in 1941. This was a standard text for Year TenHistory students in Victoria for over twenty years, and included substantial sections dealing with China and Japan. It certainly told the thousands of students (and hundreds of teachers) who studied it that Australia could not continue to be ‘a distant appendage of Britain’, well before Clark may have begun to do so.

Finally, I think Etherington is too glib in dismissing as ‘daft’ Clark’s premise that ‘modern Australia was forged in the conflict between Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment’. Clark may not have sustained that premise very consistently throughout his six volumes, but given the protracted debates over state aid to the churches and their schools, plus the general process of secularisation of both state and society that was going on throughout the nineteenth century, it seems to me a potentially fruitful approach to the study of Australian history and indeed of our current condition, given the pressures the Enlightenment and its values seem to be under these days.

Etherington’s review certainly prompts me to read McKenna’s book, but it does seem in places to foster the myth (which Manning would no doubt join in promoting) that Clark was the first academic historian to approach the history of Australia in a challenging way.

J.S. Gregory, Balwyn, Vic.

Exonerating Clark

Dear Editor,

Norman Etherington’s review of Mark McKenna’s life of Manning Clark is a perceptive response to an outstanding biography. It has to be corrected on one point, though. The review suggests, to Clark’s detriment, that ‘McKenna’s bibliography of Clark’s publications lists not a single journal article’. But the alleged failure ever to produce a serious scholarly article does not stand up to scrutiny. In 1956 the learned journal Historical Studies published, in two parts, an important article by Clark on the origins of the convicts transported to eastern Australia. It was a tour de force. Clark ticked off other historians and delved into original source material to defend a lively hypothesis (that the convicts were not innocent victims of a harsh penal system; most were hardened products of an urban criminal underclass).

In this instance, the deficiency is with the bibliography, not with Clark. Surely he had enough faults to make the fabrication of an extra one unnecessary?

Stephen Holt, Macquarie, ACT

A creature of his time

Dear Editor,

Norman Etherington would have it that Manning Clark’s ‘premise that modern Australia was forged in the crucible of conflict between Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment seems just daft’. But this is not just what Clark thought; it was a truism of his and previous generations. Indeed, the European sweep over Australia was carried out by the British, who brought with them their nations’ own special religious and philosophical problems. At the vicarage dinner table and in the classrooms of Melbourne Grammar School, this was the world view being expressed right up to the 1960s, and is central to an understanding of our people’s life, motives, and outlook.

Surely the real issue here is not that Clark worked from such a premise, but that he didn’t question it. His premise is not daft; it shows he was a creature of his time, like all historians. From my reading, it is only late in his life that Clark discovered women, multiculturalism, and an Indigenous reality, mainly through listening to his colleagues. The world did not begin in 1788, and Clark’s premise will be revisited and retested by younger historians. It is, even as we speak.

Philip Harvey, Macleod, Vic.

Norman Etherington replies:

Pity the poor reviewer who must rely on the biography for information. I took Mark McKenna’s bibliography and statement about the Australian history course at face value. I neither wrote nor implied that Manning Clark was the first to promote engagement with Asia as an important theme in Australian history. Several precursors could be mentioned in this regard, including the Adelaide historians G.C. Henderson, W.K. Hancock, and Jerry Portus.

It goes without saying that Catholics, Protestants, and rational thinkers figure prominently in the nation’s history. But they are historical presences, not historical forces. To lump together the fissiparous Protestants – high, low, and broad church Anglicans, plus all the dissenters – and imagine them an undifferentiated ‘ism’ somehow engaged in shaping the collective psyche still strikes me as daft.

Emma Kowal replies to Diane Austin-Broos

Diane Austin-Broos’s response to my review of her book A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia (November 2011) confirms her affinity with the group she calls the ‘anti-separatists’ (Letters, December 2011–January 2012). My concern is not that Western education and mainstream employment are ‘neo-liberal’, but that Austin-Broos’s emphasis on the role of ‘public opinion’ in achieving these goals elides rather than solves the central dilemmas of Indigenous affairs.

Public opinion represents ‘an obvious alternative to policing and heavy-handed governance’ only where such opinion is present. Clearly, public opinion regarding the importance of school attendance and sustained employment is not effectively driving change in many remote communities. Is this a function of cultural difference to be respected or disadvantage to be remedied?

Austin-Broos describes well the reproduction of disadvantage through Aboriginal cultural forms that make this question very difficult to answer. In such contexts of ‘social dysfunction’, how can an internal agenda for change be fostered? Should we wait for public opinion to drive the change we want to see, and accept if it fails to materialise (i.e. respecting difference) or is externally driven action to address social dysfunction and alter social norms required (i.e. disadvantage to be remedied)? What if the most powerful people in communities are most likely to oppose change, as they benefit from the status quo? Austin-Broos sidesteps these questions in advocating for ‘Aboriginal people determining their own paths’.

She is not alone in this. My research with non-Indigenous Australians who work in Indigenous affairs shows that a desire for Indigenous people to change themselves without outside intervention is characteristic of progressive Australians who care about Aboriginal disadvantage. These aversions among white anti-racists stem from a desire to avoid inflicting further harm on Indigenous people. However, policy makers do not have the luxury of avoiding the dilemmas of Indigenous affairs. While Austin-Broos claims that I fail to see the ideas underlying policy, my concern is that her position is of little use to policy-makers.

Emma Kowal, Melbourne, Vic.

Not the last word

Dear Editor,

Rachel Buchanan’s essay ‘“Sweeping up the ashes”: The Politics of Collecting Personal Papers’ (December 2011–January 2012) made fascinating reading, with its emphasis on the importance of archives and on the constant search for material that throws light on the creative process. But there is one point on which I must disagree. Buchanan’s essay seems to suggest that the archive record should be the ‘last word’ on the subject.

Much depends on the subject, but in my experience the official archival record can be anything but the final word (here I note that the British Foreign Office vets most of its material before it is sent to the Public Record Office). In my own case, while researching a book on my father, Robert Frederick Bird Wake, who worked for state security during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, I found evidence of the record’s having been manipulated to suit the priorities of the state/federal departments involved.

Some evidence was misconstrued. For example, in my father’s personal ASIO files there were pictures of my father visiting the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) offices in Market Street, Sydney. These pictures were taken during ASIO surveillance of those offices, after my father was forced to retire from ASIO. ASIO saw these pictures as evidence of my father’s dealings with the CPA. What they really showed was my father visiting the CPA bookshop. Since the early 1940s my father had made it a practice to gather as much material as he could find about the CPA. He believed that by reading CPA literature he could find out more about communist policy, methods, and objectives. By being better informed, my father believed, he would be better able to protect the Commonwealth from its secret enemies. However, ASIO was working with another agenda. They wanted to make my father look like a suspect character, largely because of his association with H.V. Evatt.

ASIO’s version of my father’s activities was recently picked up in Peter Butt’s documentary I, Spry (2010). The irony of this documentary is that, while it reached the conclusion that Spry was a flawed spymaster, it still insisted that my father was a man of suspect loyalties, whereas in fact my father seriously doubted if Spry was the right man for the job. Not much of this is going to be revealed in the official record. This is why researchers should not accept the archive record as holy writ.

Even when it comes to the creative process, I doubt that authors fully understand the forces that move them. What is written down is only part of the story. Finding out what really happened, and why, takes time and effort and a curious suspension of belief. In my experience, too many researchers have an agenda in mind before they start.

Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW

As of writing, Australia has six living ex-prime ministers – not quite a record. Of these, one, of course, is still in parliamentary harness, and may still aspire to the top job. Of the remaining five, all but one have provided us with voluminous accounts of their stewardship. The exception is our twenty-fourth prime minister, Paul Keating (1991–96). Not that he has not promised, or rather threatened, such an account, telling his great rival Bob Hawke, ‘if I get around to writing a book, and I might, I will be telling the truth; the whole truth ... [of] how lucky you were to have me to drive the government during your down years, leaving you with the credit for much of the success’. One can imagine how his publishers must salivate at the prospect. This might explain this grand piece of vanity publishing – more than 600 pages in hardback – containing the ex-prime minister’s speeches in retirement. Apart from one notable exception, they cover the period 1996 to 2011 and range in subject matter from Mahler’s Second Symphony – ‘go[ing] beyond any music of its kind ever written’ – to the ending by Labor of Australia’s ‘jurassic economy’, along with big picture approaches to international politics and perceptive analyses of the contemporary world’s economic woes.

David Marr is not on the list of Australian living treasures, but perhaps he should be. Among our best journalists, he stands out as someone who has consistently challenged the powerful, at his best with forensic skill and deep research. Like other journalist–authors such as Anne Summers and George Megalogenis, he brings an analytic intelligence to understanding our politics that few academics can rival.

The Princeton Post Office, as befits this famed university town, has a certain grandeur. It is small – Princeton is a village after all – and modest in its proportions, but grand in aspiration. As you step through its panelled doors your gaze is drawn by the long parade of milk-glass and bronze lights towards the mural that adorns the far wall. Like the White House murals, it is lofty, but almost domestic in its depictions of American history, American hope, American mythology. Men in knee breeches and white hose smile benignly upon a representative assembly – the Native American, the Black Man, the reclining Woman, posed amid a harvest of plenty and the symbolic paraphernalia of learning, with Princeton’s historic Nassau Hall receding behind, distant like a Tuscan hill town, and the Muse at the mural’s centre exhorting Old and New World comers alike:

America! With Peace and Freedom blest
Pant for True Fame and scorn inglorious rest
Science invites, urg’d by the Voice divine
Exert thyself ’till every Art be thine

My fellows in the long, slow queue stare when I scribble down the scrolled words. ‘Pant for True Fame’ is obscured by one of the tottering blue cardboard racks of DIY postal apparatus that desecrate the oak interior. I risk my place in the line to find out whether the word is ‘pant’ or ‘fight’. There is not much inglorious rest about this queue. I think I am the only person who ever so much as looks at the mural.

But when you reach the one open postal window, there to greet you is the smiling, infinitely genial Mr Ron Clark. Over the years Mr Clark has grown used to Australians telling him that he bears a famous Australian name. And he is old enough for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics to be part of his world, of his race memory. We trade memories and accents. His ‘Gidday ma-y-te’ is enthusiastic, though not wholly convincing. I always leave the post office in a very good mood. Curiously, so do most of Mr Clark’s customers. Impatience melts in the face of his implacable courtesy.

But individual American charm and exemplary kindliness cannot disguise the fact that the US Postal Service is in serious trouble. It is caught in the universal trend towards email and e-commerce and by the particular American burden of health care provision for its circa 600,000 employees, plus a Congress-mandated requirement that it prepay approximately $US75 billion in employee retirement benefits. Attempts to diversify profitably – as Australian post offices have done – are resisted both by the competition and by the competition’s political friends in Congress. No wonder these once proud edifices have such a ramshackle air. But who is to blame? The truth about the postal service’s financial health (or terminal illness) is hard to come by. Like Qantas, it suffers from clouds of witnesses, some of them working at the executive level of the service itself. And all around it, like a doomsayer’s edict, hangs the very American conviction that any government institution must, by definition, be inefficient, bloated, socialist – European.

And yet Americans love their Saturday mail delivery, their pick-up from the door-slot service, the frontier symbolism of the mail always getting through. Carved into the Corinthian-columned exterior – two blocks long – of New York’s Eighth Avenue James A. Farley Post Office is this boast: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ But something is going to stay the Eighth Avenue couriers, because their Post Office is currently being gutted and refashioned into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station. Rail commuters will cheer. The grandeur that was lost when the adjacent Penn Station was demolished and rebuilt into tawdry commercial catacombs will be restored.

But what of the 120,000 federal postal workers whose jobs are currently in jeopardy? What will they make of the proposed transformation? Will a mail clerk in a small town in Louisiana be bemused by American paradox when her local post office is closed and she is laid off? Will she be consoled by latter-day manifestations of American grandeur and exceptionalism in an age of austerity? Or will she simply decide that she won’t bother to come out and vote any more because American democracy no longer works for her.

In a different political age, the grand station project would be regarded as nation building, part of a getting-back-on-track process that involves collective purpose and a willingness to fund crucial infrastructure through taxation, including the relinquishing of tax cuts for those already well off – the wastrel legacy of George W. Bush. It is not as though America doesn’t have mighty precedents: Roosevelt’s New Deal, or the postwar nation building under Eisenhower, with its focus on science, on space research, on education, on the building of highways. But in this political age, with its bunkered-down individualism and entrenched suspicion of government initiative, America can’t even fix its bridges, let alone put a man on the moon.

The inertia is shocking to an outside observer. It is shocking to Americans themselves, but the remedy – revenue raising and a reassessment of the way of life that George H.W. Bush declared ‘not negotiable’ – seems to be even more shocking, or unacceptable. So the connective tissue of this vast country stretches and severs. When a vital commuter bridge in Philadelphia fell down last Fall, I listened agape as Public Radio traffic reports detailed the ensuing chaos, but not the action being taken to fix the problem. Why no fix? Because so many of the states are broke. And yet the resistance to raising taxes or to readjusting tax rates to ensure greater equity seems stronger than the will to keep Americans in work. So teachers and firefighters are let go, and the labour force that might be employed to fix the bridges, rebuild the highways, and service the hospitals goes looking for a job at Walmart, or onto the brutally time-limited dole queue. There are fourteen million people officially unemployed in America.

When President Obama addressed a joint sitting of Congress to present his Jobs Bill on 8 September last, in a speech that reminded America yet again of the rhetorical skills, the resolve and the wit to tell it straight, of their elected leader, the response from the Republicans was a frankly insulting silence followed by the kind of stonewalling that renders government impotent and Washington – the president included – indiscriminately loathed.

While Congress dithered, the circus of the Republican debates commanded the available media attention. Late-night comedians had a high old time with Texas Governor Rick Perry as he made an ass of himself, with Herman Cain for his ‘Like a Virgin’ routine, and with the newly righteous Newt Gingrich. But the spectacle was degrading, the satire jaded, and one longed instead for an acerbic Auden to revisit a dive on Fifty-second Street and decry, again, ‘a low dishonest decade’.

But poets and prophets don’t get much airspace in America’s public world. ‘Exert thyself ’till every art be thine’ is not an aspiration to catch the contemporary imagination or find a place in the platform of a presidential aspirant. Early in the Republican primary season, Mitt Romney, keen to divest himself of an inconveniently ‘liberal’ political past (progressive social policy and popular health care legislation during his time as governor of Massachusetts) did some prospective triage on American cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Public Broadcasting Service. All nice enough things to have, he allowed, but in hard times maybe they weren’t what a good presidential candidate would call necessary.

As for ‘Science invites’: well, with the exception of Jon Huntsman, who will not win the Republican nomination, most Republican candidates reject the scientific consensus on global warming, and a lot of other science besides. Mitt Romney at least vacillates. (On the human contribution to climate change: ‘It could be a little. It could be a lot.’) But he is not going to inspire a boom in alternative energy production. When an American scientist wins a Nobel Prize (as so many of them do), there is a flurry of media attention. But national pride does not lead to serious listening. American ignorance about science is frightening. American suspicion of intellectual élites (the president and First Lady included) is plain dangerous.

There is a publishing industry now devoted to analysing the short Obama years. The tone is often elegiac. Much of the commentary blithely or wilfully ignores the context in which the forty-fourth president has had to operate. It underplays the Republicans’ concerted resistance (and the implicit racist subtext of that resistance) to any legislative initiatives associated with Obama. It takes scant account of the conservative bent of the Supreme Court or of the corrupting effects of its unleashing corporate money into the electoral funding process through ‘Citizens United’. It neglects to mention the super majority required to get legislation passed (‘Why isn’t he Roosevelt?’), even during the period when the Democrats enjoyed a majority. Strong on frustrated hopes, the critics fail to acknowledge achievements: the revival of the American car industry; health care legislation; the withdrawal from Iraq; the elimination of Osama bin Laden. Under George W. Bush, the death of bin Laden would have been heralded as a victory – a mission genuinely accomplished. Under Obama, it is construed as a civil rights violation, or ignored, as foreign affairs generally are in this economy-obsessed country. As the 2012 elections approach, the scandal of Republican attempts to limit people’s voting rights (particularly in electorates where African Americans and Hispanics constitute a majority) has become an open one, drawing action from Attorney General Eric Holder. Too little too late cry the pundits. But what do they expect if the Republicans win?

I am not blind to the failures, the stumbles, the miscalculations, and the ill-advised appointments that have marred the Obama administration. They are endlessly documented. And if the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street was not initially so decried in the general population as it was in the press, ‘Occupy Wall Street’ has now made its condemnation a cause. But in its willingness to blame rather than build, in its impatience with Obama’s attempts at conciliation (‘banal’, according to some) and with its lethally short memory, America risks squandering an historic opportunity, and the talents of one of the most intelligent and thoughtful presidents it will ever have.

Just before I left Princeton late last year, I heard that the Post Office, a prime piece of real estate overlooking fashionable Palmer Square, was to be sold and the business relocated. I hope not. Hope is a resilient, not just an audacious virtue. And Mr Ron Clark is an indispensable part of American experience.

Postscript - August 2020

The Post Office is now gone from its central location in the town – relocated to a flimsy makeshift building down the far end of Nassau Street, a long walk from the campus, from the residential halls with their far-from-home students, and from the bustling life of the town. I am glad Mr Clark retired before he had to watch his workplace diminished and dishonoured.

Ambitious, arrogant, talented, brave, learned, truculent, and convivial: Ben Jonson was too outstanding, too odd, and too contrary to be taken as a creature of his time. Yet he had so wide-ranging a life that to write his biography is to capture, in little, a great part of his remarkable age.

It is a brave undertaking to write a single-volume history of World War II. As Max Hastings notes, we already have many good books in this category: Weinberg, A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994); Calvocoressi, Wint, and Pritchard, Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War (1989); Millett and Murray, A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (2000); and Hastings might have mentioned Parker’s Struggle For Survival: The History of the Second World War (1989) and Ellis’s Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (1990). He was too late to notice Andrew Roberts’s latest contribution.

Bernard Smith, who died in September 2011, was responsible for creating the first orthodoxy in Australian art history. His version of the story of Australian art has been persuasive and enduring. It held sway for half a century; in many ways we are still living with it. Smith’s classic account of the development of Australian art was Australian Painting, first published in 1962 and reprinted with updates in 1971, 1991, and 2001.

I can name many Australian creators of literature. Let not our historians depress them with proofs that they are merely creators of Australian literature.
(W.A. Amiet, Meanjin Papers)

I first discovered Australian literature in Argentina. While I was there studying Argentinian literature at the University of Buenos Aires in 2009–10, I spent many nights hunched over the table in our dingy kitchen with one of my housemates, Teresa. We would pick over the politically infused vernacular of the short stories that I was reading for my class on ‘Problems in Argentinian Literature’. Most days I caught bus number 168, the same route on which Julio Cortázar’s short story ‘Ómnibus’ is set. My encounter with the city became an encounter with its literature. I lived near calle Garay, and walked along it wondering about the possibility of the infinite nutshell window in a Borges basement. Around the corner from my apartment, in the small independent bookshop La Libre, I found a book of contemporary Australian poetry translated into Spanish by Colombian poets. Included were poems by Les Murray. On the cover was a horizon of orange desert, with ‘AUSTRALIA’ in a huge font. At once a rush of recognition and homesickness; then a flush of embarrassment trying to explain to my Argentinean friend why I had never read anything by the famous Australian poet.

Simon Leys is the pen name of the distinguished academic Pierre Ryckmans, who came to notice, first as a sinologist, then as a critic and author. The essays in this collection, composed over more than three decades during which Ryckmans held appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, cover a wide range of subjects.

Wolf Creek, released in 2005, was always smarter than your average slasher. Anchored by a brilliant performance by John Jarratt, the film was harrowing enough to strike the unobservant as another Saw or Hostel, but far more lurked there for those who bothered to look. In acclaimed novelist Sonya Hartnett’s brief but vivid critical study, the film has found the analysis it deserves. In the book’s arresting autobiographical opening, Hartnett, describing the fear and deprivation of childhood, coins the term ‘two-bit antipodean horror’, which she claims to prefer to the more familiar ‘Australian Gothic’. It evokes a ‘sullen blandness’ at the heart of the country, and it’s this pinched meanness, this horror, that she describes so well in her study.

Whenever I have found myself in disagreement with Philip French’s film reviews in London’s Observer, I have always felt worried, assuming I had missed a crucial point or misread a plot move. He may well be the longest-serving film reviewer in the English-speaking world; he is certainly the most honoured.

It is easy, too easy, to feel familiar with Clint Eastwood. However fully we realise that he is just another actor playing a role, part of us wants to believe that he speaks to colleagues in terse catchphrases and squints at friends and family with profound contempt. Almost invariably, his tough-guy image sets the terms for assessments of his work as a director – whether he’s seen as the Last Classicist or merely as a hardened old pro who gets the job done. To be sure, in conversation with journalists Eastwood has often been willing to play up to his laconic reputation. My favourite example came when he was asked how he approached the adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County: ‘I took all the drivel out.’

Henry Reynolds is the pre-eminent historian of Aboriginal–settler relations in Australia, and with this theme he begins his history of Tasmania. He eschews the obligatory set piece description of Aboriginal society before the Europeans arrived, with which so many books now awkwardly commence. His opening chapter is ‘First Meetings: Extraordinary Encounters’, where the explorers and founders of settlements are not much more than names and the interest is in how the Aborigines responded to them. I thought it was by design to leave the reader knowing little more about these Europeans than the Aborigines did, but it is not altogether so, for in the next chapter Reynolds operates as if he has told us much more about the identity and motivation of the Europeans than he actually has.

Family histories have their limitations. One compensation is to discover famous or infamous ancestors. In most Australian states, disinterring a convict becomes a badge of honour. In South Australia, having a nineteenth-century premier and a noted pastoralist in one’s lineage advances a claim to fame. Author James Waite Morgan is the great-grandson of two notable colonial figures, and the captivating title of his new book, The Premier and the Pastoralist, above portraits of William Morgan and Peter Waite on the jacket, intimates a strong relationship between two powerful men. There isn’t one.

The current issue of Meanjin is a forthright one. In her editorial, Sally Heath singles out the contributions of Marcia Langton and Darren Siwes, and with good reason: their work typifies the issue. Siwes has given the journal its cover, and his choice of image – a coin depicting an Indigenous head of state in the year 2041 – makes its point. The cornerstone of the issue is, however, ‘Reading the Constitution out Loud’, a thorough and level-headed essay by Langton on Julia Gillard’s promise to hold a referendum on the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution. Langton, a member of the government’s inquiry panel, whose matter-of-fact style leads the way for the rest of theissue, asks, ‘how can we sustain the opportunity for a referendum […] in circumstances that are not riven by “dog whistle” issues in the racialist Australian politics that arise with each electoral season?’ The question cannot be ignored, nor easily answered.

 In his closing address to the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Peter Carey made a plea on behalf of the fading ‘cult’ of serious reading. This prompted a fierce riposte from Bryce Courtenay: ‘There’s no such thing as popular writing versus literary writing. If I’m a popular writer then Peter Carey is an unpopular writer. If I’m a best-selling writer then he’s a worst-selling writer’ (Crikey, 9 June 2010). Courtenay’s full comments were somewhat more nuanced than the ensuing newspaper headlines suggested. He challenged the creators of Australian ‘literary fiction’ to acknowledge how many readers are – that is, aren’t – attracted to their output. But Courtenay’s suggestion that Carey is ‘unpopular’ is only true if we compare Carey to an author such as Matthew Reilly (using Courtenay’s example), or to Courtenay himself. While I am not privy to Carey’s global sales figures, I would wager that a hefty majority of Australian novelists would envy his readership.

It begins with a car accident. Five friends are returning to college after a night of drinking. The driver, Cameron, hits a deer and overturns the vehicle. When the police and ambulance arrive, Dylan, who has drunk the least, claims to have been at the wheel. The others – Elliot, who narrates the story, Tallis, Brian, and especially Cameron – let him assume responsibility. It is, more or less, what Dylan does, what his role in the group is: a mediator, a defuser of tension, a solver of problems. Ten years later, shortly after he is killed in a traffic accident, the details of that night, and other similar instances of Dylan’s particular kind of timely assistance, will resurface as the four gather for their annual reunion in Las Vegas.

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was always going to be a tough book to follow. Carrie Tiffany’s début novel, published in 2005, was shortlisted for various major prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. It also won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award in 2005 and the Dobbie Literary Award in 2007. Everyman’s Rules tells the story of a sewing instructor and a soil scientist who meet aboard the ‘Better Farming Train’ as it passes through the Victorian countryside, and who settle in the impoverished Mallee farmland.

Currawalli Street is Christopher Morgan’s second novel for adults. Set in a suburb north of Melbourne, the novel is divided into two parts. It follows the lives of the street’s residents on the brink of World War I, then skips to 1972, when one of the grandsons of the original residents returns from the Vietnam War.

In writing Bite Your Tongue, Francesca Rendle-Short, who is director of Creative Writing at RMIT University, has chosen a thorny tale. She dedicates the book to her mother, Angel, who is clearly a formidable personality: Northern Irish; medical doctor; mother of six daughters; Christian activist; ‘book burner’. Early on, we are told that ‘some stories are hard to tell, they bite back. To write this one I’ve had to come at it obliquely, give myself over to the writing with my face half turned; give my story to someone else to tell.’

Memoir, it seems, is proliferating ever more furiously in Australia, filling bookshelves and review pages like bacteria in still water. We are insatiable in our appetite to read and write memoir, to feel the ‘real’. As a memoirist myself, I am all too aware of my hypocrisy in feeling uneasy about this rage for introspection. But memoir is most successful when it portrays an extraordinary individual; or gives witness to an important experience (accounts of Holocaust survivors, say); or when the personal resonates with the universal, and one person’s experience becomes a prism for that of many. A memoir that hesitates to claim such reader-oriented ratifications risks being a tedious assembly of anecdotes, a public catharsis, or mere narcissism.

Small towns, as anyone who has lived in one can attest, abound in colourful characters. Or is it just that people’s peccadilloes are magnified without the distractions of the madding crowd? Rod Usher knows a thing or two about small towns; he happens to live in one: the village of Barcarrota in Extremadura, Spain. After a long career in journalism – including stints as literary editor of The Age, chief subeditor of The Sunday Times in London, and as a senior writer for TIME magazine in Europe – he opted for the quiet life to concentrate on his literary career. He has published two books of poetry, Above Water (1985) and Smiling Treason (1992), two previous novels, A Man ofMarbles (1989) and Florid States (1990), and some non-fiction. Echoes of that work resound in the new book … but more of that later.

A treacherous beauty pervades Chandani Lokugé’s third novel, a tragic story of loss and squandered love. Chris Foscari, owner of a rarefied specialist bookshop in Melbourne and son of an Italian father and an Australian mother, is married to the outrageously beautiful Sri Lankan Uma, whom he met when she was studying in Melbourne. They have a teenage son, Arjuna, who is also blessed with unusual grace, at least in his mother’s eyes: 

Peter Corris’s Comeback, the thirty-ninth or some such book in his Cliff Hardy series, is yet another to be plucked from the apparently bottomless ocean that is the crime fiction genre. Ageing private detective Hardy – as adept with his fists as he is tactful with the ladies – skulks around a Sydney crammed with scabrous cops, fat-cat entrepreneurs, hired muscle, slinky prostitutes, and myriad other shady types. Misogyny at times bubbles uncomfortably close to the surface, there is no ailment physical or emotional that cannot be alleviated by alcohol, and the outcome conceals an Ian McEwan-ish twist so inevitable that it ultimately manifests as anything but.

Deep River
(Kevin Rudd has named Dietrich Bonhoeffer as his inspiration)

Jennifer Maiden

Late afternoon. Another forty degree day.
Sick of ecological talk I decide to meet it,
take my book into the park,
not sure how far I’ll go with Against Nature.
Rare grass crackles beneath my feet.
This is not turf but a shell oval,
yet die-hards play in their filthy whites.
Only clouds billow, lyric.
Dog after dog sniffs my rug,
preferring the plastic hats ringing the oval –
odoriferous boundary. Impatient
with Huysmans I sit gathering
impressions like someone weaving
a garment that will never cloak.
Despite the heat, the cricketers play on.
This is the kind of bowling my brother
would have dismissed as ‘poop’.
Ball after ball is clubbed to the boundary
by the principal red cap. I think of someone
carved in marble, adamant – Moses, Ahab.
Week after week he humiliates
the brotherhood of salesmen.
One of his sixes clears my rug,
sends up a cloud of dust,
as if drought too will applaud.
Someone must be keeping score
but there is no board, no crowd,
only a few girlfriends, smoking, bored,
and the captain’s century,
when it inevitably comes, is like
a minor miracle among the poplars,
the aching poplars soon to be removed.
The red cap, having none of this applause,
smites the next ball into an oak.
Nearby at fine leg, so close we almost speak,
the sole handsome blue cap –
nimble, no stomach, but a woeful catch –
slaps his thigh inspirationally,
twitching for a bowl but never called.
Futilely he exhorts his mates, the last fanatic.
Urging them on, his martial cries
bounce off the apartment blocks
that ring the oval, cool, shining, indifferent.

CONTENTS: FEBRUARY 2012

‘One would have to be extremely naïve not to know immediately upon entering his room what was what when one saw the decoration with its reproduction Greek statues of hermaphrodites, and its strange collection of pictures, each boasting a posterior, mixed with pictures of pretty young men from the local garrison which the talented dilettante has made himself and continues to make.’

There is an entertaining moment in Woody Allen’s new film when the protagonist, Gil Pender, meets young Ernest in a bar. ‘You liked my book?’ Hemingway asks. ‘Liked? I loved all your work!’ gushes the time-travelling Pender. Hemingway looks chuffed and then proclaims his aesthetic.

With the recent focus on new anthologies in the Australian poetry community firmly placed on UNSW Press’s Australian Poetry Since 1788 (edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray) and the publication of two anthologies dedicated to the work of younger poets (UQP’s Thirty Australian Poets and John Leonard Press’s Young Poets), the arrival of Best Australian Poems 2011 could seem almost like an afterthought. Nonetheless, as always, this annual anthology deserves attention because it acts as the yearbook of Australian poetry, reporting on the state of the craft as seen by the year’s editor. This year John Tranter is in the driver’s seat, and his sensibility is substantially different from those of other recent anthologists. Tranter, the author of more than twenty poetry collections, has also been an influential editor, both as the founding editor of the pioneer online journal Jacket and as co-editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991). Tranter was a natural choice to take over from Robert Adamson (2009–10) as editor of The Best Australian Poems

War is one of the great paradoxes of Australia. Why should a people occupying a continent so far from the world’s trouble spots have spent so much of their history dying in often distant wars? It is one of the questions that drew me to the study of Australian history. I am little the wiser after reading this collection of Australian war writing. This is partly because editor Mark Dapin is intent simply on providing a range of Australian literary responses, and a few not so literary, to the experience of war.

Best known for her poetry and plays, Dorothy Hewett was also the author of novels, short stories and numerous reviews, articles and lectures. An excellent Collected Poems (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995), edited by William Grono, has been complemented by Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (2010). The highlight of Hewett’s prose writings as a whole is her brilliant autobiography, Wild Card (1990), in which she presents aspects of her tumultuous life story from 1923 to 1958. UWA Publishing will reissue this work in May 2012, a decade after her death. Hewett’s life and work cry out for a full-scale biography. Fiona Morrison’s Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett fills some of the gaps in Hewett’s published record of articles, reviews, lectures, and journalism.

As contemporary author fan bases go, Margaret Atwood’s must be among the broadest. She is read at crèches, on university campuses, and in nursing homes. Feminists, birders, and would-be writers jostle to see her perform at literary festivals. Yet despite an Arthur C. Clarke Award and, in her own words, ‘three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism’, she has had a rather more rocky time of it with science fiction enthusiasts.

In 2004 Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher, began to experience a cluster of mysterious symptoms. Bruises appeared and vanished ‘like stigmata’, and a numb headache and sudden exhaustion suggested that something was ‘terribly wrong’. Her pains were ghostly and mobile. When her doctors suggested migraines and prescribed aspirin, she demanded blood tests. She received a call to come back for more tests, and still recalls the urgency in the nurse’s voice. ‘Come now,’ Reed remembers her saying. ‘Come now.’

In the past, a twenty-something could exemplify le dernier cri without having to dispense with his bicycle gears, reflectors, and brakes. Worry not. An infinitely cooler trend – less prone to vehicular mishap – is doubtless on its way to erase fixed-gear bikes, or ‘fixies’, from the palimpsest that is sub-cultural fashion. HipsterMattic, blogger Matt Granfield’s amusing début memoir, records his entrée into the fickle world of sartorial politics, organic produce, and National Bike Polo Championships.

Russell Braddon was part of the first wave of postwar Australian ‘expatriates’ who embedded themselves in British cultural life. He published memoirs, novels, and biographies. He wrote for newspapers. He was a regular guest on BBC radio, a presenter on television, always in demand on the lunch and dinner speaking circuit. He enjoyed the life of a popular and successful author for more than forty years. He was a showman with sound instincts and good intentions. Nigel Starck has written his biography with respect and affection.

Catherine Duncan looks like becoming the poster girl for Australian women playwrights of the 1930s and 1940s. Her sleek, sophisticated face – the epitome of the 1940s career woman – looked out from the cover of Michelle Arrow’s Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last (2002), and now it graces the cover of Views from the Balcony: A Biography of Catherine Duncan, written by her son, Michael Keane.

New Zealand coins often sneak into Australian purses. Both currencies bear the queen’s, and some coins have common colonial symbols on the front (Cook’s Endeavour on the Kiwi fifty cent, for example), but these coins only work by stealth. They have value if they can pass as Australian. Recognised for what they are – foreign objects – their currency evaporates.

Knuckled, poet and editor Fiona Wright’s highly anticipated first collection, arrives with an assuredness of style and voice that augurs well for Australian poetry. The overarching idea of ‘knuckles’ – of being knuckled, of beating knuckles, of the working joints of bare hands, even the throwing of knuckles in a game of chance – gives us a strong clue to the collection’s main themes. These fluent and highly evocative poems bring a sharply observed, sometimes bruised, sometimes raw and violent sense of the worlds they document. The poet as watcher and as reflector of such images is a robust filter through which to moderate the world of perception, and yet is inevitably precarious in the face of the onslaught from outside; of the intrusion of otherness into the vulnerable sanctuary of the self.

Mamang and Noongar Mambara Bakitj are retellings of traditional Noongar narratives by the Miles Franklin Award-winning author Kim Scott, in collaboration with a team of others. The books are part of a broader Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories reclamation and revitalisation project currently under way in the south-western coastal region of Western Australia, an area roughly traversing Albany to Esperance. Like many other Australian languages today, Noongar is barely hanging on. These modest diglot books, charmingly illustrated by Noongar people in simple, unaffected, and direct style, therefore represent a timely intervention into the continuing post-colonial destruction of this critically (and globally) endangered language.

Habibi, Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel, is an epic six years in the making. Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, spanning ancient and modern epochs, Habibi tells the story of Dodola and Zam, child slaves who fall in love and dwell on a boat moored in a desert, before being dragged violently into lives of suffering and misery. It is a melodramatic tale full of humour, conflict, and heartbreak. It reminded me of Osamu Tezuka’s histories and of Will Eisner’s gritty, realistic fables.