Miles and the mindset

How refreshing it was to read – on the announcement of the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award’s shortlist – that The Trust Company, which administers the Miles, has written to the judges ‘authorising them to use their discretions to modernise the interpretation of “Australianess” (sic) beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values, as in keeping with the current Australian literary landscape’. This decision follows much debate and consultation, some resistance, and a slow process of liberalisation since the mid-1990s. It is hard to imagine that doctrinaire interpretations of the notorious phrase ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ will ever again result in books with a clear Australian flavour, cast, or sensibility being excluded from the nation’s pre-eminent literary prize.

Patrick Allington – ABR’s inaugural Patrons’ Fellow – wrote about these issues at length in our June 2011 issue; his article ‘“What is Australia, anyway?” The Glorious Limitations of the Miles Franklin Literary Award’ is still available. In this issue he comments on this welcome new development.

Meanwhile, of the thirteen longlisted titles, five have been shortlisted for this year’s Miles. They are Tony Birch’s Blood (University of Queensland Press), Anna Funder’s All That I Am (Hamish Hamilton), Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread (Allen & Unwin), Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light (Vintage), and Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows (Hachette Australia). The winner, who will receive $50,000, will be announced in Brisbane on 20 June.

ABR at the Boyd

This time next month ABR will be ensconced in The Boyd, at 207–229 City Road, Southbank. We’re looking forward to taking part in the official opening on Saturday, 7 July. To introduce our readers and supporters to the new office, and to welcome those unfamiliar with the magazine, we are planning a series of talks and readings throughout the day. Readers and speakers will include Joel Deane, Morag Fraser, Lisa Gorton, Elisabeth Holdsworth, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Full details will appear in our July–August issue and on our website.

Amy Baillieu and Peter Rose in ABR's new office at the Boyd

National Biography Award

Martin Thomas

This year’s National Biography Award, the country’s premier award for biographical writing and memoir, has gone to Martin Thomas, author of The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (Allen & Unwin).  Mathews was one of Australia’s most significant, tenacious researchers of Aboriginal languages and culture. Dr Thomas, ARC Future Fellow at ANU’s School of History, received $26,000.

Peter Rose (chair of the judging panel), speaking on behalf of his fellow judges, Bernadette Brennan and Hilary McPhee, commented: ‘Martin Thomas’s study of a “magnificent obsession” struck us as a fine and urgent example of biography as retrieval, biography with a clear moral message, one we encourage all readers to explore.’

The judges also praised the NBA’s benefactors, Geoffrey Cains and Michael Crouch, for increasing the prize money and for giving all six short-listed authors $1000. Would that all substantial literary prizes rewarded unsuccessful shortlisted authors – especially when the organisers encourage them to attend the ceremonies, often not knowing the result. Surely this is something that the Miles Franklin Literary Award – following the NBA and, earlier, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – should seriously consider.

2012 Seymour Biography Lecture

Now in its eighth year, the Seymour Biography Lecture – sponsored by John and Heather Seymour, presented by the National Library of Australia, with support from ABR – goes from strength to strength, and adds to the fertile conversation about this protean, adaptive form. Last year’s lecture, by Robert Dessaix, continues to reverberate (we published it in April 2012), and he will repeat it during the Brisbane Writers’ Festival.

This year’s lecturer – in keeping with the laudable alternation of local and overseas writers – is Jeffrey Meyers, who has written some forty books, including biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Joseph Conrad, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Professor Meyers’ interests are by no means exclusively literary: among his other books are lives of Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper, and a dual biography of Errol Flynn and his son.

Jeffrey Meyers will deliver the Seymour Lecture at the National Library on Thursday, 13 September,  then repeatit at The Boyd, in Melbourne, on Monday, 17 September – part of our new events program. Full details will follow.

Community of readers

Volatile markets, disappearing chains, ubiquitous eBooks, and queasy tidings from the Hellenes don’t seem to be inhibiting local publishers – quite the reverse. There is something vivifying about a crisis. Hot on the heels of the first tranche of Text Classics – inexpensive paperbacks, often fascinatingly introduced by other writers – comes another fine imprint, the Giramondo Shorts. These are new titles, not reissues. William Heyward reviews one of the first titles, Eliot Weinberger’s Wildlife. Advances is particularly looking forward to reading The Recluse, by Evelyn Juers, who shared the Prime Minister’s Award for non-fiction in 2009.

Ivor Indyk, Giramondo’s publisher, told Advances: ‘The new Giramondo series is designed to take advantage of the new printing technologies to produce attractive short-form books – essays, novellas, memoirs – that will appeal to a literary readership. There’s an ideology behind it too, a commitment to a community of readers, and to a relaxed kind of curiosity – hence Les Murray’s quote, which each book carries, “it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts”.’

Changes at ABR

Amy Baillieu is the new Deputy Editor following Mark Gomes’s departure. Amy, who holds a BA and a Master’s in Publishing and Communications from the University of Melbourne, joined us some years ago as a junior editor. Last year she became our Philanthropy Manager.

During his three years with ABR, Mark Gomes made an immense contribution to most aspects of the magazine. Mark joined us as an APAEditorial Intern and soon became Deputy Editor. When he left ABR to become an editor at the National Gallery of Victoria, he went with everyone’s best wishes.

At our recent Annual General Meeting, two of our ten serving members left the ABR board: Anna Goldsworthy and Paul Hetherington (our longest-serving board member). We thank them for their contribution and look forward to publishing them in the future. Indeed, Paul Hetherington will return next month with a review of Michael Sharkey’s new collection of poems, Another Fine Morning in Paradise (5 Islands Press).

Eleven reasons to subscribe

ABR follows its former volunteers’ careers with much interest, and we were thrilled to learn of Paul D. Carter’s success in this year’s The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, worth $20,000, plus simultaneous publication. Paul, who volunteered for us in 2009, worked on his coming-of-age novel for some years. Amy Baillieu reviews Eleven Seasons in this issue. Courtesy of Allen & Unwin, we have ten signed copies to give to sprightly new subscribers.

Also this month, fifty renewing subscribers (thanks to Palace Films) will win double passes to Elena, the new Russian thriller directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Phone us now to claim your prize: (03) 9429 6700.

CONTENTS: JUNE 2012

This author, this book, and its composition are all extraordinary. Tony Judt, one of the most distinguished historians of his generation, made his name with studies of French intellectual history, then in 2005 he published his masterwork, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. For me this is the finest historical study written this century. Empirically grounded, with a respect for facts, but constantly interrogating those facts, aware of the doctrines and ideologies whereby men and women interpret their world, the whole is suffused with a moral sensibility.

Soon after the announcement of the shortlist of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award (‘the Miles’), bookmaker Tom Waterhouse installed Anna Funder’s All That I Am (2011) as favourite. Fair enough, too: it’s an astute and absorbing Australian novel about, among other things, Nazism’s long shadow. But Waterhouse favoured Funder – oddly – because her non-fiction book Stasiland (2003) won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2004. He asserted – debatably, even if it proves correct in 2012 – ‘a strong positive correlation’ between the Miles and the Australian Book Industry Awards. Most interestingly, he noted that the administrators of the Miles, The Trust Company, have now authorised the judges to extend their interpretation of Australianness beyond geography.

Royals, it seems, have their tenacious uses, often fictive. Contemporaries such as Alan Bennett and Edward St Aubyn have deployed them. One hundred years ago, Ford Madox Ford wrote his singular trilogy (1906–08) about Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen of Henry VIII. Now the esteemed novelist and memoirist Hilary Mantel returns to the Tudor world, again with revisionist intent.

Wolf Hall, published three years ago, was that rarity, a genuine bestseller that won high critical praise and the Booker Prize. The novel ends in July 1535, with Thomas More’s downfall: Anne Boleyn is secure as queen, and Thomas Cromwell dominates the political scene in the aftermath of his mentor Cardinal Wolsey’s disgrace. The sequel, Bring up the Bodies, rather shorter than Wolf Hall, covers some of the most extraordinary months in English history: the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the rise of the Seymours, and the unleashing of a new, sanguinary phase in Henry VIII’s reign.

The book is wonderfully anxious-making. We never relax, because our subject can never afford to relax – and this is a book, as Mantel reminds us in a firm afterword, about Thomas Cromwell (‘still in need of attention from biographers’), not Anne or Henry. ‘So now get up,’ the fifteen-year-old Thomas is told at the start of Wolf Hall, having been kicked to the ground by his brutal father, Walter. ‘Felled, dazed, silent’, he awaits the next, murderous kick. In a way, Cromwell has been getting up ever since, cannily, doggedly, notoriously. ‘His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, but it has taken him years to sweep up the mess.’

The autobiography, that seemingly inevitable act of self-revelation, is frequently a work tricked out with very little art. For the novelist, unlike the anecdote-disposing musician or painter, the problem is doubled: they are making a home with the same tools. Rare is the autobiography that, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) or Martin Amis’s Experience (2001), speaks in the voice of the working artist, similarly lush or distinctive – the same register, that same unmistakable snap and hum. Too often a plainer style is attempted: the unadorned truth, as it were, after so many convincing lies. But what happens when, at some crucial point in a writer’s oeuvre, the distinction between fact and fiction – or, to use the market’s terms, fiction and non-fiction – becomes a useless one? Gerald Murnane has always been a deeply autobiographical writer – he once famously claimed to possess no imagination, which would seem to make memoir of any kind a default position – and his latest work of fiction, A History of Books, renders the distinction more useless than ever.

At the closing performance of the Borovansky Ballet in 1961, Peggy van Praagh stepped onstage and spoke about the importance of founding an Australian ballet company. Harold Holt, the serving federal treasurer, went backstage to pledge his personal support. Van Praagh’s celebrated history as a dancer and director overseas made her the perfect candidate to run such a company.

Despite its unrewarding title, The Steins Collect, both exhibition and catalogue, tells the most captivating story of early modern art and its patronage. The cast of characters ranges from the downright difficult (Leo) and the overweeningly self-important (Gertrude) to sunny Californian idealists (Sarah and Michael). Gertrude and her brother Leo set up their joint ménage at 27 rue de Fleurus, close to the Luxembourg Gardens, in 1903. A year later, Michael, their elder brother, and his wife, Sarah, settled in Paris and lived close by at 58 rue Madame. By 1909 the two households had assembled the largest and finest collection of Matisse and Picasso anywhere. Though comfortably off, the Steins were not remotely among the super-rich, yet only the Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, at the end of the decade, would challenge their supremacy.

Leo was the moving spirit early on. Bernard Berenson, with whom the Steins would later have fraught relations, tipped Leo off to Cézanne and where to find him at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in the rue Lafitte. After a windfall, Gertrude and Leo’s first major purchase together was Madame Cézanne with a fan, for 8000 francs – a large sum for them. Cézanne was a touchstone of modernity and quality for Leo, closely followed, interestingly, by Renoir. Leo acutely observed Renoir’s ‘feeling for absolute colour, colour handled not as the medium but as the stuff of art’. Cézanne was the other lodestar, ‘rendering mass with a vital intensity […] this upending gripping of the form, the unceasing effort to reveal its absolute self-existing quality of mass’. Together they formed his remarkable taste.

Leo and Gertrude made their most adventurous acquisition in 1905 at the Salon Automne. They bought, in the teeth of gales of derision, Matisse’s Woman with a hat, for 500 francs. Its impastoed patches of raw colour still challenge taste. Le bonheur de vivre (now at the Barnes, in Philadelphia) and The blue nude (Baltimore) followed in quick succession, along with the superb early Picassos such as Boy leading a horse (MoMA) and Girl with a basket of flowers. Gertrude and Leo’s concentration on Matisse and Picasso is quite extraordinary. Both were obscurities in the Paris art world when they started collecting them. Indeed, the Steins introduced Picasso to Matisse in the rue de Fleurus.

There were occasionally startling exceptions, such as Bonnard’s sumptuous The siesta (NGV). Prominently hung at the Metropolitan Museum next to Matisse’s Woman with a hat, it looked superb. Curiously, the Steins bought it in November 1905 and traded it fourteen months later for a good but not great Renoir portrait. Like all private collectors, Leo and Gertrude were active traders, and, like most private collectors, they never outsmarted the dealers.

From 1907 onwards Leo and Gertrude concentrated their firepower on Picasso. They bravely collected a series of gouaches, watercolours, and studies around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and were among the first to acquire masterpieces of early Cubism, such as the brooding, monumental Three women (1908), pushing beyond Cézanne, an anti-bather idyll. Matisse had become the exclusive domain of Michael and Sarah Stein. Leo was as quick to put down as he was to pick up. He shunned Matisse after 1908. Gertrude, never lacking in self-estimation, was stung that Matisse never suggested painting her. 

Gertrude Stein in her apartment at 5 rue Christine, 1938 (detail from a photograph by Cecil Beaton). Pablo Picasso’s portrait of her (1905–06) hangs on the wall behind her.

Matisse increasingly disliked the atmosphere of 27 rue de Fleurus, with its taste for the oracular and its subfusc promotion of a rivalry between him and Picasso. At the rue Madame, he found Sarah and Michael less grandiose, more sympathetic, to say nothing of the fact that they were enamoured of Matisse and his family. A striking contribution of both catalogue and exhibition is the new-found emphasis given to ‘the Mike Steins’. In a succession of period photographs of the interior of both the rue de Fleurus and the rue Madame, you can see the evolution and triumph of both collections.

What made these four Americans in Paris such outstanding collectors was that they sought and found answers to inner needs and longings in their collections. Clive Bell spoke for all when he said in 1912: ‘We have ceased to ask, What does this picture represent? And ask instead, What does this picture make us feel?’

Leo, who came to Paris via Florence and Berenson with an unfinished study of Andrea Mantegna, discovered those life-enhancing, ‘tactile values’ in modern art, in colour as well as modelled form. Gertrude found a new way of writing as she followed Picasso into his intensifying Cubism with its repetitive, fractured and faceted planes:

If I told him would he like it. Would he
like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would
Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him
if Napoleon.

For Sarah Stein, who, despite her Jewish background and marriage, became a Christian Scientist in 1912, Matisse’s paintings came to have a profound therapeutic effect, from the brilliant decoration of Interior with aubergines to the brisk and aery landscapes they collected so abundantly. Each of them discovered a vital ‘principle of being’ in the works on their walls.

1914 would prove a fatal year for the Steins. Leo, now as openly contemptuous of Picasso’s Cubism as he was of Gertrude’s writing, and resentful of Alice B. Toklas’s presence, abruptly left the rue de Fleurus and divided the collection with Gertrude. He took sixteen Renoirs with him and some of the smaller Cézannes, leaving her with most of the Picassos. They barely spoke again. Leo was freshly embittered in 1933 when Gertrude’s minor classic, The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, appeared and reduced him to a bystander during their collecting years together. ‘God, what a liar she is’ was his brotherly assessment of the book.

At Matisse’s urging, Michael and Sarah Stein sent nineteen of his choicest works to an exhibition in Berlin in July 1914. War broke out the next month and the Steins could not repatriate the works. Some confusion reigns over what happened next. There may have been some kind of fake auction so that works could be secreted away in private hands, to be returned after the hostilities ended and to prevent confiscation. Fearing they would never see the works again, the Steins drew up a list with current valuations and sold the group to a pair of Norwegian magnates.

Although Gertrude sold a number of works to subsidise the publication of her otherwise unpublishable work, a substantial amount of the collection passed to Toklas on Stein’s death in 1946. She and the descendants of the Mike Steins were to be the chief beneficiaries of the will, which also authorised the sale of works to help subsidise publication of her books and to provide Toklas with an income. When Toklas sold some works without consulting anybody, there was a terrible falling out between the beneficiaries. When Toklas was temporarily absent from Paris, the collection was seized and she was reduced to near penury. On her death in 1967, a syndicate of MoMA donors such as David Rockefeller and William S. Paley bought much of the remaining collection. The Haas family in San Francisco acquired many of Sarah Stein’s Matisses including Woman with a hat,and gave them to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where this exhibition began in May 2011, before moving to Paris and New York). Thus the pioneering taste of the Steins, the first serious collectors of twentieth-century art, continues to percolate through major American museums on both seaboards. There is a certain justice and irony to that conclusion, for Gertrude firmly believed that you cannot be a museum and be modern.

As creative writing programs continue to surge in popularity, it has become something of an uphill battle to recruit students for literature courses in universities. In an environment overstocked with would-be writers fixated on the image of a potential publisher whose own field of vision is a mass of BookScan figures, a collection of critical essays on a literary writer has something of an ambassadorial role to play. Can those who profess an interest in books and writing be persuaded that there is value in complex engagements with context and tradition, form, and theme?

Why do you write?

When I was young I tried different things: drawing, painting, music, poetry, short stories, journalism, reviewing, but poetry turned out to be what I was best at.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Oh, yes. I always dream in colour, and I can remember how things are oriented in my dreams — which way is north, I mean, and where the coast is. I think I developed that talent as a child, roaming through the bush. I used to take an Army contour map with me, so I always knew where I was.

Peter Robb, in this collection of some of his journalism, quotes E.M. Forster’s remark about Constantine Cavafy: that he lived ‘absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’. That line is half true of Robb’s subjects in this book. They have a way of existing at an angle to the universe, but they are not at all motionless. The lives in this book have trajectories and velocities that bring out an equal dynamism in the man who recounts them, as could well be imagined by anyone who has read his earlier work about Italy and Brazil (2004) or his biography of Caravaggio (1998).

As is often the case with brilliant writers, an Eliot Weinberger sentence cannot be mistaken for that of anyone else. There is his insistence upon concrete details: ‘It was recorded in the 12^th century, in the Collected Stories of Anomalies, that Chang T’ien-hsi dreamed that a green dog with a long body came from the south and tried to bite him.’ Even when entering the realm of the absurd, he avoids abstraction: ‘Each year, in the village of Pullipudupet, in southern India, a very young girl is selected to marry a frog.’ His adjectives and nouns have a rhythmic weight: ‘Camels’ feet leave lotus-pad prints in the sand.’ His conjunctions attest to the peculiarity of the world: ‘Naked mole-rats have no fur, but their lips are hairy.’

For a young academic in need of a job, 1964 was a lucky time. After three pioneering years with small enrolments, Monash University was bracing itself for the first big influx of postwar baby boomers. Above the flat and muddy stretches of Clayton farmland, where Wellington boots had been the footwear of choice, the first tall buildings were emerging. The Arts wing of the twelve-storey Robert Menzies School of Humanities was in pristine state when I moved into Room 727 in the department of English, on the seventh floor.

What are we to do about education? Few other human enterprises are discussed more often – family, money, sex, and politics, perhaps – but the practice of education never comes close to satisfying us.

Balancing the big picture with the intimate details that engage us when reading a novel is not easy. This latest book from veteran Australian author Tom Keneally is epic in scope, but takes us into the intimate worlds of particular people. This is the way to tell a story about an event as mammoth as World War I. Keneally, the author of Schindler’s Ark (1982) and many other fine works of fiction and non-fiction, knows this well and has done it many times before. This time around, though, the story is overwhelmed by the attention to detail on which he obviously prides himself.

Why is the measure of love loss? As I worked my way through the hundred vignettes that comprise My Hundred Lovers, my thoughts kept returning to this first line of a novel by Jeanette Winterson that is similarly preoccupied with the interlinking of the body, love, sex, and death. My Hundred Lovers is the story of a life rendered as a litany of bodily memories. The twin-faced abstractions of desire and loss have lured and impelled the narrator through her worldly existence; this is a journey of self-formation made through metaphors of desire and dissolution.

Eleven Seasons is an impressive début novel from this year’s Vogel Prize winner, Paul D. Carter. A nimble and understated coming-of-age story, it takes its rhythm and structure from football, but encompasses so much more. Over the course of the eponymous eleven seasons, Carter follows Jason’s progress from a forlorn, yearning boy into an adult, while exploring issues of identity, belonging, friendship, love and the more sinister aspects of what loyalty to a teammate might involve. Written in the present tense, the narrative has a dreamlike quality. The prose is clear and powerful, with moments of brilliance and brutality. The occasional fumbles and unsatisfying moments are easily forgiven.

This début novel by Sydney playwright Jennifer Paynter is a skilful retelling of Pride and Prejudice, narrated by Mary Bennet, the forgotten middle sister. Mary’s character is true to Austen’s original conception. She is bookish, plain, and unloved, although romance soon appears on the horizon in this version of events.

Deborah Burrows’s well-researched historical novel, A Stranger in My Street, begins with the protagonist, Meg Eaton, declaring that Sunday, 3 January 1943 was the day her life changed forever. We quickly learn why – the Stranger of the title has arrived in the eponymous Street.

Two contrary and paramount composers

Robert Gibson

Two households. Two household names. Verdi and Wagner. To the north of the Alps, Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner compound in the otherwise unremarkable Bavarian town of Bayreuth. To the south of the Alps, Sant’Agata, the Verdi farmhouse outside Busseto, a marshy and little-visited corner of Emilia-Romagna. The respective residences reveal something of their owners’ personalities and priorities. For Giuseppe Verdi, Sant’Agata was a retreat; a place where he could escape from the hubbub of Milan, plant trees, grow vegetables, go fishing, tend livestock, and oversee his tenant farmers. For Richard Wagner, Wahnfried was headquarters of the greater Wagnerian project; a place to compose, write pamphlets, receive visitors, tend to his personality cult, and oversee his band of disciples.

Five years after Michelangelo Antonioni’s death, the ground-breaking Italian director’s films occupy an increasingly important but odd position. Exemplifying serious ‘art cinema’ at the peak of its European expression, his most famous work continues to compel yet also cause problems for critical reception. How to write about such demanding and endlessly rewarding films without falling back on what we are often told are the old clichés of ‘alienation’ and chilly formalism? A welcome addition to the slowly percolating appreciations of the film-maker in English, Antonioni: Centenary Essays quite visibly, if not perhaps intentionally, struggles with and exemplifies this challenge.

Choosing to set a screen adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in contemporary India might seem like an almost perverse shift, or an over-determining decision. But for British film-maker Michael Winterbottom, there is consistency and history of a sort. It is his third Thomas Hardy adaptation, and his fourth feature shot on the subcontinent. In re-imagining and relocating Tess, he has adhered closely to certain key elements and incidents of the novel, and dispensed with others – notably questions of religion, faith, and fate. Yet, in the end, the most significant transformation is not about geography or culture or time: it is the condensation of two main characters into one. Alec d’Urberville, the wayward idler who seduces Tess, and Angel Clare, the compulsively virtuous youngman she loves, ‘the earnestest man in Wessex’, have been distilled into a single, somewhat problematic figure.

Historical dictionaries depend on quotations to exemplify how a word is used over time. An unsung hero of Australian lexicography, who contributed more than 100,000 quotations to the Australian National Dictionary (AND) and Oxford English Dictionary (OED) over a period of thirty years, died two years ago this month. Mr Chris Collier of Brisbane had spent every day since the mid-1970s combing the Courier-Mail newspaper for new words and new senses of words, which he then glued to 4 × 6 slips and sent to the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC). Extremely private, he only provided us with a PO Box address. In many ways, he was a modern-day Dr Minor (1834–1920), the nineteenth-century contributor to the OED whose fascinating life is described in Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998).

I first became aware of Mr Collier’s work twenty years ago when, as a graduate student working at the ANDC in Canberra, it was my job to open the mail and the bundles of slips faithfully sent by him each month. His packages stood out from the rest, because they were eccentrically wrapped in old cornflake boxes with bits of dog hair and cereal stuck to them. It made me wonder what his work environment might be like, but no one had ever seen or spoken to the man and there was a veil of mystery surrounding him.

Years later, I discovered that Mr Collier’s reputation was not confined to Australia. When I went to work at the OED headquarters in England, one of the first questions I was asked was ‘Do you know Mr Collier?’ Little did we know in Canberra that he also sent hundreds of slips to Oxford each month.

When I was on a trip to Australia in 2006, visiting the ANDC, Mr Collier called the offices there. For the first time we were able to hear his voice. I asked if I could meet him in person. We met at a park behind the Paddo Tavern in the Brisbane suburb of Paddington, his ‘office’ as he put it. Mr Collier had moved with his family to Paddington from Victoria when he was three years old. He was educated at the Milton State School, and spent most of his life working in the Queensland Patents Office. In 1975 he read an article in the Courier-Mail about the then Chief Editor of the OED, the New Zealander Robert Burchfield (1923–2004), who was calling for public contributions to his Supplement volumes of the OED. ‘I thought, imagine if I could help get one word in the dictionary,’ Mr Collier told me. And so began the obsession that occupied him every day after that. He supplied an average of 250 quotations every month, and sent more than 100,000 quotations in all. Open any of the drawers in the OED Quotations Room and you will find slips from Mr Collier. Not all of these words have gone into the dictionary, of course, but so many of them did that Brisbane’s Courier-Mail is now the 584th most frequently quoted source in the OED, with more quotations than Virginia Woolf or T.S. Eliot.

Mr Collier’s contribution to the OED is matched only by one other Australian: Edward Morris (1843–1902), the headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School who, over a period of forty years in the late-nineteenth century, sent so many citations of Australian English to the OED editor James Murray (1837–1915) that Murray suggested Morris publish his own dictionary, which he duly did, in 1898. This was Australia’s first historical dictionary, Austral English.

Mr Collier lived alone in the same Paddington house his entire life. His collection of movie posters and words from the Courier-Mail eventually took over his living quarters. ‘He was the local naturist and a hoarder,’ explained his neighbour of forty-six years. ‘Eventually there was only a single, narrow track through the house with piles of paper and newspapers lining each side.’

I doubt we could find a more devoted friend of the Dictionary. I had asked him whether there was any chance of his going to Oxford to see firsthand the work of the editors of the OED. ‘No way,’ he replied, ‘I couldn’t face all the Courier-Mails waiting for me on my return. I am going to be at Paddington for the rest of my days.’ Aged seventy-nine, Mr Collier went in to the Royal Brisbane Hospital on 20 June 2010 for a heart operation. He died on the operating table. His funeral was attended by his neighbours, none of whom knew the extent of his contribution to English scholarship.

At the dangerous time when Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey were around, the sonnet sprang into English from Petrarch’s Italian. A constant cuckoo, it has stayed in our linguistic tradition ever since. It is an odd verse form to have done so, regular, yet in one way asymmetrical. Moreover, this cuckoo form has long stood at the heart of what we mean by ‘lyrical’. As Wordsworth quotably if unsubtly wrote, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ Borges was to see through that romantic sense of the poet-dramatist in his mini-story ‘Everything and Nothing’, where God and the playwright eventually come face to face: that is if they have faces at all. Or hearts.

Until recently, there was a prevailing attitude that to succeed as a professional author one had to go into exile. The small Australian market could not support a writing career; it was necessary to travel abroad and court a larger readership. Because Australia was a British colony, the obvious destination was London, heart of empire.

The author of this handsomely produced volume claims in his opening sentence, ‘The sex lives of celebrities (and the less famous) always excite the curiosity of others.’ For the sake of his book he’d better be right, because what follows are more than eighty gay histories and/or partnerships, each moving inexorably to the matter of sexual orientation and declaration – reluctant or otherwise. Aldrich is probably right. Think of all those journals whose covers you browse while waiting in the supermarket queue, inviting you to speculate on, say, the vicissitudes of Brangelina. Recent political controversies about gay marriage rights or the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy of the US armed forces provide a contemporary context for Aldrich.

The circumstances surrounding Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on 18 September 1961 have been the subject of a catalogue of suspicion, speculation, and official scrutiny since the moment the charred carapace of his plane, the Albertina, was recovered outside Ndola, Zambia. Did it, as the then-Rhodesian authorities concluded, crash? Was it shot down by a mysterious second plane? Was it blown up by a carefully emplaced bomb? Susan Williams pursues all of these possibilities, and various subspecies of them, in her exhaustively researched account, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa.

Violent and non-violent harm is endured, inflicted, and internalised by all people at different times, and to varying degrees. It was Cicero who is believed to have first posited that the main obligation human beings have is to refrain from harming one another, and that any unnecessary act of doing so renders that person an enemy of the human race.

The years 1909 to 1914 were unusually busy in Antarctica. Back in 1900 the continent had barely been walked on, but in the succeeding decade or so, expeditions of scientific and geographical enquiry, often burdened with heavy loads of imperialist endeavour, penetrated to the heart of the last unexplored continent. The attainment of the South Geographical Pole became the emblematic centrepiece of triumph and tragedy in the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration. In January 1909 Ernest Shackleton and three others were forced to turn back just a few days’ travel from the South Pole. Two years later, in December 1911, the southern geographical extremity of the planet was first reached when Norwegian Roald Amundsen and four companions stood at the pole. Just over a month later, a defeated and exhausted British party led by Robert Falcon Scott marched away from the South Pole to their deaths and, until recent historical deconstruction, a revered place in Britain’s Imperial folklore.

Any recent ‘big picture’ church history will suffer by comparison with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (2009). That book discovers all manner of new evidence about this protean religion and opens up questions about its life in every age and across every continent. Even its subtitle, The First Three Thousand Years, wants us to appreciate that Christianity has to be understood through its origins in the Hebrew and Greek cultures of the millennium before Bethlehem. Geoffrey Blainey’s history begins more conventionally with the birth of Jesus.

Communities, extended family connections, and role models have been keys to Aboriginal participation in Australian sport. Other factors – racist exclusion among them – have limited the appearance of Indigenous athletes in professional running and boxing. The high proportion of Aboriginal footballers now playing in the Australian Football League and both rugby codes inevitably begs the question of absences in other major sports.

In Australia’s past, sex has been theorised, pathologised, even criminalised, but comparatively little has been written about the topic. One of the more exciting developments in Australian historiography over the past fifteen years has been the inclusion of gay and lesbian narratives. These perspectives have broadened understandings of Australia’s past and have shown how reading original historical sources against the grain can provide evidence about the intimate lives of Australians.

If modern politicians rely excessively on pollsters and spin doctors, what should we say of the trust which their medieval and Renaissance predecessors placed in diviners and soothsayers? Among the most famous of these latter practitioners was ‘Dr’ John Dee, born just six years before Henry VIII’s youngest daughter, who availed herself of his services even before she succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I. Alchemist, antiquary, astrologer, astronomer, geographer, magician, mathematician, political adviser, seer, spirit-raiser, and theorist of empire: the full dimensions and scope of Dee’s omnidisciplinarity are not easily conveyed. Dee moreover inhabited a world ‘saturated with magic [...] not so much a world that we have lost, but more a strange, unfamiliar place that few modern readers can imagine’, to quote his latest biographer.

Dan Disney’s début collection, and then when the, is a slim volume infused with irreverent outings in philosophy and place. Just as the opening poem places its speaker in a philosophy class, philosophers offer constant points of reference. Disney reformulates such well-worn dicta as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum with verve, as in the poem ‘Towards a unifying theory of non-coincidence’, in which he writes, ‘the dead / (who tick not) / murmured “we do not think; therefore we are not”’.

In his polemical Introduction, Les Murray notes that Quadrant was founded sixty years ago by poet James McAuley, the ‘stern formalist’ who ensured that poetry occupied a prominent place in the magazine. Poetry has continued to be central to Quadrant, its profile not waning under Murray’s stewardship as literary editor since 1990. For this anthology, Murray has collected the best poems published in his second decade in that role.

This new book of Vivian Smith’s is really quite a surprise. If it were the case of any other poet approaching his eighties you might think of it as rather a grab bag, knocked together out of odds and ends. It is made up of an imaginary biography of ‘Ern Malley’; another set of sonnets, ‘Diary Without Dates’, mainly dealing with momentary meetings; a small group of sonnets imagined as postcards; and two prose pieces: one remembering the 1953 exhibition of French paintings in Hobart, and the other recording visits to Pablo Neruda’s three houses.

Like all good titles, Kate Lilley’s Ladylike offers the reader a coded and evocative entrée into her new collection. These poems are concerned with exposing and critiquing some of the expectations of femininity, of being ladylike, as found in the past and the present, in contemporary cultures such as the cinema and in the discourses of the academy. The idea of ‘liking ladies’ is also central to these poems, as a current of desires that cuts across more conventional notions of the lady. The title also suggests a motif of mirroring, even doubling, where a self is similar to, perhaps even indistinguishable from an ‘other’, and yet is also simultaneously different, a simulacra or sign that can never be the thing in question. It is within this point of slippage – this petticoat slide between an embodiment of femininity and its repetitions or likenesses – that Lilley’s poetry operates, generating a reading experience which can be both vertiginous and full of the rigour of possibilities.

Cecily Lockwood’s heart ‘bounced like a trout’. An arresting simile on the first page of a novel is always a good sign, but will this piscatorial comparison mean anything to young readers? No matter, back to those footsteps climbing the dark stairs to twelve-year-old Cecily’s room, where she is quailing under the bed. She pictures her older brother Jeremy in the next room, his heart ‘flipping and diving’. Ah, so that’s what trouts do. Clever Sonya Hartnett.

In Ruby Moon’s family, the colour red is associated with shame, sin, death, and – much later – love, triumph, and happiness. Creative, introverted Ruby (nicknamed ‘Button’ after swallowing one as a child) is twin to daring Sally. Ruby describes them as one moth: ‘two wings grown from the same beginning.’ Two halves, not yet formed.