In September 2018, NewSouth published a new edition of A Certain Style.

On a chilly evening in 1980, a stylish woman in her early seventies, wheezing slightly from a lifetime’s cigarettes, climbed a staircase just beneath the Harbour Bridge, entered a room full of book editors – young women mostly, university-educated, making their way in a newly feminised industry – and proceeded, in her crisp, extemporising way, to lay down the law. She had been invited to talk about the role of the editor, but first came the caveat: ‘[A]lthough I can see that this audience consists mostly of women, I shall throughout refer to the editor as he.’ And so she did, despite the mental hisses of some in the audience – and despite years spent contending with the smugness, neglect and condescension of men in the publishing industry. Did she remember a very different lecture half a century earlier when, as an Arts student at the University of Sydney, she had watched Sir Mungo MacCallum start his lectures with the word ‘Gentlemen’, glaring at the few women in the auditorium.

Thus, beguilingly, Jacqueline Kent’s biography begins. The woman’s name was, of course, Beatrice Davis. After this personal prologue, the book proceeds in chronological fashion. It is a traditional biography. One suspects that ‘Beatrice’ (not to be addressed as ‘Bea’, as one of her authors discovered) would have approved of the style, if not of the act of publication itself. Kent discovered this a little later when Beatrice chastised her for publishing a history of radio. ‘You are an editor,’ the doyenne reminded Kent. ‘Editors do not write books.’ Indeed, she appears to have taken something of an interest in Kent’s life. Condoling with Kent, in 1987, soon after the death of her husband, Kenneth Cook, Davis said: ‘[I]t’s really difficult when you have to bury them, isn’t it?’

I should make it clear at the start of these discursive memories that I knew Ted Hughes only slightly and Sylvia Plath hardly at all. But I lived in fairly close proximity to their ascent to fame in the 1950s and 1960s and knew much more closely some of the personalities intimately involved in the crisis in the lives of these two remarkable poets. Then, after Sylvia’s death in early 1963, I watched across successive decades the curious progress of each writer’s reputation and, more importantly, the establishing of their respective canons. Even today the Collected Works of each are not settled matters – Plath because we shall never know exactly what was suppressed or edited to fit the desires of the estate of her heirs (she died intestate, which automatically made Hughes her legal executor since, though separated, they had not divorced); and Hughes as he was an inveterate censor of his own work, and many of his major productions appeared finally in forms simplified from his original intentions. I don’t object to this last fact: every writer is entitled to shape his utterance into the fashion he would like the public to receive it. Nor will I be writing any criticism of Hughes’s intimate relations with his wife. I have always believed that marriages are opaque to all but their participants.

What matters most is the double bequest to posterity of these writers’ works, especially their poetry. Here I feel justified in using the adjective I chose above – ‘remarkable’, though I believe it applies to Plath’s writing more completely than to Hughes’s. There are certain proprieties to be observed: I surmise that Plath’s standing is at least as high as Hughes’s, most notably outside Britain. Nevertheless, she continues to be an icon of feminist hostility to Hughes in particular and to masculine artists in general. If this hostility concerns itself with the part the Hughes estate played in controlling the posthumous publication of her output, then it is justified, but if it stems from a more general distaste, it is unpleasantly reductive. One circumstance which all Plath’s admirers must take into consideration is her self-consciously rivalrous attitude to his poetry throughout their period of living and working together, when he was much better known than she was, and even more vehemently so after their separation when she wrote her most powerful poems. One further decorum in judging the aftermath of her death is concerned with Hughes’s stated reasons for suppressing some of the material she left behind: namely that everything he did was designed to protect their children from the psychic storm of their parents’ tragedy. I offer one further proviso at the beginning of my essay: although I would like to be concerned chiefly with the poetry each produced, the likely difficulty of obtaining permission to quote from it will force me back on to a more autobiographical position – to what I observed or heard about at the time, and the conclusions I drew from this.

On the second last day of the weeklong Poetry Africa 2001 international festival in Durban, South Africa, an interview with me appeared in one of the national newspapers. The text presented me as a returned exile. I was asked questions such as: ‘Have you lost your South Africanness, or do you still need it?’ Since my return to South Africa – I was last here in 1995, just after the first ‘free and fair’ election – I’ve been asked about my feelings towards South Africa and Australia. The questions are always intentionally superficial: there’s a right and a wrong answer. I’ve found that usually the best response is evasion or, better, a lie. In their questioning is a not so subtle politics of decorum: Are you a foreigner? If you are, mind your manners.

In the last however many years, we have seen the rise of a kind of faction in this country which has enabled people like Drusilla Modjeska and Brian Matthews to show what scintillation and what fireworks may follow when the life of the mind (with whatever attendant discursive zigzagging) allows itself to imagine a world as well as to analyse one. It’s not too hard to say that the peculiar energy with which this meta-field has been mined here is due to the fact that middle-aged academics or intellectuals are afraid of defining themselves as novelists, but that doesn’t change the high level of distinction that has been shown.

High on anybody’s list of crossover people you are likely to find Robert Dessaix. A Mother’s Disgrace was a good, straightforward book about a poignant subject which also enclosed a vivid and unashamed self-portrait, but it was in Night Letters, that story of fatalities and history-haunted places, and then in his section of Secrets and in the iridescent collected prose pieces of and so forth, that Robert Dessaix proved himself to be someone whose signature mattered more than the thing he signed.

I admire these works not because of the trappings of the sensibility they display — the exquisiteness they embody, the temptation towards solipsism they defy — but because of the wiriness and intellectual intensity, the integrity of purpose they display under all that lavender and carry-on. It’s an overused phrase but Robert Dessaix really does have a tough reasonableness under the lyric graces, slight or otherwise. He’s also a man dripping with culture the way a man might drip with hair oil who nevertheless refuses to accept cultural cant, multicultural or museum-style. On top of that, he’s a spiritual seeker, someone who has a feeling for the colour and incense and metaphor of religion, has heard the beating of the wings of the spirit, believes at least as much as he disbelieves and, more particularly, can dramatise the apprehension.

If there was any doubt about the need for intelligent writing on sex, international relations, and that current political catch-phrase – globalisation – look no further than last month’s United Nations General Assembly special session on HIV/AIDS. Convened by the Secretary-General, the session ground to a halt as Syria, Egypt, and Malaysia objected to the observer status of the San Francisco-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Forced to a vote, thirty countries abstained, including China and Russia.

More disturbing was the watering down of the final declaration. At the behest of the Vatican and a number of Islamic countries, out went the specific recognition of men who have sex with men, prostitutes, and intravenous drug users. You can see the reasoning here. Recognition of these groups in a United Nations forum would grant them some legitimacy, which institutions like the Roman Catholic Church bitterly oppose. While the Vatican opposes homosexuality, other nations refuse to even acknowledge its existence. For them, homosexuality, prostitution, and drug use are the exports of a permissive West, at odds with local tradition and culture. Such ‘traditional’ attitudes promote unlikely international alliances. The Bush administration, in deference to its domestic supporters on the religious right, quietly supported the watering down of the communiqué.

Global Sex enters into this complex brew of politics, prejudice, appeals to local tradition and the rhetoric of globalisation. Dennis Altman has been writing on globalisation for the past decade, primarily through his work on international HIV/AIDS politics and the global gay/lesbian movement. Ever the public intellectual, he wrote an opinion piece on the UN special session for The Australian urging governments to address, not ignore, the behaviours that lead to the spread of HIV. But Altman casts his net widely, beyond AIDS and homosexuality, to sketch out a theory of the connections between sexuality, political economy and international relations. It’s a big ask – an unfashionably modern task, perhaps – and I suspect that Global Sex will garner as many brickbats as plaudits.

In the last week of June, after a period in the doldrums, the News Corporation share price suddenly took wing again. Buyers piled in. A lazy few hundred million dollars were added to the company’s value. The basis of the revaluation? Apparently, Rupert Murdoch himself had descended from Olympus to participate in a presentation to sharebrokers in Sydney. Enraptured at this visitation, analysts had upped their profit projections for News.

This took me back. In the years I worked at The Australian, when Murdoch was never seen though incessantly discussed, I used to conjecture to colleagues that he did not exist, or at least not as we understood it; he was immanent, a kind of plasma pervading the chipboard. We should instead see the Murdoch in things, like the fact that obtaining a cab chit required almost a papal decree, and that our huge cans of industrial-strength coffee had to be consumed to the last grain before replacement. Even now, I find it hard to believe that those Sydney analysts actually saw him: they can do wonderful things with holograms nowadays.

If T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
Came back to life, again it would be found
One had the gab, the other had the gift
And each looked to the other for a lift.

As recently as May, Frank Kermode, writing in the London Review of Books, had the temerity to say, ‘Some writers really are better than others’. This may come as a surprise to the odd professor of English, it seems. You will recall that Raimond Gaita, our La Trobe University Essayist in the previous issue, cited one vigilant professorial leveller who, having purportedly disposed of the illusion that there are great books, was determined to expose the folly of the notion that there are good ones.

Sunday morning at Balgo in the Kimberley, the wind ripping past in a cold gale of dust and smoke. Wirrimanu, the name of this place, means ‘dirty wind’. White plastic shopping bags pulse and inflate, struggling against the twigs and wire that restrain them. My view down the magnificent plunge of the pound is intercepted by the gridded weld-mesh cage enclosing the verandah, and again by the three-metre-high cyclone mesh fence surrounding the compound. An insufficient barrier, as it turns out, to the entry of determined petrol sniffers. They have been in during the night and have opened all the jerry cans in the back of my car. Slippers, the dog who sleeps in the tray, has clearly made them welcome. I am carrying only diesel and water, and the sniffers have taken nothing, leaving a small stone on the lid of the toolbox as a gesture of – what? – irony, defiance, humour?

Attending a poetry festival is not normally considered a life-threatening event (not even if you are prone to deep vein thrombosis from constant sitting) but when I told my family I was going to Struga, I was greeted by worried looks and expressions of deep concern. Struga is in the Republic of Macedonia. Just days before, Macedonian hotheads had set fire to a mosque in Prilip (not that far from Struga) in revenge for the death of a Prilip policeman in a road-mine explosion planted by Albanian terrorists. The hair-trigger tensions in that country were clearly dangerous, and possibly escalating.

Travelling to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference on the morning tram, I marvel at Melbourne’s sophistication and self-regard. In Swanston Street, new sculptures honour John Brack’s satire of Melbourne’s regimented workers, while in front of the State Library there’s a classical portal half buried in the pavement, as if the ancient world lies below. At the Trades Hall in Carlton, the framed wall directory is ‘Heritage Only’, so I follow the photocopied paper arrows to the conference venue. There’s more historical self-consciousness here than in the new National Museum in Canberra. Banners assert the importance of eight hours’ work, recreation and rest, and there is a massive socialist realist representation of good Australian workers toiling to keep the country alive. We’re in the sacred place of the Left: Frank Hardy, Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten surely haunt us here.

The politics of the Australian literary world, however, have moved on. Even feminism has given way to the values of post-colonialism and a continuing anxiety about the literary academic’s relationship to Aboriginal reconciliation. Some of the liveliest papers address Australia’s relationship to Asia and the place of Asian-Australian culture, with ‘hybridity’ and ‘diaspora’ keywords in the discussion. Throughout the conference, Asian visitors ask punchy questions that reveal how much we take for granted about our conference culture.

Samuel Johnson once wilfully said, ‘Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.’ One can understand Johnson’s sentiment. Talk about will can be interminable. If we feel our will to be free, does it matter if it really is? Right now, I’m willing myself to write this review, instead of having dessert or watching Big Brother (‘Will to Power in Big Brother: Or, Are You Smirking at Me?’ would make an interesting paper). But my will is weak. I’ve just returned from making a cup of tea. Writers – like everybody else – are notoriously good at finding distractions. But what does it mean to say that my will is ‘weak’? How much am I willing my writing of this review, and how much am I forced to write it? Is writing determined by economics (need for money), psychology (desire to see one’s name in print), or class (aspirations learned through upbringing and education)? And yet I’m free, am I not, to pass my own judgment on the book? Sooner or later, we give up and go to the pub with Dr Johnson.

This book is suspended from a question mark, and all of Australia’s history is suspended with it. Henry Reynolds has been doing it for twenty years. What happens if we try to understand the coming of the Europeans from the Aboriginal viewpoint, from the other side of the frontier? Did the European invaders really think they were occupying a country that belonged to no one, a terra nullius? If we, the white people, had a legal title, how did we acquire it? If everything was fair and above board, why then this whispering in our hearts? And if so many big questions were left unanswered, if so many black people died so that we could live in prosperous comfort, Why weren’t we told?

We were of course told, but had good reason not to hear.

Better off without him

Dear Editor,

James Griffin, in his effort to rehabilitate John Wren (ABR, June 2001), attacks me and other historians. Stuart Macintyre has replied strongly; and Manning Clark, the main target, is unfortunately dead.

My turn now. Griffin refers to a book by me and two co-authors, Doc Evatt (1994), and says that ten letters from Evatt to Wren were ‘made available’ for the writing of this biography. Actually, no such letters were made available to me by anyone, and there was no reference to them in my main source, the Evatt Papers at Flinders University. I had never heard of the existence of the letters until I read an article on the subject by Griffin in Eureka Street (September 1992).

There is about Lisa Merrifield’s second novel a quality of aqueousness, an obsessive returning to states of immersion, whether in water, sleep, waves, a glass of gin. Hers is a superb exploration of the gelatinous margin between mind and world, innocence and experience, madness and sanity – those interregnums in the government of the self. And while it is from the weird clarity of this amniotic silence that Arriving at Night draws its various strengths, it is the same somnolence – the torpor of fiction in aspic – that comprises its singular flaw.

Dawn Fraser had a hundred or so pages of fair prose in her and she put them in this book, her autobiography. The trouble is that the book is 400 pages long. But that’s not a bad result. If a David Malouf or Helen Garner lined up for an Olympic swimming final, you’d expect them to sink.

I Scheme: The Good, the Bad, and the Bland

Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as I can and hope it doesn’t choke going down. Whether it is nourishing or not, I leave you to decide.

You turn on lights inside your head

and after drawing in that mist

soon decide how you must paint

Taking some brushes and primary colours

you make a long and massive wash

a spectrum fading into nowhere

This painting which you hope will last

is now complete on silky nothing

almost paper or is it air?

You watch it rolled and stored away

‘The low clouds coming quickly

will break those trees

The sheep on that steep slope

will tumble into the gully’

I was twelve and troubled

when he also said

‘this storm will be the end of everything

I’m only joking so

don’t worry

let’s go home and hear

our wireless saying

how bad the war is now’

My father died that year

Last night I saw when sound asleep

my father’s ghost or one like him

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational.
Money is a kind of poetry.

(Wallace Stevens)

It may be a question not so much of what poetry we read but of how we read it. I confess myself to be a snail-pace reader – a Marianne Moore snail, that is – and rereader, above all a rereader. And the problem with being a university teacher of poetry is that you are obliged to appear to believe, for professional purposes, that poetry is explicable. ‘Read it? I haven’t even lectured on it!’ (with apologies to Stephen Knight). Yet the context in which one reads a poem may determine one’s sense of it.

Nothing divides people as much as the idea that history is a text and, in many cases, a fiction. It’s the sort of notion – more or less accepted by academics in the Humanities – that really annoys ‘among the barbarians’ public intellectuals. Point out that history is written by the victors, that much of what we think of as gospel was written decades after the event from secondary sources (the Gospels, for example), and that the bulk of tradition, from Scots tartan to Christmas, is a nineteenth-century confection, and their anger becomes tinged with panic. It’s vertigo, but one of time rather than space – the sudden realisation that you are standing on nothing but the present, with the texts and living witnesses (whose memories are texts) inhering in the present.

While the nineteenth century invented the past, the late twentieth turned to inventing its present. Consider fakes and forgeries, for example. Where once the signature of the great – of Shakespeare, of Vermeer, say – could make a sham text Meaningful, the highest cachet is now attached to the hitherto anonymous and marginal – the black, the terminally ill, the Ukrainian gentile – whose authorship makes a text ‘authentic’, a hitherto unknown voice speaking from the et cetera. Suddenly it seemed that literary fakery, hitherto assumed to be a marginal practice, had moved centre-stage.

I remember reading a book entitled Deeds That Won the Empire at primary school. Mainly, it seemed to be about the slaughter of various groups of native races by the superior technology and organisation of the West, always personified by focusing on an intrepid leader called Carstairs or Hethington-Bloggs, or some such name. Even in the 1950s, the book had a desperately old-fashioned feel to it. This type of writing, one felt, could not last.

But it has. There is an ever-increasing volume of books that add up to not much more than that book I read so long ago. Historians need to contemplate this issue. Why is it that when the industrial and de-personalised nature of modern war has never been more apparent, publishers are issuing books that attempt to reverse this picture and to concentrate on what for want of a better word I will call ‘deeds’?

Gerry Turcotte’s Flying in Silence is a book of boyhood memoirs and family secrets, yet it creates a genre all its own. It contains an anatomy of depression and speaks of a family’s inability to cohere. Nevertheless, it swells with compassion and a deep commitment to life and living.

Our male narrator is an astute observer and analyst. At times, he is a young boy, in the midst of his experiences, informed but untainted by the adult voice he will later adopt. Other times he is a grown man looking back and trying to make sense of things or continuing his search for meaning.

Both the narrator and author share a mistrust of language. The home we enter and occupy for much of the novel is bilingual. The mother is English-speaking, the father French, and all three family members create an imperfect dialect that combines the best of both worlds and falls into gaps of silence neither can adequately fill. Both parents play with language. The mother reinvents French much to the delight of her in-laws, while the father creates a secret pricing code in his store, the sharing of which with his son is a gift of unparalleled importance.

It wasn’t long before myths and legends grew up around the story of St Francis of Assisi. James Cowan is right to suggest that this process began before Francis died and that Francis himself allowed or willed it to happen. He may even have encouraged it: ‘Francis endeavoured to make a metaphor out of his own life.’

Many of these myths come close to suggesting that Francis was a kind of reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Not since John the Baptist had the Christian tradition needed to work so hard to assert both the singularity and pre-eminence of its founder. After all, Francis of Assisi was the first Christian said to have been afflicted by the stigmata. The belief that Jesus’s wounds reappear from time to time in specially chosen individuals is one of the more confusing themes in the history of Christian piety. Such wounds are not a punishment. If anything, they are a sign of God’s special love for the afflicted. Why, then, would God want to inflict pain on somebody close to him? Surely there is enough suffering in an ordinary life for anybody to be able to empathise at some level with what Christ went through without holy people needing to be stigmatised. Furthermore, if the sufferings of Christ are regarded as the key to understanding the mystery of human life and are therefore unique, why do they need to be duplicated at odd times and places?

Kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos abound, literally, on our farm, as do platypuses, echidnas and wedge-tails. We’ve even been told by visiting bushwalkers that we’ve got a few koalas up the mountain. But we don’t have wombats.

To compensate, we’ve a ceramic wombat doorstop and a big wooden wombat garden seat. We buy books for our daughter – The Muddle Headed Wombat, Wombat Divine – and tell her how the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, the one that drowses through the Madhatter’s Tea Party, was a wombat in Lewis Carroll’s first draft. Our mythology is augmented with jokes about eating wombat sandwiches and wombat soup and how a rare breed of wombat flies from tree to tree each spring.

In early 2001, several Roman Catholic nuns stood trial in Brussels for crimes against humanity for their part in the genocide in Rwanda. Rwandan nationals, they were charged with violating new provisions of Belgian national law, which make participation in genocide and crimes against humanity anywhere in the world a violation of the law of that country. Unlike the case of Slobodan Milosevic, who awaits trial before an international tribunal in the Hague, or recent well-publicised proceedings in England against Augusto Pinochet, which were based on an extradition request from a Spanish judge investigating the former dictator for crimes against Spanish citizens in Chile, the Belgian law grants jurisdiction against anyone, who commits certain types of crimes against anyone regardless of citizenship, anywhere. In other words, the Belgian system has nationalised international crimes and international criminal law jurisdiction.

Of course, insofar as Rwanda is concerned, Belgium has a special interest. The history of Belgian colonialism in that part of Africa is the history of the creation of the Hutu/Tutsi racial taxonomy, which served as a basis for the Rwandan genocide. The accused had sought refuge in Belgium because of the continuing close relationship with the former colony. The expiation of the sins of the colonial past and present no doubt informed the Brussels trial. But the Belgian system does not end there. Palestinian refugees have filed a complaint, now being investigated by Belgian judges, against Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, for his alleged participation in the mass slaughter of civilians in Lebanese refugee camps when he was an Israeli military commander. During his recent trip to Europe to discuss the possibilities of peace in the Middle East, Sharon studiously avoided a trip to Brussels. His meeting with the Belgian foreign minister took place in Berlin.

This Gauche intruder into the Australian book scene is sure to annoy many readers. Their annoyance, even disgust, will be various and peculiar to their own preoccupation with what they consider a good read, good literary criticism, good Australian cultural identity. Jennifer Rutherford presents us with a passionate, scholarly, rude and uncompromising discussion about Australian culture, reading identity at both individual and collective levels. She is a Lacanian (sure to annoy some), an unapologetic deployer of psychoanalytic insights into Australian identity fantasies; she is an astute and forthright literary and cultural critic (critics past and present, quake!) who offers a range of non-partisan and theoretically consistent readings of the novels of Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Handel Richardson, George Johnston, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Patrick White; and she is a canny, amusing, serpent-toothed reader of the broader Australian culture, from Hansonism, to the streets and suburbs of Canberra, to contemporary academia. She bites hard.