This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of Australian Book Review. Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived and thrived, through changes of editor (though not very often) and of editorial policy (though not very much); through changes of appearance, ownership, sponsorship and affiliation.

However, that ‘250’ effaces a whole earlier chapter in the history of ABR. When Issue No. 1 appeared in June 1978, the magazine was not being started: it was being revived. The original incarnation was published out of Adelaide for twelve years, edited in the first instance by Max Harris, Geoffrey Dutton and Rosemary Wighton. Dutton dropped out along the way, but Harris and Wighton continued to edit the journal until its final issue at the end of 1973. The first issue of the original Australian Book Review – Vol. 1, No. 1 – was published in November 1961.

Dark Victory opens with a coup: in a deep-etched narrative, joint – and seamless – authors David Marr and Marian Wilkinson make human beings out of the anonymous acronyms of John Howard’s border protection strategy. Explicitly rejecting the gulag language of numbers, of SUNCs in SIEVs (Suspected Unauthorised Non-Citizens in Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels), they begin with people – stirring, then waving. These are men and women with names, professions, histories, family:

[Khodadad] Sarwari, a teacher, sat jammed between his wife, their three children and his brother on the boat’s flimsy upper deck. The family was fleeing the Taliban. So were most of the people on the Palapa.

The effect is sudden and bracing. Here are names, contexts, explanations. These were the kind of people Australians feared so much that they would endorse – even applaud – sending them back out to sea. These were John Howard’s ‘people like that’. In a dramatic and deliberate way, Marr and Wilkinson put flesh on shadows. They make asylum seekers responsive players, not passive victims or malign invaders. ‘Rajab Ali Merzaee, an Afghan medical student, watched two sailors come down to the foot of the stairs. “They were two very strong men. Very lovely, very good persons.”’

W.H. Auden, following Samuel Butler, thought that ‘the true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat’, and plenty of people, poets, and others have believed this: to recast a dictum of Christ’s, if you can’t be trusted with the cats, why should we trust you with the tigers? Gwen Harwood could be trusted with the cats, and with yet more domestic things; here, for example, is her fairly late poem ‘Cups’:

They know us by our lips. They know the proverb
about the space between us. Many slip.
They are older than their flashy friends, the glasses.
They held cold water first, are named in scripture.

 

Most are gregarious. You’ll often see them
nestled in snowy flocks on trestle tables
or perched on trolleys. Quite a few stay married
for life in their own home to the same saucer

 

and some are virgin brides of quietness
in a parlour cupboard, wearing gold and roses.
Handleless, chipped, some live on in the flour bin,
some with the poisons in the potting shed.

 

Shattered, they lie in flowerpot, flowerbed, fowlyard.
Fine earth in earth, they wait for resurrection.
Restored, unbreakable, they’ll meet our lips
on some bright morning filled with lovingkindness.

In the list of life’s most stressful events, family breakups and moving home are way up there in the top ten, and one often follows the other, compounding the trauma. This is the situation for eleven-year-old Rain in Catherine Bateson’s Rain May and Captain Daniel, when her mother, Maggie, sells their inner-city house in the aftermath of divorce. They head for the country to turn Grandma’s deceased estate into a dream home. Maggie’s hopes are higher than her daughter’s: she foresees serenity, harmony, and self-sufficiency; Rain expects ‘Boringsville’.

Amanda Laugesen’s Convict Words is a dictionary of the characteristic or salient words of early colonial discourse, the lexis of the convict system and transportation, which survived until 1840 in New South Wales, 1852 in Van Diemen’s Land, and 1868 in Western Australia. It is not immediately clear what sort of readership is envisaged for the book. It would not occur to many people interested in Australian colonial history to address the subject through the words the actors in that history used, and the book does not directly answer most of the questions the enquirer might have in mind, unless of course it were convictism itself. As for word-buffs, the limited range of the target lexis – convict words in this narrow sense, and not necessarily Australianisms – may not have suggested itself as an engrossing topic.

First, a small tribute to Peter Craven and his colleagues for the establishment of Quarterly Essay (of which the above is the eighth issue). It is such a good idea that one wonders why it is such a recent innovation. A 20,000-word essay on an important contemporary issue, followed, in later issues, by responses to that essay, enable one to get one’s teeth into a matter of moment while it is still topical. The production is nicely done, too.

Much science and fantasy fiction is written in a predominantly realist mode. This is the most economical means of signifying the internal truth of its fictional worlds, no matter how strange its aliens, or how superhuman the powers of its heroes. So, for example, Tolkien writes, ‘Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other; and moved them to the edge of the shelf.’ Whatever his nature – half-Ent, half-tree – Treebeard comfortably occupies the grammatical subject position.

These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Ian Denys Peek’s sometimes irascible ‘memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, relates the experiences of a member of the Singapore Volunteer Armoured Car Company. Peek was British and had grown up in Shanghai, but was not taken into captivity there as was novelist J.G. Ballard (who recalled the experience in Empire of the Sun). Peek and his brother Ron were at the fall of Singapore. Soon afterwards began their movements between a series of hospital and labour camps along the railway. Peek’s story – his first book, published sixty years after his capture and told in the first person – gives a British perspective on a fate that he shared with thousands of Australians.

Ever since Federation, Australians have heard of the Boer War, as they have heard of the Wars of the Roses. As to deep understanding, they have as much about the one war as about the other. As a ‘Matric’ student in 1939, I had for my Commercial Practice teacher a Boer War veteran – lean, tall, bowlegged – every schoolboy’s image of our horsemen who had taught the Empire’s enemies such a lesson in South Africa. Beguiled by eager juvenile diversionists, he would treat us to ten minutes of soldier anecdotes, straight from his saddle forty years earlier.

Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s first volume since New and Selected Poems (1996) is substantially a product of his recent move to Brisbane, containing a large section of poems coloured by references to the city’s subtropical conditions. However, Mangroves also brings together varied material that dates from 1988 to 1994, some of which – notably the ‘Blue Hills’ sequences – has been published elsewhere.

To refashion the fashioned, lest it harden into iron, is work of an endless vital activity.’
                                                                                                                        - Goethe

The year 1937 was the centenary of the death of modern Russia’s first great poet, Alexander Pushkin. Celebration was mandatory in the USSR, and it wasn’t a good year to ignore the dictates of Stalin’s bureaucrats. So the Soviet satirist Mikhail Zoschenko takes us into a grim but determined apartment block in Moscow, past a slap-dash artistic rendering of the great poet wreathed in pine branches, into a room where the tenants are gathered and a slightly flustered youngish man is preparing to speak. There is a general doziness and smell of old onions.

Marion Halligan’s latest novel should be a success. It is a continuation and concentration of themes, characters, and settings that have consistently engaged her in a considerable body of work. The Point is full of Halligan favourites: food, art, love, literature, hubris, Canberra, Séverac, and the Spensers. It is a novel with currency, exploring the IT industry, the business of food, and the perceived distance between those with and those without. Halligan has a reputation as an intense and original writer, but The Point is a disappointing novel.

Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter —
No plastic bottles or scraps of styrofoam packing,
No jetsam at all except the occasional corpse
Of a used slave tossed off a galley —
And the shrieks of the dancing Queen as the hero splashed her
While her cheer-squad of ladies-in-waiting giggled on cue,
The eunuchs holding the towels.
With salt in her eyes did she wrinkle the perfect nose
Of which Pascal would later venture the opinion
That had it been shorter (he didn’t say by how much)
History would have been different?
They were probably both naked. What a servant saw
Did not count. They might even have boffed each other
Right there at the water’s edge like a pair of dolphins
Washed up in the middle of a mad affair,
With her unable to believe the big lunk would ever
Walk away from this, and him in his soul
Fighting to forget that this was R&R
And there was still the war.

In the latest offerings in Cambridge University Press’s ‘Contemporary Japanese Society’ series, Vera Mackie outlines 130 years of Japanese feminism, while Roger Goodman’s collection explores a decade of policy interventions in that country that challenge a society still based largely on a strict gendered division of labour. Men’s primary role is to be the overworked salaryman warrior, while women’s is to care for dependents, both children and grandparents, in a society that ‘is rapidly becoming the world’s oldest ever human population’. Perhaps the shock of 1989, when women’s birth strike reduced the fertility rate to 1.57, should have been expected.

Mackie sets the story of Japanese feminism against the three great social transformations of Japanese society since the Meiji Restoration: modernisation, colonialism, and advanced capitalism. In the modernisation phase, there was considerable debate about which Western political and civil institutions should be incorporated into Japanese society. Once granted access to an education (in 1900 Japanese women entered universities), women challenged the ‘Confucian family-state’ that positioned everyone as subjects of the emperor, and married women additionally as the subjects of their husbands. Some feminists argued for a democratic liberal form of citizenship, including monogamous marriage based on love and the nuclear family. As women factory workers became the backbone of Japanese industrialisation, socialist feminists struggled to incorporate working women’s issues into socialism and the labour movement. The ‘new women’ of the first decades of the twentieth century sought active expression of women’s sexuality, in the process debating reproductive control, prostitution, and men’s and women’s marital rights.

During the period of imperialism, Japan expanded its territorial control into China, Korea, Taiwan, and much of South-East Asia. Millions of Japanese women mobilised in support of Japan’s colonial expansionist goals, and several prominent women served on government committees between 1937 and 1940, including suffragists, a bluestocking, and a social democrat. A handful protested against Japanese imperialism, while many sought government support for Japanese women acting ‘appropriately’ in their role as mothers.

At 9:40 pm on 23 October 1942, in the North African desert, the heavens lit up with myriad flashes from more than one thousand guns, and the roar of the British Commonwealth Eighth Army’s opening barrage rolled out towards Field Marshal Rommel’s poised Panzerarmee Afrika. Promptly, at 10 pm, when two search-lights arced across the sky, beams crossing, the waiting infantry from Australia, Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Great Britain rose from weapon pits, where they had been lying doggo all day, and began to fight their way forward through wired and dug defences, and ingeniously laid enemy minefields stretching up to six thousand metres deep.

The intense fighting that followed over the next twelve days is recounted graphically in Alamein, co-authored by Mark Johnston, Head of History at Scotch College, Melbourne, and Peter Stanley, of the Australian War Memorial. Their concentration, underlined by the book’s subtitle, is on the Australian 9th Division’s part in the battle. It deserves that emphasis. Partisan chest-thumping aside, its part in the battle, on the right of the line and defending the main road and railway approaches to the Nile delta and Cairo, was absolutely crucial, a fact that General Bernard Montgomery acknowledged at the time, and after the war.

It was Montgomery’s intention to use the 9th Division to undertake a series of ‘crumbling’ operations by attacking north, parallel to the front line, that had the effect of attracting the bulk of Rommel’s tank forces to that area and tying them up. So successful were these operations (at great human cost to the 9th), they allowed Montgomery’s other forces to make a decisive breakout further south. That operation, ‘Super-charge’, forced Panzerarmee Afrika into decisive retreat after twelve days of round-the-clock fighting and bombing by the Desert Air Force, including two RAAF fighter squadrons. This heralded the end of German–Italian hopes in Africa.

On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, The Thirteenth Night dwells on the complex fatality of that night, which permanently changed several life stories in an instant. For his mother, who had coped with his exceptionally difficult childhood, winning through in his early teens to a remarkably close relationship, Jeremy’s death was and remains a dark frontier. Beyond lay a strange and cold country. Totally disoriented at first by devastating grief, she found the courage and stamina to pursue the true story of the accident’s cause for five years in the face of institutional defensiveness and media ignorance. This book began as a story for the family, but it is an important book for other readers on several counts.

The first section, dealing with Jeremy’s birth and troubled childhood, will speak to many first-time parents who have discovered that parenting poses challenges that baby-care manuals never mention. It is possible that Jeremy’s difficult birth, hastened by the doctor’s use of vacuum extraction, was the cause of his early misery, although McNess wastes little time on speculation. For her, the reality was how to survive feelings of despair. She details the frustration and depression induced by the unrelenting demands of her son’s first five years, and by the shattering of her dreams of motherhood. Perpetually unhappy, Jeremy drove her to distraction with his constant crying, while his unresponsiveness and slow development sapped her confidence. The unpretentious prose graphically evokes the daily grinding despair of this period, but meanwhile a picture implicitly emerges of the mother’s own strength and determination. Jeremy’s eventual growth into a confident, brilliant, warm young man clearly owed a great deal to her perseverance. During the even more terrible first five years succeeding his death, this aspect of her personality was to serve her well, as the RAAF discovered.

Some judicious editing would have tightened the section dealing with Jeremy’s middle and adult years. Fortunately lightened by touches of irony and humour, which serve to colour Jeremy’s personality and relationships, the story of his and the family’s activities nevertheless has pedestrian stretches of diaristic triviality. In the latter part of the book, however, McNess dives fearlessly into critical experience.

Here are two sumptuously produced keepsakes serving very different purposes. Beyond 40 describes itself as ‘Forty Years of Dreams’, but actually offers one year’s worth of images that the Australian Ballet want to project. A Collector’s Book of Australian Dance, on the other hand, for all its unintoxicating title, comes much closer to being a book of dreamings.

The Australian Ballet’s first home was in Albert Street, East Melbourne. Anyone who remembers the shabby studios of 1962 will also remember how familiar and fitting such studios seemed. Dancers in those days were not used to big spaces, well-sprung floors, or fine pianos to accompany rehearsals or classes. The fact that you worked in dilapidated halls, rattled by traffic, lacking kitchens or first-aid kits, sometimes without even running water, was a sort of proof that you were engaged in Art. But a consequence of the limited conditions was that big performances seldom happened. Forty years ago, men seldom flung themselves into great cartwheeling circuits of the stage, women were not accustomed to swinging their legs up past their ears, or committing themselves to gravity as they plummeted towards a partner’s arms. What might be achieved by young athletes on the stage took time to be recognised, even by the achievers. But, as the Australian Ballet rose into existence out of the aspirations of the Borovansky company, dancers’ belief in themselves – like that of Australians in general – began to alter.

The long postwar conservative reign gave way (with some intermissions) to the governments of Whitlam, Hawke, and Keating; Patrick White took his place among international writers; David Williamson wrote the words that a young Mel Gibson spoke in the film Gallipoli. Even universities gathered self-confidence.

The Australian Ballet archives are well placed to reveal this evolutionary change, the very topic of Valerie Lawson’s excellent introduction to Beyond 40. She sketches the national context that encouraged a new sense of Australian identity in both repertoire and performers. How valuable, therefore, it would have been to have had a pictorial record of the alterations in dancers’ body shapes over these forty years, their changing technical abilities, the new imaginative worlds they were given to inhabit, and so on. Instead, what we get are the pin-ups of 2002: last year’s company members photographed in costumes of yesteryear. No one wears shoes that have ever been danced in; the look of 1963 has been replaced by something much more up-to-date; almost without exception, each plate is laboriously posed, the performers holding a position as if being paid by the hour.

When you bump into people who know Gideon Haigh – and that happens a lot in Geelong – they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail, and his casualness with money. I want to add to this list of his idiosyncrasies a delicious ability to turn the mundane into the magnificent. For this is exactly what The Vincibles is to we weekend warriors – a magnificent vindication of our very existence.

I will try not to descend into hagiography, but right from the title – a clever play on the epithet given Bradman’s 1948 side – this book starts out as beautifully as Trumper V. in full cry. Some bits are so cleverly constructed they have to be read twice, even thrice, to be fully appreciated:

We look, accordingly, very rusty, not to say crusty. Big John’s first over for the season includes a full toss metres above the batsman’s head, and a triple bouncer that zeroes in on point. I wear one in the chest when I get into position to hook, then remember I don’t hook. ‘Jeez, you’re tough,’ comments Tommy, my partner. ‘No,’ I confide, ‘just crap.’

This is the reality of being smitten by cricket for all but the select few. At fifty years of age, I simply can’t imagine not playing cricket on Saturday, something I have been doing since I was fourteen. Not only would I miss batting and bowling but the exchanges between people with whom you share your smittenness – or the challenges of just getting underway. We don’t play on carefully manicured grounds. Only last week, we had to dig a trench almost the length of the Suez, or the sewers, to drain the water around the concrete and plastic wicket just so play could start. The ‘super-sopper’ was a couple of old towels from the boot of someone’s car.

According to Andrew O’Hagan, writing in a recent London Review of Books: ‘If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.’ The journey from Nobody-hood to Somebody-hood is central to June Dally-Watkins’s recent autobiography. Indeed, O’Hagan’s pithy insight could almost have been the Sydney socialite and queen of etiquette’s mantra.

Because it is predominantly associated with her modelling career and deportment school, Dally-Watkins’s name conjures images of a bygone era. Her autobiography is frequently dated by claims such as ‘breath freshener [is] vital to a pleasing presence’ and ‘feminists wanted to be like men’. In other ways, however, Dally-Watkins has produced a quintessentially contemporary text. Emanating from the same cultural melting pot as reality television and ‘tell all’ tales in New Idea, the book celebrates the capacity of pain to produce Somebody-hood. Its confessional tone – amply captured in the wonderful, though unwittingly camp, title The Secrets Behind My Smile – confirms its contemporariness.

Evidence that this doyenne of femininity has joined the populist ranks is provided early on when the author virtually promises that this will be a tale of woeful self-revelation. She writes:

I had to be honest about my whole life, which meant dredging up the unhappiness I had been hiding behind my smile. I didn’t know how much it would hurt: at times it was more than I could bear.

In such moments, Dally-Watkins demonstrates a clear, if unconscious, grasp of our epoch’s requirement that allure entails having something to ‘dredge up’. It is not enough now to be a Somebody and to write about that. Disclosure of one’s secret suffering is integral to having a story and a subjectivity worth telling, and, crucially, integral to book sales. In this light, Dally-Watkins’s claim that she ‘had to be honest about [her] whole life’ is less a signifier of personal courage than an indication of what is now necessary for marketability.

Pigs don’t fly, but dragons and kites do, and possums can jump, which is perhaps just as scary if you’re a little one. These four picture books deal with flight, their authors and illustrators using more or less imaginary elements in the process.

Jump, Baby! is almost completely realistic. The animals – three ring-tailed possums and an owl – are anthropomorphised only insofar as they can talk, but their behaviour is entirely natural. Well, perhaps not quite. Presumably, baby possums know how to jump naturally, and are not paralysed with fear as this baby is. This book is about learning and about growing up. ‘Baby doesn’t feel very big at all,’ even when Mumma tells him he is now too big for her back, and Big Sister assures him he’s too big for the owl to eat. He still feels small enough for both things to happen, and so jumps to join his mother and sister in the peach tree. ‘I jumped all by myself!’ he tells Mumma, who responds, ‘I knew you would’. He has grown up.

Baby Bear Goes to the Park moves into the familiar fantasy world of bears flying: ‘How sweet to be a Cloud / Floating in the Blue,’ sings Pooh, holding onto his balloon. In this case, it is Baby Bear with a kite. Familiar from other books in the series, Baby Bear is visiting the park with Papa and learning kite flying. ‘Suddenly a gust of wind tugged at the kite,’ and Baby Bear takes off. Pooh Bear was brought down by Christopher Robin’s popgun. Baby Bear has a different experience, and an original one. The caterpillar, who had helped him untangle his kite on his first park excursion, returns as a butterfly, and comes to his aid again. In this story, it is the caterpillar who has grown up – into a butterfly – and responsibly gathers all her friends to help. As usual, the parent is completely unaware.

In The Dragon Machine, the dragons themselves do surprisingly little flying. The first tail we spot with George is clearly in the sky, but from then on we see none of the multifarious dragons actually airborne, only the mechanical dragon George builds for himself, to lead his pet dragons to the ‘great wilderness unnoticed and overlooked and safe’ where dragons belong. And the little dragons follow. George also has a wind-up toy dragon, which is his companion until he acquires the ‘real’ ones. A solitary child – ‘unseen, ignored and overlooked’ – George clearly needs the dragons as friends, even though they are a bit of a nuisance. In the end, when his family find him, they give him a cake and a puppy to celebrate his return. They are certainly noticing him now, but, nevertheless, he still sees his new pet as a dragon.

250 and all that!

Welcome to the 250th issue of ABR – or, rather, to the 250th issue of the magazine in its present guise. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the first series, which appeared between 1961 and 1973. It came out of Adelaide under the editorship of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton and, for a time, Geoffrey Dutton. Kerryn Goldsworthy – herself an Editor for two years in the mid-1980s – writes fascinatingly about those early ABRs in her article ‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’ (page 23). Like Kerryn, we celebrate the original begetters of ABR, and everyone else who has made the magazine such a success since the present series began in 1978. Independent magazines have never been more vital than now, when a remarkable (even eerie) editorial consensus obtains in the major Australian newspapers. We look forward to bringing you more cogent, questioning writing in coming years, and we trust you enjoy the 250th issue.

First of the Forums

ABR’s highly successful season of ABR Forums is underway again. The next one will take place on Tuesday, April 15, at the usual venue: fortyfivedownstairs. Our partners on this occasion will once again be Readings in Carlton and the admirable Mietta Foundation. The topic is ‘The Dark Side of Economic Reform’. Michael Pusey and Clive Hamilton – authors of two major new books, The Experience of Middle Australia (CUP) and Growth Fetish (Allen & Unwin), respectively – will be in conversation with Robert Manne, the Chair of ABR. Full details appear on page 5, and bookings are essential. Meanwhile, we look forward to announcing similar events in Adelaide and regional Victoria in coming months.

April is the cruellest month

For writers and scholars seeking funding, April is an important month. The National Library of Australia is calling for applications for the 2004 Harold White Fellowships, while the State Library of Victoria has inaugurated eight Creative Fellowships to explore the SLV’s collections. The deadline for both awards is 30 April. For details on the Harold White Fellowships, contact Graeme Powell at the NLA on (02) 6262 1258, or visit www.nla.gov.au/collect/fellows.htm; and, for the SLV’s Creative Fellowships, call Dianne Reilly on (03) 8664 7182 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lunch with a Freedom Rider

On 16 April, at 1 pm, the ACT Writers’ Centre is holding a Literary Lunch with Ann Curthoys, who participated in the 1960s Freedom Rides and is now Manning Clark Professor of History at ANU. To book, call (02) 6262 9191 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Broken Song

At the State Library of NSW on 28 April, at 12.30 p.m., Barry Hill will discuss his book Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Contact the library on (02) 9273 1516 for further details and bookings.

Poets and platters

Poetry and wine seem to go together, and not just in Canberra. On 22–23 April, at 7 pm, South Australian poets including Geoff Goodfellow, Rory Harris and Nan Witcombe will read from their work as part of the Barossa Vintage Festival. The cost ($30) includes supper and, yes, a glass of wine. To book contact Nicole Bitter on (08) 8563 2595, or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Shifting the Centre

The nachos around the Nicholas Building in Swanston Street, Melbourne, must be delectable: everyone is moving there. Two months ago, ‘Advances’ reported that Collected Works had relocated to the first floor of the Nicholas Building. Now that excellent little bookshop has a new neighbour: the Victorian Writers’ Centre. Who’ll be next? The shift hasn’t diminished the Centre’s events programme. One coming highlight is ‘A Writers’ Weekend in Daylesford: The Art of Storytelling’, with Arnold Zable. This will take place on 10–11 May. To book, call the VWC’s new number, (03) 9654 9068, or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ABR Rules OK!

One of our readers has drawn our attention to a series of graffiti that has appeared around Melbourne. This one appeared in St Kilda. ‘Advances’ neither knows how it got there nor endorses the method, but it applauds the sentiment.

Salty quarterly

Any new poetry magazine deserves a boost from us, and Saltlick Quarterly, whose first issue (‘Autumn 2003’) has just been published, looks good. Poets include Jennifer Harrison, Alex Skovron, Kris Hemensley, Jill Jones, Judith Beveridge, and Anthony Lawrence. The Editors – Clint Greagen, Luis Gonzalez, and Paul Croucher – describe the new magazine as one in which ‘first-class, unpublished poetry is given space to speak for itself without being contextualised by literary politics, cheap manifestos etc’. A one-year subscription costs $42. Enquiries to 104 Rennie Street, Coburg, Vic. 3058 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

How violent was the Australian frontier? At the moment, this is the biggest debate in Australian history. As most would know, the question has gained national attention largely through the efforts of Keith Windschuttle who, in four Quadrant articles in 2000 and 2001, argued, among other things, that historians had inflated the numbers of Aborigines killed on the Australian frontier and that the National Museum of Australia’s ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit contained factual errors. In December 2001 the National Museum organised a conference that brought together Windschuttle and many of the historians he had criticised. This book results from that conference and provides a useful introduction to the debate.

The editors, Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster, have structured the book so that it gently guides the reader through the issues and points of contention. They first set out the historical background, with chapters by Lyndall Ryan, John Mulvaney, Jan Critchett, and Raymond Evans, which provide case studies of frontier conflict from New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Victoria, and Queensland.

Windschuttle’s central role in the debate is reflected in his chapter being placed in the middle of the book as part of a section on the different types of available evidence and how they should be interpreted. Windschuttle’s argument that historians have fabricated written evidence and used unreliable oral evidence is challenged in chapters by Henry Reynolds on official, private, and newspaper records of frontier conflict, Richard Broome on calculating casualty estimates for the Australian frontier, Alan Atkinson on the British use of language in colonial Australia, and Deborah Bird Rose on Aboriginal oral evidence and its use in frontier history.

The next two chapters look at how frontier conflict has been remembered. Tom Griffiths talks in broad terms, while David Roberts examines the conviction of residents of Sofala, north of Bathurst, that Aborigines were massacred at nearby Bells Falls. The veracity of this story cannot be verified, but an Aboriginal belief that there was a Bells Falls massacre led to its controversial inclusion in the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit.

Brett’s T-shirt

Dear Editor,

There is much to enjoy in the March issue of ABR. I found Patrick McCaughey’s ‘A Sketch Portrait of Fred Williams’ particularly illuminating and moving. A fine record of a deep friendship, rare in the annals of art writing in Australia. Also, John Mateer’s ‘Diary’ reflections on a symposium at Edith Cowan University, inspired by the American philosopher Arthur Danto’s ‘The Abuse’, give us notice of imaginative conversations and events coming from the west.

Barry Dickins claims in Black + Whiteley that he went in search of Brett Whiteley. One can only say that, if that’s the case, Dickins didn’t find him. The Friends grow weary of writers poring through the entrails of our memories. Each year Whiteley’s absence is more acutely felt among us, the absurdity and weight of his untimely loss heavier. All this for reasons totally absent from these narratives. Writer and reviewer here both miss what they cannot find or comprehend.

Edwina Preston, who apparently writes on art, describes the portrait of Whiteley on the cover of this book as ‘a cover pic’, then, in the following paragraph, demonstrates her inability to read the photograph. Of course, in this highly informed discourse, the photographer’s name is not cited in this careless discourse. The portrait session from which the cover portrait for Black + Whiteley is chosen took place in 1987. Preston mentions a T-shirt. Brett designed it and chose to wear it for the portrait session, yet its message, ‘96% Love’, also seems to have escaped both writer and reviewer.

In contrast, your cover portrait for the March issue – Meryl Tankard, photographed by Régis Lansac – was accompanied on the title-page by generous textual information about both subject and photographer.

In the USA, Aperture Journal, now celebrating its fiftieth year, regularly features great writing on photography, often by known writers, poets, historians, and photographers. If a writer wanted to research the subject, they could begin there. Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Franks’s The Americans remains as vital a piece of writing today as it was when it was written in 1957.

Writing about an artist’s life or work is surely a serious project that requires deeper research and engagement than either the author of this book or its reviewer have come up with in this so-called ‘search for Brett Whiteley’.

Juno Gemes, Sydney, NSW

Peggy Glanville-Hicks ranks as one of the few Australian composers whose international training and reputation mean that she remains vastly more appreciated outside Australia than within the shores of her native land. A student of Vaughan Williams and Nadia Boulanger, a close friend of the Menuhins, Carlos Surinach, and a host of other major figures, she was a genuine pioneer in the realms of ethnomusicology and music journalism, and an energetic advocate in the articulation of a post-serial musical aesthetic. Her courage and enduring individuality in all of these areas make her one of the most interesting figures in the annals of Australian composers.

Yet, as James Murdoch’s intricately detailed biography amply demonstrates, this story is about an Australian – well, an Australian with a US passport – rather than about Australia. The biography’s settings are multifarious: London, Vienna, Paris, New York, to name a few. Similarly, her human contacts, personal and professional – and Murdoch emphasises that the two were rarely separate in her life – display fascinating variety: from husbands Stanley Bate and Rafael da Costa, to lovers including Errol Flynn’s father and a sea captain, Bernard Hickey; all upheld by enduring friendships with the likes of composer Virgil Thomson, choreographer John Butler, and composer and writer Paul Bowles.

Hers was clearly a dazzling life despite its poverty, frequent ill-health, and often tortured and fractious relationships with friends and colleagues. Murdoch presents her story with the intimate authority of an old and trusted friend. He reveals not only her driven artistic energy and indefatigable entrepreneurship but also her querulousness, occasional nastiness, not inconsiderable ego, and vulnerability.

David Rowbotham is a Queensland poet whose first book was published nearly fifty years ago. His career has a shape that is often found in the arts: a quiet figure whose work is politely rather than rhapsodically received, and whose reputation grows almost by a process of attrition until, eventually, he is one of the few of his contemporaries left standing. It often comes about that a consistent, undemonstrative style, adhered to religiously, itself becomes an important statement, to be rediscovered by a new generation of contemporaries. But this is not quite what has happened in Rowbotham’s case, because his books have changed continuously. He began writing as a young man, returned from the war, discovering for the first time the place in which he had grown up: Ploughman and Poet (1954) may be Bulletin in style, but it is a complex book, and the central oppositions between city and Darling Downs, between manual labour and poetry, remain compelling.

Perhaps the central pattern of Rowbotham’s career has been rediscovery. His first book rediscovered the rural life, and later ones have rediscovered those war experiences firmly put aside in his earlier works. Now this strange new collection rediscovers, on the surface, travel experiences, but its real task is rediscovering the self by a complex form of redefinition. It aims to do this by exploring self-history – when you are close to eighty (Rowbotham was born in 1924), you can see yourself not only as a developing self but as an historical phenomenon. But, instead of containing thoughtful, autumnal retrospectives or (pace Dorothy Hewett’s last books) intense but lucid flashes from past experience, Poems for America is a series of difficult, compressed, multi-layered poems, squashing together personal experience, myth and history, with complex results.

Poems for America is a powerful, even extraordinary, book but, caveat lector, it is not one that declares its qualities immediately or easily. Stylistically, for example, it is a long way from the opening lines of ‘For the Darling Downs’, the first poem in his first book – ‘Your subtle veins of soft creeks lisp and beat / Under the exile’s dream, and your ripe wheat, / Golden like a fable, quivers in blades / Of light in the white appraisal of the clouds’ –  to these lines, taken at random from the American poems early in this book:

What exactly is popular culture? Does Big Brother really pose an inherent challenge to law? And what connection does the regulation of cyberpornography have with the film Pretty Woman? These are some of the questions I was left with after reading Romancing the Tomes, a cross-disciplinary collection of conference papers exploring the ‘uneasy relationship’ between law and popular culture from a feminist perspective.

In her introduction, editor Margaret Thornton (Professor of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University) argues that we must understand the relationship between popular culture and the law as a symbiotic one. While popular culture’s fascination with the law is easily observed in the growth of films, dramas, and reality shows about law, the effect of popular culture on the law is less obvious, but, Thornton argues, no less significant.

Marxists, feminists, and other critical legal theorists have challenged the traditional claims of law to objectivity, impartiality, and autonomy. They have also examined the values and assumptions brought to the process of making and enforcing laws. Thornton employs a similar approach, arguing that popular culture has the potential to corrode the authority of law through its focus on the ‘affective’ side of life – sexuality, desire and the body – which challenges law’s claims to rationality, objectivity, and universality. As many of these essays reveal, however, popular culture is not inherently subversive. Its potential to destabilise legal boundaries is often in spite of itself. Thornton alludes to the tension this creates – that part of the radical potential of popular culture lies in its popularity, but that it risks losing its popularity (and thus its force) once it becomes too self-conscious about its own subversive potential. This tension makes it an intriguing area of study for feminists and others seeking to challenge law’s claim to power.

Childhood is something we take for granted. We all had one, but our idea of when it ended is quite subjective, depending on the society and culture in which we grew up, our economic and class background, and particular family circumstances. In some societies, the end of childhood is quite clear-cut. Most Aboriginal societies in the past (and some in the present) defined the onset of male adulthood by putting boys through stringent initiation ceremonies. Some girls also went through initiation ceremonies, others ended childhood when they reached what was deemed a marriageable age.

Penelope Hetherington has found that in nineteenth-century Western Australian colonial society childhood is not so easily delineated. Her solution to this problem of definition is to look at how childhood was defined in legislation and censuses. Even here she runs into problems. Under British law imported to the colony on the Swan River, people were deemed infants until the age of twenty-one. In reality, childhood in the colony was socially constructed according to the gender, class, and ethnicity of the child and the labour needs of the colony. For most children, childhood, or dependence on adults, ended around the age of fourteen or fifteen.

Childhood as portrayed in Settlers, Servants & Slaves is not the carefree idyll of the romantics, but the hard truth of exploitation and cruelty experienced by the working class. These lives are glimpsed through the legislative and institutional framework established by the state, rather than the subjective experiences of individuals. Hetherington found that childhood and children’s lives were not easily accessed through the archival records. Much of her data had to be extrapolated from more general records and statistics.

One of the puzzles of Australia’s diplomatic service is the comparative lack of informative memoirs by senior diplomats. Of the sixteen heads of Foreign Affairs mentioned in this book, only three apart from Richard Woolcott – Alan Watt, Alan Renouf, and Peter Henderson – have written memoirs (although John Burton wrote much about international conflict management, and Stuart Harris – more an academic than a public servant – has written about many international issues, especially economic ones). Some senior figures have contributed columns and articles, but many other senior and respected ambassadors have written nothing. Perhaps this is one reason for the lack of a profound appreciation of international affairs in Australia, which Woolcott so deplores. This book, however, is a substantial contribution to the literature, situated firmly in the realist tradition, and is probably the best memoir to date from a former Australian diplomat.

Woolcott begins with a homily about the need for Australia to ‘adjust to the region in which we are situated’. He laments the trivialisation and oversimplification with which external affairs matters are often treated, and the way in which domestic politics can inhibit best diplomatic practice.

Two Dick Woolcotts are known to the public. One is the distinguished senior diplomat, a rising star from very early in his career, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and holder of virtually every senior Australian ambassadorial appointment at one time or another; debonair, articulate, well-briefed, with an amazing ability to charm and persuade every prime minister from Robert Menzies to Paul Keating, and most major world leaders with whom Australia has dealt in the past forty years. The other Dick Woolcott is the evil genius of Australia’s East Timor policy, leader of the ‘Jakarta lobby’ in Foreign Affairs, who, as ambassador in Jakarta in 1975, exerted far too great an influence over the governments of the day and was blind to the rights of the East Timorese. Which is the reality and which is the caricature?

To an appreciable extent, this is a book that can be judged by the cover. In the auto-interview accompanying the publisher’s media release, Anthony O’Neill explains that he was motivated to write his second novel by a desire to ‘emulate certain classic tales of the macabre that emerged from the nineteenth century, arguably the greatest century for novels’. In particular, he states that The Lamplighter is ‘my attempt to write something like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, without it being a homage – I wanted it to live and breathe in its own right’.

O’Neill succeeds in this aim. It is no criticism of his work to observe that it is in large measure pastiche, a quality made manifest in the impressive ‘retro’ dust jacket whose design is clever and ironic, being at once the jacket and the book underneath that it appears to be covering. The central image of the lamplighter reflected in a child’s eye against the backdrop of a blood-soaked Victorian city is arresting, and captures the atmosphere as well as alluding to the events of the narrative.

The attention to self-conscious period detail extends to the endpapers, chapter headings, typography and even the pages themselves, which are roughly cut in the manner of a book of the time. It is not often that designers and publishers receive credit for the effort they put into book production, but this must be surely one of the best-made Australian novels of recent times. It is on a par with the UQP hardcover edition of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, itself textually an example of a kind of pastiche.

As a literary form, pastiche at its least consequential is merely a lampoon, a light-hearted parody. At its least ethical, it may have associations with forgery or plagiarism. But it can also be a serious, innovative, and reverential form of artistic expression. And it is this higher form of imitation – the original kind – that O’Neill assays.

William C. Clarke cuts an interesting figure. An anthropologist who has concentrated on Pacific populations, Clarke combined this discipline with an interest in poetry in his 2000 lecture ‘Pacific Voices, Pacific Views: Poets as Commentators on the Contemporary Pacific’. Clarke used his poetry as a vehicle for considering issues such as land tenure, corruption, and tourism. It is angry, astute poetry; this is not the tranquil Hawaii and Fiji of tourist literature. Such poetry is undoubtedly moving, despite Clarke’s echo of W.H. Auden’s assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.

In A Momentary Stay, his first collection, Clarke persists in exploring politically charged issues. He draws attention to the ways we mistreat and misunderstand nature: how ‘the soil slides down slope / beneath the dearth of a bird’s song’. Politically, nothing may happen due to this collection; on a smaller scale, Clarke’s poetry inspires movement, in both poet and audience. As with all good poetry, thoughts are rearranged, positions reconsidered.

The title touches on, ironically perhaps, the meaning of existence. According to Clarke’s environmental understanding, we are simply ephemeral dwellers on this earth. The phrase comes from Robert Frost, who argued that poetry ‘runs a course of lucky events and ends in clarification of life … a momentary stay against confusion’. For Frost, the ‘momentary stay’ of poetry makes something happen; humans have the capacity to understand and order the world through art. It is through the unobjective, illogical language of poetry that we are invited to do both.

So it is for Clarke. In ‘Ecology’, he struggles against his desire to personify and sentimentalise nature, exploring instead nature’s command of order and logic: ‘I know the songs of birds / sound not for happiness / but to denote possession.’ Yet something happens and the poet is returned to that which he doesn’t ‘know’:

These two first novels confront the ongoing complaints of literary commentators that new novels are too often set in the past rather than dealing with present realities. Moving from the criticism of ‘literary grave-robbing’ by American author Jonathan Dee, Malcolm Knox has complained that most major Australian novelists tend to mine fantastic or historical subject matter rather than examining the culture of our daily lives. Knox takes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a popular and critical success, as his model for a perceptive fictional treatment of popular culture. More recently, David Marr urged novelists to use contemporary settings to address what he calls the ‘new philistinism of John Howard’s Australia’.

David Kelly and Julia Osborne have set their novels predominantly in the Australian suburbia of the past few decades, and focus on attempts by liminal characters to negotiate their place in these sometimes-harsh environs. Kelly’s Fantastic Street presents what our prime minister might call the black-picket-fence view of Australian suburbia, a world of poverty, domestic conflict, broken families, and sexual abuse.

Alex has grown up in a family of oft-changing configuration: after his father’s infertility was discovered, his mother turned to adoption and fostering, which has resulted in a revolving door of damaged youngsters. Alex himself starts adolescence with more than his fair share of burdens: he was given away for adoption by his thirteen-year-old birth mother, he has striking buck-teeth, and his schoolmates have perceived his homosexuality. The adoptive father he loved is replaced by a stepfather who proves adept at all forms of abuse. These tensions are strengthened by the competition for maternal affection between the children, and the occasionally violent inter-sibling antipathies. As the novel opens, Alex has washed up at his mother’s house in Brisbane. He is on social security and living in a caravan in the backyard. He is there to care for her now that she has terminal cancer.

Singapore and Malaysia have a lot in common beyond a shared border and a shared colonial heritage. Both countries have been dominated for decades by one strong leader – Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Dr Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia. Both have a weak Opposition and a muzzled media. Both have an internal security act inherited from the British, and which is used to detain people without trial. In both countries, the common law system has been bent into ugly new shapes to silence dissent. Each of these books traces the fate of a man who dared to challenge the leader but failed, crushed by an adversary with superior tactics, greater political strength, and, above all, more sway in the courts.

In the case of Singapore, we have indefatigable opposition campaigner J.B. Jeyaretnam, with his trademark mutton-chop whiskers and sonorous voice, which, once heard, can never be forgotten. Chris Lydgate describes it, almost lovingly, as

a stately Victorian bass, with a crusty accent almost extinct in modern Singapore; dry, forceful, eloquent, creaky like an old cabinet, polished by the echoes of a thousand dusty courtrooms, laden with the cadences of an advocate, a campaigner, even a preacher.

When Jeyaretnam won the seat of Anson for the Workers’ Party at a by-election in 1981, he became the first opposition MP elected in Singapore in eighteen years. He had already fought and lost against Lee Kuan Yew’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) in four previous elections. More ominously, he had also fought and lost against the PAP in two libel suits, and been forced to sell his house to pay the costs and damages awarded against him. Worse was to come. Lee Kuan Yew described Jeyaretnam as ‘a thoroughly destructive force’ and Lee saw it as his job to destroy him politically. Lydgate illustrates Lee’s take-no-prisoners approach with a revealing quote from a series of interviews conducted with Singapore’s ‘senior minister’ in 1997:

Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac … Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle-dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.

Most of us were taught at school to understand the difference between discovery and invention. Both words imply finding, but discovery meant finding something that already existed ‘out there’ in the concrete world; inventions were found in the imagination. Explorers discovered; scientists invented.

Big business is a kind of communism. Employees in their vertical villages banter this truth, checking over their shoulders for fear an office spy is eavesdropping. It is a communism that aims for the inequitable distribution of wealth, just as traditional communism aims for the inequitable distribution of poverty. It is the People’s Republic of Capitalism (PRC). Its languages are Bluff and Spin and Acronym. It is always ‘strong and growing’; always ‘resilient and facing up to new challenges’, with the CEO pursuing higher EBIT and better KPIs before the all-important IPO. It is active in funding charities and the arts.

Reading Swan Bay, one is quickly struck by a sense of the familiar. A damaged, misanthropic man meets a damaged, unbalanced woman. He attempts to penetrate her almost mystical reserve and, in the book’s central flashback sequence, she recounts the past that has almost destroyed her. Back in the present, the truth of her account seems uncertain. The two achieve some sort of equilibrium. This narrative outline could equally be applied to almost any of the novels of Rod Jones.

When, in 1986, Jones’s Julia Paradise was released, it was, rightly, heralded as an exciting debut from a promising new writer. The above outline largely took place in Shanghai, in a book that suggested a morphine-addled, Freud-obsessed Graham Greene. His third novel, Billy Sunday, was, if anything, even better. Jones had moved his focus to North America. Nightpictures (1997), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, added a heightened eroticism and Venice to the patented Jones formula. The leitmotifs and narrative echoes throughout Jones’s oeuvre are, however, incidental: he is much more than a one-trick pony. Each of these novels is wonderfully written; each explores, with an unflinching eye, key themes of sex and death, life and loss, power and abuse. Jones should be counted amongst Australia’s most interesting and talented novelists. His gift lies in his ability to write with crisp clarity about the murky and the intangible; with confidence and force about the uncertain; with detachment about passion and with passion about detachment.

According to my dictionary, a handbook is ‘a short manual or guide-book’. Somebody ought to inform the ornithological world of this, because ‘handbook’ has come to be applied to huge, multi-volume compendia about the bird faunas of particular regions. These books aim to present clearly and concisely all available knowledge about each species, drawing together observations and data from innumerable scientific journals, books, museum specimens, and field notes of scientists and bird watchers. Inevitably, they are massive compilations, running to thousands of pages. They certainly cannot be carried easily. However, they have developed a tradition of fine scholarship and precise writing and illustration, building on the high standards set by the first such work, the four-volume Handbook of British Birds (Witherby et al. 1938–41). Their contribution to bird research and conservation has been immense.

Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic ornithologists are now close to completing a twenty-year endeavour to produce their own ‘handbook’, and are certainly maintaining the scholarly and artistic standards (and dimensions). What makes this all the more remarkable is that this handbook has been produced by a community group, Birds Australia, and that more than eight million dollars have been raised through private donations and sponsorships to complete the project. The size and cost of the project is conveyed by its workforce. Volume 6 alone employed six artists, fifteen section editors, two senior editors and two assistant editors. A further ninety-two reviewers gave freely of their time and expertise.

At first glance this book looks like a quickie bashed out to take advantage of the looming war in Iraq and to cash in on the coincidence that the author – taking a break from his day job covering wars for the Sydney Morning Herald – happened to be in New York when the towers came down. But to see it in this light would be a disservice. What Paul McGeough has done is to draw on his reporting from Afghanistan, New York, Iraq, Israel, and the occupied territories, in order to give some coherence to the events of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. What we have ended up with is actually a very good rundown of the pre-existing conditions, conflicts and events of the past year and a half in disparate conflict zones. But for their being woven together by the common thread of the US reaction to 9/11, they probably would not have got into print.

For McGeough, 2001 starts in Afghanistan, well before 9/11. He goes there to check out the situation of those refugees fleeing the Taliban regime who were to become a domestic political football in Australia later that year. His coverage of the situation on the Afghan–Pakistan border and in Afghanistan itself is a slap in the face to Phillip Ruddocks’s attempts to distinguish ‘genuine’ refugees from ‘economic’ ones among the Afghans trying to reach Australia. McGeough also puts into perspective the role of the ‘people smugglers’, who at that time were being portrayed in Australian politics as odious villains. As he puts it:

The word ‘mahjar’, Eva Sallis informs us, ‘refers collectively to all the lands of Arab, most often Lebanese, migration’. Her third book of fiction is a slight volume composed of fifteen stories, divided into three sections. In deceptively simple prose and syntax, Sallis surveys the gamut of experiences affecting the displaced migrant. As in her previous novels, Hiam and The City of Sealions, a beguiling mixture of fantasy, fact, and fable make up the fabric of the book. With a PhD in comparative literature (Arabic and English), Sallis is well placed to oscillate between two cultures, and Mahjar is a perfect vehicle to showcase cross-cultural interactions.

when life says shut
the most you could muster
moments on a lake
pooled passive
or close enough and whispering
the past and only glory