What is it about Paul Keating that so fascinated his retainers? Six years ago, John Edwards wrote a massive biography-cum-memoir taking Keating’s story to 1993. Now Don Watson has produced an even heftier tome. Narrower in chronological span – 1992 to 1996 – Watson is broader in his interests, more personal, more passionate. While not the masterpiece it might have been, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart remains the most compelling contemporary portrait of an Australian prime minister. Paul Keating has found his Boswell.

Recollections is really three books in one: a subtle and sympathetic analysis of the many facets of the twenty-fourth prime minister; a narrative of high – and low – politics in the Keating years; and a compendium of the political wit and wisdom of Don Watson.

In Youth, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began with Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life (1997). We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible. But there is little doubt that it is autobiographical, if not autobiography; if it is a novel, then the claim resides essentially in its being an exploration of mood and feeling, rather than external events – with perhaps an occasional fictional elaboration. Whatever the case, Coetzee is intent on tracking the Siberian wastes of himself.

This is done with singular ruthlessness as the central character struggles to find self-realisation. Determined to stand alone at the age of nineteen – self-supporting, scornful of family, at odds with South Africa (while not being at all political) – he constantly interrogates everything he does, or is about to do, and lurches into a compensatory passivity. In Cape Town, an older, more experienced woman moves in on him – on rather than with, since ‘he can’t remember inviting her; he has merely failed to resist’. For a time, until he finds himself falling behind in the class, he is attracted by the purity of mathematics. He will be an artist, he decides, a poet. But he is also fatalistic: destiny is to reveal itself, in part through experience, whatever that may entail. Art, if necessary, must come out of the contemptible side of himself. It has plenty of opportunity. In Cape Town, an unenthusiastic coupling results in the girl having an abortion, which she has to arrange and pay for herself. In London, he effects a particularly bloody deflowering and, although the girl is a close friend of his cousin, cannot stir himself to make a phone call after the event.

It’s the silence. Even by the river, my ears are straining. It’s the silence. At this moment it’s a warmish humid silence with the grass outside lushly mesmerising the eye. Then there’s the drone of a fly. And the hum of the fridge. And down by the river at dawn, where I sat watching this morning’s mist melt over the water with the poet Judy Beveridge, there was suddenly from the far bank the rippling improvisations of a lyrebird.

This is a wonderful place. Frequently, I have silently thanked Arthur Boyd for this gift of his home, and for the blessing of my time here. I am working with the composer Jonathan Mills on a chamber opera, The Eternity Man, which has been short-listed for an opera competition. In a few weeks, we’ll be in London collaborating with musicians and singers. For now, we’re working in this rich, unsettling silence. I’m scratching for words. Jonathan is scratching for sounds. Amidst this provocative silence, we’re both listening for the stir of our embryonic opera growing in our heads.

I am liberated from all my routines, with huge tracts of time. Sometimes I walk into the silence and start talking to myself, sometimes obsessively on the same sore topics, like a rat trapped in the four-am-morning-blues wheel. Other times, and these I prefer, I meld with the silence and let my eyes take over.

Advertisements asked ‘Which twin has the Toni?’
Our mothers were supposed to be non-plussed.
Dense paragraphs of technical baloney
Explained the close resemblance of the phoney
To the Expensive Perm. It worked on trust.

The New York City Opera could not have known when they programmed a revival of John Philip Souza’s The Glass Blower just how appropriate it would be post-September 11. The opera, a pastiche of Gilbert and Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw and Franz Lehár, was first produced in 1913 but harked back to the war with Spain in 1898, which gave the USA its empire in the Caribbean and Pacific. Among other joys, it contains an Act One finale reminiscent of the ‘Ascot Gavotte’ from My Fair Lady, a scene in a factory that invokes the language of Major Barbara, a newsreel of the storming of San Juan Hill by Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and an orgy of American patriotism, summed up in the phrase ‘Remember the Maine’ (the US ship whose sinking in Havana harbour triggered off the war).

At the end of Act Two, set in a glass factory, the union is about to call a strike when war with Spain is announced: ‘There is only one Union now,’ proclaims the hero. ‘And that is the US of A.’ An eagle, bearing the stars and stripes in its beak descends, and the workers rush to enlist to fight in Cuba. It is hard to imagine a better analogy for the period from which the USA is gradually emerging, as the triumph of the Taliban’s defeat gives way to increasing doubts about the country’s ability to control the latest fighting in the Middle East.

‘Post 9/11’ has become the alibi for everything: the subways run less efficiently, people are friendlier; crime has declined. New Yorkers still talk of where they were when it happened, and there is ongoing controversy over the plans and costs of rebuilding ‘Ground Zero’. Airport security is noticeably tighter, and photo identification is demanded almost everywhere, though, as it is hardly ever recorded, it is hard to see why showing a driver’s licence to a bored guard is regarded as increasing anyone’s security. A man, collecting for the homeless, hectors passers-by to contribute ‘for your country’. The box-office success of Spiderman is explained by the need for Americans to see the good guys win.

‘... the reasons why anybody is an expatriate, or why another chooses to return home, are such personal ones that the question can only be answered in a personal way.’

Patrick White, 'The Prodigal Son'

At seven o’clock on the morning of 2 February 1999, I was due at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide to relieve my older sister at my mother’s bedside, where she had been all night. The alarm was set for six. At five-thirty, I was woken by the phone; my mother had died, as we had known for a couple of days that she would, from complications following a cerebral haemorrhage. Before it happened, she had been fragile but functional; we had worried in a general way about her health, which had never been good, but nobody could have predicted or prevented the manner of her death.

By the time we left the hospital, the sun had risen and the family had already begun to reconfigure itself; with the lynchpin and peacemaker gone, it remained to be seen whether my father and his three daughters could close ranks and carry on. We walked out of the cool, hushed building into an Adelaide summer morning, through a rose garden whose perfume had begun to be liberated by the heat; every day it had wafted up to and through the open window of the room where she lay. She had been a student of roses, and their tender nurse; she grew them in each of the four gardens of her adult life.

She was unconscious for several days before she died, and nobody really knows what, or how much, unconscious people can take in. She died peacefully in a pretty room at a quiet hour with her first-born at her bedside; it’s as much as anyone could reasonably ask of death. But I hope she knew those roses were there. I hope she took them with her.

‘During the past ten years I had turned myself into a kind of public animal ... giving talks, programming festivals, making friends, making enemies ... I missed the anonymity and absorption of my twenties. I wanted to write again. I wanted, simply, to be.
(Peter Rose, Rose Boys)

Eighteen months earlier, in the winter of 1997, I resigned from a lectureship in the Melbourne University English Department after working there for seventeen years; I gave my six months’ notice, and, five days before Christmas, I drove home to Adelaide for good, with my thighs covered in little round black bruises from bashing into the corners of tea-chests late at night when I was too exhausted from packing to walk in a straight line. It’s 750 kilometres, and I sang the whole way.

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How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

It is tempting, and dangerous, for a writer to return perpetually to the obsessions that drive him. The Holocaust and its manifold aftermaths is a literary seam in danger of being mined to exhaustion. But Zable’s heritage, replete with a strong Yiddish-Polish culture, is so rich, his approach so fresh, that his readers will follow him willingly down some well-worn paths.

First, a disclaimer. Since 1975 I’ve had a sneaking affection for Jim Cairns. At that time, I was flirting with various environmental causes – as you do at the age of nine. I circulated some petitions at my primary school calling for the preservation of the Tasmanian south-west from its concrete-crazed Hydroelectricity Commission. I forwarded these to a string of political power-brokers, identified rather shrewdly by their appearances on the ABC news. 

Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.