If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

Melbourne historian Ian Britain has commented that Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) – her first and still best-known work – was ‘a book of outrage: an exposé, a jeremiad, a manifesto’. More than forty years after the Eunuch made Greer an instant international celebrity, her latest book is written in a different mood. Still spirited and sparring (could Greer ever be otherwise?), it is a sober, meditative, deeply moving account of her efforts to regenerate sixty hectares of scarred rainforest at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley in the Gold Coast hinterland not far from the northern border of New South Wales. It is a cry too, not just for one small patch of earth but for country, every bit as passionate and anguished as that of poet turned environmental campaigner Judith Wright before her.

If the London Australian expatriate community has an aristocracy of sorts – as it clearly does – then Geoffrey Robertson QC and the novelist Kathy Lette, his wife since 1990, would be among its leading nobility. Robertson and Lette mix with royalty, both real and literary (‘our daughters had been flower girls at Salman’s wedding – I can’t remember which one’). I would love to have been present when Robertson advised Diana, during her affair with James Hewitt, that the Treason Act of 1361 laid down the death penalty for any party to adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne. Did she blush or blanch?

An American friend recently asked me to define the Australian short story. Despite misgivings, I muttered something about birth, landscape and setting, vernacular, diversity, then retreated. The Best Australian Stories 2013 provides a viable answer. Short stories don’t want to be defined; they are much too subversive for that. They only want to be read. The best ones will want to be read again, and will offer up something new each time.

Donna Tartt has produced just one novel a decade so far: The Secret History, which came out in 1992 to enormous success; The Little Friend, ten years later, which barely rippled the surface of the literary world; and now The Goldfinch, which I suspect will achieve at least the standing of her first novel. Her novels possess a signature of sorts: crisply polished prose, perfect syntax, beautifully observed places and events, tricky characters, and unresolved crimes. They also explore the difficult world of adolescence, with their principal characters either witness to, or active participants in, those crimes. To this extent they possess a family resemblance to crime fiction; but they refuse to obey its conventions. The world is not restored to order at the end of her novels; the guilty are not punished, or the innocent rewarded. Instead, events and consequences roll indifferently on, unconcerned by fairness or justice or right, leaving the narrator to stumble through an attempt to make sense of what is in fact almost entirely random.

Theo, the narrator of The Goldfinch does precisely this, struggling through his own anomie and loneliness, struggling with post-traumatic stress and a fractured moral centre. For much of the novel he is a hapless adolescent, but when we first meet him, at the start of the novel, he is twenty-something, and hiding out in Holland. He has done something very wrong, probably involving murder. Though he is staying in a hotel room awash with Northern European beauty, where ‘the brocades were rich and the carpet was soft’, for him ‘the winter light carried a chilly tone of 1943, privation and austerities, weak teas without sugar and hungry to bed’, and he is sick and feverish and filled with ‘indeterminate anxiety’. Theo is a long way from home, and from comfort.

But he has been far from home, far from comfort, for much of his life; this he attributes to his mother’s early death. ‘Things would have turned out better if she had lived,’ he says. ‘When I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier.’ This complaint forms a segue from his Dutch hotel room to his thirteen-year-old self, when he was a child loved and cared for by a vibrant, intelligent mother. He is not a particularly good child; he has been suspended from school for smoking, or perhaps for more criminal acts; and the reason he and his mother are out together on the day she dies is that they are supposed to be meeting the school principal for a ‘conference’ on his behaviour. Early for their appointment and caught in a rainstorm they step into the art museum, and as Theo follows his mother from gallery to gallery, listening to her disquisition on the works and their contexts, he notices a girl, who notices him. At that moment his mother draws his attention to a little painting, The goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius, who was killed by an explosion that destroyed his studio.

Three perfect things are thus present: Theo’s mother; the girl, Pippa; and the painting. Minutes later, in an echo of the painting’s history, there is a sudden explosion. ‘A roar of hot wind slammed into me and threw me across the room,’ Theo says, ‘and that was the last thing I knew for a while.’ When he comes back to himself, damaged and concussed, he is in a ruined gallery; neither his mother nor Pippa is anywhere to be seen, but in attempting to help the elderly man – Pippa’s grandfather – he inadvertently steals the painting. Then the dying man presses a ring on him, and directs him to ‘Hobart and Blackwell’ with the instruction to ‘Ring the green bell’: a fairy-tale moment that sends Theo to Hobie, the furniture restorer who will become his mentor and his guardian, and to Pippa, who is bound to Hobie by trust, and to Theo by their shared experience of trauma.

This is where the whirling energy of the novel seizes Theo. He has been thrust out of childhood, and sent unprepared into the world. He clings obsessively to the idea of his mother and of Pippa, and to the actuality of the painting. Each is a fragment of beauty and tenderness in a world that is increasingly ugly. But though all three elude him, the world is not entirely unkind: Theo finds himself faced with several options. He could remain with the elegant Barbours, where he seeks refuge after the disaster and where, if he was not exactly loved, he was cared for. He could stay with Hobie and become an honest antique specialist. He could go into state care or boarding school. But Theo’s capacity for choice is arrested when his failed actor father turns up, like a bad fairy, to whisk him off to Las Vegas, where they live in an empty house, in an empty suburb, on the edge of the desert.

Theo’s life here is characterised by an empty bleakness, the strange, stunned, disoriented state of the recently bereaved, until he meets Boris, a boy as orphaned and neglected as himself. Boris is a junior Russian criminal who teaches Theo how to shoplift, and introduces him to beer for lunch, pharmaceutical drugs for afternoon tea, and vodka as an aid to digestion before they slip into unquiet sleep. Other than the deep and abiding affection that grows between the boys, this life offers few charms. Theo asks himself, ‘how had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?’; while Boris’s philosophy – ‘None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?’ – offers no consolation.

After Theo’s father dies, Theo flees Las Vegas for New York, and the safety of Hobie’s home. He returns to school, finds local dealers for his pharmaceutical drug dependency, and creates himself as an almost likeable, almost respectable young man. But his Aristotelean fatal flaw has travelled with him, along with his stolen painting, the material remnant of Theo’s ‘unbruised’ childhood self; together they drive Theo toward a dénouement that is first heart wrenching, and then unexpectedly consoling: the realisation that art is more than mere beauty, and human society more than darkness, catastrophe, and loss:

The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy movement of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little creature – fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

Whether or not one agrees with Theo about what art can do in an unkind world, the novel crafts a space for the possibility of something that might sever the chain, and afford a small, temporary hope.

The end of the year tends to bring a small and exquisitely formed avalanche of Australian poetry, including Best Poems from Black Inc., Best Poetry from the University of Queensland Press, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. Sadly UQP gave up the ghost with its annual after 2009, but we have already had Australian Love Poems.

Black Inc. shows no signs of abandoning Best Poems: in fact it goes from strength to strength. It has had a run of editors lately who have made each iteration distinctive and differently weighted: Peter Rose, Robert Adamson, John Tranter, and now Lisa Gorton. Gorton, in her introduction, says that ‘Poetry, whose forms close in time, is a kind of writing that justifies the printed book – an artefact.’ That being the case, Best Poems has, since last year, had a vibrant new design that gives it a real identity as an annual object. On the shelf it is like that other regular pleasure, the Bedside Guardian, while inside the poems are beautifully set in a clear font on crisp creamy paper, and easily scanned and investigated.

This may seem superficial – surely the quality of the verse is the main thing? – but on opening Now You Shall Know, this year’s Newcastle anthology, it is clear why design matters. Faint type, on cheap paper with a grey tinge, almost defies the eye. The poetry just seems to be dumped on to the page. The contrast is shocking, and also of course unfair. Best Poems is produced by a commercial publisher which values design highly and is prepared to support it (and for the moment can afford to).

Now You Shall Know, on the other hand, is a prize anthology, published by the Hunter Writers Centre: all their money goes, rightly, to help writers, prize winners and otherwise. They simply don’t have the resources to produce typographic eye candy. But previous anthologies have been neutral, plain, and legible. Something seems to have gone amiss this year.

Best Poems has an élan, almost a swagger, that’s invigorating. There are newish faces here, but what’s perhaps most enjoyable is the way the seasoned players step up on the stand and show that they have their chops. John Kinsella, writing a poem while a bushfire approaches, does narrative and literary reference as only he can: ‘The breeze blows / from the east, but is ambivalent and could swing / about. There are no semantics in this. And Paul Auster / is right where William (the lumberman) Bronk was wrong: / the poem doesn’t happen in words, but “between seeing / the thing and making it into a word.”’

Jennifer Maiden offers up a riff on Frank O’Hara that plays with that ‘Forbes said to me and Tranter said’ mode that can be infuriating, but here is nostalgic and spirited. When a poet is enjoying herself as much as Maiden is here, and so surefootedly, there is hardly any more pleasure to be had from verse.

More soberingly, Clive James, in the face of death, abandons all his orotund autodidact armour to be heartbreakingly honest: ‘All of my life I put my labour first, / I made my mark, but left no time between / The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst, / With no life, there was nothing I could mean / But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air / As if there were not much more of it there.’

Best Poems regularly reminds you of those poets whom you have missed during the year, includingKen Bolton, Peter Bakowski, and π.O.Poets that one feels should be there this year are there – Kate Middleton, Toby Fitch, Michael Farrell, Pam Brown. However subjective this may be, it does give the ‘best poems’ aspect more weight.

Lisa Gorton (photograph by Sue Gordon-Brown)

Gorton takes the eloquent-shrug approach to the unanswerable question: ‘I hope the experience of reading this anthology will bring into question how far those abstractions – “best”, “Australian”, “2013” – exist in fact, and what end they serve as one thinks about the poems collected here.’ Although, sadly, Gorton cannot be in this anthology, her spirit is. The poems are set out alphabetically ‘to bring home the ritual and music of language, always more at play in poetry than in prose’.

Gorton looked for poems that seemed to her ‘surprising, generative, memorable’, and notes that after all the ‘transactions with possibility’ involved in writing a poem, some seem to ‘hold like an electric charge the trace of all those forfeited possibilities’. That is the feeling her anthology generates, and by and large it is a modern, metropolitan one, knowing and reflexive.

Now You Shall Know is utterly different. Putting aside its aesthetic failings (as one owes it to the poets to do), it still has a character all its own. For one thing, as a competition collection, it tends to longer poems, as the poets have stretched out toward the word limit, and also, one feels, toward the discovery of something rather than the display of something. It’s not always so, but this year the result is a biographical, familial, anti-rhapsody of a book. Parents die (as in the winning title poem by Jennifer Compton), partners lapse into dementia, lives go by, and are remembered, amid landscapes that refuse to be fully known. Tony Hancock dies in his hotel room in Sydney.

The anthology is remarkably unified, despite the competition not having a defined theme. The judges do say that ‘playfulness can have its own wisdom and can dance with profundity’, but if there is play here it is very muted. John Jenkins’s ‘Diary of a Missing Poem’ does its best to be picaresque and personifying, but rings flat, while John A. Scott’s poetic recasting of ‘Hancock’s Last Half Hour’ would need a lot more play and invention to justify its existence than is on offer.

However, in these poems there is always the land and family, and no time or need, in the end, for playful display. Mark Crittenden’s ‘Red Soil Elegies’ have all the intelligence required to dazzle, but instead meditate ideas into stillness. The poet knows his place, in every sense: ‘I have been out into the carbon-black night, / trusting my way from page / to wire barbs. Mostly I find myself // a little afraid, enlarged upon the landscape, / dwarfed at first light. / I travel less and less, preferring // local roads. Imagination’s international. / A vast itinerary awaits me at the desk. / At home, my family / are the earthwire and fire inside my words.’

This feeling has echoes throughout the collection. Third-prize winner Mark Tredinnick, as ever, fuses rural life with culture and intellect by sheer force of will, and defies the sadness such an enterprise inevitably brings with it. ‘Sorrow is happiness grown wise / after its own event,’ he says, from his tractor, with Debussy in the background.

Everything seems to be getting its eulogy in this anthology: a parent dying; a partner losing memory and life; family life and freedom from it. Even writing, in Dylan Gorman’s ‘Seasonal Work’, is given its threnody: ‘The nib of my fountain pen has developed a bias, an edge / worn down over the years by the pressure I bring to bear on paper. / This morning I am aware of the sound it makes.’

Now You Shall Know seems to exist far from the bright metropolis, in a quiet valley where there is still an unrecorded folk tradition, its songs full of death and strange companions. It tends towards a low drone, but the keening and the scrape of discordance, once heard, are there all the time, even back in the well-dressed world of Best Poems, and give that world a whole new tuning.

In 2006, novelist Ann Patchett found herself in the midst of intense controversy. Truth and Beauty, an account of her friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy, had been allocated as a text for freshmen at Clemson University, South Carolina. One parent objected because the book depicted an intense affection between two women, discussed premarital sex, and ‘encouraged (students) to find themselves sexually’. Clemson banned Patchett’s book, branding it ‘pornographic’. Her 2007 Atlantic Monthly essay, reprinted in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, is an eye-opening account of her confrontation with American academic fundamentalism. Written with unflagging dry wit, her subsequent address to the Clemson University student body is a courageous, blazing defence of intellectual, academic, and artistic freedom.

Part memoir, part retrospective, the twenty-two essays in this collection build up a composite portrait of Patchett as writer, friend, granddaughter, wife, and investigative journalist. ‘I was always going to be a writer. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything,’ she recalls. Selling her first short story to the Paris Review when she was twenty, she published her début novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), seven years later. Since |then she has written six more novels and three works of non-fiction, winning the Orange Prize for Bel Canto (2001).

For many years she combined novel writing with journalism for publications as diverse as the New York Times and Vogue. The discipline of writing precisely and to word limits is evident in her fiction. She generally underwrites, preferring taut to florid, banishing the unnecessary phrase.

Take her personal response to anti-police riots in Los Angeles, ‘The Wall’, sealed with her own memories of growing up the daughter of an LAPD cop. She takes the gruelling Academy entrance exams because ‘I want to tell a story about people who do hard work. I want to explain that living beneath the weight of all those three-ringed binders filled with the neighbourhood dead takes its toll … that being the one to discover children entombed in cement wears you down … To show what’s good. But good, like the police, turns out to be complicated.’

‘Patchett’s initial premise for writing is frequently turned on its head by the force of experience’

These essays confirm that Patchett’s initial premise for writing is frequently turned on its head by the force of experience. She sets off for a camping holiday in a Winnebago, ‘to expose it for the gas-guzzling, fitness-eschewing underbelly my editor knows it to be’. After discovering the vast open spaces of America, she recognises ‘the Winnebago has set me free. It has made me swim in cold rivers and eat pancakes with strangers and turn down obscure roads with no worry about where I have to be or when.’

Her revisionism is particularly evident regarding her personal life, and here Patchett is unabashedly candid. There’s her hopeless, short-lived first marriage, an eventual rewarding second marriage to a Tennessee physician, and several mistakes in between.

‘The Sacrament of Divorce’ and the title story reveal much about her, but these essays also celebrate common links between women who fail at relationships, dust themselves off, and start over. ‘I was as grateful for divorce as I was for my own life, but it had done me in … I saw a much simpler path: if I never married again I would never again be divorced. In short, I had found a way to beat the system. I was free.’

Free – that word again. Free to cock a snook at political correctness and write, blithely childless and content withher dog in her lap, ‘I wonder if there are people out there who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog?’ Patchett’s enthusiasm for new passions discovered in adulthood (including dogs and opera) is infectious.

Some of the most illuminating essays concern her attitude to her craft. Nothing if not practical, casual jobs and an apprenticeship at Seventeen magazine allowed her to pay the bills as she wrestled with her early fiction (proudly, she notes that she was the first to get a perfect score in the T.G.I. Friday’s waitress test).

A former student of Allan Gurganus, Grace Paley, and Russell Banks, Patchett sets out a road map for wannabe writers: challenge yourself and write what you don’t know; be consistent; ‘writer’s block’ is just an excuse for procrastination. Amusingly, she banishes forever the notion that everyone has a book within them. ‘Does everyone have one great floral arrangement in them? ... One algebraic proof? ... One Hail Mary pass? One five minute mile?’

As editor of The Best American Short Stories 2006, Patchett in her introduction uncovers an admiration for a form she visits only rarely herself. ‘The stories offered me their companionship, each one a complete experience in a limited amount of space,’ she writes. The same could be said of this book. Dive in and savour the essays at random, although in a recent interview Patchett suggests reading them sequentially.

Two years ago, Patchett opened Parnassus Books in her home town, after the last bookstore in Nashville closed. Her journey from writer to successful entrepreneur is recounted in her Atlantic Monthly essay, ‘The Bookstore Strikes Back’. It sums up her unflagging energy and optimism. ‘Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn’t get to make all the decisions … If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore … This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.’

Ronnie Scott, who started The Lifted Brow in Brisbane in 2007 at the age of twenty, has now curated this Best of collection from the magazine’s first five years. It’s an eclectic mixtape of contributions from internationals such as David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Tao Lin, local writers Christos Tsiolkas and Frank Moorhouse, and a roll-call of the young and/or hip, including Romy Ash, Tom Cho, Anna Krien, and Alice Pung, many of whom were but talented emerging writers when their work first featured in the magazine.

It’s hard not to point to Michaela McGuire’s caustic but strangely uplifting diary of an ashtray-emptying summertime casino worker, which opens the collection, as broadly emblematic of The Lifted Brow’s often playful, ironic sensibilities, and its predilection for entertaining and creative non-fiction. Luke Ryan’s light-hearted cancer memoir and Benjamin Law’s tale of nuking the shit out of Queensland cockroaches also fit this bill.

The Lifted Brow is also serious about short fiction. Karen Russell’s story of women on pilgrimages to a sham fertility well on a Spanish clifftop presents a world crafted in perfect magic realist miniature. n.a. bourke’s‘Arboretum’ is an unforgettable account of the surprising proximity of grief and fleshly desire, and is one of two stories about human hearts. The other, ‘Pang’, by Robert Shearman, takes the metaphor of heartbreak somewhere both impossibly literal and horrifyingly, viscerally familiar.

If the quality of a literary magazine’s best short fiction is an index of excellence, this collection should leave no one in doubt of either The Lifted Brow’s ambitions, nor of its track record in realising them. Under Scott’s editorship – and now with Sam Cooney at the helm – the bimonthly arts, culture, and fiction publication affectionately known as The Brow has lived up to its potential.

When did you first write for ABR?

1981, during John McLaren’s incumbency as editor.

What prompted you to take up book reviewing?

Well, it took me up, really. It hadn’t occurred to me to review books until I was invited to write a piece for a journal called Prospect at Melbourne University. A long hiatus ensued during my school teaching years, but when I moved to Flinders University I began reviewing for the Advertiser, The Age, The Australian, and Australian Book Review. Invitations to review fiction, non-fiction, and some books on sport then became fairly frequent, and when the reborn Adelaide Review appeared I regularly reviewed for it.

While becoming a reviewer was not the result of a conscious decision, I continued to review because I enjoyed writing about books and their authors and I liked the process of learning how to do it.

Honours galore

Australia Day brought the usual gallimaufry of national honours, with fewer politicians this year and due recognition of the performing arts. Creative writers, as usual, were hardly represented. Theirs is a largely disorganised class, not suited to this bureaucratic process. But Advances was pleased that John Bryson – author of Evil Angels (1985) – was awarded an AM. John McLaren, founding editor of ABR, was similarly honoured.

Ruined!

Double Down (W.H. Allen, $55 hb) – Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s ‘explosive inside account of the 2012 presidential election’ – proves every bit as incendiary as this subtitle suggests, and no less devourable than its predecessor, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010). These two voracious American journalists have moles everywhere, at the highest levels. No politician or staffer appears capable of resisting them. Spookily, they even seem to know what Mitt Romney (often confusedly) thought.

Advances raced through the book towards Election Day, only to find the authors, skipping a day for once, moving straight to the dénouement: Romney’s belated concession and a series of entertaining recriminations within the Grand Old Party. In one treasurable vignette, Rupert Murdoch, a furious opponent of Barack Obama, watches the election returns with a four-star general. As the president claims victory Murdoch mutters, ‘Our nation is ruined’. For someone who has – how to put it? – presided over so many victories in Britain and Australia, it must have been a galling defeat for this four-star mogul.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch literature grows apace. Next up is Rodney Tiffen’s Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment (NewSouth, $34.99 pb). We will review it in a coming issue.

Reader survey

Hundreds of readers have responded to our reader survey – and we are grateful to all of them. Your ratings and comments have been encouraging and most helpful.

There is still time to complete the online survey, which will remain live until the end of February.

Critic of the Month

Brian Matthews

Many respondents have expressed the desire to read articles about the publishing industry and the role of critics. We’re planning a series of interviews with key publishers, and this month we introduce a new feature: ‘Critic of the Month’. Each month we will invite an ABR reviewer (long connected to the magazine or a relative newcomer) to reflect on his or her craft.

Brian Matthews, who has been writing for ABR since 1981 and who reviews the latest volume of ADB for us this month, is our inaugural Critic.

‘Critic of the Month’, one of several new features we have planned for 2014, complements ‘Open Page’. Rest assured, Open Page will be back in March.

Victim of hypocrisy

Geoffrey Robertson QC is the busiest of author–silks. Not content with the series of ruminations on his native land collected in Dreaming Too Loud: Reflections on a Race Apart (which Frank Bongiorno reviews here), Robertson has just published a small book on Stephen Ward, the ultimate victim of the Profumo affair. Perhaps the most infamous osteopath of the 1960s, Ward killed himself on the eve of his conviction for supposedly living on the earnings of a prostitute (viz. Christine Keeler).

The title of Robertson’s brisk philippic is unambiguous – Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK: The Case for Overturning His Conviction (Biteback Publishing [NewSouth], $24.99 hb). Robertson deplores the home secretary’s vengeful role in initiating the police investigation, and argues that the ensuing trial was grossly unfair. Ward, for Robertson, is a British Dreyfus. He invokes Dr Evatt on the Tolpuddle Martyrs to describe it as a case of ‘injustice within the law’.

Six mourners attended the once-fashionable Dr Ward’s funeral. The inimitable Kenneth Tynan – another committed libertine – sent a wreath. The card on it read, ‘To Stephen Ward, Victim of Hypocrisy’.

Eucalypt talk

Supported by the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust, we are seeking applications for the twelfth of our writers’ fellowships – the ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship. We welcome proposals for a substantial article on any aspect of eucalypts. The chosen Fellow – who will work closely with the Editor – will receive $5000.

This article will form the cornerstone of our first Environment issue in October 2014.

Classics stripped bare

To complement its A&R Australian Classics series, launched last year and now running to about twenty titles, HarperCollins has launched A&R Modern Australian Classics, each of which costs $14.99.

First up we have Glenda Adams’s Longleg, Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, Steven Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver, Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Nikki Gemmell’s The Bride Stripped Bare, Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro, Janette Turner Hospital’s Due Preparations for the Plague, and Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home. What an inexpensive feast for lovers of fine Australian writing of the past forty years.

Writing for ABR

We hope you enjoy our first issue for 2014. This month we have almost fifty contributors, seventeen of them new to the magazine – a promising start. Each year we publish about 230 writers in our ten issues (twenty issues really, counting ABR Online). This number is likely to grow because of our digital publishing and the growing number of articles that are exclusive to ABR Online (particularly those in Arts Update). Of those 230 writers about fifty are new to ABR, and at least half of that cohort are in their early twenties.

ABR is proud of this tradition but also conscious of the importance of assisting new reviewers and of replenishing our team of contributors. We encourage bright young things to contemplate writing for ABR. Familiarise yourself with the magazine first. Peruse the Editor’s ‘Advice for New Reviewers’ (‘Editors relish wit and irony – though not the comedy festival kind … We don’t all have to write the same way … No hissy fits!’). Then drop him a line outlining your interest and experience (attaching a couple of examples of your work). Email Peter Rose at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In his brief preface to Volume 1 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography 1788–1850 A–H (1966), Douglas Pike describes the ‘all-Australian, Commonwealth-wide … consultation and co-operation’ underpinning the volume and notes that the breadth and complexity of its intellectual network meant the Dictionary could ‘truly be called a national project’. Five decades later, in an informative, elegant introduction to Volume 18, the present general editor, Melanie Nolan, endorses Pike’s pioneering claim for the ADB, describing it as ‘a national collaborative project, the largest and longest running of its kind in the social sciences and humanities in Australia’. As such – ‘a reference work for many purposes’ – it is familiar territory to historians, researchers, biographers, film-makers, novelists, and any number of browsing general readers.

Among the diaspora of European-born Jewish artists, architects, academics, and intellectuals who made a life on Australian shores pre- and post-World War II, Harry Seidler (1923–2006) was, arguably, the most successful and at various times during his life, one of the most visible and most controversial. As an architect, he left behind signature office buildings in five state capital cities, a brace of stunning modernist houses in Sydney, Canberra, and Darwin from the 1950s to the 1990s, the much-acclaimed Australian Embassy in Paris, as well as buildings in Acapulco, Hong Kong, and Vienna. He also made sure he was remembered. He published Houses, Interiors, and Projects, the first book on his work, in 1953 and then, almost without fail, every ten years a book on his architecture would appear, culminating in 1992 with the magnum opus, Harry Seidler: Four Decades of Architecture, complete with essays by architectural historians Philip Drew and Kenneth Frampton. The last word? Certainly not. Four more books followed, and now, in the tradition of marking each decade, another book has appeared on Seidler, this time by journalist and author Helen O’Neill.

After four days in the theatre, and just as many resting up between instalments, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen ends with a big tune. Like most of Wagner’s themes, this one has been given a name: the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif. The name was not the work of the composer but of one of his acolytes, Hans von Wolzogen, and in its original German it is ‘Liebeserlösung’ which, strictly speaking, is ‘Redemption of Love’ or ‘Love’s Redemption’. But ever since guides to Wagner’s music began appearing in English – which is to say, a long time ago – the motif has been incorrectly labelled ‘Redemption through Love’, and so it has stuck.

Alma Moodie’s story is remarkable, which makes it all the stranger that she has been so thoroughly forgotten. A frail child prodigy from central Queensland, she became Carl Flesch’s favourite pupil and a renowned concert violinist in Germany after World War I, friend and performer of most of the great figures of international contemporary music, from Max Reger to Igor Stravinsky. As no recordings survive, we have to guess how she played, but it was evidently a style that suited the new music of the time – crisp, rhythmic, and intense, without the overt emotionalism of an Ysaÿe or a Kreisler. She was the dedicatee of violin concerti by Hans Pfitzner and Paul Hindemith, as well as Ernst Krenek, who drew on aspects of her personality as the basis for Anita, the musician who has a brief love affair with the black jazz band leader in Jonny spielt auf, the controversial opera that made his name. Moodie’s story ends sadly with artistic and personal decline before her death in Frankfurt at forty-four, probably by her own hand. But it is the vitality, ebullience, and courage of the earlier years that leaves the strongest impression.

The author of this impressive book had his ninetieth birthday this January. Born to a Jewish mother and Catholic father, he was fortunate to escape death in his native Hungary in World War II and to live another existence in the United States as an intellectual and historian throughout the Cold War. The label he sometimes claims is ‘reactionary’, but this is too simple for such a thoughtful spectator of the tempestuous, topsy-turvy twentieth century.

He likes to examine turning points and the role of individuals. He dissects and evaluates Woodrow Wilson (‘this pale professor president’) and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose ‘greatest asset was his self-confidence’. He shines a torch on Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Mao Zedong, and, briefly, on Nelson Mandela. He hints – without exactly saying so – that one of Mandela’s many virtues was that this forgiving leader belonged to a continent that produced, in the same half-century, many brutal tyrants.

Who was the towering figure of the whole century? Lukacs votes for Hitler. While he despises Hitler’s core of evil, he also recognises his genius in the 1930s in understanding and then arousing the German people. At that time, Hitler’s military ambitions were restricted. He hoped, by winning minor wars, to avoid a major war, and so escape a repetition of the colossal World War I. In the late 1930s Hitler thought he could speedily conquer his European neighbours, one by one. To the last he expected Britain and France would be, like cautious chickens, unwilling to help Poland. Deep was his disappointment when he heard on 3 September 1939 that both had declared war on Germany. Though some historians say that Hitler had resolved to rule the world, his main ambition – according to Lukacs – was simply to ‘rule most of Europe’.

A remarkable facet of this fascinating book is that it blames Hitler solely for the war. I doubt, however, whether the small print in the book supports such singular blame. Lukacs himself notes turning points where Hitler in peacetime could have been halted and even disarmed, thus avoiding a major war. When in 1936 Hitler decided to reoccupy the old German Rhineland – a step deadly for France’s defence lines – France was indecisive and Britain, its vital ally, was weak. Together they were so powerful militarily that they could have made Hitler retreat, without even firing a shot. But they gave in, thereby emboldening and strengthening Hitler. Also to blame for World War II was the United States, which, having helped to defeat Germany psychologically more than militarily in 1918, then withdrew from Europe.

My own view is that both sides were to blame for the new war of 1939–45. Germany was visibly to blame for violating the peace. The nations that defeated her in 1914–18 were invisibly to blame for proceeding in the next two decades to throw away the victory they had won at enormous cost on the battlefields of Europe. The tragedy of the history profession globally is that today it possesses less agreement on what causes international peace than the medical profession, even a century ago, possessed on what caused diseases.

Churchill wins Lukacs’s prize as the hero of the twentieth century. He did not win the war, but in the crisis of 1940 he could have ‘lost the war’. We are informed with some confidence that Churchill had an excellent eye for human weakness and strength. Churchill understood Hitler, who in turn could not understand Churchill’s mind and determination. Likewise, Churchill ‘understood Stalin and Russia better than Roosevelt did’. Stalin’s grave defect in 1941 was that he, unlike Churchill, could not peer into Hitler’s mind, and so was astonished when Hitler, then his ally,overnight became his enemy. It is curious to learn that towards the end of the war Hitler still half-respected Stalin but now hated Churchill.

Lukacs concedes some respect for Stalin’s peasant-like realism. He thinks Stalin’s decision to declare war on Japan in August 1945 was as influential as Truman’s simultaneous decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. At first sight, Lukacs’s experience as a young man would suggest that he would always remain a thankful worshipper of the United States and would shun the main line of Soviet leaders. But he respects what he calls Stalin’s ‘stunning’ proposal of 1952 to unify East and West Germany, to allow free all-German elections, and to remove all Russian and US troops and replace them with ‘an essentially all-German army’. Lukacs admits that Stalin was then ‘ailing and probably unsteady’, but it was still a constructive proposal. The Western powers instantly said no. Khrushchev, who was Stalin’s successor, also made major concessions, for which he has so far been given little credit.

When the Cold War finally ended, Lukacs marvels that the Soviet Union dissolved with so little bloodshed. The year 1989 he marks down as the end of the twentieth century and the close of Europe’s long era of might.

His book focuses on the century’s powerful nations, leaders, and ideas. In contrast the daily lives of typical people during the century are not often discussed, though American movies and musicals are singled out as a major reason for the ascent of English as the global language. Generally, he views material factors as less important than the human mind in shaping history. In the book’s index, the motor car and jumbo jet do not appear. Lukacs travels his own way.

While the author concentrates on the great powers, he visits briefly the southern hemisphere. He observes that the ‘mostly British, Irish and Dutch populations of Australia and New Zealand lived their calm, stolid, pioneer lives’. In fact in both countries the Dutch were far outnumbered by the Scots and several other peoples.

A few of his alert observations are disguised as questions. In 2000, in Africa and the Middle East, ‘only two places remained with a considerable white population’, and they were far apart in geography – South Africa and Israel. ‘Will they remain so,’ he asks, ‘another hundred years from now?’

One of his last conclusions displays the juggling side of his mind. He concedes that at least half of the world’s population became better off materially during the twentieth century. But he cannot assess whether they were happier. Indeed nobody – not even the most sensitive historians and thinkers of our time – ‘should be allowed even to speculate’ about this crucial question’. After reading his book I am not sure why he imposes such a taboo on discussion, but his final sentence provides a clue. Contrary to what the most optimistic scientists say, we should not, we cannot, know everything of importance: ‘[t]he limitations of our human knowledge do not restrict but enrich us.’

This book offers no footnotes, no sources, and no bibliography. Some historians will condemn these deliberate omissions, but the wide knowledge and long experience of such a prolific historian serve as an adequate list of sources.

Donna Tartt has produced just one novel a decade so far: The Secret History, which came out in 1992 to enormous success; The Little Friend, ten years later, which barely rippled the surface of the literary world; and now The Goldfinch, which I suspect will achieve at least the standing of her first novel. Her novels possess a signature of sorts: crisply polished prose, perfect syntax, beautifully observed places and events, tricky characters, and unresolved crimes. They also explore the difficult world of adolescence, with their principal characters either witness to, or active participants in, those crimes. To this extent they possess a family resemblance to crime fiction; but they refuse to obey its conventions. The world is not restored to order at the end of her novels; the guilty are not punished, or the innocent rewarded. Instead, events and consequences roll indifferently on, unconcerned by fairness or justice or right, leaving the narrator to stumble through an attempt to make sense of what is in fact almost entirely random.

Theo, the narrator of The Goldfinch does precisely this, struggling through his own anomie and loneliness, struggling with post-traumatic stress and a fractured moral centre. For much of the novel he is a hapless adolescent, but when we first meet him, at the start of the novel, he is twenty-something, and hiding out in Holland. He has done something very wrong, probably involving murder. Though he is staying in a hotel room awash with Northern European beauty, where ‘the brocades were rich and the carpet was soft’, for him ‘the winter light carried a chilly tone of 1943, privation and austerities, weak teas without sugar and hungry to bed’, and he is sick and feverish and filled with ‘indeterminate anxiety’. Theo is a long way from home, and from comfort.

But he has been far from home, far from comfort, for much of his life; this he attributes to his mother’s early death. ‘Things would have turned out better if she had lived,’ he says. ‘When I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier.’ This complaint forms a segue from his Dutch hotel room to his thirteen-year-old self, when he was a child loved and cared for by a vibrant, intelligent mother. He is not a particularly good child; he has been suspended from school for smoking, or perhaps for more criminal acts; and the reason he and his mother are out together on the day she dies is that they are supposed to be meeting the school principal for a ‘conference’ on his behaviour. Early for their appointment and caught in a rainstorm they step into the art museum, and as Theo follows his mother from gallery to gallery, listening to her disquisition on the works and their contexts, he notices a girl, who notices him. At that moment his mother draws his attention to a little painting, The goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius, who was killed by an explosion that destroyed his studio.

Three perfect things are thus present: Theo’s mother; the girl, Pippa; and the painting. Minutes later, in an echo of the painting’s history, there is a sudden explosion. ‘A roar of hot wind slammed into me and threw me across the room,’ Theo says, ‘and that was the last thing I knew for a while.’ When he comes back to himself, damaged and concussed, he is in a ruined gallery; neither his mother nor Pippa is anywhere to be seen, but in attempting to help the elderly man – Pippa’s grandfather – he inadvertently steals the painting. Then the dying man presses a ring on him, and directs him to ‘Hobart and Blackwell’ with the instruction to ‘Ring the green bell’: a fairy-tale moment that sends Theo to Hobie, the furniture restorer who will become his mentor and his guardian, and to Pippa, who is bound to Hobie by trust, and to Theo by their shared experience of trauma.

This is where the whirling energy of the novel seizes Theo. He has been thrust out of childhood, and sent unprepared into the world. He clings obsessively to the idea of his mother and of Pippa, and to the actuality of the painting. Each is a fragment of beauty and tenderness in a world that is increasingly ugly. But though all three elude him, the world is not entirely unkind: Theo finds himself faced with several options. He could remain with the elegant Barbours, where he seeks refuge after the disaster and where, if he was not exactly loved, he was cared for. He could stay with Hobie and become an honest antique specialist. He could go into state care or boarding school. But Theo’s capacity for choice is arrested when his failed actor father turns up, like a bad fairy, to whisk him off to Las Vegas, where they live in an empty house, in an empty suburb, on the edge of the desert.

Theo’s life here is characterised by an empty bleakness, the strange, stunned, disoriented state of the recently bereaved, until he meets Boris, a boy as orphaned and neglected as himself. Boris is a junior Russian criminal who teaches Theo how to shoplift, and introduces him to beer for lunch, pharmaceutical drugs for afternoon tea, and vodka as an aid to digestion before they slip into unquiet sleep. Other than the deep and abiding affection that grows between the boys, this life offers few charms. Theo asks himself, ‘how had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?’; while Boris’s philosophy – ‘None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?’ – offers no consolation.

After Theo’s father dies, Theo flees Las Vegas for New York, and the safety of Hobie’s home. He returns to school, finds local dealers for his pharmaceutical drug dependency, and creates himself as an almost likeable, almost respectable young man. But his Aristotelean fatal flaw has travelled with him, along with his stolen painting, the material remnant of Theo’s ‘unbruised’ childhood self; together they drive Theo toward a dénouement that is first heart wrenching, and then unexpectedly consoling: the realisation that art is more than mere beauty, and human society more than darkness, catastrophe, and loss:

The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy movement of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little creature – fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

Whether or not one agrees with Theo about what art can do in an unkind world, the novel crafts a space for the possibility of something that might sever the chain, and afford a small, temporary hope.

As he approached his fiftieth birthday, Eric Hobsbawm finally won recognition. His Primitive Rebels (1959) was an innovative study of millenarian rural movements. In 1962 he published The Age of Revolution, the first of four books that encompassed the modern era with unrivalled powers of synthesis, and his volume on Labouring Men (1964) gathered up incisive essays on labour history that had appeared over the previous decade. Hobsbawm’s academic career, which had been held back by membership of the Communist Party, was prospering: in 1959 he was promoted to Reader in History at Birkbeck College in London. He worked as the jazz critic for the New Statesman, and in the same year Penguin published his wide-ranging account of The Jazz Scene.

It was a measure of Hobsbawm’s standing that the Times Literary Supplement commissioned him in 1964 to review two books, one by Umberto Eco on mass culture and the other by Stuart Hall (and a colleague) on the popular arts. He began by recalling the social history of the horse, for so long the chief source and standard measure of motive power, a status symbol for the landed rich, and an object of admiration for artists. Now displaced by the car and the tractor, it survived as a luxury item, but ‘horse-age thinking’ was obsolete.

So too, he argued, with the arts in the second half of the twentieth century. Handicraft had yielded to industrialisation, which provided the technology that rendered individual work redundant and the mass demand that made it inadequate. As with the printing press and then photography, cultural products were now manufactured in a continuous flow. Hobsbawm sketched the different approaches to this cultural industry: that of the Americans who discovered, described, and measured it, the continentals who analysed and theorised, and the English commentators who replaced aesthetic with social interpretation. His examples were striking: Hammett and Simenon, the Marx Brothers and the Goons, Cole Porter and the Rolling Stones, Anita O’Day and Helen Shapiro, Gunsmoke and Z-Cars, Superman and Snoopy. Hobsbawm was immersed in contemporary culture and unimpressed.

That review appears in this book, thirty years older than the other pieces. The rest date from the 1990s, when Hobsbawm had achieved international eminence and was turning to the history of his own times, the epoch that stretched from the Russian Revolution to the collapse of communism. Some of the essays were written originally for the London Review of Books, some delivered as lectures, some presented in Germany or France and now translated, some retouched, and some new. He brought them together shortly before his death in 2012.

The preface explains his purpose. He is concerned with the art and culture of the bourgeois society that suffered a mortal blow in World War I and collapsed over the course of the last century. This bourgeois society was European, and in the nineteenth century it established domination over the rest of the world through conquest, technological superiority, and economic globalisation, carrying with it a set of values and beliefs that constituted bourgeois civilisation.

Drawing on the older culture of patronage and display, it dispensed with aristocratic authority and traditional religion by constructing its own public institutions. Here Hobsbawm recalls the Vienna of his childhood, where the old medieval and imperial centre was ringed by the Stock Exchange, the university, the City Hall, grand museums, the Burgtheater, and the Grand Opera. These were the places where cultured people worshipped culture and the arts, displacing the church as ‘a worldly temple of the intellect’.

One group of essays describes this culture, with particular attention to Germany, Mitteleuropa, and the Jewish contribution. Hobsbawm argues that the release of Jews from segregation and self-segregation released an intellectual energy in science, the professions, and the arts, and he draws attention to the conscious assimilation of Westjuden to the German language and culture. Throughout central Europe, he argues, ‘German was the language of freedom and progress’, and educated Jews made up a substantial part of the intellectual stratum. Their desire to be German brought the double tragedy of their destruction and the failure to foresee that fate.

Subsequent essays on gender and art nouveau trace the shift from abstinence and accumulation to comfort and display. The meritocratic principle allowed for recognition of female talent (four women won Nobel Prizes between their inception in 1901 and 1914), while sexual emancipation allowed women to become the bearers of culture, the spenders, and decorators of the home beautiful. Within the international styles the state became the sponsor of culture, so that the classics were translated into national languages and the intellectuals nationalised.

A second group of essays explores the breakdown of this bourgeois civilisation. High culture was restricted to a small educated minority – he points out that on the eve of World War II the universities of Germany, France, and Britain contained no more than 150,000 people, or one per cent of their combined population. Their authority survived so long as this order provided peace, stability, and progress, and satisfied the basic needs of the poor, but it could not resist the forces that Hobsbawm explained in his Age of Extremes (1994). First came the Great War, then the ideological mobilisation of the masses, and subsequently the economic transformation that destroyed the old ways of earning a living to create a mass consumer society.

This provides the framework in which Hobsbawm explores the artistic manifestos of the avant-garde, the new cultural forms, and the predicament of high culture. Several of the most incisive essays began as addresses to the Salzburg music festival and must have struck a discordant note. He noted how such festivals had multiplied like rabbits – there were then 2500 of them in the United States alone – as a component of cultural tourism. He also pointed out that festivals occur outside the centres of cultural production. There are none in New York, London, Rome, or Paris, and after Melbourne featured Boris Johnson at its most recent Writers’ Festival, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the literary festival is a mutually convenient device for branding and marketing.

Another of the Salzburg addresses gave a mordant diagnosis of the predicament of high culture. It had once provided reverence and spiritual improvement but was now a form of entertainment. He saw a future for architecture but not the visual arts, which had long since lost ‘the shock of the new’. He thought the book would survive on the dubious grounds that it was more durable than text on the screen. Fractured Times pays little attention to the novel or verse, though the predictable lines from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ provide its epitaph.

At Salzburg, Hobsbawm worried most about music, his own jazz reduced to life support at festivals, and the classical canon frozen with a shrinking and ageing audience. He hazarded the guess that the principal orchestras depended on no more than two hundred works – surely too low an estimate – composed over the past two and a half centuries. Theatre and opera strove for novel productions of staple works, in his words freshening eminent graves by putting different flowers on them.

Finally, there are essays that interpret mass culture, and these too display a nonagenarian’s seemingly inexhaustible knowledge. In the last of them, he returns to the horse and the working men who rode them, the Cossacks of southern Russia and the Ukraine, the Hungarian csikós, the Andalusian puszta, the gauchos, llaneros, and vacqueros of the Americas. All provide powerful myths, so why is it that the American cowboy prevailed? The answer, it appears, is not simply the power of Hollywood to turn an invented tradition of the late nineteenth century into a global commodity, but the Hobbesian qualities that the High Plains drifter embodies.

Eric Hobsbawm never came to terms with Australia. Its stockmen and drovers appear here as ‘proletarian cattlemen’, bracketed with the ‘sheep-shearers and other hobos’ who generated ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and supposedly represent the Wild West, as if it had been organised by Wobblies. He thought this country the most derivative and least interesting of the settler societies, for it was a blind spot in his restless curiosity, but I doubt we shall ever again see such a brilliant and versatile historian.

As the smoke cleared over the ruins of the Eureka Stockade on 5 December 1854, a male diarist observed that a woman was among those ‘mercilessly butchered’ by troopers and police. According to her descendants, Catherine Smith was another casualty, shot by soldiers and dead three weeks later. In the 1880s a female correspondent to the Ballarat Star also claimed to have been among the wounded. This woman was not one of the twenty-seven-odd civilians killed; nor was she among the unknown number who later died from their injuries. Yet still soldiers shot at her as she fled, and she was lucky to escape alive.

Between European settlement in 1829 and the 1900 federal referendum, the legislation regulating matrimony in the infant Swan River colony changed eight times. Now, in this intelligent dissection of marriage and divorce laws in colonial Western Australia, historian Penelope Hetherington examines the political, religious, and social forces that effected change, redefined gender relations, and led to a gradual recognition of the rights of women.

We met at the end of the party
when all the lights were fouled
with drink and even the self-titled
Ouzo Animal was yawning in protest
at the Bacchanalian revel in which
no member is not drunken. I sipped
soda water from a cracked glass,
refrained from removing my jumper
while a twelve-year old Bob Dylan with a voice
like Hank Williams stood silently in the corner
stirring vinyl motes with his fingertips,
a younger more cherubic version of you,
Prince Valiant or some other slender
sword-bearer infiltrating the childhood
of your celebrated prettiness preparing you
for a lifetime of repetition and inaction
till your appearance in the space between
the bar and our oversexed pinball machine
conjured foxes, chickens and all the abjured
mythologies of early twenty-first century
mating games, obliterating the desire
for friendship that skulks behind the false
advertising of every sexual advance.
It’s only men who think that they and women
can’t be true, a self-serving dialect delivered
by an absent emperor, your king in waiting,
so charred, so easily bruised. Poor Scorpio
clichés of speech overcome in me
and reinstituted as a kind of structure.
The possibility of being immortal is something
I will have to give up on. Scattered to the pigs
in the rent-free cage conversing in a language
that is not so different from the one you deride.
In which all the worlds tetrahedron and give up
on the cause of the Frisky Mothers of Bullaburra
now entwined, night squad of rabbits waiting to chew
your stumps to cavities in an externalized display
of waking fictions. I decay and suffer a mannish twinge.
The first of the plagiarism dreams reclaims my heart
with false dice. All behaviour is suspicious.

‘Above the line’, a narrator begins a story. At a specific moment in time, a specific fictional character appears and something is about to happen. ‘Below the line’, another narrator begins a different story, a story in notes, footnotes, ‘citational backup’ for the story ‘above’. You have begun reading Bernard Cohen’s new novel: a work in story and notes, a game, a play of genre, a performance.

Elizabeth Harrower’s début novel was first published by Cassell in London in 1957. Down in the City begins with a hymn to Sydney, with its beaches, harbour suburbs, city arcades – and disreputable Kings Cross, ‘a haven for the foreigner and racketeer; a beacon for long-haired boys, mascaraed women and powdered men. It is Montmartre: it is bright and wicked.’

Brian Fitzpatrick – a notable historian, intellectual, and civil libertarian – was a prominent Melbourne figure in the middle of the twentieth century. He died in 1965 and survives partly as the central figure in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s poignant memoir My Father’s Daughter (2010), an affectionate and yet painfully honest book. It describes Fitzpatrick’s difficult marriage, his awkwardness in relationships, the frustrations of his career, and, above all, his drinking. Around the time his daughter was born, Fitzpatrick published two books that made a significant mark on Australian historiography: British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833 (1939) and its sequel The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939 (1941). Sheila Fitzpatrick credits these works with an important role in prompting Manning Clark to repudiate an economic view of Australian history in favour of his grand narrative of competing philosophies.

Infamy comes packaged with a blurb declaring it to be an Australian western, and a testimonial from Malcolm Knox, who compares this evocation of the hellish convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s with the imaginative achievements of Martin Scorsese. Neither claim is quite right. Bartulin’s narrative style does have affinities with a certain sort of action movie: the reader is wrenched from short take to short take, with one clutch of characters momentarily left in peril while the plight of others is unveiled. This builds suspense and mostly works, but the relentless violence is more reminiscent of Peckinpah than Scorsese. And, although that does put Infamy in the realm of the western, the tale keeps drifting towards the mood and conventions of an earlier Hollywood genre, the swashbuckling adventure movies of the 1930s. This is The Wild Bunch meets Captain Blood.

Late in his first collection of anecdotal short stories, Luke Carman’s narrator, also named Luke Carman, realises that the magic in a book he loves, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, cannot be replicated in his own life. He is stuck in Australia, and ‘Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth.’ Stuck, to be precise, in Sydney’s western suburbs, depicted as an uncultured wasteland of ‘high-rises, methadone clinics and car yards’. A complicated patchwork of ethnicities blankets this terrain: ‘Fairfield is full of Latinos’, ‘Cabra’s all about Asians’, ‘Penrith is just scumbag Aussies’, etc. It is more melting pot than multiculturalism, as Carman shows the youth leading dismal lives of depressing homogeneity. On ‘bone-grey streets spare and grim’, they drift about, squawking broken, racist language at one another, the ennui lifting only when the war cry is bawled: ‘you wanna punch on?’

White Light pieces together fragments of a colourful Australian suburbia: a bat-featured baby born to secretive neighbours; a young girl tipping over a bulldozer while playing on dormant construction equipment; and gold bullion appearing outside a rundown rooming house. The characters, like the book’s kaleidoscopic cover, are splintered. O’Flynn often creates original plotlines to emphasise this.

All scientists are writers. Science only exists in the written form. What is not written is not published, is not accepted, is not knowledge, and does not exist. It is written science that is scrutinised, peer-reviewed, and cited – nothing else matters but to ‘publish or perish’. Scientific articles, in all their clever, compacted, content-laden complexity, may well be impenetrable to all but the most specialist reader, but this does not mean they are poorly written. Articles are extraordinarily difficult to craft; writing them is the hardest and most intellectually challenging aspect of scientific practice. Evidence – the experimental result or the novel observation – may well lie at the heart of science, but until this evidence is written up and published it remains an unpolished gem which cannot be appreciated or understood. Through the medium of the written word, science has taken us to new worlds. Charles Bazerman argues that ‘scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments … [and has] literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own’.

Sarah Drummond’s début is a poetic memoir of life among the fishermen and women on the southern extremities of Western Australia.

The story of ‘Salt’, her mentor and fishing companion, is structured as a series of vignettes around life on the water in the bays, inlets, and fishing channels in this rugged part of Australia, which is at once foreign and familiar. The characters are quirky and likeable, and the traditions of the fishing communities echo ways of living in many isolated areas of Australia. There is something romantic about the harsh locations, the visceral descriptions, and the barnacled anglers who understand no other way of life, as Drummond says of the ‘Hemingwayesque’ nature of their work, it is a ‘beautiful interplay of art and labour, the cerebral marrying of the physical’.

Once regarded as a provincial backwater, Perth has been transformed by the latest mineral resources boom into the nation’s fastest-growing city. The world’s most isolated capital, it is also one of the most outward-looking: a land of ‘porous boundaries’ and endless possibilities, where time and distance are illusory, and the collective gaze of its citizens has, from the first, been resolutely fixed upon the future; and yet it remains a site of ‘great contradictions’. ‘Spacious yet claustrophobic’, open but secretive, it is a place where Georgian buildings sit alongside glass towers; where nostalgia for a ‘vanished frontier’ infects the prevailing mood of optimism; and where, in winter, even the iconic Swan River flows in two directions at once, the rainwater from the Darling Scarp washing seawards above the salty incoming tide beneath. Faced with these competing views, author David Whish-Wilson goes in search of the essential Perth and finds a people and a place shaped by ancient and modern forces.

Anyone lucky enough to have read Arguments with England (2004), the first volume of Michael Blakemore’s memoirs, will be eager to read the second, Stage Blood, in which he traces the tumultuous history of his years at London’s National Theatre. Further, anyone as lucky as I was to see such productions of his as Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1971 will be agog to read the new book in the hope of insights about their genesis. Such people will not be disappointed.

In Circus and Stage, Mimi Colligan revisits the careers of stage performers Rose Edouin and and her husband, George Benjamin William Lewis, who were significant figures in nineteenth-century Australian theatre but are now ‘largely forgotten’.

Reading Andrew Montana’s new biography of Loudon Sainthill leaves one imagining how much the artist would have achieved without his lover, amanuensis, and entrepreneur, Harry Tatlock Miller. Lovers for some thirty-four years, they seem destined to achieve remarkable things together. Well into his project Montana realised that he could not tell Sainthill’s story without Miller’s, and so Fantasy Modern became a dual biography, a ‘portrait of a marriage’ of two gay men and of the work that bound them. It is also an encyclopedic trip through rapid aesthetic change, a social-family history of rare individuals, and urban culture shaped by art and design, not just coffee, magazines, and booze.

Art, in all its diverse manifestations, from storytelling to picture-making, from singing and dancing to poetry, is as distinctive and universal an activity of the human mind as language. It is, in essence, a way of thinking about the world, of shaping experience as it is felt to be and reshaping it as it could be, that long predates the development of rational reflection. Stories have been told for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands; philosophical and scientific thought begins, for practical purposes, around 2500 years ago.

‘There’s no time like NOW!’ proclaim the signs.

Inspired by the fond reminiscences of slow tram rides of several Melbourne personalities, whose brief anecdotes are interspersed between the pages of the sumptuous Melbourne Now catalogue (Melbourne Now Limited Edition, National Gallery of Victoria, $100 hb, 280 pp, 9780724103768), I am travelling into the exhibition by tram. Through the rectangle of the window I watch the ziggurat of the Shrine of Remembrance and the green slopes of the Domain slide by. Max Delany, senior curator of contemporary art, admits in his essay ‘Metro-cosmo-polis: Melbourne now’ that, despite its scope and hundreds of participants, this exhibition can be neither completely inclusive nor exhaustive. Words like ‘mammoth’, ‘significant’, ‘grandiose’, ‘grandiloquent’, ‘pretentious’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘impressive’, and ‘inspired’ rattle around my brain in time to the tram’s stop-and-grind, and anticipate my reactions to the vast undertaking of Melbourne Now. I have high expectations – I hope to see the culture of my city with a tourist’s fresh gaze.

Editor Matthew Lamb stands by his decision to end themed issues of Island. ‘General issues,’ he explains in his latest editorial, ‘allow for more serendipitous encounters with new ideas.’ Cohesion in any literary journal can be tricky, and Island 135 offers a mostly complementary mix of new and old ideas.

Although he used screenwriters, Alfred Hitchcock was a model auteur and engineered his films meticulously. ‘Casting and performance, mise-en-scène, lighting, camera angle, construction of setting, and music must all be woven into the director’s “action” as he makes a scene,’ remarks Murray Pomerance in his study of Hitchcock’s American films as a reflection of the country he moved to in 1939 and became a citizen of in 1955.

Ben McCann’s Ripping Open the Set begins with four epigraphs, observations of various kinds. They come from American figures – Frank Capra, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Nathanael West – and they express a range of notions, none of them particularly positive, about the place of design in cinema. McCann – senior lecturer in French at the University of Adelaide – then starts his introduction with another American voice: producer David O. Selznick sends a memo to his design colleagues during pre-production for Gone with the Wind (1939). This time, however, the observation has a different tone. Selznick canvasses, with some concern, the widespread belief that French films have ‘a quality of reality in photography, sets, and costumes’ that American movies lack. American films seem constructed – French sets looked lived-in.

P.L. Travers (1906–96) did her best to keep her private life private. Perhaps her reservations harked back to the days before she penned Mary Poppins (eight novels, 1934–88) when she was a human interest columnist for a daily newspaper. As a writer of both journalism and fiction she knew as well as anyone that hearsay and speculation were quite different from myth and fairy tale. Still, Travers’s life has been the subject of tabloid sensationalism intermittently over the years. Often ignoring the magic and mysticism that flew into the Banks’ lives along with her character Mary Poppins, the press was interested in secret and scandal. There was coarse commentary on the author’s adoption of Camillus Hone, the twin whose brother she neither wanted nor took in, along with her alleged affairs with older men and with women, as though these issues ought to alter public opinion of her literary achievements.

Celebrity knows no borders, so the Australian visitor to Xi’an, capital of China’s north-western province of Shaanxi, shouldn’t be too surprised to come across images of compatriots like Hugh ‘Wolverine’ Jackman and Nicole ‘Face of Chanel’ Kidman adorning the city’s retail centre. But if they look around in Xi’an’s museums and historical displays, they may be intrigued to find photographs of a less famous compatriot, W.H. Donald (1875–1946), the subject of Craig Collie’s biography. With a nose large enough to amply justify the Chinese stereotype of the big-beaked foreigner, Donald looms up beside Chinese political figures of the 1930s like Zhang Xueliang, the warlord known as the ‘Young Marshal’, and Soong Mei-ling, wife of Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek.

This richly documented study of China’s pre-eminent writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) by Gloria Davies cannot fail to provoke deep reflection on the issue of the creative writer, artist, philosopher, or scholar and his or her involvement in politics. For Lu Xun, the issue was exacerbated by the brutal reality of China in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a ‘time of violence’, as suggested by the book’s subtitle. Highly emotive patriotism had generated political activism, and abstract ‘revolution’ had an uncanny religious aura with its promise of an ideal future society. Violence came from an intense struggle for power, and political parties were defined by an army and an extensive network of informers and assassins: public and secret executions instilled fear in the faint-hearted and, at the same time, produced heroes who were prepared to sacrifice themselves. Intellectuals were recruited into the propaganda machinery of the Nationalist Party or the Communist Party, and individuals had no option but to adopt a political stance.

The popularity of letter-writing has been in decline for years, and recent proposals to privatise Australia Post may accelerate this trend. In an age when an email reaches its recipient in mere micro-seconds, the impassioned letters between Miller and Nin, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, or Queen Victoria’s estimated 3000 letters to her daughter ‘Vicky’ can seem like relics of a bygone time. It is safe to assume that in the museums of the twenty-second century, artefacts of the current era won’t appear in the form of framed letters written in fountain pen.

Errol Fuller has played a key role in documenting historical extinctions of birds, notably the Great Auk and the Dodo. In the course of this work he has accumulated a fascinating collection of photographs of now extinct animals, many of them unique and not previously published.

David Levithan’s latest book has proved extremely popular with adolescent and adult readers alike, particularly gay men who lived through the first wave of HIV/Aids. The main storyline, which takes place over a couple of days, centres on two gay teenagers, former boyfriends Harry and Craig, who set out to break the Guinness Record for a continuous kiss (more than thirty-two hours).

I have often thought that a large part of achievement is just fronting up; having an idea and acting on it, however unlikely success might seem. What you need is a resolution (or the disposition) not to be discouraged by failure and to be pleasantly surprised by success. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. You make the most of any opportunity. You should also jettison a conventional sense of the social niceties. You’re going to Boston for your honeymoon. Hey, why not ask Noam Chomsky for an interview?

It is reasonable that poets, by the time they reach their mid-seventies, should be involved in projects which re-evaluate their current lives and poems in the light of early experience and expectations. This most recent book of Ron Pretty’s – and it is by some distance his best – is built around the Swedish proverb, ‘The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected,’ treated not as an opportunity to gloat over the wisdom which age is supposed to bring but instead to puzzle out the weird discrepancies and disjunctions between the two states of ‘what-I-was-then’ and ‘what-I-am-now’.

A signal flare, known mostly for its use as a maritime distress signal, has the ability to illuminate a disproportionately large area for what can also seem, given its intimate, hand-held origin, an unnaturally sustained time of several minutes. It is also the title of Anthony Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poetry. While the phrase itself is not to be found in any of the poems, the poetic idea offered by ‘signal flare’ is powerful and lights its terrain.

Divided into four parts, Signal Flare opens with a single poem, ‘Lines in Absentia’, delivered in concise yet syntactically flexible four-line stanzas whose duration is more than seven pages, and written as a profound response to a suicide on Sydney Harbour. One assumes the person in question was known intimately to the poet – Lawrence addresses a number ofintimates, now often lost to him, across the volume – but it is worth noting this does not need to be the case. The book’s suite of poems, whose subjects include the interrogation of the intricacy and dualities of relationship, do not need to be read biographically to maintain their impact.

In ‘Eclipse’, another poem in Signal Flare, a young woman’s near-suicide (near the Harbour) is addressed, and the book’s final poem, ‘Winging It’, is a masterful and expansive examination of the experience of facing the nearness to one’s own mortality. Here are the closing lines:

You’re in trouble, and no matter how often
you throw the wide-cast net of your philosophy
or opt for silence
after you’ve talked yourself to your knees
in the waiting rooms of prayer
you can’t shake this sense
that it’s all about to be explained, if not for forever
then for good.

These three poems testify to Lawrence’s own assertion that this volume contains some of his finest writing to date, as stated in a recent interview for the 2013 Queensland Poetry Festival. They are also linked to the idea of ‘signal flare’ – life’s existential strengths and vulnerabilities being tested to the voltage of Lawrence’s ambitious and highly achieved poetic craft. But the idea of ‘flare’ can also be one which is quietly opened, as in these lines from the book’s second-last poem, ‘A Night at Home’: ‘On nights like these / you dip a wick from its hollow / and carry cupped flame from room to room.’

In the notes, we are encouraged to read the collection as a continuation of the lyrical tracking in two other, earlier volumes by Lawrence, The Sleep of a Learning Man (2003) and Bark (2008). This is a good pointer. The territories which have engaged Lawrence’s experiential observation of nature in lyrical poetry – land, sky, sea, and the littoral, even in urban settings – from his beginnings to now remain embedded here. Lawrence, born in Tamworth in 1957, worked early as a jackeroo, gardener, fisherman, trawler-worker, and truck-driver. He now lives on the north coast of New South Wales. These sitings remain important to his work.

Overall, the lyrical conflagration that occurs in the poetry of those earlier volumes, generated by Lawrence’s knuckled yet generous conversing between the external elemental and the interior consciousness of the poet making human meaning through language, continues in Signal Flare. There is also in the new volume an equipoise in naming, choosing the right word, which he wrote of earlier in ‘Two Poems’: ‘I am being precise / because I am listening to James Wright / who loved to name and count things.’

Most notable in the richest poems in Signal Flare is an assured yet flexible control of poetic language, syntax, and thought that creates a line of ideas, images, and experiences that yield complex understanding, insight, and responses. Poems that demonstrate Lawrence’s ambitious and achieved craft are ‘The Fall’ and ‘Aubade’. What has to be noted is that this poetic ambition arises, secondarily, as a function of Lawrence’s primary passion for authentic experience, forlove, really (I am reminded of Auden’s quote that all his poems were written for love).

Inevitably, there will be weaker poems in any collection. In a book spanning more than eighty pages of poems, you might expect the odd quieter or leaner poem to provide a tensional shift. But these poems should not be sketchy or lax in words or ideas. The unsatisfying poems in Signal Flare lack the depth of subject matter and excavated meaning present in rich poems such as ‘Aubade’. They also, significantly, do not contain the verbal music and momentum – which is a powerful achievement – of the stronger poems.

But it would be unjust to dwell for more than a moment on this unevenness. Signal Flare is one of the most illuminating and moving books of poetry to be written by an Australian in recent times.

Graeme Miles, born in Perth in 1976, has lived and studied in India and Europe, and now teaches Classics at the University of Tasmania. His work, though various, is highly distinctive. Much of it exists at the difficult-to-imagine intersection of philosophy, mythology, and surrealism. Its rhythms and cadences are highly accomplished; its erudition effortless and unpretentious.

Crazy Little Heaven provides an account of Mark Heyward’s life in Indonesia. The book offers readers an affectionate insight into this nation and its diverse culture. In 1992, Heyward travelled from Tasmania to East Kalimantan to work as a teacher. He was initially blinded by fantasies of Indonesia as the stomping ground ‘of Joseph Conrad, of the White Rajas of Sarawak … of Tom Harrison, King of the Headhunters’. With time, Heyward gained a more accurate – and more exciting – perspective on his new home. Heyward, travelling around the country by boat, became entranced with Indonesia’s wildlife. He grew accustomed to meals of nasi putih and egg. He also fell in love, and this love played a significant role in his conversion to Islam.