Why do you write?

It’s an excuse to hang around books, which is all I’ve done, one way or another, over the course of my career.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. It’s like going to the cinema for free every night. I so look forward to it. But they are strictly private screenings.

Where are you happiest?

(1) Reading in bed, with a dog at hand.

(2) In a green place, with warm rain falling. (3) With sea views.

Sir Maurice Bowra, renowned as the most lively and learned don in Britain, if not in all Europe, reigned supreme as Warden of Wadham College Oxford for more than three decades until his retirement in 1970. This long-expected biography, diligently researched for many years by the late Michael Davie, London-based author, journalist, and former editor of the Melbourne Age, has now been expertly completed by Oxford historian Leslie Mitchell, who writes with the ease and authority of a biographer thoroughly acquainted with his subject and the College over which he long presided: though not, perhaps, with the sharply quizzical eye that Davie, working outside that golden circle, might have trained on both.

The larger interest of the book, enhanced by its slow period of gestation, is in what it reveals about the more sweeping changes that have overtaken not merely Oxford but the entire world of higher education since the heyday of its subject, whose idiosyncratic style of academic leadership, like his unusual scholarly skills and aspirations, were products of an era now vanished almost beyond recall.

Wadham College, in the years following World War II, was a small and intimate place. It had just a handful of Fellows, who were mainly celibate, dined together most evenings, were well acquainted with one another’s foibles and vanities, and behaved in much the same way as any small, closely bonded, potentially troublesome, highly argumentative family. The Warden’s boisterous and wittily impatient style was that of a benign paterfamilias, who knew that most of his colleagues had as little taste for administrative niceties as he had himself, and shared his strong dislike of bureaucracy, long-windedness and formal procedures. College business was transacted briskly once a week over breakfast at meetings that had to conclude by 10am, when tuition, and the real day, began. Up until the 1960s, this style could be translated more or less effortlessly into a larger administrative sphere. As a notably effective Oxford Vice-Chancellor, Bowra enjoyed setting new land-speed records for meetings of the University Council, normally scheduled to run from 2 to 4pm, but under his chairmanship often concluding by 2.30, and, on one celebrated occasion, by 2.10.

Oxbridge Colleges these days have altogether larger cohorts of Fellows, and infinitely heavier agenda to grind through. Like the Universities to which they belong, and like Universities throughout the world, they are more strictly subject to government monitoring, regulation and reporting. The administrative burdens borne by the present generation of academics Bowra would undoubtedly have viewed as an appalling waste both of their time and of their proper talents.

The further origins of Bowra’s tightly controlled yet faintly subversive style of leadership lay in his personal experiences during World War I, where he had developed a strong sense of loyalty to those with whom he served, together with a particular loathing of senior British officers, and warm admiration for the inspired feats of insubordination achieved by Australian servicemen. In his 1966 autobiography, Memoirs, he describes the behaviour of three Australians in particular, named Bourne, Marsh and Freeman.

They delighted me by their total contempt for spit and polish and their professional knowledge of soldiering. They were magnificently outspoken, and their remarks had a vigour and point which were lacking in most of the English complaints. Bourne was older than the others and had a wealth of experience and anecdote. He insisted that Gallipoli was child’s play in comparison with the Western front and that though the flies and smells were odious, they were nothing like as bad as Flanders mud. He knew all the tricks of military life and enjoyed the role of an old soldier. Once, we had fallen in and were standing at attention, when Bourne smartly stepped three steps forward, broke wind loudly, and stepped smartly back. This was the correct drill for such a need, but he alone knew it. The sergeant in control was on the point of explosion but not sure enough of himself to say anything.

Beneath Bowra’s own strong sense of collegial loyalty and personal discipline ran a similar vein of slightly anarchic mischief, learnt at moments such as these.

Rules and conventions always existed, in Bowra’s mind, to be exploited or nimbly vaulted over. Interviewing candidates for College Fellowships, he would talk almost without pause, answering his own questions at high speed the moment he had framed them. ‘Now, how about James? How about James? How about The Golden Bowl? I’ll tell you about The Golden Bowl.’ And he would, at some length, and in a style appropriate to the subject. This was a disconcerting technique, not only for the candidate who might feel like a tennis junior wandering on to a court where Rafael Nadal was practising his overhead smash but for fellow interviewers watching anxiously from the sidelines. Though highly unorthodox, it was a surprisingly effective method of interview, shattering as it did all carefully rehearsed responses, and testing to the limit the candidate’s social, diplomatic and argumentative skills.

The Fellowship interview was in fact a late invention during Bowra’s time at Wadham, being finally imposed on all Oxford Colleges in the late 1960s by the University, which demanded more formal procedures for the selection of those who would now be required to deliver lectures for their Faculty (for which they received a government-funded stipend), as well as to tutor the students of their particular College, which provided the rest of their salary.

In earlier times, the Colleges had footed the entire bill, and had selected their Fellows according to their own whims and traditions, which inevitably involved one central ritual: the high table dinner. Suitable-sounding applicants were invited to dine with the current Fellows, who would look them over as the port circulated, form an opinion and cast their vote accordingly the following day. The extreme hazards of this system, which, judged against modern standards and protocols, verged upon the scandalous, can perhaps be illustrated by a brief personal digression.

In the early 1960s, I was invited to high table at Wadham on an evening when, as it happened, two of my closest friends were being formally ‘dined’ as candidates for the then-vacant English fellowship. I watched them across the table, as, pale with anxiety, they exchanged small talk with their neighbours, while glancing nervously at the serried cutlery before them. I was relieved not to be a candidate myself (as I had prudently informed my host in advance of the occasion), and enjoyed the evening more than they did, sampling the excellent wines as they passed. Later in the evening, in another room, more wines flowing, I was placed next to the Warden, who for the next hour talked exuberantly and almost without pause. Did I speak at all during this bravura performance? I have no memory of having done so.

Very early the following morning, however, the phone began to ring. Head throbbing, I stumbled to the phone, to hear a familiar voice boomingly congratulate me on having just been elected to a tutorial fellowship in English at Wadham. This was a ghastly mistake, I stammered. He’d got the wrong number. I was the one guest that evening who was not a candidate for that post, and anyhow I’d just been offered (did he recall my saying?) a job in California. ‘Ah, too late, I’m afraid’, was the calm response, ‘we’ve already drunk the champagne.’ This was a classic Bowra ambush, driven by opportunism and low cunning. After a fortnight’s indecision, I succumbed to the seduction, and taught happily at the College until the Warden’s own retirement at the end of the decade.

Other and more profound differences separate Maurice Bowra’s academic world from that of today. He was one of the last survivors of a generation who attempted to absorb and transmit a concept of the humanities that extended across (and often beyond) Europe from classical times to the present day. ‘The breadth of his reading and his work,’ remarked his friend Noel Annan, ‘was unlike that of any other person in England.’ Born and brought up in China, Bowra had travelled by the Trans-Siberian Railway to take part in the Great War, spending time in Russia on the way and improving his skill in the Russian language, which he had first heard as a boy in Manchuria. He mastered Latin, Greek (ancient and modern), French, German, Spanish and Italian, and read with astonishing application in all those languages as well as in English, heading always for what he characteristically called ‘the big stuff’. He wrote about Pindar and Homer and the Greeks, about European epic from Virgil to Milton, about Periclean Athens, about Provençal, Persian and Georgian poetry of the twelfth century, about the songs of the bushmen of the Kalahari, of the Veddas of Sri Lanka, and of the pygmies of Gabon, and much more besides. He had met Henry James while still a boy and read all his work, loved and felt a strong affinity with the writings of Thomas Hardy, admired and befriended both Yeats and Eliot. He translated the poetry of Alexander Blok and Rainer Maria Rilke, and championed the work of Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. He introduced many writers not just to Oxford but to the English-speaking world, promoting Stefan Georg and Paul Valéry in the 1920s, and Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda in the 1960s, when their work was scarcely known in England.

His judgements were not unfailingly good. He had no time for Auden and opposed his candidacy when he stood for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (‘Bad lecturer, bad scholar, bad man, drunk and dirty. He should get in’), and persisted in thinking Edith Sitwell a poet worth taking seriously. While his conversation about writers he admired was always worth hearing, his published writings about them were often quite leaden and dull. Even the titles he chose for his books (such as In General and Particular) could induce fatigue before one had turned the pages, or offend contemporary sensibilities (as did Primitive Song).

The startling disjunction between Bowra’s learned but often pedestrian writings and his sparkling conversation has often been attributed as it is in the present biography to the perpetually inhibiting influence of his undergraduate tutor in Philosophy, the curmudgeonly H.W.B. Joseph at New College, but this explanation hardly rings true. Bowra’s ear was not perfect, and the speed that served him so well in conversation was his undoing in formal prose.

For all his range and versatility, moreover (as he was deeply aware), there were intellectual feats that he simply could not perform. In the mid-1930s he was invited by T.W. Adorno to contribute to a journal that Adorno’s friend Max Horkheimer was editing in New York. Adorno, a leading member of the Frankfurt school of writers who sought to relate literary and historical enquiry to recent developments in the fields of psychology and sociology, had come to live in north Oxford, and was a warm admirer of Maurice Bowra’s work. The essay that Bowra produced for the journal, though finally published after much struggle and revision, proved something of an embarrassment, being all too obviously in the belletristic tradition. He had scant interest in social theory and no real wish to apply its insights to the area of classical studies in which he worked. The new waves of critical theory coming from Paris and New Haven during the final years of his life likewise touched him not at all. The subsequent transformation of literary studies, in the years following his death, into specialised areas of cultural, theoretical and communication studies would have caused him nothing but distress.

Bowra died in 1971, at what he himself might have characterised as a well-judged moment. The spacious intellectual world into which he had been born, and the privileged academic sphere over which he had so long presided, had begun to change in ways he did not wholly approve or understand. Student unrest had come to Oxford. Columns of chanting students marched down South Parks Road past his College, demanding academic reform. Always having seen himself as a champion and friend of students, Bowra was distressed by their more extreme demands, privately confessing that he no longer understood the young. In one sense, however, Bowra did understand how such moments of social transition occur, and what they portend, for as Mitchell shrewdly points out, they were what he had studied in other civilisations all his scholarly life.

Bowra wrote books on Homer and Sophocles, but it is hardly a coincidence that his academic work is concentrated heavily in the period 550 to 480 BCE. He is less interested in the heroic age or the democratic Athens of the later fifth century. In his chosen period, aristocratic government in city states was often giving way to more democratic forms. The analogy with his own times could hardly be missed.

The classical poetry that Bowra most admired had been written by members of aristocratic families: Alcaeus, Sappho, Xenophanes, Theognis and above all his beloved Pindar, whose verse anticipated the changes that were to come as democratic reforms were introduced into the ancient society in which he lived. It was perhaps a similar note of ambivalent lamentation that appealed to Bowra in the poetry of Yeats, as the old and privileged way of life in Ireland gave way to the new.

‘I’m rather looking forward to meeting the Almighty’, Bowra would say from time to time with typical robustness during these final years. ‘I have three questions for him. All unanswerable.’ Right to the end he regarded life, and the possible life that lay beyond life, as a natural extension of the viva voce examination and the Fellowship interview: as a series of contests in which he himself would often simultaneously play with great relish the opposing roles of formidable interrogator and brilliant respondent. Competitive to the last, he was also uneasily aware that from a longer historical perspective, and in a deeper personal sense, his time had already passed. On occasions he might even doubt more gloomily, more unreasonably, recalling the high standards to which he himself aspired whether it had ever really come.

The reissue in one volume of three of Ruth Park’s much-loved novels The Harp in the South (1948), its sequel Poor Man’s Orange (1949), and the prequel Missus (1985) is welcome. The trilogy completes the family saga, taking the Darcy family from its emigrant beginnings in the dusty little outback towns where Hughie and Margaret meet and marry, to their life in the urban jungle of Surry Hills, then for-ward to the 1950s when the next generation prepares to leave the slums for the imagined freedom of the bush. These are Australian classics, but classics of the vernacular, of the ordinary people. They should never be allowed to disappear from public consciousness.

The physiotherapist I saw for a pinched nerve in my back not long ago turned out to be an avid reader of fiction. She would work her way through the Booker shortlist each year. But she wouldn’t read Australian novels. As she pummelled my knotted flesh, I wondered if this was the right moment to admit that I was a person who wrote such things. She explained that, having moved to Australia from South Korea as a twelve-year-old, she had been made to write essays at school about a book called A Fortunate Life that she found as painful as I was finding her pressure on my spine.

A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, published in 1981, was the success story of Australian publishing a generation ago, with sales for Penguin Australia of more than half a million copies. The memoir of a Western Australian boy who went to work at the age of eight, survived Gallipoli and came home to a struggling life as farmer and unionist was iconic of an ordinary sort of fortune plainly told. But its lesson was aversion therapy for this smart young Korean Australian finding her way through high-school English in a Sydney suburb. I urged her to try something different, recommending last year’s Booker winner, The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, as another kind of Australian literature. The author finished his high school at James Ruse, Parramatta, and his biography acknowledges Australia as one of his domiciles. She liked that one.

Up from the Mission is a powerhouse of a book. One would expect no less from Noel Pearson. This collection of thirty-eight essays combines to provide multiple overarching narratives: Pearson’s personal trajectory from the mission on Cape York, where he grew up; his intellectual development; and his political efforts at regional and national levels to redevelop Cape York communities and to influence the nation. The writings date from 1987 to 2009, from his first essay as a radical graduate student to his latest pronouncements.

The prospect of discovering another work by a favourite author is always a pleasing one, even if the reality, when it is actually encountered, is sometimes disappointing. With a writer like Jane Austen, with only six published novels, who would not wish for some further delights to be unveiled? When Austen died, her sister, Cassandra, was left with the unpublished manuscripts of a number of juvenile writings and later works. After Cassandra’s death, members of her family had them in their hands (or perhaps one should say ‘on their hands’, given their subsequent feeling that the possession entailed a level of somewhat burdensome responsibility).

Too many specific years in the twentieth century were said to be ‘pivotal’, but 1968 was clearly a standout. In the United States, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; there were student protests in Paris; and Russian tanks signalled the end of the ‘Prague Spring’. In January 1968, on the other side of the world, in an area once known as French Indochina, the army of the National Liberation Front (the Vietcong) invaded the imperial city, Hué, and all other major cities in South Vietnam. This was the infamous Tet Offensive.

Kate Middleton’s accomplished first book, Fire Season, begins with ‘Autobiography’, where the child kicks against the perceived constraints and ambiguities of her sex: she could ‘make a half-decent boy’ only if the books she read were ‘full enough of war / or gunrunners, or treasure, or spies, or spoils / of piracy. No, I didn’t know how to hold a hammer.’ Middleton constructs a version of self defined by negatives: the narrator was not a ‘boy’, but does not explain why she sees ‘boy’ as the norm or as a preferred sex. Much of Fire Season explores some historical and mythical women, often in light of this shadowy definition (‘You once said // the visible and the invisible imply each other’, ‘Essay on Absence – Journal (with Judy Garland)’). In particular, Middleton invokes several movie stars – Lana Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Doris Day, Clara Bow, Lauren Bacall, as well as Judy Garland – measuring her distance from these fabled figures, as well as investigating them as alternative lives.

John Brack (1920–99) is one of the most remarkable of Australian painters, and a salient figure in the generation that included Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Leonard French, and John Olsen, of whom only two survive. Many viewers would see him as the imagination that made our suburbs viable as art; others have been in two minds about his clarity and perfectionism. Hard edges can make for tough responses.

The sixteen volumes of The Oxford History of England provided the authoritative synthesis of English history for two generations of students. A few volumes of this reminder of my undergraduate days, some still in their austere pale blue dustcovers, sit on my bookshelves. The first volume, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, was published in 1936, and the series was completed thirty years later with the publication of A.J.P. Taylor’s path-breaking English History 1914–1945.

Thirty-four years after the former colony of Portuguese Timor experienced the horrors of invasion by the Indonesian army, the story of the killing of the five television journalists known as the Balibo Five – a persistent subtext of that history – has found new life in the forthcoming feature film Balibo, directed by Arenafilm’s Robert Connolly. In reviewing Tony Maniaty’s related book, I must declare a vested interest: his book Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor has appeared on bookshelves two months earlier than a book of my own, on which that film is based.

Living as a displaced person in Berlin during the early 1930s was no picnic, especially if you happened to have a Jewish wife. This was the situation Vladimir Nabokov found himself in, so it is hardly surprising that at one point he considered emigrating to Australia. Had he done so, how different would our literature look today? Perhaps we would have more novels like Brian Castro’s latest, for The Bath Fugues is so stylish, cosmopolitan, sinister and funny that it could justly be called Nabokovian in its lineage. This is not so much a departure for Castro as an amplification. His narrators have always been a slippery bunch and his prose invariably lavish, but rarely has his tone been as darkly comic as it is in this new novel.

Emily Ballou’s first book of poems opens with a quotation from Coleridge’s Definitions of Poetry: ‘Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose but to science. Poetry is opposed to science.’ A book of poems on the life of Charles Darwin must be a refutation of this idea, though I had expected a more direct return to the comment which, two hundred years after Coleridge wrote it, has accrued greater meaning. In Coleridge’s time, the dazzling and potentially alienating specialisation of the sciences had not occurred, and C.P. Snow had never hailed the ‘two cultures’. Anti-intellectualism had not yet colluded with postmodern suspicion of reason to decry the malign, hegemonic nature of Western science. Coleridge, like many educated men of his time, was conversant with the latest advances in most branches of the sciences. He enjoyed a close friendship with Humphry Davy, the foremost scientist of the day, who also wrote poetry.

Some stories deserve to be told more than once. Retold, they cannot be the same. Even when the teller is the same person, the shift in time and experience will make the story new. In The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker returns to the material of her autobiography, Roundabout at Bangalow (2001), in order to focus more closely on the saddest and most powerful memories therein: those of the young men of her family who served in two world wars.

Though born and bred in Brisbane, I had never read anything written by Nick Earls prior to this assignment. The closest I had come was a book reading over a decade ago when Earls amused the audience with excerpts from his Bachelor Kisses (1998), before the late Grant McLennan beguiled them with an acoustic rendering of The Go-Betweens song of the same name. The Go-Betweens connection remains palpable in Earls’s latest novel, The True Story of Butterfish. The title of the failed third album of the fictional rock band Butterfish, Written in Sand, Written in Sea, can be nothing other than an allusion to ‘Man O’ Sand to Girl O’ Sea’, the song which rounds out Forster and McLennan’s classic record Spring Hill Fair. Beyond that, references abound to the streets, monuments and cloying humidity of the Queensland capital Nick Earls what to Brisbane as Lou Reed is to New York.  Earls is also one of a long line of individuals Anton Chekhov, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard and others who gave up a career in medicine for a life of literary endeavour. Yet while the work of Ballard, to take the most contemporary example, includes disfigured bodies, transplanted limbs and exotic diseases, Earls seems to have left his life as a sawbones far behind. It is rather his misfortune to have been associated with the style known as ‘lad lit’, for which Nick Hornby is poster-boy.

Early in M.J. Hyland’s new novel, This Is How, Patrick Oxtoby joins his landlady, Bridget, in the lounge room. They watch a game show, and Patrick feigns interest in the contestants’ fortunes. It is an awkward scenario he wishes Bridget would talk more and he prattles on, making a faux pas. ‘You’re in a strange mood,’ Bridget says, eyes on the television. Bewildered, Patrick excuses himself. ‘You all want me to talk more,’ he silently complains, ‘and when I do this is what happens. I can’t keep up with life.’

Amnesia about writers of the past, even the not too distant past, is one of the besetting ills of our culture. How many readers of poetry under forty have more than a nodding acquaintance with the work of A.D. Hope, Francis Webb, Douglas Stewart or Vincent Buckley? All are fine poets, remembered now (if at all) through a handful of anthology pieces, partly because their published volumes usually disappear from print within a few years. Poets are particularly susceptible to the culture of forgetting, but the malaise extends to novelists and others who have made major contributions to our cultural, political and social life.

Timely and accurate intelligence remains crucial to providing early warning of preparations for a terrorist attack. In this sense, high-grade intelligence represents the ‘front end’ of counter-terrorist strategy. This has certainly been reflected in the streamlining of Australia’s intelligence agencies since 9/11 and in the unprecedented resources that have been diverted to those agencies, particularly ASIO. The latter remains the agency responsible for preparing and distributing threat assessments and specific warnings on terrorist threats to Australia. This decade it has been granted substantially increased legislative powers to monitor, detain and question terrorist suspects. Due to the changes to Australia’s anti-terror laws since 9/11, ASIO’s internal security profile has become more prominent along with its increasingly close cooperation with state and federal police agencies.

Bob Ellis’s lightly edited journal alternates between two main timelines spanning 27 June 2007 to 8 November 2008: that is, from the run-up to the last Australian federal election to Barack Obama’s victory. Ellis’s insomniac musings over these sixteen-odd months are brilliant and shambolic, irritating and moving. The book is essential reading, but you have to work hard for the gems.

Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro’s Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer is a tendentious and poorly written book about a fascinating topic. Riddled with clichés and full of baseless speculation, it displays neither great sensitivity nor penetrating insight. Despite the important subject matter, Wainwright and Totaro have written a shallow and dubious book.

‘How many times?’ the voice on the other side shouted. ‘How many fucken times? Will youse ever listen?’ The brick wall between the two change-rooms might have been cardboard.

On this side – the visiting team’s side – the boys sucked on their orange quarters, all ears. Dom Russo, the team manager, screwed up his face and glanced towards the wall. ‘He’s taking it a bit seriously, isn’t he?’

Paul was still contemplating his own peptalk. Half-time, no score: there was nothing he was taking more seriously. But the shouting next door made it difficult to concentrate.

‘As for you, Jase! Get into the fucken game! You want the ball served up on a plate? Use your speed, you lazy bastard!’

Dom winced again. ‘That’s his own son. The little winger.’

‘Good player,’ Paul murmured.

‘Considering he has an arsehole for a Dad,’ Dom murmured back, and they both chuckled.

‘As for that little pissant in the other team! The fucken number ten! Go through him, Jase! Straight through him!’

That’s my son, Paul realised.

It is fair to say that graphic novels are now an accepted form of literary endeavour. One could even argue that this happened quite some time ago, with the benchmark publishing event that was Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986). Comics had long been threatening to make the leap of legitimacy into the publishing mainstream, and Moore’s unashamedly adult opus was the perfect platform for DC comics to market a collection of twelve slim comics as a full-length ‘graphic’ novel. Their gamble has turned out to be prudent, as evinced by Watchmen’s faithful transition to the silver screen this year. With special-effects technology finally able to capture the fantasy world of comics, and with a guaranteed audience, it is little wonder we are witnessing an endless onslaught of Hollywood blockbusters based on successful graphic novels.

The recent, sometimes heated, debate among policy experts and commentators about Australia’s Defence White Paper has helped give focus to a curious paradox: that for the last two decades or so, since the release of the Defence of Australia White Paper in 1987, there has been a profound disconnection between defence planning and procurement and the actual operations conducted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). With its focus on major new spending commitments on submarines, frigates and the Joint Strike Fighter in the midst of ongoing operations in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands – which require none of these big-ticket items but which have, at times, stretched the ADF’s deployable capacity – the present White Paper risks falling into the same trap.

This excellent new volume, a product of the Australian War Memorial’s major research project on the history of Australian peacekeeping, provides a stirring corrective to this enduring paradox. Peacekeeping, its editors argue and contributors demonstrate, is a distinctive military activity that requires special skills, resources and equipment. It is always complex, and sometimes highly dangerous.

‘Boy he Cry’ or ‘Gwama’idou’ is the name of a boat owned by one of the inhabitants on Nuakata, the Melanesian Island that is the setting for Roger Averill’s odyssey. The boat is a canoe, hand-carved and painted yellow, with a bright plastic sail, so there is something incongruous about its poignant caption, which, as Averill learns, refers to a local expression: when a boy is hungry and cries for fish, his father must go out and catch it, so demonstrating his love for the child. In this case, there is an additional melancholic twist because Guli, the owner of the canoe, is separated from his son and unable to hear him cry. Averill’s story is permeated by a doubleness of mood that takes a while to reveal itself.

There is a buoyancy in the prose, symptomatic of an overriding commitment to the life Averill has chosen to lead on the island with his partner, Shelley, an anthropologist whose work depends on building enduring relationships in the community. The nickname given him by the local people is Gagasa, meaning ‘Show-off’ (or, as he prefers to gloss it, ‘the Extroverted One’), and most of the social exchanges he records during the early weeks of residency are forms of larking about. He and Shelley are comical figures as they negotiate the hazards of the sea toilet, choke on tapioca and bungle their way through the essential tasks of daily life. Averill admits to frustration and recounts futile attempts to escape the relentless attention of the pack of mocking children, but always comes around, as he does from a number of graver, life-threatening challenges during the year he spends on Nuakata.

The key theme of Overland 195 seems to be crisis. The contributors to this edition of the journal address the ‘global financial crisis’, as well as various other moments of tension and unrest in Australia’s present and past.

The journal opens with Germaine Greer’s essay on Kevin Rudd. Greer argues that Rudd’s contribution to the February 2009 issue of The Monthly focused heavily on the ‘ideological causes’ of the global economy’s currently parlous state. This is ‘safe ground’ for Rudd because, as Greer rightly contends, he does not map out a ‘course of action that could be shown eventually to have failed’.   Other articles explore such diverse topics as Australian literature, global warming, rock music criticism and Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan. Threaded throughout Overland 195 are short stories, poems and reviews. The highlight of this edition is Clare Wright’s provocative and impassioned essay on Lola Montez. Wright points out that Montez’s political activism is overlooked in the many historical accounts of her life which portray her as ‘the archetypal femme fatale’. Wright asks rhetorically: ‘Does it say something about Australian national identity that one of the most recognisable women in its mainstream historical narrative is a flirtatious vamp with a penchant for whips?’ Also enjoyable is Andrew Macrae’s analysis of Australian speculative fiction (SF). Macrae critiques ‘the distinction between speculative fiction and literary fiction, as it has played out in the Australian landscape …’ Macrae’s enthusiasm for SF writing infuses every sentence of his article.

The latest Antipodes opens with Katherine Bode’s provocative discussion of Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Dissecting McDonald’s ‘fantasy of an all-white, all-male Australian society’, Bode’s essay also criticises Inga Clendinnen for exempting McDonald’s novel from her much-aired arguments against historical fiction. Bernadette Brennan draws on Maurice Blanchot to explore ‘the ungraspable experience of death’ evoked in works by Alex Miller and Noel Rowe, and Lyn McCredden has philosopher René Girard in mind when revisiting the familiar territory of the Lindy Chamberlain case and the ‘rituals of perpetual scapegoating’. Helen Gildfind ‘meets’ Janet Frame through Frame’s autobiographies, and reflects on the ‘reader’s power to decide the autobiographical status of a text’. The result is interestingly self-reflexive, but some readers might prefer more Frame and less Gildfind.

The Adelaide River in the Northern Territory is both a small township and a river that is an infamous cruising zone for sizeable salties. Here, thrill-seekers frequent ‘Jumping Croc Tours’ and dine out on the local specialty of barramundi and hot chips. Resting on the Stuart Highway, 201 kilometres north-west of Katherine and 114 kilometres south of Darwin, the township’s population is around 250. The location’s in-between status is ideal for this story of splintered lives.

Brown Skin Blue’s hero, Barry Mundy, is on the threshold of adulthood, and like most adolescents he is wrestling with identity; but in Mundy’s case the struggle is compounded by not knowing who his father is, or even his own racial heritage. Some call him an indigenous Australian; others call him ‘Darkie’, ‘Brownie’ or ‘Dirt’. His mother is white-skinned; he is not. In the midst of this bewildering ambiguity, the seventeen-year-old’s troubled introspection and sexual awakening are spiked by unwelcome flashbacks of a devastating childhood trauma. Suspended somewhere between longing to forget and wanting to remember, Mundy is deeply conflicted.

For once, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. Stephen Ives’s busy image of Buster Keaton captures, in co-editor Lisa Greenaway’s words, ‘the essence of [Going Down Swinging] the slapstick/serious; the cultural ruckus; the unwavering stare’. Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic miscellany, distinguished by its vibrant eclecticism.

This issue is divided more or less evenly between poetry and prose, and also features several comics. Of the latter, ‘Flic’s Tale’, by writer-artist Jo Waite, has charming moments but fails to ripen into coherency. Vanessa Hutchinson’s succinct ‘How to Sit In Designer Chairs’ is more successful. The prose pieces are of a higher standard. Some stories cleave to familiar domestic settings, such as Julia Chiera’s ‘The Piercing’. Others are more exotic, including ‘Madeleine and the Wheel of Death’, Libby Angel’s dark and dynamic narrative of a circus tragedy.

There are few times we use words related to what we throw away in any sort of positive manner; if, for example, this weren’t a nuanced, careful book, I might call it trash. Certainly, one might refer to, say, a crime novel or a Jerry Bruckheimer film as ‘trash’, but mean it with love and affection, and ‘wasted’ or ‘trashed’ are words used with affection and some pride by people when referring to drug-fuelled exploits. In general, though, we use such words – trash, junk, garbage, waste, rubbish – in a pejorative sense, and it is this sense of waste that Hawkins wants to challenge and complicate in this brief study.

‘It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place,’ declared Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament in April 1653. ‘Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government … In the name of God, go!’

Leo Amery, a Conservative backbencher, brought Cromwell’s final six words into the House of Commons on 7 May 1940. He was unsure whether he would use them in the debate over Norway, where British and French forces were withdrawing from the first major land confrontation of the war. Colonial Secretary in the Conservative governments of the 1920s, Amery was a passionate advocate for the British Empire and strongly anti-communist. In the 1930s he became a tough critic of his own party’s appeasement of Nazi Germany. Speaking late in the debate, Amery felt the House was with him, and he ended his speech as Cromwell had done. Neville Chamberlain survived the division, but not the collapse in support from a fifth of his backbench, galvanised by Amery and others.

On the inside of the title page, we learn that this is a work of fiction to be shelved alongside other books about horse whisperers. Together with the schmaltzy subtitle, this is a less than promising start. Not that I am fundamentally opposed to animal stories. But horses? I distrust whatever parades as noble, whether beast or human. Horses are for viewing from a distance.

In this novel, young Tag Wardell becomes renowned for his marvellous way with horses, both in his native Gippsland and later in the army. I am none the wiser about what exactly he does, or why he is so exceptional. He treats animals decently, talks to them and doles out oats from his pocket. Give him the chance, and he’ll brush them down. Once he even gives a nurse the same treatment. There is no magic in this. What it translates to is that everything and everyone has their price.

The appearance of an idiosyncratic scholarly text addressing the work of a major European film-maker such as Dušan Makavejev is timely, given our increasingly fraught condition as subjects of a world that becomes more convolutedly politicised with every nanosecond. This is a highly political and indeed humanist analysis of a significant body of cinematic work.

Lorraine Mortimer’s introductory assertion that Makavejev’s 1960s and 1970s work is ‘an international touchstone of radical, transcultural and political cinema’ sets the bar high. Mortimer – an academic at La Trobe University – goes on, in this thoroughly researched and heartfelt study, to set an even more daunting goal for herself, stating that her aim is to examine Makavejev’s films ‘historically, locally, politically and aesthetically, highlighting [no less than] their implications for our understanding of the contemporary world’. This is quite a claim, yet, by and large, Mortimer’s text keeps to its word.

We all like to think of ourselves as civilised. Civilisation is like ethics: a concept and an underlying value system that seems impossible to oppose. Who, after all, could possibly be against civilisation? Who would want to take issue with the institutional stability, the democratic order and the standards of fairness, decency and culture we have come to see as hallmarks of a civilised life? Brett Bowden does. He does so in an ambitious and fascinating book that offers what could be called a genealogy of civilisation: an inquiry into the history, meaning and political impact of a concept.

At first sight, a genealogy of civilisation seems a rather dry and academic exercise. Bowden, a political scientist at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, examines the political and cultural contexts in which the idea and the ideal of civilisation emerged. He locates the linguistic roots of civilisation in fourteenth-century French, but then focuses primarily on how the concept took on an increasingly important meaning in the French, English and German vocabulary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Bowden draws only on English-language sources, he still offers a sophisticated and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of how the concept of civilisation became central to philosophy, legal discourse, scientific progress, socio-political institutions and colonial ambitions.

A crime novel worth its chops, Anthony O’Neill’s highly original The Unscratchables is narrated by tough cop Crusher McNash, a fearless bull terrier detective who is determined to solve a chain of gruesome murders in dogland. Enter Cassisus Lap, a sophisticated Siamese with smarts, and together the odd couple bite off more than your average number of plot twists and dead-end alleys. The tale (or should that be tail?) features humorous cameos from Jack Russell Crowe, Tom Manx and Quentin Riossiti, a moggified doppelgänger to Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter.

O’Neill’s vocabulary is witty, inventive and fun to decipher. Words such as ‘jangler’ for telephone, ‘tooter’ for car and ‘thwucker’ for helicopter complete an alternative, but not unfamiliar, reality where cats compete for universal domination at the expense of the underdog.

In 1858, a year before Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales, Theophilus Pugh wrote in the first history of Queensland: ‘Difficult indeed will be the task of the historian who hereafter attempts to chronicle the events connected with the early days of this now important settlement.’ Authors of the subsequent nineteen histories of Queensland, including Ross Fitzgerald, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons, would have been well advised to heed Pugh’s prescient warning.

Twenty attempts to tell Queensland’s history, over the past 150 years, range from eight pages of Francis Cumbrae-Stewart’s The History of Queensland (1930), to 2790 pages of Matthew Fox’s The History of Queensland (1919, 1921 and 1923). Some histories took a triumphalist approach, such as Frederick Morrison’s The Aldine History of Queensland (1888), Henry Stuart Russell’s The Genesis of Queensland (1888) and Raphael Cilento and Clem Lack’s Triumph in the Tropics (1959). Others, such as Ross Fitzgerald’s A History of Queensland (1982 and 1984), took what some critics regard as a ‘black armband’ approach. William Coote’s History of the Colony of Queensland (1882) and John Knight’s In the Early Days (1895) followed a chronological approach; others, including Ross Johnston’s The Call of the Land (1982), adopted a thematic approach. Raymond Evans’s A History of Queensland (2007) is analytical, while William Traill’s Historical Sketch of Queensland (1886) and Hector Holthouse’s Illustrated History of Queensland (1978) adopt a narrative style for a general audience.

The bar is set high

It was a great pleasure to read this year’s Calibre winning and commended essays in ABR. The essays written by Jane Goodall, Kevin Brophy and Rosa-leen Love continue the impressive tradition inaugurated by Elisabeth Holdsworth with her memorable work that won the first Calibre Prize. The bar is set high.

More importantly, through this prize ABR has enabled an outlet for publication that has actually encouraged the production of this kind of sustained essayistic prose, which, I suspect, would not exist without it.

No other publication for a wide readership provides a venue for writing of such length, style, sophistication and personal inflection. Indeed, the Calibre essay has grown into something of a subgenre of its own, bringing external biography or autobiography together with the life of the mind, so that intellectual engagement and speculation are experienced as integral to the existence and engaged citizenship of the author in today’s world. I hope, as I’m sure do many others, that this fine tradition will continue, bringing kudos to both ABR and to CAL as its sponsor.

Nicholas Jose, Elizabeth Bay, NSW

Dear Editor,

If my maths is correct, over the last three years there have been more than four hundred entries for the Calibre Prize four hundred occasions when writers have felt they wanted to express something which doesn’t fit into the genres of poetry, the novel or the short story, and is more deeply reflective than a journalistic article.

How magnificent of Australian Book Review and CAL to provide a forum for writers to reflect, to stretch their powers, to surprise themselves. The greatest surprise of all is how quickly Calibre has become part of the literary firmament of this country. There will be more Calibre Prizes, I’m sure of that.

Elisabeth Holdsworth, Goulburn, NSW

Six degrees of connection

Dear Editor,

Having just spent several months of life-in-suspension finishing a doctoral thesis, I settled down on a wintry June Sunday to the luxury of catching up with several issues of ABR without the nagging guilt that I should be doing something else.

As John Carmody writes (Letters, June 2009), the May issue is particularly rich, not least because of Rosaleen Love’s essay ‘Treasure Hunt’. As I read it, a thoughtful and sympathetic picture of ‘Harold’ began to emerge scholar, academic and bibliophile but it was not until I reached the word ‘Brisbane’ that the penny dropped and I hastily turned back to the first page of the essay to check names. ‘Love’ Harold Love! And here I would like to add to Dr Carmody’s connecting memories.

My recently completed thesis is a biography of the life and work of the art historian Joan Kerr (1938–2004), who was not only co-editor (with Bill Sparkes) of Semper Floreat in 1960 but also a friend of Harold Love and, like him, a bibliophile on an epic scale.

In his introduction to Joan Kerr’s paper ‘Art and Life’, delivered at the Silver Jubilee Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1994), Harold Love described Kerr ‘as a woman Orpheus descending to the underground recesses in order to restore the Eurydices of Australian art to the world of light’. While this might be an entertaining exaggeration, it paints an accurate mini-portrait of Kerr and her driving ambition ‘to paint a new canvas for Australian art history and carve a new frame to fit it’.

Biography takes many forms in its attempts to reveal the essence of a person’s life. While one can never truly ‘know’ another human being (as Rosaleen Love evokes so eloquently), books and treasured possessions often reveal more about that person than the ‘self’ he or she presents to the world.

Susan Steggall, Manly, NSW

Hornets’ nest

Dear Editor,

When ABR, our distinguished literary review, features an entirely spurious and vicious response to the new National Portrait Gallery, by Humphrey McQueen (May 2009), then, in its next issue, publishes a cloying letter by John Carmody praising the Editor for doing so, we have to start questioning whether ABR can really be considered an impartial organ of review any longer? From his first astonishingly inaccurate sentence, I wondered if McQueen had fallen into a hornets’ nest, been viciously stung and temporarily blinded on the way there! He fails to see or comprehend the most innovative thinking expressed throughout the NPG, its thematic structure or its consistently thoughtful hang. What the NPG has done is to challenge the notions of what portraiture can be and, in so doing, to constantly expand and question notions of Australian identity.

The NPG is a highly significant space in our cultural landscape. If ABR is to consider itself a serious review, I suggest that the only fair thing would be to commission another piece on the NPG by an eminent art historian who may well understand what the NPG is and what it has to offer us and the nation.

Juno Gemes, Hawkesbury River, NSW

Aberrant general

Dear Editor,

It is surprising to read in Cameron Shingleton’s review of Tom Frame’s Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia: ‘Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form’ (May 2009).

This view requires correction. In a chapter titled ‘Darwin’s Platypus’ in my book Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World (2001), I note Darwin’s particular fascination with this Australian monotreme. Darwin saw a platypus killed in the Cox’s River. Next day, he wrote to Admiral P.P. King, speaking of his ‘great feat to be in at the death of so wonderful an animal’. Thereafter, this paradoxical creature part bird, part reptile, part mammal drifted in Darwin’s maturing ideas on biogeography and diversity. It appeared in correspondence with his colleagues Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell as an ‘aberrant genera’ that fitted into his theory of natural selection in its capacity to embrace ‘useful modification’ (its unusual titless mammae being a case in point) and to survive in fresh water.

Subsequently, it appeared in The Origin of Species as an ‘anomalous form’, almost ‘a living fossil’, which had endured to the present day ‘from having inhabited a confined area and having been exposed to less severe competition’. Later, in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the platypus rose again as a key exemplar of natural selection and as a diversified link in what the great evolutionist perceived as ‘the organic chain of mammals leading up to man’.

Ann Moyal, Cook, ACT

Ways of reading

Dear Editor,

I am writing not so much to object to Adam Rivett’s review of Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (June 2009) as to suggest another reading. Rivett’s frustration stems from a particular way of reading fiction, a way of reading that, no doubt, many readers share. I suggest that this form of reading is always going to be troubled by a book like Cho’s, not just because of the choice of texts that his fiction plays with one of Rivett’s main objections but also because the kind of writing that Cho is practising is ill suited to evaluation in terms of classical hierarchies of cultural value. This is because Cho’s fantastical writing ‘keys’ (a term used by sociologist Erving Goffman) or quotes genre narratives in a particular way that revalues in new terms that which can no longer be valued on its own terms, or that which was never felt to have much value to begin with.

There are some similarities with camp, and perhaps even with the work of Australian poet John Forbes. It would be counter-intuitive for writing such as Cho’s to toy with films, television or other cultural products felt to be of ‘high’ quality. The whole point of such an appropriation is that these things no longer move us, and thus a certain playful distance can be created and shared.

This distance is then put into a dialogue with the complexities of identity and identification in newly imagined scenarios, such as Cho’s sometimes whimsical stories. This may lead to a kind of insider’s writing something that Rivett alludes to but the interest of the work for the reader is that they are invited to join in and share in this paradoxical position of being both inside and outside, near and distant, pleasured and troubled.

Adam Gall, Kogarah, NSW

Clunky modern English

Dear Editor,

In his excellent and thought-provoking article on the humanities and philanthropy (June 2009), Malcolm Gillies directs our attention to the concluding poem (Carmen xxx) in Book III of the Odes of Horace, in the verse translation by John Conington: specifically to the phrase ‘… usque ego postera / Crescam laude recens…’, of which the fragment postera crescam laude has since 1854 served as the motto of the University of Melbourne.

At the risk of dragging your readers kicking and screaming into this old discussion, that Latin phrase is especially difficult to translate, and all of the following have from time to time been proposed: (1) ‘I shall live in freshness of fame as long as the world endures’; (2) ‘I shall grow into the future, still / In fame renewed’; (3) ‘later / I shall grow by praise’; (4) ‘Ever new / My after fame shall grow’; (5) ‘In time to come / my fame will grow ever fresh’; (6) ‘On and on / shall I grow, ever fresh with glory of after time’; (7) ‘I shall increase with the praise of after ages’; (8) ‘I shall grow in the esteem of future generations’; and (9) ‘I shall rise in posterity’s praise’. Nowadays the university seems to have settled upon the very loose (10) ‘We shall grow in the esteem of future generations’.

No doubt the broad meaning is by now pretty clear, but the issue serves to demonstrate the brilliant economy of classical Latin, and the clunkiness of modern English in finding a satisfactory, attractive or even true rendering of Horace’s phrase.

Context helps. David West has pointed to the remarkable strength of the poet’s voice no false modesty there, though one might now disagree with the nineteenth-century glossist who found ‘no extravagance but much dignity’ in its tone.

It is of little comfort to find that the Germans, Dutch, Spaniards and French have had an even harder time with postera crescam laude than we have. In 1861, for example, Wilhelm Binder came up with ‘… herrlich bei Enkeln einst / Wächst mein Rame, so lang’ (from herrlich = glorious, magnificent, even lovely; bei Enkeln = among descendants; einst = some day (implying ‘with luck’, a nice touch); wachsen = to grow, lengthen, broaden, and/or shoot up, so Wächst mein Rame = my fame shall grow). The Dutch were wordier but equally sensible: ‘Mijn lof zal hier na altijt even frisch aengroeien’ (my fame shall … grow fresh).

Yet these are both as stodgy as the Spanish is impressionistic: ‘renovado siempre / Crescer con las alabanzas venideras’ (always or ever renewed / to grow with the praises of those who come after), while the French is wholly flamboyant: ‘sans cesse, moi, par la gloire de la postérité, je grandirai toujours jeune’ (without cease, I, by the glory of posterity, shall grow tall [or, intriguingly, lengthen and remain] forever young) but let us assume that the cheeky hint towards length and that conspicuous toujours jeune (forever young) are purely Gallic flourishes. Which merely reinforces Professor Gillies’ point that it is well nigh impossible to put a price tag on all of that, so let us be gay.

Angus Trumble, New Haven, CT, USA

Calibre Prize

Since announcing the joint winners of the third Calibre Prize, we have received many compliments for Jane Goodall’s and Kevin Brophy’s winning essays, and various expressions of support for Calibre. Several of these appear on our website, and this month we also publish letters from Elisabeth Holdsworth inaugural winner of the Calibre Prize in 2007 and from Nicholas Jose, who also writes about the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in this issue.

It is very pleasing to be able to announce that Copyright Agency Limited, through its Cultural Fund, will sponsor the fourth Calibre Prize, for which ABR now seeks entries. Once again the Prize is worth $10,000, making it one of the world’s most lucrative awards for a new essay. This year we are adding a second Prize Young Calibre which is open to those aged twenty-one and under. Young Calibre is worth $3000 not a bad start for a brilliant secondary student or undergraduate. More details appear on page 9, and both sets of guidelines and entry forms are available on our website or from the ABR office.