It is a critical truism, if not a cliché, that poetry estranges: it makes things strange, so that we can see the world and ourselves afresh. Defamiliarisation, the uncanny, even metaphor, are all fundamental to poetry’s estranging power. Unsurprisingly, madness, vision and love have also long been poetry’s intimates, each involving the radical reformation – or deformation – of ‘normal’ ways of seeing the world. One might describe poetry as surprisingly antisocial, since poets have from ancient times been associated with social isolation, distance or elevation, as well as with madness.

But poetry also has a long history of sociability. The sharing of poems by lovers is one long-standing aspect of this. The relation between poetry and memorialisation is another. Even in this digital age, poems continue to be memorised, while people write and recite poems to remember the dead and give form to memorialising ritual. The bond between poetry and performance also illustrates poetry’s continued communal nature.

Under Stones, a collection of short stories and one poem by first-time author Bob Franklin, reads like a study in subterfuge: a teenage outcast wreaks cyber vengeance on her local Tidy Town group; a man’s online porn addiction is turned against him by a mysterious workmate; a seasoned duck hunter finds that the target has shifted without his knowledge. Yet scratch the surface and you will find that the deception runs deeper than that; the darkly humorous scenarios hint at society’s moral decay. In ‘Soldier On’, a man’s homecoming visit to England to see his retired parents turns from farcical to forlorn, as his infuriation over their addiction to soap operas gives way to a disquieting realisation about the widespread misery of the elderly.

Taken as Required

by Ynes Sanz

An age ago, ill-matched,
ignorant but willing,
we set the rules.
‘Step by Step’, we said. ‘No Bullshit.’
Today, thinking of something else
I stumbled across the grey metal bracelet
you looped over that stick of a wrist
where your thin blood stained the skin
to resemble an antique map or a bad tattoo
(like the one they inked on for that photo shoot in the ’50s).

In October 2009, Shirley Hazzard spoke at the New York launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Hazzard read from People in Glass Houses, her early collection of satirical stories about the UN bureaucracy. Her appearance serves to remind Australian readers that Hazzard continues to occupy a defining, if somewhat attenuated, place within the expansive field of what Nicholas Jose described in 2008, on taking up the annual Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, as ‘writing that engage[s] us with the international arena from the Australian perspective’. Jose went on to cite Hazzard’s most recent novel, The Great Fire (2003), as part of ‘a range of material which Americans would not necessarily think of as Australian’.

Even among the significant cohort of Australian writers who have lived and worked in the United States in recent decades, Hazzard occupies a unique position, particularly in the way her work has delineated a writerly sensibility that finds its location, as well as its most receptive audience, unconfined by national borders and paradigms. Internationally, she is one of the great writers of movement, passage, transposition and transit. Her novels trace the fate of a series of young expatriate female protagonists in the geographical and emotional vistas opening up after World War II, but before the social upheavals of feminism. They take her readers into moral territory that is at once utterly sure and breached at every turn, with the certainties of romance forms tested by human vulnerability and the often brutal social and political canvas of modern life.

Does the title of this anthology, heralded by its editors as the first collection of Australian gay/lesbian/queer poetry, refer to the myth of Pandora’s pithos? Hesiod’s version of the story, which sees Pandora as the unleasher of all manner of evils on the (‘rational’/patriarchal) world, has been interrogated by feminist scholars who see Pandora in an older incarnation of ‘gift-giver’, bestower of plenitude, crosser of boundaries. Or does ‘Out of the Box’ have a more colloquial sense – ‘exceptional’, ‘surprising’? Whatever the reasoning behind the title, Michael Farrell and Jill Jones have made choices which should provoke debate (among other things) about gay and lesbian identity and community, and about the relationship between poet and reader.

The federal government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is, above all, an exercise of power. It illustrates for all to see that the government can interfere with the smallest details of domestic life in a blatantly discriminatory way, regardless of Australia’s international obligations and professed belief in racial equality. It declares to the world that adult Aborigines can be treated like children. Both the present and previous government would argue, in a time-honoured way, that it is for the communities’ own good.

At much the same time, there has been a determined stand against any recognition of Aboriginal traditional law in the courts, even in the consideration of sentencing. If anything, there is less concern at present about customary law than there was in the 1930s and 1940s. The Law Reform Commission’s detailed report on traditional law in the 1980s was ignored by parliaments and politicians, who appreciated that most Australians have little understanding of, or sympathy for, the idea of legal pluralism. The belief that there can be only one set of laws that should apply equally to everyone is deeply ingrained. And yet, for much of our history, we were proud members of an empire, where legal pluralism was ubiquitous, where the common law lived comfortably with a great variety of local legal systems.

Let no one say that all travel memoirs fall into the same predictable box. Otherland and Mother Land, two such works from Melbourne writers, may enjoy rhyming titles and pluck similar strings, but their styles could hardly be more dissimilar. The first, a new book from Maria Tumarkin, describes a journey to her Ukrainian/ Russian country of birth with her twelve-year-old daughter in tow; the second, a 2008 evocation by Dmetri Kakmi, follows a revisiting of his childhood on a Turkish-Greek island. Of it I wrote in The Age: ‘Always a beautiful, evocative and carefully crafted reconstruction of a past life generically familiar to many migrants, Mother Land outshines the plethora of similar memoirs because it consciously operates at two levels: the narrow focus, limited characters and humdrum events are transcended and elevated to a universal myth of loss’ (16 August 2008).

Otherland, conversely, maintains the feisty, almost aggressive style its author developed in Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (2005) and Courage: Guts, Grit, Spine, Heart, Balls, Verve (2007), which I characterised in this magazine as ‘a discussion that zigzags from colourful illustration to personal revelation, from touching vignette to belligerent polemic, from reference to riff, literature to philosophy’. Australian memoirs are indeed a significant reflection of our multicultural diversity.

This is Tom Shapcott’s thirteenth individual collection of poetry (two Selected Poems have appeared, in 1978 and 1989) in a writing life that – at least for his readers – began with the publication of Time on Fire in 1961. It continues something of a late poetic flowering, which, to my critical mind, began with The City of Home in 1995. All in all, Parts of Us is no disgrace to its twelve predecessors.

Like so much of Shapcott’s work it is keen, not so much to balance the light and dark of life, but to investigate their relationship. And there is plenty of dark here: as one poem jocularly says, ‘but anyone can see / night is the order of the day’. The poems engage the dark on many levels, including the metaphysical, the personal and the social. The book begins with a title poem which is an extended act of scepticism about all the ways in which we experience the world and respond to it: ‘The eyes are faulty interpreters’, ‘The tongue is a reckless speleologist’, ‘The skin is not party to the brain’s confidences’, and so on. And there is, throughout, a fascination with words (conceived as very shifty things) and their relationship with other powerful responses to the world, like taste.

Writing a matter of hours after Charles Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870, an obituarist for The Times of London remarked, ‘The story of his life is soon told’. The publication of Dickens’s friend John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens between 1871 and 1874 soon gave the lie to these words, revealing a far more complex and damaged Dickens than the reading public had ever suspected this novelist, journalist, actor, social reformer and bon viveur to be. Since the 1870s thousands of pages have been devoted to scrutinising the life of the self-styled ‘sparkler of Albion’, including G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A critical study (1906), Edgar Johnson’s magisterial Charles Dickens: His tragedy and triumph (1952) and Claire Tomalin’s superbly readable account of Dickens’s infatuation with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, The Invisible Woman (1991).

Sonya Hartnett is the author of eighteen novels, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning Of A Boy (2000), which was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and Thursday’s Child (2002), which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award and Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel. Hartnett’s latest book is Butterfly (2009). She lives in Melbourne.

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Why do you write?

Many reasons, some to do with justifying my place on earth. But by and large, it’s just my job. It remains an abiding pleasure, though, to create something where there was nothing.

 

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes; of frequently strickening and torturous dreams.

From its opening line – ‘It had been a shit of a day for Sister Annunciata and Sister Clavie’ – Marie Munkara’s collection of stories about life on an island mission in northern Australia is a raw, hilarious and penetrating chronicle. The two nuns stare at the sky waiting for the bishop. His plane overshoots the airstrip and lands with a ‘resounding crump’. It is as if the bishop – ‘his Most Handsome and his Most Distinguished’ or ‘his Most Sleazy’, depending on which nun you ask – represents wave after wave of invasion. Apart from God and His earthly representatives, the islanders over the years also confront an anthropologist, Indonesians, a naked French couple, Spanish workers, marijuana, rum, the flu and even John Wayne.

Nothing, it seems, is too small to have its own history. As academic disciplines such as the history of ideas have grown and prospered, popular non-fiction has followed suit, offering the history of a word, a concept, a technology. This has proven to be a highly effective method of opening up the processes of culture for closer inspection, and for revealing the contingent or motivated roots of what we now take for granted. It has become an appealing and often lively way to write cultural histories.

For many undergraduate students of Australian history in the 1960s (when there were still plenty of them), the set text was not a narrative history but Manning Clark’s Select Documents in Australian History (1950, 1955). Dry but fascinating, the documents covered the period from 1788–1900. First published more than a decade before the opening volume of Clark’s A History of Australia, here were the bones of the research for that work. In his introduction to Documents That Shaped Australia: Records of a Nation’s Heritage, John Thompson acknowledges Clark and Frank Crowley’s Modern Australia in Documents (1973). He has, however, done something different. This book has a smaller number of items than its predecessors, but it is attractively and extensively illustrated (usually, but not always, with photographs of the documents). No doubt Thompson’s publisher, Pier 9, thought of school library sales for the book. It is a hope that deserves to be rewarded.

Scepticism in the ordinary understanding is a doubting disposition, a healthy questioning mistrustfulness of extravagant or suspect claims to knowledge. Philosophical scepticism incorporates the attitude, but is more comprehensive in its objects. A philosophical sceptic may doubt the possibility of all knowledge, as the ancient Pyrrhonists did, or question our ability to obtain specific but fundamental kinds of knowledge. Early twentieth-century philosophy, for example, was much exercised by sceptical challenges to prove the existence of the ‘external world’ and minds other than one’s own. How do I know that there are other minds when all I ever see are bodies and behaviour? How do I know that there are material objects when all I directly apprehend are subjective sense data or perceptions?

At the moment, there are about 5,000 world languages, and ninety per cent of these languages are spoken by about five per cent of the world’s population. A pessimistic forecast would predict that by 2,100 only 500 of these languages will still exist; an optimistic forecast might put the figure at 2,500, about the same rate as the extinction of mammals. Many of the languages under threat are spoken in countries that are close to Australia: Papua New Guinea has 850, Indonesia 670, and India 380. (Australia is listed as still having 200, but many Australian linguists would put this figure much lower.) It is a relatively easy matter to rally the troops, the money and the organisational forces to attempt to save furry mammals; it is a much more difficult matter to rally support to save languages. This book, by the eminent French linguist Claude Hagège, assesses how and why languages die, what the cost of their deaths is, and whether anything can be done to prevent their annihilation.

The subtle beauty of the title of Sarah Day’s new collection of poetry, Grass Notes, epitomises the lightness of touch and intensity that characterises the poems. This is a collection of observing what might otherwise be seen as slight or glancing, yet that offers powerful prisms of insight. In a Whitmanesque mode, Day’s perspective not only looks up from the grass into the vastness of the world, but also looks at the grass itself, the unexceptional yet foundational ground of all perception and experience. Perhaps as the poet scribbles ‘notes’ in that grass, there is also an echo of Wordsworth and post-romantics such as Judith Wright or Mary Oliver. The title also chimes homophonically with the idea of the musical ‘grace note’, that small, quick, note that runs into the next and, in its delicacy, makes that central sound, or image, both more appealing and more complex. In Day’s work, it is the delicacy of such lateral images, often derived from close consideration of the natural world, that complicates and enriches the ideas at work within the poems.

Mother of Rock is an Australian journalist’s adoring biography of one of our great social journalists. Sydney newsman Robert Milliken’s life of expatriate writer Lillian Roxon (1932–73) is foremost an account of the birth of celebrity tabloid press in the 1960s and its close links with the emergence of rock music as an art form and breeding ground for ‘stars’. Like Roxon’s writing itself – a generous selection of which is reproduced at the back of the book – what little discussion of the qualities of the music of the times there is comes second to an account of its social and market implications and its dramatic leading personalities. Roxon emerges as a radical, under-acknowledged progenitor of ‘new journalism’.

Milliken’s portrait of Roxon as a driven journalist, irrepressible wit, compulsive communicator and, above all else, generous friend to many in the libertarian milieu that found expression in 1960s rock benefits from his regular deferral to Roxon’s own version of events drawn from the ‘Lillian Roxon Papers 1945–1973’, an extensive cache of letters left by Roxon to Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Milliken considers Roxon ‘one of the last great letter writers before the age of electronic mail’, and embeds long excerpts from her correspondence with everyone from her boss at the Sydney Morning Herald’s New York bureau, John Moses, to on-again off-again friends Germaine Greer and Linda McCartney (née Eastman) throughout. These sections are the most immediate of Milliken’s narrative, and he is careful to keep Roxon’s playful voice close to his telling of her life in Brisbane during the 1940s, Sydney during the 1950s, and New York during the 1960s.

Roxon’s social daring and prolific writing are startling. As a sixteen-year-old in pre-war Brisbane, Roxon emerges, in the words of friend Grace Garlick, as ‘full of sex and wisdom and boys talk … completely uninhibited [and] irresistible’, and as a significant personality among the Pink Elephant crowd, a subversive group of artists described by Peter Porter as a ‘strangely anachronistic literary ganging-up … [who] dared to practise a mixture of left-wing politics and high camp at a time when such notions were dangerous’. Milliken depicts Roxon as tremendously good at involving herself with influential people – Donald Friend, Barrie Reid and Barbara Patterson (who would marry Charles Blackmann) – and identifies the group as Roxon’s first salon, ‘a teenage version of the more intense bohemian and counterculture cauldrons at the Lincoln Inn coffee shop in Sydney and Max’s Kansas City nightclub in New York’.

Mirroring Roxon’s contextual approach to rock journalism, Milliken’s biography aspires to social history in his well-researched chapters on Roxon’s life in Sydney and the anti-authoritarian group to which she gravitated, known as the ‘Push’. Push identities included artist John Olsen and poets Harry Hooton and Lex Banning. The group ‘set out to live their definition of freedom, not just to argue about it’ in ways Milliken argues foreshadowed the coming rock culture revolution. In opposition to times so prudish that ‘Margaret [Fink] and Barry [Humphries] were once asked to leave the Australia Hotel after the staff disapproved of their kissing in the foyer’, the Push championed free sexuality and thinking, with Roxon recording their every exploit in her first gossip column, ‘The Postman’s Knock’, for Sydney University’s newspaper, Honi Soit. These were Roxon’s first ‘scene pieces’, written with her trademark playfulness. Fellow rock writer Richard Meltzer describes Roxon’s tone as ‘authentic, and never nasty or illtempered in the slightest’.

In 1957, Roxon started writing for Frank Packer’s Weekend magazine, edited by Donald Horne, before transferring to New York in 1958 to write for Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror. Roxon remained in New York for the rest of her life, contributing as a chief reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald alongside Derryn Hinch, Margaret Jones, Peter Michelmore and Maurice Adams, while moonlighting at underground nightspots Max’s Kansas City and The Scene, where she mixed with rock stars and gathered material for her landmark book Rock Encyclopedia (1969), the ‘first book to treat rock culture as a legitimate presence [with] Lillian’s announcement that a new breed of writer, the rock writer, was as much a star of the times as the stars themselves’. Rock Encyclopedia included 500 entries from‘Acid Rock’ to the ‘Zombies’, 1,202 rock stars and 22,000 song titles. It heralded the arrival of rock as big business and popular art on a par with film and literature.

Mother of Rock closes with one hundred pages of Roxon’s original writing, which justify Milliken’s depiction of her as a general symbol for everything the 1960s counter-cultural revolution stood for: free thought, inclusivity, artistic and political equality and ‘unadorned earthiness’. Her vivid, quick-flowing passages bristle with affection for her subjects and with a plucky Australianness that Milliken identifies in the best aspects of rock. His biography of Roxon and her light verbal brilliance are entertaining reminders of that hopeful period described by Milliken as now ‘so far away it is often hard to imagine that it ever existed’.

It is no secret that scholarly publishing is between a rock and a hard place these days. The rock is the proliferation of titles demanded by university research quanta and government assessment exercises. The hard place is the endless tightening of library acquisitions budgets. The result is ever-shrinking print runs, ever-growing covert or explicit publication subsidies and a rational but extreme conservatism in the commissioning habits of those academic presses that strive to remain quasi-commercial. Essay collections, in particular, have a hard time as book proposals, because, as publishers will tell you, people don’t buy them.

One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

Do not be put off by the earnest and fusty-sounding title. The Companion to Women’s Historical Writing is not a book to acquire for the reference shelf on the off chance of needing to look up some arcane topic in the future. Quite the contrary. I have found it to be a most enjoyable bedside companion. Arranged alphabetically, with more than one hundred and fifty entries, it offers thumbnail sketches for a quick dip and more substantial essays to hold the attention in a longer engagement. The three editors, like most of the other fifty or so contributors, are distinguished writers in their own fields. Mary Spongberg, at Macquarie University, is the editor of Australian Feminist Studies; Ann Curthoys, from Sydney University, is a doyenne of Australian cultural and political history; and at Monash, Barbara Caine is a leading scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history. Drawing on their own research fields, each has provided long and lively analytical pieces, as well as writing a great many of the shorter entries. With some six hundred pages, plus another hundred when the index and bibliography are included, the Companion is a good fat book that will not sell the reader short. The new paperback edition has presumably been issued as a consequence of the success in the last five years of the expensive hardback.

Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature was founded in 1987 as the journal of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies, itself founded the previous year. Both institutions are products of the Hawke era, when the still-simmering question of Australian identity and the Australian film boom of the early 1980s created an ideal state for Australians to be interested in (and to help fund) US literary culture’s own nascent interest in Australia.

From the beginning, it had no problem attracting prestigious contributors. A.D. Hope, Peter Carey, Les Murray, Thea Astley, Rosemary Dobson, and Mudrooroo were all featured in early issues. Even Patrick White consented to be profiled, though not formally interviewed, by our gentlemanly founding fiction editor, Ray Willbanks. Paul Kane, our poetry editor, has always made sure we are vitally engaged with the best and most exciting Australian verse. The journal continues to publish biannually, with most space devoted to refereed academic essays, but also including fiction, poetry, book reviews and the most recent addition – creative non-fiction, a hybrid genre in which regular contributors such as Ouyang Yu, Elizabeth Bernays, and the ‘Trans-Tasman’ figure Stephen Oliver have excelled.

Having cut my narrative teeth on Dad and Dave and Martin’s Corner (and my critical molars on the Listener-In), I had high expectations of this book. Night after childhood night, I would wait agog for Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and a burst of rowdy music to usher in the outback doings of Dad and his hayseed family. Martin’s Corner, on the other hand, was brought to our living room by Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which, we were assured, would ‘provide the essential bulk or roughage your system needs to keep it functioning healthily and regularly’. I didn’t know what this meant, but, such was the persuasive power of commercial radio, I believed it. Just as I believed from Sunday-night listening to the Lux Radio Theatre that ‘nine out of ten Hollywood stars used Lux for their daily active lather facials’, though I did wonder about the arid pores of that misguided ‘tenth’ star. The ABC was there for the news, but it was 3LK for entertainment, including such taxing intellectual games as Quiz Kids and Bob Dyer’s Pick-a-Box.

Robert Dessaix and China

During Writers’ Week last month, many of the writers on the program were outraged to learn of the plight of their fellow guest Robert Dessaix. The celebrated author of A Mother’s Disgrace and Arabesques was scheduled to fly to China at the conclusion of Writers’ Week, having been invited by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to take part in Shanghai’s International Literary Festival, along with writers such as Les Murray and Alexis Wright. China then banned Dr Dessaix from entering the country because of his HIV status. Ironically or not (was there a punitive link here, Robert Dessaix wondered in public), he was replacing Frank Moorhouse, who had withdrawn from the festival because of the imprisonment of Chinese writers. Led by Michelle de Kretser and Charlotte Wood, one hundred Australian authors and commentators protested at this offensive and unenlightened decision, as did ABR and the Australian Society of Authors. China’s discriminatory policy was widely criticised, even in China.

Southerly and élitism

Dear Editor,

I was pleased to see ABR’s review of the seventieth birthday issue of Southerly (March 2010), but I need to respond to a number of matters raised in Jeffrey Poacher’s review. First, though, I need to own the error pointed out by Mr Poacher. Mr Poacher correctly observes that I twice get wrong the name of the founding editor. The man’s name was R.G. Howarth. I wrote R.J. Howarth. The middle initial was wrong.

It is disappointing that Mr Poacher elected not to specify the nature and extent of this error and that he uses it as parting shot, especially when one has just edited a volume of 253 pages, including thirty-eight contributors and forty-two new works, as an unwaged activity, as the editors of Southerly do. However, it would be a mistake to allow aggression to set the tone and circumscribe debate along the very tired division of academic élitism versus the inclusive domain of belles lettres. This would also deflect attention from the substance of the review itself, and there are a number of matters that require attention.

First is the ongoing confusion of attribution, of who is saying what. The review takes ideas stated explicitly in the journal and presents them as its own deductions. I’ll give one example, but it is a broader problem. One paragraph opens: ‘Presumably it is by editorial design that the travails of ageing feature prominently …’ This theme and content is discussed extensively in the editorial. No presumption is needed or performed by the review. The reviewer paraphrases the work of others and presents it as his own knowledge or interpretation.

This is a telling marker of the anxiety that characterises this review, which, in lieu of knowledge about Southerly, resorts to accusations of academic élitism. So let’s set the story straight. Of the forty-two works published in this issue, Mr Poacher rests his judgement of the journal’s élitism on three and a half scholarly essays. To Mr Poacher these works are representative of the issue, which also includes eighteen poems, eight short stories, seven essays and nine long reviews. Indeed, Southerly publishes more new fiction and poetry than any other journal in the country. The pool of writers in all issues is diverse, as is the work.

Moreover, the reviewer reads this one issue as being representative of all issues. But as I set out in the editorial, the journal is co-edited by David Brooks and me, each taking principal responsibility for one issue per year, with a guest editor completing the third issue. This arrangement encourages diversity and is a check against individual styles or biases. Our poetry editor, Kate Lilley, and fiction reader, Alan Gold, further expand and refine the range of creative work we publish.

With that context established, I now turn to the question of élitism that dominates this review. Mr Poacher’s shorthand for academic obscurantism is that two essays use ‘the looking glass of Continental theory’. By this he means that one essay refers to a meditation on the four elements by Gaston Bachelard, from 1943, and another essay cites a 1991 essay by Luce Irigaray that links images of the sea with maternity.  Neither of these ideas nor their expression is remotely inaccessible.

Further, Mr Poacher presents, as an instance of impenetrable prose, the phrase ‘the maternal imaginary’. Which word is difficult to understand here? It must be the connection between maternity and imagination that is incomprehensible. Indeed the review pays far more attention to work by men about men than to work by women. It is clear where the reviewer feels more at home. That is his prerogative, but he should own it.

This brings me to the main problem, which is the presumption that there is a single readership in Australian literary culture and consensus regarding its tastes. Mr Poacher has definite ideas about what a literary journal should be and presents himself as a representative reader. I don’t buy it.

My editorial recounts the recent initiative of the Australia Council to promote established literary magazines, including ABR and Southerly. At the two-day workshop, I was struck by the journals’ diversity in terms of politics, tone, region, history and their respective emphases on particular genres. These differences invite different practices of reading. We are not all in the domain of belles lettres: it is not a common ground. A diverse ecosystem is a healthy one, and Australian literature is well served by the diversity of its journals.

Elizabeth McMahon, Randwick, NSW

 

‘Like it bloody was’

Dear Editor,

Having nominated David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner as my favourite Australian novel, I was surprised to see Garry Dalrymple claiming it as science fiction (Letters, March 2010). I realise we are in an era of genre-bending, but if Ireland’s fiction is to be categorised at all, it might be as a unique amalgam of magic realism and social realism.

Ireland is probably the most acute observer of Australia before it became post-industrial, post-Whitlam, post-John Button’s revival policies and post-Howard’s efforts to get rid of the bits Button had revived. My late father would have recognised Ireland’s workplaces, pubs and people in an instant. If he had been interested in genre, he  would have described the Ireland  genre as ‘like it bloody was’.

Noel Turnbull, Port Melbourne, Vic.

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

I was in the house of a friend’s parents recently and noticed, stuck to the fridge door, a poem clipped from a newspaper, among the sundry magnets and notices. Companion to book reviews, its subtleties had taken their fancy as being more than ephemera. Good, I thought, these are poetry readers – an engineer and an art teacher – who can confidently duck and weave among poems that come their way and say, yes, this one’s a pleasure. But do they buy and read collections of poetry? Well, they would more often if …

There is something to offend everyone in the latest issue of Meanjin. Several contributors boldly tackle religious questions – always plenty of kindling for the fire there. Jeff Sparrow takes on the so-called ‘New Atheists’, in the process throwing a few Marxist haymakers at Bush, Rudd and ‘the Israeli apartheid state’. The ‘religious undergirding’ of secular thought is considered by the Sydney academic John Potts, who finds that greenies, old-style lefties and post-structuralists are much closer to Messianic Christianity than they might think (along the way, he is snide about vegetarians, too). Elsewhere, Paul Mitchell contrasts the spiritual impulses at work in contemporary Australian fiction, though some of his assumptions are bound to get nonbelievers offside.

This polemical edge is arguably one of Meanjin’s strengths. There is scarcely a dull moment in the stylish pages of the current issue, where the subjects range from adoption policy to being nursed by the Dalai Lama. Of particular delight is the ‘Newsreel’ section, a gallimaufry of cultural titbits cooked up by various hands; in the present number, this includes observations on the Helvetica typeface, the history of dust jackets and Sartre’s use of mescaline.

Meanjin turns seventy this year. The latest issue continues the journal’s long tradition of publishing our finest poets, with new work by Peter Boyle, Geoff Page and Anthony Lawrence. As usual, there is plenty of fiction, including a graphic story by Bruce Mutard – graphic as in illustrated, not as in sexually explicit (though at one point a few naked humanoids can be seen in a museum display). Especially memorable is Fiona McGregor’s dissection of an upper-class dinner party, where the talk is of Sydney property prices and boob jobs. With writing as vibrant as this, there seems little chance of Meanjin being pensioned off any time soon.

Set in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Swimming is an impressive début novel by Melbourne academic Enza Gandalfo.

Kate Wilks, a childless writer in her early sixties, is a strong swimmer, and images of the sea texture the narrative. Now happily married for a second time, Kate encounters her first husband, and the ensuing flood of memories, regret and guilt provides the driving force of the novel.

Packaging and promotion have always been formidable tools in the marketplace. Once on a Road is poorly served by its sensational back cover blurb, ‘How far would you go to protect your grandchildren from their mother?’ No, this is not a new Stephen King novel, nor is it literary fiction, as its imprint would lead readers to believe.

The opening chapter of Robert Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), may have persuaded readers that Australians are a mercenary, uncouth and ungrateful lot who love nothing more than a glistening athlete on a podium. Hughes had reason to be sensitive at this time, having eluded the ‘feather-foot’ on that desolate Western Australian highway in May 1999 and endured the trials that followed. He names two writers, Peter Craven and Catharine Lumby, who have stood by him, whereas others, he says, have sought to further their careers by denouncing him. To the former small but faithful posse can be added Patricia Anderson, who defies that great Australian tradition of ‘cutting down the tall poppy’ to celebrate Hughes’s achievements in this biography of his ‘Australian years’: from Hughes’s birth in 1938 until 1970, when Time magazine afforded him the opportunity at last to leave our shores.

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

There are a number of strands at play in this curiously titled novel set in postwar London in the Coronation year, 1953. The well-to-do Mrs Harriet Wallis, convicted of the murder of her husband, Cecil, becomes the second-last woman in England to be hanged. The last woman to be executed for murder in England was Ruth Ellis, about whom Mike Newell made the film Dance with a Stranger (1985), with Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

R.W. Johnson is a brave man, morally and physically. After apartheid ended, he gave up his Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford (with its virtually automatic lifelong tenure) to return to the South Africa he had left as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1960s. For a while he was director of the Helen Suzman Foundation. Then he took the rocky road of the freelance journalist, writing mainly for the British Sunday Times and the London Review of Books. While most South African left-wing whites attached themselves to the ruling African National Congress, Johnson took the less obvious path of backing the Inkatha Freedom Party and its leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Throughout his years back in South Africa, Johnson has written fiercely against what he sees as corruption, mismanagement and foolishness in government. In the process, he has made himself deeply unpopular not just with the ANC but also with the universities that might have otherwise been his natural home in South Africa. His continuing admiration of Helen Suzman – for many years the only white parliamentarian willing to speak out against apartheid – surely deserves acclaim; it is so easy to airbrush individuals like her out of history, because of their class or colour. Often, Johnson sees himself in the role of the boy who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor’s new clothes were not a masterpiece of tailoring.

A quiet revolution has been occurring within the humanities over the last decade: the emergence into mainstream scholarship of new methods and approaches that exploit digital tools, electronic infrastructures, networks of data resources and the sheer computational power of modern technology. This renaissance builds on decades of pioneering work – well before its time and largely unacknowledged – performed by committed visionaries who perceived the possibilities for textual scholarship years before desktop computers and the Internet enabled the rest of us to see how our research could be informed, assisted, extended and even revolutionised by new technologies.