Something like a double helix of dialectical thinking winds its graceful way through these ‘eight lessons’. Ideas and theories about the nature of human (and other) life and how to live it, about the workings and the relative merits of logic, reason, belief, and faith, are sketched, rehearsed, debated, and set in ...
Something like a double helix of dialectical thinking winds its graceful way through these ‘eight lessons’. Ideas and theories about the nature of human (and other) life and how to live it, about the workings and the relative merits of logic, reason, belief, and faith, are sketched, rehearsed, debated, and set in opposition to each other throughout these eight episodes in the life of J.M. Coetzee’s heroine.
Elizabeth Costello is an elderly and distinguished Australian novelist with a dutiful son, a hostile daughter-in-law, and a sister as distinguished and singular – though in a very different way – as herself. Her reputation rests chiefly on the book regarded as her masterpiece, The House on Eccles Street, a novel that liberates Joyce’s Molly Bloom from the confines of her author, her house, and her hero husband, and lets her loose on the streets of Dublin.
Custom Article Title: Robin Grove reviews 'Mao’s Last Dancer' by Li Cunxin
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There were seven of them, as in a folk tale. The family was too poor to put shoes on their feet. They lived in a village called New. Hard though life was, they knew it would be worse without Kindly Leader, who was carrying the land into prosperity and joy. At present, however, the seven sons had little to eat.
Book 1 Title: Mao’s Last Dancer
Book Author: Li Cunxin
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $29.95 pb, 460 pp, 067004024X
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There were seven of them, as in a folk tale. The family was too poor to put shoes on their feet. They lived in a village called New. Hard though life was, they knew it would be worse without Kindly Leader, who was carrying the land into prosperity and joy. At present, however, the seven sons had little to eat. So wretched was the village that coal was mixed with dirt to help it last longer; they plundered rats’ burrows to steal whatever the rats stored there; chickens were too underfed to lay, the oxen too weak to draw the plough, and the little goat died of starvation. All the brothers seemed doomed to labour in the fields as their father had, without so much as a glimpse of a brighter world. They were like the frog born in a deep well that could never jump out, however it tried. What no one knew was that hidden amongst the seven sons was a prince who would help to rescue them all.
At this point, the folk tale stops, for the gentle optimism at its root is hardly warranted by the facts. In reality, four Beijing dignitaries arrived in the village school. They were there to select students to study ballet and to serve in Mao’s revolution. The sixth child of the Li family, Cunxin, was suddenly, almost accidentally, picked out of his freezing classroom and subjected to extreme physical interrogation. They wrenched his knees backwards to test the hip-joint’s flexibility. While holding one of his legs straight, they cranked up the other excruciatingly, tearing both hamstrings. But despite the pain, the eleven-year-old went on smiling and was accepted into Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy – because ‘I was determined to be chosen’.
Custom Article Title: Tony Birch reviews 'The History Wars' by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, and 'Whitewash' edited by Robert Manne
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Towards the end of his informative introduction, Robert Manne, the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, outlines the collective intention of the book’s nineteen contributors. He refers to Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), a revisionist text dealing with early colonial history and violence in nineteenth-century Tasmania, as ‘so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book’ ...
Book 1 Title: The History Wars
Book Author: Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 284 pp, 052285091X
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Whitewash
Book 2 Subtitle: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history
Book 2 Author: Robert Manne
Book 2 Biblio: Black Inc., $29.95 pb, 385 pp, 0975076906
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
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Towards the end of his informative introduction, Robert Manne, the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, outlines the collective intention of the book’s nineteen contributors. He refers to Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), a revisionist text dealing with early colonial history and violence in nineteenth-century Tasmania, as ‘so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book’. Whitewash proceeds to unpack Windschuttle’s polemic with intellectual precision. Manne also links Windschuttle’s work to a more general attack on Indigenous peoples throughout Australia in the last decade. He cites a range of populist conservatives who have either aided Windschuttle’s book or been ‘so easily misled’ by it. This group includes a cohort of commentators who regularly contribute to the conservative journal Quadrant and a number of print media journalists (a list of usual suspects too voluminous to record here).
Whitewash includes essays by major writers within the humanities in Australia. Unfortunately, only two Indigenous writers, Peggy Patrick and Greg Lehman, are included in the collection. Given the number of Indigenous writers and academics in Australia today, and given the strength of their critiques of colonisation, this small representation looks like an oversight. Not that some form of paternalistic tokenism should be applied to such texts. Some critics have labelled the ‘Windschuttle debate’ as little more than a ‘sideshow’. We should move forward by listening to, and reading, more Indigenous scholars. This would identify a wider intellectual voice within Indigenous Australia, able and prepared to advance ideas within the mainstream intellectual community. Such an outcome would also mitigate the at times crude and deliberately anti-intellectual polemic being constructed by conservative ideologues.
What Whitewash does achieve is a necessary and articulate demolition of the ‘thesis’ presented in Windschuttle’s Fabrication: that historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan had exaggerated and ‘fabricated’ the number of Indigenous people murdered by the invading British in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The first essay in Whitewash, ‘Fantasy Island’, by University of Tasmania historian James Boyce, is of such quality, in its detailed research and intellectual scholarship. By the end, the title of Windschuttle’s book begins to seem full of irony.
Some reviewers like to stamp their own character on a review in its opening sentences. I prefer, however, to share with you some of Alan Frost’s words:
When I was a boy, living in a village set against a beach in Far North Queensland, I was struck by two kinds of trees. Ringing the beach at intervals were great ‘beach-nut’ trees (Calophyllum inophyllum). As early photographs of the beach do not show them, these trees must have been planted by European settlers. In my time, when they were perhaps seventy or eighty years old, they were up to fifty feet high, and they spread fifty feet in diameter … And scattered about the littoral were tall hoop and kauri pines … One behind our house may have been more than one hundred feet tall. It was said that this kauri pine was a beacon for ships at sea.
Book 1 Title: The Global Reach of Empire
Book 1 Subtitle: Britain’s maritime expansion in the Indian and Pacific oceans, 1764–1815
Book Author: Alan Frost
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $59.95 hb, 397 pp
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Some reviewers like to stamp their own character on a review in its opening sentences. I prefer, however, to share with you some of Alan Frost’s words:
When I was a boy, living in a village set against a beach in Far North Queensland, I was struck by two kinds of trees. Ringing the beach at intervals were great ‘beach-nut’ trees (Calophyllum inophyllum). As early photographs of the beach do not show them, these trees must have been planted by European settlers. In my time, when they were perhaps seventy or eighty years old, they were up to fifty feet high, and they spread fifty feet in diameter … And scattered about the littoral were tall hoop and kauri pines … One behind our house may have been more than one hundred feet tall. It was said that this kauri pine was a beacon for ships at sea.
The beach-nut trees met other needs. They offered shelter from the tropic sun. Their hard fruit went well from slingshots … For me, particularly, [their hanging vines] were a blind from which I might watch the sun rise over Hinchinbrook Island, and see the Endeavour pass the gaps in the screen of islands that afforded James Cook glimpses of Rockingham Bay.
Had I indeed been a naval officer like James Cook, I should of course have viewed the trees differently … I should have seen the beach-nut trees as potential sources of frame timber and plank. And, like Cook and Banks, had I visited New Zealand, I should have transformed the extensive fields of ‘flax’ into canvas, cables and cordage.
As generally happens, your note of the recent death of ‘Clem’ Christesen (ABR, August 2003) appears to give him full credit for the early days of Meanjin. Judith Wright is, unfortunately, unable to correct that view of history herself. From what I have been told of those gestational wartime years, her role was no less significant than Christesen’s. Furthermore, she certainly did a great deal (probably most) of the practical work that is essential to sustain such a journal, especially one that was determined to open windows to worlds different from the one represented by the Bulletin. As their contemporary, the Queensland poet Val Vallis, once put it to me, poetry ‘had to have a whiff of eucalyptus about it for the Bulletin’. Certainly, Douglas Stewart, the redoubtable editor of The Red Page, did not relish the new competition, and Vallis recalls being told, with more than a touch of schadenfreude, when work appeared in the fledgling Meanjin: ‘We knocked that back at the “Bully”.’
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Judith Wright and Meanjin
Dear Editor,
As generally happens, your note of the recent death of ‘Clem’ Christesen (ABR, August 2003) appears to give him full credit for the early days of Meanjin. Judith Wright is, unfortunately, unable to correct that view of history herself. From what I have been told of those gestational wartime years, her role was no less significant than Christesen’s. Furthermore, she certainly did a great deal (probably most) of the practical work that is essential to sustain such a journal, especially one that was determined to open windows to worlds different from the one represented by the Bulletin. As their contemporary, the Queensland poet Val Vallis, once put it to me, poetry ‘had to have a whiff of eucalyptus about it for the Bulletin’. Certainly, Douglas Stewart, the redoubtable editor of The Red Page, did not relish the new competition, and Vallis recalls being told, with more than a touch of schadenfreude, when work appeared in the fledgling Meanjin: ‘We knocked that back at the “Bully”.’
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Am I alone in becoming suspicious when a writer’s previous profession is the focus of a publicist’s blurb? To me, it smacks of desperation. ‘I can’t think of anything to say about this writing,’ such an approach confesses, ‘but let me tell you about the writer’s stellar career as a motor mechanic, or their prowess in tae kwon do, or their interest in growing orchids.’ Call me an old New Critic, but I prefer to read the work and to let the author lurk darkly in the background.
Book 1 Title: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
Book Author: John Murray
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $29.95 pb, 274 pp
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Am I alone in becoming suspicious when a writer’s previous profession is the focus of a publicist’s blurb? To me, it smacks of desperation. ‘I can’t think of anything to say about this writing,’ such an approach confesses, ‘but let me tell you about the writer’s stellar career as a motor mechanic, or their prowess in tae kwon do, or their interest in growing orchids.’ Call me an old New Critic, but I prefer to read the work and to let the author lurk darkly in the background.
Not one word is wasted in Sir Nicholas Shehadie’s memoir, A Life Worth Living. Almost all the words are. This book is a triumph of lack of style over lack of substance. It’s a pity to attach such a proud word as ‘book’ to a publication like this, as it is to attach ‘music’ to two-fingered renditions of Chopsticks. Shehadie is no writer, nor does he pretend to be, which is a shame. A little pretence might have tricked up the work from being a tedious CV to a worthy member of Australia’s naïve school of sports memoirs, the current champion of which is Dawn Fraser’s energetic Dawn: One Hell of a Life (2001), with its patches of vivid, detailed recollection and clean, functional prose.
Book 1 Title: ‘A Life Worth Living'
Book Author: Nicholas Shehadie
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $29.95 pb, 255 pp
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Not one word is wasted in Sir Nicholas Shehadie’s memoir, A Life Worth Living. Almost all the words are. This book is a triumph of lack of style over lack of substance. It’s a pity to attach such a proud word as ‘book’ to a publication like this, as it is to attach ‘music’ to two-fingered renditions of Chopsticks. Shehadie is no writer, nor does he pretend to be, which is a shame. A little pretence might have tricked up the work from being a tedious CV to a worthy member of Australia’s naïve school of sports memoirs, the current champion of which is Dawn Fraser’s energetic Dawn: One Hell of a Life (2001), with its patches of vivid, detailed recollection and clean, functional prose.
I first met a refugee from Laos, a teacher in her former life, while working part-time in a miserable egg-packing factory in the early 1980s. I had only a hazy notion of what had brought Ping to this country. Christopher Kremmer’s Bamboo Palace has now clarified those circumstances, and what a sad and painfully human story it is: of a 600-year-old socially iniquitous, politically benign kingdom destroyed and replaced by a totalitarian state.
Book 1 Title: Bamboo Palace
Book 1 Subtitle: Discovering the lost dynasty of Laos
Book Author: Christopher Kremmer
Book 1 Biblio: Flamingo, $29.95 pb, 267 pp
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I first met a refugee from Laos, a teacher in her former life, while working part-time in a miserable egg-packing factory in the early 1980s. I had only a hazy notion of what had brought Ping to this country. Christopher Kremmer’s Bamboo Palace has now clarified those circumstances, and what a sad and painfully human story it is: of a 600-year-old socially iniquitous, politically benign kingdom destroyed and replaced by a totalitarian state.
The scene of Paul Hetherington’s ‘verse novel’, Blood and Old Belief, is established in the opening stanza: ‘ironbarks that wander / on ancient hillsides /stringybarks and cypresses / blackening horizons / in the western country.’ The stanza unrolls in a leisurely twelve-line sentence, but working in opposition, in tension, are the terse trimeters of each line. The effect is to simulate an eye’s isolation of individual elements of this rural landscape. From the start, we are in the hands of a skilled verse practitioner for whom ‘conservative’ metrical forms are both the bedrock and the supple medium of the story that he tells.
Book 1 Title: Blood and Old Belief
Book Author: Paul Hetherington
Book 1 Biblio: Pandanus, $19.80 pb, 84 pp
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The scene of Paul Hetherington’s ‘verse novel’, Blood and Old Belief, is established in the opening stanza: ‘ironbarks that wander / on ancient hillsides /stringybarks and cypresses / blackening horizons / in the western country.’ The stanza unrolls in a leisurely twelve-line sentence, but working in opposition, in tension, are the terse trimeters of each line. The effect is to simulate an eye’s isolation of individual elements of this rural landscape. From the start, we are in the hands of a skilled verse practitioner for whom ‘conservative’ metrical forms are both the bedrock and the supple medium of the story that he tells.
While ‘history wars’ rage, some of the subjects of the wars have quietly slipped a significant book into the market. Has the book received significant attention? Don’t be silly. For a start, it is not couched in the winners-versus-losers terminology of the history wars. It is a difficult book to pin down, certainly not susceptible to quick newspaper coverage or, heaven forfend, television grabs. This reader could imagine at least some of the contributors to Blacklines mounting a convincing case that the current debate is a diversion from far more fundamental questions of representation of Australia’s indigenous peoples in history, anthropology and various media.
Book 1 Title: Blacklines
Book 1 Subtitle: Contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians
Book Author: Michele Grossman et al.
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $34.95 pb, 258 pp
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While ‘history wars’ rage, some of the subjects of the wars have quietly slipped a significant book into the market. Has the book received significant attention? Don’t be silly. For a start, it is not couched in the winners-versus-losers terminology of the history wars. It is a difficult book to pin down, certainly not susceptible to quick newspaper coverage or, heaven forfend, television grabs. This reader could imagine at least some of the contributors to Blacklines mounting a convincing case that the current debate is a diversion from far more fundamental questions of representation of Australia’s indigenous peoples in history, anthropology and various media.
Kevin Brophy shows us his skills as an entertainer in Explorations in Creative Writing. He has read widely and has a diverse collection of tales to tell, from the mundane to the fantastic. The story, anecdote and fragment are all part of his performance. We shift between a reading of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, to the ‘agenda of the couch’ and even to writers’ accounts of visits to analysts (Lacan’s consulting rooms – shabby!). Like the best entertainers, Brophy knows how to tell a good story. His writing has an admirable lightness of touch, alternately reflective and playful, and conveys a sense of the vitality of its subject matter.
Book 1 Title: Explorations in Creative Writing
Book Author: Kevin Brophy
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $34.95 pb, 246 pp
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Kevin Brophy shows us his skills as an entertainer in Explorations in Creative Writing. He has read widely and has a diverse collection of tales to tell, from the mundane to the fantastic. The story, anecdote and fragment are all part of his performance. We shift between a reading of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, to the ‘agenda of the couch’ and even to writers’ accounts of visits to analysts (Lacan’s consulting rooms – shabby!). Like the best entertainers, Brophy knows how to tell a good story. His writing has an admirable lightness of touch, alternately reflective and playful, and conveys a sense of the vitality of its subject matter.
The opening scene of From Rice to Riches has the author travelling in a taxi with a camera crew through the city of Bengbu in China’s central Anhui province. A furtive glance in the mirror of her powder compact convinces Jane Hutcheon that they are being followed by Chinese officials. Determined to escape their pursuers in order to obtain the interviews needed for an investigative report on the pollution of the nearby Huai River, the crew twice changes taxi before diving into a crowded street market.
Book 1 Title: From Rice to Riches
Book 1 Subtitle: A personal journey through a changing China
Book Author: Jane Hutcheon
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $30 pb, 371 pp
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The opening scene of From Rice to Riches has the author travelling in a taxi with a camera crew through the city of Bengbu in China’s central Anhui province. A furtive glance in the mirror of her powder compact convinces Jane Hutcheon that they are being followed by Chinese officials. Determined to escape their pursuers in order to obtain the interviews needed for an investigative report on the pollution of the nearby Huai River, the crew twice changes taxi before diving into a crowded street market.
Thanks to Alison Broinowski and Scribe, we now have an Australian booklet that seeks to make sense of the recent war in Iraq and of Australia’s participation in the war. Whatever shortcomings the book has – and shortcomings are inevitable when the slow art of book publishing seeks to keep up with contemporary events – its presence in the public arena is important, and both author and publisher have been brave in producing it so quickly.
Book 1 Title: Howard’s War
Book Author: Alison Broinowski
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $19.95 pb, 144 pp
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Thanks to Alison Broinowski and Scribe, we now have an Australian booklet that seeks to make sense of the recent war in Iraq and of Australia’s participation in the war. Whatever shortcomings the book has – and shortcomings are inevitable when the slow art of book publishing seeks to keep up with contemporary events – its presence in the public arena is important, and both author and publisher have been brave in producing it so quickly.
Custom Article Title: The Last Respectable Prejudice?
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Article Title: The Last Respectable Prejudice?
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Is anti-Americanism one of the last respectable prejudices in Australia, or are cries of anti-Americanism a way of silencing reasonable criticism? At the risk of being injured while straddling the fence, I will argue that, although the Bush administration has often behaved like an imperial bully-boy, the US has become the whipping boy for the anxieties of many nations and people. A broad anti-Americanism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due to the resentment many feel about US power and the policies of this administration. Although I sympathise with many of its critics, the associated slide of many Australians into anti-Americanism is unfortunate. Presidents come and go, but America’s importance in our world and imaginations is much greater. Besides, the US is far too diverse to hate.
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Is anti-Americanism one of the last respectable prejudices in Australia, or are cries of anti-Americanism a way of silencing reasonable criticism? At the risk of being injured while straddling the fence, I will argue that, although the Bush administration has often behaved like an imperial bully-boy, the US has become the whipping boy for the anxieties of many nations and people. A broad anti-Americanism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due to the resentment many feel about US power and the policies of this administration. Although I sympathise with many of its critics, the associated slide of many Australians into anti-Americanism is unfortunate. Presidents come and go, but America’s importance in our world and imaginations is much greater. Besides, the US is far too diverse to hate.
Salman Rushdie recently wrote that, whereas Muslim countries seem to resent US power and arrogance, Westerners outside the US seem more vexed by Americans themselves – their emotionality, patriotism and obesity. But which Americans are they referring to? There are 290 million of them. ‘America feels itself to be humanity in miniature,’ said the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. This assessment reflects the self-centred view of many in the new middle kingdom. Yet, the US has a strong claim to being the most multicultural society on earth.
A few weeks ago, I went to see a painting in Branford, Connecticut. The owners live in a large house surrounded by woods. The picture is a fine copy of an early seventeenth-century portrait by Anthony Van Dyck. From my precarious vantage point on top of a wobbly stepladder, the canvas appeared to be machine-woven, which means that it cannot have been made, or paint applied to it, before the 1820s. Fortunately, the owners already know this, and are philosophical.
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A few weeks ago, I went to see a painting in Branford, Connecticut. The owners live in a large house surrounded by woods. The picture is a fine copy of an early seventeenth-century portrait by Anthony Van Dyck. From my precarious vantage point on top of a wobbly stepladder, the canvas appeared to be machine-woven, which means that it cannot have been made, or paint applied to it, before the 1820s. Fortunately, the owners already know this, and are philosophical.
Custom Article Title: A Comet of Wonder Fallen to Earth: The diaries of Miles Franklin by Paul Brunton
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When Miles Franklin received her six complimentary author’s copies of My Brilliant Career in September 1901 at her family’s property, Stillwater, twenty kilometres south-west of Goulburn, she was a few weeks short of her twenty-second birthday. It must have been a moment of intense pride to hold the sturdily bound copy of her first novel, published by the distinguished Edinburgh firm of William Blackwood & Sons.
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When Miles Franklin received her six complimentary author’s copies of My Brilliant Career in September 1901 at her family’s property, Stillwater, twenty kilometres south-west of Goulburn, she was a few weeks short of her twenty-second birthday. It must have been a moment of intense pride to hold the sturdily bound copy of her first novel, published by the distinguished Edinburgh firm of William Blackwood & Sons.
The book received many positive, though not uncritical, reviews both in Australia and Britain. In the Bulletin of 28 September, under the heading ‘A Bookful of Sunlight’, A.G. Stephens, the doyen of Australian critics, wrote:
It is the very first Australian novel to be published … the book is not a notable literary performance; but it is fresh, natural, sincere – and consequently charming … Her book is a warm embodiment of Australian life, as tonic as bush air, as aromatic as bush trees, and as clear and honest as bush sunlight.
This is a crime novel written largely in headlines. Lethal Factor is replete with references to such choice items as bio-terrorism, the conflict in the Balkans, paedophilia, Nazi war criminals, strange goings-on in the Catholic Church and academic plagiarism. Such manifold topicality is no guarantee of success in a thriller, and the particular merit of Lethal Factor lies not in its wide coverage of current affairs but rather the attention it pays to the detail of everyday life and relationships.
Book 1 Title: Lethal Factor
Book Author: Gabrielle Lord
Book 1 Biblio: Hodder, $29.95 pb, 317 pp
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This is a crime novel written largely in headlines. Lethal Factor is replete with references to such choice items as bio-terrorism, the conflict in the Balkans, paedophilia, Nazi war criminals, strange goings-on in the Catholic Church and academic plagiarism. Such manifold topicality is no guarantee of success in a thriller, and the particular merit of Lethal Factor lies not in its wide coverage of current affairs but rather the attention it pays to the detail of everyday life and relationships.
Last year’s issue of Papertiger (a poetry journal on CD-ROM) contained a piece called ‘Transglobal Express’, a collaboration between Mike Ladd and outfit called Newaural Net. ‘Transglobal Express’ is an ‘audio poem’, the text of which is spoken by strangers on an Internet connection and set to a heavily percussive soundtrack. Clearly, Ladd has a fondness and flair for the unusual poetic enterprise. But I wonder, reading Rooms and Sequences, whether big ideas are too often pursued at the expense of careful composition.
Book 1 Title: Rooms and Sequences
Book Author: Mike Ladd
Book 1 Biblio: Salt, $27.95 pb, 148 pp
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Last year’s issue of Papertiger (a poetry journal on CD-ROM) contained a piece called ‘Transglobal Express’, a collaboration between Mike Ladd and outfit called Newaural Net. ‘Transglobal Express’ is an ‘audio poem’, the text of which is spoken by strangers on an Internet connection and set to a heavily percussive soundtrack. Clearly, Ladd has a fondness and flair for the unusual poetic enterprise. But I wonder, reading Rooms and Sequences, whether big ideas are too often pursued at the expense of careful composition.
Being known as a personality can’t be all good. For all the fun that goes with quickness and dazzle, it surely becomes a little dangerous when you come to write an autobiography, or a memoir – whatever the distinction between these two terms is. This occurred to me when, passing the buoyant, bow-tied strider depicted on the front cover, I began to read Patrick McCaughey’s new book, subtitled A Memoir. After all, I have known the author for forty years here and there, in this role or that. Indeed, I remember him as a sixth-former, up at university to hear a literature lecture for schools, given by one of the English Department staff. Yellow scarf tossed back over the shoulder, he challenged her vigorously at question time. That’s one to watch, we thought.
Book 1 Title: The Bright Shapes and the True Names
Book 1 Subtitle: A Memoir
Book Author: Patrick McCaughey
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $32 pb, 285 pp
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Being known as a personality can’t be all good. For all the fun that goes with quickness and dazzle, it surely becomes a little dangerous when you come to write an autobiography, or a memoir – whatever the distinction between these two terms is. This occurred to me when, passing the buoyant, bow-tied strider depicted on the front cover, I began to read Patrick McCaughey’s new book, subtitled A Memoir. After all, I have known the author for forty years here and there, in this role or that. Indeed, I remember him as a sixth-former, up at university to hear a literature lecture for schools, given by one of the English Department staff. Yellow scarf tossed back over the shoulder, he challenged her vigorously at question time. That’s one to watch, we thought.
At the beginning and end of The Anatomy of Truth, Kate Wild’s central character, Janey Hunter, asserts that she is ‘just trying to establish a common base from which we can communicate’. The Anatomy of Truth suggests bold investigations into vexed issues, so I will follow Janey’s lead and begin by establishing a common definition of the title of this brave first novel. For the purposes of this review, the science of anatomy is the artificial separation of parts of the human body in order to study their structure and relationship. In a more figurative sense, it is a detailed examination or analysis of the structure of an organisation. And truth is the matter as it really is, a fixed or established standard, pattern or rule that conforms to fact and accuracy, with a hint of allegiance and loyalty.
Book 1 Title: The Anatomy of Truth
Book Author: Kate Wild
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $22 pb, 251 pp
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At the beginning and end of The Anatomy of Truth, Kate Wild’s central character, Janey Hunter, asserts that she is ‘just trying to establish a common base from which we can communicate’. The Anatomy of Truth suggests bold investigations into vexed issues, so I will follow Janey’s lead and begin by establishing a common definition of the title of this brave first novel. For the purposes of this review, the science of anatomy is the artificial separation of parts of the human body in order to study their structure and relationship. In a more figurative sense, it is a detailed examination or analysis of the structure of an organisation. And truth is the matter as it really is, a fixed or established standard, pattern or rule that conforms to fact and accuracy, with a hint of allegiance and loyalty.
Assuming the Chair of a business regulatory authority might not be thought of as an ideal path to media stardom, but Allan Fels showed otherwise. Fels is easily Australia’s best-known cartel buster and the scourge of price-fixing business and anti-competitive behaviour generally. For years he was regularly on the nightly news. In a savage sea of rapacious price-gougers, Fels was the consumer’s friend.
Book 1 Title: Allan Fels
Book 1 Subtitle: A Portrait of Power
Book Author: Fred Brenchley
Book 1 Biblio: John Wiley, $29.95 pb, 310 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Assuming the Chair of a business regulatory authority might not be thought of as an ideal path to media stardom, but Allan Fels showed otherwise. Fels is easily Australia’s best-known cartel buster and the scourge of price-fixing business and anti-competitive behaviour generally. For years he was regularly on the nightly news. In a savage sea of rapacious price-gougers, Fels was the consumer’s friend.
It is interesting to recall the number of times, in book titles alone, that Max Dupain’s name has been linked to ‘Australia’. Joining Dupain’s own Max Dupain’s Australia (1986) and Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes (1988), this new book is the third in a series by his former printer and assistant Jill White. Dupain’s Australians joins the similarly all-inclusive titles of Dupain’s Sydney (1999) and Dupain’s Beaches (2000). The pairing of Dupain with aspects of Australia says much about how we position this photographer as quintessentially ‘local’. Despite his evident contributions to modernism and, I would argue, classical modernism, it is Dupain’s apparent ability to capture a ‘national essence’ that still dominates accounts of his work.
Book 1 Title: Dupain’s Australians
Book Author: Jill White (text by Frank Moorhouse)
Book 1 Biblio: Chapter & Verse, $70 hb, 112 pp
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It is interesting to recall the number of times, in book titles alone, that Max Dupain’s name has been linked to ‘Australia’. Joining Dupain’s own Max Dupain’s Australia (1986) and Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes (1988), this new book is the third in a series by his former printer and assistant Jill White. Dupain’s Australians joins the similarly all-inclusive titles of Dupain’s Sydney (1999) and Dupain’s Beaches (2000). The pairing of Dupain with aspects of Australia says much about how we position this photographer as quintessentially ‘local’. Despite his evident contributions to modernism and, I would argue, classical modernism, it is Dupain’s apparent ability to capture a ‘national essence’ that still dominates accounts of his work.
Writing history combines empiricism, theoretical scaffolding and historical imagination. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, historians are simultaneously concerned with ‘facts’ – their definition, selection and analysis – and captivated by Steven Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’. Historians, drawing on psychoanalysis, have attempted to expose relationships between the inner and outer worlds of individuals and groups in order to write the history of emotions. Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians (1985) clarified that psychoanalysis provided historians not with a ‘handbook of recipes’ but rather with ‘a style of seeing the past’. It allowed historians not only to explore and analyse those aspects of the past the individual and/or nation chose to remember and celebrate, but to interrogate the inner world by examining those aspects of the past they chose to rewrite, amend, reconfigure, deny or forget. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) has been revered and reviled, and some might consider it brave to tackle the evolution of psychoanalytic applications in an historical context in the light of much debunking by feminist historians among many other ‘others’.
Book 1 Title: History on the Couch
Book 1 Subtitle: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis
Book Author: Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $34.95 pb, 248 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Writing history combines empiricism, theoretical scaffolding and historical imagination. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, historians are simultaneously concerned with ‘facts’ – their definition, selection and analysis – and captivated by Steven Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’. Historians, drawing on psychoanalysis, have attempted to expose relationships between the inner and outer worlds of individuals and groups in order to write the history of emotions. Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians (1985) clarified that psychoanalysis provided historians not with a ‘handbook of recipes’ but rather with ‘a style of seeing the past’. It allowed historians not only to explore and analyse those aspects of the past the individual and/or nation chose to remember and celebrate, but to interrogate the inner world by examining those aspects of the past they chose to rewrite, amend, reconfigure, deny or forget. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) has been revered and reviled, and some might consider it brave to tackle the evolution of psychoanalytic applications in an historical context in the light of much debunking by feminist historians among many other ‘others’.
When the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the ensuing row over its 433 Afghan passengers ignited renewed debate about immigration, citizenship and national identity. The Howard government’s subsequent re-election on a platform of border protection and security coincided with the centenary of the first substantial legislation passed by the newly constituted Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was the centrepiece of the White Australia Policy and reflected the new nation’s desire to regulate the composition of its population and culture, free from British interference. This collection of essays, authored by some of the country’s foremost academics in law, history and politics, commemorates that anniversary. It is a timely publication, and demanding in its persistent consideration of what the Australian national project has been and what it could be in the twenty-first century.
Book 1 Title: Legacies of White Australia
Book 1 Subtitle: Race, culture and nation
Book Author: Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $38.95 pb, 280 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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When the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the ensuing row over its 433 Afghan passengers ignited renewed debate about immigration, citizenship and national identity. The Howard government’s subsequent re-election on a platform of border protection and security coincided with the centenary of the first substantial legislation passed by the newly constituted Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was the centrepiece of the White Australia Policy and reflected the new nation’s desire to regulate the composition of its population and culture, free from British interference. This collection of essays, authored by some of the country’s foremost academics in law, history and politics, commemorates that anniversary. It is a timely publication, and demanding in its persistent consideration of what the Australian national project has been and what it could be in the twenty-first century.
Political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s exposed many of the inbuilt biases of the English language. In the tricky matter of ensuring a fair go for all, we have been made aware of the hidden warps and imbalances that exist in our everyday expressions – now dubbed sexist, racist, ageist and so on. J.M. Arthur’s book exposes a different kind of ‘ist’ language. It is about English in Australia and the tensions and maladjustments that arise when this migrant language is used in this non-European place. So many ordinary expressions used to describe Australia today are in fact the linguistic enactments of a colonial construction of the country – and the words just don’t fit.
Book 1 Title: The Default Country
Book 1 Subtitle: A lexical cartography of twentieth-century Australia
Book Author: J.M. Arthur
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 216 pp
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Political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s exposed many of the inbuilt biases of the English language. In the tricky matter of ensuring a fair go for all, we have been made aware of the hidden warps and imbalances that exist in our everyday expressions – now dubbed sexist, racist, ageist and so on. J.M. Arthur’s book exposes a different kind of ‘ist’ language. It is about English in Australia and the tensions and maladjustments that arise when this migrant language is used in this non-European place. So many ordinary expressions used to describe Australia today are in fact the linguistic enactments of a colonial construction of the country – and the words just don’t fit.
In 1519 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés marched into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), heart of the Aztec Empire. Thus began the often tragic history of European colonialism in the Americas. Anna Lanyon’s previous book, Malinche’s Conquest (1999), retraced and recovered the extraordinary life of Cortés’s translator and lover, the native American woman Malinche. The present book does the same for their child, Martín Cortés.
Book 1 Title: The New World of Martín Cortés
Book Author: Anna Lanyon
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 272 pp
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In 1519 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés marched into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), heart of the Aztec Empire. Thus began the often tragic history of European colonialism in the Americas. Anna Lanyon’s previous book, Malinche’s Conquest (1999), retraced and recovered the extraordinary life of Cortés’s translator and lover, the native American woman Malinche. The present book does the same for their child, Martín Cortés.
Between non capisco and dimentico we learn to speak a little: our history always taking place in the present tense. Between mistranslations you’re still not sure he meant it. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I want to work in Canada. I have a nice face – why won’t you marry me?’
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for Susan
Between non capisco and dimentico we learn to speak a little: our history always taking place in the present tense. Between mistranslations you’re still not sure he meant it. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I want to work in Canada. I have a nice face – why won’t you marry me?’
In some ways, Sue Woolfe’s new novel, The Secret Cure, deals with similar themes to her last novel, the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity (1996). The central character of the novel is a young laboratory technician, Eva, unqualified but desperate to be a scientist. She nurses an obsessive love for a professor of immunology who has a professionally disadvantageous but compelling desire to find a cure for autism. Like the mother and daughter amateur mathematicians in Leaning Towards Infinity, the passion for research is transmitted unwittingly by the parent figure (in this case the professor and lover) to the younger. Eva takes up the professor’s genetic research into autism long after he has given up, defeated by academic and professional enmities. Each has a deeply personal reason for wishing to find a cure: the professor has the disease himself, and so does the daughter Eva has from their affair.
Book 1 Title: The Secret Cure
Book Author: Sue Woolfe
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $30 pb, 419 pp
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In some ways, Sue Woolfe’s new novel, The Secret Cure, deals with similar themes to her last novel, the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity (1996). The central character of the novel is a young laboratory technician, Eva, unqualified but desperate to be a scientist. She nurses an obsessive love for a professor of immunology who has a professionally disadvantageous but compelling desire to find a cure for autism. Like the mother and daughter amateur mathematicians in Leaning Towards Infinity, the passion for research is transmitted unwittingly by the parent figure (in this case the professor and lover) to the younger. Eva takes up the professor’s genetic research into autism long after he has given up, defeated by academic and professional enmities. Each has a deeply personal reason for wishing to find a cure: the professor has the disease himself, and so does the daughter Eva has from their affair.
It is one of the paradoxes of our history that the battle for New Guinea between 1942 and 1945 – so much harder but so much more successful than Gallipoli – is so little studied or understood. It has made such a relatively shallow impression on our national consciousness, compared with Australia’s 1915 expedition to Turkey. The New Guinea campaign was, if not unique, certainly one of the most extraordinary conducted by any belligerents during World War II because, as Alan Powell notes, it ‘relied upon the muscle and sinew and bushcraft of the local people for success’.
Book 1 Title: The Third Force
Book 1 Subtitle: Angau’s New Guinea War 1942-46
Book Author: Alan Powell
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, $55 hb, 292 pp
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It is one of the paradoxes of our history that the battle for New Guinea between 1942 and 1945 – so much harder but so much more successful than Gallipoli – is so little studied or understood. It has made such a relatively shallow impression on our national consciousness, compared with Australia’s 1915 expedition to Turkey. The New Guinea campaign was, if not unique, certainly one of the most extraordinary conducted by any belligerents during World War II because, as Alan Powell notes, it ‘relied upon the muscle and sinew and bushcraft of the local people for success’.
From 1768 until 1779–80, in a series of remarkable voyages of circumnavigation, Captain James Cook ‘fixed the bounds of the habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern hemisphere’. During these voyages, Cook sailed further, and further out of sight of land, than anyone had previously done. He discovered – or rediscovered – numerous islands. He demonstrated how the new ‘time keeper’ (chronometer) might be used to determine longitude much more accurately than ever before. He showed how scurvy might be controlled. He encountered and left detailed descriptions of peoples about whom Europeans had little or no knowledge. The scientists who sailed with him made very extensive collections of birds, animals, fish and plants, and obtained a wealth of information about the atmosphere and the oceans, all of which contributed significantly to the emergent modern scientific disciplines. In short, as one of his companions observed after his death, ‘no one knew the value of a fleeting moment better and no one used it so scrupulously as [Cook]. In the same period of time no one has ever extended the bounds of our knowledge to such a degree.’
Book 1 Title: The Trial of the Cannibal Dog
Book 1 Subtitle: Captain Cook in the South Seas
Book Author: Anne Salmond
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $49.95 hb, 528 pp
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From 1768 until 1779–80, in a series of remarkable voyages of circumnavigation, Captain James Cook ‘fixed the bounds of the habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern hemisphere’. During these voyages, Cook sailed further, and further out of sight of land, than anyone had previously done. He discovered – or rediscovered – numerous islands. He demonstrated how the new ‘time keeper’ (chronometer) might be used to determine longitude much more accurately than ever before. He showed how scurvy might be controlled. He encountered and left detailed descriptions of peoples about whom Europeans had little or no knowledge. The scientists who sailed with him made very extensive collections of birds, animals, fish and plants, and obtained a wealth of information about the atmosphere and the oceans, all of which contributed significantly to the emergent modern scientific disciplines. In short, as one of his companions observed after his death, ‘no one knew the value of a fleeting moment better and no one used it so scrupulously as [Cook]. In the same period of time no one has ever extended the bounds of our knowledge to such a degree.’
All young persons contemplating ‘a life in the law’ as a career should read this book, ideally when they are about sixteen, to allow adequate time to switch to dentistry, say, or engineering. But whatever your age, Chester Porter’s huge experience, wisdom and humanity will enlighten you about the true inwardness of those sometimes compatible concepts, justice and law.
Book 1 Title: Walking on Water
Book 1 Subtitle: A life in the law
Book Author: Chester Porter
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $49.95 hb, 319 pp
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All young persons contemplating ‘a life in the law’ as a career should read this book, ideally when they are about sixteen, to allow adequate time to switch to dentistry, say, or engineering. But whatever your age, Chester Porter’s huge experience, wisdom and humanity will enlighten you about the true inwardness of those sometimes compatible concepts, justice and law.
I will say straightaway what I most admire about this book. It’s the way the author is present in it, the way his voice informs the content and is informed by it. Although With Intent to Destroy is a personal book, the self does not intrude in the many bad ways it often can. It’s personal in the way real conversation is personal, made so by the presence in it of people who speak authoritatively from their experiences because, as Kierkegaard put it, they have lived their own life and no one else’s.
Book 1 Title: With Intent to Destroy
Book 1 Subtitle: Reflecting on genocide
Book Author: Colin Tatz
Book 1 Biblio: Verso, $49.95 hb, 240 pp
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I will say straightaway what I most admire about this book. It’s the way the author is present in it, the way his voice informs the content and is informed by it. Although With Intent to Destroy is a personal book, the self does not intrude in the many bad ways it often can. It’s personal in the way real conversation is personal, made so by the presence in it of people who speak authoritatively from their experiences because, as Kierkegaard put it, they have lived their own life and no one else’s.
From this post-September 11 vantage point, the great debate about which Australian political party could claim to have done more to develop the country’s relations with Asia already seems bathed in a gentle glow of nostalgia. Back in the late 1990s, when issues of Australia’s identity with Asia had greater salience than they now do, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade decided to commission, as its contribution to the celebration of the centenary of Federation, a history of Australia’s engagement with Asia. The initiative was designed, in part at least, to show that no one side of Australian politics could claim the Asia project as its own.
Book 1 Title: Facing North
Book 1 Subtitle: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 2, 1970s to 2000
Book Author: Peter Edwards and David Goldsworthy
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $59.95 hb, 492 pp
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Book 2 Title: Losing the Blanket
Book 2 Subtitle: Australia and the End of Britain’s Empire
Book 2 Author: David Goldsworthy
Book 2 Biblio: MUP, $34.95 pb, 224 pp
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From this post-September 11 vantage point, the great debate about which Australian political party could claim to have done more to develop the country’s relations with Asia already seems bathed in a gentle glow of nostalgia. Back in the late 1990s, when issues of Australia’s identity with Asia had greater salience than they now do, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade decided to commission, as its contribution to the celebration of the centenary of Federation, a history of Australia’s engagement with Asia. The initiative was designed, in part at least, to show that no one side of Australian politics could claim the Asia project as its own.
‘Dwelling in the Shape of Things’ is the title of Nicolette Stasko’s sequence of sixteen elegantly executed ‘Meditations upon Cézanne’. It could, however, serve as an appropriate epigraph to both these collections. Given that the natural world is Stasko’s and Adrienne Eberhard’s main locus for exploring and responding to ‘the shape of things’, each could be described loosely as a ‘landscape’ poet, but the character of their work is neither nationalistic nor naturalistic. They write essentially of their experience as sentient beings inhabiting, and intimately responding to, the world of things.
Book 1 Title: Agamemnon’s Poppies
Book Author: Adrienne Eberhard
Book 1 Biblio: Black Pepper, $23.95pb, 110pp
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Book 2 Title: The Weight of Irises
Book 2 Author: Nicolette Stasko
Book 2 Biblio: Black Pepper, $23.95pb, 109pp
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‘Dwelling in the Shape of Things’ is the title of Nicolette Stasko’s sequence of sixteen elegantly executed ‘Meditations upon Cézanne’. It could, however, serve as an appropriate epigraph to both these collections. Given that the natural world is Stasko’s and Adrienne Eberhard’s main locus for exploring and responding to ‘the shape of things’, each could be described loosely as a ‘landscape’ poet, but the character of their work is neither nationalistic nor naturalistic. They write essentially of their experience as sentient beings inhabiting, and intimately responding to, the world of things.
An invaluable testing ground, the pamphlet provides emerging poets with their first real opportunity to gauge critical response prior to the publication of first collections. For readers, it brings continuity to work that, in all likelihood, has appeared haphazardly in newspapers and magazines.
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An invaluable testing ground, the pamphlet provides emerging poets with their first real opportunity to gauge critical response prior to the publication of first collections. For readers, it brings continuity to work that, in all likelihood, has appeared haphazardly in newspapers and magazines.
The ABR Forums move to Sydney early next month, when Peter Porter and Peter Robb will be in conversation with Ros Pesman of the University of Sydney about all things Italian – literature, music, visual arts, politics and travel. Peter Porter has written about Italy for decades; Peter Robb is the author of Midnight in Sicily and M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. No one interested in Italy, or good talk, will want to miss this Italian colloquy. It will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. The venue is the Galleries at the State Library of New South Wales, and the cost $16.50 (or $11 for ABR subscribers and Friends of the State Library). Full details appear on page 33.
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Viva L’Italia!
The ABR Forums move to Sydney early next month, when Peter Porter and Peter Robb will be in conversation with Ros Pesman of the University of Sydney about all things Italian – literature, music, visual arts, politics and travel. Peter Porter has written about Italy for decades; Peter Robb is the author of Midnight in Sicily and M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. No one interested in Italy, or good talk, will want to miss this Italian colloquy. It will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. The venue is the Galleries at the State Library of New South Wales, and the cost $16.50 (or $11 for ABR subscribers and Friends of the State Library). Full details appear on page 33.
