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Absolutely Revolting

April 2005, no. 270

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Contents Category: Poem
Custom Article Title: Poem of the Week - 'Man on the Moon' by Stephen Edgar (2005 ABR Poetry Prize winner)
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In ABR's seventh 'Poem of the Week' Stephen Edgar discusses and reads his poem 'Man on the Moon'.
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Our seventh 'Poem of the Week' is 'Man on the Moon' by Stephen Edgar. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Stephen who then discusses and reads his poem. 'Man on the Moon' won the inaugural ABR Poetry Prize and was published in the April 2005 issue of Australian Book Review.

 

 

Man on the Moon

Hardly a feature in the evening sky
As yet – near the horizon the cold glow
Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high,
Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.

Hardly a star as yet. And then that frail
Sliver of moon like a thin peel of soap
Gouged by a nail, or the paring of a nail:
Slender enough repository of hope.

There was no lack of hope when thirty-five
Full years ago they sent up the Apollo –
Two thirds of all the years I’ve been alive.
They let us out of school, so we could follow

The broadcast of that memorable scene,
Crouching in Mr Langshaw’s tiny flat,
The whole class huddled round the TV screen.
There’s not much chance, then, of forgetting that.

And for the first time ever I think now,
As though it were a memory, that you
Were in the world then and alive, and how
Down time’s long labyrinthine avenue

Eventually you’d bring yourself to me,
With no excessive haste and none too soon –
As memorable in my history
As that small step for man onto the moon.

How pitiful and inveterate the way
We view the paths by which our lives descended
From the far past down to the present day
And fancy those contingencies intended,

A secret destiny planned in advance
Where what is done is as it must be done
For us alone. When really it’s all chance
And the special one might have been anyone.

The paths that I imagined to have come
Together and for good have simply crossed
And carried on. And the delirium
We found is cold and sober now and lost.

The crescent moon, to quote myself, lies back,
A radiotelescope propped to receive
The signals of the circling zodiac.
I send my thoughts up, wishing to believe

That they might strike the moon and be transferred
To where you are and find or join your own.
Don’t smile. I know the notion is absurd,
And everything I think, I think alone.

Stephen Edgar won the inaugural ABR Poetry Prize in 2005 with his poem ‘Man on the Moon’. His latest collection is Exhibits of the Sun (Black Pepper, 2014). His previous book, Eldershaw, was joint winner of the Colin Roderick Award for 2013 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2014.

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Brenda Niall reviews March by Geraldine Brooks
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Custom Article Title: Brenda Niall reviews 'March' by Geraldine Brooks
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Spacious and solidly constructed, the classic nineteenth-century novel invites revisiting. Later writers reconfigure its well-known spaces, change the lighting, summon marginal figures to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester ...
Book 1 Title: March
Book Author: Geraldine Brooks
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $29.95 pb, 352 pp, 0732278414
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Spacious and solidly constructed, the classic nineteenth-century novel invites revisiting. Later writers reconfigure its well-known spaces, change the lighting, summon marginal figures to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the Thornfield attic, is allowed a voice and a history. She tells a story very different from the version her husband gives to Jane Eyre. The more familiar the text, the greater the lure of revisioning. Tom Stoppard’s brilliant take on Hamlet, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), turns tragedy into absurdist comedy.

In her new novel, March, Geraldine Brooks takes Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as her starting point. Refashioned, it retains very little of the sedate, warm-hearted domestic story that has been a children’s classic since first publication in 1868. Like Brooks, I read Little Women as a ten-year-old. I must have reread it many times, so clearly and accurately does memory now retrieve its words and situations. The four girls, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, are still vividly present. Meg, whose failing is vanity, behaves badly at a party and is punished when she sprains her ankle. Rebellious Jo sells her hair (‘her one beauty’) to help in a family crisis. Saintly Beth catches scarlet fever from the poor family she visits with baskets of food. Wilful Amy, forbidden to go out skating, disobeys and falls through the ice. The moral system is always clear, and the happy ending guaranteed.

Read more: Brenda Niall reviews 'March' by Geraldine Brooks

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Sue Thomas reviews J.M. Coetzee And The Ethics Of Reading: Literature in the event by Derek Attridge
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J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics Of Reading is both a deeply scholarly response to the work of a brilliant and challenging writer, and an act of advocacy for a particular mode of reading, which Derek Attridge characterises variously as ethical, literary, ‘attentive’ and scrupulously responsive to the text. This mode draws on practices of ‘close reading’, while proposing the ethics of ...
Book 1 Title: J.M. Coetzee And The Ethics Of Reading
Book 1 Subtitle: Literature in the event
Book Author: Derek Attridge
Book 1 Biblio: University of Chicago Press, $38.95 pb, 240 pp, 0 226 03117 9
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics Of Reading is both a deeply scholarly response to the work of a brilliant and challenging writer, and an act of advocacy for a particular mode of reading, which Derek Attridge characterises variously as ethical, literary, ‘attentive’ and scrupulously responsive to the text. This mode draws on practices of ‘close reading’, while proposing the ethics of ‘an openness to alterity, and acknowledgement of the historical and cultural situatedness of both writing and reading, a responsiveness to the work as invention, a sensitivity to the mediations through which we experience the world, and a registering of the event of a text in a performance of its own stagings of literature’s multiple powers’. Attridge’s arguments are motivated by a desire to redeem the ‘power and distinctiveness of literature’; to redeem Coetzee from worries over the political efficacy of his writing as a force for change in South Africa; and to salvage individual novels from misreadings.

Attridge argues that ‘[a] reading that does justice to what is literary in a literary work … is one that is fully responsive to its singularity, inventiveness, and otherness, as these manifest themselves in the event or experience of the work’. His location of the singular, the inventive, the other in a novel is grounded in an appreciation of modernist aesthetics, and his own reflections on issues raised by Coetzee’s fiction work to defamiliarise stock reading strategies.

Read more: Sue Thomas reviews 'J.M. Coetzee And The Ethics Of Reading: Literature in the event' by Derek...

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For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.
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For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile. Working without access to an adequate library, and in some cases without reliable critical editions of the works he was discussing, Auerbach was forced to rely on his prodigious erudition and to make a virtue of his uncomprehensive and subjective method. His thesis was simple. The great achievement of Western realism, he argued, was to break down the classical divisions of style. This opened up literature, gave it the freedom to represent everyday life and the concerns of ordinary people. Mimesis begins with Homer and ends with the modernists. It develops the idea that a civilisation’s capacity for depicting reality through literature is a measure of its historical consciousness. To illustrate this thesis, Auerbach begins each chapter with a long quotation, which he takes as representative of a specific development in literary technique. The quotation is then unpacked, with disarming fluency, in a long discursive essay.

The sentence reproduced above occurs in the final chapter. Auerbach is discussing the way modernist writers had begun to pay close attention to the subtleties of consciousness, depicting life as a fragmented experience lived through small but often intense moments of awareness. His examples are Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. He is harsh in his assessment, detecting in the modernists ‘a certain atmosphere of universal doom’ that conveys ‘an impression of hopelessness’. But there is a self-reflexive aspect to his judgment; it has a confessional quality that turns his interpretation back on itself. Auerbach was only too aware that he was writing an overview of thousands of years of European culture at a time when Europe was tearing itself apart. The harshness of his assessment, the pessimism he describes as a defining feature of early twentieth-century writers, is a by-product of his own historical situation. His interpretation thus has a fatal inevitability. The modernists’ loss of certainty is his loss of certainty. He is not giving a disinterested reading of a despairing culture; he is looking inward and feeling a personal sense of horror. Exiled in Istanbul, he is both removed from the historical moment and subject to it. This shapes his judgment at every step. ‘Mimesis,’ he was to observe in hindsight, ‘is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.’ Even Auerbach’s panoramic vision, capable of taking in thousands of years of literary history, returns to this point of fragile subjectivity and to the awareness of its limitations.

Read more: 'The tyranny of the literal' by James Ley

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John Tranter reviews The Long Game and Other Poems by Bruce Beaver
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The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still, called on him in the early 1970s, it was a natural meeting of minds. In one poem in The Long Game and Other Poems, Beaver says that ‘poor Dransfield draped / me with a necklet of dandelions / once and kissed my forehead / in what must have been / a satirical salute’. I have a feeling that the salute was heartfelt, but Bruce was painfully modest.
Book 1 Title: The Long Game and Other Poems
Book Author: Bruce Beaver
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $22.95 pb, 186 pp, 0702235091
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still, called on him in the early 1970s, it was a natural meeting of minds. In one poem in The Long Game and Other Poems, Beaver says that ‘poor Dransfield draped / me with a necklet of dandelions / once and kissed my forehead / in what must have been / a satirical salute’. I have a feeling that the salute was heartfelt, but Bruce was painfully modest.

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Read more: John Tranter reviews 'The Long Game and Other Poems' by Bruce Beaver

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James Upcher reviews God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics by Marion Maddox
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Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason.
Book 1 Title: God Under Howard
Book 1 Subtitle: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics
Book Author: Marion Maddox
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 386 pp, 1741145686
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason. The eventual winner of that fraught election was Woodrow Wilson, a deeply religious man who viewed the separation of Church and State as an inconvenience, and who seemed to believe that the United States was, metaphysically conceived, a religion to which the rest of the world needed to be converted. Generally, however, in the United States, the line between the secular and the religious has been policed with vigilance by Congress and by lobby groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Read more: James Upcher reviews 'God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics' by...

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Allan Patience reviews ‘Bamahuta: Leaving Papua’ by Philip Fitzpatrick
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Contents Category: Settler Colonialism
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Article Title: Missionaries, marxists and misfits
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Papua New Guinea is definitely not one of the grand colonial stories. There is no tradition of empire, no tales of the raj, to be glorified or excoriated by historians and other nostalgics. Mostly, the various German, Australian and Japanese colonial administrations were not infrequently racist and stupid, often brutal and overwhelmingly unimaginative. Australia’s colonising and neo-colonising of what has become PNG was always, and still is, principally focused on its security interests, not on bringing civilisation to noble savages or developing a thriving economy. The colonial Australians who ventured into the oppressive heat, spectacular mountains, awesome rainforests and malarial swamps mostly comprised parsimonious bureaucrats, rugged patrol officers, no-nonsense police, Christian evangelists, and fugitives of pretty well every kind – ‘missionaries, marxists, and misfits’, as the saying goes.
Book 1 Title: Bamahuta
Book 1 Subtitle: Leaving Papua
Book Author: Philip Fitzpatrick
Book 1 Biblio: Pandanus, $29.95pb, 313 pp
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Papua New Guinea is definitely not one of the grand colonial stories. There is no tradition of empire, no tales of the raj, to be glorified or excoriated by historians and other nostalgics. Mostly, the various German, Australian and Japanese colonial administrations were not infrequently racist and stupid, often brutal and overwhelmingly unimaginative. Australia’s colonising and neo-colonising of what has become PNG was always, and still is, principally focused on its security interests, not on bringing civilisation to noble savages or developing a thriving economy. The colonial Australians who ventured into the oppressive heat, spectacular mountains, awesome rainforests and malarial swamps mostly comprised parsimonious bureaucrats, rugged patrol officers, no-nonsense police, Christian evangelists, and fugitives of pretty well every kind – ‘missionaries, marxists, and misfits’, as the saying goes.

Read more: Allan Patience reviews ‘Bamahuta: Leaving Papua’ by Philip Fitzpatrick

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Anna Goldsworthy reviews ‘Farewell My Ovaries’ by Wendy Harmer
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Article Title: Hen Lit
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Where are the great menopause novels? In The Change (1991), Germaine Greer described menopause as the ‘undescribed experience’, but then noted that it had in fact been described extensively, mostly ‘by men for the eyes of other men’. Wendy Harmer’s Farewell My Ovaries is written by a woman for the eyes of other women, but it does not really aspire to greatness. It is unashamedly ‘chick lit’ – or ‘chick-making-the-uneasy-transition-to-hen-lit’.
Book 1 Title: Farewell My Ovaries
Book Author: Wendy Harmer
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.95pb, 320pp
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Where are the great menopause novels? In The Change (1991), Germaine Greer described menopause as the ‘undescribed experience’, but then noted that it had in fact been described extensively, mostly ‘by men for the eyes of other men’. Wendy Harmer’s Farewell My Ovaries is written by a woman for the eyes of other women, but it does not really aspire to greatness. It is unashamedly ‘chick lit’ – or ‘chick-making-the-uneasy-transition-to-hen-lit’.

Read more: Anna Goldsworthy reviews ‘Farewell My Ovaries’ by Wendy Harmer

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Brian Matthews reviews ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears: Australia’s WWII remembered by the men and women who lived it.’ by Margaret Geddes
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: A rather rough war
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In Margaret Geddes’s own words, Blood, Sweat and Tears ‘is a book of memories and feelings, not facts and dates’. As a result, she is able to avoid the structural, stylistic and other ramifications of historical and chronological accuracy. Instead, she is interested more in the quality and reverberations of their recollections and their reconstruction of events that are ‘with them still’, and is able to give her various interlocutors full narrative rein to hit upon their own rhythms, pursue their own lines of emphasis and obsession, and often talk at considerable length.
Book 1 Title: Blood, Sweat and Tears
Book 1 Subtitle: Australia’s WWII remembered by the men and women who lived it
Book Author: Margaret Geddes
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $49.95 hb, 505 pp
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In Margaret Geddes’s own words, Blood, Sweat and Tears ‘is a book of memories and feelings, not facts and dates’. As a result, she is able to avoid the structural, stylistic and other ramifications of historical and chronological accuracy. Instead, she is interested more in the quality and reverberations of their recollections and their reconstruction of events that are ‘with them still’, and is able to give her various interlocutors full narrative rein to hit upon their own rhythms, pursue their own lines of emphasis and obsession, and often talk at considerable length. Apart from a reference to ‘important incidents’ which time and space constraints forced her to omit, Geddes does not mention editorial processes or policies in her introduction, and the interviews have few ellipses denoting significant omissions. These are unmediated contributions to the broad theme of Australian memory of World War II, loosely but usefully grouped into three sections: The War in Europe and the Middle East; The War in the Pacific; and The War in Australia.

Read more: Brian Matthews reviews ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears: Australia’s WWII remembered by the men and women...

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Bruce Moore reviews ‘The Book of Beginnings: A miscellany of the origins of superstitions, customs, phrases and sayings’ by R. and L. Brasch
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Article Title: Fair dinkum local Brewer
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Dr Rudolph (Rudy) Brasch’s career as a rabbi took him from Germany to London and, finally, in 1949, to the Temple Emmanuel in Sydney, where he remained for thirty years. His learning was wide and eclectic, and this is reflected in The Book of Beginnings, which he compiled with the assistance of his wife, Li Brasch. Dr Brasch died in November 2004, at the age of ninety-two.
Book 1 Title: The Book of Beginnings
Book 1 Subtitle: A miscellany of the origins of superstitions, customs, phrases and sayings
Book Author: R and L Brasch
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $89.95 hb, 1167 pp
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Dr Rudolph (Rudy) Brasch’s career as a rabbi took him from Germany to London and, finally, in 1949, to the Temple Emmanuel in Sydney, where he remained for thirty years. His learning was wide and eclectic, and this is reflected in The Book of Beginnings, which he compiled with the assistance of his wife, Li Brasch. Dr Brasch died in November 2004, at the age of ninety-two.

Read more: Bruce Moore reviews ‘The Book of Beginnings: A miscellany of the origins of superstitions,...

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Chris Palmer reviews ‘The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing: A fifty-year collection’ edited by Rob Gerrand
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Article Title: The angel thing
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Writers of contemporary fiction are often novelists only; writers of heroic fantasy, a genre that increasingly overlaps with science fiction, tend to write very long novels only. Science fiction is different; the short story has been important for most of its practitioners, though it sets taxing formal problems when the writer has to cram the details of an alternative or future world into a short compass. The first of the stories in this big anthology of Australian science fiction was published in 1955, the most recent in 2001, so it offers a good sense of the path the genre has traced.
Book 1 Title: The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing
Book 1 Subtitle: A fifty-year collection
Book Author: Rob Gerrand
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $39.95 pb, 635 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Writers of contemporary fiction are often novelists only; writers of heroic fantasy, a genre that increasingly overlaps with science fiction, tend to write very long novels only. Science fiction is different; the short story has been important for most of its practitioners, though it sets taxing formal problems when the writer has to cram the details of an alternative or future world into a short compass. The first of the stories in this big anthology of Australian science fiction was published in 1955, the most recent in 2001, so it offers a good sense of the path the genre has traced.

Read more: Chris Palmer reviews ‘The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing: A fifty-year collection’ edited...

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Damien Kingsbury reviews ‘Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The politics of oligarchy in an age of markets’ by Richard Robison and Vedi R. Hadiz
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Article Title: Democracy of sorts
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Many who have followed Indonesian politics have become increasingly dismayed at the failure of the reform movement that followed the political demise of President Suharto in 1998. The glass is not so much half full or empty; rather, it is cracked and leaking. Indonesia now has a democracy, of sorts, after a constitutional coup against the first elected president, Aburrahman Wahid, and the non-presidency of Megawati Sukarnoputri. In many other respects, Indonesia has regressed. The military is again a power in the state, human rights abuses have increased and there are now more political prisoners than in 1998, if mostly from Aceh and Papua. Similarly, the poor remain very poor, the rich and powerful are again such, and corruption is worse than ever.
Book 1 Title: Reorganising Power in Indonesia
Book 1 Subtitle: The politics of oligarchy in an age of markets
Book Author: Richard Robison and Vedi R. Hadiz
Book 1 Biblio: Routledge-Curzon, $66 pb, 316 pp
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Many who have followed Indonesian politics have become increasingly dismayed at the failure of the reform movement that followed the political demise of President Suharto in 1998. The glass is not so much half full or empty; rather, it is cracked and leaking. Indonesia now has a democracy, of sorts, after a constitutional coup against the first elected president, Aburrahman Wahid, and the non-presidency of Megawati Sukarnoputri. In many other respects, Indonesia has regressed. The military is again a power in the state, human rights abuses have increased and there are now more political prisoners than in 1998, if mostly from Aceh and Papua. Similarly, the poor remain very poor, the rich and powerful are again such, and corruption is worse than ever.

Read more: Damien Kingsbury reviews ‘Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The politics of oligarchy in an age of...

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Contents Category: Advances
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Article Title: Advances - April 2005
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And the winner is …

Stephen Edgar has won the inaugural ABR Poetry Prize with his poem ‘Man on the Moon’. The three judges, Morag Fraser, Peter Rose and Peter Steele, were impressed by the overall quality of the entries and were pleased to be able to choose from such a strong short list, but the final decision was quick and unanimous because of the formal and imaginative qualities of Stephen Edgar’s poem. He receives $2000, and ‘Man on the Moon’ reappears on page 13. Elsewhere in the magazine, we publish the two poems that received honourable mentions (by Judith Bishop and Lisa Gorton). ABR also apologises to Mark Tredinnick, and our readers, for the ludicrous break that somehow infiltrated his villanelle ‘Ubirr Rock’, which we published with the other short-listed works in the previous issue.
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And the winner is …

Stephen Edgar has won the inaugural ABR Poetry Prize with his poem ‘Man on the Moon’. The three judges, Morag Fraser, Peter Rose and Peter Steele, were impressed by the overall quality of the entries and were pleased to be able to choose from such a strong short list, but the final decision was quick and unanimous because of the formal and imaginative qualities of Stephen Edgar’s poem. He receives $2000, and ‘Man on the Moon’ reappears on page 13. Elsewhere in the magazine, we publish the two poems that received honourable mentions (by Judith Bishop and Lisa Gorton). ABR also apologises to Mark Tredinnick, and our readers, for the ludicrous break that somehow infiltrated his villanelle ‘Ubirr Rock’, which we published with the other short-listed works in the previous issue.

The level of sculpture

Stephen Edgar’s latest book of poems is Lost in the Foreground (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2003). Acclaiming this in our ‘Best Books of 2003’ column, Clive James praised ‘the full impact of [Edgar’s] craftsmanship, which is like carpentry raised to the level of sculpture’. As we know, Duffy & Snellgrove is no more, but ABR understands that Michael Duffy will continue to supply Lost in the Foreground for some years. Happily, but not surprisingly, Stephen Edgar has found a publisher for his new collection: Black Pepper will issue Other Summers in 2006.

Read more: Advances - April 2005

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Contents Category: Letters
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With wings as black as night and breast as white as cloud, the sea eagle swooped from the sky. It snatched up the baby boy in front of his mother’s very eyes. She acted quickly. She grabbed a coconut shell and hurled it towards the bird. The baby dropped to the ground and landed unhurt on soft sand. But before she could reach it, the baby was gone, swept away by the tsunami. The eagle knew, you see. Like the elephants who had already left the coast, like the dogs that ran for high ground before anyone saw anything, the eagle knew that the big wave was coming. It had been trying to save the baby, and the woman had stopped it, and now her baby is dead.
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With wings as black as night and breast as white as cloud, the sea eagle swooped from the sky. It snatched up the baby boy in front of his mother’s very eyes. She acted quickly. She grabbed a coconut shell and hurled it towards the bird. The baby dropped to the ground and landed unhurt on soft sand. But before she could reach it, the baby was gone, swept away by the tsunami. The eagle knew, you see. Like the elephants who had already left the coast, like the dogs that ran for high ground before anyone saw anything, the eagle knew that the big wave was coming. It had been trying to save the baby, and the woman had stopped it, and now her baby is dead.

Read more: ‘Letter from Sri Lanka’ by Nick Drayson

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David Langsam reviews ‘The World’s Banker: A story of failed states, financial crises and the wealth and poverty of nations’ by Sebastian Mallaby
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Each day I commute with Melbourne’s wage slaves on a privatised transport system that is invariably overcrowded due to cancelled or delayed trains. Dark thoughts whirl as I read Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a tale of ambition multiplied by ambition. In recent weeks, I have edited countless business stories, many of them half-year reports boasting profits of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, some increased by more than 100 per cent. Meanwhile, in the Third World, the raison d’être of the World Bank, children die for the want of mosquito nets worth two dollars. So what has James Wolfensohn achieved at the World Bank, and what has the World Bank achieved? According to Mallaby, there has been a real decline in world poverty. But one of the greatest achievements is the housing, feeding and clothing of thousands of the world’s neediest economists.
Book 1 Title: The World's Banker
Book 1 Subtitle: A story of failed states, financial crises and the wealth and poverty of nations
Book Author: Sebastian Mallaby
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 462 pp
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Each day I commute with Melbourne’s wage slaves on a privatised transport system that is invariably overcrowded due to cancelled or delayed trains. Dark thoughts whirl as I read Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a tale of ambition multiplied by ambition. In recent weeks, I have edited countless business stories, many of them half-year reports boasting profits of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, some increased by more than 100 per cent. Meanwhile, in the Third World, the raison d’être of the World Bank, children die for the want of mosquito nets worth two dollars. So what has James Wolfensohn achieved at the World Bank, and what has the World Bank achieved? According to Mallaby, there has been a real decline in world poverty. But one of the greatest achievements is the housing, feeding and clothing of thousands of the world’s neediest economists.

Read more: David Langsam reviews ‘The World’s Banker: A story of failed states, financial crises and the...

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Gay Bilson reviews ‘A Shifting Shore: Locals, outsiders, and the transformation of a French fishing town, 1823–2000’ by Alice Garner
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Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.
Book 1 Title: A Shifting Shore
Book 1 Subtitle: Locals, outsiders, and the transformation of a French fishing town, 1823-2000
Book Author: Alice Garner
Book 1 Biblio: Cornell University Press, $69.95 hb, 320 pp
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Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.

Read more: Gay Bilson reviews ‘A Shifting Shore: Locals, outsiders, and the transformation of a French...

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Ian Noble reviews ‘A Change in the Weather: Climate and culture in Australia’ edited by Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin
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Article Title: Should we think like a Banded Stilt?
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To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.
Book 1 Title: A Change in the Weather
Book 1 Subtitle: Climate and culture in Australia
Book Author: Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin
Book 1 Biblio: National Museum of Australia Press, $49.95 hb, 216 pp
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To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.

Read more: Ian Noble reviews ‘A Change in the Weather: Climate and culture in Australia’ edited by Tim...

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Jake Wilson reviews ‘Evil Genius’ by Catherine Jinks
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At the start, Catherine Jinks’s teen novel Evil Genius resembles a local edition of ‘cult’ blockbuster phenomena such as Harry Potter and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – wish-fulfilment fantasies about misfits initiated into a hidden élite. On page one, we are introduced to Jinks’s protagonist, Cadel (Welsh for ‘battle’), a brilliant but barely socialised young boy obsessed with computers. His adoptive parents are named Stuart and Lanna Piggott, which should tell you all you need to know. Aged eight, this outwardly placid but potentially vengeful nerd learns from his psychologist mentor that his true father is a mad scientist named Phineas Darkkon, who has made millions through scams such as a line of shonky vending machines, and who subsequently bankrolls a secret University of Evil located in central Sydney, where, a few years later, Cadel precociously winds up. Among the subjects on offer are Basic Lying, Forgery, Assassination and Guerrilla Skills; the other students include a Goth chemist who is trying to turn himself into a vampire, and a pair of bitchy, telepathic twins.
Book 1 Title: Evil Genius
Book Author: Catherine Jinks
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $16.95 pb, 471 pp
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At the start, Catherine Jinks’s teen novel Evil Genius resembles a local edition of ‘cult’ blockbuster phenomena such as Harry Potter and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – wish-fulfilment fantasies about misfits initiated into a hidden élite. On page one, we are introduced to Jinks’s protagonist, Cadel (Welsh for ‘battle’), a brilliant but barely socialised young boy obsessed with computers. His adoptive parents are named Stuart and Lanna Piggott, which should tell you all you need to know. Aged eight, this outwardly placid but potentially vengeful nerd learns from his psychologist mentor that his true father is a mad scientist named Phineas Darkkon, who has made millions through scams such as a line of shonky vending machines, and who subsequently bankrolls a secret University of Evil located in central Sydney, where, a few years later, Cadel precociously winds up. Among the subjects on offer are Basic Lying, Forgery, Assassination and Guerrilla Skills; the other students include a Goth chemist who is trying to turn himself into a vampire, and a pair of bitchy, telepathic twins.

Read more: Jake Wilson reviews ‘Evil Genius’ by Catherine Jinks

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John Connor reviews ‘The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager tragedy’ by Tom Frame
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When I first heard that Tom Frame’s latest book was about the Voyager disaster, I wondered if the author had come down with amnesia, for he had already published a book on this subject thirteen years ago. However, if the federal government required two royal commissions to come to a conclusion about this naval accident, it is surely appropriate that Frame, having written Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy, should write a second book – The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy – to revisit and reconsider this complex and controversial event.
Book 1 Title: The Cruel Legacy
Book 1 Subtitle: The HMAS Voyager tragedy
Book Author: Tom Frame
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.95pb, 235pp, 1 74114 421 3
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When I first heard that Tom Frame’s latest book was about the Voyager disaster, I wondered if the author had come down with amnesia, for he had already published a book on this subject thirteen years ago. However, if the federal government required two royal commissions to come to a conclusion about this naval accident, it is surely appropriate that Frame, having written Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy, should write a second book – The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy – to revisit and reconsider this complex and controversial event.

Read more: John Connor reviews ‘The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager tragedy’ by Tom Frame

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John Uhr reviews ‘Quarterly Essay 16: Breach of trust: truth, morality and politics’ by Raimond Gaita
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On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.
Book 1 Title: Quarterly Essay 16
Book 1 Subtitle: Breach of trust: truth, morality and politics
Book Author: Raimond Gaita
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $13.95pb, 103pp, 186395 229 2
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On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.

Read more: John Uhr reviews ‘Quarterly Essay 16: Breach of trust: truth, morality and politics’ by Raimond...

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John Wanna reviews ‘Curtin’s Gift: Reinterpreting Australia’s greatest prime minister’ by John Edwards
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Article Title: The myth of Saint Jack
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John Curtin was recently voted Australia’s best prime minister by a panel of nine scholars of political leadership (The Age, 18 December 2004). He narrowly won over Robert Menzies (by one vote), but easily beat the likes of Bob Hawke, Ben Chifley and John Howard – in that order. Given that Curtin was prime minister for less than four years, while Menzies ruled for eighteen years, and given that most of Curtin’s policies were tough austerity measures of wartime preparation, his enduring reputation as Australia’s best prime minister is surely remarkable. Then along comes economist and former Keating adviser John Edwards, who says that Curtin’s deification has been pronounced for all the wrong reasons.
Book 1 Title: Curtain's Gift
Book 1 Subtitle: Reinterpreting Australia's greatest prime minister
Book Author: John Edwards
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $35pb, 198pp, 186508 704 1
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John Curtin was recently voted Australia’s best prime minister by a panel of nine scholars of political leadership (The Age, 18 December 2004). He narrowly won over Robert Menzies (by one vote), but easily beat the likes of Bob Hawke, Ben Chifley and John Howard – in that order. Given that Curtin was prime minister for less than four years, while Menzies ruled for eighteen years, and given that most of Curtin’s policies were tough austerity measures of wartime preparation, his enduring reputation as Australia’s best prime minister is surely remarkable. Then along comes economist and former Keating adviser John Edwards, who says that Curtin’s deification has been pronounced for all the wrong reasons.

Read more: John Wanna reviews ‘Curtin’s Gift: Reinterpreting Australia’s greatest prime minister’ by John...

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews ‘Hecate vol.30, no.2’ edited by Carole Ferrier, ‘Island 99’ edited by David Owen and ‘Griffith Review 7: The lure of fundamentalism’ edited by Julianne Schultz
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Towards the end of the last century, Australian little magazines were forced to make a choice: become more interdisciplinary, or die. Those that have survived, and the new ones that have emerged, have taken on a new coherence and cohesion. Still mostly featuring a varied mix of writers, genres and approaches, they tend these days to have some unifying topic, or topos, and to be conducting a kind of internal conversation within their covers.
Book 1 Title: Hecate vol. 30, no. 2
Book Author: Carole Ferrier
Book 1 Biblio: $15pb, 212pp, 0311 4198
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Book 2 Title: Island 99
Book 2 Author: David Owen
Book 2 Biblio: $11.95pb, 128pp, 1035 3127
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
Book 3 Title: Griffith Review 7
Book 3 Subtitle: The lure of fundamentalism
Book 3 Author: Julianne Schultz
Book 3 Biblio: ABC Books, $16.95pb, 268pp, 0 7333 1548 8
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Towards the end of the last century, Australian little magazines were forced to make a choice: become more interdisciplinary, or die. Those that have survived, and the new ones that have emerged, have taken on a new coherence and cohesion. Still mostly featuring a varied mix of writers, genres and approaches, they tend these days to have some unifying topic, or topos, and to be conducting a kind of internal conversation within their covers.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews ‘Hecate vol.30, no.2’ edited by Carole Ferrier, ‘Island 99’ edited by...

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ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

 

Barry Jones on the ODNB

Dear Editor,

I read Angus Trumble’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ABR, March 2005) with close interest and some envy. It was probably inevitable that he should concentrate on entries with Australian relationships. He comments that all deceased Australian prime ministers are there, except Scullin and Page. In fact, Fadden and Forde are also missing.
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ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

 

Barry Jones on the ODNB

Dear Editor,

I read Angus Trumble’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ABR, March 2005) with close interest and some envy. It was probably inevitable that he should concentrate on entries with Australian relationships. He comments that all deceased Australian prime ministers are there, except Scullin and Page. In fact, Fadden and Forde are also missing.

Read more: Letters - April 2005

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Michael Shuttleworth reviews four books
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Dreams of leaving can be a powerful force in the lives of young people. These four novels are each touched by the desire for other places. The idea that a more authentic self lurks beyond our familiar zones shapes these books, three of which are written by Australians, and one by an American writer who spends half his time in Australia and half in New York.
Book 1 Title: The Running Man
Book Author: Michael Gerard Butler
Book 1 Biblio: Scholastic, $19.95pb, 280pp, 1 86291 575 X
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Book 2 Title: By The River
Book 2 Author: Steven Herrick
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $16.95pb, 232pp, 0 74114 357 8
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Book 3 Title: Secret Scribbled Notebooks
Book 3 Author: Joanne Horniman
Book 3 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $17.95pb, 219pp, 1 74114 406 X
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Dreams of leaving can be a powerful force in the lives of young people. These four novels are each touched by the desire for other places. The idea that a more authentic self lurks beyond our familiar zones shapes these books, three of which are written by Australians, and one by an American writer who spends half his time in Australia and half in New York.

Read more: Michael Shuttleworth reviews four books

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Michelle Borzi reviews ‘War Is Not the Season for Figs’ by Lidija Cvetkovic and ‘Modewarre: Home ground’ by Patricia Sykes
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A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.
Book 1 Title: War Is Not the Season for Figs
Book Author: Lidija Cvetkovic
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $22.95pb, 74pp, 0 70223 484 2
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Book 2 Title: Modewarre
Book 2 Subtitle: Home ground
Book 2 Author: Patricia Sykes
Book 2 Biblio: Spinifex Press, $24.95pb, 90pp, 1 876756 50 0
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A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

The title poem wrestles with the complexities of conflict. Carefree summers are remembered, yet this recollection is deftly expanded through the imagery of figs, ‘huge and fragile’: ‘Once, fig in hand for a friend, across the stones / I twisted my ankle and fell. / The fig split open like a heart in my palm.’ From antiquity, figs have been a fruit of sustenance: here, the forceful tearing open of the heart-shaped fig resonates to the destruction of a people and a nation: ‘Now I want to retrace my steps … / but I hear they’ve shifted the stones / built walls.’ Segregation is questioned and mourned, ‘segregate by blood / and god and name’ marking the extent to which kinship and faith – the heart of common life – feature in this battleground. The final stanza of the poem surprisingly diverts into a hard and ironic play:

Read more: Michelle Borzi reviews ‘War Is Not the Season for Figs’ by Lidija Cvetkovic and ‘Modewarre: Home...

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Nicholas Jose reviews ‘Frontier Justice: A history of the gulf country to 1900’ by Tony Roberts
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The country south-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where wild rivers tumble from stony ramparts through coastal scrub plain to the sea, was one of the last places in Australia where settlement was attempted; more integrated with Asia to the north – thanks partly to the sojourning Macassans – than Melbourne or Sydney to the south, let alone London; a world where Aboriginal society was strong enough to resist dispossession, surviving, despite everything, to this day. It has also been something of a last frontier for historians.
Book 1 Title: Frontier Justice
Book 1 Subtitle: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900
Book Author: Tony Roberts
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $32.95pb, 321pp, 0 7022 3361 7
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The country south-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where wild rivers tumble from stony ramparts through coastal scrub plain to the sea, was one of the last places in Australia where settlement was attempted; more integrated with Asia to the north – thanks partly to the sojourning Macassans – than Melbourne or Sydney to the south, let alone London; a world where Aboriginal society was strong enough to resist dispossession, surviving, despite everything, to this day. It has also been something of a last frontier for historians.

The Gulf Country once consisted of a mosaic of Aboriginal estates traversed by pathways that provided access to food, water and sites of significance. Aborigines shared those routes with early explorers from the south, like Friedrich Leichhardt, who followed the Coast Track in 1845. Stretching a thousand kilometres from the top corner of Queensland to Katherine in the Northern Territory, that track became the route by which the great cattle stations of the north-west were stocked, with 200,000 cattle driven through from the eastern colonies in the pastoral boom of the 1880s. Traders and itinerants followed the drovers, and then a gold rush. The pastoral frontier fanned out from the Coast Track and by 1885 cattle stations totalling a quarter of a million square kilometres had been set up throughout the district. In a few short years, Aborigines were dispossessed of all their land. Then, as the boom faded, the Gulf Country was relegated to a kind of no man’s land between jurisdictions, more or less off the map, where people were left to sort things out for themselves.

Read more: Nicholas Jose reviews ‘Frontier Justice: A history of the gulf country to 1900’ by Tony Roberts

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Nikki Davies reviews ‘The Catch’ by Marg Vandeleur
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The beauty of ‘chick lit’ is the discussion of sometimes quite painful, but always familiar scenarios surrounding love, life and happiness, in an open and self-deprecating way. Apparently, it doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously when it comes to matters of the heart, and rightly so – why weep when you can have a good laugh? In The Catch, Marg Vandeleur’s first novel, the search for happiness is complicated by the plight of the woman whose sudden desire for a child is thwarted by a clutch of eggs past their prime and nary a bloke in sight. Social commentators, researchers, religious leaders and feminists have all put their oar in over the last year or so on this topic. Now it’s time for ‘chick lit’ to have its say.
Book 1 Title: The Catch
Book Author: Marg Vandeleur
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $22.95pb, 370pp, 0 14 300003 9
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The beauty of ‘chick lit’ is the discussion of sometimes quite painful, but always familiar scenarios surrounding love, life and happiness, in an open and self-deprecating way. Apparently, it doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously when it comes to matters of the heart, and rightly so – why weep when you can have a good laugh? In The Catch, Marg Vandeleur’s first novel, the search for happiness is complicated by the plight of the woman whose sudden desire for a child is thwarted by a clutch of eggs past their prime and nary a bloke in sight. Social commentators, researchers, religious leaders and feminists have all put their oar in over the last year or so on this topic. Now it’s time for ‘chick lit’ to have its say.

Read more: Nikki Davies reviews ‘The Catch’ by Marg Vandeleur

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Paul de Serville reviews ‘Steadfast Knight: A life of Sir Hal Colebatch’ by Hal G.P. Colebatch
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‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.
Book 1 Title: Steadfast Knight
Book 1 Subtitle: A life of Sir Hal Colebatch
Book Author: Hal G. P. Colebatch
Book 1 Biblio: FACP, $27.95pb, 320pp, 192073 139 3
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‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.

Although written with characteristic energy by his son and namesake (poet, science fiction writer and controversialist), this biography should not be dismissed as a work of filial piety but read as a study of the preoccupations of a non-partisan politician. In the important matters, history has vindicated his often solitary stand. Thus Colebatch opposed the terms of federation, warning that they would damage Western Australia, as indeed they did. He remained a free-trader throughout his long careers in journalism and politics, at a time when protectionism was the ruling ideology. Colebatch formed one of the few links in public life between the nineteenth-century free-traders and the small band of activists who fought protectionism from the 1950s onwards. Naturally, he opposed the planned society that the Labor government introduced in World War II, ostensibly as part of the war effort, in fact as a means of advancing socialism.

Read more: Paul de Serville reviews ‘Steadfast Knight: A life of Sir Hal Colebatch’ by Hal G.P. Colebatch

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Peter Pierce reviews ‘Morris West: Literary maverick’ by Maryanne Confoy
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Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.
Book 1 Title: Morris West
Book 1 Subtitle: Literary maverick
Book Author: Maryanne Confoy
Book 1 Biblio: John Wiley & Sons, $29.95pb, 304pp, 1 74031 119 1
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Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.

Read more: Peter Pierce reviews ‘Morris West: Literary maverick’ by Maryanne Confoy

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Article Title: Rabbit
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Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch

toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we’ll never occupy

again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass with you,

searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet winds cut

the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp, Quickly, I must go —
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Read more: ‘Rabbit’, a new poem by Judith Bishop

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Article Title: Space Command
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Fold out evenings, chairs in the street.

‘See Iridium?’ Making out the satellite pantheon:

efficient gods that do return our prayers

(small voices cast across our desert spaces)

                                    like stars —

                                    like Clint Eastwood

                                    riding impassive

                                    through our networks of desire.
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Read more: ‘Space Command’, a new poem by Lisa Gorton

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Richard Arculus reviews ‘The Geology of Australia’ by David Johnson
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No doubt there is a diverse readership for a book about the geological evolution of Australia. In fact, the last comprehensive text intended for experts was The Geological Evolution of Australia and New Zealand (1968), by D.A. Brown, K.S.W. Campbell and K.A.W. Crook; and nothing of major scope for a lay audience has appeared for a longer time. In the past forty years, of course, the subject has advanced enormously in a general sense, not the least being the revolution in our understanding of the mobility and interactions of the outer shell of the Earth through the processes labelled ‘plate tectonics’. Our specific geological knowledge of Australia has also progressed significantly.
Book 1 Title: The Geology of Australia
Book Author: David Johnson
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $69.95pb, 276pp, 0 521 60100 2
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No doubt there is a diverse readership for a book about the geological evolution of Australia. In fact, the last comprehensive text intended for experts was The Geological Evolution of Australia and New Zealand (1968), by D.A. Brown, K.S.W. Campbell and K.A.W. Crook; and nothing of major scope for a lay audience has appeared for a longer time. In the past forty years, of course, the subject has advanced enormously in a general sense, not the least being the revolution in our understanding of the mobility and interactions of the outer shell of the Earth through the processes labelled ‘plate tectonics’. Our specific geological knowledge of Australia has also progressed significantly.

In The Geology of Australia, David Johnson, of James Cook University, has attempted to occupy the middle ground between expert and lay readerships. In a visually appealing but expensive volume, Johnson attempts to take the reader on a tour of the generalities of modern Earth science illuminated specifically by Australian examples and history.

Read more: Richard Arculus reviews ‘The Geology of Australia’ by David Johnson

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Rod Beecham reviews ‘Don’t Worry About Me: Wartime letters of the 8th division AIF’ edited by Robyn Arvier and ‘Hellfire: Australia, Japan and the prisoners of war’ by Cameron Forbes
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Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.
Book 1 Title: Don't Worry About Me
Book 1 Subtitle: Wartime letters of the 8th division AIF
Book Author: Robyn Arvier
Book 1 Biblio: Robyn Arvier, $24pb, 226pp, 0 646 44026 8
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Book 2 Title: Hellfire
Book 2 Subtitle: Australia, Japan and the prisoners of war
Book 2 Author: Cameron Forbes
Book 2 Biblio: Pan Macmillan, $45hb, 560pp, 1 4050 3650 8
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Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.

Robyn Arvier, editor and publisher of Don’t Worry about Me: Wartime Letters of the 8th Division AIF, has assembled and published a revealing and moving collection of letters by men of the Second AIF unit sent to Malaya: the 8th Division. The directness, simplicity and non-sensationalism of these missives, even the triteness of much of their content, make them unputdownable. We hear from those precious creatures, the ordinary people who acted in and witnessed history.

Read more: Rod Beecham reviews ‘Don’t Worry About Me: Wartime letters of the 8th division AIF’ edited by...

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Stephen Garton reviews ‘Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture’ by Gail Hawkes
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Article Title: Illusion of choice?
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I should read my email more carefully. Like many, I have to admonish myself thus at regular intervals, but it doesn’t always work. This review is a case in point. When invited to review a book on ‘sex and pleasure’, this request stood out from an unread e-mail queue that was uncomfortably long. I had just published a book myself on the history of sexuality (Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution), so the topic had appeal, but, in my haste to reply, I neglected the qualifying phrase ‘in Western Culture’. To my horror, I opened Gail Hawkes’s book only to be confronted with an immediate ethical dilemma (and given my current role as Dean of an Arts Faculty, I could do without another one). Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture covers substantially the same ground as my book: from Ancient Greece to the present day. Even some of our chapter divisions overlapped: classical antiquity; early Christianity; the medieval era; the early modern period and so on. How could I approach a review in the dispassionate way this art requires, when troubled by insidious fears that this might be a better book?
Book 1 Title: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture
Book Author: Gail Hawkes
Book 1 Biblio: Polity, $61.95pb, 215pp, 0 7456 16712
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I should read my email more carefully. Like many, I have to admonish myself thus at regular intervals, but it doesn’t always work. This review is a case in point. When invited to review a book on ‘sex and pleasure’, this request stood out from an unread e-mail queue that was uncomfortably long. I had just published a book myself on the history of sexuality (Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution), so the topic had appeal, but, in my haste to reply, I neglected the qualifying phrase ‘in Western Culture’. To my horror, I opened Gail Hawkes’s book only to be confronted with an immediate ethical dilemma (and given my current role as Dean of an Arts Faculty, I could do without another one). Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture covers substantially the same ground as my book: from Ancient Greece to the present day. Even some of our chapter divisions overlapped: classical antiquity; early Christianity; the medieval era; the early modern period and so on. How could I approach a review in the dispassionate way this art requires, when troubled by insidious fears that this might be a better book?

Read more: Stephen Garton reviews ‘Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture’ by Gail Hawkes

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Sherryl Clark reviews ‘H2O: Stories of Water’ edited by Margaret Hamilton, ‘And the Roo Jumped Over the Moon: Australian Stories and Poems for Children’ edited by Robin Morrow & illustrated by Stephen Michael King and Poems By Young Australians Vol.2
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Putting together a collection or anthology is not as easy as it looks. There are decisions to be made about theme, order and intent, which are often based on the intended audience. Three recent anthologies for children show that, in children’s literature at least, originality and diversity are achievable.
Book 1 Title: H2O
Book 1 Subtitle: Stories of Water
Book Author: Margaret Hamilton
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $18.95pb, 170pp
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Book 2 Title: And the Roo Jumped Over the Moon
Book 2 Subtitle: Australian Stories and Poems for Children
Book 2 Author: Robin Morrow, illustrated by Stephen Michael King
Book 2 Biblio: Scholastic, $14.95pb, 96pp
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Book 3 Title: Poems By Young Australians Vol. 2
Book 3 Biblio: Random House, $12.95pb, 96pp
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Putting together a collection or anthology is not as easy as it looks. There are decisions to be made about theme, order and intent, which are often based on the intended audience. Three recent anthologies for children show that, in children’s literature at least, originality and diversity are achievable.

Poems by Young Australians Vol.2 could be read by anyone who enjoys poetry. Here we have the work of thirty-eight young poets who won prizes and commendations in the second Taronga Foundation Poetry Prize. The Foundation is chaired by Bradley Trevor Greive, with support from Ron Pretty and the Poetry Australia Foundation.

Read more: Sherryl Clark reviews ‘H2O: Stories of Water’ edited by Margaret Hamilton, ‘And the Roo Jumped...

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Contents Category: Commentary
Custom Article Title: The ‘History Wars’ and Aboriginal Health
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The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians, journalists and politicians are concerned to levy blame for terrible acts of European greed and brutality and to bestow praise for acts of Aboriginal resistance; while rightists emphasise the white settlers’ and authorities’ normally good intentions and the small amount of blood shed by comparison with the histories of North and South America, and of Africa. The leading protagonists in both camps have generally been formed by Marxism and retain that absolutist faith that nothing happens by accident, thereby permitting simple assignments of good and evil.
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The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians, journalists and politicians are concerned to levy blame for terrible acts of European greed and brutality and to bestow praise for acts of Aboriginal resistance; while rightists emphasise the white settlers’ and authorities’ normally good intentions and the small amount of blood shed by comparison with the histories of North and South America, and of Africa. The leading protagonists in both camps have generally been formed by Marxism and retain that absolutist faith that nothing happens by accident, thereby permitting simple assignments of good and evil.

The History Wars have occurred in a context of wide-spread European and Aboriginal disillusionment with the movements towards reconciliation and Aboriginal betterment. Significantly, neither major party pressed these causes in the 2004 federal election, presumably because there were no votes in them. I think Australia is not alone in this development, but I cannot pursue that here; except to observe that a generational shift from expressive to instrumental politics may be occurring. Meanwhile, there is evidence of widespread unobtrusive settlement of persons claiming Aboriginal descent into the urban European–Asian community, a process that all sides choose to ignore.

Read more: Commentary | ‘The ‘History Wars’ and Aboriginal Health’ by Barry Smith

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