There is a mesmerising scene in Carpentaria when Joseph Midnight is asked if he has seen the fugitive Will Phantom, a young local Aboriginal man who is single-handedly waging a guerrilla war against a large lead ore mining company. He eyes the questioner and astutely spots him as a ‘Southern blackfella … a real smart one, educated, acting as a guide. He got on a tie, clean white shirt and a nice suit.’ His response is several pages long, a vivid, vernacular stream of detail about the essence of Will: his relationship with his father and his country, his difference to other men and women, his ability to control his own fate. ‘Oh! Poor me – What a history. This lad was writing memory with a firestick that made lightning look dull. So if you want to know what Will Phantom looked like – he looked like that.’ Midnight’s reverent delivery has lacerating wit; he plays his listener for the outsider he is, yet he does it with a tone of sincerity. Whether it is the charismatic voice of her omniscient narrator or the everyday dialogue spoken by her characters, Wright recognises the strength of the oral tradition as a satirical and ironic tool. The combination of storytelling on a mythic scale with the guile of the knowing look generates the energy required to drive this genius epic.

Carpentaria is set in the small town of Desperance. It is a place with a stratified population. The deeply insecure white community occupies ‘Uptown’ with its neat, clean houses and its unquestioning sense of entitlement. The Aboriginal population, represented by the ‘Pricklebush’ mob and divided into two feuding camps, clings to the eastern and western fringes of the town. Much of the dramatic action of the novel is derived from local politics and from the intensity of the surrounding landscape and the extremes of the tropical climate. The narrator guides the reader through the ancient gulf terrain with a tone that can switch from reverence to cackling derision in a flash. The feeling that you are an outsider, an interloper, never leaves you – one minute you are being confided in, whether it is about local gossip or the movements of ancestral spirits – the next you are left stranded and completely lost.

IBy the Balls opens in the 1950s, when young Laszlo Urge and his family were forced to leave Stalinist Hungary and head to Australia. Laszlo was shocked to find his new country to be a ‘dry and colourless’ place where soccer (which he refers to as ‘football’) was unpopular. However, this situation was to change. In the following decades, Laszlo became ‘Les Murray’, a popular television sports commentator who has publicly championed his favourite game.

Hold the hearts close to your heart:
they’ll feed each other blooms of colour

and the nudity of shapes
until you are bursting

Welcome to the feast, piccolo pasero,
A feast that never ends, of loyalty and treachery.
Two are sold for a farthing, little sparrow

How did you get in, confront the tracery
Beyond the boarded-up high window
To fly so gaily past the painted sky?

Everything happens fast and then goes –
the new movie you were waiting for
that you’ve suddenly just seen, the tunnel
under the harbour that seemed to take forever
now built and grooved by a million trips.
In winter fruit trees bud, shops
are full of summer clothes; only this
mind is slow, still stalling on the same
questions, never getting it, left behind
by life as by some wild-eyed nag
storming down the street, her hoofprints
pasted in the grass.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Percy Grainger is a minstrel wrapped in a harlequin inside a jack-in-the-box. His personality, obsessions, and general eccentricities still cause one to gasp and stretch one’s eyes even almost half a century after his own hypnotic eyes closed forever. His music, too, remains quicksilver; indefinable in its eclecticism, yet the work of a sprite who was also a genius who, magpie-like, collected music from wildly different sources to stuff into the capacious if overcrowded nest that was his mind.

It is a wonder Grainger had the time to write anything down apart from music. But he was a ceaseless annotator who (writes Malcolm Gillies, in the introduction to Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger) left more than half a million words of autobiographical reminiscences. Why, though, has it taken so long for these thoughts to join the existing volumes of published letters and essays? Here, one feels deep sympathy for the task that faced the three editors of this book, Gillies, David Pear. and Mark Carroll, who might have found it easier to retranslate The Iliad or hieroglyphics from the dusty walls of some recently discovered tomb. Gillies describes the texts as ‘diverse raw materials’, adding: ‘[they] are mainly written by hand and are in highly varied states of preservation (hence, occasional references to illegibility). They present the widest range of connection and also disconnection.’

David Malouf’s fiction has been justly celebrated for its veracity. His prose, at once lyrical and precise, has an extraordinary capacity to evoke what a character in an early story called the ‘grainy reality’ of life. For Malouf, small concrete details convey a profound understanding of the defining power of memory. He has a strong sense of the way the most mundane object can embody the past, how its shape or texture can send us back to a specific time and place and mood, just as Proust summons a flood of memory from the aroma of a madeleine dipped in tea. This tangible quality to memory is essential to our sense of self. The prisoners of war in The Great World (1990), for example, cling to their memories as a bulwark against the potentially overwhelming horror of their experiences. They treasure anything, however small, that provides a physical link with home, knowing that these relics help them to reconstruct the past and thus retain a grip on their identity and their sanity.

John Kinsella’s new memoir, Fast, Loose Beginnings, may have been published by the august publishing house of Melbourne University Publishing, but it is nevertheless a garage-band of a book. It is, as its title signals, both fast and loose. Its rhythms aren’t always graceful, and its timbres aren’t always smooth. You can almost hear the hum of the amplifiers. The poet Jaya Savige, in his review of the book for the Sydney Morning Herald, commented on the book’s lack of polish.

The memoir is indeed unpolished, but few people complain that Nick Cave (or Elliot Smith or Björk or any other alternative-music darling) can’t hold a tune with great authority, or that bands such as The White Stripes can’t actually play their instruments with great skill. Such music does not lack style. Rather, its style is one of spirit, energy and – often enough – anger.

There is plenty of spirit and energy, and possibly some anger, in Fast, Loose Beginnings. The link with popular music operates thematically as well as stylistically. The narrative of Fast, Loose Beginnings is one of an artist’s (usually drug and alcohol-related) excesses giving way to a successful creative career. If Kinsella was a rock star, he could be telling his story on Parkinson. But Kinsella is a poet, and while he may not be about to appear on Parkinson, he has attracted plenty of attention, not just at home but also internationally. Indeed, where ‘home’ is for Kinsella might not be a simple matter, given that he now lives in England, the United States and Western Australia. Kinsella, though not yet in his mid-forties, has published more than thirty books. These have mostly been poetry, but he has also written fiction, theatrical works and an earlier memoir, Auto (2001).

Although not stated explicitly, Fast, Loose Beginnings picks up more or less from Auto, which is largely concerned with Kinsella’s early, pre-public life. Auto covers the author’s childhood in the wheat belt of Western Australia, as well as his experiences in Geraldton and Perth. It is an associative, free-wheeling work that is interested in the relationship between place, language, violence and memory.

What holds these themes together – both in Auto and the new book – is poetry. The subtitle of Fast, Loose Beginnings is ‘A Memoir of Intoxications’, and the intoxications referred to are as much poetic as they are drug-induced. Poetry is central to Kinsella’s avowedly obsessive personality (‘this is really a book about obsessions’). But where poetry is a ‘magic circle’ in Auto, here it is a world associated with institutions, power, public figures and publication. As Kinsella writes, ‘literary lives’ can only be lived within such a world. Consequently, there are many stories in the memoir about attending literary festivals, editing journals and working in universities.

Kinsella’s response to this world is one of ambivalence. He writes that Fast, Loose Beginnings is a ‘work about making sense of a world I distrust and often dislike but feel compelled to be a part of’. In this respect, Fast, Loose Beginnings is a self-portrait, but what we learn about Kinsella is mostly refracted through his portraits of others (though there are also comments that illuminate his own poetry, such as, ‘It struck me that to be a poet you had to be a scientist – or a forester – as well’). The others in this work are mostly poets, and they are people whom Kinsella has known and worked with. Some (such as Dorothy Hewett, Les Murray, Robert Adamson, Anthony Lawrence, and John Forbes) are Australian. Others (such as Michael Hulse, Sean O’Brien, Jeremy Prynne, Lyn Hejinian, and Sharon Olds) are not. Some (such as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and George Steiner) are critics.

Anyone interested in poetry and criticism will no doubt find this list of names impressive. Kinsella writes with a strange mix of directness and obliquity about these people. Whether or not one agrees with Kinsella’s angle on his peers and mentors (or even his decision to write about them), there is no doubt that this collection of portraits has a compelling quality. It was impossible not to race through this work, just as it races across time and place. The accounts of the Australian poets are the ones that seem most invested with emotional weight, which is probably not surprising, given that most of these accounts deal with Kinsella’s early career. In the best of the portraits, one gets a sense that Kinsella is offering us something new about his subjects. He has interesting things to say about Les Murray, Australia’s de facto ‘national poet’. Concerning Murray’s weight, Kinsella writes, ‘Why are people so concerned with Les’s looks? It is worth checking out his eyes some time; they retreat deep into his head but look far off into the distance.’

As this suggests, Kinsella is not interested in flattery. It should be remembered that he doesn’t present himself in a flattering light. Regardless of this, writing about the living can be a dangerous pursuit. This is something that Kinsella himself recognises, but it is also observable in the reaction engendered by Kinsella’s memoir. As has been reported in the press, the poets Anthony Lawrence and Robert Adamson have sent Kinsella emails that he considered threatening. The emails, as Lawrence’s and Adamson’s public comments make clear, were in response to what they saw as a defamatory book. In August, Kinsella went to court in Perth and took out a restraining order against the two poets. He then cancelled his appearance at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. This led, inevitably, to stories in the press about ‘poetry wars’, with predictably facetious headlines (‘War, blood, courts: It’s poets at arms’). When, in early September, Kinsella made an incident-free appearance at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, it was reported in The Age (‘All quiet on Kinsella front as poetry saves the day’). It is not hard to see what made Adamson and Lawrence unhappy. Adamson appears only briefly in the book, but his cameo appearances present him as out of it, and raving about Bob Dylan and the abyss. As caricature (which is what it plainly is), it is quite funny, if inevitably discourteous to its subject. The representation of Lawrence, dealing with the failed friendship, is longer and profoundly ambivalent. Kinsella recounts some of his exploits with Lawrence when the poets were younger (which the press has presented along the lines of ‘wild drug-fuelled parties’).

It is difficult to write about Fast, Loose Beginnings with-out reference to the scandal that briefly surrounded it, but the argument between the writers is not one that I wish to broach. What is interesting in this context is the way in which the work has been read and responded to. Some of the emails sent to Kinsella have been quoted in the press. According to Angela Bennie’s report in the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the emails poetically reads: ‘Deep Regret is the name of an ocean they’ve found, five miles under the ice at Antarctica. You’re about to enter it. Are you ready?’

What is intriguing about the book and its reception is the way in which it raises anxieties about the status of literature. Indeed, the memoir makes us ask the question, ‘What is literature?’ Is life writing ever simply ‘literary’? Using proper names, biography trades in the dangerous space between text and world. There are many responses one can have to a fictional work, but one cannot, for instance, argue that Shakespeare defames Hamlet. (Although Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Elizabeth I, were profoundly attuned to the ways in which fictional worlds could critique, satirise and deride real worlds.) As Kinsella writes, in the world of poetry ‘nothing says exactly what it seems to say. Anything is possible.’

There are two responses to a text like Kinsella’s: a legal one or a literary one. Significantly, both responses occur in the public domain. Lawrence’s and Adamson’s email response did not occur in the public domain. The poets’ reaction to the news of the court order was that Kinsella had taken their emails too seriously, that they were simply jokes, parodies of Kinsella’s style. What is notable about the email response – such as we can determine from what has been reported – is that it takes the form of a literary response (using all the rhetorical and metaphorical energy open to lyric poetry), but it is not presented in the public domain.

Literature, as we understand it, is a public discourse, however private (or ambiguous) the message. In other words, the publication (of a review, an essay, a poem) that refutes Kinsella’s text would be normative both in literary and legal terms. The emails of Lawrence and Adamson are definitively ambiguous in terms of their status. Are the emails serious or are they jesting? Are they a game or are they threatening?

Interestingly, Kinsella’s memoir is both highly attuned to the effects of pain and emotional violence, and uncompromising in its stance with regard to the author’s right to write as he sees things. A mixture of belligerence and psychic frailty seems to be relevant to a number of Kinsella’s subjects. Towards the end of the work, Kinsella writes that ‘Truth is dangerous, not life-enhancing’. He speaks with some authority, though it is a characteristically disarming assertion, given the truth-telling nature of the book.

For these reasons, I would say that Fast, Loose Beginnings is a powerfully strange book. In particular, the potential for emotional danger (both for the author and his readers) seems to be a central feature of this strangeness. This is not to suggest that the work is merely strange. Overwhelmingly, this is a work of great energy and enthusiasm. One of the most telling of Kinsella’s digressive comments is when he writes that as a youth he was violently bullied for being an enthusiast: ‘My defining characteristic then and now is enthusiasm.’

Not surprisingly, given the ambiguous response (past and present) to the author’s enthusiasm, this is a book that shifts between engagement and disengagement. Kinsella presents his memories as authoritative and then declares that ‘Biography lies’. He recognises poetry as a compulsion and a necessity, and also as a form of futility. His mix of directness and obliquity applies to what he has to say about himself, as well as others.

The sense of engagement and disengagement applies more broadly, too, since the structure of the work mimics the movement of a private self engaging and disengaging with the wider world. The work begins with an image of home, moves out into the world with its many stories and portraits of others, and then returns home at the end. At the work’s start, Kinsella writes movingly about his mother (who is presented as the source of poetry for him) and about his wider family. The final section of the work is a diary mostly concerning time spent at the property in York that Kinsella’s family calls home when in Australia. In between these two accounts, Kinsella moves out into the world, the site for his enthusiasm and energy, but also a source of pain and risk. He writes that poetry (along with drugs and alcohol) was a thing to draw him out of the ‘cave’ in his head. By moving in and out of the world like this, Kinsella’s memoir is both strikingly direct and touchingly vulnerable: ‘I stand condemned myself for revealing things as I think I’ve seen them.’

Why do we need another edition of Mansfield Park? Particularly, what is the justification for an expensive one, when we can get a plain reprint for $5, or a well-annotated paperback for $10? The answer is the one that all scholarly editors are driven by: editorial principles have changed. What was considered acceptable textual practice even twenty years ago no longer fulfils readers’ desires to get close to origins, to understand contexts.

In the case of the six completed novels of Jane Austen’s maturity, almost any paperback we pick up is a largely unrevised version of an edition that is over eighty years old: R.W. Chapman’s magisterial Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen. Chapman, like most editors of that period (and well into the twentieth century) corrected the text published in Jane Austen’s lifetime with a sure conviction that he could recognise an error of typesetting (or even an authorial grammatical or narrative solecism) and substitute what Austen must have intended. Modern editorial practice, followed scrupulously by La Trobe University’s John Wiltshire in this splendid edition, offers a text as close as possible to what was published within the author’s lifetime.

If journalism is the first draft of history, this book is a rough-hewn draft of some important historical chunks. Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of The Australian, may not match some of his colleagues there in gravitas, intellectual depth, or analytical precision, but he compensates with an abundance of enthusiasm and enviable access to those in high office. In the early and mid-1990s, when The Australian was prominent among those boosting Asia and Australian–Asian relations, Sheridan was cheerleader for the boosters. His columns and books were often based on long interviews with presidents and foreign ministers, recounted in a tone more often found in celebrity journalism than in diplomatic reports. Sheridan’s obvious delight at being granted personal interviews with the powerful aroused some envious comments, but his technique served a purpose. Heads of governments and senior officials happily granted time to a journalist who reported their views extensively, with respect and often sympathy. Journalism tends inevitably to focus on crises and disasters, and there is some value in allowing government leaders to tell their side of the story.

Despite its rather grandiose title, Alice Garner’s The Student Chronicles is a friendly, unpretentious book. It is a coming-of-age story, set mostly in libraries – an anti-Monkey Grip, or a love letter to geekdom. The only sex happens behind closed doors; the real romance is with the library. ‘I loved the Baillieu Library so much I wrote a really bad poem about it,’ Garner confesses, with characteristic self-deprecation. Occasionally, she takes her reader by the hand – like a less precious Alain de Botton – and guides them towards the classics. Thus she introduces Montaigne, a partial model for this book, as a writer of ‘disarming modesty and honesty’, two qualities that the author herself possesses.

The Student Chronicles charts Garner’s awakening as an historian and her attempt to find a foothold somewhere in academia. She skewers her early flirtations with post-modernism, and delivers a neat delineation of modernism versus postmodernism:

I think the difference turned on whether you made fun of Originality and Inspiration and High Art etc in a spirit of pessimism and disappointment (modernism), or with undisguised pleasure, revelling in the meaninglessness of things (post-modernism).

Several years ago, on two separate occasions, Drusilla Modjeska and David Marr called for Australian fiction writers to address directly the state of the country in its post-9/11 incarnation. ‘I have a simple plea to make,’ said Marr in the Redfern Town Hall in March 2003, delivering the annual Colin Simpson Lecture: ‘that writers start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching … So few Australian novels – now I take my life in my hands – address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live. It’s no good ceding that territory to people like me – to journalists. That’s not good enough.’ Six months before Marr’s lecture, Drusilla Modjeska had published in Timepieces (2002) an essay called ‘The Present in Fiction’, which raised, from a slightly different direction, some of the same issues:

Why are so few people writing novels about the lives we are living right now, here in Australia? Why this retreat of fiction into history, I hear people say, naming one novel after another set in the pre-modern past … too much of our recent fiction has become safe; our novels have lost their urgency, protected by the soft glow of ‘history’.

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) suggests that the Babel fish, which, when inserted into the ear, offers instant translations of any alien language, cannot have evolved by mere chance. Similarly, proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) argue that, as Robyn Williams summarises, ‘there are parts of the natural world so complex and engineered with such precision that only a very smart intelligence, not blundering selection, could account for them’. But whereas ID seeks to bolster faith in (a neo-conservative) God, the Hitchhiker’s Guide proposes that the Babel fish, impossible to create by evolutionary chance, actually proves the non-existence of God:

‘I refuse to believe I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

Fremantle’s first real newspaper, The Herald, saw the light of day in a building on the corner of Cliff and High Streets on Saturday, 2 February 1867. The brainchild of two ex-convicts, James Pearce and William Beresford, it soon became the main voice of opposition to colonial autocracy, as well as the voice of Fremantle itself. William de la Poer Beresford (to give him his full aristocratic name) was an eccentric Anglo-Irish cleric who had been transported for forgery in 1858, and was a ripe sixty-eight years old when The Herald began. James Pearce came from more humble origins. Convicted of felony at the Gloucester assizes, he was transported in 1851. Keen on literature and amateur dramatics, he was secretary of the Fremantle Literary Institute for four years. Together with Beresford, and another upper-class forger, James Elphinstone Roe, he produced the liveliest and best-written newspaper in the colony for the next twenty years. Nevertheless, The Herald had a rocky beginning when a reader pulled off an ingenious but obscene literary joke at its expense.

It is hard to imagine that any reader of the text of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be unmoved by the nobility of its aspirations. Born of the determination that human beings would never again have to suffer the oppressions and indignities that reached so hideous a climax in the events of World War II, it promises a world in which all people can enjoy a range of fundamental freedoms in peace and harmony. To observe that the promise has not been kept is a patent under-statement. Even in the most advanced democracies, where notions of universal human rights are foundational, there is a sense of crisis. Here in Australia, as the Victorian government moves to institute a bill of rights, people of responsibility and integrity are forced to confront what appears to be a systemic disregard for human rights by the federal government in its treatment of asylum seekers.

The intrinsic quality of a state is, in the final instance, determined by that which guarantees its claim to authority. In the case of Indonesia, such guarantee is its military, the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), while the rebellious, resource-rich province of Aceh has arguably been the site of its most concerted effort. At a time when Western political leaders and most Indonesia scholars champion Indonesia’s procedural democracy, despite a reduced political capacity, the TNI structurally remains the institution that it was. As a result, studying the role of the TNI in Aceh reveals critical insights into continuing aspects of the Indonesian state.

There have been a handful of studies on the TNI, most of which more or less concur on its negative organisational qualities. There have also been a smaller number of studies touching on the TNI in Aceh, but these tend to diverge on the extent of understanding of, or support for, Indonesia as a unitary state and the methods by which its unitarian status is asserted.

The American poet William Carlos Williams often admitted how much he owed to the ‘little magazines’ that first published him. As they lapsed in and out of existence, he regarded them all as essentially the one publication and was grateful for the lifeblood they gave his (at first unpopular) writing. It is to be hoped that Australian literary magazines of various political shades and aesthetic proclivities, from Quadrant to Overland, are doing something similar. Indeed, when so much else is in flux in the publishing world, it is amazing how enduring Australia’s top literary magazines have been, despite their often small subscription lists. Even Island magazine, which is something of a junior compared to Meanjin, Southerly, and Westerly, has been around for twenty-seven years. Space: New Writing, on the other hand, has just appeared in its third number. To judge from the best material in the current issues of both magazines, Australian literary culture is not being ill-served here. If not everything is of equal interest (how could it be?), there is plenty of satisfaction to be had in both.

Shane Warne is one of the greatest bowlers of all time, if not the greatest. Highly competitive and aggressive, he is one of the main factors in Australia’s prolonged dominance in world cricket. He has been involved in a series of controversies, on and off the field. He has been fined for sledging and over-aggressive appealing; and for providing, along with Mark Waugh, information to a bookie (something they both readily admitted, which the Australian Cricket Board tried to cover up). In 2003 he received a one-year ban for taking a banned substance, diuretic tablets, intended, he claimed (and this is not disputed by Barry), to help him lose weight. Off the field, like many leading sporting personalities, he is a serial womaniser.

More revisionism, I sighed, viewing the title of this book. First it’s the extent of frontier warfare between Indigenous Australians and settlers, now it’s the 1930s Depression. Doubtless in the next year or two we shall have a history demonstrating that the trauma of Gallipoli has been much exaggerated, since most of those who took part survived and some lived to ripe old ages. I was too hasty. David Potts has produced a subtler and more nuanced study than might be expected from the book’s title and advance publicity. Some of his findings are open to debate, but he underpins his arguments with evidence based on many years of oral history research with his undergraduates in the splendidly creative school of history at La Trobe University. It is this use of oral history that makes for controversy.

Books like this are not written for people like me, and it is only fair to acknowledge that at the outset. ‘Australia’s most beloved popular historian’ (he must be, it says so on the inside flap) actually doesn’t want to be regarded as an historian, but as a storyteller (he says so himself), and so has little or no interest in satisfying the requirements and expectations that a professional historian might seek to apply to his undertaking. He will make a lot of money in the process, and good luck to him.

When I started reading My Israel Question, the Israel Defence Force Chief of Staff had just vowed to ‘turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years’; and the demolition was underway. Beirut’s airport, major roads, bridges, power generation facilities and other civilian infrastructure had been bombed, and villages and densely populated suburbs were being reduced to rubble. In a report some weeks later (August 23), Amnesty estimated that 1183 Lebanese had been killed, mostly civilian, about one-third of them children. The injured numbered 4054, and 970,000 people were displaced; 30,000 houses, 120 bridges, 94 roads, 25 fuel stations and 900 businesses were destroyed. Israel lost 118 soldiers and 41 civilians, and up to 300,000 people in northern Israel were driven into bomb shelters. Israel estimates that Hezbollah, the putative object of its wrath, lost about 500 fighters.

As a middling country far from the centre of major world events, Australia has usually bobbed about in the wake of greater Pacific powers. After being a dependency of Britain for nearly two centuries, the country was accustomed to having its fate decided by distant power brokers. Yet Australian leaders occasionally attempted to strike out on their own in pursuit of what they saw as distinctively Australian interests. Alfred Deakin did it in 1908 when he ignored the usual diplomatic niceties of consulting the British Foreign Office before inviting the American fleet to visit Australia; Billy Hughes did it with his grandstanding at the Versailles peace conference of 1919; and Robert Menzies and John Curtin did it during the desperate days of mid-1941, when they tried to keep Japan out of the war, as British Empire forces struggled to maintain their tenuous hold on the Mediterranean.

When Prince Hamlet cried ‘The play’s the thing’, he was about to use a performance of The Mousetrap to demonstrate a point central to his purpose: he intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Nearly 400 years later, British playwright David Hare endorsed and expanded Hamlet’s utilitarian approach, writing: ‘Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since the war, then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period … than by looking at any comparable documentary source.’

Leonard Radic, theatre critic for The Age for twenty years from 1974, quotes Hare in the introduction to his second book on Australian theatre; his first was The State of Play (1991). He sets out to exemplify Hare’s contention in an Australian context, describing the playwright as witness, chronicler, observer, commentator, entertainer. He extends to other playwrights David Williamson’s celebrated self-description, ‘storyteller to the tribe’.

It is rare that two books of such quality should appear at the same time, especially on a subject as tragic but absorbing as the fall of Singapore. The reader is reminded immediately of films about the maiden voyage of the Titanic. You know that at the end of the film the ship has to sink: you also know that Singapore must fall with equally dramatic suddenness. Worse, in the case of Singapore, the systematic massacre (sook ching) of much of its overseas Chinese population by the Japanese kempetai (secret police) adds a huge dimension of tragedy to what is already a disaster; as does the fact that the Japanese, unlike most Western armies of the period, had no plans to deal effectively with more than 130,000 Allied prisoners, who were then dispersed and incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps across South-East Asia and Japan itself. Every so often, these scenes are revisited by sympathetic writing, and also by new evidence and analysis, which is the case here.

Surprise, surprise

This year’s inclusion of two Australian novels on the Man Booker Prize shortlist is a rare event, but no one was more surprised than one of the authors, M.J. Hyland, listed for Carry Me Down. Hyland went along to the dinner to support her friend Andrew O’Hagan, who was widely expected to make the final list for Be Near Me. Hyland was amazed to find herself on the shortlist. O’Hagan was not shortlisted. Nor were several other fancied contenders, including Nadine Gordimer, David Mitchell and Peter Carey, whose Theft: A Love Story seems to be the work of a novelist at the height of his powers. Commenting on these omissions, Hermione Lee, chair of the judges, remarked: ‘These were all books that had extremely strong support and books which we thought were really considerable and moving and impressive … What I feel, though, is that they are such talented and exceptional and splendid writers that they don’t need us. They will go on regardless.’ There must be some logic coiled in that statement. Kate Grenville is the other shortlisted Australian, for The Secret River. The winner will be announced on October 10.

Stickers on a rotten apple

Dear Editor,

In his review of Angela Bennie’s anthology of hostile Australian reviews, Peter Rose is correct when he surmises that ‘we tend to exaggerate the number of severe reviews’ (September 2006). I think that, generally, Australians do not like disagreement; they prefer to ‘keep the peace’, and this is mostly true of our critics also.

The really troubling aspect of Crême de la Phlegm: Unforgettable Australian Reviews (apart from the clear assumption of its subtitle that it is only adverse reviews which are ‘unforgettable’) was a comment in Bennie’s introductory essay. At least on my reading, she appeared to generalise that our critics are ‘philistines’. Many maybe, but I’d rather not call them critics.

Australians have a reputation as avid travellers. Prompted by our isolation, our international ancestry or basic curiosity, we roam far and wide, often for years. One million Australians currently reside overseas. Away Game examines an expanding niche within this group; those antipodeans living Stateside at the respective helms of such corporate giants as Ford Motors, IBM, Dow Chemicals and, until recently, even the all-American bad boys of the food industry, Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

Collins sets out to discover the reasons why so many Australians enjoy such success in the United States, and he elicits varied responses. Some cite our cultural forthrightness as a boon, others regard it as a hindrance when dealing with colleagues. The saturation of our local media with American content is credited with lessening the culture shock by the younger of the expatriates, yet the interviews reveal that, rather than attributing this mini-phenomenon to any set of supposedly Australian character traits, what links these people ultimately is ambition. Several interviewees cite the desire to test themselves on the world stage as a deciding factor in breaching their comfort zones. The decision to return home is often simplified as a choice between career and way of living. The many New Yorkers interviewed here talk wistfully about the beach and the open spaces back home.

As Collins and his subjects discover, it gets narrow at the top, and the fact remains that many Australian industries simply cannot offer the same opportunities as their American or European counterparts. An editor at Time describes Australia as ‘a fantastic safety net’. Yet while many expatriates reluctantly admit that a permanent return to our shores is unlikely, all declare themselves wholly Australian in spirit – and by passport, with the American government recently permitting dual citizenship, thus ensuring the growth of this trend.

Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is particularly fond of the word. In Melbourne last year, we had ‘Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’ and ‘Albrecht Dürer: Master of the Renaissance’. In 2004 the NGV put on ‘The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay’.

The ‘blockbuster’ is obviously still with us, but it is increasingly showing signs of having evolved. Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, jointly organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, joins a number of important recent exhibitions of Renaissance painting which have managed to be both popular and scholarly successes (such as the superb Raphael: From Urbino to Rome at the National Gallery in London, 2004). A surprisingly large number of these exhibitions have focused on Venetian rather than Florentine or central Italian Renaissance painting. Since 2000 there have been significant exhibitions of the work of Giorgione (Venice, 2003 and Vienna, 2004), Titian (London and Madrid, 2003) and Venetian Renaissance art in general (Edinburgh, 2004).

It was the first game for the season in some halcyon year of my cricketing past. We’d scraped together a team, but the other mob was rumoured to be a couple short. Their first three batsmen were competent enough and made a few. Then a collapse brought number eight to the wicket. Impeccably clad, he was one of those blokes who puts his gloves on after taking guard and then spends minutes surveying the field, pointing to each position with his bat, as if burning them into his tactical memory. At last he faced his first ball, which went straight through him and took the middle and off stumps out of the ground. ‘Bad luck, mate,’ said one of our blokes, with a kindness the ensuing months would erode. ‘First knock for the season, eh?’ The beautifully attired number eight looked at him in astonishment. ‘First knock ever,’ he said.

It was another world that you entered around eleven o’clock on Saturday morning and farewelled when you left the pub a couple of hours after stumps. It is a world whose atmosphere and details William McInnes has caught unerringly: the amiably hopeless players; the heat, the amateur sledging; the makeshift conditions; the obsessive enthusiast who holds them together and who drags them out each Saturday – and who is therefore and properly the captain.

The third volume to be produced by the Asian Association for the Study of Australasia, Diaspora: The Australasian Experience, is a large publication with more than forty chapters. It makes an important contribution to the often willing debate about preserving Austral(as)ia’s perceived homogeneity in the face of the challenges carried in the cultural baggage of postwar arrivals from beyond the shores of the United Kingdom. Most, if not all, of the writers prefer to celebrate what Jane Mummery calls, in the opening essay, ‘the affirmation of the hyphen and hybridity’. Many other essays in the collection also demonstrate the extent to which Australian academics in the humanities and social sciences are contributing to the development and analysis of cultural connections between South Asia and Australasia.

With such a range of perspectives and approaches from so many chapters, readers can travel where their interests will take them, even if there is no index to help map the journey. Some chapters will make more of an impact than others. Bill Ashcroft asks questions about migration, travelling and home; home is usually seen as ‘a place, a location, a feeling, a tradition [or] an ethnicity’. In settler communities, however, especially in nations as transformed by migration as Australia has been since 1945, many members of the ‘imagined community of seekers … [define] home by its absence, by its situation as the focus of desire’. Ashcroft argues that we need to think more about horizons rather than borders or boundaries; ‘the horizon, with its merging of location and possibility, renders boundaries problematic’.

Folly & Grief, Melbourne poet Jennifer Harrison’s third collection, reads on one level as a playful enquiry into the centuries-long association of folly with innovative live performance. Lizard men abseil down gallery walls; an extreme body artist creates a living sculpture of bees; a ventriloquist’s dummy stirs to life; New Age travellers toss firesticks, knives and chainsaws high into the sky. While the danger lurking in such displays is often what retains our interest (‘He juggles a chainsaw … even the fine patinating rain / feels like sprayed blood on my face and lips’), Harrison is equally concerned with the challenging apprenticeships these unusual skills demand. The road to becoming a master entertainer is explicitly connected to the craft of writing: ‘a juggler first conquers clumsiness / then writes the same poem, over and over.’

The sideshow artist’s metamorphosis from individual into character is attended with heightened interest: how the statue busker applies her silver greasepaint, or the clown his white talc and wig; the transformation of an actor donning a commedia dell’arte mask. Grief, that other term in the collection’s title, shears into focus. In the poem ‘Pierrot’, inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting Soir Bleu, Harrison’s world-weary clown has a ‘chemo-smooth skull’. ‘[H]unched / around pain, like a hospital’, there is gritty recompense in the fact that ‘nobody notices / you’re an odd-looking guy.’ The cancer survivor, like the street entertainer, is expected to don a mask to negotiate the public realm.

Folly & Grief is an original, if occasionally unsettling, meditation on the intersections of illness, artifice and art. Ultimately, Harrison’s conclusions are ambiguous. Yes, she seems to say, we need the distractions of folly; yet we must also face what the magician’s flashing scarves conceal: ‘the possibility / that a statue like a poem / plugs a hole in each life / that disguise / is the true form of evil.’

Grassdogs’ literary antecedents jostle like faces crowding around a porthole on a departing emigrant ship. One can tick them off like books on a required reading list for a twentieth-century Australian literature course. The doppelganger Jekyll-and-Hyde protagonists (blithe young city lawyer Tony Tindale and his bestial, increasingly wretched uncle Edgar) might have been written with actor Dan Wyllie in mind. Edgar even loses teeth in a car accident, just like Wyllie.

Part murder mystery (as reminiscent of the taking of the Beaumont children as it is of Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net [2000]) and part social-realist tragedy à la the film Tom White (2004), Grassdogs evades easy categorisation. The novel, though set in the present, begins and ends in a part of the country that time has neglected but not entirely passed over. Edgar, too, suffers from benign neglect. He gets more loyalty and companionship – more understanding, even – from the family pet terrier and various stray dogs than he does from his parents and the wary townsfolk.

Jill Golden’s Inventing Beatrice is a fictionalised account of the life of her mother, Beatrice (or B). This is life writing at its most precarious, right out there on the borderline of ‘fact’ and the ‘inventing’ of the title. Is it a novel or a biography? The media release labels it a novel but concedes that it ‘crosses the genres of biography and autobiography, fiction and non-fiction, speaking in several voices’. What is certain is that the point of view, and of judgment, is constantly shifting as the narrator sets out to unravel the enigma of her mother’s emotional frigidity and to find out the real circumstances of a childhood that, she feels, has destroyed her. Why did B send her three small daughters – the youngest only eight months old – away from home for more than five long years? They spend this time in foster care, then boarding school.

It is only after B’s death, when the narrator discovers an improbably detailed and comprehensive cache of letters and diaries, that she begins to reconstruct the past. It is not clear how much of the ‘evidence’ is tangible, how much is fiction; the title and a number of disclaimers certainly suggest the latter. A mixture of narration and commentary, excerpts from diaries and letters (true or false), interviews with B’s friends from the past, and a long section in the first person, entitled ‘Beatrice Speaking’, are intended to disclose the ‘truth’ of B’s behaviour. The question remains. Is B the product of her treatment by two arch-manipulators – her father, then her husband – or is she herself in some way accountable?

In the bohemian district of an imaginary city not unlike a very bleak Sydney, Izzy and Eve have been living together for twenty years. Eve, who torments herself with clippings of unsolved murders, is a jeweller and also a receptionist – sometimes more – in the local brothel. Izzy draws erotic cartoons for a living, and has taken to frequenting S & M clubs. Gay men start disappearing from the clubs, and Eve is catapulted into an investigation that leads her to Izzy’s world, his friends and ‘silt’, the drug linking the disappearances. So Izzy and Eve becomes a gothic thriller, the narration whipping back and forth between Eve and Izzy, sometimes distractingly quickly. Beginning with Izzy, the characters talk, frequently but fleetingly, of faith, which seems to be at the core of this narrative. But it is Eve the non-believer, drawn more vividly, who dominates the story.

Reading Izzy and Eve, I was reminded of many films, not least of which being the darkly powerful Love and Human Remains (1993) – but unlike the latter, there is little humour to save us from the desolation of these characters’ lives. The moments with a young neighbour, Tibby, are touching. Away from his mother and consuming junk food at a rate of knots, Tibby brings out the generosity in Izzy and Eve, two people who, while once interested in broader issues, are now caught up entirely in themselves. It is the main characters’ one-dimensionality that results in the book falling short as a truly convincing fictive journey.

Izzy and Eve, a beautifully packaged book, broaches the big issues (good versus evil, faith, hope and love). The writing is intelligent, sometimes wonderful, but the story and the characters lack intensity and, as a result, it fails to resonate.

In a 1985 interview, Kylie Tennant was quoted as saying: ‘I … don’t know how people get on who haven’t been raised in a battling Australian family.’ Jane Grant expands upon this image of Tennant as a quintessential ‘Aussie battler’ in her biography of the acclaimed novelist. Kylie Tennant: A life is relatively brief, yet it provides a remarkable insight into the pressures (societal and otherwise) that informed Tennant’s politics and prose.

The book opens in November 1932, when Tennant, then twenty years old, walked ‘600 miles’ to visit her friend and future husband, Lewis Rodd, in northern New South Wales. On one level, Grant writes, this trek represented ‘an escape from [Tennant’s] family’s middle-class expectations as her father was threatening to find her a respectable job’. More broadly, perhaps, Tennant’s trek might have been an early indicator of her ability to gain independence and to achieve her goals despite facing seemingly insurmountable odds.

Theatregoers with long memories may well hug to themselves the ‘golden years’ of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s tenancy of the Russell Street Theatre in the 1960s, a time in which plays as varied as Hochhuth’s The Representative, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s infallible matinee version of Henry James’s The Heiress, and many others jostled for attention. It was the time when an actor called Clive Winmill stepped on stage in the swinging London comedy The Knack and, instead of saying his lines, treated the audience to a passionate anti-Vietnam involvement speech. It was a time when the provocative new and the venerated classic made equal claims on a theatrical ensemble which achieved real importance in Melbourne’s cultural life.

One of the most illustrious names (among many such) associated with this period was that of George Ogilvie, director of some of its greatest successes. For him it offered two of the elements he most cherished in his career: an intimate space and what he, quoting Jerzy Grotowski, called ‘poor theatre’. As one reads his memoir, it becomes clear that he was always drawn to the idea of a theatre that grew out of a sense of family, of interdependence, rather than the (to some) irresistible glitter of the big commercial stages.

Set during the Depression, Peter Yeldham’s eighth novel follows the adventures of Belle Carson and her son Teddy. Despite having enjoyed considerable renown throughout Sydney’s bohemian enclaves, Belle’s ambitions as an actress were never fully realised. Determined that the same fate should not befall her son, she turns her back on her husband and their steady life in Gundagai to introduce Teddy to the glittering city.

The novel is crammed with an array of Dickensian characters – the dashing-yet-dastardly former beau, an Establishment lawyer whose sterling exterior conceals steel lurking within, a plain-but-honest husband, a plodding copper and a screech of avaricious landlords. Teddy’s agent even adopts the moniker Uriah Heep. All of which serves to reveal the book’s true colours.

Although the title and Bryce Courtenay’s recommendation suggest otherwise, The Murrumbidgee Kid is not a coming-of-age story. It is not the child but his mother who sits at the heart of this tale. The fact that it is Belle’s wistful face gracing the front cover tells us as much. Forced to abandon her career with the birth of her illegitimate son, she spends her life striving to make him a star. Eventually succumbing to a mysterious malady, she reveals on her deathbed to her unsuspecting son the true identity of his father. What we are dealing with is more Moulin Rouge (2001) than I Can Jump Puddles (1955).

The scenes with extended dialogue – catty exchanges between stage mothers and negotiations with a Latino Lothario – are particularly enjoyable. This is no surprise given Yeldham’s celebrated screenwriting career. Just don’t expect a study of the period. The 1930s merely serve as a backdrop to the action, and historical references aren’t fleshed out in any great detail. 

When it was first published, Tasmanian army nurse and prisoner of war Jessie Simons entitled her memoir of captivity While History Passed (1954). It was reissued as In Japanese Hands (1985). This was one of the numerous autobiographical works produced after their ordeal by POW survivors, whether they were driven by an enduring hatred of their captors (Rohan Rivett, Russell Braddon) or by a striving for forgiveness (Ray Parkin). In his study of ‘Literary imagination and the prisoner-of-war experience’, Roger Bourke has turned instead to what he regards as the neglected area of fiction (sometimes autobiographically tinged) of captivity by the Japanese in World War II. His range encompasses British as well as Australian authors. He is particularly concerned with what the film industry made of such novels as Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice (book 1950, film 1956), Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1954, 1957), James Clavell’s King Rat (1962, 1965) and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984, 1987).

On the face of it, One Day In July might induce a state of groaning, as yet another ‘victim’ with attend-ant publisher prepares to cash in by virtue of a rank media with an appetite for ‘terror’. Remember Douglas Wood, hostage in Iraq, triumphant with that VB stubby in hand? Now our potential hero is Experiencing 7/7 across the front cover as Survivor of the Edgware Road Bomb. One wonders how many more dates, not to mention people, will be claimed and maimed in this manner. On the back: the injured figure of the author, as seen in newspapers and by television audiences worldwide, repeated.

Looking beyond the cover, there is more to Tulloch than his bloody face. As an academic who specialises in media studies, sociology, and risk, he not only examines how the media have used, and in some cases hijacked, his own image, but fosters a cultured interest in ‘media imaging of contemporary warfare’, and in particular, Iraq:

Iraq is part of a much bigger picture, whether it’s emotional, ideological, psychological, cultural – I mean, there’s a whole range of things that are broader than Iraq. But what Iraq is doing is symbolising an awful lot that’s wrong about how we relate internationally, and how we relate internally and domestically.

Alexander Downer, when asked on the ABC in February 2003 about the legality of military measures against Iraq, was keen to emphasise Australia’s fidelity to international law: ‘We’ve reached a point where you either take international law seriously and ensure that Iraq does comply with international law or else you abandon the whole concept, at least in this case, of trying to enforce international law.’ But only a month after these comments, the federal government demonstrated its commitment to ‘enforcing’ international law by participating in an invasion characterised as illegal by the preponderance of states and international lawyers.

No Country Is an Island shows how international law has been distorted or instrumentally used in recent high-profile debates about Australia’s place in the world. Jointly authored by Hilary Charlesworth, Madelaine Chiam, Devika Hovell, and George Williams, all specialists in either public or international law at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales, it is a clear account of international law in Australia for a general audience, and is in some respects a companion volume to a recent academic collection edited by the authors (The Fluid State, reviewed in ABR in May 2006).

Switched On showcases the careers of twenty-nine ‘influential’ women who work in the media. Catherine Hanger, interviewer and former editor of Vogue Australia, believes that Switched On ‘connects two major spheres of influence in our society – the media and the women who work in it’ – and argues that the influence of these women is ‘very powerful indeed’. While the title promises ‘conversations’, Hanger, strangely, omits her questions. Perhaps she asked just one: ‘How did you become editor of Australian Women’s Weekly/an SBS news presenter/a film reviewer/a PR adviser to PBL/host of Media Watch?’

While mentors and networks clearly maketh the woman, ‘conversations’ can become reminiscent of gushing acceptance speeches and lists of names quickly become tedious. One significant name that pops up throughout the book is ‘Packer’. A story by the Australian Women’s Weekly editor-at-large, Lisa Wilkinson, illustrates the ease with which Kerry Packer wielded his power. Wilkinson initially preferred the ‘safety’ of the ‘cardigan-wearing Fairfax board’ to the editorship of Cleo, but agreed to meet the media mogul. Whisked away in a helicopter (flown by a future organ donor), she was delivered onto a helipad covered in a foot of bird-droppings and told she wouldn’t get lunch until she agreed to the job. The deal was done.

The popularity of his ABC radio program WordWatch gives Kel Richards the licence to publish a second volume of definitions of words and phrases and ‘terse verse’. Word of the Day 2: Wordwatching reads like an exact transcript of Richards’s radio program, complete with off-the-cuff comments.

Handsomely illustrated, beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Gavin Fry’s monograph on Albert Tucker aims to establish him as an important artist within the Australian twentieth-century canon. Fry begins his introduction with the statement that Tucker ‘was a man who inspired strong feelings and his work likewise required the viewer to make a stand. Many found his work difficult, some even repellent, but the artist and his art demanded attention. Equally gifted as a painter, and possibly more so as a draughtsman than his contemporaries Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, Tucker belongs with this élite who revolutionised Australian painting in Melbourne in the 1940s.’ But is this really so? Was Tucker really so much better than his contemporaries, or even as good as them?

Nebuchadnezzar is Shelton Lea’s ninth and last book. Sadly, this colourful poet, a well-loved stalwart on the Melbourne reading circuit, died of cancer in May 2006, shortly after its publication.

The book begins by surveying a ‘land of fences and diatribes’ (‘1988’). It describes the inhabitants of Koori streets: ‘old men with no tomorrows / who rock on broken chairs / and stare at a bitumen sea’ (‘fitzroy’). Lea was an advocate for Aboriginal causes, and his poems often celebrate marginalised people who must summon the desire to survive. This burden of grit grounds life in harsh experience, before a remarkable lift-off.

One of the pleasures of sitting down to read a number of Young Adult books in quick succession is that of being catapulted into a world of such passionate intensity: a world of strong colours and energy, where boundary testing, self-consciousness and questioning are the norm; in which a character’s search for personal integrity often puts him or her at odds with a community seeking conformity, and all this struggle played out against the richness and stresses of family life. Quite heady stuff. It can also be illuminating, as much for the adult reader as for the young. Maybe warring parents and their children should be persuaded to read and discuss some of these books. The experience could be enjoyable and eye-opening for both parties.