Although you might not guess it from media comment, The Latham Diaries (MUP, $39.95 hb, 429 pp, 0522852157) is the most important book yet published on Labor’s wilderness years. It provides a pungent characterisation of Labor’s post-1996 history; conveys a profound understanding of the challenges facing a social democratic party in contemporary Australia; and its damning account of Labor’s feuds, machinations, and toxic culture suggests why the party is incapable of meeting those challenges. It is also the most rancorous and at times rancid memoir ever penned by an Australian politician. For someone so sensitive to invasions of his own privacy, Latham throws around personal slurs and innuendoes with much abandon. Yet his effective use of a larrikin argot lends the book a gritty authenticity rare in such writing. Much black humour and some telling stories move the book along with a compelling pace until it is finally overwhelmed by self-pity, blustering defiance, and denial.

The diaries are not a set of regular daily entries but rather occasional jottings that appear to have undergone a degree of stylistic polishing. Sporadic in the early years, by 1998 they average about one a week. Although the entries are supposedly uncut, it is unclear whether any have been omitted. Some report the events of a single day; others cover a week or more. There are also hints throughout the diary of a greater degree of retrospectivity.

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

Prochownik’s Dream (as one of the characters helpfully informs us at one point, it is pronounced Pro-shov-nik) attempts something similar, probing questions about the nature of art, the responsibility of the artist to the work, the responsibility of the artist to the past, and the relationship between the artist and those who share his life.

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television series Hypotheticals.

At Sydney University, Robertson studied history as well as law. This provides the best explanation of the meticulous research that went into this book, in which the ‘notes on sources’ are as interesting to read as the elegantly written narrative. In 1999 Robertson had a debate in London with Justice Michael Kirby to mark the 350th anniversary of the trial and execution of Charles I. Was it a fair trial? According to Kirby, a monarchist, probably not; according to the republican Robertson, ‘yes’ in the context of legal standards at that time. This is a distant point and very much a lawyer’s one, but, in researching it, Robertson became fascinated by the significance of the events that took place between 1640 and 1660. These included the civil wars, the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month and must include a telephone number for verification.

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?

His task is complicated by the fact that this book is also explicitly directed at a general audience, an aim that is frustrated by indulging in psychoanalytic vocabulary with little definitional assistance. Pitching his discussion of identity politics and Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) at the lay reader, Attwood delivers able summaries of the issues, although they do not go beyond the now extensive literature on the subjects. To this extent, two-thirds of Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History repeats commonplaces and rushes through doors opened by scholars before him. Some of these scholars are acknowledged; many are not.

Brisbane crackers

The Brisbane Writers’ Festival has come and gone with great success and a sizeable audience. ABR sponsored a session: Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Tim Milfull, Brenda Niall and Peter Rose (photographed by Judith Potts below) discussed ‘The Art of Literary Criticism’. On the Sunday, Delia Falconer launched our October issue: ‘a cracker’, in her words. Describing ABR as ‘an ideal as much as a magazine, and an essential part of our literary culture’, Delia wished us ‘a long and argumentative life to come’ and urged everyone to subscribe. Many did rather than running the gauntlet of the four volunteers who assisted us throughout the festival, and to whom we are grateful.

David Lange’s autobiography was published on 1 August 2005. Twelve days later, he died in Auckland, at the age of sixty-three, after kidney failure and a long battle with amyloidosis, a rare disorder of plasma cells in the bone marrow, having been kept alive by a pacemaker, chemotherapy, peritoneal dialysis, and blood transfusions. He had been a diabetic for many years. When My Life appeared, press reports concentrated on isolated paragraphs and sentences, containing critical remarks about his former ministers, and about Bob Hawke. The book could have been dismissed as shrill vituperation, but it is far more than that. My Life is a touching, searching and reflective work, deeply analytical and self-critical. David showed great courage in completing an autobiography so close to death.

After Lange died, I was dismayed by the dismissive feature articles that appeared in Australian newspapers, especially one in The Age by Tony Parkinson, spokesman for the US cheer squad, attacking him as ‘a poseur and dilettante who misread badly the pulse of history’ – coded language for refusing to be a mere pillion passenger in foreign policy issues. In New Zealand, Jim Bolger, former National Party prime minister, later ambassador to Washington, wrote a thoughtful piece in The Dominion, defending David Lange on the nuclear ships issue.

The poems collected in Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (published by UQP as winner of the 2004 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize), are often marvels in their own right – street-savvy, sensitive, intelligent lyrics. Together, even more impressively, they generate a many-branched, collective meditation on lateness.

These two first novels are based upon events and people from Australian history. Noni Durack recasts the story of the pastoralists of the north-west of Australia in terms of an enlightened awareness of land degradation, but the narrative remains oddly captive to the legend of heroic conquest that she is trying to critique. Wendy James, on the other hand, has written an elegant feminist account of the lives of women in Melbourne at the time of the struggle for women’s suffrage.

There are many strong moments in Durack’s Beyond the Legend, especially when she writes of the climate, the animals and the landscape of the Kimberley region, and when she is describing life in Sydney during World War II. This is a family saga about the men of the second and third generations of the great pastoralist family, the Galways. Durack’s main characters continue to be dazzled by the pioneer romance of the first generation; indeed, the narrative suggests, this story of white settlement of the harsh terrain is etched into their masculinity.

Moving house recently reacquainted me with my books as I handled each one, packing and unpacking, dismantling the shelves from under them, banging the shelves together in the new place and lining up the books in a jumbled vestige of the old order. Books carried round for half a lifetime, books read more than once, books that will never be read, gifts, enthusiasms, bearers of memory and desire. Arranging books is something we all must do, culling and keeping in mysterious ways that reflect ourselves and our circumstances.

The Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalls the day his father, a librarian, cleared a space on the shelf for his son’s books. It was ‘an initiation rite, a coming of age’. The boy arranged his books by order of height, starting with the picture books. When his father came home, he asked bitterly: ‘Have you gone completely crazy? Arranging them in order of height? Have you mistaken your books for soldiers? … The firemen’s band on parade?’ He proceeded to explain the librarian’s art, the ways books can be catalogued according to what’s inside them. ‘And so,’ writes Oz, in A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), ‘I learnt the secret of diversity … In the days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards …’

Books, as the story shows, are part of our life’s growth. Ingeniously portable, they become a home we carry on our backs, like the snail’s shell, an extension of our inner life. Yet books also go missing: lost, lent, victims of fire or flood, left behind if we are forced to flee with only the bare necessities. The books we lug from place to place are reminders of that, too; of dislocation and rupture. The shelves are full of holes. The true survivors are those we have made part of our self-formation, an accreting, shifting line-up of books that we have kept alive by our investment in them. That’s what I call the shelf of our own.

That row of books is important for all of us, but particularly for writers whose work grows from relationship with them and who may aspire to put a book of their own at the end of the shelf one day. When I arrange my books, they fall into idiosyncratic categories that map my personal development: literature by language, region and chronology, with large British and American sections, and history; reference; art; philosophy, psychology, religion; China; and a substantial general Australian section that accounts for about a quarter of the total. At the end of the shelf, I have a place for the books I have written, and for notebooks, journals and other unpublished stuff. I shelve my own writing alongside what I have read by others as a way of acknowledging illustrious examples, near or far. All writers breathe inspiration from other books, even if they deny it or pull away. Their work is enhanced by those other, larger contexts.

The books on the shelf of one’s own select themselves in response to needs and discoveries. That’s what Virginia Woolf demonstrates incandescently (her word for Shakespeare) in A Room of One’s Own (1929) as she argues the creative necessity of a writer’s finding an enabling context in which to work. She understood that ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’. But when she goes to the bookcase for writing by women that might provide her with that common body, she finds the shelf largely empty. Analysing why, she notes that early women writers ‘had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help …’ To find fertile ground for herself, Woolf must revisit the writing of the past in a new way, sifting it imaginatively, awakening a new line of descent that will allow the poet of the future, Shakespeare’s vanished sister, to appear at last. Woolf’s is also a political project, requiring all women to become educated and to develop the freedom and habit of reading, writing and critiquing. Her forerunners must have worked for Shakespeare’s sister – for Woolf herself – with a forward-looking determination that ‘she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry’ (my italics). Woolf asks not only for changed material conditions – a room of one’s own and £500 – but a new kind of involvement with life outside the room, reclaiming both the contemporaneity and the historically shaped depth of a community and a culture. The great writer, Woolf insists, ‘is an inheritor as well as an originator’.

Aspiring creative writers in Australia today mostly have a room and quite a few have their £500, thanks to grants, scholarships and other publicly supported programmes. But where do they turn for a tradition to help them? Are they able, as Woolf so brilliantly was, to redefine their literary heritage as a creative source for themselves and a channel of shared culture? What books are on their shelves? Writers can work in multiple contexts, of course – China and Chinese writing provide an important source for some of my own writing, for example – but I want to focus here on one context that is surely both inevitable and significant for creative writers in Australia; and that is the context of Australian literature itself (and the various regional, intercultural and local traditions within it). Is there a shelf of our own – not as self-expressive individuals, but as a group, a literary community – that connects us with our society, past, present and future?

The books on our shelf usually include some of the texts we have read at school. The English curriculum plays a key role in our formation as readers and writers. Creative writing has evolved in step with changes to the teaching of English over the last half-century, and most professionals in publishing, the media and the arts, not to mention education, have been shaped by the same changing environment of school and university English. What has not changed is the importance of the English curriculum, at all levels of education, in its symbiotic relationship with the wider public culture. In its exercise of power, the English curriculum has juggled literature, Australianness and individual expression over the decades. Creative writing exists in the overlap of those energies, with an eye on the market.

I first met creative writing as an activity in its own right in primary school in the early 1960s.¹ We were asked to write a paragraph inspired by the word ‘monotony’. The look and sound of this strange word sparked what I wrote as much as any notion of its meaning. The practice was called Composition and continued to the end of high school, under the banner of English, in tandem with, but separate from, the study of literary texts. The opportunity to write my own stuff as part of schoolwork was a reason for me to like English. It was disappointing then to discover that at grown-up university in the 1970s there was a strict bifurcation of literary study and creative writing into curricular and extracurricular. We studied British literature, and the occasional American author, and put together small magazines as a home for our own writing. Yet the division between books studied and writing produced was always false. I wrote my first, mercifully unpublished novel in my spare time, heavily influenced by books I had studied: Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, The Merry-go-round in the Sea by Randolph Stow, The Outsider by Albert Camus, the poetry of John Donne and Judith Wright – an eclectic and potent mix. How could I have gone forward without their inspiration? My novel even had an epigraph from Emily Dickinson that I’d gleaned from somewhere. Stow’s novel was particularly important, with its themes of growing up and family in a Western Australian setting. At a time when authors were read but not seen or heard, I knew someone in Adelaide who had actually met Stow. That seemed to bring the possibility of writing within my own range.

By the 1980s, when I taught at university, writers’ groups had arrived, with their idea that collective sharing might be part of writing, too. Responding to student demand, the English department organised an extracurricular Creative Writing group. The traditional literature courses were meanwhile being theorised, deconstructed, diversified – allowing a moment in the sun for Australian writing – and embracing cultural studies in ways that generated new modes of critical writing which blurred with creative writing. By the 1990s most Australian universities had Creative Writing programmes that were starting to wag the tail of the old literature dog. A Chair of Creative Writing that would have been an oxymoron when I was an undergraduate now acknowledges a zone where some of the best and brightest are searching for a language of their own to take their concerns and constructs into the public sphere. In a framework of academic scrutiny, Creative Writing programmes offer a rare, privileged space for attention to literary art, craft and value and for self-reflexive interpretation of the kind advocated by critic James Ley in a recent essay in Australian Book Review, ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’.² Unlike the old-style thesis, however, the intensive and inward research in creative writing is often best when it’s invisible in the final work, making it all look easy.

Writing happens in a sanctum engulfed by the sound and fury of a marketplace of competing media and messages. It’s a fecund, if not always friendly, environment. Survival means taking it on without letting it take you over. There are more people reading (seventy-eight per cent of Australians reportedly do it for pleasure every day); more people who have done some sort of personal writing (sixty per cent of Australians is one statistic I’ve heard; eighty-one per cent of Americans apparently feel they should write a book, and, to judge by my taxi drivers, I’d say the figure here is about the same); more people at writers’ festivals and in book clubs; and simply more books – although not always the ones we want.³ The old-fangled piece of technology that is the book continues to defy predictions of its demise. That’s partly because publishing is at heart a cottage industry, even if it takes place on a ‘worldwide village green’, as Jason Epstein reminds us in Book Business (2001). Anyone can do it. The great democratisation of reading and writing in which we rejoice through print and electronic media – even blogs, those largely ignored ‘spasms of assertion’, as they have been called⁴ – only continues what the book was designed for from the beginning, to carry messages to more people more economically, more conveniently than before. Add to that, in our society, expanded education rates, including at tertiary level, with most people having studied English somewhere along the way, and longer lives and more leisure time for many, and the resilience of the book is no surprise. The entry point is, of course, literacy, which has become a matter of burning concern. Figures here are less celebratory, with one in four Australian schoolchildren below par, rising to one in two where poverty is a factor, and eighty per cent in indigenous communities^.5

The word is out: read to your newborn. Then your newborn will have every chance of writing back to you when she grows up, as well as generally coping with life. There is both anxiety and zeal in contemporary Australia about literacy and the power of reading and writing to shape our society. Debate about English teaching, from language acquisition to interpreting Shakespeare, is a battleground that regularly attracts politicians, pundits and priests as well as parents and school principals, with the media lobbing the occasional incendiary bomb. Cardinal George Pell grabbed the headlines recently by calling schools back to the literary classics in order to oppose ‘the dictatorship of relativism’.⁶ Participatory democracy demands that we get language empowerment right. Our basic liberties start with being able to read, write and criticise. To place ourselves on record by writing is a fundamental desire, sending a message in a bottle to an imagined posterity. To join with others by sharing words seems to fit our species well, as the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid writes in his elegant reflection on reading, So Many Books (2003): ‘The freedom and happiness experienced in reading are addictive, and the strength of the tradition lies in that experience, which ultimately turns all innovations to its own ends. Reading liberates the reader and transports him from his book to a reading of himself and all of life. It leads him to participate in conversations, and in some cases to arrange them, as so many active readers do: parents, teachers, friends, writers, translators, critics, publishers, booksellers, librarians.’ The shelf of our own sets up just such conversations.

Contemporary Australian writers are free to choose whatever context they like in the universe of writing, but the Australian literary traditions that might connect us most closely to our own society seem to have less and less traction. Even to think of Australian writing as a category of its own – beyond the grants and prizes – is starting to sound a little odd once more. In North American bookstores, the Careys, Keneallys and Maloufs are bundled in with all the other literature, and maybe that’s the way it should be. Here there’s usually Australiana. Australian fiction sometimes has its own ghettoised rack, but smart locals – writers and publishers alike – aspire to wider generic categories, such as Romance or Crime. In schools and universities, it is the same. Australian literature is taught less as a course in its own right; local content needs are served by introducing Australian material under other headings: journeys, post-colonialism, life writing (with Indigenous Studies a partial exception). National constructs are regarded with suspicion. An earlier generation’s commitment to putting Australian literature on the world map has waned, leaving it pretty well off the world’s map, except for the representative writer or two who fills the slot. Australian literature has been squeezed by globalisation in the marketplace, intellectual fashion in the academy and opposition to cultural intervention in the public sphere.

Does it matter? Unlike war veterans or cricketers, Australian writers are neither enshrined nor celebrated. If anything, they are regarded as anomalies. Patrick White cheerfully suggested his biography be called ‘The Monster of All Time’. J.M. Coetzee, our other, adoptive literary Nobel laureate, has his Elizabeth Costello, prize-winning Australian novelist, write of herself in Slow Man (2005): ‘Australian novelist – what a fate!’ Judith Wright, one of the great poets, didn’t get much of a eulogy in parliament when she died. We pay ironic tribute to our authors by putting them on the currency. Catherine Helen Spence, Banjo Paterson, David Unaipon, Mary Gilmore: their faces enjoy far wider circulation than their books.

When Spence arrived in South Australia in 1839, not long after the colony’s inception, she sat on a log and, ‘in spite of’ her fourteen years, ‘had a good cry’. But she was a reader and by the age of seventeen had ‘mastered’ (her word) ‘the few books we had, or which we could borrow’: British poets, the Irishman Oliver Goldsmith, her countryman Sir Walter Scott, a telling shelf for literary formation. At nineteen, she was writing a novel. Through her long life, Spence’s storytelling, her reading, her writing, her communicative, educative energy were inseparable from her identification with the community she had grown up with. She wrote her novel Clara Morison, published in London in 1854, when the gold rush depopulated Adelaide, but partly also to redress the novelist Thackeray’s misrepresentation of the situation of emigrant women like herself. In An Autobiography (1825–1910), published posthumously and now reprinted in a splendid, annotated edition, Spence presents herself powerfully as an Australian writer with local, national and international affiliations. She did what Woolf was later to do, defining for herself a set of ‘elective affinities’ that included Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, alongside younger Australian and American contemporaries such as Catherine Martin (1847–1937) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). But it was never easy. Looking back, she concludes that ‘though Australia was to be a great country there was no market for literary work, and the handicap of distance from the reading world was great’. She puts her finger on a dilemma that Australian writers still face. ‘If stories are excessively Australian they lose the sympathies of the bulk of the public,’ Spence observes. ‘If they are mildly Australian, the work is thought to lack distinctiveness.’ She wanted ‘to see Australia steadily and see it whole’, which meant not simplifying. When her later novels failed to find publishers, she noted that ‘the only novels worth publishing in Australia were sporting or political novels’.⁷ What has changed is that tales of sport and politics are marketed now as non-fiction – memoirs and diaries.

Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw continued Spence’s tradition, as M. Barnard Eldershaw, but their work is out of print, too, as I discovered a couple of years ago when recommending Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947, first published unabridged, 1983) to my friend Mary Cunnane. Mary asked: ‘Where’s the Norton?’ She was referring to the Norton Anthology of American Literature or an equivalent that could furnish her with a compendious education in Australian literature. Mary had worked for Norton in New York before moving to Australia some years ago, where she is now a literary agent. In 1979 she had watched the NAAL begin as a two-volume venture, dear to the publisher’s heart, and then grow, thanks to impressive sales, to the current five-volume edition (2003). Taken up around the world, the NAAL, for better or worse, established a canon. Revised continuously since its first appearance, it has generated many spin-offs. The latest version is impressively expansive and inclusive. Norton – still an independent publisher – is synonymous with its anthologies and with quality literary publishing.

The closest was the fine Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (1990), edited by Ken Goodwin and Alan Lawson. Despite a good reception and respectable sales upon publication, however, it has long been out of print.

Mary and I began to wonder whether a new anthology might help recover Australian literature for a new generation. We were, at the time, vice-president and president respectively of Sydney PEN, an international writers’ association with a concern for endangered literatures. In PEN’s name, and with support from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Macquarie University, we set about investigating. The situation proved more chronic than we realised. Surveys showed that Australian literature is not taught in many places because suitable texts are not available. Students are unfamiliar with it, and those who go on to become teachers resist it in the classroom, reducing interest still further. When asked to name the best Australian book, few people choose a pre-1980 title, and most pick one from the last five years. The history has apparently gone. We added our voices to a growing chorus of concern for what is happening to our literary heritage and lined up with other initiatives to bring Australian books back, such as the few scholarly Academy Editions of Australian Literature, the print-on-demand Classic Australian Works series supported by the Copyright Agency Limited through Sydney University Press, and the online provision of texts by Project Gutenberg of Australia.⁸

There has been much discussion of what an anthology might look like. The way the material is presented is important if the project is to attract new audiences. It needs to be lively, affordable and user-friendly, creating multiple contexts for Australian writing, a kind of Lonely Planet that guides different readers competently over the ground: many things to many people. We envisage a one-volume book of 1500 pages, chronologically organised, designed to work both in universities and schools, and for the general market, with a hardcover edition for the trade and an online teachers’ manual. Research suggests that key areas of interest are indigenous writing, early colonial writing and, generally, the period from 1950 to now, which we estimate would comprise 900 pages of the total. It would be an anthology for contemporary Australians. But we are coming to accept that it’s a quixotic undertaking in the current climate. The government’s favoured model of amortising costs through partnerships and linkages with wary industry, starved academy and feel-good community produces great windmills of management structure for a long-term, public-interest project such as this. Resources are needed to muster the estimated $350,000 to cover copyright permissions, many of which are owned offshore. ‘Build it and they will come,’ has been Mary’s mantra. Allen & Unwin, an Australian publisher with strengths in both trade and academic publishing, has already made a commitment. Now the blueprint and the brickies are there, but not yet the bricks and mortar to get going.

The sceptics wonder how much a book can do. The problem seems larger: the collapse of Australian literary studies; the toothlessness of Australian literature as a category; the malaise in literary publishing. In a paper titled ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’, Mark Davis shows how bean counters and marketing departments in big corporate publishing houses have stripped the literary of its prestige and no longer value it as an enduring investment. It’s a shift he analyses against a broader background: ‘The decline of the literary paradigm is part of a wider trend to the commodification of all cultural forms that is typical of the drive within neo-liberal societies to transform social relationships of the sort that once underpinned literary production, with its reliance on government support, coterie culture and educations systems, into market relationships wherein all potentially profitable forms of cultural production become media properties.’⁹ The neo-colonialism of globalisation has knocked Ozlit on the head.

Yet it is a mistake to measure literature by numbers. Gabriel Zaid has a neat counter-argument to the tyranny of sales figures. He observes that books can pay for themselves with 3000 copies, depending on how the publishing nuts and bolts are handled. Zaid identifies those 3000 readers, wherever they may be found, as the natural, rightful and most desirable audience for a book. They are the ones who give a book its community and move it into the ‘constellation’ of other books. For a writer, they’re all you need. The rest is just units. Hotdogs, as Mary would say. Zaid cites Octavio Paz’s prose masterpiece The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961), which appeared in a small printing and wasn’t reissued for nine years. It has since sold more than a million copies and become a classic. ‘If it had been a television program, it would never have been produced,’ says Zaid.

Mary Cunnane and I remain hopeful that the anthology can happen, even if in hands other than our own. Perhaps we should have heeded Jason Epstein’s sobering account of the quarter-century of struggle needed to get the magnificent Library of America series afloat, an ongoing series of affordable quality editions of American literature paid for partly by subscribers. Negotiating the territories of academics, publishers, philanthropists and users took daunting stamina and diplomacy. Edmund Wilson, its progenitor, didn’t live to see it. But here in Australia we do seem to be living in anthologising times, buffing up the icons we’ve been bequeathed, the ones that haven’t been sent to the tip or the garage sale. And why shouldn’t a new Australian anthology be progressive rather than merely monumentalising and preservative? For the moment, at least, Australian literature joins the national anthem, the flag and the republic as something we are half-hearted about. Perhaps, self-doubting as ever, we fear that, if we set up a grand shelf of our own, our books will just stay there on the shelf, wallflowers in the global dance party. In the battle of the books where Pell lamented that ‘students are not forced to confront and learn from the great English language classics but are allowed to sink towards the sordid and the dismal’, reporting that ‘parents wonder why their children have never heard of the Romantic poets, Yeats or the Great War poets and never ploughed through a Brontë, Orwell or Dickens novel’, and Catharine Lumby, chair of the Media and Communications Department at Sydney University, came spiritedly to the defence of today’s teachers, commending ‘the effort … put into getting our young people to think creatively, critically and ethically’, neither combatant mentioned an Australian text by way of example.¹⁰ The culture that the wars are about is still elsewhere. ‘Life is over there – / Behind the Shelf // The Sexton keeps the Key … ‘, as Emily Dickinson knew in the 1860s, even when she was at the heart of the American Renaissance.

It feels strange, though, to be letting it slide without much of a murmur after the vociferous efforts of past generations. As recently as the bicentennial year of 1988, Australian literature appeared triumphant. Now the work of our forerunners is left undiscussed and unsung. In The English Men (1997), Leigh Dale implicates university English departments in the fate of Australian writing. She concludes her study by suggesting that in literary and cultural studies, ‘there must be a recovery of the sense of audience’. Creative writing seeks to engage audiences, too. Maybe through a renewed understanding of Australia’s literary traditions and contexts by creative writers a reconnection with community and social purpose will be achieved. Literature, with the humanities and the other arts, is vital to extending the empathy, the imagination across barriers, the ‘appropriate compassion’ of an engaged citizenry.¹¹ That deep-thinking cultural critic A.A. Phillips, coiner of ‘the cultural cringe’, considered all these things years ago in his struggle to reinvigorate Australia from the ‘stagnation’ of the 1920s and 1930s. He ‘believed that a community’s members draw strength from pride in their fellowship’, and that included pride in their own culture. For him, the local in no way precluded other, larger contexts: ‘Each man lives at the centre of a series of concentric circles of felt membership,’ Phillips wrote at the end his life. He understood that the Now and Where of time and place are fundamental to any writer’s work.¹²

Yet Australian literature remains a fugitive phenomenon. Perhaps that is part of its charm. It grows from the oral, from the long-delayed passing of words across oceans of separation, from the tall-story tellers and bullshit artists. It’s like those dispersed books from the legendary library of Borroloola, lost in the bush. Today’s creative writers will have to wait for a compendium of Australian writing for their shelves, or go searching for themselves in the undergrowth. We are well served by libraries and second-hand bookshops. The trouble is you need to know what to look for. We’ll have to keep talking, comparing notes, swapping books, exchanging information and ideas, if we are to make and maintain for those who come after us the traditions we need as readers, writers and citizens.

^1. Incidentally, the anthology we used then was called Off the Shelf, edited by Andrew K. Thomson, first published in Brisbane by Jacaranda Press in 1960. It was a taste-forming anthology, almost half of which was Australian, with the editor making no apologies for his choices: ‘Throughout the whole of Off the Shelf poems written by Australians have been placed in proximity to similar poems by English or American poets’ (p.ii).

^2. James Ley, ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’, Australian Book Review, April 2005, pp.32–38. Ley regrets our ‘broader cultural failure to attend to literature as a representative, ironic art form. There is plenty of chatter about books,’ he writes, ‘but little in the way of serious consideration of basic questions about literature, about how and what it expresses, about what to expect from it, about how it should be read’ (p.33).

^3. A National Survey of Reading, Buying and Borrowing Books for Pleasure, conducted for Books Alive by A.C. Nielsen (2004); Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books (2004), p.142.

^4. George Packer, Mother Jones, May/June 2004, quoted by Richard Johnstone, ‘“Spasms of Assertion”: The Politics and Aesthetics of Blogging’, Australian Book Review, May 2005, p.35.

^5. Literacy Standards in Australia, http://www.dest.gov.au/lsia, accessed 4 October 2005. Also Jeff McMullen, ‘The Gift’, Australian Author, December 2004, pp.14–17.

^6. Cardinal George Pell, ‘The Dictatorship of Relativism’, Address to the National Press Club, Canberra,21 September 2005, http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/Archbishop/Addresses/2005921, accessed 4 October 2005.

^7. Ever Yours, C.H. Spence: Catherine Helen Spence’s An Auto- biography (1825–1910), Diary (1894) and Some Correspondence (1894–1910), edited by Susan Magarey, with Barbara Wall, Mary Lyons and Maryan Beams (2005), pp.39, 42, 54, 133, 202, 193.

^8. For example, Hilary McPhee, ‘Writers in the Global Australian Village’, 2004 Colin Simpson Lecture, www.asauthors.org, and Jeremy Fisher, ‘Heritage Restoration’, Australian Author, April 2004, p.13.

^9. Mark Davis, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’, Public Lecture, The University of Melbourne, August 2005, p.15. Also Andrew McCann, ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden: A Note on Literary Pessimism’, Overland 177 Summer 2004, pp.22–24, and Mary Cunnane, ‘Moving Units or Moving Hearts’, Paper, Melbourne Writers’ Festival, 27 August 2005.

^10. Pell; Catharine Lumby, ‘Murder and madness? It’s All in the Bard’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 September 2005, p.13.

^11. As Martha C. Nussbaum argues, ‘Implementing Rational Compassion: Moral and Civic Education’, Upheavals of Thought (2002), pp.425–33.

^12. A.A. Phillips, ‘Cultural Nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s: A Personal Account’, Brian Head and James Walter (eds), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (1988), pp.137–141.

A review of Anton Chekhov’s ‘Ivanov’, first performed in 1887, and staged at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, in August 2005.

Be warned: what follows is in the nature of a rave. It’s not often one is tempted to weep with gratitude for how the theatre has brought a play to such magisterial life that one can’t imagine ever wanting to see it again – let alone supposing it could be done better. If you’re tired of over-smart productions doing vulgar, opportunistic things with great plays, then Ariette Taylor’s recent production of Chekhov’s Ivanov at fortyfivedownstairs (that’s 45 Flinders Lane) was the place to be. It was an occasion of unalloyed joy and celebration.

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

In their first novels, both Le Hunte and Teo range across continents and generations, telling sagas that test the meaning of family, of heritage and inheritance. Now, in their second novels, they test the meaning of family against the other bond that makes independence a form of betrayal: the shared history of survivors. But they choose very different battlegrounds.

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.

In Ten Pound Poms, the study of Australia’s British migrants most definitely comes of age. The culmination of a decade spent listening to hundreds of life stories, this masterful book shares with the best oral histories a commitment to empathy and to getting myriad stories right. Using letters, diaries and photographs, Hammerton and Thomson place people’s intimate journeys into the stories of large-scale movements without ever sacrificing those people to abstractions. They might be buffeted by the forces of history, but the characters in this book are decision-makers, negotiators and knowing compromisers.

Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.

Mayer engages the reader by producing a carefully constructed investigation of Baker’s career, which includes a description of his initial experience of cinema. Baker was twelve in 1928 when his father bartered goldfish for tickets to the gala opening of MGM’s newly renovated Empire Theatre in Leicester Square. They watched a Movietone short sound film followed by Trelawny of the Wells, a silent feature accompanied by a ninety-piece orchestra. Roy Baker was so awestruck that he set his sights on becoming a filmmaker as soon as he could leave school.

Beyond Belief is yet another account of the atomic tests that were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1962. It does not deal with nuclear strategy, the technical aspects of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. It is weak on secondary sources, and there is no reference to archival records. The absence of footnoting makes it of limited use for detailed scholarship. It relies to a great extent on the 1984-85 McClelland Royal Commission for a discussion of the reasons behind the bomb tests, the so-called ‘Black Mist’ incident, the undeclared use of Cobalt in the trials and the poor oversight of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission. The section of the book, based on the writing of Alan Parkinson, dealing with the problems in cleaning up the test sites is useful, but hardly new.

The book contains a clear message: the veterans of the tests should be accorded the same consideration as members of the armed services who fought in combat areas. This is reflected by the fact that one of its authors, Avon Hudson, has long campaigned on behalf of those who have suffered from the effects of the tests. Beyond that, the book assembles testimony from civilians and service personnel alike to record a process of culpability by the authorities from the moment the decision was taken to conduct the tests and continuing through to the present.

Peter Russell, a distinguished Canadian student of the politics of the judiciary, asks if ‘my people’ – the English settlers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US – can live honourably. Is their authority defensible against indigenous people’s charge that ‘my people’ bullied them out of their sovereignty? Because European colonial power has been shadowed by a sense of moral unease, interpreting the colonists’ laws matters. ‘There is a lot of leeway in the law,’ Russell observes, ‘and no more so than in legal cultures based on the common law.’ The High Court of Australia’s decisions in Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) – making native title recognisable to the common law – seemed to Russell to confirm judges’ potential to be the conscience of liberal constitutionalism.

While Russell’s phrase ‘legal magic’ usually conveys his scepticism about a statute or a judgment, ‘legal magic’ also reflects his sense of the law’s plasticity. The law is ever in need of interpretation. As authorised interpreters, judges can ensure that law serves the national community. To reconcile ‘might’ with ‘right’ sometimes requires judges to tell legislators to change their laws and administrators to change what they do. In judicial discretion, Russell sees one of the paths of his people’s redemption.

Picturesque Pursuits is a pioneering survey of a neglected area within Australian cultural history: the lives and works of colonial women artists. Caroline Jordan places her analysis of this subject within a broader social, political and historical frame. This approach allows her to reveal the multifaceted importance of an art tradition that was often interwoven with women’s daily domestic life. Evidently, colonial women’s art does not conform to traditional notions of a studio based ‘high art’, and its significance extends beyond the limited definitions of this category. As Jordan points out, most women artists produced works that were confined to the lower-value genres of miniatures, botanical studies, picturesque sketches and scrapbook collages. Their works were often small-scale mixed-media pieces of varying technical proficiency. The fact that the majority of colonial women’s art is found in libraries and archives rather than in the major galleries has further con- tributed to its virtual exclusion from the high-art canon.

A misunderstanding of the term ‘amateur tradition’ within a nineteenth-century context has also contributed to the neglect of colonial women’s art. Jordan points out that the division between amateur and professional artists was not clear-cut. Mary Allport’s botanical illustrations, for example, were highly skilled and not ‘amateurish’ in the modern sense of the word. However, she was supported by her family rather than from the sale of her work. Her art played a valuable role in strengthening social relations and fulfilling community obligations. In contrast, professional women artists were sometimes forced through financial necessity to carry out paid commissions and were considered to be of a lower social status than the amateur artist.

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – partners in life and work – made three documentaries in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: First Contact (1983), Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These films have won several awards which is fitting, given that each exemplifies what is possible in the medium of observational filmmaking, where the drama evolving from real situations outdoes anything that could be imagined in a Hollywood studio. Of course, they were shrewd in their choice of subject. With its mixture of cultures and traditions, PNG offers plenty of conflict, the essential salt in the documentary pie. Anderson and Connolly had a special taste for salt – who else would have recognised local mayoral elections as a site of grand drama as they did for Rats in the Ranks (1996)?

More so even than The Age, the New Yorker is a journal shaped and defined by its illustrators and cartoonists. For many decades it did not include photojournalism at all, and it only appears these days under sufferance. The cartoons contribute crucially to the ethos and style of a magazine that depends a lot on ethos and style. To think of the New Yorker is almost inevitably to think of the famous cover by Saul Steinberg that shows the cars, buildings, and people of Ninth and Tenth Avenues filling the foreground, then the Hudson River marking the edge of the real, figurative world, beyond which New Jersey, Nebraska, Japan, and the Pacific Ocean are just names on a vaguely conceived map. Parochial universalism fuelled by an ironic sophistication is the ethos of this famous image, and a thread of continuity in the work of the four New Yorker artists profiled in Iain Topliss’s fine and sensitive book.

Robert Murphy, in his contribution to this collection of essays on The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, focuses on a little-seen example of the ‘British noir tradition’, Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1952). Murphy makes a convincing case for The Long Memory, placing it in the frame with other, better-known contributions to the genre such as John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947), Hamer’s own, earlier It Never Rains on Sundays (1947) and, best known of all, Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Long Memory, Murphy concludes, is ‘a good example of the invisibility of British cinema’, and in that striking phrase he seems to imply that the fate of forgotten or neglected British films such as The Long Memory is to be doubly invisible, relegated to an also-ran position within a national cinema that has itself been unfairly relegated over the years.

The ‘invisibility of British cinema’ may seem an odd way of putting it, when a film such as The Third Man appears on most film buffs’ lists of the top fifty or one hundred films ever made, British or otherwise, and so can hardly be described as invisible. But The Third Man, notwithstanding its provenance, is more about internationalism and statelessness than it is about Britain, thus neatly slipping out from under the rule that has it that Britishness itself is the cinematic problem. It’s a rule that was subscribed to by Satyajit Ray, who is quoted by Brian McFarlane in his introduction. The British, observed Ray in passing, are not ‘temperamentally equipped to make the best use of the movie camera’. Other luminaries have been even more scathing. McFarlane again quotes the foreign competition, this time in the form of François Truffaut’s ‘silly aphorism’ regarding the ‘incompatibility’ of cinema and Britain. And Wendy Everett, in her essay on Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), relays Jean-Luc Godard’s pompous put-down: ‘The British never were very gifted filmmakers’ (Godard excepting Davies alone from the comprehensive sweep of his dismissal).

Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.

Slattery invokes Knox more than once in his own ‘modern adventures in the ancient world’, and he also has some of Hecht’s double attunement to the beautiful and the terrible. His book may best be seen as an essay on the durability and the utility of Classical art and insight, in particular the Greek version of these things. As he writes at the beginning, ‘A plea for classical literacy unfolds in the following pages, a piece of advocacy on behalf of the ancients’; and the book’s last sentence runs: ‘Twenty-five centuries after the climax of the pagan world, it is revealing itself anew.’ I hope that this last claim is true with some generality: it is certainly true for Slattery.

John Mateer’s fifth poetry collection confirms him as a poet of considerable assurance and originality. The Ancient Capital of Images is, in a sense, a metaphor for the poetic imagination – the entity formerly known as the Muse. The terrain ranges from South Africa to Australia to Japan. It is in the latter section that his achievement is most impressive. There is little here of the travelogue, the sense being rather of an inward journey.

The idea of home is a distinct motif in Mateer’s interrogations of his relationship to both Australia and South Africa, and these represent the most overtly political parts of the book. I found the South African section particularly engaging, the poems more closely realised. At the outset, in ‘The Kramat of Tuan Guru’, Mateer acknowledges the uneasy truce between poetry and experience: ‘Outside your tomb, staring at the bright Atlantic / my thoughts aren’t words, are this listening – .’ Particularly affecting is ‘An Empty Flat’, about his father, with its wonderful juxtapositions: ‘a box of ashes; the family handgun; / and memories absent from this poem.’

I remember Richard Waterhouse as my lecturer in American colonial history at Sydney University in 1978. Then in his late twenties, he stood at the lectern as if itching to break free, arms flailing, feet shifting, constantly pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose; every lecture had its moment of vaudeville. After daily suffering the monotone perorations of those who stood entombed in their academic gowns, I enjoyed his lectures, which seemed driven by an infectious curiosity about the past. Perhaps it was also the material that captured the students’ imagination. American history, laced as it was with any number of grand and naïve utopias, could be read as epic and tragic drama, a constant fall from grace.

The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia begins by way of the American example. Unlike the religious idealism that marked the foundation of Puritan New England after 1630, and the more entrepreneurial models of Virginia, South Carolina or England’s Caribbean colonies, ‘Botany Bay was intended to be structured and hierarchical’. At the same time, it was still very much part of the British government’s broader plans to create a colonial trading network. From the beginning, dreams of a successful rural industry – pastoralism, agrarianism, the yeoman farmer – formed part of the colony’s raison d’être.

There is an almost overwhelming tide of historical texts for young people being published at the moment. Fictional accounts of actual events are enormously popular, and frequently the diary form is used, as this is felt to be more accessible to young people, and also gives the writer licence to use the historical present tense with impunity.

Gary Crew and Mark Wilson have collaborated on Young Murphy: A Boy’s Adventure, which presents a diary in a picture-book format. John Murphy was a fifteen-year-old boy who was part of Ludwig Leichhardt’s expedition to find a route through the Darling Downs of south-east Queensland to Port Essington, near present-day Darwin. During the expedition, Leichhardt’s incompetence as any kind of navigator or leader led to the loss of supplies and transport, serious altercations with Aborigines and, ultimately, death and disability for team members. Crew presents Murphy’s diary in spare and period prose. Murphy’s devotion to his new father figure, John Gilbert, is seen in his increasing interest in botany and drawing, as well as in the necessary questioning of his childhood beliefs. His disgust with Leichhardt’s leadership is evident in his sorrow at the loss of John Gilbert and in his boyish outrage and helplessness in the face of cruelty to animals.

In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.

‘Time will tell’ is an old adage that, in a peculiar way, links and separates these three different tales. While Victor Kelleher’s moving and poetic Dogboy lures readers into the harsh ‘Dry’ of a time that never was and never will be, Jutta Goetze’s story plunges into snow-bound Bavaria, in a time both familiar and strange to contemporary audiences. Kerry Greenwood, on the other hand, situates her futuristic sci-fi in a place and era at once known and yet irrevocably altered; creating an anachronistic story that is both challenging and exciting. All of these writers rely on temporality to both weave and anchor their stories with differing results.

Kelleher’s ‘dogboy’, the offspring of a nameless woman who sacrifices her newborn to the Great Father mountain, survives his first few hours of life only because of the tenacity of a freshly whelped bitch. Resisting the forces of nature, this dog, her one surviving pup, and her human child are discovered, after storms and floods, on the outskirts of a superstitious community. Despite their efforts to rid themselves of the boy’s unsettling presence, and despite attacks by an eagle, a pack of wolves and a foraging bear, the villagers eventually leave their new neighbours alone and even construe the boy’s survival as god-given. While none of the villagers is harmed by the animal incursions, the boy is both marked and saved by them, and the totems of his survival are hung around his neck by a kindly servant. The latter alone shows tenderness to the ‘half-beast’ boy who, as the years pass and a drought grips the countryside, grows and develops before the villagers’ eyes. Much to their horror and chagrin, the child also learns human speech and it is he who insists on the appellation ‘dogboy’, which will both exclude and bind him for years to come.

The story moves chronologically, following dogboy’s rapid maturity and his eventual exodus from the village, firstly, in the company of a devious pedlar and, later, in order to pursue what he believes is his destiny. His odyssey is heart-wrenching. As dogboy learns about the complexities of human nature – the wiles and cruelty that men and women are capable of – he also learns about himself and his own ‘humanity’. The lessons are sometimes brutal and unkind, but they are meaningful and always learned over time.

The climax of the story is a beautiful weaving of past, present and future; faith and material reality; and familial bonds and self-awareness: all of which are humbling for both the protagonist and the reader alike.

There have been other well-known tales written about children raised by animals (Edgar Rice Burroughs’s and Rudyard Kipling’s stories spring to mind), yet to compare Kelleher’s work to these is to imply that he does not contribute anything new to this type of narrative, but merely dallies with an established genre. That misunderstands and misrepresents a compelling story, sublimely told, that will leave readers, regardless of age or gender, simultaneously inspired by human potential and saddened by their own limitations.

In Snow Wings, Jutta Goetze is very aware of her readers and of the demands they make of a fantasy/quest story: a group of quickly established characters with identifiable idiosyncrasies, a frightening set of adversaries, a series of hurdles that show the group’s strengths and weaknesses, and a triumphal return. Goetze even throws in some domesticated and clever animals, such as a cat that thinks it is a hat and a cockatoo that has a better vocabulary than most students.

Set in an imaginary place named Wintersheim, an eclectic group of teenagers from different cultural backgrounds are soon thrown together, both to protect a young boy they call IDK (an acronym for ‘I Don’t Know’ – he can’t remember his name) and to save the town from the encroachment of the terrible and rapidly growing Shadows, who, coincidentally, appear around the time IDK is found.

This tale is relentless in its adventures as the children leave Wintersheim and magically move through a barrier that takes them into not quite another world, but nonetheless into danger and potential resolution. With the help of the mysterious Weatherman, who appears to be able to move between our world and the next, the children discover they have to find the ‘King’s crystal’ and thus restore light and equilibrium to both worlds. They confront more monstrous Shadows, a giant snowman, ice-lizards, avalanches and their own internal fears and anxieties.

While Goetze sets out to show how a group of disparate and differently talented teenagers can learn to work together and arrive at an understanding in order to thwart a mutual enemy, sometimes the characterisations fall into cliché and stereotype. There are also some inconsistencies in characterisation and plot that may not sit well with older readers. These misgivings aside, young readers should enjoy a story that presents a different setting from most young adult fantasies and that cleverly borrows Odysseus’s ancient ploy to escape the Cyclops, Polyphemus, to ensure the young protagonists’ victory.

Kerry Greenwood, a well-known author of crime novels and aficionado of ancient myths and legends, also uses themes, names and tropes from older fables, and, in doing so, constructs a gripping narrative. Binary oppositions collide and are unravelled in this tale of self-discovery and political machinations.

The Rat and the Raven is set in some indeterminate, post-apocalyptic future in which, above and below the poppet head of Ballarat, two potential adversaries – the ageing tyrannical ‘Rat’ King and youthful Bran the ‘Raven’ – are destined to meet.

Laden with allegory and metaphor, this book sparingly, yet clearly, exposes how rapid the decline of so-called civilisation can be when human-instituted systems collapse. Ballarat, now known as the Kingdom of the ‘Rat’, has deteriorated into an outpost of lawlessness and corruption. Yet the reader feels that it is just a microcosm of the global social changes that war, systemic failure and death have bred.

In this dystopian setting, nepotism thrives and power is held by predatory types who identify weaknesses and exploit and abuse them. Even universities, supposed bastions of social equity that pride themselves on correcting such abuses, are, in Greenwood’s cowardly new world, willing to use whatever means enable them to survive. It is perhaps significant that the heroes of this tale are from a university. On a quest to reunite family and friends, they journey by train along pre-existing tracks to derail one system and replace it, through passive resistance, with another more benign one. Linking the two rivals and two ‘worlds’ is a unique character, the androgynous ‘mouth of the prophet’, Scathe. Possessed of female breasts and a penis, the hauntingly beautiful Scathe is a child of incest – a necessary abhorrence, kept by the Sibylline Jocasta who, in an appropriation of the Oedipus fable, is blinded by her own hands and cannot read the future she painstakingly inscribes on the leaves that flutter into her cave. Her reliance on Scathe is pitiful and cruel, but he eventually sees through her lies and is unwittingly set on a path of liberation from his past.

Scarred by Jocasta, this tale of the downfall of an oppressive régime is as much about Scathe and the personal, familial and social politics that have ensured his outsider status and fuelled his personal demons, and about their gradual disintegration.

The love story between Bran and Scathe is unusual and compelling, and Greenwood is to be congratulated for taking readers in a direction that few have dared. At no stage is sexuality or masculinity compromised; instead, the notion of bonds and love, beyond those forged by the manacles of blood, is keenly played out.

As the first book in a new series, this is a more than promising start. One wonders, after employing ancient taboos and a variety of myths and legendary names as metaphors, where else Greenwood will take us.

The accounts of childhood in this anthology date from the 1920s to the 1960s. Most deal with experiences in Western Australia, although three are written by migrant women and are partly anchored in Europe. Two are extracted from the autobiographies of well-known writers, Dorothy Hewett and Victor Serventy, two are taken from self-published memoirs, and one, by Alice Bilari Smith is taken from her book Under a Bilari Tree I Born. This last is based on tapes of oral history collected by the West Pilbara Oral History Group and published in 2002.

With the Harbour as the backdrop … the Festival of Dreaming seems well named. Looking out across the water, it is easy to dream away, the lights, the roads, the buildings, to picture the odd cooking fire, to smell that fish cooking.

Written in hotel rooms while working as a professional actor in various indigenous film, television and theatre productions, Peter Docker’s Someone Else’s Country is a deeply sensitive and at times intensely visceral engagement with contemporary indigenous culture. A work of non-fiction (the names are fictionalised), it is also a powerful historical document, which has at its heart the struggle of a non-indigenous author trying to find an authentic position from which to discuss the indigenous culture with which he largely identifies.

The book follows the journey of Stephen Motor (Docker’s fictional alias), as he travels from one production to another, from his home in St Kilda (Boonwurrung Country) to Redfern to Broken Hill. Motor, of Celtic heritage, has grown up on a station in Wudjari Country, near Esperance (which, we are reminded, means ‘Hope’), and has clearly forged strong indigenous connections both there, and in Melbourne and Sydney. The strength of these relationships is such that he is considered part of the family by numerous Aboriginal acquaintances and has been adopted, as it were, by a ‘Spirit Mum’ (the ‘blood mother’ of ‘Henry’, a colleague referred to as his ‘dhaambi’, or ‘brother’) from the Gunditjmara people.

That Motor identifies so strongly with indigenous culture, despite being non-indigenous, furnishes the work with its central paradox. Indeed, if it were simply a case of a non- indigenous author writing on behalf of indigenous Australia, the work would suffer fundamentally from questions of authority and authenticity. However, it is Motor’s continual process of self-interrogation – his constant calling into question of the viability of his own position – that provides the fulcrum on which his writing pivots. For example, when in inner Melbourne he learns of the death of a young friend, his sudden grief gives way to an overwhelming sense of shame: ‘What right do I have to this grief? I’m like a middle-class English kid listening to gangsta rap and thinking it’s all about me.’ The cogency of this simile for Motor’s anxiety lies in its vivid cultural currency; his dilemma is clearly one that strikes at the heart of contemporary attitudes. Although his position is relatively unique (his immersion in indigenous culture is such that he has grown used to being ‘the only gub in the photo’), his own responses to the suffering of his extended family and friends are constantly subjected to a vicious and unrelenting self-scrutiny.

That Docker is an actor by profession, always working to tell indigenous stories, places him in the frontline of what might be called the battleground of indigenous representation. The vital importance of this is seen in his reflections after a performance at the Festival of Dreaming, in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics: ‘Show goes really well. Another full house. People yelling for their stories. People so full of joy to see their stories up on stage. Telling stories is the best way to combat the ignorance that has prevailed in this nation. When people who’ve been marginalised suddenly feel celebrated for who they are, there’s a particular type of relief and outpouring of joy.’ However, despite the relevance of his contribution, Motor’s insecurities return time and again, as here, in the first rehearsal of a new play:

After the first half hour [of rehearsing with the all-Aboriginal cast], I’m humbled. My knowledge is a tiny thimble of water evaporating in the desert, awaiting the arrival of Burke and Wills.

I become convinced that every- one else is communicating in a way that I don’t understand. I feel a step behind. I don’t get all the jokes. Don’t understand all the shifts in the talk. I’m reaching out now.

George is reaching too, for something different from me. We share our reaching like a meal.

The mutual ‘reaching’ of this scene is as powerful an image of Motor’s predicament and, by extension, of the dilemma facing Australia’s historical conscience, as we are likely to find in contemporary writing on the subject.

Motor’s itinerant profession enables him to canvass the sheer diversity of indigenous culture (for to compare, for example, the Gunditjmara people in Victoria with the Waka Waka people in Queensland is, for Motor, ‘like comparing Sicilian Culture to Norwegian Culture. All Europeans – but completely different’). But alongside this diversity there are also shared experiences. Motor’s world is ravaged by violence, actual or threatened, and by drug and alcohol abuse. Indeed, the violence of Motor’s world is all-pervasive, extending beyond actual encounters (of which there are many), to the poetic violence of his literary descriptions. One of the numerous car accidents described in the book provides an example: ‘I look ahead. The corner is rushing up at us like Royal Marines screaming up the beachhead. A fist cocked for the king-hit.’ Yet we are also shown a world that celebrates the unshakeable bond of family, and one wherein it is absolutely vital that the stories of these families be told.

But it is his visceral responses to the violent roles he is to play as an actor that are perhaps the most poignant testimonies to Motor’s extraordinary capacity for empathy and identification. When he has to simulate the shooting of a peer on a film set, a ‘silent scream’ rips ‘out of [his] throat like a cavalry charge against women and children’; when in a play about Aboriginal deaths in custody, he almost passes out on a number of occasions, partly out of empathy, but also out of shame. Eventually, the distinction between representation and reality dissolves for Motor, as he comes to realise: ‘This is not just a play we’re doing here …’

Motor implicitly understands that he cannot viably assume the role of ‘An Arrente Everyman. A Nunga Jesus Christ. A Palawa Superman. A Gunditjmare Macbeth. A Koori Hamlet.’ Instead, one could argue he assumes the role of an Australian St Paul when, on a break from shooting a film in Broken Hill, he pauses to look at the night sky.

I look up. I look through the stars, not focusing on the light, but on the dark. Something like looking at those 3D images in the Sunday papers, but on a vast scale. And stretched out across half the sky is the great Emu spirit. I’m struck dumb. I’m on the road to Damascus, on my knees, rubbing the lightning from my eyes, wondering how long you can look and not see.

Docker’s mixture of European heritage and indigenous enculturation, together with his proximity, as an actor, to the dilemma of representation, make him an unlikely voice for indigenous Australia, but with this, his first book, he proves to be precisely that.

This is the last of David McKnight’s quartet of books on the Lardil people of Mornington Island, with whom he has worked from his first field trip in 1966 until his most recent in 2001. (For reviews in these pages of two of them, From Hunting to Drinking and Going the Whiteman’s Way, see the October 2004 and the February 2005 issues, respectively.) The title is characteristically challenging. A struggle for power in what we are always being assured was a tranquilly ordered society? Most of us have seen the pretty diagrams representing ‘traditional Aboriginal marriage practice’. How could violence and sorcery intrude on those elegant, iron-clad arrangements? Where all is prescribed, how can there be a struggle for power? And power over what?

Ruth Rothwax is back. The star of Lily Brett’s Too Many Men (2000) is still running a successful letter-writing business in New York City, but she’s branched out into greeting cards. Her father, Edek, with whom she made the trip to Poland in the earlier novel, has moved from Melbourne to New York to be near her. At the heart of the novel is the fraught, yet fond, relationship between them.

Despite many years in therapy and the restorative aspects of the visit to Poland, the Holocaust and its legacy continue to shape Ruth and help explain at least some of her lingering neuroses. When her friend Sonia, whom Ruth thinks must be one of the few women in New York who doesn’t have a food disorder, asks why she doesn’t eat properly, Ruth replies: ‘I can’t eat red meat. I associate it with burning flesh.’

To varying degrees, both of these second novels by Brisbane authors conjure southern Queensland as completely different from any other place in Australia. It is disconcerting but also beguiling. Disorientation and displacement are strong themes in both novels. In very different ways, they explore the lives of characters who have been lost, abandoned or orphaned at some time. Now each of these adults is discovering that their pasts are washing up as fast and surely as the flooding Brisbane River, which is omnipresent in Manfred Jurgensen’s The Eyes of the Tiger.

‘A crystal atmosphere reflecting a liquid blue never excelled in purity even by soft azure splendour hung over the old Venetian palaces by the magic brush of Turner, lay on the mountain tops throughout the weekend. Sunshine illumed the crags and played fantastic vagaries of colour amidst the fresh foliage, gleaming in gilded beauty on the outer fringe of fern curtains and throwing into deeper shade the bosky nooks of the laminated cliffs and mossy gorges.’

One Edwardian visitor to Katoomba was so inspired by its beauty that he felt compelled to send this fulsome (and full-page) account to the Blue Mountain Echo. While today’s tourists may sometimes appear less enraptured when they are released from coaches at Echo Point, their itineraries still adhere to a sublime principle of grand depths and sweeping views. But travel several towns downhill to the walks around Hazelbrook or Lawson, and you will find yourself virtually alone among the chill pools and dainty waterfalls that the Victorian imagination once transformed into fairy grottoes.

‘One day I will have to tell (my daughter) … that her grandmother is a bag lady.’ Josiane Behmoiras’s exquisitely crafted memoir of her mother, Dora, delivers its punchline in the opening chapter. Behmoiras’s childhood and youth were shadowed by her mother’s untreated mental illness and by their descent into chronic penury, loneliness and fear. Nonetheless, the overall effect of this work is of warmth and colour, and of a keen sense of the absurd. The pleasure taken in recapturing each vignette seems to reflect its subject’s irrepressible fighting spirit. Dora fostered her daughter’s artistic gifts, as well as her capacity for love, joy and compassion.

Dora was born into a large middle-class Turkish Jewish family whose fortunes appear to have declined after migrating to France in the 1920s. In Behmoiras’s first snapshot, Dora is well on her way to pauperisation. A single mother in her forties, she keeps house for an elderly Parisian doctor, sleeping with her child under the kitchen table and keeping watch for her enemy, the ‘Algerian’. The death of her only surviving brother tips her over the edge. Soon she and her daughter are sleeping rough in the French countryside. Under archaic vagrancy laws criminalising homelessness, Dora, a French resident for thirty-six years, is picked up by the police and threatened with ‘repatriation’. On observing that she is Jewish: ‘alors, the solution to your problem is simple’: emigrate to Israel. In old age, life repeats itself. She is picked up off the streets of Tel Aviv to fade away in a nursing home.

True crime is experiencing a boom these days. Its popularity is directly connected to the number of forensic investigative shows on television. The average viewer of CSI probably knows more about criminal profiling and blood pattern analysis than most retired police officers. At least one book, it seems, is published on every major murder committed in Australia. Some murders warrant the public’s attention more than others; they represent turning points in our society. A good example is the disappearance on 15 July 1977 of Liberal parliamentary candidate and anti-marijuana crusader Donald Mackay from a hotel car park in the Riverina town of Griffith. That evening, Mackay left the Griffith Hotel and headed for his van. A local accountant heard a groaning noise and three ‘whip cracks’. By eight o’clock that night, when Mackay hadn’t returned home, his wife became worried. At midnight, Barbara Mackay rang the Griffith police and reported her husband missing. She had been wary of calling the local police earlier because she didn’t trust them – and with good reason. Early next morning, Mackay’s solicitor found the locked van in the hotel car park. Three spent cartridges lay on the ground, and Mackay’s keys were nearby. Blood was smeared on the front mudguard, the side door and front wheel; the blood type matched Mackay’s. Despite an exhaustive search and a large government reward, his body was never found.

Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

I was reminded, just the other day, of the extent to which our culture is saturated with crime when I saw, parked in a quiet suburban street near where I write this, a hoon car with an array of stick-on imitation bullet holes dotted across its rear flank. The paradoxical nature of this form of decoration is perhaps analogous to that of so-called ‘crazy paving’ on suburban driveways in the 1970s. The scattering of those fake bullet holes had been arranged to look both random and just right.