Someone once described Clive James as ‘a great bunch of guys’, a joke worthy of James himself, although he is probably tired of hearing it. Some of those guys – the television comedian and commentator, the best-selling memoirist – are better known than others, and there’s little doubt that their fame has obscured the achievement of two of the quieter guys in the bunch.

One of these is a literary critic – and there are few better – but the quietest of all is Clive James the poet. Partly, this has been a deliberate, if optimistic, decision to let the poems speak for themselves. ‘If they do,’ James writes of his poet-self in the introduction to his new Collected Verse, ‘it might be because no one was expecting him to speak at all.’

Screened by a big, noisy front row of alter egos, the poet has been sneaking up on readers in recent years. A few poems have scored anthology tries – especially the title piece, ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ – but I still sense a resistance to look beyond James the jokester. A tide of anti-expat feeling in recent years may be part of this, although that tide is currently ebbing. In an essay in the New York Review of Books on David Malouf’s work (‘Great Days’, 21 December 2000), James wrote that Malouf’s short story ‘Dream Stuff’ is the story ‘of an internationally successful writer who has taken his risks, including the risk – perhaps the scariest of all for an Australian expatriate – of going home’. That scary risk is very much evident in James’s recent poems.

Gabriel García Márquez once said that all of us lead three different lives simultaneously: public, private, and secret. In his second novel, A Private Man, Malcolm Knox explores two very secret recesses of the modern Australian male’s experience: porn and sport. That both these spheres also have a very public face merely allows for these secret experiences to be played out in front of a paying audience as either tragedy or farce, or sometimes both.

Wagner’s Creek is a rundown seaside village full of fibro shacks, rubbish and the ‘dirt poor’: ‘Their boredom and despair was as high as the dry grass in their yards and as deep as the ruts in the road – and their hearts seemed as broken as their hanging gates and peeling fences.’ Elizabeth Stead’s other novel, The Fishcastle (2000), was also set in a seaside village where, as in Wagner’s Creek, strange things happen. Time goes more slowly in Wagner’s Creek, and the weather is different from everywhere else.

The common ground between Elizabeth Stead and her aunt Christina Stead is a predilection for the surreal. I’ve always found The Man Who Loved Children (1941) a nightmarish book, steeped in an intense, claustrophobic atmosphere that separates Louisa and the Pollit family from the rest of the world. The family in this novel consists of Fin Starling, a bastard, and his mother, Molly Starling, who is the town’s prostitute. And yes, she does have a heart of gold. Molly is delighted by the birth of her son, though he does have strange eyes and webbed feet. Fin is a silent child, obsessed by cleanliness and order. He suffers from what appears to be a contagious version of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Whenever he looks at people in a particular way, they too become infected by a desire to scrub, disinfect, and straighten furniture.

At once extravagant and tightly wrapped, this novel reinforces the view that historical fiction says as much about the present and the future as it does about the past. At the level of history proper, Anouar Benmalek’s vision unites three continents that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, are subject to the depredations of European colonialism and domestic tyranny. At the human level, his fiction is preoccupied with the bodily functions and basic needs of survival: things that never change. The broad, impersonal sweep of world history is made up of the infinitesimally small transactions of the primal scene: copulating, defecating, vomiting, bleeding, all driven by the elemental forces of fear and desire, violence and conscience.

Grennan sucks in air along his gums and yells
again to Davey who is filling the trough
of the gunwhale with scrabbling crabs. Far off
lightning slips down the sky like a forkful
of buttered sea-worms. The rain works fast
cutting with decisive precision across
the sea. Grennan pulls in squid, then severs
the slimy cordage of the tentacles, throws
one at Davey who laughs; his voice hard, sharp
as a scuttling tool. He brings up more pots
as wind rattles the uneven links that his palms
pay in before he lets down the crash of
another stone-weighted creel. The boat pitches
among the waves and their hearts drum
hard as they pull in the loads, their stomachs
rumbling, turning like captured ghosts as
the boat rides a thick swell. Squid ink spreads
across the deck, an oily roil of thunderheads.
The crabs that are in the hold are going claw
to claw, outdoing the clatter of the hail
that falls across the deck like marble scree.
Grennan pierces a squid’s eye with the end
of a blade, soft fruit he’ll save later for pelicans
when their beaks clash in the quieter air
like dry fronds. These men who toil with ease
through a storm’s blow, who pull with fervent
thirsts at the fathomless cold; who watch squid
turn orange, red, green in a spectrum of
unearthly dawns; who follow lightning’s flickering
panic, the black slough when clouds flume
their tempests, their dirty weather into shapes
made from ink and thunder; from a darkness
piled up like primordial mud. But they go out
each day happy among the slippery stench
of weather’s trouble to work like sea bulls in
the rain’s surge and swell … Grennan
throws another tentacle at Davey who has just
tied a crab’s pincer into a crescent moon. He
laughs again, rain spatters against his fingers,
ink like thick rope winding down his arms.

We’ve been hectored by Miss Greer and savaged by Mr Hughes, but, like Goldilocks with the three bears’ bowls of porridge, Mr Conrad loves us just right. His book At Home in Australia is a collaboration between the National Gallery of Australia and Thames & Hudson, and more particularly between himself and Gael Newton, the gallery’s Senior Curator of Photography, who rang him in London with an invitation to write a book about the gallery’s photography collection.

Peter Conrad was an excellent choice. His monumental book Modern Times, Modern Places (1998) was an encyclopedic ocean of the intersecting currents of history, invention and culture. Now, in turning his attention to Australia, he has woven a story about its life from early white settlement – or displacement, as the case may be – to the beginning of a new millennium. This story has been generated by the 205 photographs he chose to include. Other images may have been jettisoned in the interests of narrative drive, but that is the writer’s prerogative.

The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth verse collection from the gifted and exacting Anthony Lawrence. He has also written a novel. The epigraph to this book gives some hint as to where the poet stands, and where he intends to go. It is from Antonio Porcia: ‘I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.’ But looking is only one means to find his way, a dilemma that a number of the forty-two poems gathered here confronts.

There is burgeoning interest in the history of psychiatric institutions and services in Australia. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon’s ‘Madness’ in Australia now sits alongside Stephen Garton’s Medicine and Madness (1998), Milton Lewis’s Managing Madness (1988) and numerous articles on the subject that have been published in recent years in local journals of medicine and psychiatry. Perhaps this interest represents the desire to record for posterity the role of the asylum and older-style treatments in the care of the mentally ill in the wake of new, cutting-edge national mental health policies and agendas. Possibly, the fascination represents an unconscious, necessarily forlorn attempt to undo, through revisiting, some of the abuses of psychiatric methods in the past. Whatever the reason, one of the problems faced by a slim tome such as this is that mental health services in Australia, since their inception, have been characterised by an extraordinary level of complexity and diversity. To capture their essence in a small, multi-author volume, and to provide a coherent, integrated synopsis, as the editors might have hoped, is probably not achievable. If, however, we are to view ‘Madness’ in Australia with less aspiration – as a collection of essays devoted to different, often novel, aspects of asylums and institutions – then it becomes an absorbing and welcome addition to the literature and furthers our understanding of these grand edifices.

Modern Japanese Culture – what a seductive title! It evokes images of a fast-paced, technologically advanced nation with deep traditions reinventing itself as a post-industrial society with a rich culture. We immediately think of Kurosawa’s epic films, manga comics and anime, contemporary ceramics, video games, Issey Miyake’s extravaganzas, the sublime minimalism of Ando Tadao’s architecture, and the photography of Ishida Kiichiro, currently on display at the Museum of Sydney.

By chance the other day, watching British director Herbert Wilcox’s toe-curling ‘Scottish’ whimsy, Trouble in the Glen (1954), one of Orson Welles’s worst films (one of anybody’s worst films), I was struck anew by the fact that even when Welles could not save a film, he was always sure to be remembered in it. Here he plays a Scottish laird, long absent in South America, who returns to take up the castle he has inherited and, failing to bring a castful of theatrically canny Scots to heel, admits his errors and ends by presiding – benignly, but still presiding – in a kilt, yet. A romantic liaison and an appalling little girl taking her first post-illness steps may be intended to warm our soured hearts, but it is the massive figure avoiding the worst punishments for hubris that grabs what is left of our attention.

Do John and Janette choke on their cereal at the name of Robert Manne as they breakfast in their harbourside home-away-from-home? They have every reason to do so. No single individual has provided so comprehensive a challenge to Howard and his ideological claque in the culture wars now raging in this nation. Manne was early to denounce Howard: for his soft-shoe shuffle with Pauline Hanson; for the inhumanity of the government’s approach to the boat people; for the shallow basis for our participation in the Second Iraq War. In the wider war, he wrote a savage critique of the right-wing cognoscenti who assailed Bringing Them Home, and he has rallied the troops to repel Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist history of black–white confrontation in nineteenth-century Australia. Now he has edited this selection of essays, which provides a critical survey of the Howard government across a wide range of its policies.

‘Women who want to be equal with men lack ambition.’ This was the rather damning assessment of equality-based or liberal feminism scrawled on public walls in the 1970s and 1980s. It took a swipe at the strategy of achieving civil and economic equality on men’s terms. It sought a radical agenda of change that would bring about profound alteration to the deepest social, economic and psychic structures of gender identity, patriarchy and capitalism. It demonstrated, even then, that ‘equality’ did not have unqualified support among women. Thirty years later, Anne Summers is in a position to consider how this strategy has stood up to repeated attacks, and its overall gains and shortcomings.

Admirer’s of Judith Beveridge’s distinctive talent have had a long wait between collections (it’s eight years since Accidental Grace), although she has been published consistently in anthologies and journals, and poems from the central sequence of this collection, ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, won the 2003 Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize. Patience is rewarded: this is a collection of impressive poetic maturity.

Perth has been well served by its historians. C.T. Stannage’s The People of Perth (1979), a pioneering urban social history, covered the period to World War I, with a summary of developments into the 1970s. His work, because of ‘its sheer honesty did not win universal approval’. Jenny Gregory, following a lively prologue summarising the interwar years, concentrates on the period of rapid growth following World War II. She has been equally forthright. To their credit, the incumbent lord mayors welcomed the publication of both works.

It’s something of a shame, I suppose, but an enduring cliché emanating from Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed film Lost in Translation is the term itself – used currently to describe social encounters where language really is a barrier to communication, or abused in glib dismissals of ailing relationships or fraught encounters. But this is the term that sprang to mind when I was reading this book and considering the deft ways in which each of the writers has contextualised Yvonne Audette’s art, but has not lost in their translations of her practice the lyricism and understatement in her work, and the ultimately mysterious internal impulses that have driven Audette through five decades of creative enterprise. For some viewers, Audette’s is, or could be, an uneasy art. The pleasant surprise in this book is its balance of scholarship against its evocation of the poetics and introspection of an artist’s vision and visual life.

The Cypriot brought his wine-dark eyes with him
Along with his skin and hair. He also brought
That shirt. Swathes of fine fabric clothe a slim
Frame with a grace bespeaking taste and thought.

The careful media management accompanying the Australian National Archive’s release in January 2004 of cabinet papers covering the first year in office of the Whitlam government underlined the interest of the ageing ex-prime minister and his supporters in safeguarding his status as an Australian icon. It was a success: most analysts agreed that the papers showed that in 1973 the newly elected Labor government performed with exceptional dynamism and transparency.

Things shimmer in the distance, as idiosyncrasies of air and light press in upon the eye, causing the terrain before one to wobble, smudge and dissolve. It was the singular achievement of Fred Williams to find an original pictorial syntax to poeticise such distance as it was experienced in the Australian landscape.

Williams (1927–82) can be counted among the four or five best Australian artists of the twentieth century. There is a good argument to regard him as the greatest, but an impersonal quality in his work – the result, perhaps, of a lifelong rumination on distance – seems to block the kind of empathy that turns certain other kinds of artist into sentimental favourites. There is a discipline, a technical reach and a professionalism about Williams that compels interest even as it may deter infatuation, and nowhere can this be felt more than in his prints, currently the subject of an important exhibition at the British Museum (which runs until 25 April). The occasion for the show is what the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, describes as ‘an astonishing gift’ of seventy etchings and nine drawings, gouaches and watercolours to the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings by Lyn Williams, the artist’s widow. The exhibition is accompanied by an exemplary 128-page catalogue, with an essay by Irena Zdanowicz and a brief summary of the British Museum’s collection of Australian prints by the department’s Australian-born assistant keeper, Stephen Coppel.

Williams lived for five years in London in the 1950s, during which time he spent many hours in the Prints and Drawings rooms, learning from the graphic inventions of Rembrandt and Goya, as well as Degas and Sickert. He boldly wondered at the end of his stay in London whether he could not have learned as much about painting back in the lively artistic milieu of Melbourne. Regarding the graphic side of his work, however, he felt differently: ‘I have made decided steps in my drawings thanks to the many factors here. British Museum etc. have been a great help to me.’ Almost all the great Australian modern landscape artists grappled with the relationship between figure and landscape. In Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, the relationship is loaded with mythic reverberations, and frequently a sense of anomaly, or jarring displacement. With Frank Hodgkinson and John Olsen, things change: their pictures teem with life, both animal and human, and the relationship between living creatures and landscape brims with fecundity and a joyful, antic sense of perpetual becoming.

Williams’s vision of the landscape, however, is devoid of both humans and animals. Even trees are reduced to blobs on sticks. The explanation, perhaps, has to do with his key term, distance. But it seems odd, since his art studies at the National Gallery School and George Bell’s private art school in Melbourne, and later at the Chelsea Polytechnic and the Central School in London, were almost entirely devoted to drawing from life. Indeed, it was through figure drawing that Williams first gained recognition: he won the drawing prize at the Victorian Artists Society in 1947 and had one of his drawings bought by the NGV in 1949.

Tantalisingly, the first twenty or so prints on display at the British Museum all describe the human figure – specifically, the performers and audiences of the London music hall. Williams’s haunts were the Angel at Islington, the Metropolitan and the Chelsea Palace, and one can feel in these works the breathing presence of Degas and Sickert, who addressed similar subjects. Above all, they show what a terrifically direct and engaging draughtsman Williams was. But inevitably, they also make one reflect on their relationship to the later, signature landscapes – on what might have been taken away, as nourishment, and what was left behind, unexplored.

Despite their brio, the feeling that these are student exercises – gifted, bold, assured, but exercises all the same – never quite leaves them. For Williams, the really serious work began on his arrival back in Australia at the end of 1956, one month shy of his thirtieth birthday, and shortly after his home town had hosted the Olympic Games.

It was Fremantle, however, rather than Melbourne, that Williams reached by ship that December, and it was the ‘peculiarity’ of the Western Australian landscape that immediately struck him. ‘He determined in that instant to paint it,’ writes Zdanowicz.

Painting, drawing, and printmaking were pursued concurrently throughout Williams’s career, and each activity fed into the other. So it is fascinating to see his inimitable syntax– especially its key term, the ubiquitous gum tree – emerge through his experiments with prints. In the context of what was to come, his rendering in 1958 of a sapling gum, with long curving trunk and lighter circles of foliage atop a few thin branches, is the visual equivalent of a child’s first words. Once he had found these first key ‘words’, the rest happened quickly.

A flat field cut off by a horizon line above which hovers a kind of Morse code of treetops can already be seen in the mirage-like ‘Sandstone Hill Number 1’ of 1961, and, in the same year, a sapling forest is represented by no more than a barcode of dark vertical lines on a dappled field. These are works that feel uncannily true to the Australian landscape, and yet intensely conscious of the main tenets of postwar abstraction: flatness, ‘all-overness’ and the autonomy of the medium itself.

Williams was obsessive about exploring all the technical possibilities of printmaking. He ‘subjected his work to a continual process of review’, writes Zdanowicz. Drastically different editions were pulled from the same plate by adding or taking away marks and by experimenting with aquatint, and Williams would home in on particular sections of certain plates to create entirely new compositions. His dotted marks were initially done with patches of aquatint, and later by a system of calligraphic strokes and curves. Later still, as his paintings become richer in colour, his etchings became more starkly black and white, and he stopped using aquatint altogether.

‘It was precisely because of this possibility of change and variation inherent in etching that he considered printmaking a major medium and of equal importance to painting,’ we are told. It is crucial, in this light, to know that Williams almost always printed his own plates, despite the considerable cost to his health, which deteriorated sharply in the late 1970s and early 1980s (he died at the peak of his creative powers, in 1982).

In 1969 Williams announced that he had ‘finally made the subject matter subservient to the picture’. Another time, he insisted: ‘I only use the subject matter as an excuse to hang the picture on.’ But set against these fiercely modernist-sounding dicta is his pictures’ firm grounding in observed reality. ‘Observation,’ he said, ‘is the catalyst for me.’ It is surely right to note, as others have before, that out of the Australian landscape – with its absence of clear focal points, its vistas devoid of the picturesque, and its calligraphic, far-off eucalyptus – Fred Williams moulded a subject that came to seem uniquely suited to late modernist abstraction. But what cannot be forgotten in front of the actual works is the wonderful complexity Williams brought to this neat-seeming match, a complexity that is as emotional, in its evocation of distance, as it is formal. Printmaking was absolutely central to the overall achievement, as the works donated by Lyn Williams to the British Museum make abundantly clear.

Posthumously and handsomely published, this book is a poignant tribute to its author’s ‘magnificent obsession’. For a decade before her sudden death in April 2000, the Melbourne historian Jacqueline Templeton had pursued her interest in the migrations to Australia of Italians from the Valtellina, a province of Sondrio in Lombardy, high up in the Alpine and prealpine zones of northern Italy, close to the present-day border with Switzerland. On the day following the completion of her manuscript, Templeton was diagnosed with a terminal illness and told that she had only months to live. That night she suffered a severe stroke; three days later she was dead. Family and friends grieved for the loss of a vibrant and charming woman.

John McPhee put John Glover in the picture, identifying him as the foreground figure with sketchbook sharing our view of the Tamar River at Launceston. David Hansen saw that Glover marked his Hobart Town house in special colour at the centre of a distant panorama of the town, the viewpoint for which is across the Derwent in a sportive scene of Indigenous Tasmanians at Kangaroo Point. For that work, the artist’s point of view (and ours) doubles with that of the Tasmanians, and the artist, looking at the neat settlement under frowning Mt Wellington, sees himself in it. I like the verbal image, which joins the painter to the scholar in viewing a work and imagines the artist as one who searches for meaning. It may not correspond with the deep perspective of art history, however, and the authors of John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque have preferred to look back with hindsight. An intriguing aspect of this gentle, though magisterial, text is what the writers saw.

At the height of summer fire danger, on Friday, 13 February 2004, the ABC launched on its website an online documentary about the most awesome bushfires since the European occupation of Australia. The Black Friday fires of 1939 still represent the ‘worst possible’ conditions in a continent of fire. The website reveals just how deeply Black Friday burned into the national conscience, and how profoundly it changed attitudes to society and nature. It also took lives and left survivors with enduring emotional and physical scars. Some of those stories are told for the first time.

Studies of nineteenth-century decorative arts in Australia have largely focused on objects – furniture, silver, ceramics – produced in Australia for the home market, rather than on a systematic study of imports. The design sources for Australian-made furnishings during the nineteenth century were mostly British; this is also reflected in Britain’s being the principal source of exports to Australia. Given the vast amount of imports from Asia available today – from tableware to mobile telephones, and much of it demonstrating the latest in technology – one could be excused for thinking that our reliance on Asian trade is a twentieth- century phenomenon. Not so. As India, China, Australia:Trade and society 1788–1850 amply demonstrates, our trade with Asia began in the eighteenth century – even ensured the survival of the fledgling port of Sydney – and we have never looked back.

The art collections are the main thing in an art museum, not the special exhibitions or other programs necessary for present-day credibility and fundraising. Special exhibitions can be easy fast-food showbiz, or else they can be too authoritarian, over-theorised, and bullying. Collections, the bigger the better, are where you can drop in, any day of the year, for a bit of reinvention. It’s good to choose your own pace when you want to get out of yourself .

Australian expatriate artist Bessie Davidson was a woman who ripened with age. After decades of living in Paris and dressing somewhat dowdily ‘à l’anglaise’, she gained confidence with the liberation of France towards the end of World War II. In her sixties, she adopted a long black cape, a wide-brimmed fedora and a slender black cigarette-holder. Penelope Little’s A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris similarly improves as it goes along, becoming increasingly engaging as the artist is brought to life and found to be in the midst not only of two world wars but also of bohemian interwar Paris.

Last summer, Peter Booth became the first living artist to have a full-scale retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square. With eighty-one paintings and 150 drawings, it ranked as one of the largest surveys ever accorded a contemporary painter. It was a bold move on the gallery’s part and made a claim for Booth’s pre-eminence within his generation. Surprisingly, there were no interstate takers for the show.

Here is a production that most poets would die for. Peter Steele’s new book is a spectacular hybrid beast, a Dantesque griffin in glorious array: it is a new volume of poetry and an art book, with superb reproductions of works of art spanning several centuries, from collections all over the world. Paintings most of them, but also statues, sculptures, objets d’art, a toilet service, the figured neck of a hurdy-gurdy, a hoard of Viking silver and a diminutive six-seater bicycle. And the reason for this pairing is that these are all ekphrastic poems, ‘poetry which describes or evokes works of art’, as Patrick McCaughey glosses it in his introduction. How Steele brought off such an ambitious venture I can’t imagine. There is insufficient space here to do more than gesture at the visual contents; they are full of delights and splendours: Vermeer’s geographer preserved in light; an ivory Virgin and Child (the latter modelled, evidently, on the young Caligula); a bronze horseman by Briosco; Velázquez’s wonderful An old woman cooking eggs.

In the penultimate chapter, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.

As the wry parenthesis suggests, Smith is knowingly doing something similar in this book. Autobiography becomes polemic, and vice versa. Smith is both narrator and subject. Sometimes the cultural historian Smith leaps out from the page, telling readers how much they missed when he, the subject, forsook painting for art education. He peevishly complains, too, that ‘the influence of Federation Art Society lectures has been completely ignored by historians of modernism in Australia’. But there is never any doubt that Smith, now in his late sixties and a retired but prolific art educator, enjoyed putting this elaborate self-portrait together. The book ends when he was about twenty-six, after a number of decisive experiences and events.

Eva Marks was nine years old and living in Vienna when Kristallnacht forced her family to leave Austria. Although her parents separated early, there was no shortage of money during her first nine years. Her mother ran a successful business manufacturing exquisite accessories for fashionable women, which involved occasional travel. At these times, Eva was left in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts, who were as independent and strong-willed as her mother. An only child, only niece and only grandchild, she was greatly indulged, although conscious that she lacked siblings and happy parents.

After Hitler’s annexation of Austria, her mother’s business rapidly deteriorated and she lost her fine apartment, Eva’s father left for England, and the women suffered the humiliating experiences familiar to Jews in Nazi territory. Her mother, new stepfather, and grandmother chose Latvia as a temporary refuge, hoping to get visas for the US. These finally came through but, as the grandmother was rejected on the grounds of age, they stayed in Riga. Holding German passports identifying them as Jewish, they were trapped. Worse was to come. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, they were forced by the Russians into cattle trucks and transported to a gulag deep in Siberia.

The journey, described in horrific detail, took six weeks. Eva’s accounts of her family’s sufferings in this gulag, and in the even worse one in Kazakhastan that became their home in 1943, are on a par with the most rending of Holocaust memoirs. The only difference between a Nazi concentration camp and a Soviet gulag was that the Russians killed their prisoners by neglect rather than by a conscious policy of extermination. Eva suggests that their experiences outweighed those of Solzhenitsyn in that he had contact with the outside world, had been given a definite sentence, knew that he would eventually be free if he survived, and his barracks had electricity. For the Hungarian, Austrian, German, and Polish prisoners in this gulag, there was no news of the outside world and no indication that they would ever be freed.

We expect memoirs to be true – it is one of the main reasons we read them – but we have also grown accustomed over the years to the idea that, while the memoir may be true in spirit, events may not have happened exactly as described. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memoirist to include some prefatory remarks to that effect. Such caveats seem fair; we have come to see them as no more than acknowledgments of the way things are.

But change is in the air, as the American writer Vivian Gornick found to her discomfiture last year at a conference in Maryland. After giving a public reading from her memoir, Fierce Attachments (1987), about her relationship with her mother, Gornick ended her presentation by remarking, casually and as it turned out incautiously, that she had made up quite a lot of it. The reaction – from fans, readers and other writers of non-fiction – was swift and angry, and has yet to die down. Gornick replied, in an article in the e-journal Salon, by calling for a ‘more informed’ readership of memoirs like hers, thereby rather missing the point. The ground has shifted, and readers who flock to memoirs – and to autobiography and biography – are no longer quite as content as they once were to be told that truth relies on fiction to draw out its essential nature. It is a bit more complicated than that, and what we might once have happily accepted as a hybrid called ‘faction’ now starts to sound a bit like fibbing. Where once we tolerated, even celebrated, shading and nuance and the need, sometimes, to elaborate or exaggerate (or simply fail to mention some crucial point or other) in order to get at a higher or deeper level of truth, now we are not so sure where the boundaries are, or ought to be.

Phyllis McDuff’s A Story Dreamt Long Ago and Brian O’Raleigh’s The Boy in the Boat, each subtitled A memoir, both tackle in their different ways this question of what it means to tell the truth. The Boy in the Boat is the long story of a man’s attempt to escape the legacy of his violent and drunken father. O’Raleigh takes us from a turbulent childhood in Blackpool, where he would seek refuge from the beatings at home by hiding in the boats that lay drawn up on the seashore, to Australia and his own struggle with alcohol addiction, then back to Blackpool and Ireland in an attempt to settle his demons, and, finally, to a resolution of a kind. But is it all true?

Books, of course, should not be judged by their covers. In this case, however, the choice of cover illustration – the historic Reichstag veiled in silver fabric by the Bulgarian–American ‘wrap artist’, Christo – seems unusually significant, and not only because the author devotes his concluding remarks to it (more about that later). German history is a well-ploughed field. With library shelves groaning under the weight of books on the subject, only the narrowest studies, aimed at specialised markets, will offer much that is really new. The only justification for yet another narrative history of modern Germany – and with a title as blandly generic as this one – is therefore that a familiar story will be presented in a new wrapping.

And how German history needs such a new wrapping. For decades now, it has been all but monopolised by the Sonderweg (‘special path’) brand in its two major flavours: Germany’s deviation from the high road of Western liberalism through its illiberal patterns of philosophical thought; or through the German bourgeoisie’s self-interested pact with an authoritarian, militaristic, and aristocratic Prussianism. They are simultaneously teleological and apologetic, in that they explain Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust in terms of deep-rooted pathologies in German history while reassuring a sceptical audience of Germany’s rehabilitation following defeat, occupation and integration into the West.

Where would the picture book industry be without animals? Talking or non-speaking, cute or obnoxious, mischievously alive or poignantly dying, animal characters can be utilised to teach life lessons, and to make complex issues accessible and less confronting for young children. Add humour, passion and strong original writing, and you have a winner.

Leigh Hobbs combines all three in Fiona the Pig, and the appeal starts with the cover. Who could resist that beaming piggy face, all blonde curls, pink ribbons and stage-struck ambition, framed by red velvet curtains and a large heart? Like Horrible Harriet and Old Tom before her, Fiona is a misfit. ‘Why can’t Fiona be more like us?’ wail her puzzled and disappointed parents. Fiona is fastidious: she takes bubble baths instead of wallowing in mud; she hosts dainty tea parties for her dolls instead of living in filth; she wants to be a ballet dancer. Her parents consult the wise Dr Pinkysnout, who reassures them that Fiona’s behaviour is not abnormal: ‘Most pigs are very clean and very neat, you know.’ Mr and Mrs Pig decide that it is they who must change, which is easier said than done. But blood is thicker than water and, in a warm and funny resolution, the parents learn to accept their ‘different’ child.

Hobbs is able to convey a wide range of porcine expressions, often by just the curve of a mouth or the (mis)placement of an eyeball, and he’s equally brilliant at portraying exuberant activity. Fiona’s solo performance in her ballet ‘Pigs Can Fly’, and her attempts to teach herself to tap dance are only two of the pictorial gems in a book that will captivate readers of all ages. But I couldn’t help wishing Fiona had been a Floyd or a Freddie: now that would have tested Mr and Mrs Pig.

Holidaying in Tuscany, I once met an escapee from a Glenn Murcutt lecture. The class of American students had flown from New York to be immersed, in the modern manner, in six weeks of architecture beside an Italian beach. Murcutt delivered the first lecture.

His first words were never to think of applying for a job with him, as every student across the globe wanted to work for him and he didn’t employ students. Work for him — good God! He went on for three and a half hours and I couldn’t get away quickly enough.

Of course, the wider Tuscan landscape could tempt even the most earnest student, but readers of Françoise Fromonot’s book will feel some sympathy for my student.

Murcutt is probably Australia’s best-known architect internationally. Although he builds only in this country, he teaches and lectures, takes part in juries, and wins great acclaim, around the world. The breadth of this acclaim is remarkable, and includes the Alvar Aalto Medal, the Richard Neutra Award for Architecture and Teaching, the Thomas Jefferson Medal for Architecture, and, most recently, the 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

History of Modern Design: graphics and products since the industrial revolution

by David Raizman

Laurence King Publishing

$75pb, 400pp

History of Modern Design has developed from a course of the same name at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In keeping with its didactic origin, the subject is presented in chronological order, illustrated with more than 500 images, 125 of which are reproduced in colour. The book is ambitiously broad in its coverage, commencing with the seventeenth century and ending in the twenty-first, focusing on design from Europe and North America, and ranging through furniture, interiors, metalwork, ceramics, graphic design, typography, and product design. A good two-thirds of the book is devoted to the twentieth century, which is presented in context from the preceding historical surveys. While the focus is on design for mass production and industrial processes, the crafts are not entirely neglected. An extensive bibliography on design, coupled with helpful reading lists, will prove popular in this useful introduction to the complex and wide-ranging subject of design. (CM)

Just off the A9, en route to Port Arthur,

Here close by the Blowhole,

Tasman’s Arch and the Devil’s Kitchen,

 the little settlement of Doo

revels in its punning nomenclature.

The vying houses try to outdo one

another: Doo Drop In, Nothing to Doo,

Diggery Doo, Morning Doo –

we are the punning species,

looking for ways to escape

enclosures of language,

the incarcerations of identity:

give us a gap in commonsense

and we’re quick to brave chained

dogs of earnest and deadly probity.

At Port Arthur, only eleven

men ever escaped, though one at least

perished in the Bush, the leg irons

still fixed to his skeleton.

They were poets every one.

Guarded by the criminally sane,

we go about our business in the modern

panopticon, while miles of video tape

record inanities in the bank,

the supermarket, outside the apartments

of the wealthy, before the consulates

of the civilised nation states.

In the unconsecrated church at

Port Arthur – built by those hardened

boy criminals from Point Puer,

who cut the stone, fashioned

the bricks and carved the woodwork –

we stand in the open space (the roof

burnt down from a trash fire

next door) thinking, what

at this point in this anomalous

place, can one do? Our escapes –

our escapades – may be momentary

freedoms, but this place seethes

with unlawful provocation.

It is no nightmare from which

we simply awake – and for those in

hammocks slung low across the cells

the morning sun was the eye

of despair. Do unto others, the

golden rule of Tasmania. One could

do worse than live in the village of Doo.

On the cover of Mick Taussig’s new book, video artist Juan Manuel Echavarria performs a rather clever metaphor for the disintegration of the state. A floral pottery platter with the legend Republica de Colombia para siempre (‘The Republic of Colombia for ever’) is progressively broken up until it is nothing but a pile of white powder: the state as drug cartel.

Taussig is an expatriate Sydneysider who is really only known among anthropologists, but should be appreciated much more widely. In anthropology, he has reached the top of his profession, as a professor at Columbia University, New York, where his innovative methods have set the cat among the pigeons. If you were around Sydney’s pubs in the mid-1960s with the Push, you might have met Taussig as a medical student at the University of Sydney. He practised medicine for a while, then worked his way to London as a ship’s doctor, only to become involved with radical political experiments at the London School of Economics and in the anti-psychiatry movement. After learning Spanish, he headed off to South America, where his medical skills were in demand. There he found the lure of the intellectual puzzlement that was traditional shamanism too strong to ignore, especially as it intersected so strongly with what he was later to call ‘the magic of the state’. What is the essence of this political power whose stories of saints and dead heroes feed off the vitality of the people? How is it that the hallucinogenic medicines and magical cures of the oppressed Indians of the Putumayo in the upper reaches of the Amazon, where colonials plied a murderous rubber trade, were still so much in demand that they could only be seen as cures for a deeply festering historical wound? Thus the ideas that would appear in the book that catapulted him to fame (Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 1987) were forming, and by the late 1980s Taussig was already the most significant anthropologist, and maybe intellectual, that Australia could lay claim to.

Alfred Felton, bachelor who lived for many years in boarding houses of one kind or another, might seem a familiar Victorian figure, particularly in a colony where there were not enough women to go around. But Felton was a bachelor with a difference. In the first place, as the co-founder of the prosperous drughouse Felton, Grimwade and Co., he was a colonial success story. He also had interests beyond business. His rooms at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, where he spent his last years, were crammed with paintings, books and objects; some splendid, recently unearthed photographs document this ‘obsessive profusion’, as John Poynter describes it.

Felton’s friends and colleagues might have dismissed his compulsive collecting as the harmless eccentricity of a wealthy man. His will, therefore, came as a considerable surprise. Having no direct descendants to provide for, Felton directed that the bulk of his estate should pass to a trust, half the income of which was to be devoted to ‘charitable objects’, the other half to ‘the purchase of works of art’ for ‘the Melbourne National Art Gallery’. This latter provision, formally known as the Felton Bequest, enabled the National Gallery of Victoria (now marketing itself under the twin labels of NGV International and NGV Australia) to become, in Patrick McCaughey’s words, ‘the first encyclopedic collection of art in Australia’.

The puzzle of PhDs

Dear Editor,

It’s pretty clear that historians can’t win, especially if they have the audacity to use a doctoral thesis as the basis for a book. As I read Aviva Tuffield’s puzzling review (ABR, December 2003/January 2004) of Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, and Wright’s understandably puzzled response (ABR, February 2004), I was reminded of a debate that occurred over several issues of ABR in 2002, which spawned plenty of silly generalisations about the quality of writing in PhD theses, but not much else.

Were she alive, Edna Walling would probably be delighted to know that another of her books has been reissued. She might also be astonished and just a little peeved. After a brilliant career as a garden designer, columnist and author – as well as photographer, cottage designer and ardent protector of the natural landscape – Walling’s fame had all but faded by the time she died in 1973 at the age of seventy-seven. Few noticed her passing. However, her renaissance began in the early 1980s, with new editions of selected works and with Peter Watts’s widely praised The Gardens of Edna Walling. Many more such publications followed.

Changes at ABR

This month we welcome back Aviva Tuffield, who returns as Deputy Editor, a new position for ABR and one that reflects her seniority and her long commitment to the magazine. We also farewell, with many thanks, Anne-Marie Thomas, who filled in while Aviva Tuffield went on maternity leave. Dianne Schallmeiner remains as Office Manager, and Alastair Lamont joins our admirable team of volunteers.

National Biography Award

It is comforting to think that the foundations of the legal system are sound. Perhaps this explains why there are so many common myths about the law, such as the notion that every legal problem has a ready solution, or that the law is essentially objective and value-neutral.

As students, litigants, witnesses and others who have suddenly become more familiar with the system of justice can attest, a closer look at the structure is usually disconcerting. This book, written by a professor of law, will be a revelation to those yet to become familiar with the cracks in the structure. It examines the fundamental concepts and assumptions that underlie law, taking nothing for granted. In the process, it explodes most of the myths.

Changes in the composition of the family or friendship group are among the most challenging situations to confront children, so it is no surprise that many books for the upper-primary-aged reader address this theme.

For Elizabeth Honey’s engaging Henni Octon (The Ballad of Cauldron Bay, Allen & Unwin, $15.95 pb, 289 pp), writing her third novel about the Stella Street gang on her very own computer, the fly in the holiday ointment is Tara. Like Henni, Tara has recently turned thirteen, but is going-on-twenty in her preoccupation with fashion, figure, and boys. Even before the advent of Tara, Henni is conscious of change: the holiday at remote and magical Cauldron Bay is not a replica of the blissful Fiddle-back experience. Zev has brought a new friend into the group, and of the neighbourhood adults only Sue and Tibor are available, so more responsibility for the younger children devolves upon Henni. When Tara arrives for a break from her messily divorcing parents and starts romancing a larrikin surfie, Henni is faced with difficult and disturbing decisions. Although Henni reluctantly picks up hints of an imaginative creativity in Tara that nicely complements her own, it takes a near disaster before the pair are able to stand in one another’s shoes and fully appreciate their contrasting qualities and experiences.