For sheer entertainment value, the standout article is Tony Moore’s essay on the irrepressible Marcus Clarke. Throughout his brief but eventful life, Clarke cultivated a louche, bohemian image in conscious opposition to the staid bourgeois society of nineteenth-century Melbourne. He built his reputation as a journalist by playing the role of wag-about-town, and lived according to the principle that: ‘It is no use borrowing if you mean to pay.’ As a Baudelaire-loving aesthete, Clarke was naturally contemptuous of the species of ‘Parochial Committee Man’ that dominated the politics of the day. ‘He is,’ wrote Clarke, ‘bland, pious, and is known in political circles by some “Honest”-prefixed abbreviation of his baptismal name.’ Which does indeed, as Moore suggests, sound strangely familiar.

The hinge essay is a contribution from Marion Halligan that develops a stimulating but occasionally confused argument about the respective truth claims of painting, photography and fiction. Halligan argues that fiction can often, in the words of Susan Sontag, ‘do more justice to the complexity of reality’ than non-fiction, and remarks that it is ‘curious that we as a society are so hung up on authenticity’. Where she gets herself in a tangle is her interpretation of the torture photographs that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to Halligan, these images were powerful because they were ‘not posed but part of a process that was nothing to do with the imaging of it’. This appeal to authenticity is curiously phrased. Is she trying to suggest that a pyramid of naked men is some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon? And what exactly were those leering soldiers doing as they leaned into frame to be snapped with their victims but posing? This torture had everything to do with the ‘imaging of it’. The composition of every photograph from Abu Ghraib was an act of barbaric creativity. The torturers crafted the images as a representation of the power relationship between guard and prisoner; the victims were all posed against their will, transformed into a living monument to their captors’ depravity. Recording the process was an essential part of the systematic, ritual nature of the humiliation and violence.

Halligan’s essay does have the virtue of suggesting some of the political questions that are involved in philosophical arguments about the exact status of a representation of reality. When the British torture photographs were exposed as fakes, Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, defended them on the ground that they were a recreation of ‘true’ events. Halligan rightly recognises this argument as self-serving rubbish, but later claims that ‘a great photograph can be a work of art too, but not because of its realism. Perhaps because of its honesty, or its integrity, but not because of its factuality.’

There is an unsustainable distinction being drawn here between artistic and non-artistic representation and the licence granted to each, but there is also a confusion between the concepts of honesty and truth. The idea of truth needs to be defended from Morgan’s tendentious usage. Truth is not always self-evident; it is something to be argued over; it can be evoked, in complex ways, through fictional means; but we still cling to the idea that truth is something that exists independently of ourselves. In this it is distinct from honesty, which is confessional: it rests on the idea of individual worthiness and is used to denote purity of motive. I submit that the latter does not exist. If the world’s grown honest, then Doomsday is near. Honesty, as the word has been annexed by Gemmell, for example, is being used to assert her right to determine the manner and context in which her fiction is interpreted. The best that can be said for this is that it is naïve. When Halligan argues that ‘Honesty in fiction is more transparent, dishonesty easy to observe,’ she aspires to paradox but stays well within the realm of the contradictory. We do not look to fiction – or art generally – for its honesty. ‘I’ is always an Other. We might, however, find in art a kind of truth, although the exact nature of this truth will always be difficult to pinpoint.

John Mateer, in his brief essay on the decline of art that demands a psychological engagement from the viewer, refers to the photographer’s search for ‘the “natural moment” during which the self is said to be revealed’. This is something inevitably elusive. He goes on to argue that ‘the “disconnect” between emotion and image that can be identified in contemporary art has its mirror image in the histrionics of political campaigning and the sensationalism of the news media’.

It is an interesting point: the implication being that contemporary artists, for all their genuflecting before the altars of the avant garde and the radical, are often neutered politically, leaving the field open to those who are less reticent about aestheticising political debate through direct and manipulative appeals to sentiment. Without an understanding of this process, we are destined to be played for suckers. Apologists for the current government, faced with hard evidence of the prime minister’s deceptive behaviour, rush to assert his essential ‘honesty’, as if his integrity exists in some airy Platonic realm where it remains forever untainted by his actual behaviour. Honesty, in this sense, has no necessary relationship with the truth; it is all about reputation and appearances. Just ask ‘honest Iago’.

Southerly devotes its latest edition to commemorating the ‘Watermark’ literary festival which was held at Camden Haven in October 2003. As Elaine Van Kempen explains in the issue’s brief introductory essay, the festival grew out of informal gatherings at the house she shares with her husband, Eric Rolls, to become an official, biannual event dedicated to the celebration of nature writing.

The unifying theme is the literature of place, with an underlying interest in environmentalism. It is a disappointingly uneven collection. In his essay ‘Sandstone Stories’, John I. Cameron, a lecturer in ‘place-based education’ (for the uninitiated, he helpfully defines this as ‘education concerned with and arising from the experience of a particular place’), cautions that it can be ‘easy to slip into sentimentalising or romanticising a place’. It is a warning that not all of the contributors heed. A number of articles devolve into vague assertions based around undefined theological terms, such as ‘spirit’ and ‘sacred’. John Hughes, in his essay on the drawings of John Wolseley, at least makes an attempt to link Wolseley’s techniques to the mystical Eastern philosophy of Taoism, but other writers are less explicit, being content to indulge in the kind of uncritical, woolly thinking about the special magic of storytelling that, quite frankly, gives me the howling fantods.

There are, however, several strong articles. Tom Griffiths’s piece, in particular, gives a critical reading of the frontier legends that have informed the historical interpretation of settlement. A well-written and thoughtful article, its ideas resonate interestingly with some of the themes explored in Andrew McGahan’s recent Miles Franklin Award winner, The White Earth (2004). There is, too, an admirable commitment to poetry. Southerly includes the work of no less than nineteen poets, including the likes of Anthony Lawrence and Robert Adamson, with the latter’s verses the highlight for me, particularly the twisting and extended metaphors in ‘The Yellow Chinese Parrot’.

The lead essay in Australian Literary Studies is a fascinating account by Irmtraud Petersson of the rapturous reception granted Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998) when it was published in Germany. An exercise in cultural analysis rather than literary criticism, this piece highlights the contrast in tone between the German and Australian reviews, drawing out the way the author’s public persona became entangled with the critical understanding of the work. It is also interesting for its exposure of how a different cultural perspective can lead to a poem being interpreted with a markedly different emphasis. The article is backed up by an interview with Fredy Neptune’s German translator, Thomas Eichhorn, in which he discusses the tribulations of rendering the idiosyncrasies of Murray’s vernacular poetry into another language.

Andrew McCann contributes a densely written essay on Rosa Praed’s use of the uncanny in her depiction of colonialism and, in particular, her representation of Aborigines. As a piece of criticism, McCann’s essay is characteristically intelligent: both theoretically literate and culturally shrewd. As a piece of writing, however, it leaves something to be desired, being afflicted with a moderate case of academese – a little surprising from a writer whose prose is usually far lighter on its feet. The McCann article chimes nicely with M. Dolores Herrero’s essay on Roberta Sykes’s Snake Dreaming trilogy (1997–2000). Herrero interprets the autobiographical work as focused on questions of authenticity, arguing that Sykes deliberately cultivates and exploits a sense of ambiguity in regard to her origins as a way of demonstrating the difficulties involved in claiming Aboriginal identity. The article limits itself to the unique politics of Aboriginality, but hints at the issues surrounding the construction of a literary identity. Among the remaining articles and reviews, Michael Ackland, whose biography of Henry Handel Richardson is reviewed in Meanjin, discusses Richardson’s time at the Leipzig Conservatorium of Music. Ackland reveals how Richardson finessed – perhaps that should be lied about – the events that led to her rejection of music in favour of a literary career. Maybe Gemmell is right after all: you just can’t trust anyone with a pseudonym.