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Absolutely Revolting

September 2008, no. 304

David Trigger reviews The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper and Gone for a Song by Jeff Waters
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Contents Category: Australian History
Custom Article Title: David Trigger reviews 'The Tall Man' by Chloe Hooper
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Article Title: 'Refugees from Wild Time'
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Custom Highlight Text: Chloe Hooper has written an insightful and intensely personal book about the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody on Palm Island off Townsville in north Queensland. In late 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, aged thirty-six, died after being arrested by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley ...
Book 1 Title: The Tall Man
Book Author: Chloe Hooper
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $32.95 pb, 276 pp, 9780241015377
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Gone For A Song
Book 2 Subtitle: A death in custody on Palm Island
Book 2 Author: Jeff Waters
Book 2 Biblio: ABC Books, $24.95 pb, 246 pp, 9780733322167
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Chloe Hooper has written an insightful and intensely personal book about the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody on Palm Island off Townsville in north Queensland. In late 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, aged thirty-six, died after being arrested by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. The Tall Man follows the initial internal police investigations, the riot on Palm Island which was prompted by an announcement that the death was accidental, several stages of the inquest, and the drawn-out process whereby Hurley was eventually charged with manslaughter and acquitted by a Townsville jury.

The race politics that arose were complex in their historical origins and in what the case says about the experience of many Aboriginal people with the Australian judicial process. Hooper’s achievement is to portray the issues without the superficial point scoring so prevalent in writings about indigenous affairs. While she has great empathy for the Aboriginal families involved, this is no simplistic or one-dimensional account. Hooper thinks deeply about the circumstances of both the deceased Aboriginal man and the policeman, and about their families and backgrounds. Unlike those who might proclaim unswerving and exclusive allegiance either to the Aboriginal cause or the moral uprightness of police, Chloe Hooper explains that she tries ‘to look at things from every angle’.

Read more: David Trigger reviews 'The Tall Man' by Chloe Hooper and 'Gone for a Song' by Jeff Waters

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Adrian Mitchell reviews Sea of Many Returns by Arnold Zable
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Pain of home-longing
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Australia’s obsession with Greece goes back a long way; it has not always been as warm as we might like to think. The George Johnston–Charmian Clift–Sidney Nolan kind of love affair with the islands could sometimes turn a bit sour: think of Patrick White or demeaning references to the ubiquitous Olympic Café in films and stories. The temptation of writing in these well-established furrows is to exploit the subject matter rather than explore it.
Book 1 Title: Sea of Many Returns
Book Author: Arnold Zable
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $32.95 pb, 305 pp
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Australia’s obsession with Greece goes back a long way; it has not always been as warm as we might like to think. The George Johnston–Charmian Clift–Sidney Nolan kind of love affair with the islands could sometimes turn a bit sour: think of Patrick White or demeaning references to the ubiquitous Olympic Café in films and stories. The temptation of writing in these well-established furrows is to exploit the subject matter rather than explore it.

There is male dancing, but no Zorba the Greek handkerchief-waving, in Arnold Zable’s new novel. In poignant fact, he reminds us of the earlier reception of Greeks in this country, during World War I, when our pleasant forbears – challenging etymology among other things and denying any connection with forbearance – rioted, smashed and looted Greek stalls and stores, and chased off those early refugees. Our cultural practices were entrenched from an early age. ‘Go back to where you fuck’n came from’: I’m not convinced that would have been the idiom in 1917. Where is the great sanguinary expletive? But you get the message. As against which the narrative invites us into a circle of listeners: ‘The fire is burning. And the fire loves you.’In Australia that reads as more threatening than welcoming.

Sea of Many Returns, only approximately a story, is rather an interweaving of stories which define the culture of Ithaca last century, and of those Ithacans who relocated to Melbourne, some of them via Kalgoorlie, and the tension of the unsevered links between them, links between brothers and families, intimate and extended. In this it develops the manner and mannerisms of Zable’s well-received Café Scheherazade (2001). Nostalgia is the underlying and crippling malaise of the Ithacans too, the pain of home-longing.

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Kerrie Round reviews An Antarctic Affair: A story of love and survival by the great-granddaughter of Douglas and Paquita Mawson by Emma McEwin
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Antarctic exploration began with Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the continent (1772–75) and continued intermittently until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Douglas Mawson’s three expeditions coincided with what has been called the ‘heroic era of Antarctic exploration’, beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4) and ending with Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–17). Four out of the twenty expeditions undertaken in this period stand out: those of Roald Amundsen, Mawson, Shackleton and Scott. However, the present-day polar adventurer Ranulph Fiennes has argued that Mawson did not achieve the fame of the other three, even in Australia, because he survived his explorations and died in old age.
Book 1 Title: An Antarctic Affair
Book 1 Subtitle: A story of love and survival by the great-granddaughter of Douglas and Paquita Mawson
Book Author: Emma McEwin
Book 1 Biblio: East Street Publications, $32.95 pb, 254 pp
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Antarctic exploration began with Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the continent (1772–75) and continued intermittently until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Douglas Mawson’s three expeditions coincided with what has been called the ‘heroic era of Antarctic exploration’, beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4) and ending with Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–17). Four out of the twenty expeditions undertaken in this period stand out: those of Roald Amundsen, Mawson, Shackleton and Scott. However, the present-day polar adventurer Ranulph Fiennes has argued that Mawson did not achieve the fame of the other three, even in Australia, because he survived his explorations and died in old age.

Not only does Emma McEwin, Mawson’s great-granddaughter, wish to counter this relative neglect and to place his achievements within the context of polar exploration, she aims to tell his personal story through the love letters that he and his then fiancée, her great-grandmother Paquita, wrote to each other during his second voyage, the Australian Antarctic Expedition (1911–14).

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Robin Prior reviews Arthur Blackburn, VC: An Australian hero, his men and their two world wars by Andrew Faulkner
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In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.
Book 1 Title: Arthur Blackburn, VC
Book 1 Subtitle: An Australian hero, his men and their two world wars
Book Author: Andrew Faulkner
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $45 pb, 498 pp
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In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

He has been well treated by Andrew Faulkner, who has written this book with admirable verve and restraint. The verve obviously came from finding a congenial figure such as Blackburn to write about; he was a soldier who surely deserves the much overworked appellation of ‘hero’. The restraint brought to this labour of love is worthy of note. Faulkner neither claims that Blackburn, nor his Tenth Battalion, nor Australia, won either World War I or II single-handedly. Other authors of recent works on the Australian role in these wars could do worse than read Faulkner’s account to appreciate how heroism and nationalism can be placed in context.

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Martin Duwell reviews Bark by Anthony Lawrence
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Staking all for revelation
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Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.
Book 1 Title: Bark
Book Author: Anthony Lawrence
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $24.95 pb, 109 pp
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Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.

In a pair of poems at the beginning of the book’s second section, the confrontation gets ratcheted up in intensity. In the first, the author is caught in a northern cyclone and spends the night of the storm’s passing huddled beneath table, reading a meteorology textbook by torchlight. The second concerns itself with the various nasty stingers of the tropical shore. The mode is comparative (‘bluebottles are less than a minor irritation’), but at the top are the box-jellyfish which teach us that the word ‘agony’, ‘falls so far short of the mark as to render it redundant’. The poem finishes with a victim who, while waiting to die, can hear and understand waterbirds talking to each other. As in the case of Siegfried, revelations about the natural world are given to those who stake all.

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Brian Nelson reviews Charles Baudelaire by Rosemary Lloyd
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Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern writing, not just as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a modern aesthetic based on the experience of city life. More than any other French poet of his time, he marks the transition from the Romantic to a proto-modernist poetic style and stance. T.S. Eliot recognised the nature of this achievement when he said that for him the significance of Les Fleurs du mal was summed up in the first lines of ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’), in Baudelaire’s vision of the ‘teeming city, city full of dreams, / where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passer-by’. ‘I knew what that meant,’ Eliot said, ‘because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.’
Book 1 Title: Charles Baudelaire
Book Author: Rosemary Lloyd
Book 1 Biblio: Reaktion Books, $34.95 pb, 189 pp
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Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern writing, not just as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a modern aesthetic based on the experience of city life. More than any other French poet of his time, he marks the transition from the Romantic to a proto-modernist poetic style and stance. T.S. Eliot recognised the nature of this achievement when he said that for him the significance of Les Fleurs du mal was summed up in the first lines of ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’), in Baudelaire’s vision of the ‘teeming city, city full of dreams, / where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passer-by’. ‘I knew what that meant,’ Eliot said, ‘because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.’

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Roger Covell reviews Robert Schumann: Life and death of a musician by John Worthen
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Does it matter whether Robert Schumann suffered a slow, passive and continuous decline towards the madness of his last two years or, as John Worthen strongly affirms, a sudden descent into psychosis after a creative lifetime marked by personal resilience and determination? Many people would argue that it is particularly important in music not to let biography get in the way of hearing what the composer has created in sound, if for no other reason than that it could hinder music’s special freedom to mean quite different things to different listeners.
Book 1 Title: Robert Schumann
Book 1 Subtitle: Life and death of a musician
Book Author: John Worthen
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, $75 hb, 496 pp
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Does it matter whether Robert Schumann suffered a slow, passive and continuous decline towards the madness of his last two years or, as John Worthen strongly affirms, a sudden descent into psychosis after a creative lifetime marked by personal resilience and determination? Many people would argue that it is particularly important in music not to let biography get in the way of hearing what the composer has created in sound, if for no other reason than that it could hinder music’s special freedom to mean quite different things to different listeners.

Very few people with an interest in concert-hall music, however, can approach the works of a composer like Schumann (1810–56) without some knowledge of his life. Worthen believes – and I think there is warrant for his belief – that many listeners have been encouraged by both scholarly biography and the snippets of information derived from it to think of Schumann as a sad case of genius dragged down by more or less continuous mental and physical degeneration after his dazzling achievements in the years leading up to, and immediately following, his marriage to the superlatively gifted young pianist Clara Wieck. This has resulted, he plausibly claims, in a damaging undervaluation of the music written by Schumann in the late 1840s and early 1850s, and a reluctance to acknowledge that the composer continued to develop his creative range and his stamina for large-scale structure until the onset of the final catastrophe.

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Tom Frame reviews The Collins Class Submarine Story: Steel, spies and spin by Peter Yule and Derek Woolner
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Contents Category: Military History
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Article Title: Expensive mice
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Operating submarines has been a very expensive part of Australian naval history. The first two boats (submarines are referred to as ‘boats’ rather than ‘ships’) were lost in wartime operations: AE1 with all hands off Gape Gazelle (New Guinea) in 1914, and AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey) in 1915. After World War I, Australia was given six ‘J’ Class submarines by Britain, but lacked the personnel and funds to maintain them. They were soon scrapped. Two submarines acquired in the late 1920s – Oxley and Otway – were decommissioned during the Great Depression. Thirty-five years later, the RAN took delivery of the first Oberon Class submarines built in Scotland. All six boats served with distinction during the Cold War, several engaging in highly classified ‘special operations’. By the mid 1980sthe RAN’s ageing submarine fleet needed replacing. Australia was about to learn that submarines were even more costly to build. Although submarines had been refitted and extensively modernised in Australia, none had been built from plans.
Book 1 Title: The Collins Class Submarine Story
Book 1 Subtitle: Steel, spies and spin
Book Author: Peter Yule and Derek Woolner
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $59.95 hb, 364 pp
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Operating submarines has been a very expensive part of Australian naval history. The first two boats (submarines are referred to as ‘boats’ rather than ‘ships’) were lost in wartime operations: AE1 with all hands off Gape Gazelle (New Guinea) in 1914, and AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey) in 1915. After World War I, Australia was given six ‘J’ Class submarines by Britain, but lacked the personnel and funds to maintain them. They were soon scrapped. Two submarines acquired in the late 1920s – Oxley and Otway – were decommissioned during the Great Depression. Thirty-five years later, the RAN took delivery of the first Oberon Class submarines built in Scotland. All six boats served with distinction during the Cold War, several engaging in highly classified ‘special operations’. By the mid 1980sthe RAN’s ageing submarine fleet needed replacing. Australia was about to learn that submarines were even more costly to build. Although submarines had been refitted and extensively modernised in Australia, none had been built from plans.

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Patrick Allington reviews In Defence of Food: The myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating by Michael Pollan
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In Defence of Food is several books rolled into one. It is a primer on nutrition science, a contextual exposé on what we put in our mouths, an advertisement for the joys of eating and even something of a self-help diet and behavioural book. It is also part of Michael Pollan’s ongoing conversation with the reading (and eating) public, and is more satisfying when placed within his oeuvre, particularly The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006).

Mostly, though, In Defence of Food is a polemic about ‘the problem of the Western diet, and how we might plot our escape from it’. Pollan even cites a shiny new eating disorder for us to worry about: an ‘orthorexic’ is a person ‘with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating’. While Pollan writes about the United States, we only have to read the ingredient lists on our supermarket products, or reflect upon the controversy over the meat-heavy (or meat-rich, depending on your viewpoint) CSIRO diet books, to recognise the Australian relevance of the ‘Western diet’ debate.
Book 1 Title: In Defence of Food
Book 1 Subtitle: The myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating
Book Author: Michael Pollan
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $32.95 pb, 256 pp
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In Defence of Food is several books rolled into one. It is a primer on nutrition science, a contextual exposé on what we put in our mouths, an advertisement for the joys of eating and even something of a self-help diet and behavioural book. It is also part of Michael Pollan’s ongoing conversation with the reading (and eating) public, and is more satisfying when placed within his oeuvre, particularly The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006).

Mostly, though, In Defence of Food is a polemic about ‘the problem of the Western diet, and how we might plot our escape from it’. Pollan even cites a shiny new eating disorder for us to worry about: an ‘orthorexic’ is a person ‘with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating’. While Pollan writes about the United States, we only have to read the ingredient lists on our supermarket products, or reflect upon the controversy over the meat-heavy (or meat-rich, depending on your viewpoint) CSIRO diet books, to recognise the Australian relevance of the ‘Western diet’ debate.

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear by Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh and Alexis Wright
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Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear comprises a trio of essays commissioned by the Sydney PEN. According to its website, PEN is ‘an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia’. In this book, three major Australian authors discuss the roles that tolerance, prejudice and fear have played in contemporary Australian society. This is a society in which traditional ideas about national identity and race have been variously championed and attacked. The result is thought-provoking and engrossing.

The text opens with Christos Tsiolkas’s essay on tolerance. Tsiolkas argues that it is no coincidence that a liberal ‘politics of tolerance’ has become popular during an historical period in which neo-conservatism has flourished. Gideon Haigh follows with an essay on the cultural ‘narcissism’ that swept through Australia during John Howard’s eleven years as prime minister. During this period, Haigh argues, Australian culture became ‘shallow, thick-skinned, aloof from the world’s problems, impervious to the sufferings of others – then retracting in angry confusion at the hint of questioning, raging petulantly when crossed …’ The third piece is Alexis Wright’s analysis of the harmful and infectious nature of fear. This is a topic that both Tsiolkas and Haigh raise at different points in their essays. Wright argues that Anglo-Australians have long been socialised to fear ‘Aboriginal people and … law’, while a ‘fearfulness of white Australia’ has arisen within Aboriginal culture. Wright concludes her piece by arguing that literary fiction can offer an effective mode of political resistance in a period when both major political parties in Australia are essentially singing the same neo-conservative tune.
Book 1 Title: Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear
Book Author: Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh and Alexis Wright
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 176 pp
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Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear comprises a trio of essays commissioned by the Sydney PEN. According to its website, PEN is ‘an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia’. In this book, three major Australian authors discuss the roles that tolerance, prejudice and fear have played in contemporary Australian society. This is a society in which traditional ideas about national identity and race have been variously championed and attacked. The result is thought-provoking and engrossing.

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Heidi Maier reviews The Flower Hunter: The remarkable life of Ellis Rowan by Christine and Michael Morton-Evans
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During the hot summer of 2002, I visited Canberra for the first time and alternated between the air-conditioned confines of the National Gallery and the National Library of Australia. It was in the latter that I stumbled upon The Flower Hunter, an exhibition of works by the Australian flower painter Ellis Rowan, whose life is now chronicled in a biography by Christine and Michael Morton-Evans.
Book 1 Title: The Flower Hunter
Book 1 Subtitle: The remarkable life of Ellis Rowan
Book Author: Christine and Michael Morton-Evans
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $34.95 pb, 328 pp
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During the hot summer of 2002, I visited Canberra for the first time and alternated between the air-conditioned confines of the National Gallery and the National Library of Australia. It was in the latter that I stumbled upon The Flower Hunter, an exhibition of works by the Australian flower painter Ellis Rowan, whose life is now chronicled in a biography by Christine and Michael Morton-Evans.

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Article Title: Whose story is it?
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I was always going to be a novelist. At the age of six, I wrote fiction about a Willie Wagtail, whose best friend was an ant (even then I had a good grasp on relationships). Several years later I had moved on to human protagonists, mainly young girls living at boarding school and excelling at ballet. I had no experience of either, but I had my dreams. As an adolescent I wrote stories about homelessness and drug addiction, once again from vicarious experience. Then I went to university to do a literature degree and realised that great Australian novelists were serious, learned and (then) mostly male. I still wanted to write my novel, but I decided to live a bit first.
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I was always going to be a novelist. At the age of six, I wrote fiction about a Willie Wagtail, whose best friend was an ant (even then I had a good grasp on relationships). Several years later I had moved on to human protagonists, mainly young girls living at boarding school and excelling at ballet. I had no experience of either, but I had my dreams. As an adolescent I wrote stories about homelessness and drug addiction, once again from vicarious experience. Then I went to university to do a literature degree and realised that great Australian novelists were serious, learned and (then) mostly male. I still wanted to write my novel, but I decided to live a bit first.

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Geoff Gallop reviews The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics by Clive Hamilton
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Any summary of Clive Hamilton’s contributions to public debate thus far would focus on two themes: his savage criticism of modern society and its ‘fetish for growth’; and his rejection of contemporary politics, in particular the theory and practice of social democracy. He sees the implicit faith in growth and markets, and the avoidance of a realistic analysis of power, combining to ensure that modern politics is ineffective in tackling the causes and consequences of the contemporary epidemic of unhappiness.
Book 1 Title: The Freedom Paradox
Book 1 Subtitle: Towards a post-secular ethics
Book Author: Clive Hamilton
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $35 pb, 274 pp
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Any summary of Clive Hamilton’s contributions to public debate thus far would focus on two themes: his savage criticism of modern society and its ‘fetish for growth’; and his rejection of contemporary politics, in particular the theory and practice of social democracy. He sees the implicit faith in growth and markets, and the avoidance of a realistic analysis of power, combining to ensure that modern politics is ineffective in tackling the causes and consequences of the contemporary epidemic of unhappiness.

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Gregory Kratzmann reviews Book Self: The reader as writer and the writer as critic by C.K. Stead
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C.K. Stead’s new collection of non-fictional prose confirms his reputation as New Zealand’s grand old man of letters, still swimming, aged seventy-six, against the tide. The author of fourteen books of poetry, as many novels, and several critical works which followed from his highly influential The New Poetic in 1964, Stead continues to be under-read and under-appreciated outside his own country, despite his outward-looking vision, the cross-national themes of his writing and the translation of his work into several European languages. The parochialism of ‘mainstream’ literary critical culture is nicely illustrated by an approving British review of his novel My Name Was Judas (2006), which Stead quotes in one of the journal entries included in this anthology. The reviewer ‘praises’ Stead as ‘an elderly and obscure New Zealand author who ... must surely be a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize’. Well might the Nobel bridesmaid remark, ‘How’s that for even-handed!’.
Book 1 Title: Book Self
Book 1 Subtitle: The reader as writer and the writer as critic
Book Author: C.K. Stead
Book 1 Biblio: Auckland University Press, $49.95 pb, 328 pp
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C.K. Stead’s new collection of non-fictional prose confirms his reputation as New Zealand’s grand old man of letters, still swimming, aged seventy-six, against the tide. The author of fourteen books of poetry, as many novels, and several critical works which followed from his highly influential The New Poetic in 1964, Stead continues to be under-read and under-appreciated outside his own country, despite his outward-looking vision, the cross-national themes of his writing and the translation of his work into several European languages. The parochialism of ‘mainstream’ literary critical culture is nicely illustrated by an approving British review of his novel My Name Was Judas (2006), which Stead quotes in one of the journal entries included in this anthology. The reviewer ‘praises’ Stead as ‘an elderly and obscure New Zealand author who ... must surely be a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize’. Well might the Nobel bridesmaid remark, ‘How’s that for even-handed!’.

Read more: Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Book Self: The reader as writer and the writer as critic' by C.K. Stead

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Angus Trumble reviews Creation: Artists, gods & origins by Peter Conrad
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‘This book is a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion,’ writes Peter Conrad in the introduction to this enormous book. Neither aim is especially unusual, but their ambitious fusion here creates a questing mesh of narratives, huge in scope, in which architecture, music, literature, drama, motion pictures, poetry and philosophy in many schools and eras are gathered under the sprawling rubric of art, and no religious tradition is excluded. At times it feels as if you are reading a book about everything, and its restlessness carries you through thirty-three extremely solid, occasionally indigestible chapters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Book 1 Title: Creation
Book 1 Subtitle: Artists, gods & origins
Book Author: Peter Conrad
Book 1 Biblio: Thames & Hudson, $75 hb, 592 pp
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This book is a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion,’ writes Peter Conrad in the introduction to this enormous book. Neither aim is especially unusual, but their ambitious fusion here creates a questing mesh of narratives, huge in scope, in which architecture, music, literature, drama, motion pictures, poetry and philosophy in many schools and eras are gathered under the sprawling rubric of art, and no religious tradition is excluded. At times it feels as if you are reading a book about everything, and its restlessness carries you through thirty-three extremely solid, occasionally indigestible chapters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Read more: Angus Trumble reviews 'Creation: Artists, gods & origins' by Peter Conrad

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ABR readers to decide the John Button Readers’ Award

To commemorate the life and work of John Button, an esteemed ABR contributor and board member who died in April 2008, we have created a new annual prize. The John Button Readers’ Award will be presented to the author of the most popular article published in ABR during the previous year, as selected by ABR readers.
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ABR readers to decide the John Button Readers’ Award

To commemorate the life and work of John Button, an esteemed ABR contributor and board member who died in April 2008, we have created a new annual prize. The John Button Readers’ Award will be presented to the author of the most popular article published in ABR during the previous year, as selected by ABR readers.

The voting system could not be more simple. There are no floating chads or Hare-Clark system of proportional representation at ABR! In keeping with John Button’s democratic spirit and his status as the most popular contributor to ABR (which emerged when we surveyed our readers in 2006), we invite ABR readers (whether subscribers or not) to decide who wins the inaugural John Button Readers’ Award.

We imagine you might have a few questions, so here is more information.

Read more: Advances - September 2008

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David Carter reviews A World-Proof Life: Eleanor Dark, a writer in her times, 1901-1985 by Marivic Wyndham
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Eleanor Dark is one of the great novelists of Australia’s mid-twentieth century, along with Christina Stead, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Patrick White. The modernity of her writing is still stunning. But it has always been difficult to grasp her oeuvre whole. Her novels have seldom, if ever, all been in print at once, and some have virtually disappeared from sight, while the popular success of The Timeless Land (1941) overshadowed the achievements of her other works. Oh, for a ‘standard edition’ of all her titles! Somehow her career lacks a satisfying shape or trajectory, as if it amounts to less than the sum of its often brilliant parts. As G.A. Wilkes put it in 1951, ‘The kind of novel she can write well … no longer satisfies her; the kind of novel she wants to write, she has not yet achieved.’
Book 1 Title: A World-Proof Life
Book 1 Subtitle: Eleanor Dark, a writer in her times, 1901-1985
Book Author: Marivic Wyndham
Book 1 Biblio: UTSePress, $29.95 pb, 372 pp
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Eleanor Dark is one of the great novelists of Australia’s mid-twentieth century, along with Christina Stead, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Patrick White. The modernity of her writing is still stunning. But it has always been difficult to grasp her oeuvre whole. Her novels have seldom, if ever, all been in print at once, and some have virtually disappeared from sight, while the popular success of The Timeless Land (1941) overshadowed the achievements of her other works. Oh, for a ‘standard edition’ of all her titles! Somehow her career lacks a satisfying shape or trajectory, as if it amounts to less than the sum of its often brilliant parts. As G.A. Wilkes put it in 1951, ‘The kind of novel she can write well … no longer satisfies her; the kind of novel she wants to write, she has not yet achieved.’

We should be grateful, then, for a new full-length study of Dark’s life and works. Marivic Wyndham’s book is a biographical study, but one focused less on the formation of the self than ‘the interrelationships between [Dark’s] personal world, her literature and her society-in-crisis’. It has new things to say about Dark’s family life and gives more importance than previous studies to her mother and stepmother alongside the decidedly mixed blessings of her father, Dowell O’Reilly, and about Eric Dark, crucial in every aspect of Dark’s mature writing life, both protector and disturbing element, Wyndham suggests.

Read more: David Carter reviews '"A World-Proof Life": Eleanor Dark, a writer in her times, 1901-1985' by...

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Christina Hill reviews Still Waters by Camilla Noli
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Camilla Noli’s novel about a cold, narcissistic personality is not pleasant reading. It is, of course, a tall order to write about a woman whose will to power is so all-consuming that she is prepared to kill her children to reassert her need for control. Narrated in the first person, it is quickly apparent that the speaker is hardly sane. Her anger exacerbated by her need for sleep, she burns with rage at the demands of her two small children. Her wilful young daughter, Cassie, a miniature version of herself in all but appearance, seems especially to provoke her resentment, even hatred. 
Book 1 Title: Still Waters
Book Author: Camilla Noli
Book 1 Biblio: Hachette Australia, $24.95 pb, 222 pp
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Camilla Noli’s novel about a cold, narcissistic personality is not pleasant reading. It is, of course, a tall order to write about a woman whose will to power is so all-consuming that she is prepared to kill her children to reassert her need for control. Narrated in the first person, it is quickly apparent that the speaker is hardly sane. Her anger exacerbated by her need for sleep, she burns with rage at the demands of her two small children. Her wilful young daughter, Cassie, a miniature version of herself in all but appearance, seems especially to provoke her resentment, even hatred. An over-achieving perfectionist nostalgic for the time when she was a highly successful advertising executive, the narrator’s growing outrage at everything that undermines her now shaky sense of self is pathological. Although she is sexually voracious, using sex as a source of power (vagina dentata?), we soon learn that hers is a personality incapable of love, of feeling compassion and maintaining friendships. Some explanation for this is offered in the account of her grief at the death of her father when she is on the verge of puberty and her subsequent blame and hatred of her mother.

Read more: Christina Hill reviews 'Still Waters' by Camilla Noli

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Rebecca Starford reviews The Woman in the Lobby by Lee Tulloch
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The Woman in the Lobby lacks the satirical punch of Fabulous Nobodies (1989) and the blithe esprit of Wraith (1999) that has made Lee Tulloch such a diverting storyteller. This overlong novel, entertaining in places, engages in some of the lowest common denominators of popular fiction – fashion, drugs and lots of sex.
Book 1 Title: The Woman in the Lobby
Book Author: Lee Tulloch
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $32.95 pb, 441 pp
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The Woman in the Lobby lacks the satirical punch of Fabulous Nobodies (1989) and the blithe esprit of Wraith (1999) that has made Lee Tulloch such a diverting storyteller. This overlong novel, entertaining in places, engages in some of the lowest common denominators of popular fiction – fashion, drugs and lots of sex.

Dumped by her husband, Violet, a global aid worker, begins an affair with international tennis star Luka Uyanik. ‘Filthy with the scent of a stranger’, she travels to the Hotel Royal Park in Paris to be with him. On her arrival, however, she discovers that Luka has already checked out, leaving neither message nor forwarding address. Reluctant to go home – ‘she wants to sleep under lemur-skin tents in Madagascar, in hotels carved out of rock in Turkey’ – Violet meets Florin, a suave Romanian gigolo. In Violet he recognises a kindred spirit, and before you can say Louis Roederer (enough champagne is consumed in the first one hundred pages to induce cirrhosis) he has facilitated her first pick-up, one of dozens, marked by parodic dialogue and explicit sexual acts.

Read more: Rebecca Starford reviews 'The Woman in the Lobby' by Lee Tulloch

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Hannah Kent reviews Yearning for Acceptance by Lisha Miller
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Born in Fiji, Lisha Miller was given away to her grandparents when she was a few months old. Miller’s separation from her immediate family during her youth created intense feelings of unworthiness that continued to haunt her throughout adulthood. Yearning for Acceptance is based on these experiences.
Book 1 Title: Yearning for Acceptance
Book Author: Lisha Miller
Book 1 Biblio: SidHarta Publishers, $24.95 pb, 242 p
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Born in Fiji, Lisha Miller was given away to her grandparents when she was a few months old. Miller’s separation from her immediate family during her youth created intense feelings of unworthiness that continued to haunt her throughout adulthood. Yearning for Acceptance is based on these experiences.

The novel evolves around the protagonist, Lanisha, as she struggles through a childhood fraught with rejection and ridicule. During her adult years, she is entangled in a series of destructive relationships. Migrating to Australia and moving from state to state, Lanisha continually suffers from her family’s lack of acceptance, a spurning that triggers irrational life decisions.

Read more: Hannah Kent reviews 'Yearning for Acceptance' by Lisha Miller

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Not just another depressive

Dear Editor,
Barcroft Boake has suddenly become trendy, with a fictionalised (shudder) account of his life (Where the Dead Men Lie, by Hugh Capel) just published, as well as a Collected Works, Edited, With a Life, the review of which by Patrick Buckridge (July–August 2008) suggests that the old misconceptions about the poet, based on a biased account by A.G. Stephens, on which Clement Semmler based his biography, are in danger of achieving the status of fact.

Boake had a lot to be sad about. His much-loved mother died when he was thirteen; he had been apprenticed to a bankrupt who conned him out of a large inheritance; an employer neglected to pay him; and a couple of love affairs went bust. But to write him off as a depressive, with death his ‘single theme’, is to fly in the face of the reality I discovered when researching the biography that won the Walter Stone Award in 1986.
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Not just another depressive

Dear Editor,
Barcroft Boake has suddenly become trendy, with a fictionalised (shudder) account of his life (Where the Dead Men Lie, by Hugh Capel) just published, as well as a Collected Works, Edited, With a Life, the review of which by Patrick Buckridge (July–August 2008) suggests that the old misconceptions about the poet, based on a biased account by A.G. Stephens, on which Clement Semmler based his biography, are in danger of achieving the status of fact.

Boake had a lot to be sad about. His much-loved mother died when he was thirteen; he had been apprenticed to a bankrupt who conned him out of a large inheritance; an employer neglected to pay him; and a couple of love affairs went bust. But to write him off as a depressive, with death his ‘single theme’, is to fly in the face of the reality I discovered when researching the biography that won the Walter Stone Award in 1986.

As well as masterful if morbid ballads, Bartie Boake also wrote light, humorous verse. He produced lyrical pieces as well as lampoons savaging pompous Establishment figures of the time, and was fêted for them. He sang and recited at public gatherings. One performance in Adaminaby, reported one newspaper, ‘had the audience in roars of laughter’. He smoked and drank and played the fool, one stunt nearly resulting in his (accidental) death.

Read more: Letters - September 2008

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews Tasmanias Wilderness Battles: A History by Greg Buckman
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In Tasmania’s Wilderness Battles, Greg Buckman provides a history of the environment movement in Tasmania. He focuses on the various battles that have taken place between environment activists and those developers that have viewed Tasmania’s wilderness as being purely a source of profit.

Buckman opens with the Lake Pedder battle in the 1960s. This battle was waged between activists and the Hydro Electric Commission, and was significant for ‘its radicalising influence on the Tasmanian environment movement’. Buckman moves on to describe disputes over the Franklin River, the Farmhouse Creek forest and the Gunns pulp mill. Buckman concludes by arguing that Tasmania needs to adopt a more ‘enlightened view of wilderness’.
Book 1 Title: Tasmania's Wilderness Battles
Book 1 Subtitle: A History
Book Author: Greg Buckman
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 272 pp
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In Tasmania’s Wilderness Battles, Greg Buckman provides a history of the environment movement in Tasmania. He focuses on the various battles that have taken place between environment activists and those developers that have viewed Tasmania’s wilderness as being purely a source of profit.

Buckman opens with the Lake Pedder battle in the 1960s. This battle was waged between activists and the Hydro Electric Commission, and was significant for ‘its radicalising influence on the Tasmanian environment movement’. Buckman moves on to describe disputes over the Franklin River, the Farmhouse Creek forest and the Gunns pulp mill. Buckman concludes by arguing that Tasmania needs to adopt a more ‘enlightened view of wilderness’.

Read more: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'Tasmania's Wilderness Battles: A History' by Greg Buckman

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Ian Holtham reviews W. A. Mozart by Hermann Abert, translated by Stewart Spencer and edited by Cliff Eisen
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It seems astonishing that one of the most important studies ever undertaken on Mozart should have taken almost eighty-five years to reach the English language. Hermann Abert’s monumental, and indeed famous, work was first published in 1924 and was originally intended as an updated edition to that other monumental work of Mozart scholarship undertaken by Otto Jahn, published in four volumes between 1855 and 1859.
Book 1 Title: W. A. Mozart
Book Author: Hermann Abert, translated by Stewart Spencer and edited by Cliff Eisen
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, $114.95 hb, 1515 pp
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It seems astonishing that one of the most important studies ever undertaken on Mozart should have taken almost eighty-five years to reach the English language. Hermann Abert’s monumental, and indeed famous, work was first published in 1924 and was originally intended as an updated edition to that other monumental work of Mozart scholarship undertaken by Otto Jahn, published in four volumes between 1855 and 1859. History appears to have repeated itself for the benefit of English speakers, with a fully revised and updated version of Abert’s text prepared by the Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen. A vast amount of historical and bibliographical material has been updated through informative and relatively unobtrusive footnotes, and one of the most comprehensive bibliographies on Mozart and his contemporaries ever assembled has been added. Stewart Spencer’s translation deftly preserves Abert’s original tone and grammatical idiom without a tortuous excess of Teutonic syntax.

Read more: Ian Holtham reviews 'W. A. Mozart' by Hermann Abert, translated by Stewart Spencer and edited by...

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Article Title: La Trobe University News
Article Subtitle: La Trobe Graduate Steven Carroll wins the Miles Franklin Award
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On 19 June 2008, at a gala dinner held at the State Library of New South Wales, Steven Carroll was announced as the winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Award for his novel The Time We Have Taken (HarperCollins Australia). On accepting the Award, Steven Carroll said:

It’s an extraordinary thrill and an honour – but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel that weight almost instantly.
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On 19 June 2008, at a gala dinner held at the State Library of New South Wales, Steven Carroll was announced as the winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Award for his novel The Time We Have Taken (HarperCollins Australia). On accepting the Award, Steven Carroll said:

It’s an extraordinary thrill and an honour – but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel that weight almost instantly.

Read more: La Trobe University News | La Trobe Graduate Steven Carroll wins the Miles Franklin Award

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews A Good Death: An argument for voluntary euthanasia by Rodney Syme
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In A Good Death, Rodney Syme outlines his case for the legalisation of euthanasia. Drawing on his experience working with seriously ill patients over several decades, Syme (a medical practitioner) advances the controversial argument that ‘physician-assisted death’ is a humane response to ‘intolerable and otherwise unrelievable suffering’.
Book 1 Title: A Good Death
Book 1 Subtitle: An argument for voluntary euthanasia
Book Author: Rodney Syme
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $32.95 pb, 301 pp
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In A Good Death, Rodney Syme outlines his case for the legalisation of euthanasia. Drawing on his experience working with seriously ill patients over several decades, Syme (a medical practitioner) advances the controversial argument that ‘physician-assisted death’ is a humane response to ‘intolerable and otherwise unrelievable suffering’.

Read more: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'A Good Death: An argument for voluntary euthanasia' by Rodney Syme

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Elisabeth Holdsworth reviews Empires & Splendour: The David Roche collection by Christopher Menz and Robert Reason
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The art gallery of South Australia has assembled a cast of expert contributors for the catalogue that accompanied its recent exhibition of European decorative arts. Empires & Splendour: The David Roche Collection, is the most expensive publication to date from AGSA and was published with assistance from David Roche.
Book 1 Title: Empires & Splendour
Book 1 Subtitle: The David Roche collection
Book Author: Christopher Menz and Robert Reason
Book 1 Biblio: Art Gallery of South Australia, $120 hb, 276 pp
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The art gallery of South Australia has assembled a cast of expert contributors for the catalogue that accompanied its recent exhibition of European decorative arts. Empires & Splendour: The David Roche Collection, is the most expensive publication to date from AGSA and was published with assistance from David Roche.

Read more: Elisabeth Holdsworth reviews 'Empires & Splendour: The David Roche collection' by Christopher Menz...

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John Thompson reviews Ever, Manning: Selected letters of Manning Clark 1938–1991 by Roslyn Russell (ed.)
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In death, as in life, Manning Clark casts a long shadow. The author of A History of Australia (1962–87) remains a figure of considerable interest and contention in intellectual and cultural debate. Clark’s imposing oeuvre has its detractors and admirers. In pioneering a fresh and richly imagined awareness of national history for a post-World War II generation of Australians, Clark was an inspiring teacher. He encouraged his students to work with primary source materials. In doing so he assembled for publication three volumes of Australian historical documents that brought the underpinnings of Australian history into the ken of general readers. The publication of these documents served as something of a dress rehearsal for the great task Clark set himself: to write a version of the Australian story he conceived in grandeur and tragedy, nobility and ordinariness. As Carl Bridge has noted, Clark’s History has been seen by some as ‘a majestic blue gum of Australian historical scholarship’, and by others as ‘gooey subjective pap’. With the appearance of each volume, reviewers were sharply divided about the merits of Clark’s style, his interpretation, and even the veracity of his history. But while doubts remain, distance has conceded to the History its standing as a work of literature of the imagination that might sit in the same company as the paintings of Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, or the novels of Patrick White.
Book 1 Title: Ever, Manning
Book 1 Subtitle: Selected letters of Manning Clark 1938–1991
Book Author: Roslyn Russell
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $65 hb, 552 pp
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In death, as in life, Manning Clark casts a long shadow. The author of A History of Australia (1962–87) remains a figure of considerable interest and contention in intellectual and cultural debate. Clark’s imposing oeuvre has its detractors and admirers. In pioneering a fresh and richly imagined awareness of national history for a post-World War II generation of Australians, Clark was an inspiring teacher. He encouraged his students to work with primary source materials. In doing so he assembled for publication three volumes of Australian historical documents that brought the underpinnings of Australian history into the ken of general readers. The publication of these documents served as something of a dress rehearsal for the great task Clark set himself: to write a version of the Australian story he conceived in grandeur and tragedy, nobility and ordinariness. As Carl Bridge has noted, Clark’s History has been seen by some as ‘a majestic blue gum of Australian historical scholarship’, and by others as ‘gooey subjective pap’. With the appearance of each volume, reviewers were sharply divided about the merits of Clark’s style, his interpretation, and even the veracity of his history. But while doubts remain, distance has conceded to the History its standing as a work of literature of the imagination that might sit in the same company as the paintings of Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, or the novels of Patrick White.

Read more: John Thompson reviews 'Ever, Manning: Selected letters of Manning Clark 1938–1991' by Roslyn...

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Ruth Starke reviews Hamlet: A novel by John Marsden
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The greatest play by the greatest playwright, Hamlet has over the centuries daunted readers far older than Holden Caulfield. Today, however, he would have another choice: he could read the novel of the play, and one written especially for his age group. John Marsden, the Pied Piper of Australian YA literature, has decided to lead his vast army of devotees into Shakespeare country – to be specific, Elsinore. And why not? The progress from adolescence to maturity is the very stuff of YA fiction, and Hamlet is a story about growing up. Most stage Hamlets are too old. Holden describes the Danish prince as a ‘sad, screwed-up type guy’, and one of the defining features of Marsden’s often dark fiction is exactly this kind of young protagonist.
Book 1 Title: Hamlet
Book 1 Subtitle: A Novel
Book Author: John Marsden
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $29.95 hb, 228 pp
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What I’ll have to do is, I’ll have to read that play.

                   (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

The greatest play by the greatest playwright, Hamlet has over the centuries daunted readers far older than Holden Caulfield. Today, however, he would have another choice: he could read the novel of the play, and one written especially for his age group. John Marsden, the Pied Piper of Australian YA literature, has decided to lead his vast army of devotees into Shakespeare country – to be specific, Elsinore. And why not? The progress from adolescence to maturity is the very stuff of YA fiction, and Hamlet is a story about growing up. Most stage Hamlets are too old. Holden describes the Danish prince as a ‘sad, screwed-up type guy’, and one of the defining features of Marsden’s often dark fiction is exactly this kind of young protagonist.

Read more: Ruth Starke reviews 'Hamlet: A novel' by John Marsden

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Norman Abjorensen reviews Howard’s Fourth Government by Chris Aulich and Roger Wettenhall (eds), Inside Kevin 07 by Christine Jackman, and Howards End by Peter van Onselen and Philip Senior
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The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.
Book 1 Title: Howard’s Fourth Government
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian commonwealth administration 2004–2007
Book Author: Chris Aulich and Roger Wettenhall (eds)
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $44.95pb, 303 pp
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Book 2 Title: Inside Kevin 07
Book 2 Subtitle: The people. The plan. The prize.
Book 2 Author: Christine Jackman
Book 2 Biblio: MUP, $34.95 pb, 320 pp
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Book 3 Title: Howard’s End
Book 3 Subtitle: The unravelling of a government
Book 3 Author: Peter van Onselen and Philip Senior
Book 3 Biblio: MUP, $34.95 pb, 272 pp
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The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.

Read more: Norman Abjorensen reviews ' Howard’s Fourth Government' by Chris Aulich and Roger Wettenhall...

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Shahram Akbarzadeh reviews Inside Muslim Minds by Riaz Hassan
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What can explain the growing assertiveness of Islamist groups? Why are key aspects of the Islamic faith and civilisation that helped Islam flourish in its Golden Age – respect for life and property, philanthropy, tolerance and a thirst for science – being sidelined in the Muslim world? How can we explain the seemingly unstoppable slide from rational thinking in the Muslim world?
Book 1 Title: Inside Muslim Minds
Book Author: Riaz Hassan
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $45 pb, 430 pp
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What can explain the growing assertiveness of Islamist groups? Why are key aspects of the Islamic faith and civilisation that helped Islam flourish in its Golden Age – respect for life and property, philanthropy, tolerance and a thirst for science – being sidelined in the Muslim world? How can we explain the seemingly unstoppable slide from rational thinking in the Muslim world?

Read more: Shahram Akbarzadeh reviews 'Inside Muslim Minds' by Riaz Hassan

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Christina Hill reviews Life in Seven Mistakes by Susan Johnson
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The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, Neil, Elizabeth and her three children are spending Christmas with her parents. Bob and Nancy Barton have retired to the Gold Coast where they live in a vulgar, ferociously air-conditioned apartment. Also there are one of Elizabeth’s brothers, Robbie, with his wife, Katie, and their two children. The youngest brother, Nick, is in jail for drug offences and erased from the family narrative, but he is ever-present in Elizabeth’s mind.
Book 1 Title: Life in Seven Mistakes
Book Author: Susan Johnson
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam, $32.95 pb, 352 pp
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The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, Neil, Elizabeth and her three children are spending Christmas with her parents. Bob and Nancy Barton have retired to the Gold Coast where they live in a vulgar, ferociously air-conditioned apartment. Also there are one of Elizabeth’s brothers, Robbie, with his wife, Katie, and their two children. The youngest brother, Nick, is in jail for drug offences and erased from the family narrative, but he is ever-present in Elizabeth’s mind.

Read more: Christina Hill reviews 'Life in Seven Mistakes' by Susan Johnson

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Richard Broinowski reviews Phnom Penh: a cultural and literary history by Milton Osborne
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Milton Osborne began his observations of Phnom Penh as a junior Australian diplomat from 1959 to 1961. Norodom Sihanouk presided over a town influenced by a powerful French cultural presence, a buoyant Chinese commercial sector, Vietnamese clerks, Cambodian civil servants, teachers and bonzes, and free-spending Americans. Osborne returned in April 1966 as a Cornell graduate student, then each year until 1971, the year after Sihanouk was deposed and four years before the terrible entry of Pol Pot’s forces. For a short time during Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, he worked as a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Thai border, and in 1981 returned to a run-down city full of squatters. In subsequent years, Osborne saw a dispirited and exhausted city regain its self-confidence and some of its joie de vivre, in spite of a government (like others in Asia), rampant with corruption and intolerant of challenges to its power.
Book 1 Title: Phnom Penh
Book 1 Subtitle: a cultural and literary history
Book Author: Milton Osborne
Book 1 Biblio: Signal Books, $30 pb, 248 pp
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Milton Osborne began his observations of Phnom Penh as a junior Australian diplomat from 1959 to 1961. Norodom Sihanouk presided over a town influenced by a powerful French cultural presence, a buoyant Chinese commercial sector, Vietnamese clerks, Cambodian civil servants, teachers and bonzes, and free-spending Americans. Osborne returned in April 1966 as a Cornell graduate student, then each year until 1971, the year after Sihanouk was deposed and four years before the terrible entry of Pol Pot’s forces. For a short time during Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, he worked as a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Thai border, and in 1981 returned to a run-down city full of squatters. In subsequent years, Osborne saw a dispirited and exhausted city regain its self-confidence and some of its joie de vivre, in spite of a government (like others in Asia), rampant with corruption and intolerant of challenges to its power.

Read more: Richard Broinowski reviews 'Phnom Penh: a cultural and literary history' by Milton Osborne

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Geordie Williamson reviews Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicott by Carol Mavor
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Carol Mavor is professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester: a specialist in the field of Victorian photography who has written two earlier books on the subject. She is also one of those rare figures capable of subverting orthodox academic research by stealing some of autobiography’s subjective insight and creative writing’s imaginative reach.
Book 1 Title: Reading Boyishly
Book 1 Subtitle: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicott
Book Author: Carol Mavor
Book 1 Biblio: Duke University Press, $59.95 pb, 536 pp
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Carol Mavor is professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester: a specialist in the field of Victorian photography who has written two earlier books on the subject. She is also one of those rare figures capable of subverting orthodox academic research by stealing some of autobiography’s subjective insight and creative writing’s imaginative reach.

Read more: Geordie Williamson reviews ' Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri...

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Judith Armstrong reviews Twilight by Azhar Abidi
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Azhar Abidi’s first novel, Passarola Rising (2006), told of some amazing adventures in a seventeenth-century flying ship, and it was a delight. His new novel could hardly be more different, yet gives just as much pleasure. It also tells a more probable story.
Book 1 Title: Twilight
Book Author: Azhar Abidi
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $32.95 pb, 272 pp
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Azhar Abidi’s first novel, Passarola Rising (2006), told of some amazing adventures in a seventeenth-century flying ship, and it was a delight. His new novel could hardly be more different, yet gives just as much pleasure. It also tells a more probable story.

Abidi is a Pakistani now living in Melbourne, where he maintains a family and a job in finance, as well, apparently, as meditating on the implications of these choices. It does not surprise that his protagonist, Samad, who has also migrated to Melbourne and married Kate, gives thought to several multicultural issues, particularly when the couple visit Karachi for a home-town celebration of the marriage.

Read more: Judith Armstrong reviews 'Twilight' by Azhar Abidi

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Gillian Dooley reviews A Matter of Principle: New meetings with the good, the great and the formidable by Jana Wendt
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Jana Wendt has conducted her share of difficult and confronting interviews with public figures during her television career, but rather than rehashing old encounters for this book, she spoke afresh to thirteen people, naming each interview after a principle the subject nominated, or one that ‘seemed to me to most obviously propel the thinking and attitudes of the person in question’.
Book 1 Title: A Matter of Principle
Book 1 Subtitle: New meetings with the good, the great and the formidable
Book Author: Jana Wendt
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $35 pb, 246 pp
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Jana Wendt has conducted her share of difficult and confronting interviews with public figures during her television career, but rather than rehashing old encounters for this book, she spoke afresh to thirteen people, naming each interview after a principle the subject nominated, or one that ‘seemed to me to most obviously propel the thinking and attitudes of the person in question’.

She doesn’t explain how she chose her subjects, and it’s hard to discern a common thread. Showbiz people – Charlotte Rampling (‘Freedom’) and Rove McManus (‘Loyalty’) rub shoulders with politicians such as Richard Armitage (‘Dependability’) and Joschka Fischer (‘Curiosity’). There are writers (David Malouf, Robert Hughes) and artists (photographer Bill Henson and architect Frank Gehry); feminist Camille Paglia, war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, swimming champion Shane Gould and Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty; and Syrian psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, who has brought a fatwa down on her head by pursuing a campaign against Islam. The one thing most seem to share is a thoughtful, non-dogmatic intelligence – one exception being Sultan, who ‘ironically … has the certainty and zeal of a new convert, but a convert to humanism’.

Read more: Gillian Dooley reviews 'A Matter of Principle: New meetings with the good, the great and the...

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by the radio:
I mishear the news and sports presenter
say ‘the latest in nuisance sports’,
outside the light is green,
the lightning frightening      stay away 
from windows       but the storm            
takes no notice of me and my black Bic biro
here at the kitchen table
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Nicholas Brown reviews Chasing The Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the fight to save the world by Samantha Power
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This is a heavy book with which to make a leap of faith: to trust that one life can make a difference in the deeply compromised pursuit of international justice and security. In the epilogue to her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power suggests ‘if there was anyone who could have wrung from the UN whatever reform and promise it could muster, it was he’. In this long book, depicting some of the worst that humanity can inflict on itself, Power builds this image of Vieira de Mello. If her claim for his significance is justified, then we might indeed revisit the conditions for such faith.
Book 1 Title: Chasing The Flame
Book 1 Subtitle: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the fight to save the world
Book Author: Samantha Power
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $69.95 hb, 638 pp
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This is a heavy book with which to make a leap of faith: to trust that one life can make a difference in the deeply compromised pursuit of international justice and security. In the epilogue to her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power suggests ‘if there was anyone who could have wrung from the UN whatever reform and promise it could muster, it was he’. In this long book, depicting some of the worst that humanity can inflict on itself, Power builds this image of Vieira de Mello. If her claim for his significance is justified, then we might indeed revisit the conditions for such faith.

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Despite increasing competition from Internet search engines and online encyclopedias, quality information titles for children continue to be produced in Australia. Well-researched non-fiction books that bring their subject matter to life can have a much greater impact on an inquisitive mind than is the case with the fact-bites of Google.
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Despite increasing competition from Internet search engines and online encyclopedias, quality information titles for children continue to be produced in Australia. Well-researched non-fiction books that bring their subject matter to life can have a much greater impact on an inquisitive mind than is the case with the fact-bites of Google.

Read more: Engaging with facts

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Patrons Corner | Interview with Elisabeth Holdsworth
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When did you start reading ABR?

Several lifetimes ago. In the government offices where I worked, ABR lay around with the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. I assumed, because ABR offered a similar quality of reading experience, that the magazine enjoyed the same level of financial resources!
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When did you start reading ABR?

Several lifetimes ago. In the government offices where I worked, ABR lay around with the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. I assumed, because ABR offered a similar quality of reading experience, that the magazine enjoyed the same level of financial resources!

Why does cultural philanthropy matter to you? A life without books, music and the opportunity to visit galleries, great houses and gardens would be colourless. Insupportable. Similarly, the freedom to express one’s view about those experiences is, to me, an inalienable right. Yet in the past I have given little thought to the day-to-day lives of arts practitioners. Cultural philanthropy ensures the survival of those pleasures that it is so easy to take for granted. The smallest donation is an investment in our future as Australians, our society.

Why ABR in particular?

As the first recipient of ABR’s major prize, it is time for me to give back. Fortunately, this desire to ‘give back’ has coincided with an inheritance. Last year I was an anonymous patron. This year I am ‘out’.

What do you enjoy most about the magazine?

I read the magazine as follows: first the stoushes in the Letters pages, then Advances, poems and essays. Lastly, I pick and peck around the reviews. I always read the ‘stud book’ at the back with close attention.

Elisabeth Holdsworth was born in the Netherlands and moved to Australia in the late 1950s. For many years she worked for the Department of Defence. She is well known to ABR readers as the author of the remarkable essay ‘An Die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, which won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007. Currently she is writing a novel called New Holland.

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David Gilbey reviews ‘Poems 1980-2008’ by Jan Owen
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Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.
Book 1 Title: Poems 1980-2008
Book Author: Jan Owen
Book 1 Biblio: John Leonard Press, $29.95 pb, 328 pp
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Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.

In the final poem, ‘The Offhand Angel’, Owen’s ‘I’ flirts with a decidedly male muse, ‘her strange attractor’, who is prompting about the craft of writing: ‘Is this being a metaphor? he sends. / “Is this metaphor a being?” she writes. /… / A bead of sweat on your lip, he whispers, / leaning close. “Ah feathers of sun!” /… “Come through,” she says, “Come in”.’

Read more: David Gilbey reviews ‘Poems 1980-2008’ by Jan Owen

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Francesca Beddie reviews ‘Worrying About China: The language of Chinese critical inquiry’ by Gloria Davies
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Gloria Davies quotes William Blake in the acknowledgments to her book: ‘true friendship is argument.’ When choosing that quote, I wonder if she had the Chinese concept of zhengyou in mind. That is the word Kevin Rudd chose for friendship when he spoke to the students at Peking University in April this year. Zhengyou is not just about friendship, for which there is another Chinese word (youyi); it defines a true friend as one who dares to disagree.
Book 1 Title: Worrying About China
Book 1 Subtitle: The language of Chinese critical inquiry
Book Author: Gloria Davies
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press, $39.95 hb, 313 pp
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Gloria Davies quotes William Blake in the acknowledgments to her book: ‘true friendship is argument.’ When choosing that quote, I wonder if she had the Chinese concept of zhengyou in mind. That is the word Kevin Rudd chose for friendship when he spoke to the students at Peking University in April this year. Zhengyou is not just about friendship, for which there is another Chinese word (youyi); it defines a true friend as one who dares to disagree.

This is not just a reviewer’s device to draw our first Mandarin-speaking prime minister into the discussion. Rather, it is because of Rudd’s background and his mode of thinking when it comes to China that I must recommend this book. He is likely to read it. Regrettably, many others will find the task of doing so daunting, if not impossible, because it is couched in the impenetrable language of postmodernism.

Read more: Francesca Beddie reviews ‘Worrying About China: The language of Chinese critical inquiry’ by...

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