I am at the exhibition ‘National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries’. I have come to see a picture of a man named Bungaree. I am standing in front of him, but I am distanced. The painting is glazed, low-lit, hung on a wall on the far side of quite a deep display case. If I stand up straight he is in focus, but too far away for me to see the details. As I incline my torso forward to examine the picture more closely, we exchange bodily gestures of courtesy: I bow and he raises his hat. But in this exchange I lose clarity. The edges blur. I have to reach for my spectacles. I think about Lord McCartney’s diplomatic mission to China in 1792, which almost collapsed before it began through the refusal of the British ambassadors to prostrate themselves before the Emperor Qianlong in the courtly ritual of the kowtow. The cultural distance between London and Beijing was as great as the geographical: 5000 miles of mutual incomprehension.

I refocus, peering as closely as I can reach. This first corner of the exhibition, ‘Under the Southern Cross’, is about European exploration. Over to the left, in the corner of my eye, there is a fine terrestrial globe made in London by Richard Cushee and Thomas Wright in 1731, which shows Australia as New Holland. Above it hangs the National Library’s well-known portrait of Abel Tasman and his family, attributed to Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp. Immediately to Bungaree’s left is the famous Flinders Map, the 1814 ‘General Chart of Terra Australis or Australia’. This is entirely appropriate, a neat curatorial juxtaposition. Selected for his ‘good disposition and manly conduct’, Bungaree acted as the Aboriginal liaison officer on Flinders’ great Investigator voyage of 1802–03, making him the first first Australian to circumnavigate the continent. The trip also made him the first of a long line of indigenous expeditioner–advisers, preceding Oxley’s Toodwit, Major Mitchell’s Yuranigh, Dick, ‘the brave and gallant native guide’ of the Burke and Wills expedition, Jacky Jacky, who completed Edmund Kennedy’s Cape York expedition after Kennedy’s death, Tommy Windich, who accompanied the Forrest brothers across the Gibson Desert, down to Ray Raiwala, Donald Thomson’s guide to Arnhem Land in the 1930s.

The exhibition’s curators and designers have evidently recognised the necessary connection between exploration and empire, between discovery and dispossession. At this point in the show, the two categories segue from one to the other. Bungaree personifies the intersection. He is the link, the hinge, the fulcrum, the wedge. He stands between map and title.

Beneath his portrait, the case against which I press my belly as I lean forward contains the Endeavour journals of Captain Cook and of Sir Joseph Banks. The journals are both open to the day of the British landing at Botany Bay: 19 April 1770. Today is the twenty-first – two days late. I consider playing with time, fudging the truth of my visit so that I can write of the shivering coincidence of an anniversary encounter, but dismiss the idea: I wish to be honest. Besides, the numbers are trivial. The empirical realities I am looking for are more temporally extended. They are the lived human histories of intention, encounter, response. I look down at the Cook journal. It is not in the exhibition label, and I cannot find it in the faded brown ink of the Captain’s surprisingly untidy hand, but I recall the famous line: ‘all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.’ ‘Warra, warra’, the Aborigines called, shaking their spears and waddies. ‘Go away.’

In the case to the left, there are two other Cook-related documents. The first is the secret ‘Additional Instructions’ from the Admiralty, in which he is authorised to search for and claim the Great South Land in the name of Great Britain. The second is a letter from James Douglas, fourteenth Earl of Morton, and then president of the Royal Society, containing hints on how to deal with native peoples encountered on the voyage. The page on display includes the observation that ‘They may naturally and justly attempt to repell [sic] intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded.’ Elsewhere in the letter is a more straightforward assessment, one which is in direct contradiction of the Admiralty’s orders: ‘They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit … No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or to settle among them without their voluntary consent.’

In the case to the right, ‘natural and … legal’ indigenous ownership is reasserted. The papers in this vitrine document the beginnings of native title in Australia: notes from a speech by Eddie Koiki Mabo delivered at the University of Townsville in 1981; Mabo’s texta-colour map of his customary land holdings on Mer (Murray Island); and his hospital diary, in which he reflects on his life and his struggle for land rights.

I look up again at Bungaree. His lifted hat and benevolent expression are at once courteous and condescending; regal, in fact. They epitomise the casual self-possession of the New South Wales Aborigines described by the colonial poet Barron Field: ‘They will not serve … they bear themselves erect, and they address you with confidence, always with good humour, and often with grace … They have bowing acquaintance with everybody, and scatter their How-d’ye-do’s with an air of friendliness and equality, and with a perfect English accent.’ Bungaree’s erect and stately pose, his gracious and formal gesture of greeting, are those of a proprietor. Captain Faddei Bellingshausen records Bungaree’s welcoming visit to the Russian exploring ship Vostok in 1820, and his confident opening address: ‘Indicating his companions, Bungaree said “These are my people”. Then pointing at the whole northern shore, he said, “This is my shore.”’ My shore? My land, perhaps? But what land, exactly? Here we encounter a slight mistranslation, one of contact history’s inevitable misapprehensions and misreadings. In recent years, following the anthropologist Norman Tindale, it has become common to refer to the Aboriginal people living around Port Jackson at the time of the British annexation as ‘Eora’. This is undoubtedly a positive thing. It gives those who bore the initial brunt of the white invasion an identity more specific, more personal than a general Aboriginality. It thereby conveys a certain dignity, offers a posthumous respect.

It is also not quite right. Although recorded in the earliest written word lists – those of David Collins and John Hunter from the 1790s – Eora seems never to have been a national or tribal name as such. Rather, it appears to derive from the Darug word ‘ora’, meaning place or country, with the ‘e’ as some kind of indicative prefix: this country, my country. The same sort of grammar gives us Kuringgai, the name given to the tribes which lived north of Port Jackson. The root word is the now-familiar ‘kuri’ or ‘koori’, meaning ‘man’, with the suffix denoting possession, thus ‘belonging to the men’, the place of, or pertaining to, those who were there. It is simple and circular, this Aboriginal equation of place and people and language, and until 1788 it was unchallenged.

‘The lines between language, dialect and accent are always fluid, and the more so in non-literate cultures’

Settlers will never get these names exactly right. The lines between language, dialect and accent are always fluid, and the more so in non-literate cultures. Identification of tongue and territory is further complicated by the Aborigines’ regular inter-nation trade, marriage and ceremonials, and the common multilingualism of adjacent tribes. Nevertheless, the consensus ethno-linguistic cartography of maritime southern New South Wales seems to be roughly as follows: from Jervis Bay in the south to Botany Bay lived the Dharawal. Moving up the coast, between Botany Bay and Port Jackson were the Darug speakers (or Eora), while above Port Jackson as far as Tuggerah Lake lived the Kuringgai. Further north still, and extending as far as the Hunter River, was Awabakal country.

Working on the basis of early ethnographic accounts, the 1828 colonial census and records of blanket distribution, James Kohen has identified a dozen distinct clans or bands within the Kuringgai tribe. And it is here that we find Bungaree, a Kuringgai man, probably from the Broken Bay–West Head group known as the Carigal. Again, we cannot be entirely certain. The engraved brass gorget presented to Bungaree by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1815, the first of the colonial ‘king plates’, was inscribed simply ‘Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe’. What we do know for sure is that although Bungaree and his extended family spent their days fishing on the harbour or wandering the streets of Sydney Town, they usually returned every night to the north shore, the Kuringgai side of the harbour.

What is the purpose of these speculations, this apparent diversion? In Beneath Clouds, Ivan Sen’s award-winning blackfella road movie of 2002, the two hitchhiker-runaways, Vaughn and Lena, are given a lift by some of Vaughn’s cousins. An older woman passenger divines Lena’s (hitherto unadmitted) Aboriginality, and asks: ‘Wher’re your people from, girl?’ Place of origin, family of origin: these are the first questions of first peoples, even today.

Art historians are likewise preoccupied with beginnings, with genealogy and location. I am interested in this man Bungaree in part because his image occupies a place – Sydney in the 1820s – not far from the beginnings of Australia’s settler art history. He is represented many times in drawings, watercolours and prints. We have more pictures of Bungaree than of any contemporary individual, black or white: a total of some eighteen portraits (give or take one or two subject to definitions and attributions), as well as half a dozen incidental appearances in broader landscapes or figure groupings. His is among the first full-length portraits in oil to be painted in the colony, and the first to be issued as a lithograph.

Beyond his personal, individual celebrity, Bungaree also stands not too far from the start of a long and ongoing thematic series of works of art: European representations of Aboriginal Australians, a pictorial tradition first explored by Geoffrey Dutton in 1974, and which he simply and succinctly called ‘white on black’. And while Augustus Earle’s portrait of 1826 (reproduced on the front cover this month) is not one of those universally recognised historical paintings such as John Glover’s House and garden, William Strutt’s Black Thursday, or Tom Roberts’s Shearing the rams, nor is it some obscure colonial oddity. A highlight of the Rex Nan Kivell collection at the National Library of Australia, it featured in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s important 1988 exhibition ‘The Artist and the Patron’. Certainly it has been widely enough known since the 1990s to be reiterated in paintings and prints by Stephen Bush, Juan Davila, Julie Dowling and Clinton Nain, and in Murray Walker’s Federation Tapestry. I am interested in Bungaree because of the distance his image has travelled.

The man himself covered a fair bit of territory during his lifetime. In 1799, when in his late teens or early twenties, he sailed with Matthew Flinders on the Norfolk to Hervey Bay. A couple of years later, he accompanied James Grant on the shorter trip to Newcastle, before serving again with Flinders on the Investigator. Finally, with middle age approaching, he volunteered to go with Philip Parker King to the Gulf of Carpentaria, on a mission to fill in a few of the gaps in the earlier coastal survey.

Bungaree’s conceptual journeys were even longer, and certainly more difficult

Bungaree’s conceptual journeys were even longer, and certainly more difficult. He was born probably some ten to twelve years before the arrival of the British, and presumably enjoyed a traditional childhood, practising for grown-up hunting and war. Although the Kuringgai were initially relatively undisturbed by the growth of the settlement at Sydney Cove, they were devastated by the smallpox epidemic of 1789, and tribal structures of kin, territory and law were significantly loosened. By the late 1790s Bungaree and the surviving Carigal had drifted south to Port Jackson, now home to several thousand British convicts and settlers. Then followed the young man’s various maritime excursions. After 1810 the patronage of Governor Macquarie gave him a farm at George’s Head (not a success), a fishing boat (a rather more useful and profitable gift), various items of cast-off officer’s uniform, a formal title and a quasi-official appointment as the colony’s chief Aboriginal interpreter and master of ceremonies.

Augustus Earle, Bungaree A Native Chief of N.S. Wales, c.1829–38, lithograph, (courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia)It is in this capacity that Bungaree finds his lasting fame. According to his biographer Keith Vincent Smith, an historical tradition maintains that Bungaree, as ‘host’ of the Sydney Aborigines, always attended Macquarie’s annual Native Conferences at Parramatta, and was responsible for introducing the other tribal chiefs or elders to the governor on these occasions. Much better documented is the position mockingly described by James O’Connell as ‘chief … boarding officer and official welcomer and usher’, his self-appointed role in greeting European ships as they entered the harbour. Of the several accounts of Bungaree’s visits to newly arrived vessels, that of Peter Cunningham in his Two Years in New South Wales (1827) can serve as exemplar. Cunningham describes the experience of an immigrant arriving in Port Jackson:

King Boongarre [sic], too, with a boatload of his dingy retainers, may possibly honour you with a visit, bedizened in his varnished cocked hat of ‘formal cut’, his gold-laced blue coat (flanked on the shoulders by a pair of massy epaulettes) buttoned closely up, to evade the extravagance of including a shirt in the catalogue of his wardrobe; and his bare and broad platter feet, of dull cinder hue, spreading out like a pair of sprawling toads, upon the deck before you. First, he makes one solemn measured stride from the gangway; then, turning round to the quarter-deck, lifts up his beaver with the right hand a full foot from his head (with all the grace and ease of a court exquisite) and, carrying it slowly and solemnly forwards to a full arm’s length, lowers it in a gentle and most dignified manner down to the very deck, following up this motion by an inflection of the body almost equally profound.

Advancing slowly in this way, his hat gracefully poised in his hand, and his phiz wreathed with many a fantastic smile, he bids massa welcome to his country. On finding he has fairly grinned himself into your good graces, he formally prepares to take leave, endeavouring at the same time to take likewise what you are probably less willing to part withal, namely, a portion of your cash. Let it not be supposed, however, that his Majesty condescends to thieve: he only solicits the loan of a dump, on pretence of treating his sick gin to a cup of tea, but in reality with a view of treating himself to a porringer of ‘Cooper’s best’, to which his Majesty is most royally devoted.

This is the reputation that sticks. Not Flinders’ assessment. In the published account of the Investigator voyage, Flinders describes Bungaree as ‘good-natured’, ‘modest’ and ‘humble’ in himself, and ‘gallant’, ‘brave’ and ‘worthy’ in his work for the expedition. He also describes him as a friend. Not the view of Lieutenant Menzies, Commandant at Newcastle, who thought him ‘the most intelligent of that race I have yet seen’. Not even the more general opinion expressed in the New South Wales Almanackof 1815: ‘This native has even been distinguished for the docility of his manners; his kind and tractable disposition; his friendly demeanour; his general utility.’

Bungaree is rather remembered as he was in the decade before his death, through anecdotes such as Cunningham’s, and through their reiteration and fanciful embroidery by subsequent writers. He is represented through portraits such as those by Augustus Earle and Charles Rodius, portraits reflecting the pronounced 1820s British taste for paintings and prints of low life and ‘eccentric characters’. Bungaree is not remembered as the explorers’ aide, the first Aborigine to circumnavigate Australia. He is not remembered as the first Aboriginal agriculturalist. He is not remembered for his political power, either as Kuringgai leader or as interpreter and negotiator for British governors. No, he is remembered as a comic metonym of early colonial Sydney: mimic, beggar, drunk.

Economic dependency and substance abuse are the familiar gifts of conquerors to indigenous peoples. But the mimicry is intriguing, the pantomime, the ‘dancing with strangers’, to use Inga Clendinnen’s potent phrase. In Clendinnen’s courageous and imaginative reconstruction of the First Fleet’s first year in New South Wales, the book’s title, cover image and first chapter summon the unlikely image of Britons and Aboriginals hand in hand, stepping out together on the light fantastic toe. She traces the first tentative, fragile contacts between whites and blacks, and the curious forms of that original interaction; not only dancing, but combing hair, whistling, singing, exposing sexual parts, a whole gamut of ‘clowning pantomimes’.

Yet, while for the 1788 European dancing is just one among many possible performances, a lightweight social pastime which signifies only high spirits, preliminary courtship, or a degree of class distinction, for Aboriginals the dance is primary, essential. Before any other form of exchange, whether of words, gifts or blows, strangers and meetings must be defined choreographically. The song and dance of encounter is a place of pause, a neutral space in which identity, location, authority and purpose can safely be established, and the expectations, the rights and the responsibilities of each side articulated. The convention was nicely described by the nineteenth-century Wurundjeri tribal leader and artist William Barak, whose paintings of traditional ceremonial life include many corroboree scenes. Speaking to the naturalist and pioneer anthropologist Alfred Howitt, Barak explained that among the tribes of the Kulin nation, ‘when visitors came to meetings from some distant place they danced and the hosts looked on; for it was for them to dance and make friends with each other, being from a distance’.

The occasional or introductory dance has left plenty of footprints in the dust of colonial art. Corroboree images or dancing figures are the common, continuous currency of white on black. Aboriginal dancers appear in the work of dozens of colonial artists: in the printed accounts of French and British exploring expeditions and of the early history of the colony of New South Wales; in Joseph Lycett’s Awabakal album; in John Glover’s Van Diemen’s Land oil paintings and S.T. Gill’s and George French Angas’s South Australian watercolours; in countless popular prints and amateur sketches.

Reciprocal performances are much less frequently referenced in the colonial archives, but an Aboriginal expectation can nevertheless be clearly inferred. In the relatively innocent encounter between Arthur Philip and the Kuringgai at Broken Bay in 1789 – drawn by Lieutenant Bradley of the Sirius, and reproduced on the cover of Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers(2003) – the hand-holding attitudes (a gavotte? an Aboriginal line dance?) imply equality, connection and instruction. Bradley’s capering figures invoke an image from another beach, in another hemisphere, in another century: Zorba the Greek and the young schoolteacher doing the syrtaki. In Tasmania a few years later, Antoine Piron, draughtsman on the Bruny d’Entrecasteaux expedition, blacked up with charcoal and danced with the Palawa at Rocky Bay. In 1818 Piron’s compatriot and fellow artist Jacques Arago impressed Shark Bay Aborigines by rattling a pair of castanets.

From HMS Beagle’s voyage to Australia in the late 1830s, we have a fine example of both the serendipity and the seriousness of cross-cultural etiquette. While at Adam Bay, on the Western Australian coast, two of the expedition’s survey staff put ashore to undertake a routine calibration of the ship’s compasses. Halfway through their observations, there suddenly appeared on the low cliffs behind the beach a large group of Aborigines, foot-stampingly, beard-chewingly and spear-quiveringly angry at the white men’s intrusion. The Beagle’s commander, John Lort Stokes, continues the story: ‘It was, therefore, not a little surprising to behold this paroxysm of rage evaporate before the happy presence of mind displayed by Mr Fitzmaurice, in immediately beginning to dance and shout, though in momentary expectation of being pierced by a dozen spears. In this he was imitated by Mr Keys, who … joined his companion in amusing the natives; and they succeeded in diverting them from their evident evil designs, until a boat landing in a bay near drew off their attention.’ While hopelessly gauche, even to a degree incomprehensible in Aboriginal terms, the Englishmen’s dance was nevertheless the proper form for visitors, and earned Fitzmaurice and Keys at least partial access to Aboriginal social space, and a reprieve from violence.

A more conscious and equal Terpsichorean trade had occurred earlier at Bribie Island-Moreton Bay, on Flinders’ Norfolk voyage, when our man Bungaree was part of the crew. Perhaps Bungaree was even responsible for arranging protocol on this occasion. Certainly he was confident in his role as go-between; it is reported that, when the Aborigines – probably Undanbi people – appeared, he ‘went up to them in his usual undaunted manner’. After a preliminary exchange of gifts – caps, port and ship’s biscuit for the natives, headbands and hair string armbands for the whites – the local people presented a dance and a song. In reply – and, I would venture to suggest, probably at Bungaree’s urging – three of the Norfolk’s sailors attempted a Scottish reel, though Flinders noted with regret that ‘for want of music they made a very bad performance’. Nevertheless, the ritual was repeated a week later when the Norfolk’s crew again visited the Undanbi, and were again greeted with singing and with a slow dance in which ‘their hands being held up in a supplicating posture … the tone and manner of their song and gestures seemed to bespeak the good will and forbearance of their auditors’. On this occasion, it was Bungaree himself who responded in kind, to complete the obligations of indigenous courtesy. Much preferring the music of the Undanbi to that of the Darug, and missing the point rather, Flinders was again disappointed by his team’s performance, observing that ‘the song of Bongree [sic] which he gave them at the conclusion of theirs, sounded barbarous and grating to the ear; for [he] was an indifferent songster, even amongst his own countrymen’.

‘What I think these anecdotes show is not only the centrality of corroboree, of dance and song in Aboriginal culture, not only its specific application within rituals of encounter, but also the mutual obligation it implies, the requirement of reply, participation, reciprocity’

What I think these anecdotes show is not only the centrality of corroboree, of dance and song in Aboriginal culture, not only its specific application within rituals of encounter, but also the mutual obligation it implies, the requirement of reply, participation, reciprocity. There is in the literature one further instance of response that is relevant to Bungaree’s story. Again it is from a Flinders expedition, though in this case from the incoming leg of the Investigator trip, before Bungaree was on board. At their first extended anchorage, at King George’s Sound, in Western Australia, Flinders and his crew had several weeks of tentative but cordial intercourse with the local Nyoongar. Towards the end of their stay, Flinders ordered the small detachment of marines under his command to drill on the parade ground of the beach. Flinders describes both the foreigners’ action and the indigenous reaction:

I ordered the party of marines on shore, to be exercised in their presence. The red coats and white crossed belts were greatly admired, having some resemblance to their own manner of ornamenting themselves; and the drum, but particularly the fife, excited their astonishment, but when they saw these beautiful red-and-white men, with their bright muskets, drawn up in a line, they absolutely screamed with delight; nor were their wild gestures and vociferation to be silenced, but by commencing the exercise, to which they paid the most earnest and silent attention. Several of them moved their hands, involuntarily, according to the motions; and [an] old man placed himself at the end of the rank, with a short staff in his hand, which he shouldered, presented, grounded, as did the marines their muskets, without, I believe, knowing what he did.

The old man knew exactly what he was doing: learning by imitation, drilling his body into remembering the forms of the strangers’ performance. For Aborigines, dance is a somatic mnemonic, the literal embodiment of story. Many early contact memoirs describe how good the natives were at this kind of physical learning, how quick on the uptake. Louisa Ann Meredith, for example, writes in her Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844) of one man who ‘learned to waltz very correctly in a few minutes’. And they had not just quick memories, but long ones, too. Through the old man’s remembrance and reiteration, the parade drill of Flinders’s marines eventually became a part of the local culture, a formalised corroboree known as the Koorannup, which was still being performed by Nyoongar over a century later.

I would argue that Bungaree’s clowning welcomes, his much-celebrated imitations of colonial governors, fall within this category of encounter-dance. His mimicry of English manners signifies not submission to the imperial power, but simply the adoption of new gestures to permit the maintenance of Aboriginal protocols of meeting under the new régime.

One particular story bears repeating. In his History of New South Wales (1834), the Reverend John Dunmore Lang recalls a meeting with Bungaree in his boat on the Parramatta River: ‘My brother requested Bungary [sic] to show us how Governor Macquarie made a bow. Bungary happened to be dressed at the time in the old uniform of a military officer, and accordingly standing up in the stern of his boat and taking off his cocked hat with the requisite punctilio, he made a formal bow with all the dignity and grace of an officer of the old school. My brother requested him to show us how Governor Brisbane made a bow, to which Bungary very properly replied in broken English ‘top top; bail [not]me do it that yet; top nudda Gubbana come’. In short, Bungary could exhibit the peculiar manner of every governor he had seen in the colony; but he held it a point of honour never to exhibit the reigning Governor.’

This story seems to be intended purely as comedy, as an illustration of the wide-eyed, innocent black man’s inability to comprehend the complexities of European social manners. Indeed, Bungaree’s response does seem a bit confused, a bit overstated, even a bit peculiar. But if we dispense with Lang’s idea of politesse, and instead cross-reference to the traditional cultures of, say, Central Desert Aborigines, which have been mapped in more detail and with more understanding by twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists, an explanation emerges. It is possible to think of the ritual performance – the actual manner of bowing – as being a story belonging to the particular governor, with Bungaree – the white man’s black man, vice-regal favourite and master of ceremonies – taking the role of the skin-group uncle, the ritual boss or agent of the story. When Governor Brisbane is present amongst his people, it is his privilege, indeed, his responsibility, to deliver this small dance of identity, power and courtesy, as required by the circumstances of encounter. Bungaree, on the other hand, while he knows the script intimately, can only perform it himself if the actual owner, the originator, is gone away. For whites, the Bungaree’s impressions are little more than parlour-games, charades; for the man himself they are potent summonings of absent authority.

It is not so much story as authority that I am calling on here in this brief salute to Bungaree. What Augustus Earle’s portrait conveys are three important concepts in Aboriginal culture; or rather, one concept and two particular inflections or applications of it. The core idea is the Aboriginal dance of encounter, the indigenous notion that identity and greeting should initially be enacted or represented by bodily motion, that a ritual physical performance is required to neutralise the charged, uncertain and dangerous space of meeting.

Early contact Aborigines are always dancing for, if not always with, the white strangers. The first extension of the idea that such a dance demands a response is that there should in fact be a ‘with’. Dance yourself, your people, your totem, your place, and I will dance you back. When things are managed properly, the Undanbi dancers receive in reply a Scottish reel, albeit a fairly rough and ready one. For his carefully choreographed welcoming ritual, Bungaree receives ships’ captains’ and emigrants’ acknowledgment of his status, albeit in mocking tone. He gets a drink, at least. The second sub-concept, associated with the expectation of reciprocity, is the notion of mimicry. The Nyoongar’s trance-like following of the marines’ movements, or Bungaree’s careful attention to the particular mannerisms of successive governors suggest, when taken in context, that for the Aborigines imitation is, if not the sincerest form of flattery, then at least the customary form of respect.

First imitation, then repetition. This is not a totally unfamiliar concept for Europeans; Judaeo-Christian literary mannerism often entails statement, restatement in other words, and then a third reiteration, a tripartite exploration of metaphor, a trinity of revoicing. Aboriginal song and dance likewise reinforce the meaning of a story or a map or a social role or an encounter by copying it, making it, singing it, telling it over and over and over a long, long time, as long as Aboriginal possession, as long as a piece of hair string.

‘As hopeful visions of a national future shrink to the narrow compass of the next business or electoral cycle, or at most to the superannuated end of each of our individual aspirational lives, it is not surprising that more and more Australians choose to explore, invade and settle in that other country, the past’

As hopeful visions of a national future shrink to the narrow compass of the next business or electoral cycle, or at most to the superannuated end of each of our individual aspirational lives, it is not surprising that more and more Australians choose to explore, invade and settle in that other country, the past. Some seek only the slow, comforting rhythms of generation succeeding generation, and perhaps a convict or two to decorate the family tree. For others, the journey is more purposeful. They are in search of undiscovered or unfamiliar narratives for postmodern microhistories, recyclable imagery for post-colonial paintings, settings and characters for magical-realist novels. Meaner spirits want material for the history wars: lower body counts to distract from the frontier ethnocide, ancestral Aboriginal poverty, drunkenness and violence to explain and excuse failed government policy. Whatever their intentions, whether words, gifts or blows, whoever goes travelling in the Australian colonial past must not only encounter what Bernard Smith called in his 1980 Boyer Lectures ‘the Spectre of Truganini’: they must also face the confident, graceful greeting dance of Bungaree.

I step back from the glass case. Who is this man who salutes me from the wall of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2006, and from the rough streets of The Rocks, Sydney, in 1826? Is it Bungaree of the Carigal clan of the Kuringgai tribe, from Broken Bay–West Head country? Is it indeed Bungaree, husband of Matora, father of Young Bungaree and Long Dick and Sophie and stepfather of Gaouenren; also husband of Rose and father of John Bungaree; also great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Warren Whitfeld, presently of Woy Woy? Or is it rather Bungaree, ambassador of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, dressed in Macquarie’s discarded general’s uniform and cocked hat, decorated with Macquarie’s medallion and standing in front of the Sydney Cove fort that bears Macquarie’s name? Or possibly even Bungaree, the proxy for Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane, painted by Augustus Earle, the artist of Brisbane’s official portrait, bowing the Brisbane bow, while behind him in the harbour is HMS Warspite, the Royal Navy frigate commanded by Brisbane’s first cousin? Which is the real Bungaree? Or is he lost completely, the very type of post-colonial theory’s mottled, creolised, unsubstantial, subaltern mimic man?

A school tour comes into the exhibition gallery. For a few minutes, I move still further back and leave exploration to the young. I watch from the shadows of convict punishment. The guide provided by the library is dynamic, intelligent, well-practised, and speaks with a marked Spanish accent. The students, from a Catholic secondary school, are neat, interested, well-behaved; and nine of the class of twenty-one are of East Asian descent. They listen to brief disquisitions on the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English, on the European discovery and naming and settlement of Australia. Bungaree is not included in the programmed tour. No one wants to know who he is. The conga line of contemporary Australia moves on through the glass labyrinth towards Ned Kelly’s helmet and Sir Donald Bradman’s cricket bat.

It is rare in Australia for a literary biographer, even one of distinction, to write at book length about her intellectual formation and biographical pursuits. A country so demonstrably forgetful of its best poetry and fiction is unlikely to foster a literature of this burgeoning genre, still emerging from its decorous constraints. Elsewhere, we have Richard Holmes’s seminal Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic biographer (1995) and Leon Edel’s Bloomsbury: A house of lions (1979), but Australian examples are few. So it is good to have Brenda Niall’s lucid account of her gradual transformation from academic to biographer.

Regardless of debates over Australian cultural identity, the flag and a potential republic, the ‘Green and Gold’ colours of our national sporting teams are recognised worldwide. The Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha), from which these colours are derived, was first proposed as a national flower in the 1880s during the prelude to Federation. However, it was not until the 1988 Bicentenary Celebrations that it was formally declared as Australia’s floral emblem. Why was the wattle chosen for this honour over its main competitor, the spectacular red waratah? And what was the significance of using wattle as a symbol of national unity and mourning in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings?

The United Nations’ eighth secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, has just taken over what has been called the world’s worst job. But it is one that attracts fierce, devious and polite competition. Why would anyone seek, for less than $400,000 a year, to be the chief administrative officer of a non-government that cannot govern, a non-corporation that cannot borrow or invest? The UN’s total budget is about the same as the New York City school system, and the secretary-general has to beg 192 national stakeholders for funds even to carry out what they instruct him to do. Who would want to be answerable, as well, to a fifteen-member board, five of whose members use their permanency to frustrate others and advance their own interests, rather than those of the organisation?

For almost half of the twentieth century, train passengers travelling into Sydney from the western suburbs and beyond could observe a large sign, painted in drop-shadow lettering, on the vast blank brick wall of an industrial building facing the tracks between Redfern and Central. It carried the message: TEAGUE’S HAMBURGER ROLLS – WHAT YOU EAT TODAY, WALKS AND TALKS TOMORROW.

United in this remembered image are two of the many themes of One Continuous Picnic, Michael Symons’s landmark history of gastronomy in this country and of the Americanisation of Australian food. The latter began in the 1920s when Kellogg’s, Kraft, and Heinz established their beachheads in our grocery stores, roughly coinciding with Teague’s introduction of the newest thing in baked goods and a growing awareness that what we eat affects our health.

It is now thirty years since James McAuley died, and more has been written about him in that time than about any other Australian poet. Poets are not usually of great biographical importance unless they are also caught up in historical and political events, or are a kind of phenomenon like Byron or Rimbaud. McAuley was not a man of action, but he was associated with a number of events which were significant in Australian development and culture; and a large, some would say inordinate, part of his life and energy went into politics and polemics. He became something of a public figure, and, as he himself recognised, the lives of such figures quickly become public property. Any book about him is bound to be of interest.

Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms is the ninth volume to be published by the Academy Editions of Australian Literature project. Edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, the handsome volume is a major addition to this growing library of classics of Australian writing. It will undoubtedly become the definitive critical edition of Robbery Under Arms; the comprehensive scholarship that accompanies this book will illuminate our teaching and thinking about Boldrewood’s classic in the twenty-first century.

Robbery Under Arms is by common consent one of our established classics, and this edition provides us with many new insights, beginning with the restoration of the 29,000 words cut from the original serial text. The new material adds considerably to the sense of the novel’s sprawl. Robbery Under Arms is a big book that covers a lot of country, as the essay on places mentioned in the novel demonstrates. While it mostly represents the high country, it was one of the first east-coast fictions to look northwards and westwards beyond the Divide. This is one of our early national fictions, one of the first novels in which characters travel three colonies, traversing the inland corridor, that great crescent of productive pastoral country and farmland watered by the Murray Darling and stretching from Queensland to South Australia.

Dear Elizabeth,

Well, it seems our long correspondence is over. Actually it ended some years ago, didn’t it? Your last letter to me is dated Christmas Eve 2001. I continued writing to you into the following year, not immediately realising you were unable to reply, even though your later letters spoke of confusion and of unaccountably getting lost in familiar streets.

It’s been a long goodbye. I hope you know that during your last illness there were always people beside you, your son in particular, and some close friends who regarded it as a privilege to be with you, to repay some of the kindness you had shown to them. Even when you weren’t able to talk and laugh with them any longer, they felt sure of lively activity happening inside your head. They sent me a lovely photograph of you having lunch with them one Christmas in the leafy courtyard of your nursing home. You are wearing a straw hat at a jaunty angle, and your face bears an unreadable expression. Wise? Amused? Baffled? Hard to say.

Your inscrutability is one of the things I miss most about you, Elizabeth; you could encompass multiple meanings into the simplest statements. When confronted with an enthusiastic interpretation of one of your characters or stories, you would invariably hesitate briefly and then say, ‘But how clever of you! I would never have thought of that myself.’ It was impossible to tell if you meant exactly what you said or if you considered the interpretation too banal or absurd for words. In any case, you would never crush anyone who had taken the trouble to read your work with sufficient care to formulate ideas about it, though you were secretly irritated by reviewers who insisted on laying out your whole narrative on the slab, thus threatening to spoil discoveries other readers might prefer to make for themselves. ‘But I have had some lovely reviews from people who can read’, you said, in one of your last letters, as if to excuse yourself for having voiced a gentle complaint about the others.

I can’t let you have my ‘papers’ because I don’t keep any. My mss are destroyed as soon as the books are printed. I put very little into notebooks, don’t keep my friends’ letters … and anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt. The final versions of my books are what I want people to see …

       (Patrick White, reply to Dr George Chandler, Director General, 9 April 1977, National Library of Australia, MS 8469)

Patrick White repeated these stern denials for the rest of his life, and the world believed him. He even denied the existence of these papers to his biographer, David Marr, with whom he otherwise cooperated over many years. White’s partner of forty-nine years, Manoly Lascaris, maintained the fiction until he died in 2003, entrusting the remaining papers and the nearly 200 condolence letters he received after White’s death to long-term agent, literary executor and friend, Barbara Mobbs. Mobbs – with Manoly the only witness to a scattering of White’s ashes at Centennial Park – also kept her counsel, and perhaps added to the mystique by her refusal to ‘talk’, even when pressed by scholars, curators and the press.

But from the moment Barbara Mobbs emailed me on 16 August 2006, calmly writing ‘you might be interested in the material on the attached list. Nobody has seen this …’, it became clear that White had not ‘destroyed’ everything, that he had left a rich – if far from complete – archive to posterity, that the archive had been lovingly cared for in the intervening years, and that Mobbs was willing to ignore White’s written, if somewhat ambiguous, instructions to destroy unpublished material in favour of placing it with Australia’s premier repository of White’s published works and unpublished letters.

The dust jacket describes James Fenton as ‘rightly praised for his own love poetry’. Evidently, Fenton does not demur, because he has found room for six of his own poems when other likely names are represented less generously or not at all. But more of that anon.

The introduction begins by quoting Michael Longley: ‘I have believed for a long time … that love poetry is at the core of the enterprise: if poetry is a wheel, then the hub of the wheel is love poetry. Poems which articulate all the other cares and attachments … radiate from the hub like spokes on a wheel.’ Fenton continues: ‘I love you. You love me. I used to love you. You don’t love me. I want to sleep with you. Here we are in bed together. I hate you. You betrayed me. I’ve betrayed you. I want to kill you. Oh no! I have killed you. Such are the simple propositions on which these lyrics elaborate.’ One can agree or disagree with Longley’s contention, but it is at least a case to be argued. Fenton’s simple declaratives seem a reasonable summation of the promptings of love poetry, except possibly the last one. But do the contents of the anthology bear out these prescriptions? Many of the poems do, but there are choices which strike me as curious. Take W.H. Auden’s ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’. Three stanzas of this poem, beginning at ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you’, emblazon the entire back cover of the dust jacket, so presumably we are to take this as a central, or at least typical, poem. It is one of my favourite poems, but is it a love poem exactly? It contains a love poem, yes, the quoted stanzas, but the poem is much longer than that and the speaker of those lines is not the speaker of the poem, who announces his preoccupation in the next stanza: ‘O let not time deceive you, / You cannot conquer time.’

The plans for this book were announced at the time of Ninian Stephen’s eightieth birthday, almost four years ago. Each of the ten contributors focuses on one of his public roles in the last thirty-five years – five of them in Australia, and five on the international stage. The last of the Australian positions, ambassador for the environment, is a bridge between the two. Kenneth Keith’s chapter finds another bridge: in Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982), on Stephen’s last day as a High Court judge, his judgment decisively transformed the issue of racial discrimination in Queensland by recognising its international potency.

Dominique Hecq and Brian Edwards are well versed in the contingencies of language, roaming in their poetry between experimentation and high tradition – at least in terms of content, if not so much in form. Both target the self-reflexive play of language early in their latest collections: Hecq in her title poem, with ‘words spreading / like couchgrass after summer rains / on my tongue’; Edwards even more demonstrably in ‘Reading Althusser on Marx’, where ‘Standing between objects and meanings / the language: there are only partial truths’.

Laying bare the disjuncture between words and ideas can, of course, add a layer of meaning while paradoxically questioning how we make meaning, but the results in these collections vary. The Edwards poem above closes: ‘Of course the text is subjectivity / and the code an artifice, / but there is something out there.’ What might have been overly academic is nicely rescued in that last line, an appropriation from any number of popular sci-fi and horror flicks employed to telling comic effect. Edwards regularly plays with the vernacular to enliven retellings of the classical. In ‘Rereading Rubens Reading Homer’, Athena ‘stays the course’; in ‘The Pale Cast of Thought’ (Hamlet rewritten), there is ‘Little wonder she [Ophelia] gathers wildflowers and sings mad songs’ – but at times the conversational grappling with discourse can be highly explanatory:

There are so many gestures and signs,
triple-plays of reference, of meaning,
such irresistible temptations in the perils of language.

(‘Remembering Melville’)

In the clear light of a cloudy summer morning
The idiot boy, holding his father’s hand,
Comes by me on the Quay where I sit writing.
His father spots me looking up, and I don’t want
To look as if I wished I hadn’t, so
Instead of turning straight back to my books
I look around, thus making it a general thing
That I do every so often –
To watch the ferries, to check out the crowd.

In the myths that inspired Wagner to write Der Ring des Nibelungen, the World Ash-Tree (Die WeltEsche) is the symbol of Wotan’s power and enlightenment and eventual downfall. As a young god, he cut a branch off the tree to fashion into his spear. In The Ring, it is not until the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, as the three Norns are weaving their rope of fate, that we are told the World Ash-Tree is withering and dying, as the gods themselves will do by the end of this long evening. As with most of the objects in The Ring, symbolism is never too far away. The tree: the spear: the twilight of the gods. On Wotan’s orders, the branches of the tree (as the Norns tell us, and as Waltraute is soon to tell her sister Brünnhilde) are split and piled around Valhalla, where the gods sit, waiting for their fiery end.

The Butterfly Effect is a travel guide to the inner sanctum of lesbian sensibility. The title of the work comes from the last line of the first poem, ‘Strange Tractors’ (which was selected in The Best Australian Poems 2006): ‘chaos in the shape of two vulval wings, the butterfly effect.’ The butterfly effect is also a concept from physics, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the planet can cause storms on the other.

Neville Wran was nothing if not sartorial. He represented the new generation of politicians – dapper, immaculately tailored, effortlessly elegant – and stood out from his Labor colleagues in their crumpled suits and gaudy ties. His dress sense was not merely a matter of personal taste but also a political statement. He once appeared on the podium of a Labor party conference perspiring uncomfortably in the glare of the arc lights. A colleague leaned over and urged him to take off his jacket. Wran retorted, ‘What! And look like a Labor politician.’ It was classic Nev.

While Australian women in particular have been avid diarists and letter-writers, the activity du jour is overwhelmingly the writing of memoir, inspired by the notion that everyone’s life is memorable and worth recording. Some memoirists are searching for the truth of their lives, to recover the past or perhaps recover from it. Some are simply recording their story for family consumption. Others, the more ambitious, are seeking publication and fame. Carmel Bird’s advice to them – ‘Stay young. Stay Beautiful. And maybe climb Everest with your eyes shut’ – is the only pessimistic comment in this whole book.

Swept away

Dear Editor,

I was among the many swept away by Elisabeth Holdsworth’s essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ (February 2007). From the moment she confided, ‘I have returned to the Netherlands to have a specific conversation with the past’, I became an intent listener, almost an inter-loper, following this haunted child’s return after decades away, back to her heritage, Zeeland – ‘The land of my nightmares’.

I do not know the stark Calvinist low country of dunes and ‘massive dykes’, though I flew over it often enough at night. I followed the returning child entranced and often shocked: the fearful Nazi reprisals, the deliberate flooding of the hard-won lands; brother executing brother; the unofficial motto of the province even: ‘never forgive, never forget.’

University of Western Australia Press should be commended for recognising a significant gap in Australian literary scholarship: a book-length study on the work of Tim Winton. Aside from Tim Winton: A Celebration (1999; not a critical work), and Michael McGirr’s Tim Winton: The Writer and His Work (1999), written for young readers, there have been no major studies of his work and little critical commentary. Is Peter Craven’s response to Dirt Music (2001) – which he called a ‘profoundly vulgar book’ that ‘bellyflops into a sort of inflated populism’ – widely shared? Is Winton on the nose because he is popular? Certainly, there is nothing sexy about Winton’s work; it embodies wholesome and worthy values, without shying away from stories where these values are absent. But he is a damn good writer – a difficult thing to measure, I know. His work resonates for many people. Whether they adore it or hate it (think Cloudstreet [1991]), people who have read Winton have an opinion on him. Winton’s work, particularly The Turning (2004), prompts interesting questions about contemporary Australian life.

Michele Gierck’s account of her years spent working as a human rights advocate in El Salvador raises the problem of how to understand other people’s lives. Early in 700 Days in El Salvador, she distinguishes between the two Spanish infinitives for the verb ‘to know’. Saber means to gain an understanding intellectually, through books or art, through a representation. Conocer is to understand by experiencing something directly, to live through it or to witness it oneself. Gierck’s passionate work on behalf of the Salvadorean peasants, or campesinos, is testament to her conviction that to conocer is truly to know. She attributes an inviolable sanctity to the stories of those on the ground, who witnessed the misery and fear in El Salvador during the decade of civil war and its equally troubled aftermath.

It is little appreciated just how much power and influence are wielded by a successful Liberal prime minister, success being measured entirely by electoral victory. Whereas a Labor prime minister has a caucus, factions, the ACTU, a not always co-operative national executive and a sometimes fractious national conference to exert countervailing influence, a conservative leader is remarkably unfettered. The party, and indeed the government, becomes an extension of him, a mere appendage.

Everyone is fascinated by families. First we are landed in one, then most of us seek out or create yet another one, sometimes more. The success or failure of families is endless, as the contributors to this year’s Sleepers Almanac demonstrate.

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

At the centre of this book is the story of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York on 9/11. Terry Smith’s focus is architectural: what does it mean for buildings that are supposed to shelter and sustain our lives so spectacularly to collapse? The WTC’s destruction raises this question so singularly, not only for those who immediately suffered – traumatised by the obliteration of family members or their own escape from death – but for contemporary Everyman and Everywoman, who encountered the WTC not first-hand but as an image, what Smith calls an ‘iconotype’ in an ‘iconomy’ of architectural images.

At the close of the twentieth century, in the tradition of countless Westerners before him, British travel writer Julian Evans travelled around the Pacific. At the Kwajalein atoll in the independent republic of the Marshall Islands, he found the resident US missile testing base to be efficient, clean and ‘tidy, quiet, ordinary: suburban trailer-park America at its best’. No Marshallese lived at Kwajalein, but 10,000 of them huddled on the small neighbouring island of Ebeye, whence they commuted to provide labour for the base. At Ebeye, nothing was ‘real nice’, as Evans described:

On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of Christianity. One of the latter’s faultlines ‘racked / sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist / and tigerchrist’. Other stress fractures are ‘the dark arcades / where losers piss themselves / off the edge of memory’. My travelling companion had an immediate sense of Kelly’s fine metaphysics, which, as the back-page blurb glosses, finds ‘the numinous in the undeniably secular’.

Australian elections are not what they used to be. The policy debates have been reduced to ten-second audio grabs. The big public rallies have been replaced with pre-packaged and scripted set-piece television events. According to the majority of the contributors to this account of the 2004 election, the passions that Australian voters once carried to the polling booth have been swapped for something much more prosaic. At the last election, our vote was apparently determined largely by interest rates and by mortgage costs. It seems that voters are now less animated by ‘It’s Time’ and more by ‘It’s Mine’.

Australian author Max Barry specialises in satirising the profit-obsessed world of corporate enterprise in his sharply observed, easily digestible novels, of which Company is his third. Syrup, his first book, published in 1999, told the story of Scat, a character whose name more than broadly hinted at the author’s jaundiced view of the career he had previously been engaged in (Barry was a salesman for Hewlett-Packard while he was writing the novel). A venomous satire about corporate rivalry and marketing squarely aimed at Coca-Cola, Syrup was also an easily marketable product. Thanks to the American branch of Penguin Books’ interest in the manuscript, Syrup established Barry as that classic Australian success story, the artist who was better known overseas than in his own country.

The most recent cause célèbre of Australian industrial relations was the 1998 waterfront dispute, when the Howard government failed to destroy the Maritime Union of Australia. The Australian waterfront has been a continuing site of struggle since the famous industrial disputes of the 1890s. Tom Sheridan’s Australia’s Own Cold War: The Waterfront Under Menzies helps to remind us of the intense and bitter nature of industrial relations in that industry. Readers will find themselves making comparisons with the 1998 dispute and with other major events which have occurred in Australia’s political history.

Inspector Anders, the one-legged anti-terrorist expert, is back. In Marshall Browne’s new novel, he returns to Italy after being sent to the safety of a Europol desk, away from the southern Italian mafia, who had sworn, and attempted, to kill him. Outspoken right-wing politicians are being murdered, and all the signs point to serial killings with deep-seated motives.

While the police claim that the murders are the work of terrorists, Anders and his streetwise partner, Matucci, follow a trail of subterfuge through the difficult terrain of Italian politics and black-market art. For the police, keeping Anders safe from the mafia is as big a challenge as is the capture of those responsible for the murders.

To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce
that airless element, the body
breathing calm within its envelope of gas …

Morning took me to the jetty.
I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:
as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.

If you found the film Candy (2006) hard to swallow, with its junkie protagonists emerging from years of heroin addiction still looking like Hollywood film stars, then The Crimes of Billy Fish may be just what you need. Sarah Hopkins’s first novel has more in common with Luke Davies’ gritty novel Candy (1997), on which the film was based, than with the film’s improbable charms.

(A fugue in words inspired by a shipwreck at Vanikoro)

They

should have known

the blood-red coral

would look for props –

fallen men, upturned ships

numinous

against darkened

skies.

They

should have known

Medusa’s head was

severed in an

artist’s fugue,

the sinking man beheaded

by a passing sword

was her reply.

They

should have known

velvet seas prefer

to be arranged

on flesh,

that still-life on

the ocean floor

will never date.     

They

should have known

the sound of silence –

Vanikoro

would keep them

here,

that only one

would be released –

he

has good teeth,

is of average height,

thirty-five years –

a private man

found living

darkly

in an ocean rift.

A young Kenyan-born white man called Jason Conway has a revolutionary idea: he will save the African elephant from extinction by transporting the animal to the sparsely inhabited Kimberley region in Australia. Sounds far-fetched? In fact this idea, which forms the basis of Ivory to Australia, is less implausible than some of the action that surrounds Jason’s attempt to fulfil his wild scheme. Early in the novel, Jason foils an attempted robbery in a Nairobi restaurant by disarming and shooting one of the gunmen, only to go home to bed wondering if he should sneak in next door and conquer his one-time girlfriend, Jane. The action doesn’t stop there, as Jason, full of idealism, battles against Somali Shifta poachers and sceptical politicians in order to get his beloved elephants safely onto Australian shores.

‘The stories you will read in this book have been written primarily from memory and many years after the fact. Everything within these pages is true in essence, polished by how I experienced it and as I remember it.’

Presented in three parts on a canvas of time and distance, Pip Newling’s first work of non-fiction recounts her time as a barkeeper in two remote northern Australian communities, Halls Creek and Mataranka. Blondie, as she comes to be known, is a restless and strong-willed 23-year-old in 1990, when she sets out to find ‘the real, the experience, the education’. These towns – communal outposts where race, sex, heat, isolation and desperation collide – are well equipped to provide them. Newling relates her experiences through a series of vignettes, full of memory’s spaces and slippages, but with a definite temporal dimension, a sense of time traced. Such is their impact, the stories probably didn’t need a gifted writer to bring them to life.

In The Netherlands, freedom of speech is enshrined in Article 23 of the Constitution, a document written in blood, firstly in the fight against the Spanish in the sixteenth century, then amongst ourselves – Calvinist against Catholic. Radical Calvinism created the welfare state and made possible euthanasia, same-sex marriages and a slew of rights not available in other countries.

Theo van Gogh, born into a celebrated family, made himself famous, and infamous, in the Netherlands for his outrageous opinions, such as accusing the Jewish lord mayor of Amsterdam, the son of Holocaust survivors, of being a Nazi sympathiser. According to Ian Buruma, the author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2004), when van Gogh made the controversial film Submission with the Muslim activist turned politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Buruma thought that this would be seen as another of his national ‘village idiot’ gestures. There was no intention to draw more than imaginary blood. Van Gogh had lived his whole life secure in the knowledge that in the Netherlands he was onze Theo (our Theo), and that what he was free to deride because of Article 23 also protected him. But to Muslim fundamentalists, freedom of speech is anathema. God, and his representatives, decide what is and can be said. In this mindscape, this very freedom of speech, as espoused in the Netherlands, proves that the country is an infidel state.

New Partner for ABR

Let’s be candid. Producing a magazine of this kind is not easy in a country with a small population and one where the life of the mind (even if not ‘the least of possessions’, to quote Patrick White) rarely commands the attention or glamour often associated with sporting events and other fashionable distractions.

ABR is fully aware of this challenge and mindful of the speed with which literary or cultural magazines – however old, however worthy – can wane and disappear. In recent years much effort has gone into the development of a series of partnerships with key institutions. ABR readers will be familiar with the range of these partnerships, which have grown in scale and efficacy – for all parties, not just ABR. Our aim here is severalfold: to improve the magazine; to promote it better; to reach new readers; to preserve ABR for future generations of writers and readers; to draw on our partners’ intellectual and creative capital to produce the finest, sharpest literary review this country can sustain.

Accordingly, we have much pleasure in announcing that ABR has a new sponsor, Ord Minnett, a leading wealth management group whose history spans nearly 150 years (three times as long as ABR’s). This is a major development for ABR. Ord Minnett becomes our exclusive corporate sponsor.

Ord Minnett, which has fifteen offices throughout Australia, will be closely involved in ABR’s patrons’ scheme, an important venture into the area of cultural philanthropy. We will launch our patrons’ scheme in several states later this year:

Ord Minnett is delighted to be the inaugural corporate sponsor of ABR,’ said Dr Steve Christie, Head of Ord Minnett Private Wealth Management. ‘Both Ord Minnett and ABR have long, proud traditions of working for Australians, both in the capital cities and across regional Australia. The natural fit between our two organisations is obvious.’

Ord Minnett recognises the importance to Australia of a proudly independent Australian champion of literary excellence. We believe that literacy, education and an appreciation of the ideal of excellence can only benefit Australians, including our clients. ABR promotes all those ideals.’

Calibre – the race begins

Given the national interest in the first Calibre Prize and the extraordinary response to the eventual winner, Elisabeth Holdsworth’s ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, there can be no doubt about the importance of this new prize, which is intended to foster superlative new essay-writing in this country.

ABR and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) have much pleasure in announcing the second Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. The winner will receive $10,000, making it one of the world’s most lucrative essay prizes.

Once again, all non-fiction subjects are eligible, from memoir to literary studies to politics to natural history. The terms and application form are available on our website, or from the ABR office: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The closing date is August 31, and the winner will be announced in December 2007.

Meantime, Elisabeth Holdsworth’s essay, published in the March issue, is still available from our office.

Alex Skovron wins the 2007 ABR Poetry Prize

Melbourne poet Alex Skovron is the recipient of the third ABR Poetry Prize. We published his winning poem, ‘Sanctum’, in the March issue along with the five other shortlisted poems by Robert Adamson, Ross Clark, Stephen Edgar, Anthony Lawrence and Kathryn Lomer. The winner receives $2000.

Alex Skovron was born in Poland and emigrated to Australia in 1958. He has published four books of poetry, most recently The Man and the Map (2003). He has also published a novella, The Poet (2006). His several prizes include the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore Awards, and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. His poem ‘Boy’ was shortlisted for last year’s ABR Poetry Prize. On receiving the judges’ congratulations for his dark, suggestive poem, Alex Skovron commented: ‘I’m delighted and honoured to be this year’s recipient of the prize. I wrote the first version of “Sanctum” in July 2004. It’s an oblique, shadowy piece, an offbeat portrait framed within a telling that’s imbued with at least some of the delirium of its protagonist. The other protagonist is, of course, language.’

The long and the short

We’re not the only ones in the awards business right now. Each day, shortlists pour from our costive fax machine. Six books have been shortlisted for the National Biography Award. They are John Bailey’s Mr Stuart’s Track (Macmillan), Gillian Bouras’s No Time for Dances (Penguin), Peter Doherty’s The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science (Miegunyah Press), Peter Edwards’s Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins (Allen & Unwin), Meg Stewart’s Margaret Olley: Far from a Still Life (Random House) and Jacob G. Rosenberg’s East of Time (Brandl & Schlesinger), which seems to have been winning prizes since the dawn of time. The winner will be announced on March 27, while this issue is with the printer.

More on Miles

No nominations yet for the Miles Franklin Beat-up Award, so that bottle of red is ageing nicely in the cellar. Meanwhile, eight works have been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. A total of fifty-five works were entered. It’s a smaller longlist this year: Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story (Knopf), John Charalambous’s Silent Parts (UQP), Sandra Hall’s Beyond the Break (HarperCollins), Kate Legge’s The Unexpected Elements of Love (Viking), Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (Picador), Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking (Random House), Deborah Robertson’s Careless (Picador) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (Giramondo). The shortlist will follow on April 19.

Note on our cover image

Augustus Earle (1793–1838)
Bungaree, A Native Chief of New South Wales
(London: J. Cross, 1830)
hand-coloured lithograph; 31 x 20 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK2652
Pictures Collection an6016167-2
National Library of Australia

Augustus Earle, artist and traveller, was born in London in 1793 and arrived in Sydney in 1825. In New South Wales, he travelled widely and sketched in the Illawarra district, Port Stephens and the Hunter River, the Blue Mountains, Wellington Caves and Port Macquarie. Returning to London in 1830, he published Views in New South Wales, and Van Diemen’s Land, which featured this portrait of Bungaree. He joined HMS Beagle as artist supernumerary in 1831, befriending Charles Darwin. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) notes that Earle died in 1838, of ‘asthma and debility’, and describes him as ‘a professional artist who painted highly competent portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes of colonial and shipboard life’, adding that his Australian and New Zealand paintings of the later 1820s (now held in the National Library’s Rex Nan Kivell Collection) have both historical and artistic importance.

Of Bungaree, a man from the Broken Bay group north of Sydney, the ADB notes that ‘Various governors and colonels’ gave him ‘discarded uniforms and a cocked hat; in this garb he lived and slept. He affected the walk and mannerisms of every governor from Hunter to Brisbane and perfectly imitated every conspicuous personality in Sydney.’ He accompanied Matthew Flinders in the Investigator in 1801–02 and was thus the first Aborigine to circumnavigate Australia. A valued communicator, he was commended by both Flinders and King for his bravery and character. He died in 1830 and was buried at Rose Bay.

Publishing non-fiction books for young adults and children demands creativity, invention and a dash of bloody-mindedness. Our relatively small population means that non-fiction books must make their way in an ever-tightening market. Big-budget ‘wow factor’ titles like the design-heavy Pick Me Up (Dorling Kindersley) and the best-selling The Dangerous Book for Boys (Conn and Hal Iggulden) are largely beyond the scope of the domestic market. Both have been international hits. Without the audience base to launch such books, Australian writers and publishers must work to a tight brief, navigating between the relatively small market and the diminishing school library budget. To succeed, these books need to work outside the school context as well as within.

It is not just that school libraries lack money. Increasingly, state primary school libraries are starved of knowledgeable staff with time to do the job properly. The library also helps to create an audience for books, but websites including Wikipedia can provide the necessary fact with rigour and imagination. Why support books if they date quickly or, worse, can’t compete with the computer for the reader’s attention? And yet good non-fiction does far more than just impart facts: the best books challenge our ideas of the world in ways that fiction cannot. They can and should reach beyond the school market, and not be bound by it.

Philoponus Against Proclus's 'On the Eternity of the World' 1–5 translated by Michael Share

Duckworth, £55 hb, 163 pp

There was a time not so long ago when research on ancient philosophy was confined largely to the study of the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and their antecedents. To take one example, in A History of Ancient Western Philosophy, published in 1959 by the respected scholar Joseph Owens, only fifty-one of 419 pages were devoted to post-Aristotelian philosophy, and only two pages to philosophy after the third century of our era. All of this has radically changed. For some time there has been a flourishing industry engaged in research on Hellenistic and early Imperial philosophy. Now the last frontier, the philosophy of late antiquity, is also yielding its secrets.

Alasdair Duncan’s Second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Once again, the main character is a repressed homosexual: this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. The novel palls around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing, given today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it is unfortunate that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the contemporary sexual mores undermine the novel’s social commentary.