To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play there
at five or six: to be immersed though not safe among the things
that preceded you, immediate and limitless,
everything already there, the way the world went on
before you were thought of, that flux, and your small-child
leisure for introspection while others shinnied trees for the same
sense of endless outlook, here,
in this would-be attic brought down to earth, whose breath
was frosty as Mother Shipton’s well, holding the tossed refuse
of older siblings, stages shrugged off: limp tutus, pink as dropped
gum blossom, too big, though you stepped
into them and stood, as if in a fairy ring you might animate;
satin and tapshoes, toe-shoes from a sister’s long gone bit-part
in Hans Christian Andersen, poems called Off The Shelf
that you avidly grabbed for your own, puzzled
at faded marginal doodles in real ink;
dark ocarina whose holes you could never master,
bakelite cracked, spookily fake-organic,
as if a new kind of reptile had laid it,
and a distant, shadowy instrument, lipped, where fingers should sit,
with verdigris your father later chastised you for rubbing –
an oboe perhaps – resisting your grip, but venting
a slow corruption in you as descant,
its distant kin in this vast orchestral silence:
strange octagon you toyed with that would never quite close or open,
squeeze box, little lung resisting pressure, push and draw, your hands
impeded from fully parting or meeting, stretching
in musical secretion, cat’s cradle, ectoplasm,
crimped membrane so vulnerable to puncture,
it made you wince, lantern-thin but giving sound
for illumination. At last: harmonica, cupped, bracketed but not
for all that an afterthought, heart of the whole unpeopled
space, for the way it moulded to your own small wheeze
and gave it a different life, if a pleasure to the player only,
pleasure to make your mouth water, metal, felt, and papery
velvet, though your brother might shudder
at the old spit he imagined pooled there,
to you it was honeycomb,
striving to isolate each note, then giving up,
as if you had many voices at once, speaking in chords,
and could make yourself heard.

While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.

Brigid Rooney’s survey of literary activism in Australia over the past sixty years begins with Patrick White’s famous ‘Prodigal Son’ rant (Australian Letters, 1958) against the mediocrity of Australian cultural life. Rooney notes the regular criticism of White’s position as élitist, a function of his distance from ordinary working Australians. This charge of élitism, in turn, can be applied to anyone who cares about art and ideas more than about the politics of class power. But in Australia those with a passion for art are more likely to know my daughter’s experience of being derided by ‘ordinary Australians’ than they are to feel the authority that supposedly accompanies high culture. Rooney cites the case of David Williamson writing about the ‘yobbos’ he met on a cruise that he won in a charity auction. Not even a popular satirist like Williamson is allowed to get away with criticising the philistine nature of ‘ordinary’ Australians.

What do you do when you can live for thousands of years, travel nearly everywhere you wish in the galaxy, and customise your environment and your body to be exactly the way you like? When there is no risk of starvation, injury, or disease? When your back-up simply takes over when, for some reason, you die? What do you do if the whole universe is your playground and you’re just plain bored?

This is the dilemma faced by Rakesh, a software descendant of the DNA panspermia which spread organic life to a million worlds across the galaxy. When Greg Egan’s new novel opens, a chance encounter offers Rakesh the opportunity to do something exciting enough to satisfy his longing for novelty: to trace the origins of a previously unknown DNA source, never before documented. In order to do this, he must interact with the mysterious civilisation known as the Aloof, who are custodians of the information.

If the back-flap biography did not proclaim John McDonald as ‘Australia’s premier arts commentator’, if the author himself did not describe The Art of Australia in the preface as ‘a massive work of synthesis intended to bring together the most recent scholarship’, and if it were not being puffed in advertisements as ‘destined to take its place as the definitive work on Australian art’, one might be inclined to take this book on its merits.

They are not insubstantial. McDonald covers a great deal of chronological and aesthetic territory confidently and competently. His style is bright and his narrative comprehensible. Occasionally he writes with great delicacy, as in observing how, in Arthur Streeton’s Cremorne pastoral, ‘tiny plants and wild flowers are distributed … with calligraphic flicks of the brush, their sharp verticals creating a counter balance to the massive, slow diagonal of the slope’, or characterising the faceted rocks in Tom Roberts’s In a corner on the McIntyre as ‘Cézannesque’. He has a nose for fascinating trivia, from the visit of England cricket captain Ivo Bligh to the artists’ camp at Box Hill, to Marion Ellis Rowan’s being the first Australian artist to have a facelift.

Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.

In characteristically symbolic fashion, the Rudd government chose the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 2008) to announce a consultation process into human rights protection in Australia. Attorney-General Robert McClelland appointed a committee, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, to consult the public on issues including whether Australia needs a bill (or charter) of rights and responsibilities. Geoffrey Robertson’s latest book, The Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights, injects much-needed energy, imagination, and international context into this rather circumscribed debate. ‘I have spent my professional life making arguments based on bills of rights,’ says Robertson. As a distinguished and courageous human rights lawyer-activist, his emphatically pro-charter stance commands the thoughtful consideration of supporters, opponents, and equivocators alike.

That is not to say that Robertson’s views should automatically prevail, or that his book is comprehensive or flawless. While his prose is accessible – simple but not simplistic, as he puts it – the book also shows signs of hasty assemblage, perhaps to ensure its publication at the commencement of the national consultation process. The combination of history lesson, human rights primer, and polemic is occasionally disjointed. Some of the technical detail is sketchy (though never unclear); readers might choose to fill in gaps with more sober texts. Most significantly, because the book is so compressed, there is not always space for Robertson to expand upon his themes. For instance, while his potted history of human rights from the Magna Carta to the International Criminal Court provides useful background, and while it emphasises Australia’s vital role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a similar discussion in Robertson’s landmark work Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (third edition, 2006) is considerably more comprehensive, honed, and eloquent.

It is never a good moment at a party when, after one and a half drinks, the person you’re talking to pronounces herself ‘a little bit crazy’. You haven’t, as a rule, stumbled into the company of a psychopath; more probably, the opposite. The person who feels the need to claim craziness is nearly always the dullest, most conformist person in the room, and now you need to find a civil way of escaping her. Something similar obtains with self-­attributions of a good sense of humour.

Australians are the funniest people on earth. Just ask any of us. Our wonderful sense of humour is what defines us as a nation, especially against the former or current imperial powers (‘great and powerful friends’, as we like to call them). We are a larrikin race, unencumbered by old-­world pomposities. The worst mistake any Australian can make is to be seen to take herself too seriously. Laughter frees us to be authentically ourselves.

This is an exhilarating coverage of everything to do with the politics of the Middle East. Gilles Kepel takes the reader on a journey over the trouble spots and offers a bird’s eye view of the complexities of Islamic radicalism in the region. The book starts slowly but soon settles into a quick pace, taking the reader from place to place and event to event with case and mastery. Kepel does not shy away from displaying his intricate knowledge of Islam and the Middle East, a habit that might not agree with every reader; but it does help the novice to navigate the many issues that interweave into a grand narrative regarding the evolving nature of jihad.

Acts of suicide terrorism perpetrated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates were carried out by Sunni Muslims. What is often forgotten is that martyrdom has been a staple of Shi’a doctrine since the community’s foundation. In 680 CE, near Karbala (in today’s Iraq), Yazid, the Sunni caliph who ruled from Damascus, murdered Imam Husayn, the son of Imam Ali (the fourth caliph for Sunnis and the first Imam for the Shi’a), along with his companions. Every year, in rallies and self-flagellatory processions, the Shi’a community commemorates the legendary martyrdom of Husayn. The Shi’a maintain a vivid memory of Husayn’s sacrifice.

Following the formation of the Shi’a Islamic Republic in Iran, the Shi’a ulema encouraged the elevation of martyrdom from symbolism to a military strategy. The organised suicide of tens of thousands of young boys at the Iran–Iraq front allowed the Iranian régime to stem Saddam’s advance and to match Iraq’s motorised superiority. Kepel argues that this organised and hierarchical approach to suicide missions, glorified as martyrdom, was adopted by Hezballah in the war against Israel. The military discipline of Shi’a candidates for martyrdom made them highly effective weapons of war. But as Kepel points out, the adoption of the notion of martyrdom by Sunni groups led to a diffusion of hierarchy. While the Shi’a martyrdom operations were carefully organised by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or by Hezballah to target enemy combatants, ‘Sunni suicide bombers targeted military personnel and civilians indiscriminately.’

Robert L. Park is an American professor of physics who has taken up the sword against superstition and wobbly science. In an earlier book, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000), he assailed pseudoscientific delinquents and pretenders, and some of its themes reappear in Superstition. But the majority of the new book’s bogeys are generally acknowledged to be remote from science: religion, creationism or intelligent design, vitalism and the soul, reincarnation, the power of prayer, divine agency in cataclysms, New Age mysticism, homeopathy, and a host of related things. A few of the targets, such as acupuncture, space colonisation and the ‘quantum mysticism’ conjured from alleged mind-involvement in quantum phenomena, may be thought by some to border on (good) science, but not by Park.

It is possible to sympathise with Park’s anxiety to stem the tide of the destructive religiosity, superstition, and prideful ignorance that menace our age, yet deplore this book. Superstition is a genial, entertaining and (to me) often congenial work, but its unreflective scientism, many slapdash passages, and superficial sketches and arguments do not recommend it as an exemplary contribution to achieving its ends.

Park likes to yarn, and his book combines argument with a great deal of easy anecdote: about eminent scientists, religious charlatans, the intelligent design wars, the politics of anti-science, dodgy research foundations and so on. Mingled with the anecdotes is more incisive work. Its implicit strategy is twofold. Park thinks that superstitions involve nutty explanations of phenomena that are in competition with science. So the first thing is to discredit them, one way or another; the second is to demonstrate the superiority of scientific explanations.

In TheGhost Writer (1979), the first of the nine Philip Roth novels in which Nathan Zuckerman plays a major role, the young Zuckerman uses a family squabble over an inheritance as the basis for a short story. His father is appalled. Why would Nathan depict his own family in such an unflattering light, perpetuate negative Jewish stereotypes, and give ammunition to anti-Semites? ‘You are not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it’s the truth,’ his father despairs. ‘But I did write it,’ Nathan replies. ‘I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story.’

Traditionally, there has been an almost physical force, like a law of gravitation, making Australian literature’s visibility in the United States an elusive phenomenon. This is not, contrary to received opinion, because Australian literature did not meet world standards. It is hard to conceive of Christopher Brennan, Joseph Furphy, and John Shaw Neilson not meeting ‘world standards’. What does this mean, anyway? It seems to indicate not just that the work is of merit but that it is aware of wider literary and cultural conversations. Brennan and Furphy’s overt intertextualities show their enmeshment with global literary developments. Neilson’s cosmopolitanism, as Helen Hewson has shown, is there, but is admittedly more difficult to discern. Yet Neilson’s poetry makes demands that show that pure poetry can be as indicative of sophistication as heavily allusive verse, as in ‘Song Be Delicate’:

Let your voice be delicate.

The bees are home:

All their day’s love is sunken

Safe in the comb.

 

Let your song be delicate.

Sing no loud hymn:

Death is abroad ... Oh, the black season!

The deep – the dim!

Gareth Evans has strong claims to being the most influential Australian political figure of the past half century on the international stage. As foreign minister, he helped bring about the Cambodia peace settlement and negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention. His energetic post-political life has encompassed the leadership of an outstanding non-government organisation, the International Crisis Group, and participation in the work of several important international commissions. His book is an account of the emergence of a new international norm – the responsibility to protect – by the person who has done more to develop it than any other: the ‘norm entrepreneur’ himself, in the language of some international relations theorists.

Terry Eagleton has been widely hailed as Britain’s most important contemporary literary critic. He is surely that, and a great deal more besides.

Marxist maverick, cultural theorist, budding novelist and playwright, he was for many years the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Having traded Oxford for the University of Manchester in the early 2000s, Eagleton has roamed the globe over recent years, speaking on such lofty topics as postmodernism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and it’s early in the morning, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond ... If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy ... What should you do?

Peter Singer first told this story in the early 1970s. Then, as now, the consistent response of listeners to Singer’s question is: well, obviously, one saves the child! What is a pair of shoes, or even a new suit, compared to the life of child. Anyone who placed footwear or fashion above the moral demand of a life in danger should surely be the subject of the most severe moral censure.

Andrew Sant’s tenth book of poems marks a new, welcome direction in his work. Many of his signature flourishes are still here: intimate, detailed observations on domestic life, travel, relationships, history, and popular music. But he has added something special: strange, unpredictable associations and a willingness to break free of the constraints that kept much of his formal, lyrical earlier work too circumscribed by its subject matter. It is hard to know if Sant has made a conscious decision to confront himself stylistically, or whether it has been an organic process. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. Whatever the case, it has worked. This is the book I have been hoping Sant would write.

According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were required to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital, to be aged between twenty-one and forty, and either single or widowed. The rules about marriage, however, were not always strictly observed, and as men sometimes fudged their age and other circumstances to get into the army, occasionally a woman may have disguised her marital status. But once in the Army Nursing Service, marriage usually meant resignation. If a nurse wished to keep working after she married, she had to join one of the private medical or hospital services that had come into being.

This novel is Sonia Orchard’s second book, published six years after her first, the compelling and intimate memoir Something More Wonderful (2003). For those who read the memoir – the harrowing story of her thirty-one-year-old friend’s battle with cancer – The Virtuoso may come as a surprise. Orchard has abandoned her own assured voice for that of a fictional and unreliable narrator, a young Englishman besotted with a concert pianist, slightly older than himself. The milieu is an eccentric circle of musicians and writers in 1940s London. If there is any similarity between Orchard’s memoir and her novel, it is the narrator’s stance as the observer, with a beloved and idealised friend at centre stage.

‘Read monkeys for pre-existence’ wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Darwin in one of his notebooks, pondering Plato’s assertion that our ‘imaginary ideas’ derive from the pre-existence of the soul. Two years earlier, when HMS Beagle had returned from its circumnavigation of the world, Darwin was still a creationist, albeit one who had entertained doubts. Keen to capitalise on his wide-ranging collection, and to make a name for himself, he arranged for various experts to examine the specimens. Fairly quickly during the ensuing discussions, Darwin realised that his doubts concerning the stability of species were ready to burgeon into a new and disturbingly materialist worldview.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

As a poet Robert Gray is a magical storyteller. His first poetry collection, Creekwater Journal (1974), marked out his key territory of interest: the small towns, rural communities, landscapes, and people of the New South Wales north coast. Although he has travelled widely and written about other cultures, cities, and characters, his poetry’s richness is still tethered to the textures, talk, and rhythms of his country town childhood. His word pictures immediately transport the reader to another place. The idea that ‘eucalypts are the blue of husky voices’ or the recognition of a long jetty and ‘a few gull­molested fishing boats’ are the images of a beguiling writer.

Gray’s most recent book, The Land I Came through Last, is described as ‘a family memoir’. In the preface, the author explains that in the beginning ‘this book was to be mainly about my parents’. Initially, he shunned the idea of an autobiography as distasteful or too difficult. However, in the process ‘of gathering people’s lives’, and as one memory led to another, that resistance was discarded.

Glowing reviews of an author one is not familiar with can inspire scepticism, but in the case of David Francis these tributes are justified. Stray Dog Winter – an impressive political thriller – is set mostly in Moscow in 1984, with occasional flashbacks to Melbourne during the 1970s.

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

The novel focuses on two couples who are associated with the (fictitious) Truggamora Museum, in Tasmania. The first couple comprises museum employee Robert and his partner, Lloyd, while the second comprises Lloyd’s ex-wife, Dorothy, and her partner, Cindy Lee. Both couples are ‘perfectly happy’ and enjoy a close friendship that is sorely tested when Cindy Lee asks Robert to donate sperm to help her conceive.

Imagine a street with a neo-Gothic church, a fish and chip shop, and bronze statues of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and Shakespeare. Someplace in England? No, it’s Thames Town, a satellite on the outskirts of Shanghai. German, Czech, Spanish, Scandinavian and American suburbs are also planned, to cater to the new Chinese middle class, for many of whom, like the Chinese for most of the twentieth century, ‘modern’ equals ‘Western’. Or recall your local Chinatown, with its ‘Chinese’ shops and restaurants, curved roof façades and resident diaspora, many of them convinced that they are preserving the ‘real’ Chinese culture, now lost in the mainland’s twentieth­century convulsions. How does each of these represent modern Chinese culture?

Moral panics, which Stanley Cohen, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), said involve any group of people who are defined as a threat to societal values and interests, were grist to John Howard’s mill during refugee debates. Applying the classic analysis, his governments were ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who employed scare tactics whenever a perceived threat arose. Asylum seekers and their supporters were ‘folk devils’, outsiders and deviants responsible for the problems placing our values and principles in jeopardy.

Stereotypes negate complexity, supplant individual attributes, and essentially dehumanise us. Are refugee advocates simply an amorphous group of naïve do-gooders, obstreperous students, and pungent radicals? In Blind Conscience, Margot O’Neill attempts to dismantle such typecasting by focusing on the ranks of a ‘new wave of refugee advocacy’, many of whom ‘abandoned holidays, nice restaurants, and weekend rest’, ‘became obsessed’ and sometimes ‘discovered a new purpose.’

There has always been a problem with locating conservatism in Australia’s political traditions. As a new settler society dedicated to development, it is hard to see a natural place for a political philosophy that advocates taking things slowly and respecting the wisdom of the past. Nevertheless, the term has been in use as a political label in Australia since the nineteenth century, generally to refer to the defence of privilege and wealth and to the political arrangements that protect them both. It is often used to refer to the Liberal Party and its predecessors, even if at various times these parties have themselves denied the label in favour of the term liberal which stresses the party’s positive commitment to civil and economic liberties and its faith in individual rather than collective and state action. And recently John Howard proudly described himself as a cultural conservative and an economic liberal, as if one could promote radical economic change without also causing cultural and social change.

These are witty, sometimes boisterous, and meditative poems. There is a consistency of craft but an intriguing variety, and perhaps even contradictoriness, to their desires. Each poem is a little box of longing: for courage, for calmness, for love, for transcendence. Equally, the poems are often pleas for the self to abandon desire in its grasping forms, ‘to be whittled down to a twig & grow again into a tree’.

‘Two Ways Out’, the eponymous poem, lays out the map of the book: the human, desiring machine who must choose between opposing impulses: the ascetic and the rococo, two distinct paths by which to escape ‘the insufferable / medium of a par-boiled heart’. The poem, as with the volume, leaves you understanding something of both poetic journeys. Sometimes the two collide or are enmeshed in each other, in the figure of the poet who craves transcendence but who is impatient, who hasn’t ‘time to wait for grace’.

In life, timing is everything. Charles Darwin’s classifications of the species appeared in England at a moment when religious dogmatism was not powerful enough to suppress his notions about evolution. In the 1940s Alfred Kinsey turned his attention from gall wasps to the scrutiny of human sexual behaviour. He would not have got away with it in rural Indiana but for chance events, including a great university president (Herman Wells), who defended his work and was probably himself homosexual.

Likewise, with the influential eighteenth-century English legal taxonomist, William Blackstone. His life as an undistinguished barrister, an academic, and a Tory parliamentarian would have disappeared without trace but for the American Revolution of 1776. The loss by the American colonies of their institutional connections to the common law of England had two important consequences for the Commentaries on the Law of England that Blackstone had written at Oxford a decade or so before. First, his four-volume work, summarising the basic rules and principles of English law, contained plenty of great quotations on the ‘absolute right of individuals’, as well as on the traditional liberties of Englishmen. These purple passages were enthusiastically embraced by the revolutionaries looking for a respected expression of their ideals.

As I sat down to write this review, two news stories jostled for prominence on the ABC’s website. One was the unfolding story of two brothers who were trapped on Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain. Only one brother would come back (the other fell 500 metres to his death). Lincoln Hall would understand what the brothers went through. Hall is an Australian mountaineer who was, famously or infamously, left for dead at 8700 metres on Mt Everest. Having made the summit, Hall was heading back down with sherpas when he was struck down by an oedema, a brain malfunction caused by oxygen deprivation. His body gave out. Without a pulse or any sign of life, Hall was abandoned on a rocky ledge. (Ten days earlier, an English climber had been left to die on the mountain as others trekked past him. Hall was luckier, but both these events sparked condemnation, including from Sir Edmund Hillary.)

Katherine Johnson’s first novel, Pescador’s Wake, is a well-paced account of the pursuit of a Uruguayan vessel that has been fishing illegally for Patagonian toothfish in Australian territorial waters south of Heard Island. What follows is a stern chase. The Pescador is followed across thousands of nautical miles by another fishing boat, the Australis (from Hobart), which for six months of the year is chartered by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to deter fish poachers. Johnson’s narrative cuts between action on the two vessels, hauling gales in waters near Antarctica, and more muted domestic dramas in Uruguay and Australia.

Black Saturday

The devastating Victorian bushfires of early February seem to have changed the state forever. The death toll, still not confirmed as we go to print, is incredible. The natural environment, always fragile in this state, has never seemed so vulnerable. It will take decades to recover.

Our condolences go to all the victims of the fires. Few Victorians were unaffected, directly or indirectly. Last month, in his ABR review of Tim Birkhead’s The Wisdom of Birds, Peter Menkhorst cited the internationally renowned La Trobe University ornithologist Richard Zann. Dr Zann, along with his wife and daughter, died in the Kinglake fire.

ABR wishes to donate books and magazines to affected communities and their public libraries. This is difficult at present. Two thousand houses and libraries – private or institutional – have been destroyed. The Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Booksellers’ Association and the Australian Publishers’ Association (of which ABR is a member) have joined forces to restock libraries and schools in devastated areas.

In the meantime, if you know of any individuals who have lost their libraries, please contact the Editor, who will endeavour to arrange a suitable donation.

Shimmying

Dear Editor.

It was a delight to go to my mailbox this morning and find the February issue of ABR. Two glimpses as I flicked through it have given me enough pleasure to last for the rest of the day, at least. One was to read Dorothy Porter’s poem, ‘Travel’. It is a moving and memorable epitaph for a great poet and performer, a ‘plucky traveller bird’. One question: is ‘shimmying-up-the-mask’ correct, or should it be ‘shimmying-up-the-mast’?

The second pleasure was to see Rachel Robertson’s photograph in Gay Bilson’s review (February 2009). I am delighted that Robertson’s essay ‘Reaching One Thousand’ was included in The Best Australian Essays 2008, and on the strength of that alone will buy the volume.

Which brings me to a note of thanks. I have received the splendid deluxe edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, my voter’s prize for nominating Robertson’s essay for the John Button Reader’s Award. This is a gift that will last me for the rest of my reading, editing and writing days. I hope that the John Button Reader’s Award competition will be run again, and that more readers will support it, giving back something for the pleasure and instruction of reading a variety of fine essays on diverse subjects every month.

Christina Houen, Perth, WA 

The line should indeed have run ‘in Blake’s shimmying-up-the-mast’. Ed.

Christina Hill replies to Elizabeth Lawson

Dear Editor,

In her letter to the editor (February 2009), Elizabeth Lawson addresses my review of Peter Goldsworthy’s latest novel, Everything I Knew (November 2008). After generously concurring with my assessment of the novel as ‘overwrought and undisciplined’, Lawson poses a question about Goldsworthy’s intertextual/intra-literary references to John Shaw Neilson. Penola and Robbie Burns and asks whether some cognisance of these might have ‘modified’ my review.

What Lawson (I think too kindly) calls ‘the novel’s pointed intrigue with lyricism’ does not rescue the novel from its excesses. On the contrary, I thought this ‘intrigue’ altogether too ‘pointed’, a manoeuvre that seemed both meretricious and gestural rather than integral to a plot already seriously overloaded.

We respond to narrative in terms of our frame of values, our interests and our personal history, and the representation of the teacher-student relationship compelled my attention. I had made a number of negative comments in the review and, in the space allotted to me, I particularly wanted to include some recognition of Goldsworthy’s courage in challenging the mantra of adolescent innocence. This meant that I had to omit comment upon the literary references, which. anyway, did not ‘do it’ for me.

Christina Hill, Melbourne, VIC

Chancing her arm

Dear Editor,

In her review of Jill Roe’s full-dress biography of Miles Franklin (February 2009), Kerryn Goldsworthy misunderstands its scale and method, finding a major flaw in a main virtue: ‘the book is a magnificent feat of exhaustive research but that is one of its major disadvantages: the reader must plough through [excessive detail] ... until ... quite benumbed by facts … [Roe] too seldom chances her arm in a passage of speculation, summary, analysis or overview ...’

This complaint reappears some half a dozen times, like an insistent undertow. Goldsworthy blames Roe’s ‘methodology’ as ‘an empiricist historian’. This reductive description is pejorative; ‘empiricist’ usually means reliance on fact, but has come also to mean an overreliance. Moreover, biographies combine ‘empiricism’ with other methods. Unfortunately, ‘empiricism’ has developed a disparaging meaning in literary studies, prompting dismissive references to ‘mere’ empiricism or archival work. Meanwhile, rich literary deposits in archives around Australia, acquired at great public expense, are underused. Yet supposedly, and oddly, ‘the [biography’s] biggest weakness is that Roe is rather too much of an historian’.

The massive detail of this biography is indeed, as Goldsworthy argues, a major challenge. It is also a ‘chancing of [Roe’s] arm’. Two unasked questions arise: does the nature of Franklin’s life make Roe’s approach appropriate; and does it bring Franklin effectively to life? Goldsworthy aptly refers to ‘the breadth and complexity’ of Franklin’s experiences: ‘It is the story of a life full of travel, friendship, politics and writing.’ The life is even richer than this. Rather than ‘politics’ as such, Franklin committed herself to social activism and involvement, while her creative writing, much of it unpublished, always continued. (The journalism, co-edited by Roe, is passed over here.) Franklin’s causes were many and various. If Franklin was ‘best known for her nationalism’, it flowed into many causes. No one of her times – except the Palmers – did so much as Franklin to raise the status and independence of Australian culture, literature in particular. The public literary prize is only the visible index of her founding work. The speeches and journalism she wrote with vigour and humour, laced with a mischievous style, make her one of our most humorous writers.

The biography’s massive detail, selected and woven into a composed narrative is not, as Goldsworthy states, a question of ‘overstuffing’. To claim that the book ‘goes some way towards conveying the dense texture of Franklin’s life’ is ungenerous. Readers will deeply feel the density of the representation of the living out of the life, in both its private and public aspects. For the most part, Roe calculatingly stands back, leaving readers free to ‘speculate’. The passion of the biographer and subject is in the detail. To take one example: Roe depicts Franklin’s education at a ‘bush school’ in enthralling richness. Franklin was self-educated apart from that.

This is a monumental biography, a tribute to a notable Australian.

Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, QLD 

Kerryn Goldsworthy replies:

Dear Editor,

That great original of Australian letters, Gerald Murnane, once remarked that the only true map of a country is the country itself. (I paraphrase, of necessity, but that is the gist of what he said.) The same applies to book reviews. If one is faced with the task of reviewing a 700-page book in 2,000 words, then inevitably the account will be a summary view, and there will be some people familiar with the territory who take issue with the way the map has been drawn. But given that my review of Professor Roe’s biography was overall a very positive one, I am bemused by Professor Hergenhan’s representation of it here, in which I barely recognise what I thought I had written.

When he says that I ‘misunderstand the book’s scale and method’, what he appears to mean is that he disagrees with me about it. When he uses the words ‘complaint’ and ‘blame’ he is misrepresenting the review, in which I was making observations and neither complaining nor blaming. When he says the word ‘empiricist’ is ‘pejorative’ and ‘disparaging’, I can only reply that he may think so but that I was not using it that way, and indeed I have great respect for facts myself. The point was that Professor Roe’s empiricist approach led to what I thought an occasional overemphasis on factual detail at the expense of more analytical, abstract or speculative passages – passages which, as I said in the review, I thought Professor Roe had written brilliantly well and of which I would have liked to read more.

The remark about her being too much of an historian was part of a larger observation, and if Professor Hergenhan thinks it looks ‘odd’ out of context, then it would be a simple matter for him to put it back in. Of course, one can-not be too much of an historian, if one is writing history – but if one is writing biography then perhaps, in my view, one can.

Professor Hergenhan appears to be leaping chivalrously but unnecessarily to the defence of two women who have not actually been attacked. I made it clear in my review that I admire Professor Roe’s book, with that one reservation, very much. And I found it unnecessary to waste any of my 2000 words in talking about how wonderful Miles Franklin was, not least because that is something that everybody already knows. The job of the reviewer is not, in my view, to heap unqualified praise upon books, their authors and their subjects, but as far as I can make out, Professor Hergenhan’s main complaint is that I did not do so.

Kerryn Goldsworthy, Queenstown, SA

Final assembly to remember

Dear Editor,

I was delighted to read the account of Valentine Leeper’s ‘intrusion’ at the final assembly at Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, quoted by John Rickard in his review of Marion Poynter’s book on Valentine’s letters (February 2009). This amazing incident was the highlight of my final assembly at the school. I remember being ‘shocked and amazed’ and secretly thrilled that anyone would dare disrupt such a solemn event – and Valentine was right, as always! A memory to treasure.

Rosemary Goad, Middle Park, VIC

Apology to Michael Brennan

Dear Editor,

In my review of Michael Brennan’s Unanimous Night (February 2009), I ascribed the death of his brother – the subject of an extended sequence – to suicide. The poem itself never says this was the cause of death. I am mortified not only at my interpretative error but at the distress this must have caused to family and friends. I hope they will accept this apology – it was an innocent mistake.

Martin Duwell, The Gap, QLD

ABR regrets this mistake and apologises to Michael Brennan and his family. Ed.

Yellow Jacket
Vespula maculifrons

The washing line
hangs across the backyard,
slung from makeshift post
to post;
our clothes brush
lazily
against the
yarrow, their toes in the
goldenrod;
they sway in the warm breeze,
soaked as they are
in sunshine,
while I unpeg and fold
dreamily,
into the basket.