In such circumstances, Judith Wright’s upbringing in the austerity of New England was probably essential, and her contribution – not just as a writer – should not be forgotten.

John Carmody, Sydney, NSW

Hoppin’ mad

Dear Editor,

Despite a raft of schoolboy-clever questions from me, my father never let on how he voted. Evidently, he felt that what went on behind the curtain was best kept between a man and his conscience. More’s the pity Greg Dening had to throw in his own personal politics (‘those thugs in the White House’) when he reviewed Edward Duyker’s work concerning a naturalist who lived between 1755 and 1834 (ABR, June/July 2003). During much of that time there was no White House and, once the building was constructed, the British torched it – along with the Library of Congress. No ‘Books Are Our Friends’ party in that Merrie Olde government. Whitewash was used to cover the blackened façade.

Perhaps the review would not have come screeching to a halt to fit page constraints had Dening’s editor exercised his rubric pencil. While academics on both sides of the Pacific drool at having a mouth-breathing moron in the White House, it’s foolish to underrate my country’s passion for revenge after September 11. On the scale of Pearl Harbour, Americans are still hoppin’ mad. And on the streets of this democracy, ‘pissed-off’ don’t mean stinky with drink.

The French – Dening sighs like a maid in the hayloft for ‘our brilliant French past’ (I always thought so many names along the Great Australian Bight were left in that language because the Royal Navy wanted to keep up the pressure, and the dangers of invasion, in a worldwide chess match between England and Napoleon, the self-appointed republican emperor who executed publishers and lined editors up against the wall) – the French are a different matter: their profit-over-principles disgust us. They’ve lifted a page from Lord Jim, ‘the business of business is business’.

We don’t demand that they join the US: a Yank general opined that ‘going to war without the French is like going into combat without your accordion’. We couldn’t even rely on them getting the Germans out of France. But let’s not forget that they sold the planet’s number two oil-producing nation a nuclear reactor ‘to make electricity’, then, when Israeli jets took it out in 1982, offered Iraq a replacement.

The French remain poor masters. Look no further than Tahiti (nuclear testing) or New Caledonia (Paris policemen culled from traffic patrol to guard nickel mines), then bless the Royal Navy’s wooden frigate crews for ensuring that those monsters got no toehold in Oz.

Jerry Briggs, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, US

In praise of indexes

Dear Editor,

A good index adds value to a book, while a poor index seriously detracts from it. The absence of an index is a crime. So this is a plea, in my capacity as President of the Australian Society of Indexers, to ask that it be part of your canon that a book review should desirably include a comment on the book’s index.

ABR is one of the premier sources of serious book reviews available to Australians, and it is widely read. If comments about indexes appeared regularly in your reviews, we believe it would raise public awareness of the value of these important tools, and would raise the standard of indexing demanded by publishers and provided by indexers.

If you ask me what constitutes a good index, I would reply that a good index is one that provides access to the detailed content of a book; is an efficient means of tracing information; and is accurate, impartial, comprehensive and easy to use. It does this by: being subject-based and including terms for concepts as well as for names and objects; avoiding long strings of undifferentiated page references; using words and phrases that reflect the language of the text; being comprehensive and providing access to all topics of potential interest; and being logically arranged.

I hope you will consider this suggestion, and that your reviewers will regularly comment on indexes.

Lynn Farkas, Farrer, ACT

Skipping the ball

Dear Editor,

About a decade ago, I visited Western Australia. Before leaving Melbourne, I had noticed, buried inside The Age, a report on the latest federal funding for the states. It was bland and factual. When I arrived in Perth later that day, I saw a headline to the effect of ‘Federal Funding Bias; the West Robbed Again’. That difference in response typifies what has been a fractious relationship between the eastern states and the western third of the continent. Within a year, I had moved to Perth. During my five years on the periphery of the art and literary scene in that city, I came to realise that its inhabitants had good reason to resent the eastern states’ tendency to ignore them.

In Farewell Cinderella: Creating Arts and Identity in Western Australia, Geoffrey Bolton, Richard Ryan and Jan Rossiter, with their contributors, provide an interesting and insightful review of the history of the arts in Western Australia, but, as Wendy Were has noted in her review (ABR, September 2003), the claim that Cinderella has ‘arrived at the ball’ is not made out. It is hard to see how the Western Australian arts scene can be fully integrated with the rest of Australia when, for example, the Weekend Review section in The Australian publishes stories on ‘new art/writing/theatre in the west’, but just a few words into the article the reader discovers that ‘the west’ begins and ends within a few kilometres of Parramatta. I have talked with an art historian from the east who has an extensive knowledge of many Western Australian artists from the past, but who has little awareness of contemporary artists, including members of the WAIT class of 1982 whose work is well known to Perth collectors.

Based on my experiences, the Western Australian arts remain largely ignored by the Sydney–Melbourne axis. While a litany of well-known and middle-aged names in Australian literature are trotted out in Farewell Cinderella to support the argument that Cinderella has indeed ‘arrived at the ball’, the resort to those familiar names masks those young and promising writers who remain little known outside the literary scene in their home state.

Perhaps that is what is so different and fascinating about the arts in Western Australia. Perth and its environs remains a ‘city-state’ all too often governed by philistines. Not all that long ago, the state government found millions of dollars to erect a carillon tower, yet successive governments have been unable to fund a modern theatre complex. The Western Australian arts scene is small but fragmented, with feuds and gossip providing the frisson that comes when everyone knows everyone else. Yet it is that same hotbed that is giving rise to original and inspiring work – far beyond the cultural ‘Brisbane line’, whose writers, poets, painters, actors and dancers are more likely to be inspired by their unique landscape and by the view across the Indian Ocean than by looking back over their shoulders to Australia’s eastern seaboard. It is cause for regret that Farewell Cinderella did not devote more space to that work, and that it did not raise the fundamental question as to whether it is not better for Cinderella to remain at her knitting, rather than joining her ugly sisters in cavorting at the ball.

Despite its weaknesses, Farewell Cinderella is a valuable work, and I look forward to its sequel.

Christopher Wray, Ringwood, Vic.