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Absolutely Revolting

November 2002, no. 246

Welcome to the November 2002 issue of Australian Book Review!

Don Anderson reviews The Prosperous Thief by Andrea Goldsmith
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'History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years ... 
Book 1 Title: The Prosperous Thief
Book Author: Andrea Goldsmith
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin $27.95 pb, 291 pp, 1865087564
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for someone not a Jew to talk about it? Nell, the goyische lover of Jewish Laura Lewin, puts her foot right in it in Melbourne at the end of the century dominated by the Holocaust and its memories. ‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’ Laura, in a not particularly deft similitude, reacts with a sharp response worthy of a ‘partly exposed landmine’. Nell can only put her unexploded foot further into it. ‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Laura ‘was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand.’ Is that sentiment intended to be generalised to all non-Jews?

Well, here’s a galloping case of where angels fear to tread. ‘Not another Holocaust novel!’ was my initial response to Andrea Goldsmith’s book. Yet the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Lest We Forget. As one character upbraids herself: ‘When you realise you have forgotten something so significant as your grandmother dying before your eyes, you are terrified at what else you might have blocked out.’ But haven’t we heard it all before, from more qualified, by virtue of temporal and geopolitical proximity, novelists? Was I over-influenced by the satanic narrator of the young Anglo-Indian novelist Glen Duncan’s I, Lucifer? (2002) ‘Raphael found me in the open-air cinema. Schindler’s List … “He who saves a single life,” Ben Kingsley said to Liam Neeson, “saves the world entire.” I got up and slouched out in disgust.’

Read more: Don Anderson reviews 'The Prosperous Thief' by Andrea Goldsmith

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Peter Craven reviews A Pavane for Another Time by Bernard Smith
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It’s a Proustian title, or at any rate a Powellian one, that Bernard Smith has produced for this memoir of his life in the long-ago 1940s, and, yes, there on the cover is Anthony Powell’s hero, Poussin. That’s doubly appropriate because one of the more vivid figures (though also one of the more saturnine ones) in this remembrance of things past is Anthony Blunt, great scholar of Poussin’s work, master spy, eminent director of the Courtauld and critical educator of the Young Bernard.
Book 1 Title: A Pavane for Another Time
Book Author: Bernard Smith
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $59.95 hb, 480 pp, 1 876832 66 5
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It’s a Proustian title, or at any rate a Powellian one, that Bernard Smith has produced for this memoir of his life in the long-ago 1940s, and, yes, there on the cover is Anthony Powell’s hero, Poussin. That’s doubly appropriate because one of the more vivid figures (though also one of the more saturnine ones) in this remembrance of things past is Anthony Blunt, great scholar of Poussin’s work, master spy, eminent director of the Courtauld and critical educator of the Young Bernard.

Blunt is a fascinating shadow in this story, not least because of the younger Smith’s Marxism and his hope that the great art historian will remember his own affinity for Marxist approaches. Instead, Blunt (who at this very period is providing information to the Soviets via Burgess) is all patrician superciliousness. He has renounced his Marxist trappings – possibly as a form of cover – and he gives Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition a cursory flick, only to remark condescendingly, ‘Oh, you have surrealist painting there, too, do you?’

Still, it is Blunt who introduces Smith to Charles Mitchell, the man who will become his Socrates, teaching him not to write ‘too well’ and introducing him to the ideal, as well as the rigours, of research. And it’s not hard to see England as something more than Bernard Smith’s blacking factory, indeed as a kind of salvation. Smith goes to Britain as a young colonial – albeit one with considerable belief in himself – who has renounced the expressionist painting that might have been his destiny, but he comes back as a critic who has had his intellectual epiphany with Ernst Gombrich and has discovered – in Freudian terms – his dream painting in a work attributed to Rogier van der Weyden. More particularly, the iron has entered his soul. He has mastered art historical method. He is a man of the Warburg Institute and has published in its journal. He is now in a position where he can set about writing European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850 (1960).

Read more: Peter Craven reviews 'A Pavane for Another Time' by Bernard Smith

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Religion and Justice by Raimond Gaita
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‘Dear God. Save us from those who would believe in you.’ Not long after the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 last year, those words were sprayed on a wall in New York. Knowing what provoked them, I sense fear of religion in them. Their wit does not dilute the fear, nor does it render its expression less unsettling. To the contrary, it makes the fear more poignant and its justification more evident.

Enough people have been murdered and tortured over the centuries in the name of religion for anyone to have good reason to fear it. Is it, therefore, yet another example of the hyperbole that overwhelmed common sense and sober judgment after September 11 to sense something new in the fear expressed in that graffiti? In part, I think it is. But the thought that makes the fear seem relatively (rather than absolutely) novel is this: perhaps the horrors of religion are not corruptions of religion, but inseparable from it. To put it less strongly, but strongly enough: though there is much in religion that condemns evils committed in its name, none of it has the authority to show that fanatics who murder and torture and dispossess people of their lands necessarily practise false religion or that they believe in false gods. At best (this thought continues), religion is a mixed bag of treasures and horrors.
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‘Dear God. Save us from those who would believe in you.’ Not long after the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 last year, those words were sprayed on a wall in New York. Knowing what provoked them, I sense fear of religion in them. Their wit does not dilute the fear, nor does it render its expression less unsettling. To the contrary, it makes the fear more poignant and its justification more evident.

Enough people have been murdered and tortured over the centuries in the name of religion for anyone to have good reason to fear it. Is it, therefore, yet another example of the hyperbole that overwhelmed common sense and sober judgment after September 11 to sense something new in the fear expressed in that graffiti? In part, I think it is. But the thought that makes the fear seem relatively (rather than absolutely) novel is this: perhaps the horrors of religion are not corruptions of religion, but inseparable from it. To put it less strongly, but strongly enough: though there is much in religion that condemns evils committed in its name, none of it has the authority to show that fanatics who murder and torture and dispossess people of their lands necessarily practise false religion or that they believe in false gods. At best (this thought continues), religion is a mixed bag of treasures and horrors.

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Custom Article Title: Homer and the Holocaust
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I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.
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I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.

Read more: La Trobe University Essay | Homer and the Holocaust by Andrea Goldsmith

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I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.

I’ve read the Iliad before but don’t recall turning soft halfway through. I grant it was a long time ago; I’ve never had the desire to revisit it as I have the Odyssey. I take down Rieu’s prose translation in the Penguin classic edition. It falls open towards the end of Book XIV; my annotations have stopped a good deal earlier. I suppose one can imagine reading a classic, particularly one so well known, although I confess it is not an explanation that appeals. But, even if it were true, I am curious as to why I feel so overwhelmed now.
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I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.

I’ve read the Iliad before but don’t recall turning soft halfway through. I grant it was a long time ago; I’ve never had the desire to revisit it as I have the Odyssey. I take down Rieu’s prose translation in the Penguin classic edition. It falls open towards the end of Book XIV; my annotations have stopped a good deal earlier. I suppose one can imagine reading a classic, particularly one so well known, although I confess it is not an explanation that appeals. But, even if it were true, I am curious as to why I feel so overwhelmed now.

And just when I was needing some respite. I finished writing my latest novel, The Prosperous Thief, a short time ago. Opening in 1910 Berlin, it sprawls across three continents and the twentieth century. Filtering through it is the long shadow of the Holocaust. During the four years it took to write, I read extensively about the Nazi years and the Holocaust: memoirs, histories, fictions, plays and poetry, some well-written and sparking with insight, others not, but all portraying the hatred and violence which characterised that time. When my novel was finished, I needed a change and I reached for the ancient Greeks - as far from the barbarous twentieth century as possible.

Read more: La Trobe University Essay 'Home and the Holocaust' by Andrea Goldsmith

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Custom Article Title: Letters - November 2002
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ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Letters and emails must include a telephone number for verification
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ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Letters and emails must include a telephone number for verification

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Susan Van Wyk reviews Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas by Helen Ennis
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During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.
Book 1 Title: Man with a Camera
Book 1 Subtitle: Frank Hurley Overseas
Book Author: Helen Ennis
Book 1 Biblio: NLA, $34.95 pb, 107 pp
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During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.

Hurley is best known, both in Australia and internationally, for his Antarctic photographs. Ennis sets out to inform readers about these and other aspects of his career. Hurley is often referred to as a documentary photographer, but Ennis shows that he was not simply interested in photographing a scene as it appeared before him. For this adventurer, exploration and photography went hand in hand. Hurley was renowned for his skill in combining negatives to create images that captured a scene’s essence. This technical skill was one of the attributes that recommended Hurley to Douglas Mawson and led to his inclusion on the first of six trips to Antarctica. His production of photographs was also informed by his experience as a filmmaker. Throughout his career, he selectively edited and revisited images.

Read more: Susan Van Wyk reviews 'Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas' by Helen Ennis

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Susan van Wyk reviews Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas by Helen Ennis
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During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.
Book 1 Title: Man with a Camera
Book 1 Subtitle: Frank Hurley Overseas
Book Author: Helen Ennis
Book 1 Biblio: NLA, $34.95 pb, 107 pp
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During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.

Read more: Susan van Wyk reviews 'Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas' by Helen Ennis

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Gideon Haigh reviews Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock by Robert Milliken
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Martin Amis’s encapsulation of biography is that it should convey a sense of what it would be like to spend some time alone in a room with the subject. Robert Milliken begins his story of Australian journalist and rock music taxonomist Lillian Roxon by revealing that he once went one better: thirty years ago, as a rising reporter in London, he not only met Roxon at a boutique hotel in Notting Hill but jawboned with her at length. That is to say, she talked and he listened. Roxon, Milliken recalls:

talked without interruption for the next two hours, entertaining me, shocking me and making me laugh. She told scandalous stories about this one and that one, and even about herself. She also talked about her problems with editors, her asthma and her mother, three principal preoccupations of her life, even though Mrs Roxon, caricatured as an interfering Jewish mother, was long since dead.
Book 1 Title: Lillian Roxon
Book 1 Subtitle: Mother of Rock
Book Author: Robert Milliken
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., 356 pp, $39.95 hb
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Martin Amis’s encapsulation of biography is that it should convey a sense of what it would be like to spend some time alone in a room with the subject. Robert Milliken begins his story of Australian journalist and rock music taxonomist Lillian Roxon by revealing that he once went one better: thirty years ago, as a rising reporter in London, he not only met Roxon at a boutique hotel in Notting Hill but jawboned with her at length. That is to say, she talked and he listened. Roxon, Milliken recalls:

talked without interruption for the next two hours, entertaining me, shocking me and making me laugh. She told scandalous stories about this one and that one, and even about herself. She also talked about her problems with editors, her asthma and her mother, three principal preoccupations of her life, even though Mrs Roxon, caricatured as an interfering Jewish mother, was long since dead.

Read more: Gideon Haigh reviews 'Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock' by Robert Milliken

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Contents Category: Poetry
Custom Article Title: Palace Inventory (Partial): Sleeping Beauty
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Seven dresses. Of satin, for example, and

crêpe de Chine, tulle, shot-silk, that sort of thing.

Beading and ivory buttons. One with a rip in it.

(The tailor, in interview, remembers the incident –

a sleeve torn on the workfloor; as there were no needles

left to mend it this passes without comment.)

Made before birth for the seven balls

which would have been held in her honour

by the seven suitors, princes from provinces nearby.

Gored by the briars, providence was not on their side.
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Seven dresses. Of satin, for example, and

crêpe de Chine, tulle, shot-silk, that sort of thing.

Beading and ivory buttons. One with a rip in it.

(The tailor, in interview, remembers the incident –

a sleeve torn on the workfloor; as there were no needles

left to mend it this passes without comment.)

Made before birth for the seven balls

which would have been held in her honour

by the seven suitors, princes from provinces nearby.

Gored by the briars, providence was not on their side.

Read more: 'Palace Inventory (Partial): Sleeping Beauty' by Kate Middleton

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Lyndall Ryan reviews ‘The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838’ by John Connor
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Article Title: New Perspectives on the Frontier Wars
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In the aftermath of the ideological jousts between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle about the level of violence on the colonial frontier, a new book has appeared that tackles the issue from a fresh perspective. The author, John Connor, is a military historian. In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, he uses the methods of military history to examine the weapons, tactics and conduct of warfare on the Australian frontier during the first fifty years of British colonisation. Connor emerges from the fray with exciting new findings.
Book 1 Title: The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838
Book Author: John Connor
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $29.95 pb, 175 pp, 0 86840 756 9
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In the aftermath of the ideological jousts between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle about the level of violence on the colonial frontier, a new book has appeared that tackles the issue from a fresh perspective. The author, John Connor, is a military historian. In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, he uses the methods of military history to examine the weapons, tactics and conduct of warfare on the Australian frontier during the first fifty years of British colonisation. Connor emerges from the fray with exciting new findings. 

Read more: Lyndall Ryan reviews ‘The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838’ by John Connor

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Brendan Ryan reviews ‘Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002’ by Anthony Lawrence
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Anthony Lawrence’s latest collection of poetry, Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002, a revision of his New and Selected (1998), is a much tighter work than its predecessor – 121 as against 335 pages. While some may wonder why UQP has published another ‘Selected’ from Lawrence in the space of four years, the publication of his novel, In the Half Light (2000), justifies introducing Lawrence’s poetry to a wider readership.
Book 1 Title: Skinned by Light
Book 1 Subtitle: Poems 1989–2002
Book Author: Anthony Lawrence
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $19.95 pb, 121 pp, 0702233439
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Anthony Lawrence’s latest collection of poetry, Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002, a revision of his New and Selected (1998), is a much tighter work than its predecessor – 121 as against 335 pages. While some may wonder why UQP has published another ‘Selected’ from Lawrence in the space of four years, the publication of his novel, In the Half Light (2000), justifies introducing Lawrence’s poetry to a wider readership.

Read more: Brendan Ryan reviews ‘Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002’ by Anthony Lawrence

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Article Title: The Place of Reeds
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Kogarah (suppress the first ‘a’ and it scans)
Named by the locals for the creek’s tall reeds
That look like an exotic dancer’s fans
When dead, was where I lived. Born to great deeds
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Kogarah (suppress the first ‘a’ and it scans)
Named by the locals for the creek’s tall reeds
That look like an exotic dancer’s fans
When dead, was where I lived. Born to great deeds

Read more: ‘The Place of Reeds’ a poem by Clive James

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Custom Article Title: Two poems by Craig Sherborne
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A stable of silver
was our sacred skite.
It’s the poor in us
my father said; we are ill
with going without
even when we gain
a stable of silver.
‘Bring the guests this way, son.’
That’s Oreka from his Hotham
rout. That’s Ima Martian from
leading all the way.
Sliding the glass, the mirror skins
of trophies warped us round.
Decanters and their goblets of young
buckled the face of a bender-down.
Trays and teapots like models
for a meal, never used,
hardly touched except by my mother
when champagne washed the plum
from her mouth and improved her swearing.
China was not a country,
it was a cup and saucer place
in there at arm’s length from the world,
her arm’s length, turning over a dish
to show her Wedgwood or Doulton tattoos.
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The Cabinet of Wins

A stable of silver
was our sacred skite.
It’s the poor in us
my father said; we are ill
with going without
even when we gain
a stable of silver.
‘Bring the guests this way, son.’
That’s Oreka from his Hotham
rout. That’s Ima Martian from
leading all the way.
Sliding the glass, the mirror skins

Read more: ‘The Cabinet of Wins’ and ‘A Racing Life’, two poems by Craig Sherborne

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Nick Hudson reviews ‘Lexical Images: The story of the Australian national dictionary’ by Bill Ramson
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Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.
Book 1 Title: Lexical Images
Book 1 Subtitle: The story of the Australian national dictionary
Book Author: Bill Ramson
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, $34.95 pb, 255 pp
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Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.

The opening chapter places the AND project in its context, with a succinct and lucid account of what a ‘dictionary on historical principles’ is all about, and its relationship to the reference dictionaries we have for daily use. The chapter outlines the methodology developed by Sir James Murray for the Oxford English Dictionary and explains how this was applied to the Australian project.

The second chapter provides an inside account of the stoushes between the various parties who were, or thought they were, or wanted to be, involved in the project. The heroes, notably David Cunningham, former managing director of Oxford University Press Australia, are splendidly heroic, and the villains, particularly those whose only villainy was a patriotic desire to keep the project in all-Australian hands, are presented with understanding. Bill Ramson is, of course, partisan: he was Editor of AND, and founding director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the ANU. One can hardly expect detachment from somebody so deeply involved, but Ramson explains the order of battle very well.

Read more: Nick Hudson reviews ‘Lexical Images: The story of the Australian national dictionary’ by Bill Ramson

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Edwina Preston reviews ‘The White Body of Evening’ by A.L. McCann
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‘Australia is all an illusion. A trick with smoke and mirrors, performed by demagogues and balladeers.’ So says Paul Walters, one of A.L. McCann’s main characters in this black, sometimes bleak, but very readable tale of Melbourne monstrosity and madness at the turn of the twentieth century. The White Body of Evening is sprinkled with such sentiments, uttered behind chilled hands into penurious South Melbourne, intoned at middle-class tables down the road in St Vincent Place, and wanly ruminated over in the superior cultural environs of Vienna. McCann revels in the detail, and his map of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ is rich with it: there are the Anatomical Curiosities on exhibit in Bourke Street’s Eastern Arcade; the understated shopfronts on Elizabeth Street, where disreputable booksellers specialise in the subjects of syphilis and sexual pathology; the Little Lonsdale stretch where tawdry prostitutes corrupt white-collar working men; and the numerous alleyways where fishmongers’ refuse washes in the gutters, and cadaverous human specimens occupy shadowy doorways.
Book 1 Title: The White Body of Evening
Book Author: A. L. McCann
Book 1 Biblio: Flamingo, $27.95 pb, 350pp
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‘Australia is all an illusion. A trick with smoke and mirrors, performed by demagogues and balladeers.’ So says Paul Walters, one of A.L. McCann’s main characters in this black, sometimes bleak, but very readable tale of Melbourne monstrosity and madness at the turn of the twentieth century. The White Body of Evening is sprinkled with such sentiments, uttered behind chilled hands into penurious South Melbourne, intoned at middle-class tables down the road in St Vincent Place, and wanly ruminated over in the superior cultural environs of Vienna. McCann revels in the detail, and his map of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ is rich with it: there are the Anatomical Curiosities on exhibit in Bourke Street’s Eastern Arcade; the understated shopfronts on Elizabeth Street, where disreputable booksellers specialise in the subjects of syphilis and sexual pathology; the Little Lonsdale stretch where tawdry prostitutes corrupt white-collar working men; and the numerous alleyways where fishmongers’ refuse washes in the gutters, and cadaverous human specimens occupy shadowy doorways.

The members of the Walters family exist above this sea of human flotsam and jetsam, but are variously drawn to it, revealing their less attractive qualities. Whether intentional or not, McCann’s novel is short on likeable characters. It is as if the Melbourne air instils a particular nastiness and noxiousness in its inhabitants. Perhaps the most innocuous character is the figure of Anna, the pale-faced German wife, ravaged nightly by her tortured husband until delivered from such obligations by his suicide. Her second husband, Dr Winton (abortionist turned respectable doctor) is initially suspect, with his sharp little teeth and immaculately trimmed beard, but he proves himself to be a ‘good man’, if nothing else. Paul, Anna’s son, has something uncomfortably desperate about him, which holds us at arm’s length, even when we are made privy to the vagaries of his inner life. Paul’s sister Ondine, meanwhile, is a blonde-haired ice queen, vacuous despite her powers of seduction – a ‘vision of the ideals for which men fight’. (Paul’s idolatrous love of her veers away from the sticky and incestuous just in time.)

Read more: Edwina Preston reviews ‘The White Body of Evening’ by A.L. McCann

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Don Anderson reviews ‘The Prosperous Thief’ By Andrea Goldsmith
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‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for someone not a Jew to talk about it? Nell, the goyische lover of Jewish Laura Lewin, puts her foot right in it in Melbourne at the end of the century dominated by the Holocaust and its memories. ‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’ Laura, in a not particularly deft similitude, reacts with a sharp response worthy of a ‘partly exposed landmine’. Nell can only put her unexploded foot further into it. ‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Laura ‘was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand.’ Is that sentiment intended to be generalised to all non-Jews?
Book 1 Title: The Prosperous Thief
Book Author: Andrea Goldsmith
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $27.95 pb, 291pp
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‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for someone not a Jew to talk about it? Nell, the goyische lover of Jewish Laura Lewin, puts her foot right in it in Melbourne at the end of the century dominated by the Holocaust and its memories. ‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’ Laura, in a not particularly deft similitude, reacts with a sharp response worthy of a ‘partly exposed landmine’. Nell can only put her unexploded foot further into it. ‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Laura ‘was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand.’ Is that sentiment intended to be generalised to all non-Jews?

Well, here’s a galloping case of where angels fear to tread. ‘Not another Holocaust novel!’ was my initial response to Andrea Goldsmith’s book. Yet the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Lest We Forget. As one character upbraids herself: ‘When you realise you have forgotten something so significant as your grandmother dying before your eyes, you are terrified at what else you might have blocked out.’ But haven’t we heard it all before, from more qualified, by virtue of temporal and geopolitical proximity, novelists? Was I over-influenced by the satanic narrator of the young Anglo-Indian novelist Glen Duncan’s I, Lucifer? (2002) ‘Raphael found me in the open-air cinema. Schindler’s List … “He who saves a single life,” Ben Kingsley said to Liam Neeson, “saves the world entire.” I got up and slouched out in disgust.’

Read more: Don Anderson reviews ‘The Prosperous Thief’ By Andrea Goldsmith

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Brian McFarlane reviews ‘The Time of My Life’ by John Bell
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As it happens, this is the sixth autobiographical work I’ve read in the last couple of months, and I’m led to reflect on the mode. If you do it in the form of publishing your diaries, as playwright Peter Nichols does in Diaries 1969–77, and are honest about it, then the absence of a time lag means you are perhaps more likely to render accurately the flavour of the experiences. If, like Henry James in A Small Boy and Others, you wait until you are seventy, the blurrings of time and the obfuscating convolutions of your late style may so distance the actualities that all the reader is left with is a meditation on the processes of memory. Nick Hornby, on the other hand, in Fever Pitch, combines meditation with sharply sensuous verbal snapshots of days spent on the ‘terraces’ cheering on the hapless Arsenal, and a life emerges – while he is still young enough to re-create the minutiae with vivid immediacy.
Book 1 Title: The Time of My Life
Book Author: John Bell
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $45 hb, 276pp
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As it happens, this is the sixth autobiographical work I’ve read in the last couple of months, and I’m led to reflect on the mode. If you do it in the form of publishing your diaries, as playwright Peter Nichols does in Diaries 1969–77, and are honest about it, then the absence of a time lag means you are perhaps more likely to render accurately the flavour of the experiences. If, like Henry James in A Small Boy and Others, you wait until you are seventy, the blurrings of time and the obfuscating convolutions of your late style may so distance the actualities that all the reader is left with is a meditation on the processes of memory. Nick Hornby, on the other hand, in Fever Pitch, combines meditation with sharply sensuous verbal snapshots of days spent on the ‘terraces’ cheering on the hapless Arsenal, and a life emerges – while he is still young enough to re-create the minutiae with vivid immediacy.

Autobiography inevitably involves some sense of reflection on, as well as selection from, the past; not merely a recital of factually affectless information. Australian theatrical producer, actor and company director John Bell offers a breezily easy read, rather than a notably contemplative approach to his life. His Prologue outlines his reasons for writing as being ‘part personal, part professional’, wondering ‘how do you separate the strands?’ The professional comes off best, and he articulates his notion that ‘our actors should know something of their own theatre history and maybe the theatre-going public should too’. He doesn’t altogether avoid the trap of listing titles of productions, with ‘sterling performances’, but his account of shifting theatrical tastes in the last few decades of the twentieth century is worth having.

Read more: Brian McFarlane reviews ‘The Time of My Life’ by John Bell

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Brian Matthews reviews ‘Don Bradman: Challenging the myth’ by Brett Hutchins and ‘Warne’s World’ by Louis Nowra
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Article Title: A Matter of Gravitas
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Custom Highlight Text: In early 1993 I was several months into a new job at the University of London. I must have been very preoccupied by my unaccustomed responsibilities because, when I ducked home to an empty flat at round about midday for a quick sandwich, I suddenly realised that the First Test was more than an hour old and that I’d completely forgotten about it. Naturally, all thoughts of hunger shelved, I turned on the television – to see Shane Warne tossing the ball from hand to hand and conferring with Allan Border. You needed only thirty years of cricket watching and playing experience to realise instantly that Warne was about to bowl his first over of the match. And that was how – settling in to sneak a look during my lunch break – I saw that ball.
Book 1 Title: Don Bradman
Book 1 Subtitle: Challenging the myth
Book Author: Brett Hutchins
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $29.95hb, 223 pp
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Book 2 Title: Warne’s World
Book 2 Author: Louis Nowra
Book 2 Biblio: Duffy & Snellgrove, $19.95 pb, 248 pp
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In early 1993 I was several months into a new job at the University of London. I must have been very preoccupied by my unaccustomed responsibilities because, when I ducked home to an empty flat at round about midday for a quick sandwich, I suddenly realised that the First Test was more than an hour old and that I’d completely forgotten about it. Naturally, all thoughts of hunger shelved, I turned on the television – to see Shane Warne tossing the ball from hand to hand and conferring with Allan Border. You needed only thirty years of cricket watching and playing experience to realise instantly that Warne was about to bowl his first over of the match. And that was how – settling in to sneak a look during my lunch break – I saw that ball. Words probably can’t do it justice, but Louis Nowra’s description comes impressively close:

Read more: Brian Matthews reviews ‘Don Bradman: Challenging the myth’ by Brett Hutchins and ‘Warne’s World’...

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Bruce Moore reviews ‘Blooming English’ by Kate Burridge and ‘Speak: A Short History of Languages’ by Tore Janson
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Contents Category: Language
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Article Title: Ozymandian Lesson
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These two books differ greatly in scope and style but they are both highly interesting and enjoyable. Tore Janson is concerned with the history of languages over the past 40,000 years and (in a brief coda to his argument) into the next two thousand years. Kate Burridge deals primarily with the present state of English, although, on many occasions, when she is explaining the present state of things, she examines the English of earlier periods. For example, two separate Old English verbs ended up, in a later period, being pronounced the same way, so that let meant both ‘to permit’ and ‘to prevent, stop’. Once this kind of thing happens, it is normal for English to discard one of the meanings. In this case, we discarded the sense ‘to prevent, stop’, although we have retained relics of it in the legal phrase without let or hindrance and in the tennis term let ball.
Book 1 Title: Blooming English
Book 1 Subtitle: Observations on the Roots, Cultivation and Hybrids of the English Language
Book Author: Kate Burridge
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $24.95pb, 259pp
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Book 2 Title: Speak
Book 2 Subtitle: A Short History of Languages
Book 2 Author: Tore Janson
Book 2 Biblio: OUP, $49.95hb, 301pp
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These two books differ greatly in scope and style but they are both highly interesting and enjoyable. Tore Janson is concerned with the history of languages over the past 40,000 years and (in a brief coda to his argument) into the next two thousand years. Kate Burridge deals primarily with the present state of English, although, on many occasions, when she is explaining the present state of things, she examines the English of earlier periods. For example, two separate Old English verbs ended up, in a later period, being pronounced the same way, so that let meant both ‘to permit’ and ‘to prevent, stop’. Once this kind of thing happens, it is normal for English to discard one of the meanings. In this case, we discarded the sense ‘to prevent, stop’, although we have retained relics of it in the legal phrase without let or hindrance and in the tennis term let ball.

Read more: Bruce Moore reviews ‘Blooming English’ by Kate Burridge and ‘Speak: A Short History of Languages’...

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Geoffrey Bolton reviews ‘The Federation Mirror’ by Ross Fitzgerald and ‘Johannes Bjelke-Peterson’ by Rae Wear
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‘Queensland is different’, overseas commentators would mutter sagely when the media ran yet another story on Joh Bjelke-Peterson, premier of that state from 1968 to 1987. Authoritarian without generosity, self-servingly ignorant of the decent checks and balances usual in the Westminster style of government, prejudiced and inarticulate, Joh was impossible. And yet Queenslanders went on voting for him. His provincialism evidently appealed to their provincialism. Eventually, like the big frog in the small puddle of Aesop’s fable, Joh puffed himself up into believing that, at the age of seventy-six, he could become Australia’s national leader. Like Aesop’s frog, his bubble burst and, before the year was over, he was out of office. During his later years as premier, he was the subject of three biographical studies, written by Derek Townsend, Hugh Lunn and Alan Metcalfe. Joh’s own memoirs followed in 1990. With the lapse of another decade, it was time for a reassessment, and Rae Wear has provided it.
Book 1 Title: The Federation Mirror
Book Author: Ross Fitzgerald
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $30pb, 267pp
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Book 2 Title: Johannes Bjelke-Peterson
Book 2 Subtitle: The Lord’s Premier
Book 2 Author: Rae Wear
Book 2 Biblio: UQP, $35pb, 249 pp
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‘Queensland is different’, overseas commentators would mutter sagely when the media ran yet another story on Joh Bjelke-Peterson, premier of that state from 1968 to 1987. Authoritarian without generosity, self-servingly ignorant of the decent checks and balances usual in the Westminster style of government, prejudiced and inarticulate, Joh was impossible. And yet Queenslanders went on voting for him. His provincialism evidently appealed to their provincialism. Eventually, like the big frog in the small puddle of Aesop’s fable, Joh puffed himself up into believing that, at the age of seventy-six, he could become Australia’s national leader. Like Aesop’s frog, his bubble burst and, before the year was over, he was out of office. During his later years as premier, he was the subject of three biographical studies, written by Derek Townsend, Hugh Lunn and Alan Metcalfe. Joh’s own memoirs followed in 1990. With the lapse of another decade, it was time for a reassessment, and Rae Wear has provided it.

Read more: Geoffrey Bolton reviews ‘The Federation Mirror’ by Ross Fitzgerald and ‘Johannes Bjelke-Peterson’...

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Graham Willett reviews ‘Gender Trouble Down Under’ by David Coad and ‘From Camp to Queer’ by Robert Reynolds
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I approached rom Camp to Queer with some trepidation. The author, Robert Reynolds, and I are roughly contemporary products of the same history department. The book itself covers much the same territory as the first few chapters of my Living Out Loud, but does so with a very different conceptual framework. This was compounded by a profile piece in a Melbourne gay paper, in which Reynolds was favourably contrasted with gay male academics like myself who look as though their gym membership cards disappeared down the back of the couch a few years ago.
Book 1 Title: Gender Trouble Down Under
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian masculinities
Book Author: David Coad
Book 1 Biblio: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, $39.95pb, 199 pp
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Book 2 Title: From Camp to Queer
Book 2 Subtitle: Remaking the Australian homosexual
Book 2 Author: Robert Reynolds
Book 2 Biblio: MUP, $34.95pb, 207 pp
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I approached rom Camp to Queer with some trepidation. The author, Robert Reynolds, and I are roughly contemporary products of the same history department. The book itself covers much the same territory as the first few chapters of my Living Out Loud, but does so with a very different conceptual framework. This was compounded by a profile piece in a Melbourne gay paper, in which Reynolds was favourably contrasted with gay male academics like myself who look as though their gym membership cards disappeared down the back of the couch a few years ago.

 

Read more: Graham Willett reviews ‘Gender Trouble Down Under’ by David Coad and ‘From Camp to Queer’ by...

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John McCarthy reviews ‘Nicky Barr, an Australian Air Ace’ by Peter Dornan and ‘Catalina Dreaming’ by Andrew McMillan
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These are two quite different books about two quite different aspects of Australia’s involvement in the air war of 1939–45. Andrew McMillan, in Catalina Dreaming, describes in an effective, episodic manner what the war was like for the aircrew and ground staff of the RAAF who flew, serviced and maintained the Catalina flying boats. These aircraft were operated from Northern Australian bases over long expanses of water against distant Japanese targets. McMillan presents a colourful account of what it was like being involved in the war fought from areas such as Little Lagoon, the Qantas Base on Groote Eylandt opened in 1938, or Melville Bay in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Book 1 Title: Nicky Barr, an Australian Air Ace
Book 1 Subtitle: A story of courage and adventure
Book Author: Peter Dornan
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 252 pp
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Book 2 Title: Catalina Dreaming
Book 2 Subtitle: Rescues, exciting missions, and other stories
Book 2 Author: Andrew McMillan
Book 2 Biblio: Duffy & Snellgrove, $21.95pb, 200 pp
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These are two quite different books about two quite different aspects of Australia’s involvement in the air war of 1939–45. Andrew McMillan, in Catalina Dreaming, describes in an effective, episodic manner what the war was like for the aircrew and ground staff of the RAAF who flew, serviced and maintained the Catalina flying boats. These aircraft were operated from Northern Australian bases over long expanses of water against distant Japanese targets. McMillan presents a colourful account of what it was like being involved in the war fought from areas such as Little Lagoon, the Qantas Base on Groote Eylandt opened in 1938, or Melville Bay in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Read more: John McCarthy reviews ‘Nicky Barr, an Australian Air Ace’ by Peter Dornan and ‘Catalina Dreaming’...

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Miles Lewis reviews ‘Glenn Murcutt’ by Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper & ‘Touch This Earth Lightly’ by Philip Drew
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Article Title: Obfuscating Stucco
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Glen Murcutt has emerged in recent years as a very Australian hero, an apparently sincere and unassuming man, a loner in his practice, and in tune with the environment - a sort of Crocodile Dundee of architecture. He has also achieved an improbable international stature. He is almost better known in Finland than at home, and has now been recognised by the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an international award which is presumably important, even though most of us had never heard of it before. Here, for once, is an Australian architect who deserves to be studied and documented.
Book 1 Title: Glenn Murcutt
Book 1 Subtitle: A singular architectural practice
Book Author: Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper
Book 1 Biblio: Images Publishing, $99.95hb, 256 pp
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Book 2 Title: Touch This Earth Lightly
Book 2 Subtitle: Glenn Murcutt in his own words
Book 2 Author: Philip Drew
Book 2 Biblio: Duffy & Snellgrove, $33pb, 200 pp
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Glen Murcutt has emerged in recent years as a very Australian hero, an apparently sincere and unassuming man, a loner in his practice, and in tune with the environment - a sort of Crocodile Dundee of architecture. He has also achieved an improbable international stature. He is almost better known in Finland than at home, and has now been recognised by the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an international award which is presumably important, even though most of us had never heard of it before. Here, for once, is an Australian architect who deserves to be studied and documented.

Read more: Miles Lewis reviews ‘Glenn Murcutt’ by Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper & ‘Touch This Earth Lightly’ by...

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Tony Coady reviews ‘Worlds in Collision’ by Ken Booth and Tim Dunne & ‘Terror’ by John Carroll
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These two books represent strikingly different responses to the events of September 11; indeed in some respects they encompass radically divergent human reactions to tragedy of any sort. The Worlds in Collision collection is mostly cool, analytic and carefully reasoned; it contains a pooling of ideas from many different sources, an academic symposium in print. John Carroll’s book is highly personal, rhetorical and passionately grim. He calls it ‘a meditation’, but the tone is not one of quiet reflection, but of prophetic jeremiad. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne want to help us cope with an urgent political problem; Carroll wants to indict a spiritual disease and issue a call for cultural reform. The stock-in-trade of most of the contributors to Worlds in Collision is argument; for Carroll it is primarily metaphor.
Book 1 Title: Worlds in Collision
Book 1 Subtitle: Terror and the future of global order
Book Author: Ken Booth and Tim Dunne
Book 1 Biblio: Palgrave Macmillan, $49.95pb, 376 pp
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Book 2 Title: Terror
Book 2 Subtitle: A meditation on the meaning of September 11
Book 2 Author: John Carroll
Book 2 Biblio: Scribe, $16.95pb, 106 pp
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These two books represent strikingly different responses to the events of September 11; indeed in some respects they encompass radically divergent human reactions to tragedy of any sort. The Worlds in Collision collection is mostly cool, analytic and carefully reasoned; it contains a pooling of ideas from many different sources, an academic symposium in print. John Carroll’s book is highly personal, rhetorical and passionately grim. He calls it ‘a meditation’, but the tone is not one of quiet reflection, but of prophetic jeremiad. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne want to help us cope with an urgent political problem; Carroll wants to indict a spiritual disease and issue a call for cultural reform. The stock-in-trade of most of the contributors to Worlds in Collision is argument; for Carroll it is primarily metaphor.

Read more: Tony Coady reviews ‘Worlds in Collision’ by Ken Booth and Tim Dunne & ‘Terror’ by John Carroll

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Vesna Drapac reviews ‘The French Revolution 1789–1799’ by Peter McPhee and ‘France Since 1870’ by Charles Sowerwine
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Peter McPhee and Charles Sowerwine, internationally renowned historians of modern France, are both professors of history at the University of Melbourne. Their latest books are what might be termed generalist surveys that provide an extensive overview of modern French history, but in ways that are never predictable and always highly readable. The events of the French Revolution are familiar to many, but McPhee also makes accessible to non-specialists the most contested themes of the Revolution without losing the narrative thread. He brings to the fore the personalities – major and minor, urban and provincial, sympathetic and unsympathetic – that shaped, and were shaped by, these tumultuous times. He has an ear for the ‘voices’ of the Revolution and, while drawn more to some than others, he gives all a fair hearing.
Book 1 Title: The French Revolution 1789–1799
Book Author: Peter McPhee
Book 1 Biblio: OUP, $49.95 pb, 234 pp
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Book 2 Title: France Since 1870
Book 2 Subtitle: Culture, Politics and Society
Book 2 Author: Charles Sowerwine
Book 2 Biblio: Palgrave Macmillan, $46.20 pb, 530 pp
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Peter McPhee and Charles Sowerwine, internationally renowned historians of modern France, are both professors of history at the University of Melbourne. Their latest books are what might be termed generalist surveys that provide an extensive overview of modern French history, but in ways that are never predictable and always highly readable. The events of the French Revolution are familiar to many, but McPhee also makes accessible to non-specialists the most contested themes of the Revolution without losing the narrative thread. He brings to the fore the personalities – major and minor, urban and provincial, sympathetic and unsympathetic – that shaped, and were shaped by, these tumultuous times. He has an ear for the ‘voices’ of the Revolution and, while drawn more to some than others, he gives all a fair hearing.

Read more: Vesna Drapac reviews ‘The French Revolution 1789–1799’ by Peter McPhee and ‘France Since 1870’ by...

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