Following True Stories, published in 1996, The Feel of Steel is Helen Garner’s second collection of non-fiction. It comprises thirty-one pieces of varying lengths. Longer narratives such as ‘Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice’, about a hair-raising trip to Antarctica, and ‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’, about the outcome of a cleanse-and-fast régime at a spa resort in Thailand, stand beside delicate haiku-like sketches with a faint stitch of narrative, such as ‘Baby Coughs’ and ‘Who Spilt the Wine?’ Large and small beads, they are strung onto strong autobiographical thread.

Unlike much of Garner’s earlier work, this latest collection does not make strong appeals to readers’ moral sensibilities. And, unlike the stories in True Stories, which are easily singled out or read randomly, the non-fiction-that-feels-like fiction of The Feel of Steel gains from being understood as it is arranged in the book, each piece answering to the others around it. It’s a question of relationship.

Relationships are central: siblings, friends, mothers and fathers and daughters, aunties and nephews, ex-partners, teams, congregations, captains and passengers, teachers and pupils, and, not least, the single person’s relationship to herself. For Garner, solitariness is not a new topic. But this time it’s different. Packing sadness, sarcasm, and true wonder into one punch (or to use a Garnerism, a ‘wallop’), she asks: ‘Isn’t a couple the greatest mystery of all?’

The art of the dumb question is the art of suggestion. Garner’s prose runs with deceptive ease. The content is often minimal and within easy grasp. The tone is intimately informative. But the reader quickly comes to recognise that there is a vastly bigger picture here, a humanised join-the-dots landscape planted with signification. Sexuality, aesthetics, spirituality, and love are only slightly hidden in, say, a pair of gumboots (as opposed to a pair of towering heels), a packet of Textas (missing the blue), stones (Garner’s controversial ‘first stone’ and those cast since), clean sheets, a weather map, a duel. At one point, Garner notes: ‘everything around me is seething with meaning, if I can only work out what it is’.

In True Stories, Garner quoted Joan Didion’s view that writers are ‘lonely, anxious rearrangers of things’. Garner arranges her clusters and networks of intimacy – people to people, people to objects, people to places – by subjecting them to emotional extremes. Around chunks of reportage, there’s a wash of pathos, hyperbole, and humour. A wedding ring threatens to slip off fingers that have shrunk with cold. Reading the poetry of Alexander Pope, the author ‘nearly died of admiration’. She feels guilty that she does not like penguins, and intense guilt at forgetting most of what she reads.

Garner has always been a bit of a joker. As much as she likes to laugh at or with others – her work is lit with lots of gleeful falling about and stumbling along – she also knows well how to take a tilt at herself. The description of collapsing from exhaustion when she visits an art gallery is funny. The analysis of self, others, and poo in ‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’ is very funny. Perhaps the funniest, because of its poetic scope and spontaneity, is her account of showing her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, a photograph of her new great-granddaughter: the mother holds the photo by one corner (Garner’s gift for detail) and asks, ‘Do I just look at it … or do I have to make a decision?’

The humour is not without sting. It hovers somewhere between feeling and steeling, the flesh and the carapace, amour and armour. Readers might well imagine that The Feel of Steel is a book of battles, because the title refers to the author’s rekindled interest in fencing. ‘The language of fencing is old French, beautiful and severe. Ernie [the coach] used the phrase le sentiment de fer. The feel of steel. That’s what I want,’ Garner says with a touch of petulance. ‘I want to learn to fight, but not in the ordinary wretched way of the worst of my personal life – desperate, ragged, emotional. I want to learn an ancient discipline, with formal control and purpose. Will my body hold out? I hope it’s not too late.’

In ‘Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice’, she battles both the savage elements and her own gloom. She recounts reaching the crest of a hill and ‘having to crouch and claw at the ground so as not to be blown off my feet’. She describes how ‘the wind whips fine grit off the stones and slashes it into our streaming eyes’, and how she keeps ‘stumping along in my brand-new gumboots, leaning forward and stabbing my toes in among the stones, the only way to make progress against the cold wall of wind’.

Even if by surrogacy it is only wine that is spilt and not blood, the book abounds with combative energy and imagery. Blokes bash one another with baseball bats. People thrash each other at Scrabble. Bones and hearts are broken. Some fight illness and death. Others struggle to read, and to read the Bible. A person says he would crawl over broken glass to take communion. A mother who was once ‘the most law-abiding person in the world’ becomes a ‘raging virago’. Friends squabble. On a football field, young boys drop, stagger up, slog on. In the aftermath, woven into the excess of battle, there are wounds and torrents of tears. At one of the lowest points of her life, Garner moves into counterpoint, choosing ‘the highest, airiest place I have ever lived in’. But the therapy is slow to work. ‘Disappointment in my famous view … Sometimes, through the windows smeared by salt from the sea wind, it even looks … ugly … It’s a drain on me – one more thing at which I fail.’

Garner once confessed to having been addicted to emotional upheaval. ‘I circle around the dark area of life (mine or someone else’s) … and search for a way in,’ she wrote in True Stories. Now, in her darkest moods, she seems beset by sadness as by a kind of curse. At the heart of this grief is the breakdown of her third marriage. ‘What if somebody’s heart has been broken one time too many?’ she asks, casting the question by way of the reader, back into her own domain.

She garners her sorrow. The paradox of an abundance of loss and a loss of abundance is worked to the bone. The skirmishes and founderings that fleck this author’s lens (and one of several self-reflective parodies of romantic disappointment is aptly titled ‘My Blue Glasses’) become so numerous that, like Garner herself, echoing Kafka’s ‘longing for something greater than all that is fearful’, the reader yearns for relief.

The reader figures, that at some point, the author must have cleaned those depressing salt-smeared windows. Connoisseurs of her work might imagine this to have been performed with the exact same fierceness of spirit as the heroine’s in the closing scene of Garner’s novel The Children’s Bach (1984), cleaning her house.

Then the sadness shifts. The author notes:

The cotton pin of my sewing machine snapped off last night, as I was about to sit down and start sewing my curtains. Normally, these days, I would have collapsed in tears, but I just looked at it with a cross, disappointed feeling, and found something else to do with my evening …

And off she goes to a cocktail party. PHEW. The hilltop apartment loses its doleful and dismembered prison-in-exile connotations and takes on a distinct brightness and blessedness, a place ‘past whose windows birds flew and called in the sunny emptiness on its eastern side’, a launching place for new beginnings in familiar (and familial) places. Garner, with no small degree of ironic effort and triumph, packs her belongings, leaves Sydney, drives south, and crosses the Murray into Victoria.

The single mother we met riding with her child on a bicycle through the streets of Melbourne in True Stories has become a single-again grandmother driving round in her ‘nanna-mobile’, head-over-heels in love with her grandchild. It’s a head-over-heels kind of story, where the stab-stab-stab of the ice, the pen, the needle, the sword produces (to borrow from ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’) an unclenching of fists, a breathing out of hysteria, and sheer beauty. I can only suggest that it has something to do with the author’s mastery of her craft.

Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’: literary essayist (his ‘best work’, Barnes insists), television critic, poet, novelist, autobiographer, rock lyricist, documentary-maker, television host, famous person. Barnes implies that the ‘best’ of Clive James has regrettably been consigned to the ‘land of shadows’ by the ubiquitous ‘TV host, famous person’. In his concluding paragraph, Barnes welcomes the recent news that James is to stop being what the tabloids call ‘TV’s Clive’. Welcome back to Grub Street, ‘Literature’s Clive’, he perorates.

Unlike Martin Amis, whose The War against Cliché: Essays and reviews 1971–2000 features a cover illustration with pens and pencils, both of the volumes under review include a cover photograph – a topic on which James writes with authority in ‘Pictures in Silver’ in the ‘Best of …’ collection –of Clive James, among other luminaries. Doubtless ‘TV host, famous person’ generates this. Yet there is, surely, something missing from this familiar, droll yet stern visage, beneath that noble if thinly furnished cranium. It begs for a wig. A wig for a wag. Not the contemporary ‘rug’, but a noble, eighteenth-century job, nothing Cavalier, but a sensible wig, an august wig that bespeaks James’s Johnsonian, delighted concurrence with the common reader.

‘ … these days I am no longer sure what is memory and what is revelation. How faithful the story you are about to read is to the original is a bone of contention with the few people I had allowed to read the original Book of Fish … certainly, the book you will read is the same as the book I remember reading, and I have tried to be true both to the wonder of that reading and to the extraordinary world that was Gould’s.’

This is Sid Hammet’s cautionary introduction to the reader. Given his penchant for, or at least hapless vulnerability to, equivocation, obfuscation, and obliquity, he might just as well be Sid Hamlet. Perhaps he is – identity is only one of the concepts that succumbs to subversion in this extraordinary, deceptively rollicking, yet often horrific story.

Hammet makes a dicey living in Hobart belting together fake period furniture for the tourists and ‘ageing’ it with libations of his own piss. One winter’s morning ‘that was to prove fateful but at the time merely seemed freezing’, he is fossicking in a junk shop when he finds, buried beneath a stack of long out-of-date women’s magazines, a weird book with a curious, intermittently luminous cover. This turns out to be William Buelow Gould’s Book of Fish. Transported to Sarah Island in 1828, convict Gould, ‘in the supposed interest of science’, was ordered to paint all the fish caught in the island’s waters. The paintings, however, are annotated heavily with Gould’s own scrawled, multicoloured (because of his varied and exotic sources of ‘ink’) journal. Hammet, obsessed with the book, discovers that, in some odd way, it is never-ending. Every time he consults it, he discovers some new section, or a scrap of paper drops from its prison within the pages to add yet more substance.

In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two-year-old Australian Rules footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community. Robert was a brilliant all-round athlete with an impeccable sporting pedigree. He was the latest of the famous Rose family of Collingwood. His father, Bob, was one of the greatest-ever players for the club and had gone on to coach it. Four of Bob’s brothers had also played for Collingwood.

At the time of the accident, Robert was playing state cricket and might have gone on to bat for Australia. His best-remembered cricketing feat was to put Dennis Lillee to the sword at the MCG. Robert’s younger brother, Peter, witnessed the assault on the great fast bowler. Sitting in the top tier of the Northern Stand reading Norman Mailer’s autobiography, Peter’s attention is drawn to the ‘microscopic drama’ unfolding below. Proud as always of his brother’s sporting prowess, he forgets about Mailer and becomes part of the rapturous crowd.

Rose Boys is Peter’s account of his brother’s life and death. The book is about their relationship as brothers, about what life is like for the families and friends of catastrophic spinal injury victims; it’s also, and appropriately, about Peter himself: about the adolescent who had to look up from Mailer to see his brother hooking Lillee; the ‘Rose boy’ who, far from playing for Collingwood, was to become an accomplished poet, a gay man, and now a fine practitioner of a form of life-writing that combines biography, autobiography, pathography, eulogy, ethical reflection, and an enquiry into Australian myths, ideologies, styles of masculinity, and cultural locales.

The cover illustration of Peter Porter’s selection of essays shows a mosaic from the Basilica di S. Marco, Venezia, in which Noah leans out from the wall of the Ark and releases the questing dove. The last words of the selection go:

This is what I have been trying to unearth in my talk – the possible replacing what is not possible, the Poetry we make from our inadequacy – inadequacy not just of our own minds but of the place we live in, the language we have developed and the moral truthfulness we espouse. Poetry has such opportunities for failure it must always be preferable to philosophy or religion. It is simply that much more human.

Admirers of Porter’s poetry, of whom I am one, will be surprised by neither of these facts. On the one hand, that poetry has a powerful impulsion towards retrieval and celebration – all those painters and paintings re-housed, those musicians re-harmonised – while, on the other, the rueful, baleful ways of the best-known hominid are treated as though Porter were a dark Mrs Beeton, bringing all the bad news about maladroitness in the world’s housekeeping. Saving from the Wreck sports eleven papers or lectures whose titles range from ‘Poetry and Madness’ through ‘The Couplet’s Last Stand’ to ‘Recording Angels and Answering Machines’. Consistently, Porter sounds like neither of the latter creatures – itself a refreshing change from much critical or theoretical writing – but like what he really is, namely someone for whom vivacious, complex and incident-packed conversation is a natural and necessary thing. As he has often mentioned, his first love is music, and he deals with it here as a matter of course; but poetry as art, as calling and as predicament is the main business of the book, and Porter handles it with both zeal and zest. John Lucas, in his introduction, invokes the name of Randall Jarrell, and Porter’s prose does indeed have the heft, brio, and sometimes the mordancy of that singular performer.

The episode of the refugees on the MV Tampa raised two separate problems, one moral, the other legal. To see both issues in perspective, it is useful to recall the facts that precipitated this unlikely crisis.

The refugees, most of them claiming to be from Afghanistan, embarked on a boat in Indonesia and headed for Australia. It began to sink. The master of the Tampa, quite properly, rescued them. He was about to take them to Indonesia when some of them threatened to commit suicide if they were not taken to Australia. He considered that many were in need of urgent medical help. He sailed towards Christmas Island and radioed for help, but none was given. He was asked to turn away, but considered the risks to life too great. Thus it was that 450 refugees found themselves in Australian territorial waters.

Of all major South-East Asian nations, the Philippines is least known in Australia, and rarely studied, even in our universities. The material and historical differences between the two countries seem to have blinded us to the interests our two countries share. Australia did not support the long Filipino struggle for independence, as with Indonesia’s, nor actively oppose it, as with Vietnam’s. Nonetheless, both countries were part of SEATO and supported US involvement in Indo-China. Within ASEAN, the Philippines has often been the country most sympathetic to greater links with Australia, and the Philippines is regarded as a high-priority country for development assistance by Ausaid.

Traditionally, the ties between the Philippines and Australia have been thin, and often mediated through the USA. From one perspective, this is odd: there are cultural and intellectual similarities which should make links far richer, and there is a significant and growing Filipino population in Australia. The first Filipinos came as pearlers or seamen, but the White Australia Policy blocked the growth of immigration until the 1960s, though we were linked by World War II – General MacArthur fled from Manila to Brisbane. (There is a wonderful fictional account of the war, including MacArthur’s role in both Manila and Brisbane, in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, 1999.) Filipino immigration has grown particularly since the 1980s, with many women coming as spouses (the gender imbalance is now decreasing). There are over a hundred thousand Filpino-Australians (the Embassy claims almost twice as many, but they include the Australian-born children of Filipino immigrants). But it is not a very visible population: while the Melbourne phone-book lists Nepalese and Mongolian restaurants, no Filipino ones are identified. Only eight students are taking Filipino in Victorian schools, fewer than are studying Tamil or Dutch.

Tigers and ‘the Silk Road to Istanbul’ feature in Part I of ‘1969’, the opening poem in this volume, which traces a hopeful setting forth into the undiscovered spaces of Asia and Europe. It is playfully exotic even while the homeward pull of a relationship envelops perception like a cloudscape:

In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst. Cronin continues to ‘just go on your nerve’, as Frank O’Hara wrote. There is the same mock candour as well as the same, often-disjointed tones as in her first book, Zoetrope (1995): ‘I do not have the time / To transform my life into a vision.’ Bestseller, Cronin’s fourth book, does signal changing preoccupations, as its title suggests. More specifically, it centres on the life of the Poet. Although Cronin’s images can lead into perky unexpected sequences, this book would have been stronger if some poems had been omitted, especially some of the shorter ones, such as ‘Cheers’, ‘Searching’ or ‘Then, Then, Then’. Some poems fizzle out in less interesting directions than those they seem to promise; they pick garrulously but semi-consciously at random images – ‘the trees wobbling like boxers / with their ungrouped leaves / moving like sand through / my outstretched eyes’.

Jazzing it up

Dear Editor,

Patrick Wolfe’s review of my book The Culture Cult (‘The Remorseless Right’, ABR, September 2001) makes an exciting read (such astonishing political intrigues!), but the truth is not quite what he imagines. Let me clarify a few points.

I am said to have made ‘scurrilous personal attacks’ on Raymond Williams, a man who is dead and unable to respond, something which is ‘truly shameful’. The original essay discussing Williams appeared in Encounter twenty years ago. Although Williams was still with us then, I don’t recall him writing a response. In any case, when I updated the essay recently, the worst charges against him (involving what I think we may fairly call his ‘truly shameful’ apologia for the Khmer Rouge) were taken from Fred Inglis’s recent biography. Inglis, an admirer of Williams, frankly expresses his own disgust at Williams’s defence of ‘the killing fields’. Which must make Williams’s biographer at least as shameful as me.

I am accused of not reading the texts I comment on. Odd though it might seem, given Isaiah Berlin’s loquacity, I have certainly read what he has to say about tribalism and nationalism, and that’s where I found Herder’s resentful provincial rage against Paris for not giving him the respect he felt he was due. Ample references are provided in my book for anyone who wants to follow up the matter. This is not a ‘bohemian theory’ (Wolfe’s curious description) but the explanation offered by Berlin himself. As for Ernest Gellner, my quotation from this author occurs in the course of expounding his interpretation of Wittgenstein in Language and Solitude. Gellner’s fascinating commentary on the communalist/individualist divide, under the rubric of ‘The Habsburg Dilemma’, is my main subject – not Wittgenstein’s thought, the intricacies of which I don’t pretend to grasp. Gellner himself wrote an awful lot, and I’m familiar with some of it, but his discussion of Wittgenstein and Vienna is my exclusive concern here. If Wolfe wants to be regarded as a serious critic of this sort of thing, he will have to think a lot harder and apply his mind much more closely to the text. I wish him well.

It is suggested that I ‘[blame] the Aborigines’ for romancing their own past. Not at all. I blame a whole army of deluded, middleclass whites who have a heavy emotional and political investment in idealising the primitive world. It’s time they moved on. Their urban sentimentalism, widely promoted in universities and by the media, derives directly from Rousseau.

I am accused of behaving badly in distancing myself from professional colleagues in anthropology, and declining to turn up at a conference hate session specially devoted to my book. Your readers should know that, although I made a few documentaries thirty-five years ago, I have no serious credentials in anthropology, have never claimed to be an anthropologist, have no wish to be regarded as an anthropologist, and have not been to an academic conference of any kind in over twenty years. The prospect of this provincial talkfest seemed every bit as repellent as its predecessors. In any case, the book is not primarily about anthropology. It is about a disease of the Western imagination: the reactionary infatuation with the tribal and communal that feeds the hatred of modernity so conspicuous today. A recent episode in New York shows the extremes to which this hatred can all too easily lead.

Finally, Wolfe implies that The Culture Cult has woeful shortcomings as an academic publication. To this, I plead guilty as charged. This is because it is not an academic book, the American publisher having accepted it on the explicit condition that it be written for the general reader. So I jazzed it up a bit and added enough entertainment to help someone trying to cope with it on a train. Of course, it uses academic writing for its argument, but the argument itself is a good-natured satire on human folly: a satire to which your reviewer seems entirely blind. Might I suggest that curious readers obtain a copy and see for themselves?

Roger Sandall, Bondi Beach, NSW

Our Shakespearean past

Dear Editor,

Peter Craven’s ‘Shakespeare in Australia’ in ABR (September 2001) styles itself ‘a cartoon of a bygone history’. The zing of his essay certainly derives from its heady succession of vivid vignettes and quirky accentuations, and his approach will prod us – more effectively than any dogged survey – into assembling our own tableaux of remembered highlights from our Shakespearean past.

Particular favourites of mine, not noted by Craven, are Rex Cramphorn’s staging of The Tempest in 1972–73 and Jane Adamson’s book-length critical studies, Othello As Tragedy (1980) and Troilus and Cressida (1987).

Cramphorn’s incantatory, percussive Tempest is still something of a legend – on a par, in Australian theatrical circles at least, with Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to which Craven pays due homage. Adamson’s work has tended to be overshadowed by more recent developments in Shakespearean criticism (some of which seem brazenly indifferent to how the plays work as literature or even as theatre) and also by the reputation of her late husband Sam Goldberg’s book on King Lear (1974).

Craven unequivocally nominates Goldberg’s book ‘the finest criticism I have read of Shakespeare by an Australian’. Yet he also suggests its want of ‘essayistic colour’ – ironic for a book that calls itself An Essay on King Lear, and doubly ironic in that Craven has made himself such a doughty champion of the essay form in this country. Adamson’s work has all the terse elegance of the most incisive essayists, yet it is also capable of blossoming forth in such rich and resonant passages as this gloss on Othello’s dying words: ‘For the last time, reality seems cushioned by voluptuous assonance, seduced, softened and recomposed in statically picturesque images, tamed by the art of a lingering cadence.’

Ian Britain, Meanjin, Carlton, Vic.

The visit of H.G. Wells to Australia in 1938–39 provides a spectacle of provocation under difficulties. The provocations were mostly Wells’s; the difficulties he shared with his hosts. The outcome was disappointment all round.

In mid-1938, Wells accepted an invitation from the Congress Organising Committee of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) to participate in their Jubilee meeting in Canberra in January 1939. His acceptance was a coup for the Committee, which was implementing recommendations from the preceding Auckland Congress that ANZAAS should pay more attention to the social relations of science. The Organising Committee, led by David Rivett of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research, was influenced by British writers on this theme, notably J.B.S. Haldane and J.D. Bernal. Rivett and his colleagues were appalled that science had become so implicated in mass killing and devastation, especially from the air, in China – where the blanket bombing of Canton in July 1938 was particularly murderous – and also in Spain and in Abyssinia. Wells, more than any other author, had predicted this catastrophe of modern science even before Bleriot flew the Channel. Weeks before Wells’s Australian landfall, Orson Welles’ broadcast readings from the War of the Worlds had alarmed thousands on the eastern seaboard of the USA. Days before Wells arrived in Perth, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn announced their discovery of uranium nuclear fission.

American English, with its vigorous ability to get to the core of things, has an implacably visual word for the kind of person this novel is about – the ‘shut-in’. A shut-in is a recluse, perhaps a cinéaste or stay-at-home opera queen. He (I use my pronouns advisedly – the shut-in is usually a ‘he’) has a rich, century-long genealogy in books and on-screen, from Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Sunset Boulevard’s Nora Desmond and Chatwin’s Utz. Alfred Hitchcock specialised in shut-ins; in Australian cinema, Norman Kaye played a lonely voyeur in Man of Flowers. The shut-in has also given birth to a critical tradition of his own. Some critics like Walter Benjamin have suggested that the habit of collecting may be a response to the twentieth century itself, a kind of specialised aesthetic reflex against consumer culture. Because he is associated with brittleness and the arts, the shut-in is frequently depicted as gay or as a sexual neurasthenic: in his wonderful book The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum has made a bravura anatomisation of the coded campness of the shut-in opera fan.

This handsomely produced anthology reflects much that is admirable about the ABC, and indicates the vital role an independent public broadcasting organisation may play in a mature and civilised society. Sad to say, it also exemplifies the current state of the corporation.

Nineteenth-century Victoria was reputed one of Britain’s most turbulent colonies. For more than twenty-five years, a liberal Legislative Assembly fought a conservative Legislative Council over reform of the constitution, control of Crown Lands, Protectionism and secular education. In the middle ground between the forces stood the governor, the umpire who was the Queen’s representative, the fount of authority, the conduit for honours, and the head of society, presiding over what passed for a court in Melbourne.

I suspect that even his contemporaries found Matthew Flinders strange and not entirely likeable. His father hoped that, like his grandfather and himself, Matthew would become a surgeon, but filled with enthusiasm for adventure after reading Robinson Crusoe, the youth insisted on a career in the navy. He wrote to the woman who would become his long-suffering wife in a style that would have been stilted even then, one that conveyed his undoubted affection in such a self-conscious way as to leave the modern reader with an unpleasant sense of self-righteousness. Amid preparations for the Investigator voyage, Flinders told his father: ‘I have no present or future intention of marrying either [Ann Chappelle] or any other person, but leave England only wedded to my ship.’ Then, when his father declined to provide him with the funds he needed to underwrite the marriage he was in fact contemplating, Flinders replied peremptorily that his father should henceforth consider that he had four children rather than five.

We moved out from the stone of Mallarmé’s mind, through silence of thought
from the start knowing the difference between sex in the head
and sex in bed, the form of women became
a way to hold chaos that singing bird
in an imaginary cage that was projected there
just ahead of where our eyes remembered the look
that kills, our unbelieving bodies listening to the rock’s voice
the sails, the oceans the walks on moonlit beaches rocking the old abyss time
and talking all night with Augustine in Hippo
explaining age and insisting time was a mere projection of the mind
O Africa in a Mustang in 1967
Highway 61 through rivers of prose
ideas slanting sunlight through the monsoon
a world blossoming from a single voice reciting The Garden in an empty room
Facing the mirror, drinking under the volcano
of teenaged lonely boys with Birmingham Rollers tumbling home
the bleak stage with a classic lady repeating a sentence
with a syntax that could loop a memory for her despairing husband in the air
and the crow at every crossroads flashing its hen-bird feathers
the black that’s blue and smudging the examination
the regret we wouldn’t let become more guilt
as we passed mountains in the desert fourth time round. The songs,
delicate music and the flashing savage adjectives employed in anger. The morning after
the manuscripts, great piles shuddering in the light
and relentless questions probing the hearts that loved
saying the word ‘heart’ over until its meaning multiplied into impossible meanings
The finger a tool and a weapon, splitting the line, the pronoun and the pen
the feather, the father, the children, years belying kindnesses
until redemption was a kitchen filled with light
and Creeley padding across the floor of the poem no shoes no issues
singing inwards dancing out
he’s gliding out from paintings on the gallery walls
this poem’s taking us in then out into three-dimensional waking dreams
laying the words down walking around the press carrying the lead
type faces, smoke proofs spelling the news the bleak-eyed story told again
yes, tell’em it’s fun, let’s go.
We are sitting here Mr Creeley, your maps
spread on the floor of the tent
wings of a thunder bird the breeze the motor purring in flying out
the stars the white moon hanging just like you said
we are living and while you’re singing there’s meaning, still no reason to repent.

The Lions at Taronga

The leaves of Tower Bridge are rigged to open
For any taxi I might chance to catch.
They say that when the ravens leave the Tower

It means they’ll use my rain-stained study skylight
As a toilet. I can see Canary Wharf,
A Russian rocket packed around with boosters

Lit up to launch at dawn from Baikonur.
The Blade of Light is cleared for butterflies
To crash-land. When that lens-shaped office block

Much loved public characters who venture into fiction in their mature years are, of course, on a hiding to nothing. Their apprenticeship, their experiences, their intuitions have all been spent or deployed elsewhere. In the case of Robyn Williams, these were as a distinguished science reporter and analyst for the ABC. The knowledge and opinions that he gathered there have been brought to the making of his pre-apocalyptic first novel, 2007. This is, the cover warns, ‘a true story, waiting to happen’. Williams’s mentor in fiction is George Orwell, who is quoted with approval by a cashiered and bibulous former Cambridge don, Cyril, now exiled to a weather station at Cape Grim in north-western Tasmania (site of the world’s purest air, as it happens). Orwell advocated ‘retaining one’s childhood love’ of the things of the natural world, toads not least. The alternative was ‘hatred and leader worship’.

There are times when the act of editorialising seems reckless, if not otiose. Any such column, written on 20 September, runs the dual risk of belatedness – or prematurity. So appalling were the events of 11 September, and so ominous their ramifications, no one can be confident of the likely international developments in coming weeks, days, or even hours. All we can do at ABR is to sympathise with the families of those killed in New York, including a number of Australians, while also following events and covering the issues and inevitable publications in these pages.

At the end of his big book Gallipoli, Les Carlyon observes that if the campaign made more sense ‘it would be a lesser story’. There’s much in what Carlyon says. The 1915 campaign was insignificant in the scale of the Great War; it achieved nothing, and petered out like a forgotten afterthought. It makes little sense, then or now.

It is thus in the intangibles and absurdities of the story, as well as the cracks and fissures of the Gallipoli landscape, that Carlyon makes his narrative. He tells it for a general reader in a vernacular voice, supported by a wealth of research into histories, diaries, and especially the ground itself. This focus on the terrain and soil is the key to this book: it is ultimately not written for historians, keen amateurs, or relatives of servicemen in far-off Britain or Australasia. Rather, it is a passionate book for those making the pilgrimage, real or metaphorical, to pay respects at a sacred site of Australia’s heritage.

‘This is a book about friendship and storytelling’, writes Marilla North in her prologue to this artfully arranged selection of correspondence. It begins in 1928 and covers the next twenty-seven years, chronicling the large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, and Miles Franklin, three of Australia’s most vital, fluent, and committed women writers.

The book begins with letters between Cusack and James, with Cusack an intense young teacher based in Broken Hill, longing to travel to England like her more sophisticated and ostensibly glamorous friend. Cusack is methodically making her way as a writer, chafing at the smallness and provincialism of Australia – a frustration that finds expression a few years later when she and Miles Franklin collaborate on Pioneers on Parade (1939), their lampoon of Sydney’s pompous sesquicentennial celebrations. There is a certain amount of schoolgirlish glee in this section of the book, which is rather difficult for the reader to share; not only is it often impossible to connect with a previous generation’s sense of humour, but Marilla North and the authors provide few real clues to the reason why Pioneers was considered so outrageous. A fascinating letter in this context, however, is written by the English critic St John Irvine, who takes it upon himself to warn Franklin that her literary reputation is in danger because of her collaboration with Miss Cusack on such a ‘smarty-smart’ novel, and expressing the hope that ‘the shock of receiving such a letter as this will make you pull yourself together’. (There is no evidence that Franklin shared this letter with Cusack: did she think Irvine might have had a point?)

In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst. Cronin continues to ‘just go on your nerve’, as Frank O’Hara wrote. There is the same mock candour as well as the same, often-disjointed tones as in her first book, Zoetrope (1995): ‘I do not have the time / To transform my life into a vision.’ Bestseller, Cronin’s fourth book, does signal changing preoccupations, as its title suggests. More specifically, it centres on the life of the Poet. Although Cronin’s images can lead into perky unexpected sequences, this book would have been stronger if some poems had been omitted, especially some of the shorter ones, such as ‘Cheers’, ‘Searching’ or ‘Then, Then, Then’. Some poems fizzle out in less interesting directions than those they seem to promise; they pick garrulously but semi-consciously at random images – ‘the trees wobbling like boxers / with their ungrouped leaves / moving like sand through / my outstretched eyes’.

How to shape the fiction of one’s life? There is something to be said for the no-nonsense narrative thrust of Errol Flynn in kicking off My Wicked, Wicked Ways, one of the most readable and also self-consciously ‘literary’ of all showbiz autobiographies. ‘Detesting’ books that begin after the fashion of ‘there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard’, the actor-autobiographer gets straight to what he archly calls ‘the meat of the matter’: his tumultuous film career and the associated carnal exploits that constituted his notoriety.

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?

Between the two poles of first-person narration and the inaccurately named ‘third-person’ narration lies another, rarely glimpsed, possibility. This is second-person narration, and it is something of a freak: Michel Butor’s La Modification and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City are among the rare examples.

Second-person narration always looks odd, perhaps in part because it is so rare but mainly because of the ambiguities it inevitably entails. Take the opening of the final story in Tom Petsinis’s new collection, The Lion Tamer:

This book tells how the Irish government gradually rearranged its methods of convict transportation, from a variety of destinations in North America to a single destination on the far side of the world. The story takes place predominately between 1783 and 1791, from the independence of the United States (which effectively closed American ports to British and Irish transports) to the sailing of the Queen, the first ship to take convicts direct from Ireland to New South Wales. It is a subject that has never been properly examined, mainly because we tend to assume that the Irish point of view – as far as administration goes – was nothing more than a footnote to the British.

Don Edgar has brought his wealth of experience in monitoring Australian society and its institutions to reflect on the changes now taking place and what needs to be done about them. The Patchwork Nation summarises the key aspects of social change, identifies the challenges associated with them (specifically for government) and sets out a coherent strategy for reform built around a strengthened role for local communities in responding to the forces of global economic change. This involves covering a huge amount of material. In this regard, the book succeeds in bringing together a number of disparate trends, ideas and themes, and makes them accessible to a wide audience. The book also contains a good deal of insight into the changes taking place. Yet there are questions to be asked about the extent to which some aspects of Edgar’s analysis are as compelling as the solutions he proposes. While many of the proposals developed in Section 3 are attractive, they do not always link with the forces for change described in Sections 1 and 2, and they are not always convincing.

At school assemblies, when I was ten, I was required to recite a pledge which ended with the words ‘and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law’. The novels reviewed here are all concerned with family, and the way in which young people operate within and outside it.

The gardener of the family has a dilemma. If she wants a brand-new compost bin, she must get an ‘A’ on the final project of the school year. So begins Harriet Huxtable and the Purpose of Rats (Scholastic, $11.95 pb, 136 pp). Her teacher has said that the project must include interesting facts about pets. The trouble is, Harriet’s beloved pet turtle has inconveniently died that very day. After trying out various suggestions from family and classmates, Harriet captures her pet in an old shed. Her best friend’s wheelchair rolls onto a rat’s tail, and the adventures – not all of them academic – begin. This novel successfully conveys the secure world of the ten-year-old: too young for real scholastic pressure and operating within the secure base of a loving family. The most serious thing in Harriet’s life is wondering whether wrapping a pair of undies around a rat bite will help stop her getting the plague. A promising first novel.

In March 1944, George Szego, a sixteen-year-old student in a provincial town, watched apprehensively as German troops replaced its Hungarian army posts. The massive deportations that ended in the near annihilation of Hungarian Jewry in the extermination camps and slave gangs of Eastern Europe were not long in coming. Szego had been christened a Roman Catholic. His Jewish parents converted in the 1920s at the height of anti-Semitic sentiment and prohibitions, mainly by reason of prudence and ambition, but also because of the genuine admiration that gifted and educated Jews often conceived for the great cultures that have – if only grudgingly – harboured them, an admiration that found uncustomary expression in Szego senior’s pride in his military exploits and his desire to be a ‘Christian gentleman’.

In Neil Armfield’s recent production of Dallas Winmar’s play Aliwa – about the struggle of the Davis family in Western Australia in the 1930s to avoid becoming members of the stolen generations – the character of Aunty Dot Collard, Jack Davis’s sister, was played brilliantly by Deborah Mailman. Aunty Dot herself, flown over to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, introduced the show and then sat on the side of the stage on an old red sofa smiling benignly, and interfering occasionally, as she watched her history being performed. But which was the ‘real’ Aunty Dot was something the show left up to the audience to decide.

Greg Dening, in Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1993), quoted Roland Barthes to point out that history is a performance. Performance, in turn, is a powerful way of strategically (re)presenting history. The theatre uses space to stage place, and it uses people to stage subjectivity. Because it is always experienced in the present – even when narrating past events – and because it is so good at reflecting on itself, it is a very good medium for problematising the ‘natural’. Theatre can explore the fragmented colonial subject because its performers are present in different modes, and can keep drawing their audiences’ attention to that fact. It can show borders because it is itself a liminal space. In its most interesting contemporary forms, it is a site of instability and, at least in the fascinating collection of plays in this anthology, of resistance.

Those readers who were sympathetic to the arguments in The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft et al., will experience in Post-Colonial Transformation the pleasures of engaging with a reinvigorated friend. For others, like this reviewer, who found this influential earlier volume both theoretically and politically troublesome, Ashcroft’s new book will provoke familiar objections.

The Empire Writes Back quickly won scholarly fame and notoriety for its contentious take on the term ‘post-colonial’. Claiming ‘post-coloniality’ as the abstract existential condition of all cultures whose ‘subjectivity has been constituted in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism’, Ashcroft et al. suggested that white settler societies stood in the same relation to colonialism as those societies that had experienced the full economic and political brutality of colonial domination. Post-coloniality, they insisted, was the proper name for an aesthetic or literary style rather than for struggles for independence in the formerly colonised world.