New home for ABR

Happily, ABR has a new home, well away from the egregious fashions of Bridge Road, Richmond. Soon we will be moving to a new community hub in Melbourne’s Southbank precinct. The City of Melbourne has renovated the nineteenth-century J.H. Boyd Girls’ High School on City Road, and our new office (not finished when we took this photograph!) will be infinitely superior to our present cramped premises. The Boyd will house a new public library, a café, and a range of arts practitioners. ABR will have access to the elegant function room on the ground floor, which will comfortably seat at least 100 people. Already we are planning an extensive program of events.

Patrick White at 100

April 12 was quite a night in Canberra, when Patrick White’s long-time agent and literary executor, Barbara Mobbs, and renowned actress Judy Davis spoke at the opening of The Life of Patrick White, an absorbing exhibition of letters, manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, and memorabilia. After a lengthy showing in Canberra (until 8 July), the exhibition will move to the State Library of New South Wales (13 August–29 October).

Continuing our series of reviews and commentaries on the great writer, this month we publish David Marr’s extended article on Patrick White’s vicissitudes as a dramatist and on his difficult but ultimately fertile (if distracting) work in the theatre.

W.H. Chong’s portrait of White (which appeared on our April 2011 cover) has been one of the most popular in his series of ABR portrait prints. Of the thirty prints in this edition, we have ten left. To mark the White centenary, we have reduced the price to $125 for current subscribers, and $150 for non-subscribers (plus postage). Call us on (03) 9429 6700 to buy a print.

Vale Bruce Bennett 1941–2012

Australian literature has lost an outstanding scholar, educator, and champion with the death of Bruce Bennett AO, who was Professor of English Literature at the Australian Defence Force Academy from 1993 to 2006. His publications include Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry (1991) and The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998, co-edited with Jennifer Strauss and Chris Wallace-Crabbe). He often wrote for ABR, and late last year he became an ABR Patron. Despite serious illness, he went on writing until the end. Elsewhere in this issue, Australian Scholarly Publishing advertises his new book: The Spying Game: An Australian Angle.

Back to Clunes

ABR enjoys close ties with various regional literary festivals, including Clunes Booktown Festival, which is on again this year (5–6 May). Featured guests will include ABR regulars Anna Goldsworthy, Geoffrey Blainey, and John Arnold. Bracingly early on Saturday, 5 May, Editor Peter Rose will repeat his workshop on ‘The Art of Reviewing’, and that afternoon he will chair a discussion on ‘Patrick White’s Centenary – Why It Matters’, with Peter Goldsworthy, Michael Heyward, and Nicholas Jose.

Postage toastage

We have copies of most back issues of ABR. So keen are we not to have to carry all of them down City Road to The Boyd that we have dropped the postage charge of $2 if you buy copies online. Now you pay just $9.95 per copy.

Wired for sound

Robert Dessaix’s Seymour Biography Lecture, published in our April 2012 issue, is proving to be one of our most popular features in years. Now readers can listen to ‘Pushing against the Dark: Writing about the Hidden Self’ as it was first delivered by Dessaix, at the National Library of Australia. The podcast is available on our website. In addition, the National Library has made Ian Donaldson’s Australian Book Review 50th Birthday Lecture, also delivered in October 2011, available as a podcast – see www.nla.gov.au/podcasts/talks.html. Robert Dessaix’s podcast is the first of many new audiovisual elements with which we plan to augment our ever-changing website.

Double lives, double prizes

This month, courtesy of Fremantle Press, ten new subscribers will win a signed copy of The House of Fiction: Leonard, Susan and Elizabeth Jolley by Susan Swingler, which Francesca Rendle-Short describes in her review on page 18 as ‘riveting, explosive even, and also deeply moving’. Twenty-five renewing subscribers will win double passes to the new film Trishna, director Michael Winterbottom’s version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Phone us now to claim your prize: (03) 9429 6700.

CONTENTS: MAY 2012

By the time I found him twenty-five years ago in the Adelaide Hills, Glen McBride was old, tiny, spry, and ready to boast about his career. I doubt many readers have heard of this little man or know of his pivotal role in the literature of this country. That’s what had me knocking at his door. And though he disowned none of it in the hours we spent ranging over his life and times, what really perked him up was confessing his part in the salami and sausage business in that part of the world.

‘Everything should not be told, it is better to keep some things to yourself.’ So begins Susan Swingler’s The House of Fiction with this quote from much-loved Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley as an epigraph. And what a loaded beginning it is, too, given the subject matter of this memoir: the discovery by Swingler of the fraudulent and secret double life her father Leonard Jolley led with Elizabeth (or Monica Knight, as she was called), his second wife. In this family drama, which began in England, there are two women who were once friends and who look uncannily alike, two daughters whose names begin with S who were born to these women at almost exactly the same time, and, centre-stage, one taciturn father, Leonard Jolley.

Newspapers, they say, are in the throes of ‘far-reaching structural change’, a euphemism for ‘extinction’ that arouses complacency in the breasts of the e-literate; fury in those of the technophobes. But one only has to take a slightly longer view to realise that the golden age of newspapers, over which Creighton Burns presided as editor of The Age, may have only ever been a transitory phase.

Even at the age of eighty-four it appears that our censors of old possessed a moral clarity that no longer exists. Censorship was carried out by the state as a force of moral purpose, protecting the population from the consequences of reading banned literature: to wit, moral decline and subversion, particularly among the powerless. This was pertinent to children whose innocence entailed a lack of knowledge of moral turpitude and who were seen as particularly vulnerable.

What happens if we take seriously the metaphor of a marketplace of ideas? Philosopher John Armstrong and economist Carsten Murawski recently tested that question in an article on theconversation.edu.au, by exploring the implications of a market logic for higher education (20 March 2012).They argued that student choice would remodel the teaching and research agendas of our universities – not instantly but over time, much as water carves out shapes in sandstone. The online response was instant, and unambiguous. Academics and doctoral students rejected the language of markets as profoundly hostile to their vision of a university. If students start paying for instruction, said one respondent, institutions will soon pander to ‘the lowest common denominator amongst student interests’.

In 1981, William Kentridge journeyed from apartheid South Africa to the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, renowned for its work in improvisation and physical theatre – theatre that creates itself in play. Though Kentridge would become an artist – working in drawing, printing, animation, film, opera, and sculpture – physical theatre and improvisation come closest to the curious magic of his work.

Kentridge, born in 1955, came from no ordinary white South African family. Three of his grandparents were celebrated attorneys. His grandmother was South Africa’s first female judge. His father, Sydney Kentridge, represented Steve Biko. In an interview with Michael Cathcart on Radio National, Kentridge added that being Jewish in a predominantly Christian milieu made him ‘one step removed’ and ‘aware of a different perspective’. Even so, how extraordinary it must have been to go from a police state to a school that encouraged open-ended play. Perhaps that experience suggests why playfulness informs Kentridge’s conception of political art. He has said, ‘I am interested in political art … that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings’.

From Johannesburg, 2^nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), you see in almost all of Kentridge’s work a dramatic conflict between two versions of the self: naked, and in public dress. Such dramatic opposition reappears in the etchings Ubu Tells the Truth (1996–97), which Kentridge created to mark the centenary of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896).Performed in 1970s South Africa, Jarry’s study of despotism served as a commentary on the apartheid régime. Kentridge’s etchings show a sort of blackboard sketch of fat-bellied Ubu – in Kentridge’s description, ‘A schematic drawing of Ubu, in Jarry’s style, with a moustache and a pointed head, wearing a robe with a huge spiral on it.’ Inside each picture of Ubu, however, he shows a naked man, the flesh every-where marked with touches of the artist’s hand. Kentridge based his sketch of Ubu on Jarry’s drawings. He based the nude human on photographs he had taken in his studio of himself. Kentridge has remarked, ‘Those two characters are both part of one brain trying to figure out its relation to the world.’ The two characters also dramatise his experience of South Africa:

It’s a particularly South African phenomenon of the late 1980s and 1990s to have contradictory thoughts running in tandem. You had people rebuilding their homes while simultaneously planning to emigrate. These contradictions work at the internal level in terms of the different views one has of oneself from one moment to the next.

What is remarkable about Kentridge’s work, though, is how he draws this essentially theatrical sense of opposition into his process of creation, and makes that process evident in the finished work. He includes the marks of his hand, the wayward and playful progress of his thought – the naked self.

It is the discovery of political urgency through play that makes Kentridge’s animations so unusual and compelling. To describe his work as animation is at once to tell the truth and to mislead. His animation has nothing in common with the mastered technology of most contemporary animation – nothing in common with the sense of authority and time those works create. In the set of animated films gathered here, 9 Drawings for Projection, Kentridge makes a charcoal drawing and takes a photograph of it; he rubs out some of the picture and adds something; he takes another photograph. The erasures stay in the picture. As a consequence, watching one of his films is not like watching another world as if from the future. It is like watching a drawing come to life before your eyes.

If memory tries to fix a single image – to set, in place of lost time, a monument – Kentridge, through animation, tries to bring the past back to life. In the second of his 9 Drawings for Projection, Monument, Soho erects a statue to commemorate the suffering of others. At the end of film, this statue raises its head and looks out through the screen. This precarious ambition – to remake time not as it came into being, but as it once might have come into being – comes into play again in Kentridge’s video installation Parcours D’Atelier, where he runs films of himself backwards: not casting tomes away but catching them, miraculously, as they rise to his hand; not tearing down his self-portrait but catching and repairing and completing fragments of the image of himself until, completed and freed, his image steps away from the wall into life. These are some of the oddities and wonders that arise when Kentridge brings his theatrical sense of time to film, remaking it not as a self-enclosed illusion but as an illusion taking place magically now, and now.

Kentridge’s work shows the process of its making; even of its dreaming. It shows, alike, its origins in the human body: the idiosyncratic line of his hand, which draws on influences from Hogarth to Manet, Bonnard to Picasso; until the line of his drawing itself suggests how we take possession of what we see. He says:

First, the drawing doesn’t begin as a moral project; it starts from the pleasure of putting charcoal marks on paper. You immediately see two things: a sheet of paper with charcoal dust across its surface, and the evocation of a landscape with a dark sky. There’s a simple alchemy in the transformation of the paper into something else …

With that in mind, the title of this exhibition, Five Themes, is less than helpful. Kentridge has said, ‘The themes in my work do not really constitute its starting point, which is always the desire to draw.’ Throughout the work – even, throughout the accompanying catalogue – Kentridge disrupts and enriches thematic interpretations of his oeuvre. Though wonderfully informative, the essays in the catalogue are characterised by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s comment: ‘Kentridge’s belief in uncertainty as a source of knowledge is reflected in his interest in shadow vision as opposed to direct vision.’ Yet Kentridge persistently upholds uncertainty not as a source of knowledge but as a presence. For instance, in the catalogue he not only introduces each section; he adds a DVD that shows works in progress, and grants an interview where he answers questions twice. His second answers countermand his first: ‘Decisions? There are no decisions’; ‘I don’t remember this at all’; ‘I don’t know what this means’; ‘This is wrong’; ‘This is only half the question’; ‘ I wonder what I meant’; ‘No, I have no memory of saying any of this. It is on the tape, but God knows what I was thinking.’

William Kentridge, A Lifetime of Enthusiasm (still), from the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008, eight-channel video projection, 6:01 min., collection of the artist, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

That is to say, some artists can be as unpleasant as they like and it doesn’t matter. Some artists are as likeable as can be, and it doesn’t matter. But Kentridge is one of those artists whose likeability – whose humorous, conversational, unassuming intelligence and curiosity – is essential to his work. Not that the latter is confessional, but his process is so much part of the work that it conveys the sense of freedom, of choice opening into choice that was part of its making. For that reason, there is far more continuity in the work than a bare description would suggest: from animations set in apartheid South Africa to films of the artist in his studio, from etchings to sculpture, from Kentridge’s sets for The Magic Flute, from an African point of view, to the work arising from his staging of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose: I am not me, the horse is not mine. In all these varied works, the open process of creativity justifies Kentridge’s assertion: ‘In my work the vocabulary and dramatis personae haven’t changed so much.’

Over four decades Kentridge explores the conflict between two kinds of illusion: the wayward, exploratory, self-questioning sort of illusion that art makes; and the sort of illusion that power establishes to perpetuate itself – the illusion that it is created by history and not by human hands. The video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine includes a transcript of some meetings of the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union, in which Nikolai Bukharin is trying to justify himself. Bukharin is struggling to speak sincerely. The crowd jeers and laughs at his pleas. Before he was killed, Bukharin wrote to Stalin, ‘Finally I need to know. Did you really believe what was said?’

It is not exactly nostalgia that drives Kentridge’s interest in pre-cinematic devices, but his desire for an art that reflects the process of its own making and for machines that reveal their inner workings. He has said: ‘When I think back to my first art lessons as a child, I remember being given a piece of charcoal.’ Charcoal drawing, shadow play, puppets, magic, tear-ups, cartoons, drawings that come to life: he uses images and activities that hold sway in childhood. In his animations, all around the heroes a series of small domestic metamorphoses take place: cats and phones and smoke and fish keep changing into other things, as though he could reclaim in his art a child’s unco-opted responses; and recover things not as they are in the present but as they were in the beginning, alive with unrealised possibilities. That is to say, the nostalgia in Kentridge’s work is bound up with his interest in politics; and his interest in politics is bound up with his interest in play. He has said, ‘The art that seemed most immediate and local dated from the early twentieth century, when there still seemed to be hope for political struggle rather than a world exhausted by war and failure. I remember thinking that one had to look backwards ...’ Behind this statement, there surely lies Walter Benjamin’s sense of history – the search not for lost time but for lost futures.

William Kentridge: Five Themes, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 8 March to 27 May 2012. See also the catalogue of the same name, edited by Mark Rosenthal (Yale University Press [Inbooks], $69.95 hb, 264 pp, 9780300150483).

I once had a vague fantasy that Martin Amis and I should get married. He was cool and handsome, and we had so much in common. We were about the same age; we had both read English at Oxford. My father worked as a cartoonist at the New Statesman when Martin was literary editor. I was mad about books and writing; Martin, in his early twenties, was already a famous novelist. Perfect match.

Why do you write?

I become preoccupied with images and memory pictures. Eventually, if they hang around long enough, these images become the cornerstone of a short story or a scene in a novel. If I did not write, I would never be able to make sense of them.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Oh, yes. I dream most nights, and, depending on my mood, these dreams can be poetic, or occasionally surreal and violent. For instance, I had a dream recently t

 Muddying the waters

Dear Editor,

A substantial part of Peter Hill’s review of my book Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953–1997 recounts the artist’s prosecution for obscenity following the visit of the head of the Darlinghurst vice squad to Brown’s exhibition Paintin’ A Go-Go at Sydney’s Gallery A in November 1965 (March 2012). As I pointed out in the book, Brown is the only Australian artist to have been successfully prosecuted for obscenity – having confronted the manifestly absurd censorship laws in Australia at that time. But the immediate and specific event that motivated Brown’s ill-fated protest was the prosecution of the editors of Sydney’s satirical magazine Oz (Richard Neville, Richard Walsh, and Martin Sharp), who, having been found guilty in the Sydney Magistrates Court, were  facing prison sentences at the time of Brown’s exhibition.

Ormond Papers showcases the academic work of Ormond undergraduates and the wider college community. This volume loosely explores issues of identity and space, opening with the Ormond-centric ‘Our Academic Home’, on the refurbishment of the Academic Centre. Robert Leach’s interview with Colin Barnes, the gardener, is a highlight, despite some ill-conceived questions (‘You’ve been here a while – you must like it!’).

Papua New Guinea doesn’t loom large in Australian literature. As Nicholas Jose says, our ‘writers have not much looked in that direction for material or inspiration’. Drusilla Modjeska is thus entering relatively new territory for Australian fiction with an ambitious epic set in PNG. It is also a new venture for her: Poppy (1990), her only previous ‘novel’, won two non-fiction awards. She has said that ‘as neither term seemed right, I opted for both’ – autobiography and fiction.

How much does the average Australian know about Indonesia? Not the tourist version, with its resorts and beaches and lacklustre nasi goreng – but the wider culture, history, and people. At best, Indonesia is a tantalising enigma to most Australians. At worst, it is ignored – a vast nation about which we neither know nor care, despite its importance as one of our closest neighbours.

Three years after her first novel, The Book of Emmett, which chronicled the trials and tribulations of a troubled family, Melbourne writer Deborah Forster covers similar territory in her second, The Meaning of Grace. It opens with an elderly woman named Grace dying of cancer in hospital, then rewinds several decades, back to when a much younger Grace and her children moved to the seaside town of Yarrabeen. They have left behind Ian, Grace’s husband and the children’s father, who suffers from chronic depression and has lost his job. He commits suicide shortly after his family leaves. In the following pages, readers learn about the tumultuous lives of Grace and her offspring. We follow Grace as she holds down two jobs to support her children. We learn about the rivalry between her daughters Edie and Juliet, and about the breakdown of her son Ted’s marriage. We follow Grace as she comes to terms with her illness.

Proudly popular fiction, Dead Heat is a romantic thriller set in a north-western New South Wales National Park. Organised crime in fiction generally operates in a large city or on the coastline, but author Bronwyn Parry sets her plot in the bush. The inclusion of bushland and animals creates unique plot obstacles and possibilities for both the criminals and the authorities, and it is affirming to read of places often overlooked in fiction: Gloucester and Barrington Tops, Coffs Harbour, Tamworth, Inverell, and Newcastle.

In a 2009 interview linked to his production of Endgame in which he played Clov, the actor–director Simon McBurney observed that ‘nearly all theatre colleagues I meet have a Beckett story’. My own (second-hand) favourite Beckett story, told me by the Brecht scholar and former deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement John Willett, might seem too drolly apposite to be true: but he assured me that it was.

When the ALP conference voted to amend the party platform on same-sex marriage at the end of last year, there was a flurry of debate in magazines, newspapers, and online. The platform now states: ‘Labor will amend the Marriage Act to ensure equal access to marriage under statute for all adult couples irrespective of sex who have a mutual commitment to a shared life.’ For lexicographers, this event meant that the word marriage appeared in Australian sources with greater frequency than ever – and with a greater variation of meanings. Whatever the word’s official definition in Australian law or in the minds of those opposed to the notion, suddenly there was an abundance of evidence that Australians were using the word marriage to refer to the union of two people regardless of sex, and that eventually this would have implications for the definition of the word in all our dictionaries. In addition to new expressions such as marriage equality, there were also new senses of old words such as marry, husband, wedding, widow, widower, and wife.

‘An admired talent for the theatre / Even when I was small / A man born of the stage you see / Histrionic / Setting snares even when very little.’ Such is the epigraph to Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic (Der Theatermacher), drawn from the play’s principal character, the megalomaniacal Bruscon. The image of the snare, or trap, is a common one in the work of Bernhard, typically figuring a moment of exposure: the individual left open by falsehood or deceit to the calumny of the world.

Is there anything left to say about Hollywood? Thomas Elsaesser’s monumental compilation of twenty-three densely argued essays written during the last four decades, The Persistence of Hollywood, provides a straightforward, at times overwhelming answer: Yes. Elsaesser’s summary work also makes a strong argument for a lifelong engagement with Hollywood that stretches from the development and ‘genius’ of what is now commonly called the classical studio era to the contemporary blockbuster and its attendant practices of truly globalised film-making. Elsaesser’s pithy title refers to both his own continuing interest in Hollywood past and present and the remarkable ‘persistence’ and longevity of this profoundly dominant film-making system. The range of Elsaesser’s enquiry and his command of the various strands of film theory that have emerged since the 1960s are often breathtaking, and clearly illustrate the author’s importance to the field, particularly as a barometer or synthesiser of dominant and fashionable ideas and critical approaches.

By chance, two of the most famous 1950s plays are in the news again. John Osborne’s historic rant, Look Back in Anger (1956), has been successfully revived on Broadway, while Terence Rattigan’s emotionally taut piece, The Deep Blue Sea (1952), has been filmed by another Terence – Davies, that is. In their day, Osborne railed against the ‘porcelain plates [of] the well-set table of British theatre’(John Lahr in the New Yorker), his arrows directed at the likes of Noël Coward and Rattigan, who in their turn were less than excited by Osborne’s class-based invective. It’s now at least arguable that Rattigan has outlasted Osborne; he has clearly been more frequently revived on stage – and on film and television – than his vituperative contemporary. Who now, I wonder, would rather watch or listen to Look Back than The Winslow Boy?

Fernando Nottebohm has been interested in birdsong since early childhood. By 2001 he had spent thirty years at Rockefeller University in New York studying how birds learn to sing, concentrating on canaries who are capable of learning new songs each year. His interest has been to study birdsong as ‘a model for the brain’. He studied the brains of caged birds and birds in the wild. The birds that needed to forage and escape predators produced more neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is essential to memory.

Sylvia Lawson is an award-winning and highly respected essayist and film critic. Her subject matter, though generally Australian, is also concerned with our nearer neighbours and with the culture and politics of the world beyond. The theme of this new collection is resistance to oppression in seven parts of the world.

Christopher Menz

Anyone who has dined at Annie Smithers’ eponymous restaurant in the picturesque town of Kyneton, eighty-five kilometres north-west of Melbourne, or read her food columns in TheAge, will understand her commitment to growing, sourcing, cooking, and presenting the best available local produce. She achieves this with a simplicity that belies the care and hard work needed to create culinary perfection from raw ingredients. Annie’s Garden to Table: A Garden Diary Featuring 100 Seasonal Recipes (Lantern, $49.95 hb, 256 pp, 9781921382345) reveals some of her secrets and much of the sheer slog involved in producing dishes of such quality. As the subtitle indicates, the book is arranged as a diary with recipes. Smithers presents her creations – kitchen garden notes and appropriate recipes – commencing in August of an unspecified year through to the November of the following. In this, she more than covers the full annual cycle of preparing, planting, growing, harvesting, and cooking.

The ‘good’ biographer always opts for a nuanced portrait, and this is what Peter McPhee has given us in his well-written, reflective, sympathetic account of one of the most enigmatic, complex leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94). McPhee had his work cut out for him. Those familiar with the period may come to this book, as I did, with somewhat preconceived ideas. Robespierre conjures up a rather distasteful character, a revolutionary with all the negative connotations that word can conjure: a zealot, cold, calculating, idealistic, paranoid, the prototype of the totalitarian bureaucrat capable of sending friends and colleagues to the guillotine for the ‘cause’. So I was curious as to what McPhee, a leading historian of the French Revolution, made of the man, and how he accounted for Robespierre’s condemnation to death of so many people.

Sea Hearts takes place in an intensely wrought setting, both unnerving and thrilling – in propinquity to our world, yet enchantingly different. We journey, with a series of intriguing characters, through brutal landscapes where the wind is ‘swiping like a cat’s paw at a mousehole’.

This book is the second in a series compiled by a group of Canberra academics on the distortions they perceive to surround the writing of military history in this country. Before the book itself is tackled, a word should be said about the titles they have chosen for their two volumes. The first (published in 2010) is called Zombie Myths of Australian Military History; this one is entitled Anzac’s Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History. As happens to many a poor author, these hideously ugly titles may have been imposed on the book by the publisher. If not, they need serious help when they title future volumes.

Although William Baillieu was not the founder of the Baillieu dynasty in Australia – that honour belonged to his father and mother, who produced sixteen children after he jumped ship and settled in Queenscliff – it was through him that the family name became a dominant one among the Melbourne Establishment. Six of the sixteen Baillieu siblings were involved in what Peter Yule describes as Australia’s greatest business empire, centred on the Collins House group. William Baillieu was its founder, builder, and leader.

A favourite quiz question for cricket history buffs has been ‘Who is the only Nobel Prize winner to play first-class cricket?’ Answer: Samuel Beckett. A question for cricket bibliophiles now might well be ‘Which Nobel Prize winner contributed an essay to an Australian cricket book?’ Answer: J.M. Coetzee.

Practitioners of real (or royal) tennis have with their game the special relationship that comes with being a small group of initiates. There are probably fewer than ten thousand of them in the world, gathered in the four countries where the ancient sport survives on no more than fifty active courts. Individually and collectively, they appear to feel, beyond the passion with which they master the complex rules and techniques of the actual playing, a responsibility for protecting, maintaining, and extending detailed knowledge of the six centuries or so of the game’s history. It is indeed an unusual microcosm, but it is full of intriguing connections with some major historical figures and moments.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of epitaphs: those formulated by loved ones to describe the living qualities of the interred; and those that would presume to speak from the grave. Writers, ever reluctant to pass up a blank page – even if it is a tombstone – are disproportionate constituents of the latter. H.G. Wells, father of science fiction, penned his epitaph: ‘Goddamn you all: I told you so.’ Dorothy Parker quipped ‘Excuse My Dust’, while Charles Bukowski, abandoning humour for something bleaker, counselled: ‘Don’t try.’ Rhyll McMaster, who happily still dwells among the living, claims her epitaph will one day read: ‘No-one knows.’

In his Keepers trilogy, Philip Salom is an Eliotian Fisher King, exploring the fissuring of identity in a triple play of plurality. The first book, Keepers (2010), was written by Salom, but authorship of The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter is attributed to Alan Fish and M.A. Carter,respectively. In his role as editor for these two poets, Salom becomes their gatekeeper or, as he states, their ‘amanuensis, editor, mentor and promoter’.

‘Dark satanic mills won the day’, S.K. Kelen tells us in one of his strongest poems, ‘Slouching’. ‘Cold modernity followed, a brooding European / monochrome hinted at worlds passing (the good old days).’ What many critics take to be William Blake’s damning of the Industrial Revolution – ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?’ (from ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, c.1804) – could easily have served as an epigraph for Kelen’s Island Earth. The industrial age, its intrusion upon great swathes of the ‘emerald world’, has been variously and often compellingly dissected by Kelen throughout his poetic career, which spans more than three decades and is represented in this New and Selected. Also scrutinised is industrialism’s accomplice and enabler: the increasingly global economy that, for Kelen, has made a hostile takeover of human activity at almost every level.

Medievalism – the inspiration of the Middle Ages and their Gothic-Romantic and Aesthetic descendants for modern writing – is one of the more fascinating historical discourses to have emerged in Western criticism in recent decades. In Australia, this criticism has been led by Stephanie Trigg, Andrew Lynch, and Louise D’Arcens, who has written perceptively (among other topics) of the architectural culture demonstrated by The Mediaeval Court, showpiece of the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Civic and ecclesiastical architecture – the Gothic cathedrals and university buildings designed by Wardell and Blacket, for example – offer, because of their solid visual presence, an obvious entry point to the colonial medievalising imagination, but in the present book D’Arcens has chosen an equally fruitful but rather more challenging subject, medievalist literature, which, in many cases, is more characteristic of Shakespeare’s ‘unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time’ than of his ‘gilded monuments’.