When Barry Humphries published his first volume of autobiography, many readers were left wanting ‘More, please’ – avid as gladdie-waving victims during one of his shows; voracious as the greedy polymath himself. After all, he had opened that comic triumph with a credible confession: ‘I always wanted more. I never had enough milk or money or socks or sex or holidays or first editions or solitude or gramophone records or free meals or real friends or guiltless pleasure or neckties or applause or unquestioning love or persimmons.’ Vague but abiding was his sense of unfulfilment: where’s the rest of it?

Ten years after More Please, prompted perhaps by his recent, belated triumphs in the USA, Humphries has dug deeper, irresistibly, into his cornucopian memory. Some readers may be perplexed by his traversal of the same material and by his reversion to the bassinet. In one slightly crabby interview, Humphries explained: ‘I remembered all the bits I left out.’ Yet the first of his many epigraphs comes from Gertrude Stein: ‘I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.’

It seems to be only a couple of years ago that my students declared gender and race to be the ‘hot’ topics in culture. Now, I confidently predict, they will relegate gender (still acknowledging its importance) and reformulate the second term by adding a third: race and its intersection with religion, in its broadest definition. Broken Song analyses the fraught relationships that exist and have existed between Indigenous Australians and those ‘ministering’ to them, whether via missionary, welfare, legal, or academic agencies. T.G.H. Strehlow (1908–78), who turbulently enacted all those roles, demonstrates how even the best intentions are inadequate compensation for colonial inequities.

Barry Hill’s biography and intellectual history of Strehlow is an important, monumental study of that giant of linguistic anthropology. It is ambitious in scope, negotiating historical perspectives scrupulously and in the spirit of post-colonialism. There is ample scholarship and circumspect sifting of evidence to admire here. Dialogues are tucked away in delectable footnotes and endnotes, enabling Hill to signal ongoing debates such as those he has with the Strehlow Research Foundation. In return for the use of the diaries, the foundation required surveillance of the contents. Nonetheless, Hill vigilantly registers his dissent through telling details: for example, the story of the removal of identifying tags by Strehlow’s widow from items whose return is requested by Arrernte people. The troubled legacy of Strehlow is enacted in the pages of this work.

Bob Ellis is the quintessential Labour groupie, and Goodbye Babylon the latest instalment in the saga of his love affair with the ALP, which began with The Things We Did Last Summer, a slim and evocative volume, published twenty years ago. By contrast, Goodbye Babylon is a fat book; rather like Ellis himself, it is sprawling, dishevelled, undisciplined but likeable, witty, and gregarious. His prose, though prone to excess, can be rich and compelling.

Goodbye Babylon covers the period from the ALP national conference of early 1998 to the South Australian election of 2002, but the book is not organised chronologically, bouncing round all over time and place. One does not go to Ellis for linear logic; he is a lateral thinker. Yet out of apparent chaos a subtle and effective structure emerges, reminding us that the author is also a master scriptwriter. Ellis advances and backtracks, circling what is the core of the book: the period between August and November 2001, from the Tampa affair to the federal election. This was the time when Kim Beazley’s journey to the prime ministership, seemingly unstoppable in early 2001, was derailed. Ellis is obsessed by this period, in which Australian history was wrenched from its seemingly preordained course. He writes of this time in tones of nostalgic anguish, with innumerable melancholic ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might have beens’. ‘I ... tried to recompose my mind,’ writes Ellis after the election was lost, ‘reorder my plans, for a world, a future, that contained no Age of Beazley.’ This, if anything, is Ellis’s lost Zion: ‘By the rivers of Babylon ... we wept, when we remembered Zion.’

When Malcom Fraser was prime minister, he was generally thought of as a hard and ruthless man of the right. In part this was because of the role he played in the removal of Gough Whitlam; in part because of his fiscal prudence; in part because of his orthodox Cold War foreign policy. Following his defeat in 1983, an alternative picture of Fraser gradually emerged. Under Labor, Australia embarked upon a program of economic rationalist reform. For his failure to anticipate this programme – to be wise or, as some would say, unwise before the event – Fraser was caricatured, especially by his former political friends, as a do-nothing prime minister. His time in office was ridiculed as Seven Wasted Years. After 1996 Fraser became one of the most influential critics of John Howard’s new brand of populist conservatism. The portrait of him was once more redrawn. The left saw him as a principled humanitarian; the right as an incorrigible Wet.

Being out of print is like moving back in with your parents – it’s not usually a sign that things are on the up. But fortune’s wheel turns with scant regard for merit or effort, so it must be a relief for writers when their publishers decide to ‘celebrate their continuing contribution to Australian literature’ with a re-release of their back catalogue.

Kate Grenville has made a continuing contribution to Australian literature worth celebrating. Her work has been consistently revealing, interesting and entertaining. She has won the Australian/Vogel, the Victorian Premier’s and the Orange Prizes, and her six works of fiction have been widely praised. Grenville has also encouraged unpublished writers with her three non-fiction titles, which offer insight, strategies and advice on the art of writing.

Writing novels, he’s Tom Keneally. Works of history – such as The Great Shame (1998) about the Irish diaspora to the USA and Australian in the nineteenth century, and this year’s American Scoundrel, concerned with the adventures of politician, general and amorist Dan Sickles – are by Thomas Keneally. There is more doubling in Keneally’s most recent novel, for he uses two titles. In this country, we have An Angel in Australia; in Britain, The Office of Innocence. Each suggests a different line of approach to a novel that seems in some ways old-fashioned, so instinct is it with his earlier work. By the way, Keneally’s novel count is now twenty-six, including two under the pseudonym ‘William Coyle’.

We meet young Father Frank Darragh as he walks out of St Patrick’s Seminary, Manly, in the early months of World War II. He’ll be back, unlike Keneally, who left the Church irrevocably in 1960, before taking his final vows. Frank is accosted by an ageing exorcist, shuffling in for a meal. This Monsignor disconcertingly instructs the ‘sheltered boy’, the ‘eternal priest’ (as Keneally will later call Darragh) that he ‘must be a merciful confessor’. It is an injunction that probes the heart of this young man for whom innocence, or openness to the pain of others, is indeed the badge of his office. What Father Darragh has to confront in wartime Sydney is all that is implicit in the local name for this book. An angel is made in Australia (as three have been in America) by a violent, obsessed, yet coldly controlled American soldier who finds a cruel, triumphant way to think of his murders.

This is a strange assortment of pieces. To someone who doesn’t move in any gay community, the anthology’s chief problem is its fissiparousness. There has to be a distinction between gay writing and writing by authors who are gay. The majority of contributors to Graeme Aitken’s book take gay life to be their subject, but several are included because they are gay, while not necessarily employing gay themes, or doing so indirectly.

The list of works by writers who address universal human topics (which may involve gay ones), and who are either acknowledged as gay or presumed to be so, amounts to a catalogue of world masterpieces. This could include Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Proust, and Auden, but it would require special pleading to put extracts from these men’s works in any collection labelled Gay Literature. As an aside to reinforce this point: can any marketing director imagine issuing an anthology of Straight Writing? Then again, this Penguin is a male homosexual gathering. Women, straight or lesbian, appear in supporting roles – often as sardonic commentators – but nothing is composed from a female point of view. Before any reader of this review accuses me of making heavy weather of obvious distinctions, I must declare that the most interesting articles or extracts published here are unequivocally about male gay life, and are written with admirable directness and humour. The worry remains: are authors, straight or gay, to be corralled according to their sexual orientation rather than by their style and skill?

- What type of truck?
- A fire truck.

The taper of a cup
sitting pretty in a circle –

God, the lonely father,
shuffles through the
corridors of heaven,
haunted by angels –
memories of desire,
the source of nostalgia.

Although the World Wide Web was begun in 1990, it didn’t really get going in a big way until 1994, with the First International World Wide Web conference held at CERN in Switzerland. That was less than a decade ago. And that should give us pause. Think how important the Web has become in those few years. Consider, too, what sort of computer you were using in 1994 and compare it to what you deploy now (assuming you’re not a holdout). No pause there. It’s been an ongoing vertical projection that is no doubt just the beginning of an enormous change that will affect almost every aspect of our lives. Of course, we’ve heard this technological refrain over and over (with various apocalyptic shadings), and we probably believe it to be true. Still, we’re not likely to get excited about it. We’ll deal with it when it comes. In many instances, it’s already here, but we haven’t fully noticed. In part we’ve simply accustomed ourselves to some of the demands of a ubiquitous silicon-based technology, and in part we’ve remained unaware of what’s headed our way in the form of a techno-savvy younger generation. We seldom see into the future because we usually look in the wrong direction: the future’s not ahead, it’s behind us, and it’s coming up fast.

According to the back cover: ‘This book explores the way common conversation matters … that during the last two hundred years we have been beguiled by reading and writing. Only during the last part of the twentieth century have we begun to remember the importance of speech as a source of truth in human affairs.’ It could also be noted that the seven essays collected here began as lectures, seminars or articles on such themes as the role of the monarchy in modern Australia (Prince Charles is judged a better speechmaker than his mum, therefore we have hope), the republican movement, the significance of Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds as influential Australian historians, the early nineteenth-century views of Edward Smith Hall and James Macarthur on the rights of Aboriginal people, and Raffaello Carboni’s account of the Eureka Stockade.

Halfway through Matthew Flinders’ Cat, the protagonist admits that, when writing, he finds it ‘almost impossible to leave out what others might think of as superfluous detail. It was, he knew, self-indulgence.’ Is this a moment of self-directed irony on Bryce Courtenay’s part, or a case of the pot calling the kettle black? This novel brims with ‘superfluous detail’, and there is little attempt to curb the flow of information.

Don Anderson

Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM (Knopf). Gripping narrative; gripping drama. Plenty of heart; plenty of blood on Canberra carpets. Fond picture of possibly Australia’s last Labour prime minister. Sylvia Lawson’s How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia: Stories and essays (UNSW Press). Complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections. And, finally, anything by Peter Temple, an outstanding crime fiction novelist who combines true grit and a college education with the smells of the city (Melbourne). Try Shooting Star or Dead Point (both from Bantam).

Peter Bishop

Dorothy Hewett’s last testament, Halfway up the Mountain (FACP), has been a constant companion in the year of her death. Drusilla Modjeska, in Timepieces (Picador), casts doubt on whether Australian novelists are meeting the present challenges of their medium, so it’s timely to welcome a new fictional voice as luminous as Saskia Beudel’s in Borrowed Eyes (Picador). In a fight between fiction and faction, Anna Funder’s Stasiland (Text) would be a sensational factional weapon, while Peter Craven’s Best Australian Stories 2002 (Black Inc.) makes it thrillingly clear with what passion the battle would be fought to the last breath.

Neal Blewett

Reflecting the pattern of my reading, the books that left a lasting impression are all biographical — three blockbusters and a modest memoir. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is a flawed but marvellous portrait of a flawed but remarkable man, and the most significant work written on Australian politics in the last twelve months. Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate (Knopf) is the third volume in the monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson, one of the great political biographies of our time. In the early volumes, Johnson emerges as a repellent, indeed possibly a malevolent, character, but, in this volume, while the personality remains unattractive, Johnson begins that use of national power that was to make him ‘the greatest champion (of) black Americans’ since Lincoln. With Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (W.W. Norton & Co.), Ian Kershaw brings to a triumphant conclusion the definitive biography in English of last century’s most calamitous figure. By thoroughly analysing both the social context and the institutional framework of Weimar and Nazi Germany, Kershaw provides the most plausible explanation yet of how this banal man and his feuding henchmen came to dominate Germany and bring much of Europe to its knees. Peter Rose’s Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin) is a finely crafted memoir, loving and unsentimental, telling how one family coped with the crippling, in a car accident, of their elder son, a young sportsman of great promise. This austere and moving account of the stoicism of one family is a rebuke to the self-pitying indulgence of our times.

Ian Britain

‘So unAustralian! And so fucking full.’ The expatriate surrealist painter at the centre of Gail Jones’s Black Mirror (Picador) levels this charge against her family house in a West Australian country town. You could say the same of the novel’s own mainly European settings and verbal arabesques. But it’s as Australian (and at times as good) as White, Moorhouse or Hazzard in posing the question ‘What does being Australian mean?’, and I yielded easily to its lush blandishments. I, too, am Australian enough to admit relishing the drug-addled frissons of Nick McDonell’s Manhattan in Twelve (Text) and of South African actor Antony Sher’s cosmopolitan cavortings in Beside Myself (Hutchinson).

Alison Broinowski

What happens when the passions of young men are let loose is our compelling issue this year, but these three writers were working on it well before 11 September 2001 and 12 October 2002. Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God: The Islamist attack on America (Granta), traces the mild-mannered Islamic scholars whose ideas, accumulated over two centuries, inspired Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta. He offers understanding, if no excuses, for their psychopathology about the West. In a first novel by Melbourne-based poet, translator and editor Ouyang Yu, The Eastern Slope Chronicle (Brandl & Schlesinger), the protagonist is a young Chinese man, desperately bored and lonely among Australians whom he hates for not appreciating his talents. But he meets similar rejection on a return visit to China. In Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin), Alex Miller’s gritty, evocative, fact-based account of a journey through past hatreds in the Australian bush, an unlikely couple resolves ancestral brutality by not repeating it.

Peter Craven

Sonya Hartnett’s Of a Boy (Viking) is far and away the best new Australian piece of fiction I have read, rivalling the achievement of Thursday’s Child last year. Hartnett is a writer who should command the world’s, not just the nation’s, attention: ravishing, often dark in tonality, consistently musical and humorous and credible, and with the tragedian’s capacity to wound and move and stagger. Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (Bloomsbury) is the long-awaited long novel by the perfectionist among the new American postmodernists. The author of The Virgin Suicides presents a comprehensive vision of Middle America through the lens of sexual catastrophe and manages to make all his whimsies purr with wisdom and grace. In the field of literary criticism, Harold Bloom’s Genius (Bloomsbury) is a grand and gorgeous tour through a hundred classics by one of the master spirits of our age: wise, relaxed and absolutely individual. Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband (Bloomsbury), in paperback this year, is a masterpiece by the finest poet to write in English for … what? … I’d say a generation.

Morag Fraser

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America (Granta), Barbara Ehrenreich’s deft investigative exposé of life on a low wage in today’s USA, gives a twist to George Bush Senior’s dictum. The American way of life, for many, is not negotiable. For many, it is also unsustainable, degrading and inequitable. The irony is that it takes an American, and one with Ehrenreich’s courage, to say so. In City and Stranger (Five Islands Press), Aileen Kelly’s uncannily perceptive poems lodge in your bones like late sun or Kosciusko chill —sharpening the way you see the world. Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal possession (Knopf), Barry Hill’s epic, tragic tale of Strehlow and Aboriginal Australia, is indispensable national narrative. Read it all summer.

Raimond Gaita

Kate Jennings’s Moral Hazard (Picador) is a novel about a woman with left sympathies who takes a job on Wall Street in order to earn enough to pay the medical bills incurred by her husband who suffers from Alzheimer’s. It is the work of an intelligence that is fiercely truthful and deepened by love and by a pity that is without condescension and sentimentality. Like all good art that speaks truthfully about affliction, it is unsparing and heartbreaking, yet beautiful. When I finished Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (Picador), I was heartened and grateful that, in these dark times, there lives amongst us a man with such vision, such courage and such love for his humane art — a man with such largeness of soul.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

I like three of this year’s big doorstops: Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, hypnotically readable and enlightening; Barry Hill’s Broken Song, lyrical and intellectually demanding; and Les Murray’s Collected Poems 1961–2002 (Duffy & Snellgrove). What these three otherwise wildly different writers have in common is a passion for metaphor, a passion for grammar, a passion for their subject matter, and an awesome capacity for sustained hard work. The Murray collection includes the magical and astonishing sequence ‘Presence: Translations from the natural world’, one of the great achievements in contemporary poetry.

Peter Goldsworthy

Les Murray’s Collected Poems 1961–2002. Walking through this astonishing book from the beginning is to follow again the current of Murray’s poetry, from the simple, still fresh visions of the early narrative poems – ‘Burning Truck’, for example –through the first glimpses of a more dense, overpowering style – ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’ – in which Murray begins to write what he likes to call the fifteenth to twenty-first lines of the sonnet. Smaller-scale images and epigrams still abound, but a third of the way into the book comes the first appearance of the really weird stuff – ‘Bat Ultrasound’ – a new voice which reaches an amazing flowering in ‘Presence: Translations from the Natural World’, probably the most original and genuinely avant-garde poetry written in this country. How many people are writing this book? I suspect that Les Murray is a committee.

Gideon Haigh

It takes a writer of great gifts to tell you a story in which you’re acquainted in advance with most of the characters, already have the gist of the plot, and know the conclusion, but John Cassidy kept me turning the pages of his Dot.Con (Penguin) right to the bitter end. Boo Hoo (Arrow), Ernst Malmsten’s first-person chronicle of his Internet start-up cock-up, told the same story from the point of view of the dimwit naïf, with a lack of self-awareness that was breathtaking. A market of a different kind was the subject of John Sutherland’s entertaining chronicle of British bestsellerdom, Reading the Decades (BBC Books). My favourite Australian book of the year, alas, is unlikely to make any such list, but Brad Collis’s anecdotal account of the CSIRO at work, Fields of Discovery (Allen & Unwin), was an achievement worthy of its subject.

Jacqueline Kent

Chris Masters’s Not for Publication (ABC Books): stories that for various reasons didn’t make Four Corners. A sharp-eyed, astute exploration of some dilemmas of modern journalism, mercifully free of self-aggrandisement or special pleading. Steven Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver (HarperCollins): in evoking 1950s Australian suburbia, Carroll creates a wide-ranging and truthful emotional landscape and memorable characters from a milieu that could have been banal or — worse — sentimental. George Clare’s Last Waltz in Vienna (Vintage). This deceptively casual memoir of middle-class Jewish family life in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss gains its power from the jolting contrast between ordinary daily events and the monstrous bureaucracy of Nazi Germany.

Patrick McCaughey

Janine Burke’s Australian Gothic: A life of Albert Tucker (Knopf) deserves acclaim as well as notoriety. In the most intimate biography of a modern Australian master, Burke untangles the tangled skein of Tucker’s personal and artistic lives. Once past the spectacular vulgarity of its cover, Angus Trumble’s Love and Death: Art in the age of Queen Victoria (Art Gallery of South Australia) provides the best introduction to late Victorian painting. Drawing only from Australasian collections, Trumble marshals an illuminating account of the cultural and social background, and enlists an impressive supporting cast of local talent and international luminaries as contributors. David Cannadine’s essays, In Churchill’s Shadow (Allen Lane), strengthen his hand as the noble successor to H. Trevor Roper and A.J.P. Taylor as the master of the historical essay. The shadow of Empire falls across his pages and the passing of its power, richly illuminated in unusual pairs such as sharp analyses of Noel Coward’s patriotism and Ian Fleming’s clubland heroes.

Brian Matthews

Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (Vintage): a wrenching and finally devastating account emerges from this deceptively unassuming narrative. Small, catastrophic brushes with the Holocaust unfold from stories of people desperate to be freed from the rapacious past. Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (Picador): well-known now as a novel you either hate or love. Seduced by its fluency, wit, effortless invention and the laterally emerging indictment of genocide, I was, and remain, among the lovers. Tim Parks’s A Season with Verona (Secker & Warburg): brilliantly perceptive, often fracturingly funny, Parks’s pursuit of the ‘Giallo Blu’ through an entire season of Serie A football is one of the great books on sport, and an honourable addition to the literature of black obsession.

Brenda Niall

Stories from three cities – Budapest, Vienna, Berlin – make my list of 2002 favourites. First published in 1942, Sandor Marai’s Embers (Penguin) has just appeared in English translation. It’s a subtly told novel of friendship, class inequality, envy and betrayal, emblematic of the collapsing Austro–Hungarian Empire. Last Waltz in Vienna (Pan) is a superb family memoir. The author, George Clare (Georg Klaar), escaped to England in 1938. His parents, who felt so thoroughly assimilated that being Jewish seemed incidental, lingered and were lost. It reads like a novel – sadly, it’s all true. Sydney writer Anna Funder worked in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Stasiland (Text), she writes about how people lived on that ‘other side’, during the time of division. Funder balances the roles of interviewer, historian and friend in a brilliant, absorbing narrative.

Allan Patience

Susan Hawthorne’s Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, Bio/Diversity (Spinifex Press) is a passionate book offering a kaleidoscope of ideas, arresting ways of seeing things, and possible solutions for many of the man-contrived environmental messes across the violated globe. Its barefaced audacity is its greatest attraction. Hawthorne has blazed a trail for others to follow. Next comes Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin). All of Miller’s novels glow like rubies, especially this one. It could be the first genuinely Australian novel after The Tree of Man (pipping True History of the Kelly Gang at the post). Its handling of the contemporary Aboriginal experience is especially moving — never patronising, always sympathetic. Arguably, with this beautiful novel, Miller is now established as a successor to Patrick White.

Ros Pesman

Bernard Smith’s new volume of autobiography, with its wonderfully resonant title, A Pavane for Another Time (Macmillan), and its telling dedication to Ernst Gombrich, is a rich evocation of the young Smith’s exploration of ideology, love and art in Sydney, London and Italy in the immediate post-war years. Among those with whom he exchanged ideas was Ernst Gombrich’s fellow art historian and neighbour in Woburn Square, Anthony Blunt, whose many lives, as told in Miranda Carter’s Anthony Blunt: His lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), are a voyeur’s dream read. Iris Origo also lived many lives: wealthy young woman in Bernard Berenson’s expatriate Florence, farmer with her aristocrat husband (and the support of Mussolini’s agrarian reforms) on a crumbling estate near Siena, wartime helper of partisans and prisoners of war, historian, biographer and literary critic. Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (David R. Godine) is a fascinating portrait of this independent, not always likeable, woman.

Peter Pierce

The best work of Australian history that I encountered was Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfella’s Point (UNSW Press), a probing account of what ‘An Australian History of Place’ might mean locally and at large. He has focused intently on the colonial process of forgetting and misremembering. In American Scoundrel (Random House), Thomas Keneally has written a rollicking history of Dan Sickles, Tammany politician, amorist, murderer, Union general in the Civil War. He is a Schindler prototype – a magnetically attractive rogue, and survivor. In Australian poetry, nothing equalled Anthony Lawrence’s sparkling and varied collection Skinned by Light (UQP).

Dorothy Porter

The two stand-out novels for me in 2002 were conspicuous favourites for many other readers as well – both bestsellers and chosen for the Booker shortlist. The first is Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (Picador). I revelled in its numinous creation of character and landscape, though believing in its happy ending with my heart rather than my head. The other is Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (Virago), a potent brew of gothic story-telling, unapologetic lesbian romance and Victorian England, fabulously evoked without forelock tugging to Dickens. My poetry reading was mainly spent revisiting poems or poets. I reread with envy and awe a number of Shakespeare’s plays. After the bomb blast in Bali, I put aside the marvellous new edition of Coleridge’s poems (edited by his biographer, Richard Holmes) and turned to the lucid perspective of W.H. Auden’s poems of the 1930s. It was strange turning to a poet not just for comfort but also for common sense.

Peter Porter

Robert Gray’s Afterimages (Duffy & Snellgrove) shows this admired poet changing direction from seeing things to thinking things. The long poems are remarkable, being like soliloquies of a Coleridge well past any hope of a ‘Frost at Midnight’ redemption. The shorter poems show Gray developing his renowned eye for the way things can become words, but it is the extended reveries on his parents and the country where he was brought up, north of Sydney, that shine with unexpected linkings and lyrical interludes. Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (Chatto & Windus) is a day-to-day, brushstroke-by-brushstroke account of how the irascible genius from Florence decorated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel erected by his nepotistic Pope’s uncle. Julius II is a monster worthy of anyone’s fascination, but the core of this brilliant book is its record of how, with ever-changing and reluctant assistants, Michelangelo covered the thousands of square feet with imperishable, if not always well-drawn, images. Charles M. Joseph’s Stravinsky Inside Out (Yale University Press) is my nomination for the worst book I’ve read this year. Joseph, an American academic, accuses the composer of posing as an all-purpose Yankee after moving to the USA. A book to prove that creative artists are hated by many university placemen, and revealing that you can study music in auspicious conservatoria and have no ear for it or understanding of it.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

My three books would have to include Christopher Kremmer’s The Carpet Wars (HarperCollins), which vividly personalises and diversifies the troubled world of central Islam. Then there is Peter Conradi’s large biography, Iris Murdoch: A life (HarperCollins). Most literary biographies are dull because the practice of writing is as boring as bat-shit, but Murdoch’s many novels intersect fascinatingly with her promiscuously inquiring life, as this book demonstrates. For a wild card, I’d add Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars (translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zonic; Dereta, Belgrade), which constructs an absurdist semi-history with fantastic elaboration.

Not half as nice

Dear Editor,

Nothing jolts a writer like finding that her book has been read in serious discord with her intentions and produced the last effect she’d have wanted. Heather Neilson (ABR, October 2002) thinks I’m ‘preaching’ and condemning to outer darkness those who don’t agree with me. This is disquieting, but also salutary. However other reviewers may differ – and they do – Dr Neilson has a right to her own reading of How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia. I’m sorry she found no pleasure in my book; but, acknowledging her seriousness, I respond to the question she raises twice in the course of the review: for whom was it intended? The answer is: for any and every reader, not only academics, for whom the shifts and struggles of the liberal conscience are never finished with, and for whom such struggles, as they are lived out, make stories worth telling. It’s also for those who share the sense that carrying Australian nationality is now a more complicated and troublesome business than we once supposed – not half as nice, in fact. In that framework, I’ve proposed that the legacies of writers such as Beauvoir and Raymond Williams have important things to offer and tried to explore how. Since the questions raised by their and others’ works are left alive but unresolved, there’s no ‘preaching’ to the ‘converted’ or anyone else. Ethical exploration isn’t preaching; the speaking position isn’t from a rostrum or pulpit, but from within argumentative milieux that are both divided in the present and shifting over time. I think this is made clear, particularly from the elements of memoir in the book.

Comedy, Angela Carter once quipped, is tragedy that happens to other people. Laughter is both an expression of our hard-bitten knowledge of the random cruelty of a universe that stubbornly resists our attempts to control it and an act of defiance in the face of that cruelty. Or, to put it in simpler terms, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

With his first two novels, Silences Long Gone and Tin Toys, Anson Cameron revealed himself as a peculiarly spiky talent, possessed of a finely tuned literary sensibility, an invigorating disregard for the moral sensitivities of his audience and a blackly ironic sense of humour. Neither seemed to have been conceived as comic novels per se, but both were funny, if cruel, black and slippery. Confessing the Blues, his third novel, is an attempt to emphasise the humour. It’s a rock ’n’ roll novel that is not so much about the bittersweet taste of success as the galling taste of failure, and the pain of ordinariness for someone who has aimed at being anything but.

‘Some meteorites make it to the surface simply because they’re so small that they literally float to the ground. There are thousands of these interplanetary particles in the room you’re in now, stuck to your clothes, in your hair, everywhere.’ This startling piece of information introduces Aileen Kelly’s ‘Notes from the Planet’s Edge’ in her new book, City and Stranger (Five Islands Press, $16.95 pb, 88pp), whose cover features Russell Drysdale’s iconic image of Woman in a Landscape. This bushwoman, then, is stuck with interplanetary particles or, as Kelly puts it, ‘the invisible sift of space’. Drysdale’s woman is transformed from the Australian legend in the dirt-coloured smock, wearing those oddly impractical white shoes, into a figure framed by an immense and moving universe. We look for this in poetry – the breaking of frames, the pleasure of surprise and discovery, and the contest between language and experience.

This is Kelly’s second book after her prizewinning Coming up for Light (1994). The poetry seems more complex, more ambitious, no less poised and measured, but less convinced of William Carlos Williams’s troublesome dictum, ‘No ideas but in things!’ There are ideas here, and many things, but mostly there is the intimate care Kelly takes with language. The book is dedicated to her parents, ‘Tops and Tom Kelly who handed on their belief that words matter’, and this mattering is there in the poems, slowing each one to a pace often doubly marked by line breaks and ends of phrases.

Before the age of thirty, Randolph Stow had published five novels and a prize-winning collection of poetry. In Australia, only Kenneth Mackenzie, another Sandgroper, had made a similar youthful impact. Mackenzie’s first book, The Young Desire It, was published in 1937, though I believe drafted some time before that. Stow’s The Haunted Land (1956) was written when he was only seventeen. When another precocious young Western Australian, Tim Winton, published his first novel, he was painfully conscious of these precursors. This was crucial for Winton, because both Mackenzie and Stow were to have troubled creative lives: Mackenzie died relatively young, his later novels disadvantaged by the youthful brilliance of his first. Randolph Stow, after his three initial successes, has published only five further novels, two collections of poems and a book for children. It has been a career with long silences.

John Hirst faced a challenging task when he set out to write Australia’s Democracy: A short history. In a single monograph, he has traced the story of political rights and practices of citizenship, assessed within a context of social change. Not only does such writing place considerable demands on a historian’s range, but any prominent historian who attempts a short history attracts the sharp attention of all stakeholders. In Hirst’s case, his position as chair of the Commonwealth Government’s Civics Education Group has contributed further to his high profile in recent discussion on the need for citizenship training. Australia’s Democracy was funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training, and made available to schools for the ‘Discovering Democracy’ programme. Few historians write while carrying so much responsibility towards their prospective readership.

Australia’s frontier legend is alive and well, as is John Flynn’s contribution to it in these two new books. In Australia’s Flying Doctors, Richard Woldendorp’s glorious photographs celebrate a medical service that reaches about eighty per cent of the vast Australian landmass. They are complemented by Roger McDonald’s economical personal vignettes of outback spirit.

The outback frontier is at its most archetypal in a crisis. The Flying Doctor medical team meets distance, isolation and fear of death in unlikely landscapes from Cape York to Tasmania and back to the Bungle Bungles. It is not just doctors who are ‘heroes’, but nurses and pilots, even one aircraft maintenance engineer seconded at short notice to pull apart a meat mincer in which a shearer’s cook caught her hand. The Flying Doctor is generally, but not always, appreciated. McDonald reminds us that some fiercely independent bushmen do not welcome help in time of trouble.

These three memoirs share central focus on fathers: Gaby Naher’s is a meditation on fatherhood, Shirley Painter’s is about surviving an abusive one, while Cliff Nichols’s relates his life as an alcoholic and unreliable parent. They are also all part of the current flood of life-writing appearing from Australian publishing houses. Drusilla Modjeska, writing recently about the failings of contemporary fiction, argued that creative writing courses since the 1980s have produced a spate of postmodern first novels that were ‘tricksy and insubstantial’, deconstructing narrative at the expense of well-developed plots and characters. These courses may also account for much of the current memoir boom, feeding the demands of our voyeuristic culture. But publishers have a responsibility to readers to tame the genre’s self-revelatory excesses.

Have the Bali Bombings completely changed our view of Indonesia? Although obviously not designed to do so, these three books provide necessary background on how such an atrocity might be possible in the near-anarchic circumstances of that country. They also give a wide-ranging and informative picture of the present state of Indonesia in all its chaos and uncertainty. They make sobering reading, as if Indonesian politics is a mixture of Shakespearean tragedy, Javanese shadow play and gangster drama: Hamlet, Semar and The Godfather.

This is a particularly interesting group of reissued ‘classics’, spanning just over fifty years in twentieth-century Australian literature. Although they have very different fictional styles, all are realist or social realist novels, and their politics and preoccupations are not dissimilar. Each is concerned with working people’s lives, differing contrasts between city and country life, and aspects of class.

Set beyond the pale of white settlement, Sarah Hay’s Skins is a compelling and often violent story of an Englishwoman shipwrecked off the southern coast of Western Australia in 1835. Winner of the 2002 Australian/Vogel Literary Award, it is a powerful evocation of a time and place rarely featured in Australian literary fiction.

It was inevitable, sooner or later, someone would write a book celebrating the achievements of the Protestant Irish in Australia. Books commemorating the part played by the Catholic Irish culminated in Patrick O’Farrell’s ambit claim that they were responsible for just about everything we like to think of (or used to think of) as being distinctively Australian. Now Professor Jarlath Ronayne has given us his own hyperbolic response in the subtitle of this sumptuous publication. The best way to see the book is as a useful reminder that ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ were not synonyms in colonial Australia. Irish-born Protestants, whether they were members of the Ascendancy élite or, as in most cases, of much more modest origins, identified themselves as Irish. In early Melbourne, they joined with the Catholic Irish to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as their national event. However, their Irish ‘nation’ was the Protestant nation euphorically invoked by the Protestant ‘Patriots’ of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ in the 1780s. And Trinity College, Dublin, was the alma mater of that minority ‘nation’.

In Future Active, Graham Meikle roams the electronic landscape picking out highlights and lowlights. Like all travellers, what he finds is influenced by his interests and perspectives. Sometimes this leads to illuminating insights; sometimes I marvelled at what he might have seen but didn’t.

This is a tale of a farm boy who grew up in ‘the world of the rural poor, [which] remained what it had been for generations; a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trodden loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot’. It is the story of James Cook’s dramatic escape from that loop, told by another equally restless soul, American journalist Tony Horwitz, who spent eighteenth months travelling the Pacific in the wake of Cook’s three great voyages of discovery.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had one quite unexpected effect on world tourism ­– it opened up Antarctica. Cash-strapped, post-Communist Russia could no longer afford its large collection of Antarctic bases, or the fleet of polar-equipped vessels that supplied them. Many of these ships are now chartered out to adventure travel companies. As a result, the opportunities to visit Antarctica have increased dramatically, while the cost of getting down to the ice has dropped steeply. The Antarctic visitor total is now around 15,000 tourists a year, quite apart from the personnel travelling south to the forty-odd scientific bases.

As HarperCollins continues to release this welcome series of Australian reissues, it’s especially pleasing to see them including less well-known, even long-forgotten, titles. While I had read none of these latest offerings, I did at least know something about three of the authors. Les Robinson, however, was almost a complete mystery. ‘Almost’ because I had a vague memory of one of his stories being included in an anthology I once lectured on. Obviously, it did not impress me enough to seek out more of his work. Nor would it have been easy to find, since, unlike the other three titles, The Giraffe’s Uncle had never been reissued since its first printing, in 1933, by the Macquarie Head Press, a firm now as forgotten as the books it published.

Allen & Unwin tells us that David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s much-anticipated book about the Tampa Affair has been postponed until February 2003. The title is now Dark Victory: The Military campaign to re-elect the Prime Minister.

Amanda Lohrey is also in the news. Her study of the Greens and their leader, Bob Brown, has just appeared as the latest ‘Quarterly Essay’ (Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens). Meanwhile, the Montpelier and Vulgar Presses have reissued her 1984 novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, along with Jean Devanny’s Sugar Heaven (1936). Delys Bird reviews the latter novel, along with several reissues, on page 61.

My first thought on reading Father Lands was of Lasse Hallström’s film My Life as a Dog (1985) in the way that both novel and film enter so completely and unerringly into the world of childhood with all its quirks, illogicality, and fears. But there are other traditions at work in this novel, set in Milwaukee in the mid-1970s, and which recounts Cherry Laurel’s experience of the ‘Historical Experiment’ of integrating black and white primary school students. Ballou, an American who has made Australia her home for the last decade, may also have had in mind the use of a child’s-eye perspective that runs through American literature from Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird to Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, in which matters of great historical significance, particularly the racial history of the USA, are brought into relief by the stark honesty of an ingenuous child-narrator.

Lily Brett a beguiler. Little by little, she draws you into her world until you become as fascinated by it as she is. In this series of recollections of such places as Mexico, New York and Poland, she intertwines past and present to become our guide in a kind of travelogue of the soul. She does not just observe, but processes and filters everything through a dramatic persona.

Brett moved to New York from Melbourne more than a decade ago, and has produced several books since then. Her reputation as a writer has continued to deepen as she has become the voice of the children of Holocaust survivors. Beginning with her first novel, Things Could Be Worse (1990), she has explored and explained the profound effect Hitler’s murder of six million Jews has had not only on its survivors, but also on their descendants.

Surprisingly, the chapter on Mexico is faintly irritating. It describes the minutiae of domestic life to no great purpose. The observations seem to be made through the eyes of a New Yorker uncomfortable outside her comfort zone: ‘I think I was expecting towns with police stations and hospitals. And road rules. Not dogs and donkeys and dust. And tacos being fried on the side of the road.’ Even Americans, one imagines, know enough about their closest neighbours’ way of life not to be uneasy around them. The short, punchy sentences set up heightened expectations that are not met by the bland observations on Mexico and Brett’s daily routine. You wait for something to happen, but it never does.

For several years, I have bemoaned the dearth of substantial, challenging Australian novels for ‘middle years’ readers. During a recent stint working in a specialist children’s bookshop, I was frequently asked by parents of these readers – upper primary, lower secondary – for ‘books that will last longer than an afternoon’. I was hard-pressed to find many recent Australian titles that would fit the bill. Two new novels by first-time writers aiming both to entertain and challenge their audience with complex yet accessible stories, concepts and language go a small way towards filling this gap.

When a children’s picture book first comes into the home, there is no way of telling whether it is going to be ‘the one’ – the one that will be read and reread; that will have pictures drawn about it and songs made up about it; that will be carried around and allowed to spend the night at the end of the bed. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; awards and critical acclaim don’t mean too much. The book is simply chosen, and becomes the centre of the child’s universe for a week, a month – a lifetime.

Archie Fusillo

The following books manage to avoid patronising their intended audience by eschewing proven ‘age-appropriate’ characters and/or sanitised versions of contemporary issues inserted into formulaic plots. Finding Grace (Allen & Unwin), by Alyssa Brugman, balances pathos and drama in telling the story of a young woman, Rachel, who discovers the real meaning of heroism and personal strength when she leaves university to care for car accident victim Grace. Wildlight (Penguin), by David Metzenthen, weaves historical detail, an ear for dialogue, and a keen sense of adventure into a clever story of self-discovery by his illiterate protagonist Dirk Wildlight. Ian Bone’s The Song of an Innocent Bystander (Penguin) grips the reader with the force of its moral and ethical dilemma, while never straying from being a probable story set in a world that is becoming less and less predictable.

Many thousands of undergraduates have walked under the stilts of the Raymond Priestley Building, which forms part of Melbourne University’s great wind tunnel, with no thought of the person commemorated by its name. He was, in fact, a remarkable man. His four years as Vice-Chancellor (1935–38) emerge in extraordinary detail and intimacy, thanks to this edition of his journals.

Raymond Priestley was a man of many parts: a soldier; the geologist on Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition (1908–9); a member of the Northern Party of Scott’s expedition (1911–12); a friend of Wittgenstein; a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and holder of a number of important administrative posts in that university. He went to Melbourne University as its inaugural Vice-Chancellor in 1935, and lasted four years. His letter of resignation referred to the inadequate funding that had made his position untenable. There were other reasons, as set out in Ronald Ridley’s admirable Introduction. Priestley’s plans for Melbourne University were humane, inclusive and progressive. He was much preoccupied with the necessity to make possible a university community that did not depend only upon residential college life. The focus of this ambition was a new Union for students, to give them a sense of community and belonging in a campus singularly lacking that dimension in 1935. He was also concerned with the preservation of what used to be called ‘academic freedom’, that is to say the protection of discourse within the university from more or less crude censorship, whether from outside the university or within it. His views were liberal, and caused him trouble.

It is the fashion, when discussing Patricia Carlon’s thrillers, to claim that she has been shamefully ignored in her home country. So what? If Miss Carlon (1927–2002) had been a genius of the running track or swimming pool and couldn’t get a gig in the Australian Olympic team, that would be a scandal. But she was a writer. She was ignored. What else is new? What we really want to know is whether her thrillers are worth all the fuss. Do they deserve to be reissued after being out of print for many years?

The arresting cover of James Jupp’s important From White Australia to Woomera features the distraught faces of the children of detained asylum seekers. As the blurb puts it: ‘There never has been a greater need for a sober, historically informed yet critical account of immigration policy in Australia.’ This is indeed a book for the times. The nation’s left/liberal intelligentsia – much-disparaged by the right as ‘the politically correct chattering élite’ – has been in a state of profound shock ever since John Howard and Philip Ruddock swept the government to victory in November 2001 on the back of their hardline policy on asylum seekers. The Tampa episode, the ‘Pacific solution’ and the rising desperation of the families incarcerated and punished at Port Hedland, Maribyrnong and Woomera are surely all too familiar to readers. Labor’s experimentation with temporary protection visas for refugees in 1990, and the introduction of mandatory detention for the ‘boat people’ in 1991, had been followed under Howard, from 1996, by the freezing of humanitarian programme levels, reductions in social security support and an increasingly draconian detention regimen. But none of these developments quite prepared observers for the Howard government’s subsequent demonising and torturing of these wretchedly desperate folk in the final stage of their attempt to find sanctuary from evil Middle Eastern régimes. And nothing, perhaps, was more shocking than the government’s dry-eyed response to the drowning of refugee women and children at sea.

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.

The children on the covers of these How to Play handbooks also have European features, are dressed in costumes, and have the same intensity in their postures, but there the similarities end. The fictional Jacques Austerlitz learnt numbers almost as soon as he could speak. In the catalogue of first things an Australian child learns, throwing a ball rates highly, as does the wish to be a miniature Shane Warne, Liz Ellis or Nathan Buckley (footy, here, is strictly Australian Rules). The diagrams and photographs of perfect styles and heroes will help young readers to understand more about these sports. Token mention is made that boys can play netball and girls cricket and football, but there is no reference to the successes, say, of the Australian women’s cricket team or of female football umpires.