Custom Article Title: 'Littoral Truth: Peter Porter (1929-2010)' by Peter Steele
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In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions, is one of his distinguishing qualities, and something to rejoice in. Coastlands, and marshes, are essential to his intellect and to his imagination. He may never have had one foot in Eden, but he did rejoice in a plurality of territories.
When Rose, the narrator of Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character, first visits the bathroom of Gary Gravelly, ‘there in the toilet bowl, frayed around the edges and so long languishing that it had stained the water, was the most enormous rope of turd. That, I said to myself, is the death of romance.’ Rose soon forgets, overwhelmed by the boyish charm of her new lover, but the reader is left with an indelible image. Whatever Rose might think of Gary at any stage – and she changes her opinion many times over the next couple of years – we continue to associate that repulsive image with him. This is not just a bit of earthy bad taste designed to shock. It is a bold and nauseatingly effective way of influencing the reader’s attitude to Gary.
Book 1 Title: Men Of Bad Character
Book Author: Kathleen Stewart
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $32.95 pb, 320 pp
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When Rose, the narrator of Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character, first visits the bathroom of Gary Gravelly, ‘there in the toilet bowl, frayed around the edges and so long languishing that it had stained the water, was the most enormous rope of turd. That, I said to myself, is the death of romance.’ Rose soon forgets, overwhelmed by the boyish charm of her new lover, but the reader is left with an indelible image. Whatever Rose might think of Gary at any stage – and she changes her opinion many times over the next couple of years – we continue to associate that repulsive image with him. This is not just a bit of earthy bad taste designed to shock. It is a bold and nauseatingly effective way of influencing the reader’s attitude to Gary.
Rose, in a fragile and desperate state, requires regular therapy sessions with the exquisite and sympathetic Fleur. We gradually become aware, as the narrative circles round a subject too disturbing to broach directly, of the reason for this. On page two, she writes, ‘My husband, David Flower, had gone away’. A deserted wife, how sad, we think. On page nine, she mentions how he hoped to ‘charm them into giving him bail’. A criminal, then. Poor woman. We don’t know the nature of his crime until page thirty-two, when she wakes in the middle of the night and remembers, ‘My husband is a rapist. My husband. A rapist.’ Forty pages later it gets worse: ‘My husband raped a schoolgirl. There. I never noticed them before but now I see them everywhere.’ Eventually, Fleur advises her to tell Gary exactly what her husband did, ‘to let Gary understand how very traumatised [she] was’. She doesn’t tell him straight away, but, as if prompted by this, she now relates the details to the reader. When she does talk to Gary about it, his reaction is shockingly solipsistic.
During Harry Houdini’s 1910 visit, the famous escapologist claimed to be the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight in Australia. In Houdini’s Flight, Angelo Loukakis uses these bare details as the backdrop for a modern tale about a more modest achiever, Terry Voulos. A second-generation Greek-Australian, Terry confronts, almost in slow motion, a personal crisis that initially seems caused by his own stuttering approach to life. Whereas Houdini descends into water to release himself from heavy chains, Terry must break free from his own limitations to revitalise his life, his attitudes, his marriage to Jenny and his bond with his son, Ricky.
Book 1 Title: Houdini’s Flight
Book Author: Angelo Loukakis
Book 1 Biblio: $32.99, 352 pp
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During Harry Houdini’s 1910 visit, the famous escapologist claimed to be the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight in Australia. In Houdini’s Flight, Angelo Loukakis uses these bare details as the backdrop for a modern tale about a more modest achiever, Terry Voulos. A second-generation Greek-Australian, Terry confronts, almost in slow motion, a personal crisis that initially seems caused by his own stuttering approach to life. Whereas Houdini descends into water to release himself from heavy chains, Terry must break free from his own limitations to revitalise his life, his attitudes, his marriage to Jenny and his bond with his son, Ricky.
Terry is a bus driver and a novice magician. His dream of becoming a professional magician reflects his brooding dissatisfaction with himself – he wants to be somebody, especially, it seems, to impress Ricky. After he stages a successful magic show for an elderly audience at the Banjo Paterson Memorial Home – ‘he had pulled off six tricks in a row without muffing any of them’ – Terry is buttonholed by a dishevelled old-timer called Hal, who, mysteriously, doesn’t even live in the home. Soon Terry is visiting Hal’s squat to learn magic and to listen to his tales about Houdini.
Patrick White got it wrong. European Australians have never been driven to find spiritual meaning through physical deprivation in the deserts of the interior. Their passion has been for housing and construction, matched by their devoted gourmandising. White declared that in Voss he was trying to teach a nation of timid city dwellers that there was more to life than material comfort and ‘cake and steak’. He did take himself rather seriously.
Book 1 Title: Glissando
Book 1 Subtitle: A melodrama
Book Author: David Musgrave
Book 1 Biblio: Sleepers Publishing, $27.95 pb, 392 pp
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Patrick White got it wrong. European Australians have never been driven to find spiritual meaning through physical deprivation in the deserts of the interior. Their passion has been for housing and construction, matched by their devoted gourmandising. White declared that in Voss he was trying to teach a nation of timid city dwellers that there was more to life than material comfort and ‘cake and steak’. He did take himself rather seriously.
Not so David Musgrave, whose first novel, Glissando, provides the evidence for White’s mistaken interpretation of history. His narrator’s grandfather Heinrich Fliess (uncle of Wilhelm, the nasally obsessed colleague of Freud) set off from Rhine Towers in the mid nineteenth century, looking for a place to build another of his fantastic dream houses. His companions (those familiar followers Le Mesurier, Palfreyman, Robarts and Co.) caused him trouble until he was left only with Le Mesurier, the poet, and some helpful Aboriginal people. Heinrich was haunted by the pursuing spirit of his nagging wife, Muriel. As his Aboriginal friend Weeyah says, Europeans suffer from ‘House dreamin’’. It is all in the journals that the grandson, Archie, finds in the library of his eccentric house, ‘Glissando’. In the 1950s Archie lets an asthmatic writer, Patrick someone (Grey? Brown?), and his companion Maloney look at the diaries.
It may be far too early to begin writing obituaries for neo-liberalism; as with Mark Twain, reports of its demise constitute an exaggeration. With the growing critique of neo-liberalism, in which our own prime minister has joined, there is a pervasive assumption that it is something of an aberration, an errant change of course in the development of capitalism. That assumption is, I suggest, erroneous; the thirty-year phenomenon to which we give the name neo-liberalism is in reality capitalism qua capitalism; neo-liberalism is really capitalism unleashed with minimal regard for its social consequences. There is also a second myth that needs to be challenged in the emerging critique of neo-liberalism: the Keynesian consensus did not merely outlive its usefulness; it was undermined and sabotaged by a combination of US policy failures and opportunistic vested interests.
Book 1 Title: Goodbye To All That?
Book 1 Subtitle: On the failure of neo-liberalism and the urgency of change
Book Author: Robert Manne and David McKnight
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $32.95 pb, 278 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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It may be far too early to begin writing obituaries for neo-liberalism; as with Mark Twain, reports of its demise constitute an exaggeration. With the growing critique of neo-liberalism, in which our own prime minister has joined, there is a pervasive assumption that it is something of an aberration, an errant change of course in the development of capitalism. That assumption is, I suggest, erroneous; the thirty-year phenomenon to which we give the name neo-liberalism is in reality capitalism qua capitalism; neo-liberalism is really capitalism unleashed with minimal regard for its social consequences. There is also a second myth that needs to be challenged in the emerging critique of neo-liberalism: the Keynesian consensus did not merely outlive its usefulness; it was undermined and sabotaged by a combination of US policy failures and opportunistic vested interests.
Some four decades ago, the long postwar boom began to show signs of slowing, largely brought about by inflation. It has become commonplace to blame government spending and the welfare state, but the greatest contributor to inflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s was US spending on the Vietnam War, which had created an unsustainable burden not just for the US economy, but for the world. The United States effectively printed money to bankroll the war; it was excessive money growth by the Federal Reserve that ignited the fires of inflation. That was one aspect of the economic crisis of the 1970s. The other was the quadrupling of oil prices by most of the major oil exporters. Why did they do this? It was in reaction to US policy in the Middle East.
Article Subtitle: Latin America as imagined landscape
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Start with the cover, cunningly designed to provoke a double take. What at first glance appears to be a cigar-chomping Mexican bandido in an oversized sombrero proves, on closer examination, to be a grinning British soldier celebrating victory in the Falklands. All he needs to go Latin is a big hat, a bullet-studded bandolier and a cigar. Three props conjure a chuck wagon full of clichés. The sombrero speaks of braggadocio and machismo, Hugo Chavez, Manuel Noriega, Juan Peron, generalissimos and juntas. But also of laziness – a hat to pull down over your face when, slumped against the adobe on a dusty side street, you sleep off the tequila. Poverty born of sloth, whose only remedy is to slip north across the Rio Grande: wetbacks, drug runners, illegals.
Book 1 Title: Lost Worlds
Book 1 Subtitle: Latin America and the imagining of empire
Book Author: Kevin Foster
Book 1 Biblio: Pluto Press, $59.95 pb, 279 pp
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Start with the cover, cunningly designed to provoke a double take. What at first glance appears to be a cigar-chomping Mexican bandido in an oversized sombrero proves, on closer examination, to be a grinning British soldier celebrating victory in the Falklands. All he needs to go Latin is a big hat, a bullet-studded bandolier and a cigar. Three props conjure a chuck wagon full of clichés. The sombrero speaks of braggadocio and machismo, Hugo Chavez, Manuel Noriega, Juan Peron, generalissimos and juntas. But also of laziness – a hat to pull down over your face when, slumped against the adobe on a dusty side street, you sleep off the tequila. Poverty born of sloth, whose only remedy is to slip north across the Rio Grande: wetbacks, drug runners, illegals.
The bandolier manages simultaneously to evoke the guerrilla, the revolutionary and the outlaw: Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Pablo Escobar – holed up somewhere in the sierra beyond the reach of the hapless, hopeless government forces. Awaiting their chance. Then there’s the cigar, the Western hemisphere’s gift to bloated bankers and oncologists, the combustible quintessence of conspicuous consumption. We think not of wealth earned but flaunted – also of extravagant displays by poor people who, in thrifty Protestant countries, would be saving for a house: fiestas, Carnaval in Rio, the Mexican Day of the Dead – and, of course, Fidel, blowing smoke in Yankee faces.
Article Subtitle: Two very different books on alcohol
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In Under the Influence, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan look at Australian history and contemporary life through the lens of alcohol use in the community. ‘How a community or nation handles alcohol may be a strong indicator of its collective character’, they suggest. While seeking evidence for this, they throw up some fascinating material.
Book 1 Title: Under The Influence
Book 1 Subtitle: A history of alcohol in Australia
Book Author: Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $35 pb, 335 pp
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Book 2 Title: My Name Is Ross
Book 2 Subtitle: An alcoholic’s journey
Book 2 Author: Ross Fitzgerald
Book 2 Biblio: New South, $34.95 pb, 240 pp
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In Under the Influence, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan look at Australian history and contemporary life through the lens of alcohol use in the community. ‘How a community or nation handles alcohol may be a strong indicator of its collective character’, they suggest. While seeking evidence for this, they throw up some fascinating material.
There was briefly a possibility that New South Wales would be settled as a dry colony; Lord Sydney had wanted this. However, the First Fleet sailors were entitled under British naval law to rum rations, so large quantities came with them or were picked up en route. Rum soon became the surrogate currency. After that, alcohol was firmly entrenched in Australian life.
The ‘Rum Rebellion’ is described at length, and ‘in the end, the events directly precipitating [it] had nothing to do with rum at all’. It was really a clash of personalities and power between Bligh and Macarthur, though several of the fringe players seem to have spent much of their time inebriated. This angle on history is not radically revisionist, but it is convincingly demonstrated. On the other hand, the Northern Territory Administrator, John Gilruth, was run out of Darwin in 1918 simply on the basis of booze. He had prohibited the unloading of 700 cases of Melbourne Bitter for consumption during the Christmas period, something the Territorians would not tolerate.
Article Subtitle: Troubling aftertastes from a brilliant study of war
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In September last year the impressive military intellectual David Kilcullen gave the prestigious annual ‘University Lecture’ to the assembled cohort of cadets, midshipmen, officers, academic staff and senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force Academy and its partner institution, the University of New South Wales. I was especially struck by Kilcullen’s argument, to the young officer trainees, that their future responsibilities would be important because war and conflict had been perennial features of human society since ancient times, and would persist despite efforts to create a more peaceful world. Was this, I wondered, the only way to impress upon the future leadership of the ADF the seriousness of their calling?
Book 1 Title: Why America Fights
Book 1 Subtitle: Patriotism and war propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq
Book Author: Susan A. Brewer
Book 1 Biblio: OUP, $55 hb, 342 pp
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In September last year the impressive military intellectual David Kilcullen gave the prestigious annual ‘University Lecture’ to the assembled cohort of cadets, midshipmen, officers, academic staff and senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force Academy and its partner institution, the University of New South Wales. I was especially struck by Kilcullen’s argument, to the young officer trainees, that their future responsibilities would be important because war and conflict had been perennial features of human society since ancient times, and would persist despite efforts to create a more peaceful world. Was this, I wondered, the only way to impress upon the future leadership of the ADF the seriousness of their calling?
‘We tell ourselves stories,’ wrote Joan Didion in The White Album (1979), ‘in order to live.’ Kilcullen’s story is a common one told by realists and just warriors, often as a prelude to thoughtful discussions of the morality and rationale of war. Yet it risks blinding us to the fact that war is a complex human construct that – even when it appears most necessary – is a product of choices by leaderships, combatants, citizens and media, choices that affect how wars are fought, by whom, for how long, and with what cost in terms of lives, security, treasure and failure.
Article Subtitle: Robin Boyd's classic book still painfully valid
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How differently would we view Australia’s postwar architecture and urban design without Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness? Such is the significance of this classic 1960 text that it has shaped debates about our cities – their planning, development and buildings – for half a century. Whether the book has helped to improve them is questionable – they probably would not be much different today, Boyd or no Boyd – but what a context and framework he gives us for analysing and discussing them. With the dramatic changes in society and tastes in fifty years, what does Boyd offer the contemporary reader?
Book 1 Title: The Australian Ugliness
Book Author: Robin Boyd
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $34.95 pb, 300 pp
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How differently would we view Australia’s postwar architecture and urban design without Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness? Such is the significance of this classic 1960 text that it has shaped debates about our cities – their planning, development and buildings – for half a century. Whether the book has helped to improve them is questionable – they probably would not be much different today, Boyd or no Boyd – but what a context and framework he gives us for analysing and discussing them. With the dramatic changes in society and tastes in fifty years, what does Boyd offer the contemporary reader?
Clearly, Boyd’s work has not had the effect he would have liked on urban planning and design and public taste. Witness the mini-Versailles that now colonise Toorak and Vaucluse, or the McMansions of the outer suburbs, where greedy developers satisfy our desires for ever bigger, showier and more energy-inefficient houses to cater for our every need, imagined or real. This style of architecture, and the suburbs of rooftops, are just the things Boyd abhorred. One thing has changed: in Boyd’s time Americans held the prize for building the largest new houses; now that honour belongs to Australians. What makes The Australian Ugliness so relevant today, rather than just being a period piece or an eloquent, vainglorious plea, is that Boyd’s arguments for improving urban design and architecture, and his devastating critique of our cities and suburbs, remain as potent as ever. ‘The suburb is Australia’s greatest achievement (not “proudest” achievement; there is little or no collective pride in the suburb, only a huge collection of individual prides)’ rings as true in 2010 as it did in 1960.
Son-biography: which are deft or lived things which have jumped from him without genes. Passions, eccentricities, duty? I don’t believe Lamarck, but I left his Quiet for her Talk, nagging the life out of things, worsened it word-wise, garrulous, and then heavied it because Saloms drink, his side, but genes, though he didn’t, and she offered her whole life to the sobriety of wives. He voted sober but gave me his black-sheep toss-the-world bushiness, which I took as city, and poetry. He said I was a fraud, which meant I didn’t
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Son-biography: which are deft or lived things which have jumped from him without genes. Passions, eccentricities, duty? I don’t believe Lamarck, but I left his Quiet for her Talk, nagging the life out of things, worsened it word-wise, garrulous, and then heavied it because Saloms drink, his side, but genes, though he didn’t, and she offered her whole life to the sobriety of wives. He voted sober but gave me his black-sheep toss-the-world bushiness, which I took as city, and poetry. He said I was a fraud, which meant I didn’t rhyme, it didn’t mean he knew or questioned that he didn’t. Being right runs in the family. He couldn’t make me fish but gave me golf and cricket until I slid the car, controlled it sexy-dancing all body and head before sex is even started, a stiff cock starting in a boy, so then I wanted racing. He said I could buy a ‘bomb’ but when I tried he stopped it dead. Don’t push anything too far, was in his head if not his genes -I got it instead as migraine and left it behind when I left home, cured overnight. Odder things he hadn’t: say an odd walk becomes a theory of walks, or autodidact theories of everything and all the facts to face
As Stendhal did with The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Simon Leys dedicates his With Stendhal to ‘the happy few’. In both cases, humility is the motivation, rather than affectation or coyness. Henri Beyle (1783–1842) – Stendhal’s real name – was committed to his writing, but he really had no idea that his novels would become masterworks of Western literature, or that his protagonists Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo would come to be seen as archetypal figures of the Romantic era. He would have been astonished to learn that beylisme – denoting a melding of passionate energy and cynical individualism – had become a common noun in French.
Book 1 Title: With Stendhal
Book Author: Simon Leys
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $19.95 pb, 144 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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As Stendhal did with The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Simon Leys dedicates his With Stendhal to ‘the happy few’. In both cases, humility is the motivation, rather than affectation or coyness. Henri Beyle (1783–1842) – Stendhal’s real name – was committed to his writing, but he really had no idea that his novels would become masterworks of Western literature, or that his protagonists Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo would come to be seen as archetypal figures of the Romantic era. He would have been astonished to learn that beylisme – denoting a melding of passionate energy and cynical individualism – had become a common noun in French.
A discussion of the outstanding albums of the 1980s might begin with the Shanachie label’s Mbaqanga compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, 4AD’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, and American Clavé’s Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla (all 1986), three signal moments in the packaging of global music for Western sensibilities. One could go on to cite such landmarks as Brian Eno’s On Land (1982), Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1984) and John Zorn’s Spillane (1987). Add to these Joy Divison’s Closer (1980), Gang of Four’s Solid Gold (1981), Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), and the decade is beginning to look superior. Australia, too, produced various near-perfect LPs – the likes of Mr Uddich Schmuddich Goes to Town by Laughing Clowns (1982), Born Sandy Devotional by the Triffids, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by The Go-Betweens, Free Dirt by Died Pretty (all 1986), Cold and the Crackle by Not Drowning Waving (1987) and Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1988) while New Zealand’s The Chills deserve a mention, courtesy of their Brave Words (1987). To this fledgling list, author Jeff Apter would presumably demand the addition of True Colours (1980) and Time and Tide (1982) by Split Enz, as well as Crowded House’s self-titled début (1986) and Temple of Low Men (1988), each of which is accorded canonical status in Together Alone, his new biography of Tim and Neil Finn. This ought to be a matter of personal taste buttressed by (in the appropriate forum, such as a book like this) robust argument, but there is precious little of the latter in Together Alone. Critical analysis is promised but not delivered. Instead, readers are left to trawl through a skip-load of secondary material, including snatches from the omnipresent Glenn A. Baker and one-too-many customers at Amazon.com, in order to learn what supposedly makes this music definitive.
Book 1 Title: Together Alone
Book 1 Subtitle: The story of the Finn Brothers
Book Author: Jeff Apter
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $34.95 pb, 336 pp
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A discussion of the outstanding albums of the 1980s might begin with the Shanachie label’s Mbaqanga compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, 4AD’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, and American Clavé’s Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla (all 1986), three signal moments in the packaging of global music for Western sensibilities. One could go on to cite such landmarks as Brian Eno’s On Land (1982), Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1984) and John Zorn’s Spillane (1987). Add to these Joy Divison’s Closer (1980), Gang of Four’s Solid Gold (1981), Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), and the decade is beginning to look superior. Australia, too, produced various near-perfect LPs – the likes of Mr Uddich Schmuddich Goes to Town by Laughing Clowns (1982), Born Sandy Devotional by the Triffids, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by The Go-Betweens, Free Dirt by Died Pretty (all 1986), Cold and the Crackle by Not Drowning Waving (1987) and Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1988) while New Zealand’s The Chills deserve a mention, courtesy of their Brave Words (1987). To this fledgling list, author Jeff Apter would presumably demand the addition of True Colours (1980) and Time and Tide (1982) by Split Enz, as well as Crowded House’s self-titled début (1986) and Temple of Low Men (1988), each of which is accorded canonical status in Together Alone, his new biography of Tim and Neil Finn. This ought to be a matter of personal taste buttressed by (in the appropriate forum, such as a book like this) robust argument, but there is precious little of the latter in Together Alone. Critical analysis is promised but not delivered. Instead, readers are left to trawl through a skip-load of secondary material, including snatches from the omnipresent Glenn A. Baker and one-too-many customers at Amazon.com, in order to learn what supposedly makes this music definitive.
Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?
Book 1 Title: Gatherers and Hunters
Book Author: Thomas Shapcott
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, 206 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?
I hesitate to confess that I first made the acquaintance of Tom’s writing half a century ago, in the pages of Meanjin, where he published several poems. I was bowled over by their physicality, their urgency, their very human heat. Tom may be fifty years older and wiser, but the demands of the flesh still trouble his fiction. The novella ‘Sunshine Beach’, which concludes Gatherers and Hunters, is a moving version of that age-old drama of youth versus age. As Charlie, the retiree widower at the heart of ‘Sunshine Beach’, reflects while travelling north: ‘All the recent Guides praised octogenarian sex, didn’t they?’ That way trouble lies, not to mention embarrassment and shame.
One day soon, instead of meekly thanking the Editor for another memoir, I’m going to scream. Not another damned life story, confession, self-exploration! I’m fed up, I’ll shout – fed up with women (because they always are) whose only way of writing about their times is to plonk themselves at the centre (which they are, in a literal sense) and to define everything through their own feminism, jacket, migraine, dog, marriage, job or dependency.
Book 1 Title: Trouble
Book 1 Subtitle: Evolution of A Radical / Selected Writings 1970–2010
Book Author: Kate Jennings
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $32.95 pb, 330 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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One day soon, instead of meekly thanking the Editor for another memoir, I’m going to scream. Not another damned life story, confession, self-exploration! I’m fed up, I’ll shout – fed up with women (because they always are) whose only way of writing about their times is to plonk themselves at the centre (which they are, in a literal sense) and to define everything through their own feminism, jacket, migraine, dog, marriage, job or dependency.
Have I mentioned how much I enjoyed Kate Jennings’s Trouble?
Article Subtitle: Loving detail in a flawed biography
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Ernest Hemingway once wrote that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’. We might add that Oz Lit owes Twain a little something, too.
Book 1 Title: Mark Twain
Book 1 Subtitle: The adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
Book Author: Jerome Loving
Book 1 Biblio: University of California Press (Inbooks), $59.95 hb, 491 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Ernest Hemingway once wrote that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’. We might add that Oz Lit owes Twain a little something, too.
Henry Lawson, who was born in 1867 (the same year as Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), was a great admirer of the American and claimed to have read ‘all of Twain’. Chris Holyday makes a strong claim for a meeting between the two in 1895, when Twain was lecturing in Sydney and assembling material for what became Following the Equator. Both men were journalists, fond of a drink. Both were eloquent eulogisers of manly endeavours for which they themselves possessed little competence. And both gladly went ‘roughing it’ in search of adventure, characters and tall tales, which they collected and retold like folk anthologists: translating vernacular speech into prose-poetry, oral tradition into literary art.
For W.B. Yeats, Ireland was the place and source of poetry, even when he was living in Oxford or London. It was also a mythical figure, enabling of ardour and of song, the desirable ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’; and it became a delicately evocative crepuscule, mocked by Brendan Kennelly when he opens a poem with ‘Now in the Celtic twilight decrepit whores / Prowl warily along the Grand Canal’. The very phrase ‘Irish poetry’ sounds like a pleonasm. For that moist country has long seemed synonymous with verse and folksong: just as Holland is synonymous with painting and France with elegant thought. Further, when I think of contemporary poets in our widespread language, Seamus Heaney must surely be the dominant world figure and Paul Muldoon the most verbally dazzling, even if our Les is close to Paul in this caper.
Book 1 Title: An Anthology Of Modern Irish Poetry
Book Author: Wes Davis
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press (Inbooks), $59.95 hb, 600 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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For W.B. Yeats, Ireland was the place and source of poetry, even when he was living in Oxford or London. It was also a mythical figure, enabling of ardour and of song, the desirable ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’; and it became a delicately evocative crepuscule, mocked by Brendan Kennelly when he opens a poem with ‘Now in the Celtic twilight decrepit whores / Prowl warily along the Grand Canal’. The very phrase ‘Irish poetry’ sounds like a pleonasm. For that moist country has long seemed synonymous with verse and folksong: just as Holland is synonymous with painting and France with elegant thought. Further, when I think of contemporary poets in our widespread language, Seamus Heaney must surely be the dominant world figure and Paul Muldoon the most verbally dazzling, even if our Les is close to Paul in this caper.
No poem in this book is stronger than Muldoon’s elegy ‘Incantata’, which succeeds in combining deep feeling with a huge cultural vocabulary; the poem chimes like a great bell that also has access to Google. But it was Muldoon who once said on Radio Ulster, ‘Anyone who makes an anthology is almost certifiably mad.’ What-ever the truth of that, we have a new putative madman on the scene, thank goodness. A Yale man, however, and published by Harvard.
In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark on or absorb the world’s beauty and peril. Many of these poems consequently feel insubstantial and vague, though that may be their aim – to suggest, to hint at something, to sketch in mystery, rather than to pin it down.
Book 1 Title: Dark Bright Doors
Book Author: Jill Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $19.95 pb, 84 pp
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In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark on or absorb the world’s beauty and peril. Many of these poems consequently feel insubstantial and vague, though that may be their aim – to suggest, to hint at something, to sketch in mystery, rather than to pin it down.
I have lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs for almost a decade. I am also an aficionado of Australian literature. Thus, I was interested to read Stamping Ground, a collection of writings about my favourite side of the Yarra River.
Book 1 Title: Stamping Ground
Book 1 Subtitle: Stories Of The Northern Suburbs Of Melbourne
Book Author: Gordon Thompson
Book 1 Biblio: Clouds of Magellan, $20 pb, 159 pp
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I have lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs for almost a decade. I am also an aficionado of Australian literature. Thus, I was interested to read Stamping Ground, a collection of writings about my favourite side of the Yarra River.
In a brisk 159 pages, readers are transported from Northcote Plaza to the gardens of Thornbury and the traffic-congested streets of Brunswick and Preston. There are references to local landmarks such as the Edwardes Lake Park, Darebin Creek, Coburg Cemetery and the (now-defunct) Pentridge Prison. There are pieces set aboard the Epping line train and the Number 19 tram. Some pieces are set in recent years, others in the distant past. The contributions include poems, short stories and autobiographical fragments. Several contributors are well known in the Melbourne literary scene (I am thinking particularly of Catherine Deveny and Henry Von Doussa); others are relative newcomers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the contributors live in or near the suburbs they write about.
In the May issue of ABR, a new Australian novel was praised as being ‘a respite from the anodyne family dramas that seem to plague contemporary commercial publishing’. Of course, there are plenty of uninspiring domestic novels on bookshop shelves – just as there are uninspiring examples of every kind of novel – but when done well, contemporary family drama can be the opposite of anodyne, stimulating readers to analyse and debate the world. The best domestic novels use characters in a specific family or social setting to reflect and explore the values and issues of a particular time and place. Indelible Ink, which follows the intersecting lives of one Sydney family during the last days of the Howard era, is such a book – and looks set to be the most talked-about Australian novel since The Slap.
Book 1 Title: Indelible Ink
Book Author: Fiona McGregor
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $32.95 pb, 454 pp
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In the May issue of ABR, a new Australian novel was praised as being ‘a respite from the anodyne family dramas that seem to plague contemporary commercial publishing’. Of course, there are plenty of uninspiring domestic novels on bookshop shelves – just as there are uninspiring examples of every kind of novel – but when done well, contemporary family drama can be the opposite of anodyne, stimulating readers to analyse and debate the world. The best domestic novels use characters in a specific family or social setting to reflect and explore the values and issues of a particular time and place. Indelible Ink, which follows the intersecting lives of one Sydney family during the last days of the Howard era, is such a book – and looks set to be the most talked-about Australian novel since The Slap.
Winner of the Independent ‘Music Book of the Year’ for 2009,The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles is a collection of thirteen essays dedicated to arguably the most significant pop/rock group of the last century. It follows such recent tomes as Walter Everett’s two-volume The Beatles as Musicians (1999–2001), Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles (2003), the Beatles’ self-penned Anthology (2000), Kenneth Womack’s and Todd F. Davis’ Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (2006) and Olivier Julien’s Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today(2009). One might, therefore, question whether yet another substantial volume can add anything of interest – in fact, some of the contributors to the Companion also appear in Julien’s book – but the Companion is a most worthwhile addition to ‘Beatleology’. All chapters have merits, but as the contributors come from a variety of disciplines, the overall tenor of the volume is uneven: some pieces (such as Bruce Spizer’s unreferenced ‘Apple Record’) are aimed at a general audience, while others (such as Walter Everett’s ‘Any Time at All: The Beatles’ Free-Phrase Rhythms’) are suited to musically literate readers. Inevitable overlap in information occurs at times.
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles
Book Author: Kenneth Womack
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $59.95 pb, 316 pp
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Winner of the Independent ‘Music Book of the Year’ for 2009,The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles is a collection of thirteen essays dedicated to arguably the most significant pop/rock group of the last century. It follows such recent tomes as Walter Everett’s two-volume The Beatles as Musicians (1999–2001), Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles (2003), the Beatles’ self-penned Anthology (2000), Kenneth Womack’s and Todd F. Davis’ Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (2006) and Olivier Julien’s Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today(2009). One might, therefore, question whether yet another substantial volume can add anything of interest – in fact, some of the contributors to the Companion also appear in Julien’s book – but the Companion is a most worthwhile addition to ‘Beatleology’. All chapters have merits, but as the contributors come from a variety of disciplines, the overall tenor of the volume is uneven: some pieces (such as Bruce Spizer’s unreferenced ‘Apple Record’) are aimed at a general audience, while others (such as Walter Everett’s ‘Any Time at All: The Beatles’ Free-Phrase Rhythms’) are suited to musically literate readers. Inevitable overlap in information occurs at times.
In May 1981, I joined The Age, where, more or less, I have stayed put. On my first night one of the news subeditors said, ‘Let’s have a drink’. Whereupon he led me away from the news desk, along the scrofulous green carpet, past the ramshackle assortment of desks and typewriters, and straight into the men’s room. Fleet Street used to have a bar, behind St Bride’s Church, called the City Golf Club, which was neither sporting nor exclusive in any way. But The Age went one better, with a late-night hostelry on the third floor of its ugly Spencer Street building that served as a drinking hole because the others were all closed by that hour.
Book 1 Title: Breaking News
Book 1 Subtitle: The Golden age of Graham Perkin
Book Author: Ben Hills
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $59.95 hb, 536 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In May 1981, I joined The Age, where, more or less, I have stayed put. On my first night one of the news subeditors said, ‘Let’s have a drink’. Whereupon he led me away from the news desk, along the scrofulous green carpet, past the ramshackle assortment of desks and typewriters, and straight into the men’s room. Fleet Street used to have a bar, behind St Bride’s Church, called the City Golf Club, which was neither sporting nor exclusive in any way. But The Age went one better, with a late-night hostelry on the third floor of its ugly Spencer Street building that served as a drinking hole because the others were all closed by that hour.
This impromptu establishment was formally called the Locker Room (I should say it did contain lockers) or, informally, the Bog Bar, and was a sort of ante-room to the loo: a sibilant urinal shared the common wall. Its main purpose was not the release of bodily fluids, more the ingestion of alcoholic ones – an assortment of beers, cardboard-housed vino and a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for homesick Queensland subs. It was late – later still, when the party broke up – and, as the desultory gathering click-hissed its way through a few tinnies and unleashed warm Leasingham into plastic mugs, I told them that I was staying with elderly relatives and that one of them used to come home and bark like a dog. ‘Oh,’ said the chief sub, momentarily lowering his Bundy, ‘Does he lick his balls as well?’
A common criticism of Australian politics is that it is largely concerned with conflict over practical issues, rather than with debate over sophisticated political ideas. James Walter’s new book, What Were They Thinking?, challenges this view by providing a wide-ranging account of the development of Australian political ideas from the late nineteenth century to the present. The book is structured around changes in the role of the state in Australia, moving from the early disputes over democracy and responsible government in the late nineteenth century, to the Australian settlement, postwar reconstruction and the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the recent controversy over the Global Financial Crisis. While the changing role of the Australian state over time is well-covered territory, Walter’s contribution is to focus on the intellectual arguments that have facilitated and accompanied these changes, and to bring them together in a systematic account.
Book 1 Title: What Were They Thinking?
Book 1 Subtitle: The Politics of Ideas In Australia
Book Author: James Walter (with Tod Moore)
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 396 pp
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A common criticism of Australian politics is that it is largely concerned with conflict over practical issues, rather than with debate over sophisticated political ideas. James Walter’s new book, What Were They Thinking?, challenges this view by providing a wide-ranging account of the development of Australian political ideas from the late nineteenth century to the present. The book is structured around changes in the role of the state in Australia, moving from the early disputes over democracy and responsible government in the late nineteenth century, to the Australian settlement, postwar reconstruction and the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the recent controversy over the Global Financial Crisis. While the changing role of the Australian state over time is well-covered territory, Walter’s contribution is to focus on the intellectual arguments that have facilitated and accompanied these changes, and to bring them together in a systematic account.
A flooding river in the Victorian goldfields of the late 1890s dominates Robert Engwerda’s second novel, Mosquito Creek. Hidden undercurrents, old secrets and the threat of imminent death shadow this compelling narrative. Engwerda strives for a mood of anticipation, which is heightened by longing and brutality. The story follows events in the lives of several key inhabitants of a remote township, each struggling to cope with the rising flood. A bureaucrat commissions a boat to be built in order to rescue marooned miners; a policeman tries to maintain order in the town while he tries to solve a murder; a woman dreams of escape from a violent father. Linking these characters’ stories is the ambiguous presence of Phillip Oriente, the murder victim, who appears almost entirely through a series of second-hand accounts.
Book 1 Title: Mosquito creek
Book Author: Robert Engwerda
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $32 pb, 338 pp
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A flooding river in the Victorian goldfields of the late 1890s dominates Robert Engwerda’s second novel, Mosquito Creek. Hidden undercurrents, old secrets and the threat of imminent death shadow this compelling narrative. Engwerda strives for a mood of anticipation, which is heightened by longing and brutality. The story follows events in the lives of several key inhabitants of a remote township, each struggling to cope with the rising flood. A bureaucrat commissions a boat to be built in order to rescue marooned miners; a policeman tries to maintain order in the town while he tries to solve a murder; a woman dreams of escape from a violent father. Linking these characters’ stories is the ambiguous presence of Phillip Oriente, the murder victim, who appears almost entirely through a series of second-hand accounts.
Siblings tend to play little part in family memoirs that focus on parents. Most memoirists write as if they are only children. Perhaps this is unsurprising; siblings’ memories of childhood rarely correspond. As Robert Gray observes in his autobiography The Land I Came Through Last (2008), ‘the one in the family who is going to be a writer is always an only child’.
Book 1 Title: Sunshine And Shadow
Book 1 Subtitle: A Brothers' Story
Book Author: James and Stephen Dack (with Larry Writer)
Book 1 Biblio: Pier 9, $34.95 pb, 305 pp
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Siblings tend to play little part in family memoirs that focus on parents. Most memoirists write as if they are only children. Perhaps this is unsurprising; siblings’ memories of childhood rarely correspond. As Robert Gray observes in his autobiography The Land I Came Through Last (2008), ‘the one in the family who is going to be a writer is always an only child’.
It is fascinating, therefore, when siblings collaborate on a memoir about their upbringing. Sunshine and Shadow: A Brothers’ Story is collaborative autobiography in both senses of the term: the telling of the story is shared between two brothers, James and Stephen Dack (with occasional input from their only sister, Alison), while the memoir is ghost-written by the journalist and biographer Larry Writer. The latter has done a fine job cobbling together countless hours of interviews with the Dack brothers into a mostly seamless and engaging narrative.
Two drunk whitefellas have a barney at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse. One ends up with a hammer in his throat. To the police, it is a simple case of provocation and retaliatory murder, but the newly appointed Aboriginal Community Police Officer (ACPO) for Bluebush in the Northern Territory thinks otherwise. As a local, Emily Tempest knows the feuding boozers and doubts that an argument – over Greek philosophy, of all things – might have incited such mortal violence. Tempest vividly returns in Gunshot Road, Adrian Hyland’s sequel to Diamond Dove (2006). Once again, the amateur sleuth returns home to Moonlight Downs and is drawn into a web of increasing stickiness. Her reckless bravura results in her own entrapment.
Book 1 Title: Gunshot Road
Book Author: Adrian Hyland
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $32.95 pb, 388 pp
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Two drunk whitefellas have a barney at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse. One ends up with a hammer in his throat. To the police, it is a simple case of provocation and retaliatory murder, but the newly appointed Aboriginal Community Police Officer (ACPO) for Bluebush in the Northern Territory thinks otherwise. As a local, Emily Tempest knows the feuding boozers and doubts that an argument – over Greek philosophy, of all things – might have incited such mortal violence. Tempest vividly returns in Gunshot Road, Adrian Hyland’s sequel to Diamond Dove (2006). Once again, the amateur sleuth returns home to Moonlight Downs and is drawn into a web of increasing stickiness. Her reckless bravura results in her own entrapment.
The Perfume River crosses the city of Hue, in the centre of Vietnam. Like tributaries that flow into the main body of water, this anthology of short stories and poetry crosses temporal and geographical boundaries, with Vietnam as the locus point. As editor Catherine Cole says in her introduction, ‘For all Vietnam has defined itself as a voice of inspiration, of homeland, memory and discovery’. The subtitle is not quite accurate, as it implies that all the creative pieces originate within the country, whereas the contributions come from various sources: from Vietnamese nationals living in the motherland, but also from second-generation Vietnamese contemplating home from afar, and from non-Vietnamese who nonetheless have an affinity with the land and its culture. With both insider and outsider perspectives, ‘writing of or about rather than from Vietnam’ might have been a more apt subtitle.
Book 1 Title: The Perfume River
Book 1 Subtitle: Writing From Vietnam
Book Author: Catherine Cole
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $32.95 pb, 320 pp
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The Perfume River crosses the city of Hue, in the centre of Vietnam. Like tributaries that flow into the main body of water, this anthology of short stories and poetry crosses temporal and geographical boundaries, with Vietnam as the locus point. As editor Catherine Cole says in her introduction, ‘For all Vietnam has defined itself as a voice of inspiration, of homeland, memory and discovery’. The subtitle is not quite accurate, as it implies that all the creative pieces originate within the country, whereas the contributions come from various sources: from Vietnamese nationals living in the motherland, but also from second-generation Vietnamese contemplating home from afar, and from non-Vietnamese who nonetheless have an affinity with the land and its culture. With both insider and outsider perspectives, ‘writing of or about rather than from Vietnam’ might have been a more apt subtitle.
Stepmotherly malevolence is enshrined in myth and legend, and sometimes in real life. Anna Haebich’s Murdering Stepmothers takes up the controversial case of Perth woman Martha Rendell, who in 1909 was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of her fourteen-year-old stepson. It was widely believed that she also murdered her two stepdaughters in the same fashion, slowly poisoning them by swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, invoking the symptoms of an inexplicable illness and a slow, agonising death.
Book 1 Title: Murdering Stepmothers
Book 1 Subtitle: The execution of Martha Rendell
Book Author: Anna Haebich
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $26.95 pb, 224 pp
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Stepmotherly malevolence is enshrined in myth and legend, and sometimes in real life. Anna Haebich’s Murdering Stepmothers takes up the controversial case of Perth woman Martha Rendell, who in 1909 was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of her fourteen-year-old stepson. It was widely believed that she also murdered her two stepdaughters in the same fashion, slowly poisoning them by swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, invoking the symptoms of an inexplicable illness and a slow, agonising death.
Rendell, condemned at the time as a cruel stepmother who tortured the children for her own sadistic pleasure, continues to be reviled as a merciless child murderer. Academically trained historian Haebich, turning to fiction, examines Rendell’s story with a more sympathetic eye; she believes that the facts of the case may have been viewed through the distorted lens of the ‘wicked stepmother’ stereotype.
Private philanthropy has never been more important for the arts, as costs (and expectations) rise, and as traditional sources of funding and revenue become more unpredictable. ABR has had some success in this regard since entering the field two years ago, but June marks a turning point for us, with the formal launch of our philanthropy program in Melbourne, on 2 June. David Malouf, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, is our guest speaker. There will be more such events around Australia in coming months.
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Patronage and ABR
Private philanthropy has never been more important for the arts, as costs (and expectations) rise, and as traditional sources of funding and revenue become more unpredictable. ABR has had some success in this regard since entering the field two years ago, but June marks a turning point for us, with the formal launch of our philanthropy program in Melbourne, on 2 June. David Malouf, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, is our guest speaker. There will be more such events around Australia in coming months.
Contents Category: Children's and Young Adult Fiction
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Now eighty, Felix, whom we met in two previous novels by Morris Gleitzman, is living in hot dry country Australia. In Once (2005), little Felix escaped from a convent, desperate to find his parents, not understanding that they had left him there in an effort to protect him. In Then (2005), he was ten. After jumping from a train bound for a concentration camp, he struggled to hide himself and six-year-old Zelda, who was not even Jewish, from the Nazis in Poland.
Book 1 Title: Now
Book Author: Morris Gleitzman
Book 1 Biblio: Viking $19.95 pb, 176 pp
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Book 2 Title: Where There’s Smoke
Book 2 Author: John Heffernan
Book 2 Biblio: Omnibus Books, $17.95 pb, 205 pp
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Now eighty, Felix, whom we met in two previous novels by Morris Gleitzman, is living in hot dry country Australia. In Once (2005), little Felix escaped from a convent, desperate to find his parents, not understanding that they had left him there in an effort to protect him. In Then (2005), he was ten. After jumping from a train bound for a concentration camp, he struggled to hide himself and six-year-old Zelda, who was not even Jewish, from the Nazis in Poland.
Once and Then are so powerful, so pitch perfect, so uncompromising in their depiction of Nazi horrors, so eloquent in the depiction of the courage and kindness of many, that this final book struggles to match them. The two previous books are tiny masterpieces which are entirely credible in making the unconscionable comprehensible and bearable for young (and older) readers.
What a wonderful thing is the essay! What a hymn to the human mind and its vagaries and cogitations – to its humanness. All honour to Australian Book Review and the Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it with the Calibre Prize – and, of course, to our prize-winning hymnists.
To celebrate the essay with this degree of fanfare shows a certain amount of chutzpah, I think – of ‘courage’ in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word. (‘A courageous decision, Minister.’)
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What a wonderful thing is the essay! What a hymn to the human mind and its vagaries and cogitations – to its humanness. All honour to Australian Book Review and the Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it with the Calibre Prize – and, of course, to our prize-winning hymnists.
To celebrate the essay with this degree of fanfare shows a certain amount of chutzpah, I think – of ‘courage’ in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word. (‘A courageous decision, Minister.’)
In his influential book The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne argued: ‘The time has come when broad views of change that now seem impractical will seem sensible and to the point.’ This argument is taken up by the contributors to Griffith Review28. These contributors explore the ways that Australia has reinvented itself in recent years, both economically and culturally.
Book 1 Title: Griffith Review 28
Book 1 Subtitle: Still the Lucky Country?
Book Author: Julianne Schultz
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing $24.95 pb, 260 pp, 9781921656163
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In his influential book The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne argued: ‘The time has come when broad views of change that now seem impractical will seem sensible and to the point.’ This argument is taken up by the contributors to Griffith Review28. These contributors explore the ways that Australia has reinvented itself in recent years, both economically and culturally.
Julia moves to Lovely, a fictional country town in Victoria, with her yoga-teaching husband, Bryant, and their two children. The place is dismal; Julia can’t find a decent cup of coffee; the local plumbers won’t come to install her espresso machine; and she misses her ballet-dancing friends back in Melbourne.
Soon after arriving, she meets Tom, a young man who can see auras and hear people’s ‘inner songs’. Julia can also hear Tom’s ‘song’, and they are inexorably drawn to each other. Bryant, similarly drawn to Tom, decides to heal his troubled soul. New Age spirituality infuses Milk Fever, at times to the detriment of the narrative. Tom and Julia’s attraction is so heavily linked to spiritual resonance that their eventual relationship seems based on little more than cosmic codependency. This is a pity, because there is much here to suggest that the author understands the complexity of relationships, self-doubt and the past’s influence on the present.
Book 1 Title: Milk Fever
Book Author: Lisa Reece-Lane
Book 1 Biblio: $32.95 pb, 304 pp, 9781741967814
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Julia moves to Lovely, a fictional country town in Victoria, with her yoga-teaching husband, Bryant, and their two children. The place is dismal; Julia can’t find a decent cup of coffee; the local plumbers won’t come to install her espresso machine; and she misses her ballet-dancing friends back in Melbourne.
Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.
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Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.
Peter Porter’s first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, appeared forty-nine years ago. His awards were many, notable among them the Duff Cooper Prize for his first Collected Poems (1983) and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2002. He lived to see an advance copy of his new Selected Poems, titled Rest on the Flight, which Picador UK has just published, and which Allen & Unwin will publish here in October.
In Australia, fewer than one in three expected deaths takes place outside an institution, but eighty per cent of people say they would rather die at home.
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In Australia, fewer than one in three expected deaths takes place outside an institution, but eighty per cent of people say they would rather die at home.
wwww.homehospice.com.au
A few kilometres from the town of Armidale in northern New South Wales, a gravel driveway sidles around the curve of a small hill and ends in a yard of barking dogs at the back of a low dark-brick home. In 1968 Hugh and Katherine Baden* came to live on this property, one hundred and sixty acres of undulating grazing land. In the decades that followed they wove themselves into the fabric of the community: working, volunteering, socialising, pursuing various hobbies, putting three children through local schools.
The Byron Journals is organised into short, eventful chapters detailing several months in the life of Andrew, its protagonist. Andrew sets out from Adelaide on a schoolies’ trip, hoping to escape the weight of expectation and the fallout from his parents’ personal and professional lives. In Byron Bay he joins a group of street musicians. His prolonged holiday becomes a lost summer of drugs (consumed, cultivated and sold), alcohol, sex and music. Andrew is drawn into intense relationships with the members of the group, particularly with the captivating Heidi, who has herself come to Byron to escape a troubled past.
Book 1 Title: The Byron Journals
Book Author: Daniel Ducrou
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $19.95 pb, 304 pp
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The Byron Journals is organised into short, eventful chapters detailing several months in the life of Andrew, its protagonist. Andrew sets out from Adelaide on a schoolies’ trip, hoping to escape the weight of expectation and the fallout from his parents’ personal and professional lives. In Byron Bay he joins a group of street musicians. His prolonged holiday becomes a lost summer of drugs (consumed, cultivated and sold), alcohol, sex and music. Andrew is drawn into intense relationships with the members of the group, particularly with the captivating Heidi, who has herself come to Byron to escape a troubled past.
Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.
Book 1 Title: The Keys to The Kingdom: Lord Sunday
Book Author: Garth Nix
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $15.95 pb, 308 pp
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Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.
It’s not really a choice, but a necessity. Usually, it is the pressure of an idea or an emotional state that only seems to be satisfactorily released as words on a page. Sometimes, if there is a choice involved, it is in choosing not to write.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. A lot of my work originates in dream. Glissando began as a transcription of a dream I had longer ago than I care to admit.
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David Musgrave is the author of four volumes of poetry, the most recent being Phantom Limb. His first novel is Glissando (reviewed on page thirty-three). He is also the publisher at Puncher & Wattmann. See www.davidmusgrave.com
Why do you write?
It’s not really a choice, but a necessity. Usually, it is the pressure of an idea or an emotional state that only seems to be satisfactorily released as words on a page. Sometimes, if there is a choice involved, it is in choosing not to write.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. A lot of my work originates in dream. Glissando began as a transcription of a dream I had longer ago than I care to admit.
In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hansen, a professional curator, is, I feel, himself ‘guilty’ of looking around these works rather than at them – in fact, not ‘seeing’ them. Dr Hansen says: ‘It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.’ Focusing on Truganini, he details how, when her bust was made, there were still ‘two hundred full-blood Palawa living’, Darwin’s ‘Origin’ was twenty years off, Truganini was ‘smart and vivacious, young and attractive’, and she and her treaty group were ‘A-list colonial celebrities’.
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Tragedy and loss
Dear Editor,
In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hansen, a professional curator, is, I feel, himself ‘guilty’ of looking around these works rather than at them – in fact, not ‘seeing’ them. Dr Hansen says: ‘It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.’ Focusing on Truganini, he details how, when her bust was made, there were still ‘two hundred full-blood Palawa living’, Darwin’s ‘Origin’ was twenty years off, Truganini was ‘smart and vivacious, young and attractive’, and she and her treaty group were ‘A-list colonial celebrities’.
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With series titles dominating the new releases, it would seem that every author’s (and illustrator’s) ambition is to find a character and a conceit that will have sufficient appeal to carry them successfully through multiple volumes. This is a particularly achievable ambition in children’s literature, where the target readership has a high tolerance for repetition, a loyalty towards favourite characters and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more of the same.
Book 1 Title: Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion
Book Author: R.A. Spratt
Book 1 Biblio: Random House Australia, $14.95 pb, 271 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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With series titles dominating the new releases, it would seem that every author’s (and illustrator’s) ambition is to find a character and a conceit that will have sufficient appeal to carry them successfully through multiple volumes. This is a particularly achievable ambition in children’s literature, where the target readership has a high tolerance for repetition, a loyalty towards favourite characters and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more of the same.
In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions, is one of his distinguishing qualities, and something to rejoice in. Coastlands, and marshes, are essential to his intellect and to his imagination. He may never have had one foot in Eden, but he did rejoice in a plurality of territories.
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In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions, is one of his distinguishing qualities, and something to rejoice in. Coastlands, and marshes, are essential to his intellect and to his imagination. He may never have had one foot in Eden, but he did rejoice in a plurality of territories.
With a hallmark ruefulness, Porter would joke that the principal use of poetry was to supply novelists and filmmakers with titles for what they produced: but he was himself a constant crosser of borders between prose and poetry, music and verse, the most sumptuous of visual works in Western civilisation and poems which might revere, chasten or ironise them. He could mount a commanding array of insights while offering in the same breath a disarming modesty about their power. If ever there was a case of someone writing poems to see what happened, Peter Porter was the man – ‘for the littoral any day’.
Kally Palamas is an Australian of Greek descent; a trained and published philosopher barely coping with a personal tragedy in the man-made caves of Cooper Pedy. Estranged from her lover and living a solipsistic life, her world is disrupted when she travels to Greece to deal with the ceremony of her father’s death.
Her father, Akindynos Palamas, had been one of the many Greek migrants to travel to Australia in search of freedom and fortune. However, after achieving success in his adopted land he succumbed to the lure of the myths of his old country while his family continued their lives in Australia.
Book 1 Title: Palimpsest
Book Author: Kathryn Koromilas
Book 1 Biblio: $24.95 pb, 219 pp
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Kally Palamas is an Australian of Greek descent; a trained and published philosopher barely coping with a personal tragedy in the man-made caves of Cooper Pedy. Estranged from her lover and living a solipsistic life, her world is disrupted when she travels to Greece to deal with the ceremony of her father’s death.
Her father, Akindynos Palamas, had been one of the many Greek migrants to travel to Australia in search of freedom and fortune. However, after achieving success in his adopted land he succumbed to the lure of the myths of his old country while his family continued their lives in Australia.
