Butchering America

Dear Editor,

In the preface to the Symposium of your September edition of ABR, you invited letters, so here is mine. The majority of those who contributed to the Symposium set out, innocently or otherwise, to butcher the Americans. Sad, really, and certainly narrow of vision. It reminded me of those who used ABR to champion the cause of the Tampa boat people, those self-proclaimed refugees. It has now been proved that the majority of the latter were trying to enter via the back door because they didn’t qualify for entry through the front. In truth, they were nothing less than invaders of our country.

Not all US foreign policy is good. Please name a country with a perfect foreign policy. Many people suggest that the USA should keep out and mind its own business. Mostly, though, if not always, it is their own business, in an indirect manner. The classic example is Middle East oil. Without oil, the US economy would collapse - and with it the economies of the rest of the Western world. Had Saddam Hussein succeeded in his invasion of Kuwait, there is little doubt that Saudi Arabia would have been the next victim and the world would have been at the mercy of one man - that pleasant, well-meaning fellow who set the Kuwait oilfields on fire as a parting gesture of goodwill. Sceptics demand proof that Hussein is manufacturing prohibited items of war. If you have a spy in the enemy’s camp, do you tell the world what he has revealed and see him beheaded? Have the contributors to your Symposium not read the books of Richard Butler, or the story of Khidhir Hamza, Saddam’s bombmaker? George W. Bush and Tony Blair are willing to put their own futures on the line while the United Nations procrastinates. If the USA enters Iraq and does not discover what it anticipates, President Bush is finished. If he does find what he anticipates, the United Nations is finished.

Australians, of all people, owe a debt to the USA. Tens of thousands of US servicemen died in the defence of this country. Yes, it is easy to say that the Americans were looking after their own interests by keeping out the Japanese, but the fact remains that they saved us from the rape, brutality and plain savagery that some Japanese servicemen exercised at that time. All that the British could offer (and I am very loyal to England) was: ‘We’ll take it back later.’ Can we be confident about the consequences for Australia if the USA were to say the same? To those who proclaim that the USA is a superpower trying to exert its will over other countries, I must respond with a simple comment: Thank God America is the superpower, not somebody else.

Filton Hebbard, Woy Woy Bay, NSW

The Word from Townsville

Dear Editor,

I have been contributing to ABR for a very long time, and consider your September edition the best ever published. Your treatment of the September 11 event has already caused much discussion amongst my Toowoomba acquaintances, some of whom are Americans. It is reasoned, thought-provoking and stimulating, if frightening. The entire issue shows that your publication has gradually developed into much more than a review of books. It is now a vibrant exposition of challenging ideas.

Noni Durack, Toowoomba, Qld

Among the barbarians

Dear Editor,

In ‘Keeping up with the Cringe’ (ABR, October 2002), John Rickard refers to Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s 1990 Reese Lecture here in London at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, ‘Beyond the Cringe: Australian Cultural Over-Confidence’, as being given under our auspices ‘by a nice irony’. Nice irony, indeed. Out here on the wild frontier of the Australian cultural empire, we few hardy fellow Australian colonists are trying to spread Australian civilisation among the British barbarians. We are sometimes accused of cultural strut by the natives, but never of cultural cringe. We’re only occasionally accused of the latter by the odd visiting Australian who, perhaps put off by our name, doesn’t pause long enough to take in what we are doing. Most of the time, I’m pleased to report, the British and Australians compliment us on our even-handedness and objectivity.

Carl Bridge, Head, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London, UK

In defence of three poets

Dear Editor,

There were many delights in the September issue of ABR, such as Joy Hooton’s piece on Drusilla Modjeska’s Timepieces, Peter Porter’s poem ‘Ideological Moments’ and David McCooey’s review, ‘Salty Pleasures’, all of which set the juices flowing and the synapses sparkling. However, there were also unsatisfactory features, such as Richard King’s review titled ‘School of Hard Knocks’. To find, in the same issue as Juno Gemes’s letter about the plight of poetry at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, King’s turgid, self-satisfied review of John Foulcher’s The Learning Curve, Graeme Hetherington’s Life Given and Michael Sharkey’s History: Selected Poems, 1978–2000 was a great disappointment. Dismissing these books as, respectively, creating dramatic voices ‘wanting’ in ‘distinctiveness and believability’, unsuccessfully exposing ‘personal pain’ which lacks the ‘impersonal resonance’ to carry the ‘confessional’ register of the poetry, and needing ‘smartening up’ to be ‘a pleasure to read’ seemed an overly harsh and, in regard to the latter, patronising response. Not only did King condemn them for their lack of technical expertise (read formal attributes), but he also took a pot-shot at Robert Gray for his lack of insight into Foulcher’s work. It reminded me of King’s Oedipal sideswipe at Bruce Dawe for technical blindness, contained in another depressing review (ABR, November 2001) in which he slammed a group of promising new poets.

A friend gave me a copy of Michael Sharkey’s History to cheer me up in moments of despondency after watching the progress of recent political events. I wouldn’t have known I was reading the same book. It is light, witty, ironic, compassionate, irreverent and elegiac (all the things promised in the blurb on the back cover), and certainly not lacking in poetic technique. As in much modern poetry, Sharkey loves to play with formal boundaries to create new forms, meanings, ambiguities, cadences and rhythms. These linguistic and formal experiments (for instance, his use of couplets with their embedded half rhymes in the second line) enable his best poems to satirise aspects of contemporary society, as well as poetry itself.

I value the way Sharkey makes me think and laugh, and I enjoy the simultaneous play of language and form. None of this was obvious in King’s review, with its selective misreading seemingly designed to create a self-advertisement for Richard King and his conservative poetic prejudices. Traditional form and technique are not everything, which is not the same thing as saying that they are unimportant. Like all aspects of art and culture, they are subject to change. And change they have, largely for the better, particularly in response to the diversity of poets writing and performing today.

After a weekend at the recent NSW Poetry Festival, I can report that Australian poetry, both written and performed, is diverse, alive and well. It is a shame that magazines such as ABR (all too few for poetry lovers) are still used for the self-aggrandisement of critics such as King, rather than providing a forum for informed, balanced and constructive commentary, such as that of McCooey.

Molly Bloom, Bronte, NSW

Nimrod variations

Dear Editor,

I write to correct two major factual errors in Helen Thomson’s review of See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave, by Julian Meyrick (ABR, September 2002). I raise them not to quibble, but because they diminish the book’s credibility and the quality of the review; and, beyond that, because I would hate to see such errors perpetuated.

First, Thomson states: ‘Three legendary productions in its first year put Nimrod on the theatrical map.’ But none of the productions mentioned was a Nimrod production; and each of them preceded the formation of the company. Meyrick discusses The Legend of King O’Malley, Oedipus Rex and Hair, but only to show what was happening in Sydney theatre when Nimrod arrived. Second, Thomson says: ‘As early as 1974, a downturn in Nimrod’s life cycle could be discerned beginning with Ken Horler being forced out, followed in 1979 by Richard Wherrett’s move ... to the Sydney Theatre Company.’ In fact, Ken was a working director until December 1979, and it is significant to Meyrick’s argument about the way the three directors worked together that he left after Richard had gone to the STC.

Thomson’s review of See How It Runs is one of the more perceptive I have read, not least because it identifies the impressive range of the book and recognises that it will ‘lift the standard of theatre history in this country’. All the more reason why I was sorry to see it marred by such blunders.

Victoria Chance, Currency Press, Strawberry Hills, NSW

Revisionism in the ALP

Dear Editor,

The revisionists continue to shape our past to fit their own needs. Neal Blewett’s review of Bob Carr’s Thoughtlines dropped a few clangers. Your reviewer had trouble recalling any intellectual politicians, and failed to mention H.V. Evatt. Evatt may be an embarrassment to the latter-day revisionists in the ALP, but he was undoubtedly a towering intellectual who sadly lost his mind at the end. To add insult to injury, your reviewer goes on to suggest that Chifley was not an outstanding leader, and that Hawke and Keating were. No doubt Carr agrees with this proposition. The fact is that the ALP was started by the unions as a socialist party. For Carr et al. to deny this, and try and create their own party under the same banner, smacks of intellectual dishonesty and opportunism.

I dipped into the new Chifley biography recently and was amazed to find that it was using Alan Reid as a source. Reid was quoted when writing about Evatt. That’s much like using Alan Bond as a guide to transparent business practice. Reid may have mellowed with age, but he was, at best, a flawed witness of the political scene. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s he was one of Sir Frank Packer’s heavy guns in trying to demolish the ALP. What we tend to forget is that the press at that time was violently antiunion and anti-Labor, and any use of its material is suspect.

Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW