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Absolutely Revolting

April 2000, no. 219

Welcome to the April 2000 issue!
David McCooey reviews The Twelfth of Never: A memoir by Louis Nowra
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Louis Nowra was born in 1950 and is – as he presents himself in this memoir – that very mid­-century thing, an outsider. An outsider in terms of class, mental constitution, and sexuality (for a time), Nowra suffers a worse, and originary, alienation from his mother. Being born on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s shooting of her father ...
Book 1 Title: The Twelfth of Never
Book 1 Subtitle: A memoir
Book Author: Louis Nowra
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $25 pb, 377 pp, 0330361872
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Louis Nowra was born in 1950 and is – as he presents himself in this memoir – that very mid­-century thing, an outsider. An outsider in terms of class, mental constitution, and sexuality (for a time), Nowra suffers a worse, and originary, alienation from his mother. Being born on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s shooting of her father, Nowra’s existence is caught between dysfunctional expressions of daughterhood and motherhood: ‘I was born a memory of my mother killing her father.’

Such is the dramatic opening chapter of The Twelfth of Never, a tableau worthy of this skilled playwright and screenwriter. But what follows is more leisured, less self­conscious about effect and pacing. Memoirs, we often feel, should not be too self-consciously literary. They should allow for any amount of digression, rocking of hobby-horses, and grinding of at least one axe. The discovery of character should be through indirection, and surprises most effectively come from wide vistas of otherwise-conventional selfhood.

Read more: David McCooey reviews 'The Twelfth of Never: A memoir' by Louis Nowra

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Ihab Hassan reviews Dream Stuff by David Malouf
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Contents Category: Short Stories
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This collection is well named: dreams drive its narratives. Dreams or something like dreams – ghosts, memories, shadowy gleams. We are always close to the ‘mystery of suspended expectation’, as Malouf puts it in the title story, but never quite penetrate it. In dreams, you might say, begin responsibilities – that’s Yeats – and yes, flashes of knowledge, obscure reconciliations.
Book 1 Title: Dream Stuff
Book Author: David Malouf
Book 1 Biblio: Chatto & Windus, $35.00 hb, 185 pp
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This collection is well named: dreams drive its narratives. Dreams or something like dreams – ghosts, memories, shadowy gleams. We are always close to the ‘mystery of suspended expectation’, as Malouf puts it in the title story, but never quite penetrate it. In dreams, you might say, begin responsibilities – that’s Yeats – and yes, flashes of knowledge, obscure reconciliations.

Read more: Ihab Hassan reviews 'Dream Stuff' by David Malouf

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Raimond Gaita reviews Tiger’s Eye by Inga Clendinnen
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Ten years ago, when she was in her early fifties, Inga Clendinnen fell ill with a disease of the liver that would have killed her if transplant surgery had not improved in time to save her life. In hospital she began to write, as much to hold herself together as for any other reason. Without a trace of self-pity she tells of the frightening first symptoms of her illness, its diagnosis and the initial gloomy prognosis, her times in hospitals, her responses to the hospital, to other patients and to that special group of ‘comrades’ who have suffered the same illness and its awesome treatment.
Book 1 Title: Tiger’s Eye
Book Author: Inga Clendinnen
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $24.95 pb, 289 pp
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Ten years ago, when she was in her early fifties, Inga Clendinnen fell ill with a disease of the liver that would have killed her if transplant surgery had not improved in time to save her life. In hospital she began to write, as much to hold herself together as for any other reason. Without a trace of self-pity she tells of the frightening first symptoms of her illness, its diagnosis and the initial gloomy prognosis, her times in hospitals, her responses to the hospital, to other patients and to that special group of ‘comrades’ who have suffered the same illness and its awesome treatment.

Read more: Raimond Gaita reviews 'Tiger’s Eye' by Inga Clendinnen

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Carmel Bird reviews The Shark Net by Robert Drewe
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‘I’d spent my childhood and adolescence on this sandy moonscape. I was sure I had something to say about it. I just didn’t know what.’ The book is Robert Drewe’s response to that thought. It is, as he says, a portrait of a place and time. The place is Perth; the time the fifties; the portrait is so very sharp, atmospheric, brutal, and deeply moving. There is a strange and haunting sweetness in the voice of the narrator, a clean, wondering charm. The subtitle of the book is ‘memories and murder’ and, like ghastly mutilations discovered outside the shark net, the murders and other horrible deaths drift before our startled eyes.
Book 1 Title: The Shark Net
Book Author: Robert Drewe
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $35.00 hb, 358 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WD6eOX
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‘I’d spent my childhood and adolescence on this sandy moonscape. I was sure I had something to say about it. I just didn’t know what.’ The book is Robert Drewe’s response to that thought. It is, as he says, a portrait of a place and time. The place is Perth; the time the fifties; the portrait is so very sharp, atmospheric, brutal, and deeply moving. There is a strange and haunting sweetness in the voice of the narrator, a clean, wondering charm. The subtitle of the book is ‘memories and murder’ and, like ghastly mutilations discovered outside the shark net, the murders and other horrible deaths drift before our startled eyes. The prose is spare and yet poetic, the facts and the images, and the underlying fabric of horror providing a rich weird sense of heightened reality. And the structure of the work itself is seductive, with scenes selected from personal domestic life playing against the larger dramas of crime and accidental death. In spite of all this I sometimes laughed aloud, often with a laugh of recognition at a locution or a turn of events that brought back live memories of the time. Then there were things I wish I had heard when I was a child: ‘Why don’t you go and dip your left eye in lukewarm fig jam?’ Need I say I also wept.

Read more: Carmel Bird reviews 'The Shark Net' by Robert Drewe

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David Tacey reviews The High Price of Heaven by David Marr
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Contents Category: Religion
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A strong sense of déjà vu attends my reading of the latest book by David Marr. Not only have some of the pieces collected in this volume been published in the popular press and weekend magazines, but the tone, direction, and intellectual content of this work seems wearily familiar. In The High Price of Heaven we find the sardonic, witty, disbelieving voice of secular reason and common sense. It is a voice that has enjoyed a lot of airplay in Australia over the last one hundred years and more. This voice finds religion to be a huge joke, making claims about reality and truth that cannot be supported by reason or tested by ordinary experience.
Book 1 Title: The High Price of Heaven
Book Author: David Marr
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, 319 pp
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A strong sense of déjà vu attends my reading of the latest book by David Marr. Not only have some of the pieces collected in this volume been published in the popular press and weekend magazines, but the tone, direction, and intellectual content of this work seems wearily familiar. In The High Price of Heaven we find the sardonic, witty, disbelieving voice of secular reason and common sense. It is a voice that has enjoyed a lot of airplay in Australia over the last one hundred years and more. This voice finds religion to be a huge joke, making claims about reality and truth that cannot be supported by reason or tested by ordinary experience.

Read more: David Tacey reviews 'The High Price of Heaven' by David Marr

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Ken Gelder reviews ReEnchantment: The new Australian spirituality by David Tacey
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Contents Category: Religion
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Article Title: Spiritual yearning
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The cover of David Tacey’s earlier book on Australian spirituality, Edge of the Sacred, showed a few parched branches sticking out of the sand. The cover of this one is quite different: billowing clouds, rocks, water, lilac sunset colours. You might think that a certain blossoming had taken place; that Tacey’s project – the spiritualising of ‘secular’ Australia – had been wonderfully realised. On the other hand, the luscious hues of ReEnchantment’s cover may place the book more firmly still in the realms of fantasy – a genre that also happens to be popular with Tacey’s publisher, HarperCollins.
Book 1 Title: ReEnchantment
Book 1 Subtitle: The new Australian spirituality
Book Author: David Tacey
Book 1 Biblio: HarperCollins, $22.95 pb, 304 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The cover of David Tacey’s earlier book on Australian spirituality, Edge of the Sacred, showed a few parched branches sticking out of the sand. The cover of this one is quite different: billowing clouds, rocks, water, lilac sunset colours. You might think that a certain blossoming had taken place; that Tacey’s project – the spiritualising of ‘secular’ Australia – had been wonderfully realised. On the other hand, the luscious hues of ReEnchantment’s cover may place the book more firmly still in the realms of fantasy – a genre that also happens to be popular with Tacey’s publisher, HarperCollins.

Read more: Ken Gelder reviews 'ReEnchantment: The new Australian spirituality' by David Tacey

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Rolling Column | Alison Ravenscroft on Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place by Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon
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When I first picked up a copy of Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place (Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, Viking 1999), I expected to find the life story of an Aboriginal woman. The striking cover photograph the 1940s of Euphemia Mullett in high-heeled shoes and light summer dress, standing beside a white man and his horse in a forest clearing suggested it, as did the reference to the dreamtime in the book’s title. I soon discovered my mistake. Jackson’s Track is instead the memoir of the white man in the photograph, Daryl Tonkin, who owned land and a timber mill at Jackson’s Track, West Gippsland, for over forty years from the mid-1930s. During this time, an Aboriginal community of over 150 people established itself at Jackson’s Track, setting up camp in the forest and working for Tonkin, felling timber for the mill. Euphemia Mullett was with those people attracted to the promise of work at Jackson’s Track, and she would go on to live there for over thirty years as Tonkin’s wife.
Book 1 Title: Jackson's Track
Book 1 Subtitle: Memoir of a Dreamtime place
Book Author: Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon
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When I first picked up a copy of Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place (Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, Viking 1999), I expected to find the life story of an Aboriginal woman. The striking cover photograph the 1940s of Euphemia Mullett in high-heeled shoes and light summer dress, standing beside a white man and his horse in a forest clearing suggested it, as did the reference to the dreamtime in the book’s title. I soon discovered my mistake. Jackson’s Track is instead the memoir of the white man in the photograph, Daryl Tonkin, who owned land and a timber mill at Jackson’s Track, West Gippsland, for over forty years from the mid-1930s. During this time, an Aboriginal community of over 150 people established itself at Jackson’s Track, setting up camp in the forest and working for Tonkin, felling timber for the mill. Euphemia Mullett was with those people attracted to the promise of work at Jackson’s Track, and she would go on to live there for over thirty years as Tonkin’s wife.

Read more: Rolling Column | Alison Ravenscroft on 'Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place' by Daryl...

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George Papaellinas reviews The Smoking Book by Lesley Stern
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Article Title: Unsound Practice
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When I was still a jot at uni, a medical student friend stumbled late out of her latest lecture and reassured me. And then she assured me, ‘It was horrible! We had slide after slide of some dead smoker’s lungs. And they were disgusting! I’m gonna be sick! Give me a cigarette!’ That’s when I first understood that ‘smoking’ was not ever going to be a straightforward subject.
Book 1 Title: The Smoking Book
Book Author: Lesley Stern
Book 1 Biblio: University of Chicago Press, $22 hb, 238 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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When I was still a jot at uni, a medical student friend stumbled late out of her latest lecture and reassured me. And then she assured me, ‘It was horrible! We had slide after slide of some dead smoker’s lungs. And they were disgusting! I’m gonna be sick! Give me a cigarette!’ That’s when I first understood that ‘smoking’ was not ever going to be a straightforward subject.

Smoking? What an unsound practice, apparently even anti-social! But what hard, anti-social times we all live in, what a century, what centuries, we have just expelled, breathed out, like so much smoke! We are all, here in the first world, so complicit, and so much more energetically so it seems, as time passes and ideological arteries harden as rigidly as emotional ones have. When could puffing away on a fag ever possibly assume a greater moral, and even quasi-political, dimension than the excesses of capitalism? Economic, and even physicalised, traumatic imperialism and colonialism? In real time too. You think I’m exaggerating? Check with the IMF. O tempora, o mores.

Read more: George Papaellinas reviews 'The Smoking Book' by Lesley Stern

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Alan Frost reviews The Governor’s Noble Guest: Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s account of Port Jackson, 1825 translated and edited by Marc Serge Rivière
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: Setting Agendas
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The British exploration of the Pacific Ocean between 1764, when Byron sailed, and 1780, when Cook’s third circumnavigation concluded, and the colonisation of New South Wales from 1788 onwards, effectively set agendas in discovery and settlement which France and Spain had to emulate if they were to continue as Britain’s imperial rivals.

Spain’s effort to match the British agenda was spectacular, but short-lived. The expedition under the command of Alejandro Malaspina that it sent to explore in the Pacific and to report on the state of the Spanish empire (1789–94) was perhaps the best equipped of all the grand eighteenth-century voyages, but its commander fell victim to political intrigue on his return; and oblivion settled over its results. (Only now are its journals, artwork and collections being fully analysed and published.)
Book 1 Title: The Governor’s Noble Guest
Book 1 Subtitle: Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s account of Port Jackson, 1825
Book Author: Marc Serge Rivière
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: Miegunyah Press, $49.95 hb, 292 pp
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 The British exploration of the Pacific Ocean between 1764, when Byron sailed, and 1780, when Cook’s third circumnavigation concluded, and the colonisation of New South Wales from 1788 onwards, effectively set agendas in discovery and settlement which France and Spain had to emulate if they were to continue as Britain’s imperial rivals.

Spain’s effort to match the British agenda was spectacular, but short-lived. The expedition under the command of Alejandro Malaspina that it sent to explore in the Pacific and to report on the state of the Spanish empire (1789–94) was perhaps the best equipped of all the grand eighteenth-century voyages, but its commander fell victim to political intrigue on his return; and oblivion settled over its results. (Only now are its journals, artwork and collections being fully analysed and published.)

Read more: Alan Frost reviews 'The Governor’s Noble Guest: Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s account of Port...

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Laurie Clancy reviews Voices from the Corner by Serge Liberman
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A few years ago I was teaching an anthology of Australian short stories to a group of very bright Spanish honours students at the University of Barcelona. As one would expect, some of the stories were written by Australia’s most famous and highly regarded writers but at the end of the course the students voted unanimously for Serge Liberman’s ‘Envy’s Fire’ as the finest story they had read on the course.
Book 1 Title: Voices from the Corner
Book Author: Serge Liberman
Book 1 Biblio: Fine Lit, $19.95 pb, 263 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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A few years ago I was teaching an anthology of Australian short stories to a group of very bright Spanish honours students at the University of Barcelona. As one would expect, some of the stories were written by Australia’s most famous and highly regarded writers but at the end of the course the students voted unanimously for Serge Liberman’s ‘Envy’s Fire’ as the finest story they had read on the course.

Read more: Laurie Clancy reviews 'Voices from the Corner' by Serge Liberman

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Jennifer Maiden reviews Around Here by Cath Kenneally
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collections. ‘Plain-speak’ also has an Orwellian feel, particularly with ‘intelligence’ and ‘educated’. Many poetry conventions and metaphors are aids to communication, including their use in general speech.
Book 1 Title: Around Here
Book Author: Cath Kenneally
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $16.95 pb, 108 pp
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Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collections. ‘Plain-speak’ also has an Orwellian feel, particularly with ‘intelligence’ and ‘educated’. Many poetry conventions and metaphors are aids to communication, including their use in general speech.

I should stress, therefore, that there is not so much literary ideology in the text itself. Kenneally employs imagery and poetic conventions deftly. ‘On the Beach’ is about a schoolgirl swimming at the nuns’ beach-house: ‘It felt like being cupped in / a bowl of liquid light’, with ‘tips of toes clutching at / terra firma, the sun / declining’ and the swimmer ‘declining the offer / (for the moment) / of horizons’.

Read more: Jennifer Maiden reviews 'Around Here' by Cath Kenneally

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Edward Colless reviews Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology by Darren Tofts
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Contents Category: Cultural Studies
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Cultural criticism at the end of the twentieth century, says Darren Tofts (at the end of 1999), is suffering from a kind of amnesia. Interactivity is not an invention of Playstation games or electronic mail, but has been a crucial constituent of avant-garde art throughout the century: neglect this history and risk collapsing culture into fin-de-siecle, commodified monotony. Both those who rhapsodise and those who malign the anarchic non-linearity of current hypermedia as if it is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon ought to recall, Tofts advises, Marcel Duchamp’s bewildering, ludic work of art, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Hypertext archives and libraries, he notes, are only now beginning to manifest the scope and complexity of James Joyce’s textual systems. Hypermedia, Derrida once observed, simulates ‘joyceware’, and Tofts adds that it has ‘a lot of catching up to do’. Indeed, hypermedia is a term that he considers far more descriptive of the radical artistic inventions of the modernist vanguard in the first half of the twentieth century than of our contemporary ‘interactive culture’.
Book 1 Title: Parallax
Book 1 Subtitle: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology
Book Author: Darren Tofts
Book 1 Biblio: Interface (distributor Craftsman House), $19.95 pb, 112 pp
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Cultural criticism at the end of the twentieth century, says Darren Tofts (at the end of 1999), is suffering from a kind of amnesia. Interactivity is not an invention of Playstation games or electronic mail, but has been a crucial constituent of avant-garde art throughout the century: neglect this history and risk collapsing culture into fin-de-siecle, commodified monotony. Both those who rhapsodise and those who malign the anarchic non-linearity of current hypermedia as if it is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon ought to recall, Tofts advises, Marcel Duchamp’s bewildering, ludic work of art, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Hypertext archives and libraries, he notes, are only now beginning to manifest the scope and complexity of James Joyce’s textual systems. Hypermedia, Derrida once observed, simulates ‘joyceware’, and Tofts adds that it has ‘a lot of catching up to do’. Indeed, hypermedia is a term that he considers far more descriptive of the radical artistic inventions of the modernist vanguard in the first half of the twentieth century than of our contemporary ‘interactive culture’.

Read more: Edward Colless reviews 'Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology' by Darren Tofts

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Margot Hillel reviews No-name Bird by Josef Vondra
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Given the recent happenings in East Timor, this is a timely novel. It is the moving story of the developing tragedy following the withdrawal of Portugal from its former colony and the invasion by Indonesia. The book is focused through Jose, a fourteen-year-old boy who finds the events puzzling and distressing. He finds some solace in the fighting cock given to him by his uncle, the person he most relies on for wisdom and guidance. Eventually, at the insistence of his mother, he is evacuated to Portugal, where he becomes a lawyer working for Amnesty International. The last chapter brings the book full circle, as we have first met Jose as an adult, in his law office in Lisbon, looking at a paperweight which holds the tail feather of a fighting cock.
Book 1 Title: No-name Bird
Book Author: Josef Vondra
Book 1 Biblio: Puffin, $14.95 pb, 183 pp
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Given the recent happenings in East Timor, this is a timely novel. It is the moving story of the developing tragedy following the withdrawal of Portugal from its former colony and the invasion by Indonesia. The book is focused through Jose, a fourteen-year-old boy who finds the events puzzling and distressing. He finds some solace in the fighting cock given to him by his uncle, the person he most relies on for wisdom and guidance. Eventually, at the insistence of his mother, he is evacuated to Portugal, where he becomes a lawyer working for Amnesty International. The last chapter brings the book full circle, as we have first met Jose as an adult, in his law office in Lisbon, looking at a paperweight which holds the tail feather of a fighting cock.

Read more: Margot Hillel reviews 'No-name Bird' by Josef Vondra

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Brenda Niall reviews Into the Wadi by Michèle Drouart
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‘I remember only peripheries, not centres,’ Michèle Drouan says in her memoir of marriage to a Jordanian and life with his family in a village near Jordan’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Her perspective is deliberately oblique. Elegantly shaped, and or the most part gracefully written, her story bypasses the obvious cultural divisions. Political, religious, and sexual tensions are given minimal treatment. No dates are given: you would hardly know that the Gulf War comes within the book’s timespan, and when the sound of bombs is heard from across the border, someone quietly says ‘Lebanon’, and leaves it at that.
Book 1 Title: Into the Wadi
Book Author: Michèle Drouart
Book 1 Biblio: FACP, $19.95 pb, 376 pp
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‘I remember only peripheries, not centres,’ Michèle Drouan says in her memoir of marriage to a Jordanian and life with his family in a village near Jordan’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Her perspective is deliberately oblique. Elegantly shaped, and or the most part gracefully written, her story bypasses the obvious cultural divisions. Political, religious, and sexual tensions are given minimal treatment. No dates are given: you would hardly know that the Gulf War comes within the book’s timespan, and when the sound of bombs is heard from across the border, someone quietly says ‘Lebanon’, and leaves it at that.

Read more: Brenda Niall reviews 'Into the Wadi' by Michèle Drouart

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Robert Holden reviews Barbara Tribe: Sculptor by Patricia R. McDonald
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We should no longer marvel at the way art historians are forever finding yet another woman artist to rescue from undeserved obscurity. With Patricia R. McDonald’s tribute to Barbara Tribe we have the work of this eclectic Australian sculptor finally validated in a handsomely produced monograph.
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We should no longer marvel at the way art historians are forever finding yet another woman artist to rescue from undeserved obscurity. With Patricia R. McDonald’s tribute to Barbara Tribe we have the work of this eclectic Australian sculptor finally validated in a handsomely produced monograph.

Tribe was born in Sydney in 1913 and is still an active artist and a vibrant personality. However, like Bertram Mackennall, John Peter Russell, and Rupert Bunny, she spent her major productive life out of Australia. In 1935 she became the first sculptor, as well as the first woman, to be awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship and, at the age of twenty-two, left for England. Here she distanced herself still further by joining an artistic coterie in remote Cornwall.

Read more: Robert Holden reviews 'Barbara Tribe: Sculptor' by Patricia R. McDonald

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Sue Turnbull reviews Silver Meadow: A Kathy and Brock mystery by Barry Maitland and An Uncertain Death by Carolyn Morwood
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Five pages from the end of Silver Meadow, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, an effect not only of the thrilling denouement, but also a genuine frisson of aesthetic delight at a perfectly judged conclusion. Silver Meadow is a book which deserves to be noticed, not only by devotees of the police procedural (it is at least as good as anything Rendell, James or Rankin have written) but also by anyone with an interest in narrative form, the politics of contemporary space and/or rampant consumerism. This is a ‘seriously’ good book about sex and shopping.
Book 1 Title: Silver Meadow
Book 1 Subtitle: A Kathy and Brock mystery
Book Author: Barry Maitland
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 346 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: An Uncertain Death
Book 2 Author: Carolyn Morwood
Book 2 Biblio: The Women’s Press, $18.95 pb, 303 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
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Book 2 Cover Path (no longer required): images/ABR_Digitising_2021/Archives_and_Online_Exclusives/morwood uncertain death.jpg
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Five pages from the end of Silver Meadow, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, an effect not only of the thrilling denouement, but also a genuine frisson of aesthetic delight at a perfectly judged conclusion. Silver Meadow is a book which deserves to be noticed, not only by devotees of the police procedural (it is at least as good as anything Rendell, James or Rankin have written) but also by anyone with an interest in narrative form, the politics of contemporary space and/or rampant consumerism. This is a ‘seriously’ good book about sex and shopping.

Read more: Sue Turnbull reviews 'Silver Meadow: A Kathy and Brock mystery' by Barry Maitland and 'An...

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Martin Harrison reviews Beautiful Veins by Mal Morgan and Fighting in the Shade by Peter Kocan
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In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.
Book 1 Title: Beautiful Veins
Book Author: Mal Morgan
Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $18.95 pb, 64 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Fighting in the Shade
Book 2 Author: Peter Kocan
Book 2 Biblio: Hale and Iremonger, $18.95 pb, 72 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
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In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.

Read more: Martin Harrison reviews 'Beautiful Veins' by Mal Morgan and 'Fighting in the Shade' by Peter Kocan

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Ruth Starke reviews Family Business by Sophie Masson and The Rented House by Phil Cummings
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When she sat down in that Edinburgh café almost three years ago to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling apparently determined that it would take a further six books to tell the complete story of her pubescent wizard. Millions of entranced and thoroughly hooked readers around the world are now breathlessly awaiting volume four. The books are immensely readable with a strong narrative drive, and Rowling cleverly leaves major plot points unanswered; one has to get the next in the series or die of curiosity. The same technique has served John Marsden well. Pity the poor parent who back in 1993 all unknowingly bought Tomorrow, When the War Began and then saw a further six titles progressively hit the bookshops, all in hardback first release, and all extending the saga. Many readers, including this one, wish he had stopped at number three but the temptation to continue must have been huge.
Book 1 Title: Family Business
Book Author: Sophie Masson
Book 1 Biblio: Hodder Headline, $10.95 pb, 132 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: The Rented House
Book 2 Author: Phil Cummings
Book 2 Biblio: Random House, $12.95 pb, 138 pp
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When she sat down in that Edinburgh café almost three years ago to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling apparently determined that it would take a further six books to tell the complete story of her pubescent wizard. Millions of entranced and thoroughly hooked readers around the world are now breathlessly awaiting volume four. The books are immensely readable with a strong narrative drive, and Rowling cleverly leaves major plot points unanswered; one has to get the next in the series or die of curiosity. The same technique has served John Marsden well. Pity the poor parent who back in 1993 all unknowingly bought Tomorrow, When the War Began and then saw a further six titles progressively hit the bookshops, all in hardback first release, and all extending the saga. Many readers, including this one, wish he had stopped at number three but the temptation to continue must have been huge.

Read more: Ruth Starke reviews 'Family Business' by Sophie Masson and 'The Rented House' by Phil Cummings

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Stella Lees reviews Sacked! by Rachel Flynn, illustrated by Craig Smith and Footy Shorts by Margaret Clark
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Rachel Flynn’s Sacked! is for the eight-to ten-year-old market, the same audience that J.K.  Rowling’s Harry Potter books are tapping. It’s an interesting stage when everything from cereal packets to Dad’s car manual demands to be read.

Sacked! explores a clever absurdity with tongue-in-cheek, where the adult is likely to see the joke more than the child.
Book 1 Title: Sacked!
Book Author: Rachel Flynn, illustrated by Craig Smith
Book 1 Biblio: Puffin, $11.95, 81 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Footy Shorts
Book 2 Author: Margaret Clark
Book 2 Biblio: Puffin, $11.95, 120 pp
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Rachel Flynn’s Sacked! is for the eight-to ten-year-old market, the same audience that J.K.  Rowling’s Harry Potter books are tapping. It’s an interesting stage when everything from cereal packets to Dad’s car manual demands to be read.

Sacked! explores a clever absurdity with tongue-in-cheek, where the adult is likely to see the joke more than the child.

Read more: Stella Lees reviews 'Sacked!' by Rachel Flynn, illustrated by Craig Smith and 'Footy Shorts' by...

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David Matthews reviews Tin Toys by Anson Cameron and Stormy Weather by Michael Meehan
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These two second novels are rapid follow-ups to acclaimed début novels, Anson Cameron’s Silences Long Gone and Michael Meehan’s The Salt of Broken Tears. Each is, in its own way, resolutely vernacular. Meehan writes about the past and the country; Cameron writes largely about the city, very much today.

In Tin Toys, nevertheless, the characters are very aware of the Australian past. The central dilemmas of Cameron’s novels concern relations between blacks and whites. In Silences Long Gone the narrator’s stubborn old mother refuses to leave her house in a mining town that is being dismantled so that the territory can be returned to its native custodians. In the new novel, the narrator is himself the focus of the dilemma, as the offspring of a white father and black mother (in very peculiar circumstances). He begins life as a black baby, becomes a white boy and ends up a slightly confused young adult. After an opening flashback the narrative is driven by two things that happen to Hunter around the same time. His design for an Australian flag (which he has come up with by complete accident) is selected as a finalist in a national competition and his Japanese girlfriend goes missing in Bougainville.
Book 1 Title: Tin Toys
Book Author: Anson Cameron
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $25.00 pb, 388 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Stormy Weather
Book 2 Author: Michael Meehan
Book 2 Biblio: Vintage, $17.95 pb, 204 pp
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These two second novels are rapid follow-ups to acclaimed début novels, Anson Cameron’s Silences Long Gone and Michael Meehan’s The Salt of Broken Tears. Each is, in its own way, resolutely vernacular. Meehan writes about the past and the country; Cameron writes largely about the city, very much today.

In Tin Toys, nevertheless, the characters are very aware of the Australian past. The central dilemmas of Cameron’s novels concern relations between blacks and whites. In Silences Long Gone the narrator’s stubborn old mother refuses to leave her house in a mining town that is being dismantled so that the territory can be returned to its native custodians. In the new novel, the narrator is himself the focus of the dilemma, as the offspring of a white father and black mother (in very peculiar circumstances). He begins life as a black baby, becomes a white boy and ends up a slightly confused young adult. After an opening flashback the narrative is driven by two things that happen to Hunter around the same time. His design for an Australian flag (which he has come up with by complete accident) is selected as a finalist in a national competition and his Japanese girlfriend goes missing in Bougainville.

Read more: David Matthews reviews 'Tin Toys' by Anson Cameron and 'Stormy Weather' by Michael Meehan

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Peter Pierce reviews Dilemma by Jon Cleary and Fetish by Tara Moss
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Let us start with the similarities: two thrillers, set mainly in Sydney, each with a would-be snappy but jaded one word tide. On each a stiletto-heeled shoe is part of the cover design. There the ways seem to part. Dilemma is Jon Cleary’s forty-ninth novel in a career of six decades and marks the sixteenth appearance of Detective Scobie Malone. For Canadian-born, former model Tara Moss, Fetish is her first novel. HarperCollins is loyal to the old, supportive of the new. Or supportive up to a point. Both books needed much stricter editing, not only for typos (‘eluded’ for ‘alluded’ in Fetish, for instance: one hopes that is a typo), but to tighten structures that let suspense amble away.
Book 1 Title: Dilemma
Book Author: Jon Cleary
Book 1 Biblio: HarperCollins, $29.95 hb, 262 pp
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Book 2 Title: Fetish
Book 2 Author: Tara Moss
Book 2 Biblio: HarperCollins, $22.95 pb, 305 pp
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Let us start with the similarities: two thrillers, set mainly in Sydney, each with a would-be snappy but jaded one word tide. On each a stiletto-heeled shoe is part of the cover design. There the ways seem to part. Dilemma is Jon Cleary’s forty-ninth novel in a career of six decades and marks the sixteenth appearance of Detective Scobie Malone. For Canadian-born, former model Tara Moss, Fetish is her first novel. HarperCollins is loyal to the old, supportive of the new. Or supportive up to a point. Both books needed much stricter editing, not only for typos (‘eluded’ for ‘alluded’ in Fetish, for instance: one hopes that is a typo), but to tighten structures that let suspense amble away.

Read more: Peter Pierce reviews 'Dilemma' by Jon Cleary and 'Fetish' by Tara Moss

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Linda Jaivin reviews Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail by Leonie Stevens and Perfect Skin by Nick Earls
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‘Look, here I am, I’m sixteen and I’m hundreds of miles from home! I want adventure! I want excitement! I want to boldly go where no Noble has gone before. Look at me! Look! Look!’ In Leonie Stevens’s Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail, Vicky Noble has left Melbourne to escape the tedium of a shelf-stacking job at the supermarket and the torment of a publicly failed romance. Vicky wants more than just to run away from her life. She craves a brand new one, preferably on the Jack Kerouac model.
Book 1 Title: Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail
Book Author: Leonie Stevens
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $14.95 pb, 198 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Perfect Skin
Book 2 Author: Nick Earls
Book 2 Biblio: Viking, $24.95 pb, 355 pp
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‘Look, here I am, I’m sixteen and I’m hundreds of miles from home! I want adventure! I want excitement! I want to boldly go where no Noble has gone before. Look at me! Look! Look!’ In Leonie Stevens’s Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail, Vicky Noble has left Melbourne to escape the tedium of a shelf-stacking job at the supermarket and the torment of a publicly failed romance. Vicky wants more than just to run away from her life. She craves a brand new one, preferably on the Jack Kerouac model.

Read more: Linda Jaivin reviews 'Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail' by Leonie Stevens and 'Perfect Skin' by Nick...

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Robyn Annear reviews The Birth of Sydney edited by Tim Flannery and Buried Alive, Sydney 1788-92: Eyewitness accounts of the making of a nation by Jack Egan
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List of essentials for a trip to Sydney in 2000: airline ticket, style-repellent, a buddy at SOCOG, rather a lot of money, and, uh-oh, excess baggage alert. I’m afraid these two big paperbacks are a must. With the Olympics looming, an outbreak of books about Sydney was inevitable. But fear not, discerning readers. Jack Egan and Tim Flannery’s tributes to Australia’s first city are not the quick-and-slick kind. Opportunistic they may be, but you can tell they’re done with love.
Book 1 Title: The Birth of Sydney
Book Author: Tim Flannery
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $24.95 pb, 349 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 2 Title: Buried Alive, Sydney 1788-92
Book 2 Subtitle: Eyewitness accounts of the making of a nation
Book 2 Author: Jack Egan
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 351 pp
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List of essentials for a trip to Sydney in 2000: airline ticket, style-repellent, a buddy at SOCOG, rather a lot of money, and, uh-oh, excess baggage alert. I’m afraid these two big paperbacks are a must. With the Olympics looming, an outbreak of books about Sydney was inevitable. But fear not, discerning readers. Jack Egan and Tim Flannery’s tributes to Australia’s first city are not the quick-and-slick kind. Opportunistic they may be, but you can tell they’re done with love.

Read more: Robyn Annear reviews 'The Birth of Sydney' edited by Tim Flannery and 'Buried Alive, Sydney...

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Contents Category: Interview
Custom Article Title: Interview with Robert Drewe
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Ramona Koval: I once had a conversation with an Australian writer who envied my parents’ war experience and refugee tales, because he said at least you have something to write about. But in this memoir you have proved that an Australian beach-based childhood can be as compelling and strange and moving as any European story. This Australian story had been brewing for a while, hadn’t it?

Robert Drewe: It had certainly been brewing for a long time. I have written novels touching on this period. But for some reason, perhaps because of the rather harrowing experiences of my family at the time, I had pushed it aside. But in the end I found it was more and more on my mind. I realised that my whole generation of people growing up in Perth were still subject to the same myth. I decided finally to deal with it in the manner I have.
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Ramona Koval: I once had a conversation with an Australian writer who envied my parents’ war experience and refugee tales, because he said at least you have something to write about. But in this memoir you have proved that an Australian beach-based childhood can be as compelling and strange and moving as any European story. This Australian story had been brewing for a while, hadn’t it?

Robert Drewe: It had certainly been brewing for a long time. I have written novels touching on this period. But for some reason, perhaps because of the rather harrowing experiences of my family at the time, I had pushed it aside. But in the end I found it was more and more on my mind. I realised that my whole generation of people growing up in Perth were still subject to the same myth. I decided finally to deal with it in the manner I have.

Read more: Interview with Robert Drewe by Ramona Koval

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Philip Morrissey reviews Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An anthology of Aboriginal writing by Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg (eds.)
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Those Who Remain Will Always Remember is a fitting successor to Paperbark, the Muecke, Davis, Shoemaker, Mudrooroo anthology of a decade earlier. Though it is a regional publication, restricted to Aboriginal authors from Western Australia, it follows the same catholic principles of inclusion that made Paperbark a book of its time. Its editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill, and Rosemary van den Berg provide a kaleidoscopic image of Western Australian Aboriginal life in assembling writings which include critical essays, cultural-political statements, prose fiction, life histories, personal testimony, interviews, and poetry. Importantly, these disparate genres leave the reader with a sense of the editors’ unity of vision rather than ad hoc opportunism.
Book 1 Title: Those Who Remain Will Always Remember
Book 1 Subtitle: An anthology of Aboriginal writing
Book Author: Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg
Book 1 Biblio: FACP, $19.95 pb, 328 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Those Who Remain Will Always Remember is a fitting successor to Paperbark, the Muecke, Davis, Shoemaker, Mudrooroo anthology of a decade earlier. Though it is a regional publication, restricted to Aboriginal authors from Western Australia, it follows the same catholic principles of inclusion that made Paperbark a book of its time. Its editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill, and Rosemary van den Berg provide a kaleidoscopic image of Western Australian Aboriginal life in assembling writings which include critical essays, cultural-political statements, prose fiction, life histories, personal testimony, interviews, and poetry. Importantly, these disparate genres leave the reader with a sense of the editors’ unity of vision rather than ad hoc opportunism.

Read more: Philip Morrissey reviews 'Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An anthology of Aboriginal...

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Article Title: Obituary for Graham Little, 1939–2000 by Katherine Hattam
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Frank Graham Little was born in Belfast 1 November 1939 and died Melbourne 24 February 2000. He spoke quietly and literally made a profession of observation, of seeing through and beneath human behaviour, so could appear passive. He was not. He was a man who took hold of his life, and was absolutely in the middle of yet another intellectual adventure when he died suddenly last month.
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Frank Graham Little was born in Belfast 1 November 1939 and died Melbourne 24 February 2000. He spoke quietly and literally made a profession of observation, of seeing through and beneath human behaviour, so could appear passive. He was not. He was a man who took hold of his life, and was absolutely in the middle of yet another intellectual adventure when he died suddenly last month.

Read more: Obituary for Graham Little, 1939–2000 by Katherine Hattam

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters to the Editor
Article Subtitle: April 2000, no. 219
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Dear editor, I have often wished that more of the letters to the editor would comprise interesting debate or comment on literary matters. Sadly, about ninety-five percent of them are responses by furious authors to what they perceive as an unfavourable review of their book. While boring, such letters are at least understandable as being the output of wounded childish egos. Not understandable, and in fact unethical and unforgiveable, are attacks by publishers on reviewers, such as happened a while back when Fremantle Arts Centre Press rushed into prolonged print via your letters to criticise Dr Ivor Indyk for having unfavourably reviewed one of the many collections of verse by John Kinsella which Fremantle has pumped out over the last few years.
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Dear Editor,

I have often wished that more of the letters to the editor would comprise interesting debate or comment on literary matters. Sadly, about ninety-five percent of them are responses by furious authors to what they perceive as an unfavourable review of their book. While boring, such letters are at least understandable as being the output of wounded childish egos. Not understandable, and in fact unethical and unforgiveable, are attacks by publishers on reviewers, such as happened a while back when Fremantle Arts Centre Press rushed into prolonged print via your letters to criticise Dr Ivor Indyk for having unfavourably reviewed one of the many collections of verse by John Kinsella which Fremantle has pumped out over the last few years.

Read more: Letters to the Editor - April 2000

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Article Title: Coping with adults
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Blyton got rid of them, Dahl demonised or mocked them but adults are definitely central in  the lives of young people in this recent trio of books for the emerging to the retiring adolescent.

The Keeper (Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp) is aimed at the younger end of adolescence, perhaps written with the view that such readers will be willing to suspend disbelief as they will need to in this romantic story of a troubled young boy’s search for a father. Joel is twelve and lives with his grandmother on the Yorke Peninsula, and fishing is his love but fighting his tormentor, Shawn at school, and generally being disruptive, takes up much of his time. However, from the outset we are alerted to Joel’s essential goodness when he defends the meek Mei who will not fight back.
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The-Keeper-Rosanne-Hawke.jpgThe Keeper by Rosanne Hawke

Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp

Blyton got rid of them, Dahl demonised or mocked them but adults are definitely central in  the lives of young people in this recent trio of books for the emerging to the retiring adolescent.

The Keeper (Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp) is aimed at the younger end of adolescence, perhaps written with the view that such readers will be willing to suspend disbelief as they will need to in this romantic story of a troubled young boy’s search for a father. Joel is twelve and lives with his grandmother on the Yorke Peninsula, and fishing is his love but fighting his tormentor, Shawn at school, and generally being disruptive, takes up much of his time. However, from the outset we are alerted to Joel’s essential goodness when he defends the meek Mei who will not fight back.

Read more: Pam Macintyre reviews 'The Keeper' by Rosanne Hawke, 'Wolf on the Fold' by Judith Clarke, and...

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Article Title: Forms of humour
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In the current overwhelmingly dour landscape of Australian children’s fiction, it’s a welcome relief to pick up three books which at least claim to rely on humour for their effect. Of course, humour comes in different forms, with different purposes.

In Small Sacrifices, for instance, Beverley Macdonald isn’t looking for easy laughs. By its contrast with the harrowing events which constitute the story’s climax, the humour Macdonald injects into the first two thirds of the book effectively maximises the impact of the tragedy. Central to the fun at the beginning are the members of the bizarrely extended family belonging to the narrator, fourteen-year-old Harry. We meet them as they gradually assemble for Christmas at a beachside house in the town where Harry’s artily eccentric grandmother lives.
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small_sacrifices.JPGSmall Sacrifices by Beverley Macdonald

Penguin, $12.95 pb, 179 pp

In the current overwhelmingly dour landscape of Australian children’s fiction, it’s a welcome relief to pick up three books which at least claim to rely on humour for their effect. Of course, humour comes in different forms, with different purposes.

In Small Sacrifices (Penguin, $12.95 pb, 179 pp), for instance, Beverley Macdonald isn’t looking for easy laughs. By its contrast with the harrowing events which constitute the story’s climax, the humour Macdonald injects into the first two thirds of the book effectively maximises the impact of the tragedy. Central to the fun at the beginning are the members of the bizarrely extended family belonging to the narrator, fourteen-year-old Harry. We meet them as they gradually assemble for Christmas at a beachside house in the town where Harry’s artily eccentric grandmother lives.

Read more: Stephen Matthews reviews 'Small Sacrifices' by Beverley Macdonald, 'Smash' by David Caddy, and...

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Award-winning Louis de Paor, in the spirit of many of his literary compatriots, has produced his best work out of being away from Ireland. Cork and Other Poems, a bilingual collection, celebrates the presence of memory, the confrontation of points of departure. Although his luxurious rhymes in Irish are lost in English, his similes (‘The back of the car’ ‘watertight as a fish’s arse’) and kennings (‘sky-horse’, meaning plane) maintain a resilient life even in translation. Some images are plainly original. Others are held up by mythology, as in ‘The Pangs of Ulster’ and ‘Heredity’. De Paor’s poems remind me of what Bernard O’Donoghue and Chris Wallace-Crabbe said, respectively, of Seamus Heaney’s poetry-steeped in ‘northern Bog-myths’, ‘notably muddy’. This is a remarkable world of rain and birth, fetches and the supra-natural, marsh and sinking. But in this book, his third collection, de Paor’s startling, terse narratives have ‘sweetened the underground dark’ of family, love and homecoming. The language is fluid and urgent, exemplified in ‘Oisn’ and ‘Nanbird’. While he considers the particular through the lens of myth, his true ground is the specific, the faith in individual comprehension, where, when I ‘set foot on the ground / I [see] my reflection / brought down to size.’
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depaorcovercaos.jpgCork and Other Poems by Louis de Paor

Black Pepper, $19.95 pb, 102 pp

Award-winning Louis de Paor, in the spirit of many of his literary compatriots, has produced his best work out of being away from Ireland. Cork and Other Poems, a bilingual collection, celebrates the presence of memory, the confrontation of points of departure. Although his luxurious rhymes in Irish are lost in English, his similes (‘The back of the car’ ‘watertight as a fish’s arse’) and kennings (‘sky-horse’, meaning plane) maintain a resilient life even in translation. Some images are plainly original. Others are held up by mythology, as in ‘The Pangs of Ulster’ and ‘Heredity’. De Paor’s poems remind me of what Bernard O’Donoghue and Chris Wallace-Crabbe said, respectively, of Seamus Heaney’s poetry-steeped in ‘northern Bog-myths’, ‘notably muddy’. This is a remarkable world of rain and birth, fetches and the supra-natural, marsh and sinking. But in this book, his third collection, de Paor’s startling, terse narratives have ‘sweetened the underground dark’ of family, love and homecoming. The language is fluid and urgent, exemplified in ‘Oisn’ and ‘Nanbird’. While he considers the particular through the lens of myth, his true ground is the specific, the faith in individual comprehension, where, when I ‘set foot on the ground / I [see] my reflection / brought down to size.’

Read more: Bev Braune reviews 'Cork and Other Poems' by Louis de Paor, 'Refugee Kosovo' by X. Duong, 'Ten...

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Article Title: Margaret Dunkle reviews four books
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Swans are said to mate for life and The Stone Swan builds on the love and anguish of such a relationship as the focus for a lesson in environmental responsibility. A pair of swans, lagging behind the rest of their flight, take solitary refuge in a wetland adjacent to a new housing estate, unaware that it is targeted for ‘development’. The cygnets hatch as the water levels subside and the male swan becomes trapped in a tangle of exposed rubbish and plastic twine. He is near death from exhaustion when a child from the nearby estate finds and frees him. But the peril is not over, for a causeway is being built across the wetland, isolating the swan family from the rest of the flock. The male manages to climb to the top of the roadway, but he will not go on without his mate and she will not leave without her babies. The story ends as she and her young, now fully fledged, fly off to join the flock on their annual migration while the human child witnesses her last farewell to the swan-shaped stone that has appeared on the causeway. Bell’s sombre illustrations in ink and watercolour reinforce the tragic mood of the story. A final page provides background information and references for this timely picture book that could be used effectively in primary school ecology studies.
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Stone_swan.jpgThe Stone Swan by Helen Bell

Cygnet Books, $22.95 hb

Swans are said to mate for life and The Stone Swan (Cygnet Books, $22.95 hb) builds on the love and anguish of such a relationship as the focus for a lesson in environmental responsibility. A pair of swans, lagging behind the rest of their flight, take solitary refuge in a wetland adjacent to a new housing estate, unaware that it is targeted for ‘development’. The cygnets hatch as the water levels subside and the male swan becomes trapped in a tangle of exposed rubbish and plastic twine. He is near death from exhaustion when a child from the nearby estate finds and frees him. But the peril is not over, for a causeway is being built across the wetland, isolating the swan family from the rest of the flock. The male manages to climb to the top of the roadway, but he will not go on without his mate and she will not leave without her babies. The story ends as she and her young, now fully fledged, fly off to join the flock on their annual migration while the human child witnesses her last farewell to the swan-shaped stone that has appeared on the causeway. Bell’s sombre illustrations in ink and watercolour reinforce the tragic mood of the story. A final page provides background information and references for this timely picture book that could be used effectively in primary school ecology studies.

Read more: Margaret Dunkle reviews 'The Stone Swan' by Helen Bell, 'Keep Me Company' by Gillian Rubinstein,...

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There are many competitions for short story writing in Australia but few for reviewing. Indeed the Geraldine Pascall Prize is the only one that comes to mind, which was fust won by Marion Halligan, regular reviewer for The Canberra Times and ABR, and, more recently, was won by Andrew Riemer, lead reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald and regular reviewer for ABR. The Pascall Prize is awarded by a panel of judges who consider the published reviews of candidates, so is awarded for body of work and overall contribution to the reviewing world.
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There are many competitions for short story writing in Australia but few for reviewing. Indeed the Geraldine Pascall Prize is the only one that comes to mind, which was fust won by Marion Halligan, regular reviewer for The Canberra Times and ABR, and, more recently, was won by Andrew Riemer, lead reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald and regular reviewer for ABR. The Pascall Prize is awarded by a panel of judges who consider the published reviews of candidates, so is awarded for body of work and overall contribution to the reviewing world.

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Max Charlesworth reviews Unfree Associations: Inside psychoanalytic institutes by Douglas Kirsner
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Contents Category: Psychiatry
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Article Title: Freudian Associations
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Douglas Kirsner’s new book has been a long time in the making. Based on extensive interviews with US East Coast and West Coast psychoanalysts over some ten years, it started out as an encyclopedic study of Freud and Freudianism. At one stage of its evolution it was called The Culture of the Couch but later, when Kirsner and his editor realised that he had assembled almost one million words of interview material, he decided to radically scale down the scope of the book and to completely alter its focus. He had been very impressed by a very brilliant book on contemporary French psychoanalysis (French Freud as it was called) by Sherry Turkle at MIT in Boston and he decided to use her quasi-ethnographic style. It is now basically a study of the four main psychoanalytic institutes in the United States – New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles – and one is reminded irresistibly of the contentious early Christian Church communities in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Corinth. Kirsner makes a great deal of play with the analogies between the psychoanalytic institutes and sectarian religious groups but, knowing something about both, I think that the religious sectarians were models of peace and sweetness and light compared with the Freudian institutes.
Book 1 Title: Unfree Associations
Book 1 Subtitle: Inside psychoanalytic institutes
Book Author: Douglas Kirsner
Book 1 Biblio: Process Press, London $59.9Spb, 324pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Douglas Kirsner’s new book has been a long time in the making. Based on extensive interviews with US East Coast and West Coast psychoanalysts over some ten years, it started out as an encyclopedic study of Freud and Freudianism. At one stage of its evolution it was called The Culture of the Couch but later, when Kirsner and his editor realised that he had assembled almost one million words of interview material, he decided to radically scale down the scope of the book and to completely alter its focus. He had been very impressed by a very brilliant book on contemporary French psychoanalysis (French Freud as it was called) by Sherry Turkle at MIT in Boston and he decided to use her quasi-ethnographic style. It is now basically a study of the four main psychoanalytic institutes in the United States – New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles – and one is reminded irresistibly of the contentious early Christian Church communities in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Corinth. Kirsner makes a great deal of play with the analogies between the psychoanalytic institutes and sectarian religious groups but, knowing something about both, I think that the religious sectarians were models of peace and sweetness and light compared with the Freudian institutes.

Read more: Max Charlesworth reviews 'Unfree Associations: Inside psychoanalytic institutes' by Douglas Kirsner

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