‘Everyone I talk to remembers Tirra Lirra by the River as a wonderful book, sometimes even as a life-changing one. But why don’t we hear anything about it today?’ This was a young journalist who had been assigned to write Jessica Anderson’s obituary. Anderson, who died in Sydney on 9 July 2010, was the author of seven novels and a volume of stories, but it was her fourth published book, Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), which won the Miles Franklin Award and made her name as an Australian writer.

The novel opens as an ageing woman, Nora Porteus, returns after a long sojourn in London to the Brisbane house in which she grew up. Her parents, brother and sister are all dead, and neighbours care for her when she falls ill. In her feverish state, Nora becomes possessed by her memories, some consciously recalled, others which return suddenly, evoked by a sight or sound. She has been accustomed to resisting these ‘accidental flicks’, which open onto dark patches on the obscure side of her ‘globe of memory’. Now she cannot entirely control the spinning globe, and along with the ‘truthful fictions’ she has told so often to amuse or shock her London friends come unbidden memories of events she has relegated to the dark side. The novel shuttles back and forth between present and past events, and between ‘truthful fictions’ and traces of the repressed, as Nora tries to set the record straight, to recover memory from the distancing imagination.

Within this narrative framework, the events of Nora’s life are presented through her emotions. Her adolescent longing for something more than dull suburban existence with her mother and sister push her into an ill-considered marriage to the genteelly sadistic Colin Porteus. On moving with him to Sydney, she is happy at first in bohemian Kings Cross, and then miserable, trapped in her mother-in-law’s desperately respectable suburban house. His insistence on a divorce shocks her out of depression and frees her. What sustains Nora through these bad years is the imaginative space she creates through her design and dressmaking work. The dressmaking provides her, belatedly, with the means of earning her own living. Her independent life in London from the late 1930s to the 1960s brings more trials, but it leads her even-tually into the magic circle of friends with whom she shares a house. A dramatic reversal of fortunes brings these good times to an end, and brings Nora, now in her seventies, back to Australia.

Jessica Anderson, 1986 (photograph by Alec Bolton, National Library of Australia)

Nora exhibits a classically feminine combination of compliance and covert rebellion, of social conformity and an outsider’s sensibility. She is aware of performing a range of selves, all of which shape her into the person she is – there is no single self to be discovered below all the layers of social roles. For instance, deriving some pleasure in her ‘surreptitious disobedience’ of the doctor’s orders, she recognises this as a legacy from her marriage, just as she recognises aspects of herself in the ‘gentle’ neighbour who ended her life, and her family’s, in acts of extreme violence.

Like the story of her namesake in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Tirra Lirra calls out to be read as a woman’s novel in the feminist sense of representing, from the perspective of a particular woman’s subjectivity, female experiences such as sexual initiation, the struggle for economic independence, abortion and ageing. It was certainly read that way during the 1980s, the decade when women writers and feminist questions dominated the literary scene. Yet such is its richness, this short novel has also been read as a quest (as the title suggests, there are Tennysonian echoes of the Arthurian legend), as a novel of city life and as a post-colonial text.

This book was the major success of Anderson’s career, in terms of sales and also critical reception. Translated into Chinese, French, Italian and Danish, and published as a Penguin paperback in the 1980s, it was extensively and enthusiastically reviewed, and has been the subject of many literary critical discussions. It is represented in several recent publications on Australian literature, not only the influential Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009) and Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works (2007), but also in an anthology aimed at Indian students of Australian literature (Fact & Fiction: Readings in Australian Literature, edited by Amit and Reema Sarwal, 2008) and in several European essay collections on Australian literature. Tirra Lirra clearly has a continuing place in the canon of Australian fiction texts taught internationally, and locally, too: it is currently taught in seven Australian universities and appears on the VCE English syllabus.

It would be unfortunate if Jessica Anderson were to be remembered only for Tirra Lirra by the River, outstanding though it is. The books she published before and after it demonstrate an extraordinary range and depth of talent, within a relatively small compass, as Elaine Barry argues in Fabricating the Self: The Fictions of Jessica Anderson (1996), the only book-length study to date of Anderson’s work. With every novel, she tried her hand at something new. The first two, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963) and Last Man’s Head (1970), employ some of the conventions of crime fiction to explore dramas of sexual obsession acted out in contemporary middle- class Sydney milieux. The Impersonators (1980), which won the Miles Franklin Award for 1980, develops the novel of manners mode that was present in the early novels. In a family rendered complex by divorce and remarriage, the death of the patriarch sets in motion conflict over inheritance, and a love affair between his only daughter and one of his stepsons keeps the two families closely entwined. The shady business dealings that underlay his fortune are paralleled in those of a son-in-law, while a step-son is involved in Sydney’s greedy real estate business.

Anderson’s capacity for grounding her characters in contemporary life provides the setting for Taking Shelter (1989), a novel of manners ‘about love in the early stages of AIDS’, as she described it in an interview. In both this and her last novel, One of the Wattle Birds (1994), the narrative focus is a young woman discovering her capacities for love and deception in her first sexual relationship. In each case, she proceeds without any parental presence but nonetheless surrounded by loving and interfering friends and relations. Cecily, the heroine of One of the Wattle Birds, is, like Nora, the first-person narrator of her story, but the problems that she confronts, following the death of her mother, are a far cry from the ‘waste and waiting’ that marked Nora’s young womanhood in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Commandant (1975), Anderson’s only historical novel was, she said, her favourite because she so much enjoyed doing the research. Its setting is the penal settlement at Moreton Bay in 1830, and its subject is the legend of Patrick Logan. This story was one she heard about as a child growing up in Brisbane in the 1920s, and Logan was the Commandant, immortalised in the ballad called variously ‘Moreton Bay’ or ‘Brisbane Water’, as the ‘tyrant’ whose murder at the hands of ‘the blacks’ is cause for the convicts’ rejoicing. What distinguishes The Commandant from most Australian historical novels – and links it with her contemporary novels – is Anderson’s creation of a nuanced domestic setting in which to dramatise the Commandant’s cruel authority. In this way, the brutality of flogging and putting men in irons is emphasised by contrast with the predominant scenes of the domestic life of the Commandant’s wife and family, their socialising with the handful of other middle-class ‘free’ inhabitants, the army officers and the medical officers. On the periphery, prisoners and convict servants and their children are a constant presence, sometimes threatening, sometimes almost out of sight – but never out of mind. Domestic scenes and private conversations are conducted as if there are eavesdroppers, as indeed there often are. ‘A sort of Cranford at More-ton Bay’ was the way Anderson described this novel, highlighting the grotesque contrast between floggings and murders, and scenes of genteel social life.

Anderson published some fifteen short stories and novellas, eight of which are collected in the 1987 volume, Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories. The five ‘stories from the warm zone’ are autobiographical fictions set in the Brisbane of her childhood, and, if they are a reliable guide, that childhood was serene, affectionate and materially secure. Born in 1916, Jessica was the youngest of a family of four. Her father was a stock inspector, and both parents were politically radical and encouraged intellectual independence. She grew up in suburban Brisbane, attending the State High School and the Technical College Art School. When she was only sixteen her much-loved father died. At eighteen, she left home. She landed in Kings Cross, ‘the only Bohemian centre in the whole of the country’ in the 1930s. There she lived in one of the old houses at Potts Point so lovingly described in Tirra Lirra, with Ross McGill, the man she would marry when she was twenty-three. He was a commercial artist, and she earned an income writing for magazines – formulaic stories, always under pseudonyms. They lived and worked in London for several years, returning to Sydney in 1939. Her daughter Laura was born in 1946. Jessica and Ross McGill divorced, and she married Leonard Anderson in 1955.

It was only during her second marriage, which ended in 1976, that she had the time and security to turn her hand to the serious fiction she had always intended to write. Now, as well as her own novels, Anderson was writing for radio – four original plays, as well as adaptations from Charles Dickens and Henry James. The legacy of this work in radio can be seen in her skilful use of dialogue to convey the tensions and nuances of relationships. Anderson’s admiration for James is evident in her attention to the uses of power, and the power of money. Henry Green was one of her favourite writers, and Muriel Spark another.

Anderson said that she felt little affinity with other Australian writers and the documentary fiction which she felt predominated in the 1960s, but that Christina Stead, in writing about Sydney, gave her courage. There is surely a tribute in Tirra Lirra to Stead’s For Love Alone (1944) with its heroine Teresa walking and waiting, dreaming and making embroideries, desiring to escape to some wider life. The difference between the two writers is evident in Anderson’s distinctive prose, with its perfectly gauged use of significant detail, as in this account of the adolescent Nora:

I carried my pale face, my dropped flag of ashen hair, my abstracted eyes, my damp concealed body, along the rough roads and streets, and across paddocks and vacant lots and playing fields ... Our suburb merged with farms, and by day, overtaken by a farmer’s cart, I would see the whip flick the horse’s rump and the shadow of the cart draw away from a shining pile of excrement. On certain hot nights scents and stench would mingle, frangipani and lantana with the wake of the night cart. I walked and walked, sometimes with an objective – a friend’s house, a shop, the church or school – but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.

The girl’s longings, the young woman’s disappointments, and the pride that forbids her from admitting to either, are so memorably dramatised that Tirra Lirra by the River echoes in the mind long after reading. And this is no generation-specific experience, as Sally Pryor’s obituary for Anderson in the Canberra Times testifies. Born a year later than the book, she was given a copy as a teenager by her mother. Rereading the novel not so long ago revived the shock of recognition she had felt when she first read it, and also showed her new things that resonated. She was left wanting to know more about the author, ‘just what kind of woman she was, to have written such a gleaming, multi-layered story’. Jessica Anderson valued her privacy and let little be known about herself; yet there is a place for a biography that could tell the story of her life in conjunction with an account of the art of her fiction.

Needless to say, yet needing to be said, Australia’s twenty-third prime minister, R.J.L. Hawke, emerges from this interesting, sometimes engrossing yet disconcerting book smelling like roses. When MUP decided to publish, it must have seemed like a good idea. Deployed on television, Bob and Blanche were a marketing dream. But the result has a fatal flaw; it neither enlarges Hawke as a political leader nor advances d’Alpuget as a writer.

Individually, they are both significant. Prime minister from 1983 to 1991, when Australia was given much of the shape we know today, Hawke is a substantial Australian political figure. He was important in lifting the Labor Party out of its Cold War doldrums and the dismissal, forcing it to focus on how to govern the country. D’Alpuget, one of the first Australian novelists to set their work in Asia and the author of a good biography of Richard Kirby (Mediator, 1977), is a proven writer, capable of responding to challenging themes.

World War I is lodged in the minds of Australians with mythic power. Chris Womersley, in plain and startling yet tender and lyrical prose, has constructed a moving narrative that opens up the wounds of war, laying bare the events that pre-date the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory. I was reminded of A.S. Byatt’s recent novel The Children’s Book (2009), which also foregrounds in poetic language the Great War and etches forever the horror of broken bodies and minds on the consciousness of its readers.

In Bereft, Mary Walker is dying in her quarantined bedroom in the small New South Wales country town of Flint in 1919. She is a victim of the influenza epidemic (often referred to here as ‘the plague’) that followed the war. Ten years earlier, her only daughter, Sarah, was raped and murdered, at the age of twelve. After the child’s death, Sarah’s older brother Quinn ran off and was never seen again; people assumed he had committed the crime. A telegram from the army informed his mother that he had been killed in the war. In her fevered isolation, Mary is ‘comforted by visions of her lost children’. She instilled their love of stories, saying that a good story is ‘like medicine’; she also fancies that stories may be ways of ‘hiding from the world’. It is Mary who realises there is no word to define a mother who has lost a child, and Mary who, giving the book its title, grasps the word ‘bereft’ to describe herself.

Katherine Gallagher, who has lived in London since the 1970s, has now published six books of poetry, all but two of them with British or American publishers. This book selects poems from her earlier books, together with twelve new poems. As a whole, it gives the sense of a writer’s development over a period of thirty-five years, with some slight shifts of style over that time.

Gallagher has always been a poet of quiet observation, meditating on her experiences as a traveller or watching small domestic moments. The first poem, ‘Shapes within a Pattern’, the only poem from The Eye’s Circle (1974), establishes Gallagher as a poet of observation, though its rather grand sentiments and broken lines declaim rather than demonstrate the eye’s perceptive powers. The poems from Passengers to the City (1989) take up more concrete subjects – observing a couple on a train, children at play, memories of childhood scenes – with wider cultural references informing the domestic world. A good-humoured piece such as ‘Domestic’, about the contretemps between a man wanting order and ‘the untidiest nice woman he’s ever lived with’, moves above its everyday situation through a reference to Vermeer. In other poems, Zelda Fitzgerald and Anna Akhmatova become touchstones for women’s desire to express themselves in art, despite confining circumstances. In a later piece, Nettie Palmer becomes the repressed hausfrau, though by now her letters and criticism have outlived her husband’s reputation. This projection of domestic constriction onto famous artists is reversed dramatically in one of the most fully imagined poems in the book, ‘After Käthe Kollwitz – “The Face of War”’. Here, art must substitute for life; it is the desperate striving for meaning of a mother who has lost her son in war. The subject seems to release Gallagher from familiar domestic woes into larger considerations.

The political assassination of Kevin Rudd will fascinate for a long time to come. As with Duncan’s murder in Shakespeare’s play it was done, as Lady Macbeth cautioned, under ‘the blanket of the dark’, literally the night of 23–24 June 2010. The assassins heeded Macbeth’s advice: ‘if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’ And as in Macbeth, the assassins were in the shadow of the throne. Even the old king approved: Bob Hawke, himself deposed in 1991, recognised at last that the removal of a Labor prime minister is sometimes necessary.

The prime ministership brought to an end that night had been meteoric: the triumphant return of Labor from the wilderness; the opening months heady with symbolic actions, lofty aspirations and stratospheric approval ratings; the skilled navigation through the storms of the global economic crisis with the continuing approval of the people; the rapid crumbling of ambition, achievement, and popularity; and then the execution.

The Body in the Clouds, Ashley Hay’s scintillating and accomplished first novel, is in fact her fifth book, its predecessors all being non-fiction. There was the Lord Byron book, The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron (2000), Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions (2002), Herbarium (2004) and Museum: The Macleays, their collections and the search for order (2007).

The new book’s accomplishment resides, at least in part, in its avoidance of an obsession with any thinly veiled authorial self. There is none of that ‘Look at moi! Look at moi!’ so often found in first novels. This avoidance has been achieved through the counterpointing of four distinct but related narratives around a central theme. James Joyce might have called it ‘parallax’. The central theme, or emblem, is the concept of ‘Bridges’, especially the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the distant possibility of which is contemplated by the historically based William Dawes in the late eighteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ted Parker works on and beneath the Bridge, and in the present-day Dan Kopek flies back – consider the plane as bridge – from London to reunite with his childhood friend Charlie Brown, who photographs the Bridge.

Perhaps the novel might have been called ‘The Bridge’, but that title has already been taken by an American and lacks the allusion to a 1790 letter from Governor Arthur Phillip to Lord Sydney. ‘That they [Indigenous Australians] have some idea of a future state appears from their belief in spirits, and from saying that the bones of the dead are in the graves, but the body in the clouds: and the question has been asked, do the white men go thither?’ But another American poet, other, that is, than Hart Crane, suggests the universal reference of ‘bridges’:

A noiseless, patient spider,
I marked where, on a little promontory,         it stood, isolated,
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant,    vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them – ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless        oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing,           throwing, – seeking the spheres,         to connect them
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d –      till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling,     catch somewhere, O my Soul.

About one third of the way into The Body in the Clouds, Lieutenant William Dawes encounters an antipodean cousin of Whitman’s ‘noiseless, patient spider’:

In the early morning sunlight the web shimmered and glistened like a handful of jewels. At its centre, heavy among the delicate dew and the strong strands of silk, sat the spider, still and waiting. Headlong up from the observatory’s point, William Dawes found the web strung and stretched across the pathway; heading in the opposite direction, the surgeon found it also blocking his track and the two men looked at each other across the gossamer as if they’d found some great strong wall between them.

‘No symbols where none intended’, as Samuel Beckett wrote. In Hay’s fiction, Dawes’s spider web will become Ted Parker’s Harbour Bridge will become Dan Kopek’s silver-cylinder of an airliner. That William Dawes, chronologically the first of Hay’s principal characters, was an historical presence is one of the factors liberating her novel from the merely personal. According to Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill’s Radical Sydney, ‘the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge rises from Dawes Point, named after Lieutenant William Dawes (1762–1836), a First Fleet officer of marines, engineer, surveyor, mapmaker, astronomer, ethnologist and botanist. … [He later] became celebrated as a linguist, radicalised as a conscientious objector, and depicted as a symbol of nascent racial understanding / harmony.’ Irving and Cahill do allow that Cassandra Pybus has offered a revisionist reading of Dawes, challenging his depiction as a ‘saintly’ hero.

It suits Hay’s novel’s purpose to have Dawes’s spider cast a long shadow. When Dan leaves London, ‘his plane turned onto the runway and began to pick up speed. Dan leaned back against his seat, closed his eyes, and saw quite clearly the shape of a man flying across the face of the sun. Somewhere, as far back as childhood, he’d started thinking about Icarus …’ The first epigraph to Hay’s novel, before the letter from Governor Phillip that provides her title, is Auden’s celebrated account of the fall of Icarus in his ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Icarus figures pervade Ashley Hay’s novel, most prominently that of the man who falls from the Bridge during its construction, only to rise to the surface and survive. The novel has a wonderfully comic, if not shaggy dog, story regarding who that falling man in fact was. In this respect, the novel recalls the marvellous Dal Stivens story ‘The Man Who Bowled Victor Trumper’.

Charlie Brown’s photographic project, juxtaposing early journals with weather photographs, is understood by her ‘Gramps’: ‘You’re looking for overlaps, coincidences, aren’t you love? Bits of time between now and then?’ Thus a photograph of a brick stamped 1791 takes present-day characters back through the building of the Bridge to Dawes’s nascent Sydney. Such ‘overlaps, coincidences’ – parallaxes – are the very structure of The Body in the Clouds; its raison d’être. Ashley Hay’s structures and her characters are illuminated by an incandescent intelligence and a rare sensibility. A commanding début novel indeed.

In their recent polemic What’s Wrong With Anzac? (2010), Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds lament the militarisation of Australian history epitomised by the profusion of memoirs and military history in bookshops. The authors make a fair point that war history and commemoration has drowned out other notable achievements and failings in our country’s past. But their broad brush sweeps away an important Australian tradition of critical reflection about war and society. If historians ignored Australians at war – as most did until the 1970s – there would be much more wrong with Anzac. Anzac Legacies, edited by Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson, is a compelling and insightful collection of carefully researched essays about the impact of war upon Australians and Australian society. It is a timely reminder that historians need to stay in the Anzac game, and can take it in challenging directions.

A sarcastic little slogan on a wall in Australia’s arts funding organisation in the mid-1990s read ‘Il y a trop d’art’. All right, it was meant in jest, but it seemed to hint broadly at shared bureaucratic resentment of importunate artists, even though they were the Council’s clients and the reason, indeed, for its very existence. Remember the national health hospital in Yes Minister that ran perfectly until it had to take patients?

Nothing is new about this. Whether under the Ming, the Medici, or the Australia Council, art has always been more plentiful than patronage. Artists, like the poor, are always with us, and many Australians opt for Lang Hancock’s solution: to help the poor by not joining them. Usually, those who teach arts practice, administer arts funding or market the arts have more to live on than do creative artists themselves. A few creative people, thanks to their luck or skill in playing the roulette of official subsidy, private benefaction, commercial success or critical recognition, do manage to achieve wealth and fame. But then, as one of them, David Williamson, has remarked, their fellow artists treat them like traitors. Because creative people are prepared to live on very little in pursuit of their passion, they unintentionally drive down the pay, conditions and even expectations of artists themselves, to the point where many give up the struggle, and end up getting ‘a real job’ instead.

This may be Australia’s way of separating a few grams of artistic wheat from truckloads of chaff, but it gives no comfort to Robyn Archer. A lifetime in the arts (she started performing at age four in her grandparents’ Adelaide pub, overcame asthma and did ‘pure entertainment’ until she was twenty-six) has made her a passionate arts advocate and one of Australia’s few perennially successful artists. With an AO, she belongs to an even smaller élite of Australian artists who have made the honours list. A singer, actor, director, event organiser, entrepreneur, and perpetual nomad, she can also write fluently, frankly and with erudition, even on planes. This collection of her public speeches from 2003 to 2009 is her sixth publication, and as a proto-autobiography, it’s good to have them on the public record.

The ‘detritus’ of Archer’s title signifies what’s left over after the creative act: art that is sold, printed, performed, hung or otherwise stabilised. She disparages the crowds of people who queue in the Louvre to see a priceless ‘cased-up electronically protected painting of a smiling woman’. She scorns Western culture for failing to value Vincent van Gogh while he was alive and for inflating the price of his artistic detritus instead. She is down on opera, as well as on Elgar, especially his Enigma Variations, which bring out the republican in her. Her scorn of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia for using ‘Nimrod’ rather than any work by an Australian composer, is monumental. In contrast, she cites ancient cave painters, and graffiti artists such as Banksy, whose work is ephemeral, ‘in the doing and the moment’.

For Archer, the value of art is in the momentary act of doing it (the process), not the price that is paid for the detritus (the product). She wants to persuade consumers and funders of the arts to focus more on the creative process, and less on the end result. She appeals for acknowledgment of an artist’s long career as the context through which ‘moments of creativity’ are scattered. She bristles at the mechanistic implications of Blairite ‘creative industries’. An endangered parrot raises a louder outcry, she complains, than another language lost or yet another poet or composer silenced.

Archer knows what arts advocates are up against. She has read Manning Clark’s account of an Australia where power belonged not to visionaries nor women, but to ‘ruthless and tough men’, for whom material success meant happiness and material achievement represented public virtue. Even if that Australia is no more, its mindset can still be invoked on demand, as when Colin Thiele and Steve Irwin died within days of each other. The Australian media barely mentioned Thiele, but John Howard called Irwin a great Australian, and in Los Angeles he was hailed as ‘the face of Australia’. In the media, the arts are now a mere ‘fringe on the frock of life’. Only when we have a leader who cares about culture, says Archer, do the arts get a look-in. At the 2020 Ideas Summit in 2008, she believed that in Kevin Rudd the arts had a champion. How times have changed.

In these speeches, Archer rehearses the well-known arguments for the arts, calling them ‘essential food for the soul’ of Australian society. But ‘who should pay for culture?’ is always the question. Archer doesn’t bother with private or corporate philanthropy: she wants government to support the creative process of artists, ‘all of them’, and for their lifetime. Moreover, funding should go to untried work that hasn’t yet found a paying audience: ‘Those who dare the newest weirdest stuff should be supported and encouraged every bit as much as those whose work immediately resonates and becomes popular and therefore potentially profitable.’ But since government funding of all artists for life is hardly possible, how to choose? Who should decide? What criteria should apply to untried work? Here, Archer is short on answers, apart from proposing an Australian national lottery that should give half its proceeds to sport and half to the arts.

Archer’s enjoyment of regional events such as Mildura Arts Festival, her Indigenous artist friends, and her plans for future festivals is contagious. She has interesting insights on cultural policy in European countries and the United States, although her observations on India, China and Japan are less confidently informed. Like most public speakers, she has her favourite lines, which went over well at the podium, but get repetitive in a published sequence. She habitually refers to herself as a gypsy, for example, often disparages ‘bums on seats’, repeatedly advocates ‘flexing the creative muscle’, and reminisces several times about Deakin, Chaffey, and the postwar irrigation scheme. But in today’s Australia, where the best lack all conviction and the arts aren’t even discussed, her ideas deserve all the repetition they can get.

John Hirst is a distinctive figure in Australian intellectual life. As an academic, he has had a distinguished career at La Trobe University in teaching, supervision, and research. He developed new subjects and methodologies with which to teach them. In addition to those concerning Australian history, there was his pioneering subject designed to inform students about Australia’s European cultural heritage, with some of the lectures recently published as The Shortest History of Europe (2009).

As many of his former colleagues have attested, Hirst was a major contributor to the intellectual ferment that so marked La Trobe’s History department in its glory days. And many of the country’s leading historians benefited from his incisive advice when he was editor of Australian Historical Studies in the 1980s. A number of his postgraduate students have also turned their theses into informative books, such as Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (1987).

Suburban crime narratives featured in many Australian films in the 1990s, partly due to the influence of director Rowan Woods’s film The Boys, which drew inspiration from the ‘kitchen sink’ cinema of 1960s Britain. Twelve years after its theatrical release, this seminal film – based on the play by Gordon Graham and written for the screen by Stephen Sewell – remains the best example of an Australian genre that illustrates Marcus Clarke’s conception of ‘weird melancholy’ in the criminal element of our cities’ troubled underclass.

I had fun imagining Sonya Hartnett and Isobelle Carmody indulging in a little pre-publication chit-chat:

IC: What are you working on now, Sonya?
SH: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers battling for survival in a world turned upside down; talking animals; themes of freedom and loss. What about you?
IC: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers struggling for survival in a world suddenly turned alien; talking animals; themes of resilience and loss …

The result is two different novels, but the marketing meetings at Penguin must have been interesting.

These two books share common assumptions about the nature of our cities and our collective future as homo urbanis. If we are to survive the impending disaster of climate change and build an environmentally durable and socially just future, then we must do so within our existing, sprawling suburban landscapes. Gleeson and Mees know and respect one another’s work – each quotes the other approvingly – but the two authors diverge sharply in tone and intention.

Mees’s focus is particular and practical. As the title suggests, his book is a blueprint for building urban public transport systems that work. This would reduce our dependency on the car and prepare us for an oil-depleted future. It would cut our collective carbon emissions and create more liveable and more equitable cities. His conclusions are hopeful: the necessary steps are identifiable and easily within our grasp.

Madam Lash is a biography of Australia’s most famous dominatrix. Author Sam Everingham provides an engaging insight into the life of the woman who helped bring sadomasochism to mainstream attention in this country.

As when the governess
Clutched to her bosom the damp head of Miles,
Who squirmed, unseeing, frantic for a hint,
Not able yet to guess
What she appeared to see in the haunted pane
Besides the backlit sky: the shape of Quint
Trying to find his way past her denial’s
Hard stare, not quite in vain.

Food is often used as a metaphor for a range of emotions, and this device is underscored in Simone Lazaroo’s fourth book. The title alludes to the idea of nourishment as a substitute for love, sex and religion. Indeed, the protagonist, Malaysian Perpetua de Mello, is a chef at a four-and-a-half-star Balinese tourist resort, the Elsewhere Hotel. Although the slogan in its promotional flyer encourages visitors to ‘Find yourself at Elsewhere Hotel’, most of the guests have come to lose themselves, to seek consolation from whatever ails them back home. Though undated, the novel is set soon after the bombing attacks in Bali; the tremors of the terrorist strikes still reverberate. It depicts a nervous island desperate to attract more tourists, if only to stimulate its damaged economy. There has even been a directive in the local media to smile more at foreigners.

The title of Sarah Hopkins’s second novel, Speak to Me, is an exhortation: bridge the gap between us. It is also an expression of hope, however misguided, that such a gap can be bridged: if only we could speak, we could heal.

This issue of open access e-journal Transnational Literature offers contributions from a 2009 symposium on migration, held in Adelaide. It is a diverse collection, appropriately so given persistent themes of dislocation, assimilation and multiculturalism. Still, perhaps diversity has its limits: the issue is burdened with Graeme Harper’s keynote symposium address, a ponderous and misplaced commentary on ‘the journey’ creative writers undertake: ‘As might already be realised, post-working can be the pre-working for future Creative Writing, and it can (and often is [sic]) emphasize the fact that creative writers are creative writers because they are actively engaged in one or more of the many acts of Creative Writing.’

Other articles demonstrate a commitment both to stylish prose and to scholarly content. Susan Bradley-Smith’s very personal take on finding ‘home’ has a deliberately disjointed quality. Jackie Cook weaves weighty themes into her investigation of the tragic experiences of a young woman in colonial Napier, New Zealand. Isobel Grave and Giancarlo Chiro consider the poetics of alienation and disconnection in Rosa Cappiello’s Italian migrant novel, Paese fortunato (Oh, Lucky Country). They also interrogate the English translation, which Sydney University Press recently reissued.

The creative writing – a short story and two poems – is solid but seems staged to augment the migration theme. Although nicely written, Hayley Katzen’s story about inter-generational differences sets up a moral quandary that is too obvious.

The journal includes book reviews split into ‘Creative and life-writing’ and ‘History, Theory and Criticism’, but essays here by Bradley-Smith and Cook transcend the distinctions such headings imply. While there is some minor unevenness, more often sharp and obviously expert commentaries abound. And that’s the case throughout. Despite occasional patches of unnecessary denseness, the writing and the research mostly displays purpose, depth and an admirable commitment to scholarly accessibility.

The Well in the Shadow, whose title is drawn from Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929), is an unconventional book, shaped entirely by Chester Eagle’s idiosyncratic responses to certain writers and their work. Eagle’s engagement with, and enthusiasm for, the texts he considers are undeniable. So too is his close knowledge of the books and writers discussed. The range of subjects is broad and reasonably inclusive, but I did wonder, given the book’s subtitle, about the absence of well-known writers such as Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Christina Stead. Nonetheless, the choice is diverse.

Another strength of this collection is Eagle’s readiness to pose trenchant questions that are usually left unasked. In the essay ‘Jack and George: Who Owns a Life?’, for example, Eagle reproves George Johnston for ‘cannibalising’ the lives of his brother Jack and his wife Pat in My Brother Jack (1964), and for mythologising them in ways they found humiliating. Drawing on interviews he conducted with Jack and Pat in 1980, Eagle is able to give voice to their sense of violation:

Jack and Pat I met in July 1980, when the book had been in circulation for sixteen years, and they were still uneasy with it, accusing it of being wrong, of not representing them as well as it should, taking issue with points of detail (as if the book was meant to be an accurate picture of them) while at the same time rejecting it because they felt their lives had been quite other from what George had shown.

The pretext of this book is as simple as it is delightful. In 1982, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Sandy Mackinnon found himself on the windswept island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. Iona is one of those places, familiar in the world of spiritual tourism, that is layered in irony. In ancient times it became home to a community of monks, most notably St Columba, for the simple reason that nobody in his right mind would follow them there. Now, of course, it is a popular destination for those who value more than their right minds. Iona, like Santiago de Compostella, has a small but cogent literature of its own. It weaves a spell. There is very little to buy there. It creates debt in other ways.

As a teenager, Mackinnon visited Iona and was royally conned by a brash young Californian called Pixie Peterson. Nonetheless, he found his way to the Well of Eternal Youth, the last place he needed to visit. He was more in need of a Well of Immediate Maturity. He stripped off in the freezing conditions and took the bath which he thought, against all evidence, might prolong his years. Only when leaving the island did Mackinnon discover that he was not supposed to bathe in the well but to drink from it. He would need to go back and do the thing properly.

Smithy is a retired shearer turned vineyard worker. His days are spent among the vines, where minutiae become conversational talking points and the lives of others are dissected with dogged patience. Smithy, a recovering alcoholic, still haunts the bars he used to call home, but no longer drinks in them. As a consequence, memories are resurfacing: a past up north, his wife Florrie, and days when his son still regarded him as his father. Charlotte also lives in the town. She shares a common bond with Smithy, following the events of a particular night. Fearing the emotion of that night and without alcohol to numb his fears, Smithy decides to seek redemption in the only way he knows.

There is much to like in Chambers’ début novel. His ear for dialogue is acute, and he neatly captures the monotony and repetition of conversations in the vineyard. His description of the landscape is similarly impressive, and the use of the vineyard as metaphor for life works well in the narrative context.

Structurally, the novel suffers from a lack of judicious editing. Much of Charlotte’s past is conveyed in two monologues, the second of which runs uninterrupted for fifty pages. While this fleshes out her back story, it also slows down the narrative just as the tension is rising. Charlotte’s importance to the novel could have been foreshadowed more effectively by placing her in the narrative at a much earlier point.

These criticisms aside, The Vintage and the Gleaning is a promising début. Chambers has a gift for finding rhythm in the written word. With more emphasis on structure, he will undoubtedly find a wider audience.

Edward Sugden was the first master of Melbourne University’s Queen’s College, a position he held for forty years. One needs to provide this identification, because although in his day Sugden was regarded as one of Melbourne’s best-known citizens, his is one of those names that has dropped from view. Along with his contemporaries Alexander Leeper of Trinity College and John MacFarland of Ormond, he contributed to what Wilfrid Prest calls ‘the golden age’ of Melbourne University’s colleges.

It is revealing that Renate Howe confesses that the original intention had been to commission a biography of Sugden. No one was forthcoming: that the prospect was not sufficiently enticing is a comment, perhaps, on the sagging interest in institutional religion. Instead, a symposium was held and this volume is the result: its eighteen authors survey Sugden’s life and career, ranging from his role as a theologian, educationist and preacher, to his contribution to fields as diverse as music, drama and public life.

Sharyn Killens is no stranger to the spotlight. After a long career as an entertainer, she is used to appearing in make-up and gown, pouring out a song. She is also a veteran of interviews and media stories, with a different song: that of her own extraordinary life. In The Inconvenient Child, written with her friend Lindsay Lewis, Killens (known on the stage as Sharyn Crystal) relates a wrenching and finally satisfying story of abject misery and triumphant emotion. In the paradigm of classic Australian memoir, her tale needs no bells and whistles to ring true. It is a transfixing performance.

In a 1995 interview for the Paris Review, Ted Hughes was asked if the 1960s boom in translated poetry in the United Kingdom, particularly with series such as the Penguin Modern European Poets, had had an effect on poetry written in English. ‘Has it modified the British tradition!’ he replied. ‘Everything is now completely open, every approach, with infinite possibilities. Obviously the British tradition still exists as a staple of certain historically hard-earned qualities if anybody is still there who knows how to inherit them. Raleigh’s qualities haven’t become irrelevant. When I read Primo Levi’s verse I am reminded of Raleigh. But for young British poets, it’s no longer the only tradition, no longer a tradition closed in on itself and defensive.’

Gambling was and is an economically and culturally important activity in many urban African American communities, and ‘numbers’ was from the mid-1920s a ‘full-blown craze’ in Harlem. It was a complicated method of gambling on a set of three numbers generated by an apparently incorruptible process. The numbers, posted each day by the New York Clearing House, a financial institution just a couple of blocks from Wall Street, related to arcane matters such as daily clearances between banks and the state of the Federal Reserve, but they were eagerly awaited, published in news-papers and deployed for quite different purposes. Numbers ‘bankers’ roamed the streets collecting small ‘investments’ from customers who then collected a return if their three numbers came up. Regular small bets from large numbers of people generated a lot of money, and successful numbers operators became rich. Numbers had a turnover in the tens of millions of dollars a year in Harlem and, remarkably, became the enterprise ‘with the largest number of employees and the highest turnover’ in that legendary part of the city.

Equator, a rambunctious, unwieldy novel, begins in a Spanish orphanage with an elderly watchdog, Pinski. According to the narrator, who is addressing a large orange butterfly, Pinski has succumbed to the heat of the day and cannot be bothered protecting his human charges. The human characters – and therefore, by association, those who are reading his story – are called ‘the custodians of the nectar’. This rather beautiful metaphor is used many times in Equator, as are dialogues, which become incantations about good and evil.

That the narrator is revealed to be Bobbo, a teak box, quickly allows the reading custodians insight into the nature of the book. It is magic realism, of course, but there are other clues in the novel: the short, pithy chapters with names such as ‘The Room in Soho Grows a Tree of Songs’; and characterisations that border on the picaresque. There is David Darlington, aka the colonel, a Scottish Hindu; his wonderful chanteuse aunt, Lee, who performs her songs virtually nude; Elli-Isabella, a giver in a world from which too much is taken; and the boy Carlos Luque, who, orphaned by Franco, then deposited in the Hacienda Zaragoza for parentless children, is the connecting thread in the narrative. He is known by many names: Keiran Leeft, Keep Left, Kee and Sunrise Sunset. He runs away from the orphanage to find his sweetheart, Rosa Mendoza, at the age of eleven, purchases a sailing boat seven years later, and never bothers with a fixed address, since he rarely lives ashore.

On the shelves of Australia’s bookshops colonial history follows military history in popularity, though a distant second. While, say, Allen & Unwin has made brave efforts with a succession of books about the convict period – Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s Closing Hell’s Gates (2008), Babette Smith’s Australia’s Birthstain (2008) or Grace Karskens’s The Colony (2009) – not one (not even Thomas Keneally with his Australians: Origins to Eureka, 2009) has sold as well as Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1987). Hughes spoiled the Bicentennial celebrations for a generation of scholars, piqued at such a sensational popular book, one that outsold their academic books combined.

Even the name is confusing: think of it as Belgian Congo/Zaire/Congo DRC to avoid confusing it with the Republic of Congo/Congo Brazzaville across the river. Officially, the name is Democratic Republic of Congo – DRC – so you could roll out the usually accurate cliché that any country with ‘Democratic’ in the name definitely isn’t that. In fact, the DRC had an election a few years back which was reasonably democratic and certainly inspired an impressive voter rollout.

If the name is confusing, the DRC’s recent history is even more opaque. The virtually unreported war there may have claimed as many as five million lives and has justifiably been labelled ‘Africa’s World War’, all and sundry having joined the game, including countries such as Zimbabwe that don’t even border the DRC.

Australian Literary Studies is a journal of the old school, independent of the international academic publishers that have absorbed so many others, and difficult to obtain for casual reading. It has maintained a solid reputation among scholars. From the evidence presented here, it is easy to see why.

The work of Penny van Toorn frames this special issue of ALS. In the opening article, van Toorn notes consistent patterns of Aboriginal book use in Australia and argues with fellow critics about how to approach this history. Her work does carry a ‘distinctive signature’ (as Gillian Whitlock argues in her foreword), and it is the mark of extensive research and respectful intelligence. Other articles introduce forgotten or neglected bodies of work. Rachael Weaver looks at widespread depictions of frontier violence in nineteenth-century popular fiction through the lens of the Gothic. Rich Pascal puts a case for reconsidering Bill Harney’s Brimming Billabongs (1947) and its portrait of Aboriginal life in the middle of the twentieth century.

By contrast, two further articles are devoted to works that are an enduring part of public literary conversation and will be familiar to many readers. Carrie Dawson argues that Thomas King’s story ‘Borders’ should be re-evaluated, the political import of the tale having been hidden in plain sight by its widespread public recognition in Canada and beyond. Jo Jones offers a discussion of David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) in the wake of recent public disputes about Australian history and historical fiction.

The overall impression the reader takes from this volume is of careful scholarship. This can make for unexciting reading, but is also reassuring in its way. Literary, cultural and political questions given cursory treatment elsewhere are offered considered attention in the forum provided by ALS.

Dance is an ephemeral art. This is just one reason, among many, why Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s beautifully designed and presented Australia Dances: Creating Australian Dance 1945–1965 is an important contribution to the light industry of dance historiography. Its eye-catching cover, with a Walter Stringer photograph of dancer William Harvey in a soaring leap above an Australian landscape, will attract bookshop browsers. A perusal of its contents will encourage purchase, as a special gift or for one’s personal library.

Australia Dances records the creative endeavour behind what happened in dance in Australia between 1945 and 1965 – and a lot was happening. Glennon, hitchhiking or catching trains across the country, did much of the research and interviewing, delving into archives and gathering information from dozens of witnesses. I suspect that Brissenden was responsible for most of the writing. The text is informed and readable, infused with sharp observation and touches of humour characteristic of his style.

How effective is a voice of reason in a climate of fear? In his introduction to this book, Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University says that he is ‘incorrigibly optimistic’ about the role of education in assisting us to make wise decisions about our future. Over the past twenty years, he has written twelve books, including A Big Fix: Radical solutions for Australia’s environmental crisis (2005) and Living in the Hothouse: How global warming affects Australia (2005), forty-five book chapters, more than thirty journal articles and six hundred columns for various publications. That work has been written for the general public, not just the scientific community.

While Lowe is clear that the environment is our first priority, he emphasises that it cannot be separated out from other issues. At Griffith University, science students study within a multidisciplinary framework. This book contains an edited selection of Lowe’s work based around four themes: Science, Technology and the Environment; his current bête noire, Economics and Politics; Culture and Health; and Education. Perhaps unusually for someone with degrees in physics and engineering, Lowe comes across as a Renaissance man. There are references to literature, film and the performing arts; he recounts his pleasure singing with the Brisbane Chorale; and he argues that science needs the insights into the human condition provided by the arts. Ostensibly to stress the value of keeping fit, there is a new essay on ‘The Seven Ages of Cricket’.

Unsurprisingly, Australia leads the world in the production of close-grained studies of convicts sentenced to transportation. Since 1788, it’s what we do. Emma Christopher proves herself to be a crackerjack at tracking down just about anyone who ever stood before an eighteenth-century court. She reels off their crimes, social origins, associates, aliases, lovers, victims, favourite haunts and previous convictions like a bailiff of long experience. What is more, she appears to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the alleys, lanes and bolt-holes of every city in the British Isles. So stupendous is her talent for conjuring up the atmosphere of the times that most readers will forgive her for too frequently slip ping into the archaic language of the documents she studies.