Talk about unlikely associations. My first response to the opening chapter of Tim Winton’s latest novel was how its sense of a life at a standstill, awaiting some new impulse, reminded me of Jane Austen’s Emma. Winton’s protagonist, Georgie Jutland, with a string of unsatisfactory relationships behind her and bored with her present bloke, Jim Buckridge, her useful life as a nurse now well in the past, sits in front of the computer screen, ‘gone in her seat, like a pensioner at the pokies’. In White Point, the Western Australian ‘personality junkyard’ where she has fetched up, she needs a stimulus (‘recently something in her had leaked away’) as urgently as Austen’s heroine. In both novels, it comes in the form of a new man. After this, it must be said, Dirt Music isn’t much like Emma and it certainly settles for a less conservative dénouement, but the underlying narrative starter has this echo.

Another inapt association. Georgie is forty and unanchored: for the life of me, I couldn’t get Helen Mirren out of my head as I read. Even when I read later that Georgie has a short black helmet-like haircut, it couldn’t displace the image of the tough, intelligent Mirren-type sexiness. (The opposite process, perhaps, from never being able to re-read Women in Love without seeing the film’s black-haired Oliver Reed as the Nordic god, Gerald.) However, the resonance isn’t unhelpful as the wayward Georgie gradually accretes a Mirrenish determination to shape events rather than just let them happen to her.

From a small island, messages in a bottle floating out to sea. That was Gwen Harwood’s image for the poems she sent out during her early years in Tasmania, long before she had due recognition. Her letters, by contrast, knew their destination; they were treasured for decades by her friends, and they now make up the remarkable collection A Steady Storm of Correspondence.

As editor, Gregory Kratzmann has had an enviable but not an easy task in choosing no more than four hundred letters when ten times as many were made available to him. The quality is extraordinary. There’s nothing forced or formal: none in which Harwood’s voice seems muffled by the conventional phrasing of a duty letter. Spirited and witty, warm, reflective, at times enraged, often overcome by laughter, the letters are so varied that this large volume can be read as one might read a novel or an autobiography. It would be a pity just to dip in at random: this is the story of the making of a poet as well as many stories of friendship; and it gains from being read in sequence.

Many readers will remember the letters of the young Gwen Harwood (then Gwen Foster) from the collection Blessed City (1990). Written from Brisbane before her marriage, these letters all have the same recipient, Thomas (Tony) Riddell, the friend of a lifetime to whom she dedicated all but one of her published volumes of poetry. They were written in quick succession (sometimes two or three in the same week) during a single year, 1943, when Harwood was twenty-two, working as a secretary in the War Damage Commission and as organist at All Saints’ Church of England. Kratzmann reprints only three from Blessed City: enough to place the new reader, but with minimal repetition for those who know the earlier volume.

If history is a graveyard of dead aristocracies, the novel is their eulogy. It is now, for instance, a critical commonplace to explain the young Proust’s entry into the closed world of France’s nobility as an occurrence made possible by its dissolution. Close to death, holding only vestigial power, the fag ends of the ancien régime lost the will or energy to keep their secrets. Proust’s social talent, as opposed to his literary genius, was to be in the right place at the right time – to be under the tree, waiting, when the fruit of that intelligence fell.

We’ve never really had an Australian equivalent – until now. Not because, as it has long been argued, Australia is a classless society; its social strata are marbled with subtle discriminations and always have been. But, prior to Summerland, the upper reaches of that society were impermeable and omnipresent – and so seemingly invisible to fiction. Here is the novelty and fascination of Malcolm Knox’s first novel: the world he anatomises, with its QCs and charity matrons, their suburban stupor and genteel decadence, has, in revealing itself, admitted a decline.

Although the narrative is given exoskeletal sheen by a documentary vividness and factual rigour drawn from his years as a journalist, Summerland’s metafictional centre betrays Knox’s wider ‘literary’ ambitions. Two novels in particular inform the work: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. The latter furnishes Summerland with a good deal of its plot, and tone, too. Richard, a successful Sydney lawyer in his thirties, recalls the novel’s events in sodden retrospect, his whisky-fuelled meanderings reflecting the digressions, backtrackings and revelations employed by Madox Ford. In the course of a single night, a lifetime of friendship is recounted with Hugh Bowman, an Ashburnham-like aristocrat and weak-spirited heir of an old pastoral family; a man whose impregnable wealth, background, and charm have propped him up through a youth and adulthood of criminal behaviour, drunkenness, lassitude, and, most terribly for Richard, betrayal.

This is the tale of a quest driven by an obsession. At its heart are the Krakouers, an Australian family of five generations. The author is a descendant of the first Krakouers to settle in Western Australia. Terri-Ann White’s project is to record the gaps and silences, to piece together fragments, and ‘rescue’ family members ‘from obscurity’.

These four titles are reissues of well-known texts, or of the work of well-known writers, from four different publishers. A good sign perhaps, very welcome at a time when publishing seems ever more ephemeral and when many works, even from the recent past, are unavailable.

Synchronicity can bring forward strange events in the life of an artist. In 1965, arriving in Perugia in northern Italy, I felt a profound sense of familiarity and connectedness, which has no rational explanation. I had come to study Italian language at the university. I was a young woman of twenty-three, returning to Europe for the first time since I had left Hungary with my family at the age of five.

Within a few weeks I had left Il Università per Straniere in Perugia and decided to learn Italian where it was spoken as a living language. I heard that The Festival of Two Worlds, a major European arts festival, was in preparation at Spoleto, a medieval town near Perugia. Like an arrow, I hastened there to secure a job with the festival.

The festival secretary telephoned her director and said she had an interesting young theatre director from Australia who was desperate to see him. An appointment was made for the following day. I hitchhiked to Rome for the meeting.

The forbearance of those writers who entered the Australian Book Review and Reader’s Feast Short Story Competition has been as exemplary as their commitment to short fiction. I am pleased to be announce the shortlist:

Ian McFarlane: ‘A Balance of Probabilities’

Katarina Mahnic: ‘Flying Recipe’

B.E. Minifie: ‘There Has to be a Resemblance’

Carrie Tiffany: ‘Dr Darnell’s Cure’

Susan Yardley: ‘The End Is Where We Start From’

All three prizes will be announced in the December–January issue. In the same issue, we shall also publish the story that wins the first prize.

Changes continue to be rung at ABR. Later this month, we shall be moving upstairs into larger and more suitable premises. Please note that our postal address, telephone number and email addresses will be unchanged. Nor will the December–January issue be affected. Subscribers will receive their copies at the beginning of December. A new feature will be ‘The Best Books of 2001’, in which regular ABR reviewers and a range of writers, publishers and other literary figures will be invited to nominate three notable books of 2001, including the one that surprised them most.

Pleasingly, given the recent abundance of new Australian publications and the quality of material coming our way, this issue will be longer than previous ones. This is something we hope to continue in 2002, funds permitting. The theme of the December/January issue will be Reference Books, of which there have been a large number in recent months.

In previous years, the December–January issue – our summer one – has been followed by another double issue (February–March). Two issues in four months strikes us as being too infrequent. Henceforth, we will separate the two double issues. They will appear in December –January and June–July. Otherwise, ABR will appear each month.

In recent weeks, I have been a little more peripatetic than usual, because of the publication of my own new book. I also took part in the National Library of Australia’s conference ‘The Secret Self: Exploring Biography and Autobiography’. For everyone involved – the audience, but also, to an unusual degree, in my experience, the speakers – this conference proved to be absorbing and, at times, quite stirring. As in Melbourne during the Federation Lectures, the audiences were large each day, once again demonstrating the public’s desire for lively, questioning and discursive talk.

In my absence, Aviva Tuffield, the Assistant Editor, has supervised the preparation of this issue with her customary aplomb, and I am grateful to her. I should also thank Chong, Dianne Schallmeiner, Anne-Marie Thomas, and Miriam Wood, who have worked on this issue.

We heard the news in the Giardino. Our party had agreed to meet at the American pavilion. James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, co-curator of the Robert Gober exhibit, was going to take us through the show. As the various members made their way through the 49th Venice Biennale to the rendezvous, we learned that the World Trade Centre towers had been hit and that the Pentagon was on fire. Behind us, the American pavilion was quietly closed. On the vaporetto back to the hotel, a Belgian businessman was on his cell phone to his secretary in Brussels. He turned and told us that both towers had collapsed.

‘I knew I was bright, but not special’, writes Zoë Caldwell early on in her pithy, telling memoir. Still earlier (indeed, in the first paragraph), she says that she knew, even from an early age, she was destined to perform: ‘ … to stand in front of people, keeping them awake and in their seats, by telling other people’s stories and using other people’s words. I knew this because it was the only thing I could do.’ There is a bit of self-deprecation in these words that is at loggerheads with what we have come to expect from actors’ memoirs, which are, more often than not, scribbled sentences rather than thoughtful paragraphs, and which tell us more about vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and the patience of the haunted ghost-writer than they do about the actor as a professional or a person. Actually, such books are like sets on some early television shows: bricks-and-mortar, but really canvas and plaster with wooden backing, which wobble every time somebody walks past. What they are not is true autobiography.

‘It’s the essence of Bollockshire / you’re after: its secrets, blessings and bounties.’ So Christopher Reid reads from his hilarious poem at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival.

park and pay ...
assuming this isn’t the week
of the Billycock Fair, or Boiled Egg Day,
when they elect the Town Fool.
From here, it’s a short step
to the Bailiwick Hall Museum and Arts Centre.
As you enter, ignore the display
of tankards and manacles, the pickled head
of England’s Wisest Woman;
ask, instead, for the Bloke Stone.
Surprisingly small, round and featureless,
pumice-gray,
there it sits, dimly lit,
behind toughened glass, in a room of its own.

‘In 1969,’ says Venero Armanno in the letter to the reader that prefaces his new novel, ‘my parents took me to Sicily for the first time, and we lived for six months in the tiny village of their birth. What I remember most clearly … is the presence of the volcano, and just how absolutely it dominates life. It’s there smoking silently in the day, and at night … you can see the fiery glow in the mouth of cratere centrale – that fire which can never be put out.’

He also remembers, he says, ‘the poverty, the superstition, the chickens and rabbits crawling and sleeping under your bed, and the glorious cooking that would go on day and night’. And one way or another all these things find their way into this enormous, irresistible novel, but it’s dominated by the image of ‘that fire which can never be put out’.

These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the perceiving self into alternative ficto-autobiographies, but with different expectations of resolution. Both conjure up real worlds of political and institutional corruption on an international scale and pit moments of fragile subjectivity and domestic harmony against grubby injustice. Both register their authors’ age at around fifty. Caesar hankers after an ethical response; Boyle juxtaposes aesthetic possibilities. Caesar’s poetry is restrained, measured, spare; Boyle’s is crowded, insistent, histrionic.

Behind Caesar, I thought I heard Auden, Slessor and a clutch of cooler confessionals. I decided that Caesar is at base a modernist, stuck in imperfection with lots of baggage. (This is often the experience of migration and of escaping English imperialism, as in the first poem ‘In the Old Country’: ‘… how the traces of love / are not easily left / and lead us to follow the old cold miseries …’) He is an iconoclast trying to find icons and patterns in a clastic world, which is there to be written about and understood, but which resists appropriation.

Boyle’s poetry on the other hand typifies much that is postmodern, innately hostile to grand narratives, slipping between surfaces and worlds as it interrupts and disconnects signs from the reality to which they defer. Boyle is interested in the play of language and texture, content to settle for not being able to know the world but imagining it as a site of competing possibilities, both terrifying and whimsical. In ‘Missing Words’, for example, he writes: ‘I was looking for a great encyclopedia, the secret dictionary of all the missing words. I wanted to consult its index and find out what I could have become.’

Shirley Walker’s autobiography, Roundabout at Bangalow, is a remarkably rich book and a significant addition to the distinctive group of life stories that continue to fascinate Australian readers. It seems that at least once a year a striking memoir appears that strangely alters our relationship with the national past. These books are more than books. They are transforming cultural events. Inserting their stories into the generalised narratives of historians, autobiographies such as Sally Morgan’s My Place, A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Bernard Smith’s The Boy Adeodatus, or Andrew Riemer’s Inside Outside appropriate the past in new and compelling forms. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, they make the past ‘knowable’, and they do so with an immediacy available to no other form of writing. For this reason alone, they inevitably win a large popular readership.

Roundabout at Bangalow delves into the lives of four generations of Walker’s own family and that of her husband, while exploring the changing fates of several different regions. Autobiographies are often particularly valued for their re-creation of place, a feature that has sometimes led to their classification in librarians’ catalogues as regional histories. Walker’s story is no exception, and many readers will warm to her descriptions of spectacularly beautiful parts of the north coast of New South Wales. Place, though, often has a different role in this narrative, establishing itself as an impartial, if beautiful, witness to the less beautiful human dramas played out against its backdrop. Whether it is the Jacaranda Festival erupting in brilliant purples every year at Grafton, or complicated family stratagems to secure the virginity of its girls, human activities and external nature remain incongruously coupled. Later, place (now a peninsula in the Clarence River) becomes an aggressive protagonist, forcing the narrator’s family to leave their farm to find a more reliable future elsewhere.

Jill Jolliffe was one of only two reporters in Dili on 16 October 1975, the day the Australian-based newsmen, soon to be known as the Balibo Five, went missing after an Indonesian attack on the small East Timorese border town of Balibo. Jolliffe filed for AAP Reuters the first reports of the attack that killed them, and monitored the ominous broadcasts from Indonesian-controlled West Timor that referred to the missing newsmen as Australian communists who were supporting Fretilin forces. Jolliffe interviewed the Portuguese journalists who had left Balibo the day before the attack and the Fretilin troops themselves who defended the town. Finally, eleven days after the attack on Balibo, she spoke to an eyewitness, a stretcher-bearer from the Fretilin side, who confirmed that the journalists had been killed in the attack.

and you think of
the statements you have lost,
all the things unlearnt,
the words you no longer say.
It has all been one long giving away.

(David Kirkby, ‘Water’)

The six books in Series 8 of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program come highly recommended, if only by the blurbs on their own back covers. These blurbs border on the hysterical. Cate Kennedy has ‘her heart in her eyes’, while Sheridan Linnell has written a book ‘which grows great lines like buttercups’. Michael Sharkey admires Lesley Fowler’s precision but, since he goes on to say that her poems ‘conscript experience in both hemispheres’, one assumes that precision is not his suit. Even Bruce Dawe gets carried away, assuring us that, whilst David Kirkby’s poetry may look effortless, ‘its mechanisms are merely hidden’. Hidden, that is, to all except Bruce Dawe.

Roger McDonald seems never to do things twice in the same way. To be solemn about it, he has a mind which is both capacious and vivacious: events, experiences, things at large flood in to stock its territory, and become the livelier from their environment. Refreshed himself by Australia, he refreshes some of it in return.

The Tree in Changing Light is a case in point. This is a meditative work whose attention moves easily from the world’s physicalities and fluctuations to the appraising mind itself and back again. It is fluently, but not trivially, dialectical – an example of well-schooled attention which is itself a kind of schooling. Here, for instance, is an early passage:

Bauman’s point of departure

Dear Editor,

Boris Frankel bursts in through open doors. He gives Zygmunt Bauman and me stick for speaking our truths (ABR, October 2001). Viewed in its own terms, what remains of the Left in Australia is in a bad way because it has failed (1) to clarify its ethics, norms and values and (2) to develop alternative visions and policies upon them; because (3) there is no popular bearer or social movement available to carry these invisible ends; and (4) because there is no evidence of popular support for a new society, present unhappiness and misery notwithstanding. If this is not modern, what is it? (If the Soviet and Nazi experiences were not modern, what were they?)

My view is that intellectuals do not lead culture, but express it; they articulate arguments and sentiments already moving within civil society. I start from the premise that people understand inequality as a fact of everyday life and accept it, as a matter of dull compulsion. It is in this context that I claim that ‘the political opinion of the intellectual is worth no more than that of any other citizen’. Intellectual authority does not translate into political authority: that way lies Bolshevism. Critical theorists, on this account, need to come to grips with the problems of democracy, pluralism and difference, among themselves and in society at large. If we agree that the people are to choose, within the constraints that we already inhabit, then we have to cop the fact that they have not chosen us, or socialism. The extent of this crisis suggests that it is pre-political.

Tom Gilling’s first novel, The Sooterkin, was an engaging and self-conscious oddity. Set in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, it had at its centre the striking conceit of the Sooterkin itself, a child born to a former convict and who is, to all intents and purposes, a seal. The Sooterkin was a critical success, inviting comparison to Peter Carey for its Dickensian energy and its playful engagement with the slippery rudiments of the Australian imagination.

Miles McGinty, Gilling’s second novel, might form the second part of the imaginary history of Australia for which Gilling laid the foundations in The Sooterkin. Like the latter, Miles McGinty is as much confection as novel, self-consciously lighter than air and almost totally reliant upon the charm of Gilling’s writing to hold itself aloft. Like The Sooterkin, it relies upon a powerful sort of indeterminacy to suspend its possibilities, although the indeterminacy lies in the novel’s resolution rather than its inception.

I felts as if I had fallen into hell,’ reflects the Keeper of the President’s Clarinet of his visit to the city of Baha. The statement is almost redundant. The sun cannot penetrate the toxic pollution of this city; he has just passed a group of children betting on the imminent death of a fly-infested man; and he is there to kidnap an hermaphrodite child-prostitute. However, his words could be voiced by most inhabitants of the fictional land of Abaza; this novel is filled with such baroque, nightmare imagery.

Death and bereavement come to us all, often as the most challenging experiences of our lives. In the end, we must all confront the inevitability of our own mortality. A study of dying and responses to death takes us to the heart of the history of any culture, and sharpens our understanding of the meaning of our lives. Despite the significance of death in human life, Ken Inglis and other scholars observed in the twentieth century ‘a modern distaste for the physical facts of mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’. Only in the last twenty years has the taboo on death begun to lift. Public and academic concern has been stimulated by the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, palliative care, and suicide rates, and by medical technology’s increasing interventions to prolong life. However, historians in Australia have been slower to participate in this discussion than colleagues in France, the USA, and Britain, especially for the nineteenth century. My own contribution is a book entitled Australian Ways of Death: A social and cultural history 1840–1918, and this essay tells an essential and distinctively Australian part of that story.

We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next eighteen months. Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons. Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners …’ reads a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Does it sound familiar? However, the date is 18 November 1948, a time when aggrieved readers were bombarding the papers, protesting against the influx of postwar refugees.

Diane Armstrong and her parents were among that influx. They sailed to Australia in 1948, along with more than five hundred other refugees from various parts of Europe, on the SS Derna. In The Voyage of Their Life, Armstrong tells the story of the Derna’s troubled crossing, as well as the lives, both before and after Derna, of many who sailed on her.

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.

Jaivin grew up in Connecticut, clever and Jewish, but not belonging. In China, she didn’t have to care about belonging. There she found soul mates, Chinese and foreign, who also chose to live ‘on the edge’. Pop culture was their politics. In 1981, while working as a journalist in Hong Kong, Jaivin met Hou Dejian, whose song ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ had made him a superstar in Taiwan in 1978 and would do the same in Beijing in 1983. Both were already practising the art of doing the unexpected. They became great friends, but not lovers.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

The visuals for these books are clever, optical metonyms in themselves. Gaudy retro colours hold synoptic images – Hughes’s eyes and brows; Ellis’s gut, dangling spectacles and crumpled tie. That’s about all the two books have in common, for they are less the ‘Brief Lives’ they claim to be than essays, a contemplative memoir on the part of Andrew Riemer, a political backhander from Michael Warby.

Bad art is where the personality of the artist reveals itself most fascinatingly, according to Lord Henry Wootton, the Wildean aesthete in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is an idea that assumes an unexpected relevance as we reach the tenth anniversary of what is perhaps the strangest phenomenon in Australian publishing history.

November 1991 saw the publication of Chopper: From the Inside, the ‘confessions’ of the notoriously violent career criminal Mark Brandon Read, who, at the time, was a maximum-security prisoner at Pentridge Prison. Read recounts his long career as a standover man and underworld executioner, occupations he pursued both in and out of prison.

Published cheaply by an obscure press that declines to give an office address, Chopper: From the Inside has been reprinted nearly thirty times in the last ten years. Read has published eight further books, all of which have been reprinted at least once, and which have combined sales claimed in the hundreds of thousands. Read’s books, moreover, have inspired one of the most critically and commercially successful Australian films of the past decade.

The Russian theorist Yuri Lotman said: ‘Plot is a way of understanding the world.’ On this basis, texts with plots – novels, for example – do more for us than texts without plots. The telephone book, for example, a plotless text par excellence, may promote aspects of communication, but adds little to our attempt to make sense of life. However, Igor Gelbach, a Georgian Russian now living in Melbourne, has challenged this concept with his thought-provoking but virtually plotless novel, Confessions of a Clay Man, which may be narrative in shape but is highly poetic in procedure. At first reading, it is rather mystifying, the story so fabulised that you tend to lose it and concentrate on the word-pictures, which manage to make a completely unknown place hauntingly evocative, as though you had once dreamed about it. Like Goethe’s ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’, we can’t know it, but we feel as though we do. Gelbach’s seaside town resonates with a similar, impossible familiarity.

There is little doubt that few people write letters anymore. Nowadays, personal communication is conducted via e-mails and mobile phone messages, much to the dismay of manuscript collectors and researchers. So, it is surprising to come across what the publishers describe as ‘a novel in letters’, Parachute Silk, by Gina Mercer.

Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela (1742), also in epistolary form, was one of the forerunners of the modern novel, wrote in defence of his method that ‘the letters are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects (the events at the time dubious), so that they abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections’. Clearly, he had stumbled on a significant point (which would eventually lead to the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique) but also one that could advantage the novelist engaged in writing what we once might have termed a ‘women’s’ novel.

When you think about it, public swimming pools are strange places. Semi-naked bodies saunter about, while others battle against gravity in speed-designated lanes. Perhaps it is no surprise that these sites of aqua profonda dominate recent fiction. Whether the pools are in Paris or Fitzroy, they act as metaphors for the human condition.

In Kathleen Stewart’s new novel, The Black Butterfly, a burnt-out former starlet obsessively returns to a swimming pool, in the hope of seeing a man who hates her. It’s all here, at the swimming pool, the ex-actress, Julia Callaghan thinks: ‘Life and Death. People oiling their bodies like machines of war.’

At twenty-nine, Julia is a failure in a society that values success above everything else. She starred in a hit film immediately after graduating from drama school, and then nothing. No offers followed, and her career stalled. Julia is a mysterious character, even though we see events from her perspective. The Black Butterfly is made up of short vignettes and chapters. Despite Julia’s constant presence, she is as fragmented as the text.

Despite Australia’s heavy involvement in wars throughout the twentieth century, few notable war memoirs by Australians have emerged. Frederic Manning (The Middle Parts of Fortune) and Richard Hillary (The Last Enemy) identified as Englishmen, despite being born here. A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life and Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight are literary benchmarks against which Australian soldier–writers must measure themselves. Allen & Unwin is doing an invaluable job with its extensive series of Vietnam memoirs. Whether any of them will become classics, only time will tell.

Reading O’Farrell’s book took me back thirty years. When I was at school in the 1960s, I belonged to the Army Cadet Corps. Twice a year we travelled to Singleton army base where, under the supervision of non-commissioned officers who had returned from tours of Vietnam, we ran around the bush firing blank ammunition from our .303 Lee-Enfield rifles, and practised ‘Infantry Minor Tactics’. The soldiers probably didn’t take us seriously, but we were mightily impressed by their skills, especially when they ambushed us with modern automatic weapons. Despite the lessons our grandfathers and fathers had learned on the Somme and in New Guinea, Vietnam seemed a great adventure to sixteen-year-olds. How little we knew.