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Absolutely Revolting

November 2003, no. 256

Welcome to the November 2003 issue!
Alan Atkinson reviews Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen
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Contents Category: History
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Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners ...
Book 1 Title: Dancing with Strangers
Book Author: Inga Clendinnen
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $45 hb, 334 pp, 1877008583
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Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners, drawing them within the world of the settlement at Port Jackson during its first dozen years, from 1778 to 1800. The two leading figures are Governor Arthur Phillip (who departed in 1792) and Bennelong.

Clendinnen’s method is ethnographic history. This offers a way into the past that, in good hands, is full of brilliant possibilities. The trick lies in choosing a period that is richly documented, fastening on the minutiae of behaviour and building up, step by step, the image of a mental universe – another world, vividly patterned and inevitably different from the here and now. Indeed, the reader is invited to move into another here and now.

A great deal depends on the way in which the writer issues that invitation. Ethnographic history, once an exciting aspect of Australian scholarship (especially in Melbourne), has fallen under a shadow lately, and part of the reason lies in the difficulty of persuading readers to take the kind of journey it involves. Questions of identity and ethnicity, leading historical issues since the 1990s, complicate the invitation too much. Readers nowadays don’t leave behind their own here and now, their own identity and ethnicity, as easily as they used to do. History tries to say at least a little about what readers might be themselves, as much as about past Others.

Read more: Alan Atkinson reviews 'Dancing with Strangers' by Inga Clendinnen

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Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews The Murdoch Archipelago by Bruce Page
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Contents Category: Biography
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Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page ...
Book 1 Title: The Murdoch Archipelago
Book Author: Bruce Page
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $49.95 hb, 580 pp, 0743239369
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Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page, a distinguished investigative journalist with the London Sunday Times, who went on to edit the New Statesman from 1978 to 1982.

Page acknowledges his debt to the earlier biographies, particularly Munster’s marvellous Rupert Murdoch: A paper prince (1985). He is less partial to Shawcross’s Rupert Murdoch (1992), describing Shawcross as an ‘agreeable biographer’ and declaring it ‘an important measure of Murdoch’s manipulative capacity that he has more than once been able to persuade skilful, well-respected writers to accommodate insolent misrepresentations which are convenient to his purpose’. In The Murdoch Archipelago, so rich in subtexts, it is fascinating to trace the story of other Murdoch biographies: we are told (twice) that Thomas Kiernan’s attempt to produce an authorised biography failed when the author rejected Murdoch’s concept of editorial independence, resulting in Citizen Murdoch (1986) being published without approval and viewed as ‘deeply unfair’ in Murdoch circles; and we learn that a decade before penning Virtual Murdoch (2001), the business journalist Neil Chenoweth was prevented from writing a story exposing Queensland Press’s highly unorthodox purchase of News Corporation shares. Page could have shared other stories with us: the fate of C.E. Sayers’s biography of Sir Keith Murdoch, which languishes, unpublished, in the State Library of Victoria, and Rupert Murdoch’s decision in 1991 to shelve work on an autobiography.

Read more: Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'The Murdoch Archipelago' by Bruce Page

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Rodney Beecham reviews Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
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One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.
Book 1 Title: Shantaram
Book Author: Gregory David Roberts
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe Publications, $49.95 hb, 936 pp
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One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

Read more: Rodney Beecham reviews ' Shantaram' by Gregory David Roberts

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Peter Craven reviews Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman
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Elliot Perlman made a bit of a splash a few years ago with Three Dollars (1998). Parts of the novel were underfictionalised in the most blatant way, parts of it seemed to represent nothing more than the fervencies of what Perlman thought (most of it staunch stuff agin globalisation), but it seemed undeniable that the life and times of these south suburban Melburnian wine and cheesers represented, in Australian terms, a piece of subject matter worth biting off.

It was a bit ridiculous that a book of fiction of rather manifestly modest literary ambitions should be published as the crême de la crême of literary fiction and then pretty much accepted as such. Perlman’s new book confounds the pretension and makes it well and truly the author’s own by purloining the title of one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of literary criticism and adding insult to injury by calling the protagonist’s dog Empson. One of the only times I have been cut by the The Age on the basis of something other than length was when I wrote about William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) – because of the obvious topicality, given the barbarous appropriation – and concluded: ‘So in future, Elliot Perlman, call your dogs something else.’ But then, we live at a time when the latest wannabe fiction is more likely to command reverence than the work of a notable critic and poet. Not the least paradox, though, is that Perlman would be likely to agree.
Book 1 Title: Seven Types of Ambiguity
Book Author: Elliot Perlman
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $35 pb, 609 pp
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Elliot Perlman made a bit of a splash a few years ago with Three Dollars (1998). Parts of the novel were underfictionalised in the most blatant way, parts of it seemed to represent nothing more than the fervencies of what Perlman thought (most of it staunch stuff agin globalisation), but it seemed undeniable that the life and times of these south suburban Melburnian wine and cheesers represented, in Australian terms, a piece of subject matter worth biting off.

It was a bit ridiculous that a book of fiction of rather manifestly modest literary ambitions should be published as the crême de la crême of literary fiction and then pretty much accepted as such. Perlman’s new book confounds the pretension and makes it well and truly the author’s own by purloining the title of one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of literary criticism and adding insult to injury by calling the protagonist’s dog Empson. One of the only times I have been cut by the The Age on the basis of something other than length was when I wrote about William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) – because of the obvious topicality, given the barbarous appropriation – and concluded: ‘So in future, Elliot Perlman, call your dogs something else.’ But then, we live at a time when the latest wannabe fiction is more likely to command reverence than the work of a notable critic and poet. Not the least paradox, though, is that Perlman would be likely to agree.

Read more: Peter Craven reviews 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' by Elliot Perlman

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Rodney Beecham reviews Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
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One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

Shantaram is based on the life of its author, Gregory David Roberts. A heroin addict, Roberts was sentenced in 1978 to nineteen years’ imprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building society branches, credit unions and shops. In 1980 he escaped from Victoria’s maximum-security prison, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.
Book 1 Title: Shantaram
Book Author: Gregory David Roberts
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe Publications, $49.95 hb, 936 pp
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One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

Shantaram is based on the life of its author, Gregory David Roberts. A heroin addict, Roberts was sentenced in 1978 to nineteen years’ imprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building society branches, credit unions and shops. In 1980 he escaped from Victoria’s maximum-security prison, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.

Read more: Rodney Beecham reviews 'Shantaram' by Gregory David Roberts

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Martin Duwell reviews Studio Moon by John Tranter
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As one of the few Australian poets with an extensive publishing history overseas as well as in Australia, John Tranter suffers from the problem of what might be called parallel publishing. His UK books are often built out of selections from his Australian books. Just under half the poems in his new book, Studio Moon (published by Salt, and distributed in Australia by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press), have appeared before, notably in At the Florida (1993). But the best from that book has been chosen, the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing.
Book 1 Title: Studio Moon
Book Author: John Tranter
Book 1 Biblio: Salt, $22.95 pb, 114 pp
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As one of the few Australian poets with an extensive publishing history overseas as well as in Australia, John Tranter suffers from the problem of what might be called parallel publishing. His UK books are often built out of selections from his Australian books. Just under half the poems in his new book, Studio Moon (published by Salt, and distributed in Australia by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press), have appeared before, notably in At the Florida (1993). But the best from that book has been chosen, the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing.

What Studio Moon gives us is a conspectus of one of Australia’s greatest poets in mid-career, a phase beginning in 1988 after the publication of Under Berlin: New Poems 1988 (1988). This is a period dominated by a fascination with the processes of generating poetry, both in form and meaning. It begins with Tranter’s finding a computer programme, ‘BreakDown’, which analysed the frequency of letter repetition in any given text and was able to generate parodies that (after much editing), while clearly and eerily in the style of the original, are wildly surreal. One of the earliest poems in Studio Moon, ‘Her Shy Banjo’, derives from some pages of John Ashbery (its title anagrammatises his name) and was published in 1991 together with an explanatory article, ‘Dogs in All the Unregarded Bales: Mr Rubenking’s “BreakDown”’.

Read more: Martin Duwell reviews 'Studio Moon' by John Tranter

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Contents Category: Politics
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Most of us know something about John Anderson (1893–1962). He is remembered as a libertarian philosopher who, during his time at the University of Sydney, influenced various individuals and groups, most notably the Sydney ‘Push’. Writers on Sydney’s intellectual tradition tend to locate the Scottish-born Anderson at the epicentre of this universe. Anderson is someone, however, of whom it is true to say that he is more often referred to than read. His major philosophical works were collected, or entombed, in Studies in Empirical Philosophy (1962). Now, as part of his ongoing attempt to resurrect Anderson, Mark Weblin, the John Anderson Research Fellow, has collated, edited and provided a useful introduction to Anderson’s political writings. The volume, as a whole, raises two questions. Firstly, do Anderson’s political views remain of general interest? And secondly, what is the place or legacy of Anderson in contemporary Australian debate?
Book 1 Title: A Perilous and Fighting Life
Book 1 Subtitle: : From communist to conservative: The political writings of Professor John Anderson
Book Author: Mark Weblin
Book 1 Biblio: Pluto Press, $29.95 pb, 290 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Most of us know something about John Anderson (1893–1962). He is remembered as a libertarian philosopher who, during his time at the University of Sydney, influenced various individuals and groups, most notably the Sydney ‘Push’. Writers on Sydney’s intellectual tradition tend to locate the Scottish-born Anderson at the epicentre of this universe. Anderson is someone, however, of whom it is true to say that he is more often referred to than read. His major philosophical works were collected, or entombed, in Studies in Empirical Philosophy (1962). Now, as part of his ongoing attempt to resurrect Anderson, Mark Weblin, the John Anderson Research Fellow, has collated, edited and provided a useful introduction to Anderson’s political writings (‘A Perilous and Fighting Life: From Communist to Conservative: The political writings of Professor John Anderson’ edited by Mark Weblin, Pluto Press, $29.95 pb, 290 pp). The volume, as a whole, raises two questions. Firstly, do Anderson’s political views remain of general interest? And secondly, what is the place or legacy of Anderson in contemporary Australian debate?

Read more: Nathan Hollier reviews ‘A Perilous and Fighting Life: From communist to conservative: The...

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Michael McGirr reviews ‘Lessons from the Heart’ by John Clanchy
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John Clancy does a number of curious things in his new novel. One of them is to put Patrick White’s Voss into the hands of his heroine. Laura is in Year 12. Her teacher, Miss Temple, happens to find a copy of Voss when they are together on a school excursion to Alice Springs. Laura immediately warms to the book. She is a remarkable young woman, sensitive and resourceful. Destined to study medicine, she has literary gifts as well. People offer her jobs at places where others her age are queuing for work. One of her reasons for going on the school excursion, where she helps supervise a group of Year 7 and 8 children, is that she is recovering from the termination of her relationship with Patrick, her slightly older beau.
Book 1 Title: Lessons from the Heart
Book Author: John Clanchy
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $22 pb, 331 pp
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John Clancy does a number of curious things in his new novel. One of them is to put Patrick White’s Voss into the hands of his heroine. Laura is in Year 12. Her teacher, Miss Temple, happens to find a copy of Voss when they are together on a school excursion to Alice Springs. Laura immediately warms to the book. She is a remarkable young woman, sensitive and resourceful. Destined to study medicine, she has literary gifts as well. People offer her jobs at places where others her age are queuing for work. One of her reasons for going on the school excursion, where she helps supervise a group of Year 7 and 8 children, is that she is recovering from the termination of her relationship with Patrick, her slightly older beau.

Read more: Michael McGirr reviews ‘Lessons from the Heart’ by John Clanchy

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Nicholas Jose reviews ‘North of Capricorn: The untold story of Australia’s north’ by Henry Reynolds
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Contents Category: Australian History
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When Christine Anu sings My Island Home, that great Neil Murray song, there’s always an irony. She’s not singing about the big island that tugs at the heartstrings of most Australians when they hear the song, but a far smaller, more remote home in Torres Strait where things are done differently. The big island-continent may be benign in its fortified insularity, a haven against contaminants from across the seas, but it’s those smaller islands that have, in the song, the qualities of freedom, harmony and belonging that matter.
Book 1 Title: North of Capricorn
Book 1 Subtitle: The untold story of Australia’s north
Book Author: Henry Reynolds
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $49.95 hb, 236 pp
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When Christine Anu sings My Island Home, that great Neil Murray song, there’s always an irony. She’s not singing about the big island that tugs at the heartstrings of most Australians when they hear the song, but a far smaller, more remote home in Torres Strait where things are done differently. The big island-continent may be benign in its fortified insularity, a haven against contaminants from across the seas, but it’s those smaller islands that have, in the song, the qualities of freedom, harmony and belonging that matter.

Read more: Nicholas Jose reviews ‘North of Capricorn: The untold story of Australia’s north’ by Henry Reynolds

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This book, says Geoff Page in his introduction, should ‘cheer up those who are prone to lament the passing of “form” from contemporary poetry’. Speaking as one who does employ the f-word now and again, I’m very glad to hear it, though I catch the note of sardonicism and think that Page rather misses the point when he writes, again a little satirically, that some ‘may complain that fourteen lines “do not a sonnet always make”‘. I, for one, am more likely to complain that a poem of roughly sonnet proportions ‘does not a decent poem make’; the sonnet (I’d say) is a means, not an end. Apart from the obvious cases of ‘straitjacketing’, of forcing a form upon such content as may be naturally resistant to it, there is the fact that too smooth a rehashing of forms is one of the things – just think of Kipling – that announces a poet as irretrievably minor. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example: in poets of only moderate skill, its closing couplet will tend to betray a cluck of self-congratulation.
Book 1 Title: The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets
Book Author: Geoff Page
Book 1 Biblio: Indigo, $20 pb, 112 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This book (The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets edited by Geoff Page, Indigo, $20 pb, 112 pp), says Geoff Page in his introduction, should ‘cheer up those who are prone to lament the passing of “form” from contemporary poetry’. Speaking as one who does employ the f-word now and again, I’m very glad to hear it, though I catch the note of sardonicism and think that Page rather misses the point when he writes, again a little satirically, that some ‘may complain that fourteen lines “do not a sonnet always make”‘. I, for one, am more likely to complain that a poem of roughly sonnet proportions ‘does not a decent poem make’; the sonnet (I’d say) is a means, not an end. Apart from the obvious cases of ‘straitjacketing’, of forcing a form upon such content as may be naturally resistant to it, there is the fact that too smooth a rehashing of forms is one of the things – just think of Kipling – that announces a poet as irretrievably minor. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example: in poets of only moderate skill, its closing couplet will tend to betray a cluck of self-congratulation.

A rhyme scheme down the side is de rigueur.
Elizabethan maybe – or Petrarchan.
And cooks from Spenser on will all concur
the sonnet is the dish to make your mark in.
By God, we’re there and, yes, you’re doing fine.
And now, like pepper, add the fourteenth line.

Read more: Richard King reviews ‘The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets’ edited by Geoff Page

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Allan Patience reviews The Cambridge Handbook of Social Sciences in Australia edited by Ian McAllister, Steve Dowrick and Riaz Hassan
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This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Handbook of Social Sciences in Australia
Book Author: Ian McAllister, Steve Dowrick and Riaz Hassan
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $175 hb, 724 pp
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This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.

Read more: Allan Patience reviews 'The Cambridge Handbook of Social Sciences in Australia' edited by Ian...

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Bruce Moore reviews The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of The English Language (Second Edition) by David Crystal
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The first edition of David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language appeared in 1995, and was widely acclaimed. It covered an extraordinary amount of material under the broad topics of ‘The History of English’, ‘English Vocabulary’, ‘English Grammar’, ‘Spoken and Written English’, ‘Using English’ and ‘Learning about English’. It used modern design techniques and was richly illustrated with all kinds of visual material. It was a book that allowed extended reading of essays on particular topics, or dipping and pursuing cross-references. This second edition appears eight years later. Has English changed sufficiently in those eight years to justify a new edition? Is there enough new material in this new edition to persuade someone who bought the first edition in 1995 to buy the 2003 one?
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of The English Language (Second Edition)
Book Author: David Crystal
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $69.95 pb, 506pp, 0 521 53033 4
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The first edition of David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language appeared in 1995, and was widely acclaimed. It covered an extraordinary amount of material under the broad topics of ‘The History of English’, ‘English Vocabulary’, ‘English Grammar’, ‘Spoken and Written English’, ‘Using English’ and ‘Learning about English’. It used modern design techniques and was richly illustrated with all kinds of visual material. It was a book that allowed extended reading of essays on particular topics, or dipping and pursuing cross-references. This second edition appears eight years later. Has English changed sufficiently in those eight years to justify a new edition? Is there enough new material in this new edition to persuade someone who bought the first edition in 1995 to buy the 2003 one?

Read more: Bruce Moore reviews 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of The English Language (Second Edition)' by David...

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José Borghino reviews ‘Three Dog Night’ by Peter Goldsworthy
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It is difficult for non-Aboriginal novelists to deal adequately with Aboriginal experience in their work. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is general ignorance about Aboriginal experience. But another, more insidious, reason is self-censorship. The politics of speaking in an Aboriginal voice, if you’re not Aboriginal, is at best fraught and at worst a nightmare. Thinking twice before embarking on such an ‘adventure’ is no bad thing, a counter-balance, perhaps, to the days when it was all too easy to usurp an indigenous point of view, days of racist triumphalism or paternalist do-goodism.
Book 1 Title: Three Dog Night
Book Author: Peter Goldsworthy
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $29.95 pb, 341 pp
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It is difficult for non-Aboriginal novelists to deal adequately with Aboriginal experience in their work. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is general ignorance about Aboriginal experience. But another, more insidious, reason is self-censorship. The politics of speaking in an Aboriginal voice, if you’re not Aboriginal, is at best fraught and at worst a nightmare. Thinking twice before embarking on such an ‘adventure’ is no bad thing, a counter-balance, perhaps, to the days when it was all too easy to usurp an indigenous point of view, days of racist triumphalism or paternalist do-goodism.

Read more: José Borghino reviews ‘Three Dog Night’ by Peter Goldsworthy

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One of the phrases used by the Swedish Academy to describe J.M. Coetzee, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is ‘scrupulous doubter’. In his novels, memoirs, essays, lectures and academic criticism, Coetzee conveys the uncertainty and complexity of lived experience with extraordinary precision and, sometimes, with a clarity that is almost unbearable. Coetzee’s work is triumphant confirmation of the allegiance owed by literature to nothing except the truth of the human condition. His art succeeds despite, or rather because of, the fact that it is so alive to all the problems of form and content standing in its way. His prose communicates difficulty, dissonance and doubt without itself being any of these things.

In his Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa writes that ‘the defining characteristic of the literary vocation may be that those who possess it experience the exercise of their craft as its own best reward, much superior to anything they might gain from the fruits of their labours’. Coetzee himself has written that the ‘feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not emerged, that lies somewhere down the end of the road’.
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One of the phrases used by the Swedish Academy to describe J.M. Coetzee, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is ‘scrupulous doubter’. In his novels, memoirs, essays, lectures and academic criticism, Coetzee conveys the uncertainty and complexity of lived experience with extraordinary precision and, sometimes, with a clarity that is almost unbearable. Coetzee’s work is triumphant confirmation of the allegiance owed by literature to nothing except the truth of the human condition. His art succeeds despite, or rather because of, the fact that it is so alive to all the problems of form and content standing in its way. His prose communicates difficulty, dissonance and doubt without itself being any of these things.

In his Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa writes that ‘the defining characteristic of the literary vocation may be that those who possess it experience the exercise of their craft as its own best reward, much superior to anything they might gain from the fruits of their labours’. Coetzee himself has written that the ‘feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not emerged, that lies somewhere down the end of the road’.

Read more: Commentary | J.M. Coetzee by Simon Caterson

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The other day, in a stairwell within the National Library of Australia, I opened a door, expecting it to lead to a corridor and a suite of offices. Instead, I found myself inside a dimly lit room filled with rows of book-laden shelves. As I looked for the exit, I saw a man removing a book from the bottom shelf. Another man walked past me carrying books and said hello. It was like a scene from Being John Malkovich, surreal and delightful, and it characterises my last few months at the National Library, where I have been curating a two-part exhibition, In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–2000 (the first part, which deals with the processes of colonisation, opened on 9 October 2003 and will close on 26 January 2004, and the second, focusing on modern life, will open next August).
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The other day, in a stairwell within the National Library of Australia, I opened a door, expecting it to lead to a corridor and a suite of offices. Instead, I found myself inside a dimly lit room filled with rows of book-laden shelves. As I looked for the exit, I saw a man removing a book from the bottom shelf. Another man walked past me carrying books and said hello. It was like a scene from Being John Malkovich, surreal and delightful, and it characterises my last few months at the National Library, where I have been curating a two-part exhibition, In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–2000 (the first part, which deals with the processes of colonisation, opened on 9 October 2003 and will close on 26 January 2004, and the second, focusing on modern life, will open next August).

My sense of disorientation comes in part from the sheer size of the National Library’s collections. The shelf space for publications measures 250 kilometres and is growing by seven kilometres a year, while the Pictures Collection alone holds over 600,000 photographic images. Photographs are also acquired by other collecting areas, including Manuscripts, Rare Books and Oral History. What these staggering statistics reinforce is the fact that size is a key determinant in the kinds of relationships one can have with collections. Huge collections are unknowable in their entirety; their scope greatly exceeds the limits of an individual’s knowledge.

Read more: Commentary | National News by Helen Ennis

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Custom Article Title: The Crack in the Teacup: Reading Hilary Mantel
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About a decade ago, I picked up a book because I liked the cover: bleak street, stark buildings, empty sky, a robed man, his back turned, in the distance; in the foreground, a woman in a burka looking to the left at something we can’t see. When the blurb promised me ‘a Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw, with an insidious power to grip’, I bought it. It gripped. In fact, it scared the living bejesus out of me. That was my introduction to Hilary Mantel’s writings. Since then, I have read nearly everything she has published.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is about a sensible young couple who, after years of humanitarian work in Africa, decide to go to Saudi Arabia to repair their fortunes. The husband will work on a seductively extravagant building project; the wife will read, write and relax in their pleasant, if mildly claustrophobic, apartment. Then small things begin to go wrong.
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About a decade ago, I picked up a book because I liked the cover: bleak street, stark buildings, empty sky, a robed man, his back turned, in the distance; in the foreground, a woman in a burka looking to the left at something we can’t see. When the blurb promised me ‘a Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw, with an insidious power to grip’, I bought it. It gripped. In fact, it scared the living bejesus out of me. That was my introduction to Hilary Mantel’s writings. Since then, I have read nearly everything she has published.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is about a sensible young couple who, after years of humanitarian work in Africa, decide to go to Saudi Arabia to repair their fortunes. The husband will work on a seductively extravagant building project; the wife will read, write and relax in their pleasant, if mildly claustrophobic, apartment. Then small things begin to go wrong.

I read it, reread it, read it in slow motion, read parts of it backwards and still could not see how Mantel had done it. Nothing much happens, or nothing you see, but dread comes oozing down an empty stairwell, under a sealed door, into a quiet apartment. There is nothing you can do to resist it, even on the fourth reading. Then I read the other novels. One robust reviewer declared a couple of the more gothic ones, Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985) and Vacant Possession (1986), to be comedies, and I remember laughing. At first. Others, such as Fludd (1989) and The Giant, O’Brien (1998), are overtly fables, but an insidious cruelty was their action engine, too. Finally, I arrived at the novel that Mantel had begun first, A Place of Greater Safety (1992). Set in the French Revolution, it has characters named ‘Maximilien Robespierre’ and ‘Camille Demouslins’, so I decided not to read it. As an historian, I am snooty about historical novels. Besides, I knew the plot. Now, after reading the memoir, I will read it.

I also read Mantel’s critical essays as they appeared in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. They kept getting better and better, in their clarity and in a rarer quality that I can only describe as intrepid intelligence. One of the most recent, on V.S. Naipaul, deepened my understanding of his writings, which is what good literary reviews are about. Her assessment revealed hidden compatibilities. Mantel values Naipaul’s stylistic plainness because she practises it herself. She knows about dislocation and its costs and benefits, too. And they both know that injury is forever; that the people we damage remain forever dangerous.

Consider also this: ‘Naipaul has a genius for noticing, a genius for freezing the instant when meaning is born from the accidents of the everyday.’ Mantel shares that genius, though she takes a most ungenial view of accidents. Your ‘accident’ is waiting just for you. Sir Thomas Browne might warn: ‘When all looks fair about, and thou seest not a cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the wheel of things’, but that is altogether too cosy a vision for Mantel. All is never ‘fair about’. There are always stirrings: intimations of danger made more unnerving by their mask of ordinariness. And there is no regulating wheel: only the sickening lurch from the everyday into horror. If you doubt me, read A Change of Climate (1994).

Read more: Essay | The Crack in the Teacup: Reading Hilary Mantel by Inga Clendinnen

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David Matthews reviews Homecoming by Adib Khan
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Adib Khan’s fourth novel mirrors many of the concerns of his second, Solitude of Illusions (1997). Like Khalid in that novel, Martin Godwin in Homecoming looks back over a life that could have been better lived and a moral trajectory that has long since been deflected by one key event. Martin reflects on what could have been different and is tortured by what he sees as his own hypocrisy and cowardice. These attitudes to the past have repercussions for the future as his relationship with his son, again like Khalid’s, is characterised by guilt and misunderstanding. More broadly – and this is a feature of all Khan’s novels – there is a crucial disconnection between the older generation’s way of doing things and the ways of the next. This structure of present guilt and past actions (and inaction) results in novels that shuttle, sometimes a little awkwardly, between flashbacks and the present.
Book 1 Title: Homecoming
Book Author: Adib Khan
Book 1 Biblio: Flamingo, $29.95 pb, 255 pp
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Adib Khan’s fourth novel mirrors many of the concerns of his second, Solitude of Illusions (1997). Like Khalid in that novel, Martin Godwin in Homecoming looks back over a life that could have been better lived and a moral trajectory that has long since been deflected by one key event. Martin reflects on what could have been different and is tortured by what he sees as his own hypocrisy and cowardice. These attitudes to the past have repercussions for the future as his relationship with his son, again like Khalid’s, is characterised by guilt and misunderstanding. More broadly – and this is a feature of all Khan’s novels – there is a crucial disconnection between the older generation’s way of doing things and the ways of the next. This structure of present guilt and past actions (and inaction) results in novels that shuttle, sometimes a little awkwardly, between flashbacks and the present.

In most other ways, however, Homecoming is a departure for Khan. A long-term Australian resident, Khan is a native of Bangladesh. His previous novels have always been focused on characters and settings on the subcontinent. The new novel reveals no trace of his interest in Indian and Pakistani culture, and only a minimal concern with the displacement experienced by migrants. Instead, the displacement at issue in Homecoming is that of a native Australian who cannot fit into the culture around him.

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Damien Kingsbury reviews Indonesian Destinies by Theodore Friend
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Indonesia is a difficult place to write about, because of its inherent complexity and the contested views that surround it. And then there is the sheer time that it takes to get to know the place, or at least to begin to know it, or parts of it. No one book can definitively come to terms with Indonesia’s scattered geography and dozens of cultures, its aliran (streams of influence), religious factions, social strata, degrees of development and competing interests. For these reasons, few authors or even edited collections try their hand at Indonesia as such, usually preferring to focus on an aspect of its vast and fragmentary complexity. This has been particularly so in the post-Suharto period, not least with the plethora of edited volumes that have sought to explain rapidly changing events there.
Book 1 Title: Indonesian Destinies
Book Author: Theodore Friend
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press, US$35 hb, 638 pp
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Indonesia is a difficult place to write about, because of its inherent complexity and the contested views that surround it. And then there is the sheer time that it takes to get to know the place, or at least to begin to know it, or parts of it. No one book can definitively come to terms with Indonesia’s scattered geography and dozens of cultures, its aliran (streams of influence), religious factions, social strata, degrees of development and competing interests. For these reasons, few authors or even edited collections try their hand at Indonesia as such, usually preferring to focus on an aspect of its vast and fragmentary complexity. This has been particularly so in the post-Suharto period, not least with the plethora of edited volumes that have sought to explain rapidly changing events there.

But authors should be reasonably well informed, sensitive and, above all, honest. Theodore Friend has achieved these qualities with Indonesian Destinies, and has done so with remarkable depth and breadth through an engaging confluence of narrative styles. Friend, bringing together three and a half decades of personal involvement, offers not just a critique but a personal journey of exploration. Friend’s world view has been less changed by this experience than reinforced by it, not least by affronts to universal standards of acceptable social behaviour. In this respect, Friend sees his Indonesian friends and acquaintances as ‘Indonesian’, albeit of a multiplicity of types.

Read more: Damien Kingsbury reviews 'Indonesian Destinies' by Theodore Friend

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James Walter reviews The Hawke Government: A critical retrospective edited by Susan Ryan and Troy Bramston
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This is a fascinating, inspiring and disquieting book. It is fascinating because it succeeds so well in its comprehensive overview of policy making and policy intentions during the Hawke government (1983–91). That success derives from the unparalleled mix of insiders (former ministers, public servants, leaders of unions and NGOs), journalists and academic analysts, though the voice that is notably absent is that of business. Inspiration comes when one can see, beyond the obsession with pragmatism and economic reform, glimpses of a genuine ‘third way’ in the development of social capital. Disquiet arises because so many of the contributors fail to see how they created the social malaise that dogged the final years of the Labor government, and how, in abandoning the ‘old’ ideologies, they prepared the ground for the profoundly ideological and destructive government that would follow.
Book 1 Title: The Hawke Government
Book 1 Subtitle: A critical retrospective
Book Author: Susan Ryan and Troy Bramston
Book 1 Biblio: Pluto Press, $39.95 pb, 512 pp
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This is a fascinating, inspiring and disquieting book. It is fascinating because it succeeds so well in its comprehensive overview of policy making and policy intentions during the Hawke government (1983–91). That success derives from the unparalleled mix of insiders (former ministers, public servants, leaders of unions and NGOs), journalists and academic analysts, though the voice that is notably absent is that of business. Inspiration comes when one can see, beyond the obsession with pragmatism and economic reform, glimpses of a genuine ‘third way’ in the development of social capital. Disquiet arises because so many of the contributors fail to see how they created the social malaise that dogged the final years of the Labor government, and how, in abandoning the ‘old’ ideologies, they prepared the ground for the profoundly ideological and destructive government that would follow.

Read more: James Walter reviews 'The Hawke Government: A critical retrospective' edited by Susan Ryan and...

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Brian Ellis review ‘The Ethics of Economic Rationalism’ by John Wright
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Michael Pusey coined the term ‘economic rationalism’ in 1991 to refer to the narrow economic focus of many senior public servants in Canberra. These influential advisers were mostly classically trained economists who saw their task as being to assist in creating a more efficient and productive society by privatising publicly owned utilities and services, giving greater rein to market forces, increasing competition, deregulating the labour market, and so on. But like every major political programme, economic rationalism has had, and continues to have, great social costs. John Wright’s book is primarily a moral evaluation of this programme.
Book 1 Title: The Ethics of Economic Rationalism
Book Author: John Wright
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $34.95 pb, 224 pp
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Michael Pusey coined the term ‘economic rationalism’ in 1991 to refer to the narrow economic focus of many senior public servants in Canberra. These influential advisers were mostly classically trained economists who saw their task as being to assist in creating a more efficient and productive society by privatising publicly owned utilities and services, giving greater rein to market forces, increasing competition, deregulating the labour market, and so on. But like every major political programme, economic rationalism has had, and continues to have, great social costs. John Wright’s book is primarily a moral evaluation of this programme.

We have become so accustomed to hyperbole and polemics in political debate that it is refreshing to find a book on such an important social issue that avoids emotionally charged language and aims to be objective. Wright’s book examines the arguments for and against economic rationalism with detachment – as something about which decent and reasonable people might well disagree.

Read more: Brian Ellis review ‘The Ethics of Economic Rationalism’ by John Wright

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Don Anderson reviews ‘The Outside Story: A novel’ by Sylvia Lawson
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Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.
Book 1 Title: The Outside Story
Book 1 Subtitle: A novel
Book Author: Sylvia Lawson
Book 1 Biblio: Hardie Grant Books, $27.95 pb, 285 pp
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Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.

This is Sylvia Lawson’s first published novel, and only the second novel that Hardie Grant Books has published. The publishers found it ‘too hard to refuse. We think that this richly textured book offers much emotional and intellectual satisfaction.’ So there is much invested, both emotionally and intellectually, in this book. I trust it is neither ungracious nor ungentlemanly of me to point out that, at seventy-one, Sylvia Lawson is a contender for the First Novel by a Senior Award.

Read more: Don Anderson reviews ‘The Outside Story: A novel’ by Sylvia Lawson

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John Rickard reviews ‘Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Directors talk about acting’ by Adam Macaulay
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In the movie The Producers (now a musical), Gene Wilder accuses Zero Mostel of treating actors like animals. ‘Have you ever seen an actor eat?’ is Mostel’s pithy reply. There is a truth buried in this joke: eating can be important to actors in a profession where much time can be spent between jobs, ‘resting’, as it is euphemistically called.
Book 1 Title: Don’t Tell Me, Show Me
Book 1 Subtitle: Directors talk about acting
Book Author: Adam Macaulay
Book 1 Biblio: Currency Press, $29.95 pb, 223 pp
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In the movie The Producers (now a musical), Gene Wilder accuses Zero Mostel of treating actors like animals. ‘Have you ever seen an actor eat?’ is Mostel’s pithy reply. There is a truth buried in this joke: eating can be important to actors in a profession where much time can be spent between jobs, ‘resting’, as it is euphemistically called.

Every year, at least 150 students graduate from drama schools around Australia. Simon Phillips, one of the directors interviewed by Adam Macaulay, estimates that only one in ten has any prospect of working consistently as an actor. But these students – and those who might be hoping to join them – are clearly the market Don’t Tell Me, Show Me is aimed at. I suspect that they might find reading this book a chastening experience.

Read more: John Rickard reviews ‘Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Directors talk about acting’ by Adam Macaulay

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Gillian Dooley reviews ‘Women on the Rocks: A tale of two convicts’ by Kristin Williamson
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Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.
Book 1 Title: Women on the Rocks
Book 1 Subtitle: A tale of two convicts
Book Author: Kristin Williamson
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $29.95 pb, 396 pp
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Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.

Read more: Gillian Dooley reviews ‘Women on the Rocks: A tale of two convicts’ by Kristin Williamson

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John Hirst reviews ‘Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily life in a vanished Australia’ by Geoffrey Blainey
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Geoffrey Blainey is seventy-three years old and has published thirty-two books. Since his last book was a history of the world, one might have assumed that he had reached the end of his career. But he is not done yet. He moves, as he has always done, from grand speculation to what might be thought trifles – in this case, the details of everyday life in Australia from the 1850s to 1914.
Book 1 Title: Black Kettle and Full Moon
Book 1 Subtitle: Daily life in a vanished Australia
Book Author: Geoffrey Blainey
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $45 hb, 493 pp
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Geoffrey Blainey is seventy-three years old and has published thirty-two books. Since his last book was a history of the world, one might have assumed that he had reached the end of his career. But he is not done yet. He moves, as he has always done, from grand speculation to what might be thought trifles – in this case, the details of everyday life in Australia from the 1850s to 1914.

Here there are matters that have been treated in no other history book: the brand names of kerosene, the varieties of apples and horses, the uses of used candle-boxes, and the handiwork of Robert Mennicke, blacksmith of North Wagga, the ‘Stradivarius of cattle bells’, whose products could be heard nearly ten kilometres away when the night was frosty.

Read more: John Hirst reviews ‘Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily life in a vanished Australia’ by Geoffrey...

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Robert Reynolds reviews ‘Positive’ by David Menadue
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In the Australian world of HIV/AIDS, David Menadue is something of a legend. He tested positive to HIV in 1984, and first became ill with AIDS in 1989. This makes Menadue one of the longest-term survivors of an AIDS-defining illness in Victoria. As his doctors note, and as he reaffirms, not without a hint of justifiable pride, ‘this is a remarkable record … my survival is exceptional’. Equally exceptional is Menadue’s optimism. ‘I have always been an optimist,’ he writes, ‘and even in my darkest days with AIDS, I don’t think I ever gave up hope.’ This is how Menadue accounts for his longevity – a mix of optimism, hope and good fortune. The reader might also add courage.
Book 1 Title: Positive
Book Author: David Menadue
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In the Australian world of HIV/AIDS, David Menadue is something of a legend. He tested positive to HIV in 1984, and first became ill with AIDS in 1989. This makes Menadue one of the longest-term survivors of an AIDS-defining illness in Victoria. As his doctors note, and as he reaffirms, not without a hint of justifiable pride, ‘this is a remarkable record … my survival is exceptional’. Equally exceptional is Menadue’s optimism. ‘I have always been an optimist,’ he writes, ‘and even in my darkest days with AIDS, I don’t think I ever gave up hope.’ This is how Menadue accounts for his longevity – a mix of optimism, hope and good fortune. The reader might also add courage. 

Read more: Robert Reynolds reviews ‘Positive’ by David Menadue

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Colin Mackerras reviews ‘The West and China since 1500’ by John S. Gregory
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Jack Gregory has devoted much of his long career in China studies to teaching and studying the ways in which the West and China have interrelated. He is well qualified to write on the subject. Classes that Gregory has given in Melbourne to students attending University of the Third Age classes have inspired this book. In style and structure, it is highly suitable for teaching. The writing is clear, interesting and accessible. Though the book could have done with some pictures, it does have a map and the presentation is attractive.
Book 1 Title: The West and China since 1500
Book Author: John S. Gregory
Book 1 Biblio: Palgrave Macmillan, $56pb, 272pp, $157hb
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Jack Gregory has devoted much of his long career in China studies to teaching and studying the ways in which the West and China have interrelated. He is well qualified to write on the subject. Classes that Gregory has given in Melbourne to students attending University of the Third Age classes have inspired this book. In style and structure, it is highly suitable for teaching. The writing is clear, interesting and accessible. Though the book could have done with some pictures, it does have a map and the presentation is attractive. 

Read more: Colin Mackerras reviews ‘The West and China since 1500’ by John S. Gregory

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Lisa Gorton reviews ‘beautiful, unfinished’ by M.T.C. Cronin
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Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis.
Book 1 Title: beautiful, unfinished
Book Author: M.T.C. Cronin
Book 1 Biblio: Salt, $21.95 pb, 116 pp
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Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis. 

Read more: Lisa Gorton reviews ‘beautiful, unfinished’ by M.T.C. Cronin

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Ali Ismail Abbas

Dear Editor,

Chris Goddard has written a powerful letter (ABR, August 2003) arguing that the photograph of Ali Ismail Abbas should not have accompanied my essay ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). To tell the truth, I don’t know whether or not he is right. I am writing only to clarify the record. Peter Rose graciously accepted all responsibility for publishing the photograph (ABR, August 2003) and, thereby, all responsibility for whatever criticism its publication provoked. He did, however, consult me about the photograph, and I readily agreed that it should accompany my article, without, I’m now ashamed to say, thinking as much about it as Goodard has shown that I should have.
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Ali Ismail Abbas

Dear Editor,

Chris Goddard has written a powerful letter (ABR, August 2003) arguing that the photograph of Ali Ismail Abbas should not have accompanied my essay ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). To tell the truth, I don’t know whether or not he is right. I am writing only to clarify the record. Peter Rose graciously accepted all responsibility for publishing the photograph (ABR, August 2003) and, thereby, all responsibility for whatever criticism its publication provoked. He did, however, consult me about the photograph, and I readily agreed that it should accompany my article, without, I’m now ashamed to say, thinking as much about it as Goodard has shown that I should have. 

Read more: Letters - November 2003

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Geoff Page reviews ‘The Man and the Map’ by Alex Skovron
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Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual tradition, though he wears his erudition lightly. Like almost everyone else, Skovron is troubled by the twentieth century: it seems to hang over the horizon of this book. He is also concerned about the nineteenth. As he says in ‘The Centuries’: ‘It is necessary to remind oneself / that the nineteenth century has never really left us: / it has been here all along, biding its time.’
Book 1 Title: The Man and the Map
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Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $21.95 pb, 135 pp
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Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual tradition, though he wears his erudition lightly. Like almost everyone else, Skovron is troubled by the twentieth century: it seems to hang over the horizon of this book. He is also concerned about the nineteenth. As he says in ‘The Centuries’: ‘It is necessary to remind oneself / that the nineteenth century has never really left us: / it has been here all along, biding its time.’

The Man and the Map, Skovron’s fourth book in fifteen years, is in two sections: micro and macro; autobiographical and universal. It starts with the almost naïve simplicity of ‘Polish Corridors’ – a child’s wonder at phenomena it doesn’t understand and is worried by – then moves through a less than assured, ironically remembered adolescence to a number of travel poems that say a good deal more than they seem to. Along the way, there are also fine evocations of Sydney university life in the 1960s and some clever sexual embroidery in ‘Legend’. The first half also includes a number of convincing meditations on the nature and limitations of memory, in poems such as ‘Ago’, ‘And Yes’, ‘Elegy’ and ‘Eclipse’.

Read more: Geoff Page reviews ‘The Man and the Map’ by Alex Skovron

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Article Title: For Yette in a Red T-Shirt, Running
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A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.
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Read more: ‘For Yette in a Red T-Shirt, Running’ a poem by Jennifer Strauss

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Contents Category: Poem
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Article Title: On La Cienega
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By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.
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Read more: ‘On La Cienega’ a poem by John Tranter

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Andrea Goldsmith reviews ‘From a tiny corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch’ Edited by Gillian Dooley
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Article Title: Rescuing Iris
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Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.
Book 1 Title: From a tiny corner in the House of Fiction
Book 1 Subtitle: Conversations with Iris Murdoch
Book Author: Gillian Dooley
Book 1 Biblio: University of South Carolina Press, US$34.95 hb, 297 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

At the time of her death on 8 February 1999 from complications associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, many of her novels were out of print. In the following two years, books about Iris, written by John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband of forty years, swamped the bookshops. Suddenly, Murdoch was being introduced to a large contemporary audience, not as a remarkable writer and moral philosopher but as a once-great woman struck down by Alzheimer’s. The voice of the novelist and philosopher was fading fast, and Peter Conradi’s biography (Iris Murdoch: A Life, 2001) did not help. Conradi provides a vivid evocation of the young Iris – her passion, her seductive splash, her brilliant intelligence, her joie de vivre – but his portrayal runs out of steam following Murdoch’s marriage in the mid-1950s.*

Read more: Andrea Goldsmith reviews ‘From a tiny corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris...

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Grant Bailey reviews ‘Peace, Order and Good Government: State Constitutional and Parliamentary Reform’ Edited by Clement Macintyre and John Williams
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Article Title: Theory and Practise
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Speaking in the context of the Quebec secessionist movement, Stéphane Dion described Canada as ‘a country that works in practice but not in theory’. Whilst particularly telling of that country’s political turmoil, Dion’s summary also points to an abiding tension in all Western democracies: the perceived gulf between the theory and the practice of modern government. Constitution and parliament, the people and their representatives, tradition and modern requirements: in theory, each pair dovetail, but in practice they tend to be loose at the edges. (Try finding, for example, any reference to ‘prime minister’ in our Constitution.) The ongoing efforts within Australia to reconcile the theory and practice of government are at the centre of this important book, which was released to coincide with the South Australian Constitutional Convention (held in August 2003).
Book 1 Title: Peace, Order and Good Government
Book 1 Subtitle: State Constitutional and Parliamentary Reform
Book Author: Clement Macintyre and John Williams
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $39.95 pb, 333 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Speaking in the context of the Quebec secessionist movement, Stéphane Dion described Canada as ‘a country that works in practice but not in theory’. Whilst particularly telling of that country’s political turmoil, Dion’s summary also points to an abiding tension in all Western democracies: the perceived gulf between the theory and the practice of modern government. Constitution and parliament, the people and their representatives, tradition and modern requirements: in theory, each pair dovetail, but in practice they tend to be loose at the edges. (Try finding, for example, any reference to ‘prime minister’ in our Constitution.) The ongoing efforts within Australia to reconcile the theory and practice of government are at the centre of this important book, which was released to coincide with the South Australian Constitutional Convention (held in August 2003).

Read more: Grant Bailey reviews ‘Peace, Order and Good Government: State Constitutional and Parliamentary...

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Patricia Anderson reviews ‘Building the Collection’ edited by Pauline Green
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Mollison’s Creation
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Robert Hughes, bemoaning the contents of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1959, cast an eye over its sandstone façade decorated in bronze letters with such august names as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and quipped: ‘Never has so large a nut housed so inadequate a kernel.’ The National Gallery of Australia was in every respect the opposite story: its collection was a fat kernel in search of a shell. Until 1968 this collection, thought to comprise some 3000 works, was strung around Canberra offices and Australian embassies like so much washing on a line. The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, which would soon be dismantled, had been buying energetically, if conservatively, for years. However, there was no catalogue, no conservator to care for them and no established policy for the collection.
Book 1 Title: Building the Collection
Book Author: Pauline Green
Book 1 Biblio: National Gallery of Australia, $69 pb, 416 pp
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Robert Hughes, bemoaning the contents of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1959, cast an eye over its sandstone façade decorated in bronze letters with such august names as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and quipped: ‘Never has so large a nut housed so inadequate a kernel.’ The National Gallery of Australia was in every respect the opposite story: its collection was a fat kernel in search of a shell. Until 1968 this collection, thought to comprise some 3000 works, was strung around Canberra offices and Australian embassies like so much washing on a line. The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, which would soon be dismantled, had been buying energetically, if conservatively, for years. However, there was no catalogue, no conservator to care for them and no established policy for the collection.

Enter James Mollison, who arrived in Canberra that year as an exhibitions officer, and left it as a highly respected, if controversial, director in 1989. Mollison found himself with a surprisingly generous budget and a brief to travel. The art world tom-toms beat furiously. ‘I’m not the man with all the money,’ Elwyn Lynn, another peripatetic curator, was obliged to disabuse the hopeful New York dealers.

Read more: Patricia Anderson reviews ‘Building the Collection’ edited by Pauline Green

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Beverley Kingston reviews ‘What Australia Means to Me’ by Bob Carr and ‘Bob Carr: A self-made man’ by Andrew West and Rachel Morris
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Article Title: Bobby Burns is late
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Not since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir and a diary, as well as writing lots of occasional pieces. Carr, like Parkes, was a journalist before becoming a professional politician. Parkes, too, dragged himself from humble beginnings to a position where he could use official letterhead to arrange meetings with those he admired. Carr has sought out writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to autograph his copies of their books and to join him at dinner. Once established, Parkes’s main aim was to stay in power. It was his only source of income, so his manipulation of factions, policies and the electorate all focused on that end. Graham Freudenberg has said of Carr: ‘Labor politics is central to Bob’s identity … if you took the politics away from Bob there would be nothing much left.’ But unlike Carr, Parkes did not have the option of moving to federal politics (he died before 1901). After Federation, NSW politics was stripped of talent as its leaders, including Edmund Barton, William Lyne and George Reid, made the move. Reid, a long-serving and highly effective NSW premier, is one of only two state premiers ever to have succeeded in becoming prime minister, the other being Joe Lyons.
Book 1 Title: What Australia Means to Me
Book Author: Bob Carr
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $9.95 pb, 76 pp
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Book 2 Title: Bob Carr
Book 2 Subtitle: A self-made man
Book 2 Author: Andrew West and Rachel Morris
Book 2 Biblio: HarperCollins, $35 pb, 431 pp
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Not since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir and a diary, as well as writing lots of occasional pieces. Carr, like Parkes, was a journalist before becoming a professional politician. Parkes, too, dragged himself from humble beginnings to a position where he could use official letterhead to arrange meetings with those he admired. Carr has sought out writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to autograph his copies of their books and to join him at dinner. Once established, Parkes’s main aim was to stay in power. It was his only source of income, so his manipulation of factions, policies and the electorate all focused on that end. Graham Freudenberg has said of Carr: ‘Labor politics is central to Bob’s identity … if you took the politics away from Bob there would be nothing much left.’ But unlike Carr, Parkes did not have the option of moving to federal politics (he died before 1901). After Federation, NSW politics was stripped of talent as its leaders, including Edmund Barton, William Lyne and George Reid, made the move. Reid, a long-serving and highly effective NSW premier, is one of only two state premiers ever to have succeeded in becoming prime minister, the other being Joe Lyons.

Read more: Beverley Kingston reviews ‘What Australia Means to Me’ by Bob Carr and ‘Bob Carr: A self-made man’...

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Jeffrey Grey reviews ‘Australia’s Battlefields in Viet Nam: A traveller’s guide’ by Gary McKay and ‘On the Offensive: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War 1967–1968’ by Ian McNeill and Ashley Ekins
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Contents Category: History
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Article Title: Remembering Vietnam
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For most Australians, certainly for those under the age of forty, ‘Vietnam’ is either an item on school curricula or a slightly off-the-beaten-path tourist destination. History or holiday. This may affront some, especially the small groups on either side of the 1960s cultural and political divide that cannot let go, but it is a sign of a generational shift and of the creation of the distance between ourselves and the event that is necessary for enhanced understanding and reconciliation between Australians and the Vietnamese.
Book 1 Title: Australia’s Battlefields in Viet Nam
Book 1 Subtitle: A traveller’s guide
Book Author: Gary McKay
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 235pp
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Book 2 Title: On the Offensive
Book 2 Subtitle: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War 1967–1968
Book 2 Author: Ian McNeill and Ashley Ekins
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $80hb, 679pp
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For most Australians, certainly for those under the age of forty, ‘Vietnam’ is either an item on school curricula or a slightly off-the-beaten-path tourist destination. History or holiday. This may affront some, especially the small groups on either side of the 1960s cultural and political divide that cannot let go, but it is a sign of a generational shift and of the creation of the distance between ourselves and the event that is necessary for enhanced understanding and reconciliation between Australians and the Vietnamese.

The Vietnam War confounds the popular notion that the winners write the history, for in this war the losers have dominated popular cultural perception of their war in a manner that has allowed for relatively little variation on set themes. Overwhelmingly, the image of the war is American, not Australian or Korean, and certainly not Vietnamese. Rambo and Chuck Norris have little enough to say to the reality of US involvement (as opposed to its caricature), but they have nothing at all to say to the Australian experience.

Read more: Jeffrey Grey reviews ‘Australia’s Battlefields in Viet Nam: A traveller’s guide’ by Gary McKay and...

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Margaret Robson Kett reviews Five Childrens Non-Fiction Books
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Article Title: Information for Beginners
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Both of the OUP First Books have been designed with the early reader in mind. Clear colourful pictures, large print and unambiguous headings make these books a pleasure to read. Information is set out in an orderly way, from the general to the specific. There is scope for enthusiasts to skip to their particular interest, but, for the general reader, the narrative as a whole is satisfying. Barbara Taylor’s First Book of Dinosaurs gives the basic facts that the six- or seven-year-old wants to know: what kind of animals were they, and how do we know they existed? A history is followed by general descriptions of behaviours and physical types, then double-spreads on featured groups such as the well-known T.rex and stegosaurus, as well as dromaeosaurs and kronosaurus. Extra information is contained in sidebars. The book concludes with speculation about what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct and with a look at their modern successors. There is a short dinosaur quiz (with specific instructions on how to read the questions for clues, and how to use the index and table of contents to find the answers). Some simple science experiments are suggested, such as making your own fossils with plaster of Paris and with shells. As well as the obligatory glossary and index, a page-long guide to pronunciation is appended: this will help many a bemused parent.
Book 1 Title: Oxford First Book of Space
Book Author: Andrew Langley
Book 1 Biblio: OUP, $25.95 hb, 48 pp
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Book 2 Title: Oxford First Book of Dinosaurs
Book 2 Author: Barbara Taylor
Book 2 Biblio: OUP, $29.95 pb, 48 pp
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Book 3 Title: Fossil
Book 3 Author: Paul D. Taylor
Book 3 Biblio: Dorling Kindersley, $25.95 pb, 72 pp
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Both of the OUP First Books have been designed with the early reader in mind. Clear colourful pictures, large print and unambiguous headings make these books a pleasure to read. Information is set out in an orderly way, from the general to the specific. There is scope for enthusiasts to skip to their particular interest, but, for the general reader, the narrative as a whole is satisfying. Barbara Taylor’s First Book of Dinosaurs gives the basic facts that the six- or seven-year-old wants to know: what kind of animals were they, and how do we know they existed? A history is followed by general descriptions of behaviours and physical types, then double-spreads on featured groups such as the well-known T.rex and stegosaurus, as well as dromaeosaurs and kronosaurus. Extra information is contained in sidebars. The book concludes with speculation about what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct and with a look at their modern successors. There is a short dinosaur quiz (with specific instructions on how to read the questions for clues, and how to use the index and table of contents to find the answers). Some simple science experiments are suggested, such as making your own fossils with plaster of Paris and with shells. As well as the obligatory glossary and index, a page-long guide to pronunciation is appended: this will help many a bemused parent.

Read more: Margaret Robson Kett reviews Five Children's Non-Fiction Books

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Virginia Lowe reviews Six Childrens Fiction Books
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Article Title: Ways of Seeing
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Imaginative grandfathers and European cityscapes dominate in these books, with all the protagonists having creative ways of seeing, just like their creators. When Suzy, in Grandpa’s Gate, falls down the thirteen steps from her house, what is needed is a gate for the top. So Grandpa welds a special one, with an owl, a moon and stars – ‘all sorts of extraordinary bits of his own’. It’s practical, but interesting at the same time. Then Suzy and her family move away and don’t see Grandpa for years, until, lonely and confused, he comes to live with them. But Suzy has an idea: in the garage is her old gate. Together, she and Grandpa paint, rehang and weld more birds to go with it.
Book 1 Title: Hello Puppy!
Book Author: David Cox
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $24.95 hb, 32 pp
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Book 2 Title: Milli, Jack and the Dancing Cat
Book 2 Author: Stephen Michael King
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, 32 pp
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Book 3 Title: Little Red Bear
Book 3 Author: Penny Matthews, illustrated by Anna Pignataro
Book 3 Biblio: Scholastic, $27.95 hb, 32 pp
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Imaginative grandfathers and European cityscapes dominate in these books, with all the protagonists having creative ways of seeing, just like their creators. When Suzy, in Grandpa’s Gate, falls down the thirteen steps from her house, what is needed is a gate for the top. So Grandpa welds a special one, with an owl, a moon and stars – ‘all sorts of extraordinary bits of his own’. It’s practical, but interesting at the same time. Then Suzy and her family move away and don’t see Grandpa for years, until, lonely and confused, he comes to live with them. But Suzy has an idea: in the garage is her old gate. Together, she and Grandpa paint, rehang and weld more birds to go with it.

Read more: Virginia Lowe reviews Six Children's Fiction Books

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Contents Category: Commentary
Subheading: Photo Essay
Custom Article Title: William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection
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Article Title: William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection
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In 1890, at the age of forty-four, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba – accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager – decided to become a photographer. There is no record of his ever receiving any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the confines of his local community with his camera.

In 1975 Corkhill’s daughter offered the National Library his collection of glass plate negatives, which had dwindled over the intervening decades to about 1000 in number. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through Corkhill’s eyes, he, too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.
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In 1890, at the age of forty-four, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba – accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager – decided to become a photographer. There is no record of his ever receiving any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the confines of his local community with his camera.

In 1975 Corkhill’s daughter offered the National Library his collection of glass plate negatives, which had dwindled over the intervening decades to about 1000 in number. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through Corkhill’s eyes, he, too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.

Read more: ‘William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection’ by Michelle Hetherington

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