sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,
a few winter wattles, and catch a magpie or two
warbling in a melaleuca, when I took a track
I’d never taken before, through light scrub first
and then a scrappy paddock, across a wet gully,
then into another paddock? Beyond a paling fence
appeared then, gradually, first the corrugated roof
and then the bare weatherboard walls of what I
suddenly recognised as The Southern Cross Home .

One stair was gone, and the long veranda where
once two dozen of us had washed side by side
in our own bucket and bowl every morning now
had a few treacherous board ends and a couple
of shin-threatening gaps, and much of the paint
was peeling and lifting. One end was defended
by a turret of lantana, swaying its cachous of red
and yellow and white, the end near the room
I’d shared with three others, to a total of thirteen.
I noticed that not a window was broken, though

all now had newspapers pasted over them, inside.
I had merely chanced here, but how quickly now
I felt compelled to find my old room, breathe it.
Lantana had thicketed the corner of the veranda
as surely as in the fairy tale, but I considered
the art of slighting, and crouched low enough
to enter the musty darkness beneath the place,
brushing cobwebs from my shoulders as I sought
a gap in the floorboards. One I found admitted
my hands and no more, yielded to my efforts,

the breaking of splintery timber bursting dust
into my eyes a moment. I wriggled up into the hall,
saw the shapes where pictures had been removed,
stepped gingerly towards my dorm, pulled the knob
towards me till the door yielded suddenly and
dustily, then stepped towards the corner where
my bunk had been, lower at first till Henry left,
then the upper during Albert, Peder, and Vince.
Without intention, I felt on the door frame where
I’d pocket-knifed my height each year. Inhaled

but smelled nothing of then, only the sweeting
decay of this moment. But lantana too, one cane
of it through the wall, actually two. And two paces
to peel 17 March 1986 off the window in three
deft swathes, and to see the lantana becoming
a part of the building. And, concentrating, to see
Saxon Creek was silent now, a gully where once
a stream had sung to us all night. And the singing
flowed down my cheeks for Albert, Peder, Vince
and Henry and all the others in that faraway dorm.

And did I break the window and climb out; did I
scrabble through the lantana; did I stride down
the slope to the creek whose singing waters were
now no more than a gully-bog? Did I stumble back
to the picnic-ground with its signs of invitation
and warning and drink from its bubbler? And did I
unlock my late-model car, wryly recalling a camera
still in the glove-box; and did I drive away then,
thumbing memory’s album, trying to flick
its fading polaroids out of the window?
Later, bathe my scratches against infection?

Each year on Australia Day, newspaper readers disinter their magnifying glasses and begin to inch down the columns of this year’s national honours like proofreaders at a gala ball. And each list produces its surprises, its gratifications and its absurdities. Normally, ABR doesn’t concern itself overmuch with prizes and such. Laurels grow like grapes in this country. But the absence of creative writers this year was so marked as to warrant comment.

ABR is not the only malcontent in this regard. On Australia Day, David Marr published an article titled ‘Where are the ridgy-didge artists?’ (Sydney Morning Herald). Marr highlighted the paucity of actors, directors, playwrights, dancers, poets, screenwriters, and composers on the list, and expressed the hope that next year’s list might reflect ‘the Australia we most admire’. Reading this article, I thought of withdrawing from the field. David Marr – one of our finest and most forensic journalists – had put the case well for greater inclusion of creative artists, and he doesn’t need my endorsement. But then I began to consider the proportional representation of authors, and persevered.

As always, there are at least a couple of ABR connections, which is pleasing. Louise Adler – currently the CEO at Melbourne University Press – edited the magazine in 1988. She gets an AM (as does Patrick Gallagher, Executive Chairman and Publishing Director of Allen & Unwin, Australia’s largest independent publisher). Susan Crennan (AC), a Justice of the High Court of Australia, served on the ABR board in the 1990s. Elsewhere, Ann Galbally (of the University of Melbourne), who has published extensively in art history, received an AM. Diane Langmore, departing General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, also got an AM. Veteran literary agent Rosemary Creswell received an OAM.

These are worthy recipients, and we congratulate them. But where are the creative writers, those without senior academic or professional careers? An inspection of the complete list of recipients of the AC, the AO, the AM and the OAM since the scheme’s creation in 1975 (see www.itsanhonour.gov.au) is very revealing.

The proportion of literary recipients is small, and declining. (Compare it with sportsmen and -women or captains of industry and one’s spirits wilt.) In recent years, practically everyone cited for ‘service to literature’ has had another significant career (often one for which they are principally known) – e.g., professor or emeritus professor, jurist, educationist, publisher, editor, critic. There are few full-time creative writers: the novelists and poets and dramatists who work in solitude, without tenure or salaries, often with minimal financial security and superannuation.

Almost invariably in recent years, those who have been gonged have been so at the lower levels – and let’s not be coy about the hierarchy built into this system. The gradations (AC, AO, AM, OAM) are stark, and keenly noted. Here we must cite the ludicrous case of Peter Porter’s OAM in 2004, which can only be attributed to a stubborn resentment that this Brisbane-born writer has chosen for half a century to contribute at the highest level to English-language poetry from London rather than on the Loddon.

David Marr, in his SMH article, mentioned several notable writers ‘still to be recognised by the nation’: Helen Garner, Peter Carey, Shirley Hazzard, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, and Tim Winton.

It is possible – likely, even – that some writers have declined to be nominated for national honours. Some may have no desire to receive such honours from the Council of the Order of Australia, chaired as it is by the queen’s representative in Australia. It is also possible that some writers have declined national honours on being offered one. In this they would be echoing the war historian C.E.W. Bean who in 1940 politely declined a knighthood thus: ‘I have for many years believed that in Australia the interests of the nation would be best served by the elimination of social distinctions … [I]t seems to me that in practice, despite certain advantages, the system encourages false values among our people.’

A genteel convention encourages, perhaps even requires, those so minded not to promulgate their decision to decline national honours. They doubtless form a notable cohort – a kind of salon des refusés. But in a way that is beside the point. The present system is a fait accompli, unlikely to change; and it should be a balanced and inclusive one.

Australians, proud of their supposed classlessness, tend to disparage British honours (all those archaic knighthoods), but a glance at the list of the highly prestigious, twenty-four-strong Order of Merit (in the gift of the monarch) is instructive. Tom Stoppard, Lucian Freud, Anthony Caro, David Attenborough and a certain Australia coloratura soprano are there. How conservative our body of AC’s (all 405 of them to date) looks by comparison, with its preponderance of businessmen, multi-millionaires or billionaires, wealthy philanthropists, jurists and vice-regents, and former politicians and public servants.

The following have all received an AC: Nicole Kidman, Rupert Murdoch, John Coates, George Pell and Kerry Packer. Why not some of these: Rosemary Dobson (AO, 1987), Tom Keneally (AO, 1983) Christopher Koch (AO, 1995), David Malouf (AO, 1987), Frank Moorhouse (AM, 1985), Les Murray (AO, 1989)? Note the dates. Most of these writers have been rather productive since then. But evidently, national values and priorities have changed.

If we must have national honours, if we really believe that exceptional people should be lauded in this way, then creative writers should be represented alongside the moguls and the cricketers and the film actors and the swarm of state governors. Otherwise we will end up with a mickey-mouse system that no one respects – another cosy club for the wealthy, the powerful, and the well affiliated.

Almost thirty years on, in a post-Samaranch age, when the wealthy Olympic movement mimics the United Nations in world affairs, the 1980 Moscow Games resemble prehistory, especially for Australian athletes, officials and spectators still revering 2000 Sydney successes. Yet as Lisa Forrest recounts, the Moscow boycott shredded the traditional views of Australian sports people, ensured national sport would become more politicised, and produced shameful behaviour all round.

I first heard of Martin Boyd at a dinner party in the Cotswolds in the early 1980s. At the time I was adapting a novel by Rosamond Lehmann for the BBC, an enterprise with unexpected hazards, as Rosamond was very much alive and keen to be involved in the process. I had just begun my account of driving to the studio with Rosamond – a formidable and still beautiful woman, who relied on God to solve her parking problems – when the guest of honour, sitting opposite me, interrupted.

‘Forget Rosamond Lehmann,’ he said. ‘Martin Boyd is the bloke you should be adapting. Fabulous stories. Great characters. If you don’t snap him up, someone else will. His novels are crying out to be made into films.’

The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.

January 5:

Planning for the Australian Poetry Centre (APC), thanks to the largesse of CAL; we’ll be in ‘Glenfern’, the handsome Boyd/a’Beckett house in St Kilda. Otherwise I’m feeling fit as a whippet, unlike Peter Costello.

January 17:

Drove to windy Ballarat for Jan Senbergs’s drawings, David Hansen keeping us wittily diverted – the drawings, after 1992, suddenly very good, as Jan’s crowded Middle Park studio had given him cramped interiors, away from surreal cities. Out in the street, I saw someone who resembled Paul Kane, and uttered a tentative ‘Paul?’ – there they were, Paul and Tina, far from New York – so they persuaded us to drive north, coming to side roads that, like Donne’s pursuit of truth, ‘about must and about must go’. It perched on the bald head of an old volcano, in the full tug of wind: ‘The council engineer said we had to chain it to the hill.’

Sign outside a semi-rural house: DECORATED EGGS AND HAND-MADE BEARS.

The next day, sticky. Reading Tolstoy, Marjane Satrapi and Hazel Rowley. Decided to go to Paris in June for the poetry festival. Why not? There’s only one life, or so. Auden once said that Rilke was the best lesbian poet since Sappho. Off to the NGV for How Darkly’s retrospective: early black-and-white works were quite subtle – ditto a quadripartite tattooed man, and the admired suburb-scapes – but his psychedelic heads were a drug addict’s crap. Trout for dinner. Unbelievably witty TLS review by Claude Rawson, of a literary history.

Fear of Tennis is David Cohen’s quirky and absurd first novel. It features the obsessive Mike Planner, whose interests include court reporting and bathrooms. When he bumps into Jason Bunt, his best friend from high school, Mike recalls how they fell out.

At the centre of the story is a bizarre struggle towards redemption; Mike wants to atone for a past sin and believes that Jason’s series of ‘challenges’ are a way to do just that. So, somewhat perplexingly, Mike, who has never been interested in sport, begins to swim and play tennis, frequenting the gym with increasing regularity.

As survival memoirs go, Lifelines is unusual in at least one respect. Peter Couche has managed to write this book over a period of thirteen years, while almost completely paralysed and unable to speak after a stroke. With the small amount of movement left in his index finger, he uses a computer to write.

The first of Western Australia’s 9,000 or so adult convicts were not transported there until 1850, but 234 boys from the Parkhurst Reformatory, on the Isle of White, had been sent to the colony in the 1840s. Classified as ‘Government Juvenile Immigrants’, they became apprentice settlers. Among them was fifteen-year-old John Gavin, the first European to be executed in Western Australia. David Hutchison’s novel Many Years a Thief evokes the crime from the perspective of the fair-minded government guardian to the boys, John Schoales, who, wracked by guilt, begins an investigation that will, in turn, bring about his ruin.

This review of some contentious criminal cases in Australia over the last thirty years purports to demonstrate how the processes of the criminal law may, if mishandled, produce an unsafe conviction. The author has made her own investigations into most of the cases. She outlines her own discoveries and compares these to the findings of the police and the courts.

Unfortunately, these private enquiries add nothing of substance to the facts already on the public record. Nor has the author accurately represented the evidence admitted at the various trials and inquests that she reviews. Instead of a comprehensive analysis and reasoned assessment of each case, the author presents a selection of the relevant facts garnished with generalisations and unsupported assertions: ‘in some circles, getting ahead in the police seemed to be a matter of “keeping your arse covered”’; a police task squad is said to have been ‘given an open chequebook’ to try to ‘nail’ a suspect.

It is hard to become excited about Peter Carey’s new novel, and that is a hard notion to entertain. We are used to being tested, and vastly entertained, by Carey. For a quarter of a century he has written distinctive and highly original fiction, including two or three books (notably True History of the Kelly Gang [2000] for this writer) that triumphantly fulfilled the novel’s enduring claim on our attention. This new work – though comparably imaginative in places – seems to mark not so much a falling-off as a kind of marking time.

The tasteful title of this autobiography echoes the story once told of how the ebullient Italian producer Filippo Del Guidice performed the same disservice to J. Arthur Rank and survived to become a force in the British film industry. David Stratton, after looking sideways in a Venetian toilet, never looked back – despite Fellini’s understandable choler.

Travellers who go to Beijing usually visit the Great Wall. Along the way the government tour operators often take them to the Ming tombs, the final resting place of thirteen of the sixteen emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), three of which are now open to the public. The underground mausoleums have been cleared of all the grave goods and works of art that were set there to accompany the dead. They are bare, and rather too well illuminated, so that each successive room with its high ceiling looks like an empty warehouse. But the scale of the project is staggering. The intention of this sophisticated civilisation was to reproduce the world of the living in a parallel world of the dead in which emperors, empresses and attendants would commune with their ancestors and descendants forever. It is far from the in-your-face modernity of today’s Beijing or Shanghai, hard-wired into the now, with their whirring commerce and endless construction sites. Nor, one might think, does the remarkable enterprise of the Ming, that audacious and expensive attempt to recreate eternity in a physical form on earth, have any parallel in the West. But perhaps it is closer than we think.

Defending Darleen Bungey

Dear Editor,

To write the biography of an artist as prolific and complex as Arthur Boyd is an ambitious undertaking, as Ian Britain notes in his review of Darleen Bungey’s account (February 2008). Her book took seven years to research and write; it underwent considerable peer review.

As its commissioning editor, I was delighted by Bungey’s highly original, imaginative and evocative prose. If Britain prefers, as he states, ‘the austerities of Franz Philipp’s seminal study ... Janet McKenzie’s beautifully economical monograph ... the poised, elegant restraint of Brenda Niall’, then he is so patently lacking in sympathy with this endeavour that he is unlikely to be fair to its author. And he isn’t.

Marion Halligan is a long-established fiction writer with an impressive list of publications. Even readers with only partial familiarity will recall that many of her novels have been informed by autobiographical material reflecting personal leanings and experiences, particularly her fondness for France, food and cooking, and the profound grief she sustained when her husband died. But in 2006 she changed direction, plunging into crime fiction with The Apricot Colonel, to which she has now produced a sequel. Both are written in the first person by a narrator called Cassandra Travers, a book editor.

Like the theatre backstage, the artist’s studio has the look, sound and smell of the creative moment. For romantics, this is the place where genius ignites invention, where the down-to-earth mess of paints, brushes and canvas is transformed by an inspiring atmosphere. For historians such as Alex Taylor, however, the myth masks a different kind of reality: the social manoeuvring, economic strategies and self-conscious publicity of artists in search of a living. His scholarly book is a welcome alternative to recent photographic publications that attest to the continuing glamour of artists in their studios.

Peter Sculthorpe must already be the most written-about of Australian composers, by a comfortable margin. One might legitimately wonder whether we need another Sculthorpe book in preference to an in-depth study of one of his comparatively neglected colleagues. However, this imbalance is not merely quantitative, but points to an underlying phenomenon: Sculthorpe’s position, in the concert-going public’s imagination, as the very incarnation of Australian ‘serious’ music. This phenomenon is, in a way, the real subject matter of Graeme Skinner’s new book – a meticulously detailed biography not only of the man but also of his almost mythic persona as The Great Australian Composer, created by Sculthorpe himself and by others.

Though he died a quarter of a century ago, the life and career of the Australian-born reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911–83) continue to attract significant critical attention. On the heels of Tom Heenan’s political biography, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (2006), and Burchett’s re-released autobiography, also edited by Burchett’s son George and Nick Shimmin (2007), comes this collection of Burchett’s writings, spanning much of his long, eventful career.

That Burchett remains a controversial figure is testament to the power of the passions ignited by some of the great conflicts of the twentieth century. A maverick with an unerring scent for the vital stories of his time, Burchett possessed the courage, determination and savvy to get behind the lines of world-changing events.

For two decades of my life, I worked as a senior executive with first Rupert Murdoch and then Kerry Packer. These were challenging years, not without their hairy moments, but I always felt my best way of retaining any kind of perspective at that time was to conceive of myself as a bit player at the court of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century monarch.

Bruce Dover, in the 1990s, was attached to the court of the Sun King (aka Rupert Murdoch) at the time when he was attempting to negotiate a series of treaties with the highly exotic imperium headquartered behind the walls of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Dover sees with great clarity all the jockeying for position and for favouritism on the Chinese side; but he does not seem to see quite as clearly the mirror image of that struggle – the jockeying at the Murdoch Court. Nonetheless, from his position of considerable advantage, he has a mighty tale to tell that is both riveting and revealing.

Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly (1946), and the Ramingining artists’ Aboriginal Memorial (1988), are the only two Australian works in a new and highly commercial picture book, 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity across Time and Space. The Ramingining installation of 200 painted hollow-log poles, the kind used as containers for human bones, was categorised as ‘Aboriginal Culture’. Nolan’s painting was categorised as an example of ‘Surrealism’, but the caption concluded, sensibly, with the concession that he was more than a Surrealist: ‘Ultimately Nolan never adopted a single idiom, instead exploring different moods and techniques to portray his themes of injustice, love, betrayal and the enduring Australian landscape.’

Published last year by Phaidon, the blockbuster volume of one thousand full-page images was a response to the recent push towards ‘world art history’, currently a hot topic in the international art-history profession. It was convenient for Phaidon to select two works from a museum, the National Gallery of Australia, experienced in servicing requests from publishing houses, but it was nevertheless a pretty good choice for Australia’s most conspicuous appearance in a book of this kind.

‘Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it,’ wrote Watkin Tench of his companions on the First Fleet. Governor Phillip’s 1786 Commission had instructed him to build castles. Fitting their vision of the new into the old, settlers named the rocky outcrop above Middle Harbour as ‘Edinburgh Castle’, below which, in 1905, Henry Willis built ‘Innisfallen’, one of many would-be castles strewn around the continent. The newcomers’ lament that the local flowers were scentless and the birds songless had its parallel in the regret that settler Australia would never support a literary culture because it lacked ruins.

Walter Burley Griffin (WBG) and Marion Mahony Griffin (MMG) placed themselves in the middle of these matters when they launched the Greater Sydney Development Association (GSDA) in 1920. On one hand, they promoted and protected native flora and fauna; the women on the estate were blocking bulldozers fifty years before the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush who created the first Sydney environmental ban on a development. Yet the Griffins wrote of ‘pulpit rocks, grottoes, cascades and glades’ – the metaphoric language of the European landscapes, erased in the 1940s by the maligned Jindyworobaks.

At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from events in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – the subject of his trial – Milošević manipulated every legal avenue available to him, giving the impression that, like the farcical and chaotic litigation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own (1994), the trial was meaningless, ultimately ‘about itself’.

Gideon Boas (now a legal academic at Monash University) was the Senior Legal Officer to the presiding judges on the Milosević trial, and was present in the courtroom for much of it. He witnessed at close hand Milošević’s attempts to subvert the proceedings and the judges’ efforts to rein him in. But his book is not a memoir of the inner workings of the Tribunal or an account of the courtroom theatrics. The Milošević Trial is a scholarly and sometimes dense account – based on Boas’s PhD thesis – of the aspects of criminal procedure that attained pivotal importance to the conduct of the trial.

‘I want to be buried on top of Connor’s Hill, the mountain at the head of the Tambo Valley in East Gippsland.’ These were the words that came into Barry Heard’s mind as he faced death in the jungle in Vietnam in August 1967, an episode recounted in his first memoir, Well Done, Those Men (2005). Later in that book, Heard recalled another near-death experience, when his mind turned again to Connor’s Hill: ‘I was in a warm, soft place that was bright, peaceful and beautiful, like the top of Connor’s Hill. It was where I wanted to be.’

In Heard’s second book, The View from Connor’s Hill, we hear all about the idyllic place that his soul returns to in moments of extreme stress. This sunny anecdotal memoir is a prequel to Heard’s darker memoir Well Done, Those Men, which has become a widely read and loved work about the experience of a Vietnam Veteran, detailing not only the training and the combat, but also the years of post-traumatic stress disorder that Heard suffered before reaching a turning point and starting to write.

Addition is a trojan horse of a novel. It has a cutesy cover (featuring amorous toothbrushes), a kooky love story and a ‘hot’, wisecracking blonde heroine. There is a ‘hunky’ Irish love interest, Seamus O’Reilly, and a push-pull attraction of opposites between the romantic leads – whose first meeting, of course, is a witty war of words. But the heroine, Grace Vandenberg, is no ditsy Bridget Jones everywoman. She is an obsessive-compulsive counter who lives on a dis-ability pension; her only friends are her mother, her sister and her niece. And she is devastatingly smart.

So far, so quirky – but the really transgressive thing about Addition is the way it questions conventional lives. Most single-girl chick-lit (as opposed to yummy mummy chick-lit, an entirely different category) reaffirms that it is okay – even lovable – to carry a few extra kilos, to like chocolate, be born to shop and to dream of a big white wedding. It is all right to dream of a sexy boyfriend (and maybe a career to match) instead of the fabled wedding. Generally, it is all about celebrating the average.

Ninety years after the Great War, the bones of those who died are still rattling the consciences of succeeding generations. Two years ago, there were frantic diplomatic exchanges between Australia and Turkey as the possibility emerged that the remains of Anzacs may have been disturbed as a result of road widening – ironically, to enable contemporary pilgrims to ‘pay their respects’ to those very bones. A complex bureaucratic tug-of-war has also been simmering over the whereabouts of the bones of approximately 170 Australians who died behind German lines at the battle of Fromelles on 19–20 July 1916.

Fromelles, in northernmost France, is important for a number of reasons. It was the first major battle that Australians fought on the Western Front, involving the majority of the 15,000-strong Australian 5th Division. Over the course of the night, the Division suffered 5533 casualties, including more than 1800 men killed, making it the bloodiest twenty-four hours in Australian history. Because of the nature of the warfare, 1299 of these men’s remains were never identified. Crucially, it is believed that 170 bodies were not even recovered, and so, like countless thousands, their true fate was never fully established. That is, until Melbourne schoolteacher Lambis Englezos became obsessed with finding them. It is his latter-day search for these 170 that provides the impetus for Patrick Lindsay’s Fromelles.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell famously deplores Ernest’s loss of not one but both parents. The great polymath would approve of Peter Temple’s easy mastery of not just two but three popular literary genres. In the Jack Irish series, Temple created a likeable rogue who approximates a Melbourne private eye, and with The Broken Shore (2005) he won crime writing awards for a disciplined police procedural set in rural Victoria. In the Evil Day is an international thriller that moves mainly between Hamburg and London. Again, Temple’s control is strong and deft.

Temple assembles a large cast for this drama, and each character is distinctive and credible. Temple’s fine eye for observing and depicting human traits and idiosyncrasies ensures that not even his most minor players can be dismissed as caricatures. He also displays great skill in establishing settings and allowing scenes to unfold gradually, so that the reader’s imagination runs freely and every action seems natural. Temple has characters walk in the wind under ‘a sky to eternity, torn-tissue clouds’. A genre that sets stringent guidelines for authors quickly exposes weak writing as farcical, but Temple meets these demands without descending into cliché or resorting to parody.

Gary Catalano was, by profession, a writer about art. But he was also a fine poet with a distinctive style. On no account was he neglected – he appears in most anthologies that ought to include him – but he often seemed to be writing in an entirely different idiom from that of his contemporaries. He was difficult to place and thus, perhaps, difficult to appreciate.

When he died in his mid-fifties in 2002, Catalano left a nearly completed seventh book, The Master of Faux Bois. This, together with a selection from earlier books, makes up Ginninderra Press’s New and Selected Poems 1973–2002. It is worth buying for The Master of Faux Bois alone: more than forty new poems, all deriving from a stay in Paris and the south of France in 1997. Since Catalano’s world is so largely the world of the visual arts, this final book is a kind of coming home, neatly balancing the first book, Remembering the Rural Life (1978), which focused on a childhood spent in Brisbane and on his grandparents’ farm. There are different ways of belonging.

Competition, free enterprise and globalisation are regularly criticised today for a range of sins. A counterbalance to such criticism, Alan Greenspan’s view is that continuing the current free-market approach to managing economies is the only way to ensure prosperity in ‘The Age of Turbulence’ in which we live.

Greenspan, now in his eighty-second year, has been a significant participant in, and student of, the global economy for the past sixty years. Based on that experience and the positions he has held, with arguably unique access to information and the best economic minds, his clear view is that the continuous rise in prosperity and living standards in the United States and globally is a direct result of competition, free enterprise and flexible economies, with minimum government interference.

Like it or not, the American economy is the largest in the world and certainly the most significant in terms of the workings of global markets, notwithstanding the recent rise of China and India. Accordingly, this book is particularly interesting for the insights it provides into American economic decision-making over recent decades.

‘Why read Emile Zola?’ asks one of the contributors to this volume. ‘Because his representation of society’s impact on individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.’ The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, edited by Brian Nelson, Professor of French Studies at Monash University, will be of great assistance in reading and rereading this realist writer, and will doubtless become an indispensable tool for researchers and students.

What do these essays reveal? The fascination which the naturalist novelist Zola (1840–1902) still exercises on his readers because of the profoundly organic nature of his writing. Despite the meticulous planning and the scientific method and framework underlying his enterprise to describe the social and familial milieux (the subtitle of the twenty novels [1871–93] comprising Les Rougon-Macquart is The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire), Zola’s art stems from its evocative power, its descriptive force, in a word, its ‘excitement’.

Katherine Barnes’s book on Christopher Brennan (1870 – 1932) is unusual in the Australian academy in that the work does not much concern itself with postmodern theory, or the kinds of questions that might arise from Brennan’s oeuvre for a modern reader. It bypasses the more familiar kind of enquiry, such as the intriguing questions that Brennan might be seen to raise in relationship to psychoanalysis, and whether or not he might conceivably have been a first-wave feminist. It is something quite different: an enlivening scholarly engagement with Brennan’s sources, especially those available to him in Australia, in particular his esoteric sources.

The form of Barnes’s book may owe something to the fact that it is published by Brill (a religious studies publisher specialising in ancient cultures, and non-Eurocentric) in a series entitled ‘Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism’, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, a Dutch professor of religious studies who has written on Western Gnosticism and gender in religion. That Brennan was deeply engaged with the most avant-garde post-religious philosophical/mystical thought of his time, in a number of languages, is clearly established by this analysis; whether or not his work was ground-breaking is not as clearly argued. That he forms an important bridge between Romanticism and modernism (in radical thought, but not in stylistics) in the Australian poetic canon, and precisely the contribution he made to debates, is also clearly advanced.

What a pleasure it is be transported from mundane life and traverse the realms of the imaginary with a good guide. Mind you, some guides and imaginations are better than others, and so it is for these four journeys into the fantastic, which cover a variety of treatments, from Isobelle Carmody’s quest fantasy of small creatures, to the parodic melodrama of Gary Crew, to Emily Rodda’s intertwining of the fantasy world and our own, and Juliet Marillier’s romantic historical fantasy in the inspired setting of Istanbul at the time of the Ottomans.

For the youngest readership, Isobelle Carmody’s A Mystery of Wolves (Viking, $24.95 hb, 264 pp) is best described in a word that reviewers hesitate to use – ‘charming’. But charming is this small, magical fable in its deep blue furry cover, accompanied by the author’s whimsical illustrations, which capture the spirit and tone of the adventure. Little Fur – a half-troll, half-elf remnant from the Old Age before humans came into ascendancy and lost belief in magic – has knowledge of remedies and powers of healing. In this gentlest of fantasy quests, Little Fur must travel far to save her friend, a cat called Ginger, who faces danger in the distant mountains, where the Mystery of Wolves threatens all animal and surviving mythic creatures. Little Fur is accompanied by an old wolf, Greysong, whom she helps escape from the city zoo, and a most appealing owlet, Gem, and her protector, Crow.

It is a cruel time to be reading Citrus: A History. A survey by the South Australian Citrus Industry Development Board has predicted a thirty to forty per cent drop in next year’s orange crop. Growers, allowed to use only sixteen per cent of their total irrigation allocation, have bulldozed trees and borrowed money to buy water. A posse stormed Parliament House in Adelaide. The premier subsequently doubled the trickle, but far too late. One grower, who used to divide his water allocation between grapes and oranges, pulled his citrus trees out in order to nurture grapes, which command a higher price.

A remarkable feature of this book is that its thirty essays were commissioned, written, edited and printed for distribution within four months of the Howard government’s declaration on 21 June 2007 of an emergency in the Northern Territory. Seldom can there have been such a rapid and comprehensive set of responses to a major federal government policy initiative, bearing as it did all the signs of political opportunism in its timing. By contrast with the massive legislation embodying the reforms, most of the essays are thoughtfully cast and well written: a good advertisement for the way deadlines can concentrate the academic mind. The ironic twist is that the contributors’ principal target now is the Rudd government, whose own political opportunism in Opposition ensured bipartisan support for John Howard and Mal Brough during the legislation’s scandalously brief parliamentary consideration. Significantly, Minister Jenny Macklin’s actions so far suggest that she is in sympathy with the book’s main thrust.

(for the siblings)

they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour

of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a

background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,

and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.

I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen

moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness

owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds

300 and all that!

Next month marks the 300^th issue of ABR. We’re feeling very generous as we approach this milestone. We invite current subscribers to give away a free six-month subscription to ABR when they renew. This is your chance to introduce a friend or colleague to ABR (recipients of these gifts must not be current or recently lapsed subscribers). All you have to do is to complete the cover sheet accompanying the March issue or contact the Office Manager on (03) 9429 6700 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Any current subscriber can take up this special offer if they renew now: your subscription doesn’t have to lapse this month for you to be eligible.

Annual beat-up

By an accident of the calendar, the long list for this year’s Miles Franklin Award will not be announced on the ides of March. This would have been fittingly portentous. Instead, we will learn which books have been longlisted on March 13. The shortlist will follow on April 17, and the winner will be announced on June 19, when he or she will receive $42,000. The judges this year are Robert Dixon, Morag Fraser, Ian Hicks, Regina Sutton and Lesley McKay. The latter replaces fellow bookseller Eve Abbey.

Each year Advances looks forward to a new round of bleatings about the terms of Miles Franklin’s will and the restriction of the award to those works containing Australian characters, settings or references. Last year, to celebrate this phenomenon, we created a new prize: the Miles Franklin Beat-up Award (sadly not awarded in a rather tame year). This splendid award will go to the first reader who draws our attention to an article about the perfidy of Miles Franklin. He or she will receive an excellent bottle of red (Australian, naturally).

Richard Holmes – the duo

Some visitors to Adelaide Writers’ Week may be unsure which Richard Holmes will be speaking: the distinguished biographer (a former, memorable guest at WW) or the military historian and television presenter. It is in fact the latter, whose most recent publication is The World at War: The Landmark Oral History from the Previously Unpublished Archives (2007).

Happily, the other Richard Holmes – author of works including Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), Coleridge: Early Visions (1989) and Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993) – will be visiting Australia later in the year, and ABR will be much involved in his visit. Currently the Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, Richard Holmes will present the 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography in Canberra on Wednesday, September 10, and in Melbourne on September 17. Further details will appear in future issues of ABR.

More rest, please

Barry Humphries – indefatigable stage performer – has been ordered to rest for six months following an appendectomy. Humphries, who turned seventy-four in February, is reported to have cancelled a tour of North America. So he should have plenty of time to answer questions from Anne Pender, who is working on a full biographical study of Humphries, funded by an ARC Discovery Grant (the sort of detail that Sir Les Patterson would relish). The book, as yet untitled, will be published in 2009 by ABC Books. John Lahr of the New Yorker wrote the previous (brilliant) study, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries (1991). Humphries himself has written two notable autobiographies, most recently My Life As Me: A Memoir (2002), which Peter Rose reviewed for ABR in December 2002–January 2003. Anne Pender is busy. With Susan Lever she is co-editing a book of essays on the late and similarly multi-talented Nick Enright, for publication in the Netherlands later this year.

Testing the waters

Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row (1974) is the first title in the Giramondo Classic Reprint Series. It is the first step in a project managed by the Writing & Society Reach Group at the University of Western Sydney. Ivor Indyk tells us that the project includes an initial hit-list of fifteen other titles, according to Dr Indyk, going back one hundred years. ‘To be successful, such a series will depend upon the collaboration of different publishers, and the support of academic institutions and funding organisations,’ Ivor Indyk told Advances. ‘In the meantime, we are testing the waters.’

It’s been a good month for Gerald Murnane. He and Christopher Koch have just received emeritus awards worth $50,000 each for their contributions to Australian literature. One such award is presented each year by the Australia Council: this year the judges were so impressed they made it two.

Calling all reviewers

It’s on again: the ABR Reviewing Competition, and this year the first prize is worth $1000, plus publication of the winning review and (at least) two future commission from ABR. The second prize is worth $250; the third prize-winner will receive a set of Black Inc. Titles. We are seeking reviews of 800 words, of any English-language books published since January 2006 (no reissues please). More details appear on page 17. Guidelines and the application form are available on the ABR website, or e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

For decades the Bulletin had lurched from one prediction to another of its decline or demise. ‘The Bulletin is a clever youth,’ its co-founder, J.F. Archibald, famously predicted. ‘It will become a dull old man.’ In 1946 a ‘Letter to Tom Collins: Demise of the Bulletin’, by the philologist Sidney J. Baker, appeared in Meanjin. In 1961 the Bulletin unknowingly published Gwen Harwood’s sonnets which contained an acrostic, ‘so long bulletin’.

The execution, when it finally came, was swift. On 24 January 2008, staff were told the magazine would cease publication immediately. A bloodless press release followed. There was no poetry, no clever literary hoax, not even the dignity of one more issue to farewell the readers.

‘Poetically we dwell …’ Heidegger wonderfully essayed, borrowing a phrase from Hölderlin. The phrase has been in me for a long time, feeding notions of how poetry might be inseparable from a form of life. When I was writing books connected with Aboriginal culture, the poetry seemed to come out of the ground, almost literally. There, in the performance of sacred song, with each step and syllable, a poetic existence was acted out, and all in the open air, a singing of the body in the public place. The ground and the body were painted, but there was no writing to speak of. The poem was voiced from the Dreaming, the poetic key to reality, as W.F. Stanner put it. Everything was vitally connected with everything else.

Lately, I have found myself taken up with a poetic dwelling that belongs indoors or, if not inside, then along a set of thresholds, and with such refinements and thorough literariness, that it presents a whole other illustration of Heidegger’s maxim. For it seems that a thorough-going model of poetic dwelling can be found not just on the ceremonial grounds of the archaic, but in the exquisite routines of the pre-medieval court in Japan, or more particularly, in the world of the shining prince of eleventh-century Kyoto, where, for a hundred years or so, women excelled in the most passionate brushwork, writing their Japanese freely in the tremulous air, you might say – air left to them by the men whose official duties and exclusive rights to formal education obliged them to inhabit the Chinese language.   

In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.