In 1880, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at his country estate after a long period of estrangement, only to discover that the great novelist had, in the interim, renounced art in favour of ethical enquiry. Turgenev was appalled, and dashed off a letter complaining that

I, for instance, am considered an artist. But what am I compared to him? In contemporary European literature he has no equal … But what is one to do with him. He has plunged headlong into another sphere … He has a trunk full of these mystical ethics and various pseudo-interpretations. He has read me some of it, which I do not understand … I told him, ‘That is not the real thing’; but he replied ‘It is just the real thing’.

The reader of Diary of a Bad Year should be forgiven a similar perplexity. J.M. Coetzee has used his formidable skills to produce a novel whose overriding concern with ‘the real thing’ also plunges it into a sphere outside of art. Given a main narrative that purports to be a work of non-fiction by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), one that battles quixotically with a world gone awry, and in a manner not so far removed from Coetzee’s own public efforts, it is hard to escape the connection with Tolstoy’s didactic period: a time when the author’s ethical impulses – the agonising question of how to live well – overwhelmed aesthetic ones, in what the critic Philip Rahv called a ‘willful inflation of the idea of moral utility at the expense of the values of the imagination’.

Walt Whitman’s famous line ‘I sing the body electric’ could well serve as the epilogue to Etchings 2, whose dynamic offerings are gathered under the theme of connectivity and the generation of energy. indeed, being ‘wired’ has become a predominant feature of modern existence. This is obviously true of our relationship to the internet and of our addiction to instantaneous transactions and connections. Yet we are wired in other ways as well. To be wired is also to be anxious and edgy; it implies a disconnection, a nervous distance. The pieces showcased in Etchings 2 examine the multifariousness of this experience.

Among the issue’s highlights is an interview with John Tranter, who talks about the online poetry magazine Jacket and about the concerns that animate his own writing. In the 1960s, Tranter claims, his work was energised by dissent, but what motivates him now is a mystery. One might be glad for this obscurity. It results in a compelling speculation about why one participates in poetry – a practice, Tranter argues, that is ‘useless’ but one that ‘helps us understand the way we live from day to day’. But obscurity, as Tranter describes it, is also a tangible attribute of poetic experience. Like a dream, a poem ‘seems very intensely meaningful’, although it is difficult ‘to explicate what the meaning is’.

The Melbourne artist and poet Basil Eliades echoes this sentiment. Like Tranter, Eliades claims that the ‘parts’ of a poem or a painting affect us through the illogical workings of a ‘subconscious or dream state’. In his essay ‘Energy as Essence’, Eliades celebrates this energetic essence of art: ‘I am more interested in the energy of a word, of an object, than the shape of it. For me, essence is more essential than form.’ More than a vocation, for Eliades art making is not simply a way of living but the way of being alive – and of knowing that one is so.

Beginning with a lament on the lack of serious academic attention that has been paid to biography, despite its enormous popularity and importance, Nigel Hamilton seeks to make good part of this deficit by providing an overview of its history and development. The account he offers is engaging and remarkable in its breadth and scope. It is customary for more literary histories of biography to begin in the classical world with Plutarch or Suetonius, and to end with the ‘new biography’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Hamilton, by contrast, begins with the first depiction of a real human drama in a prehistoric cave painting, and ends with a discussion of the death of Dolly, the cloned sheep. This latter issue is not merely frivolous on his part, but leads to a discussion of the ways in which biography might be written in a new technological world in which individuality, as currently understood, ceases to exist as life becomes technologically created, standardised, and processed.

As this might suggest, the definition of biography with which Hamilton works is an unusually broad one. It includes any form of the recording or interpreting of real lives. He rejects the idea that these lives need to be written in any particular form. Indeed, he regards it as a singular misfortune that when the term ‘biography’ was first introduced into English by Dryden in 1683, it came to refer specifically to ‘the history of particular men’s lives’. Hamilton makes much of the way that this definition excludes women – an objection that would have been more convincing had the counter story that he offers using a broader definition of biography not been so relentlessly masculine. But what concerns him more is the way that this definition excludes not only many forms of literature, but also the personal writings that are now included in the wider term ‘life writing’ and the other ways in which lives can be created or represented visually, especially through film.

The ten essays in this volume revisit the achievement of the late Cecil Hadgraft, whose Queensland and Its Writers, published nearly fifty years ago, is a masterly and non-doctrinaire exposition of a century of writing in Queensland. Hadgraft was one of the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literature at a time when academics trained in British traditions joked about what the hapless students of local literature were going to study beyond the third week of term. I will always be grateful to Cec Hadgraft for teaching me not only about the variety of Australian literature but also about the diversity and value of what had been written in my own state. So too, I imagine, is Patrick Buckridge, one of the editors of this volume.

The curiously titled By the Book is a welcome aid to the study of Queensland literary culture, past and present. So why a history of regional literature? Is Queensland literature really different from other Australian writing? The editors are prepared, to the point of defensiveness, for scepticism, and they justify the enterprise on the plausible grounds that Queensland is different. This has nothing to do with red­neckery, political conservatism or any neo-Romantic myth of a ‘state of mind’, but everything to do with ‘demographic decentralisation’, the history of settlement and its implications for relations between colonising and indigenous populations. The professed willingness, stated in the introduction, to interrogate ‘the myth of difference’ itself in a history of literature in rather than for Queensland promises well, but it is disappointing that few of the contributors, apart from Todd Barr and Rodney Sullivan in their lively piece on late twentieth-century Brisbane writing, actually engage with this key area of postcolonial literary studies. Apart from a group of thematically organised essays (indigenous writing, children’s literature, travel writing), the history is arranged according to region, with chapters on Brisbane past and present and its hinterland, the Darling Downs, central, western, and north Queensland. This arrangement inevitably (as the editors acknowledge) means that writers such as Vance Palmer, Thea Astley, and Judith Wright appear in several chapters.

By far the longest essay is the first, Buckridge’s own, its ambitious subject being a century and more of literature written in and about Brisbane. This is a stimulating piece of traditional literary history, informed by a keen sense of political and institutional history, and giving particular attention to poetry. I imagine that he was introduced to colonial verse, as I was, by Hadgraft, who delighted in the effusions of Charles Frederick Chubb, the Bard of Ipswich:

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

Lexicographers, too, have tried to develop a way of dealing with words in this category. One short-lived idea was to label such words as ‘obsolescent’, in the sense ‘becoming obsolete’, but this was a bit of a mouthful, and in abbreviated forms the terms ‘obsolete’ and ‘obsolescent’ were likely to be indistinguishable. More recently, the label ‘dated’ has been introduced (for example, in the second edition of The Australian Oxford Dictionary [2004]) to ‘indicate a word no longer used by the majority of speakers, but still encountered occasionally, especially among the older generation’. Thus dictionaries have also begun to respond to this special category of words that have become outdated, old hat, anachronous, and demode, or, to go back to eighteenth-century nomenclature, ‘fogram’ and ‘trunk-hose’ (both used as adjectives as well as nouns).

The term ‘old hat’ is mentioned in chapter ten, ‘Hats’. Apart from baseball caps, akubras, and sun hats, we now live in a largely hatless world, and this change of fashion places pressure on the numerous phrases, such as ‘old hat’, that grew out of a world in which hats had everyday meaning. In the days when a woman would never dare take the tram or bus to go into the city to do the weekly shopping without wearing hat and gloves, the wearing of an old hat would certainly have been judged declasse. As hats go out of fashion, many of the literal and figurative phrases involving hats, such as ‘old hat’, are threatened with obsolescence and thence obsoleteness: ‘to buy a straw hat in winter’, ‘at the drop of a hat’, ‘Oh my hat!’, ‘throw one’s hat in the door’, ‘keep your hat on’.

Nicolette Stasko’s poetry is as far from the postmodern baroque as it is possible to be. This is not to say that her work lacks awareness of contemporary theories of art, but rather that her style eschews self-consciously clotted imagery, radical syntactical dislocation, and the production of high-sounding obscurities. There is nothing rebarbative here. At their best, the limpid surfaces of these poems invite the reader into aesthetic experiences where the pictorial is rendered with such clarity that the images resonate deeply. As we might expect from a poet who writes one of her best sequences in response to Cezanne and another following Van Gogh, the most satisfying of these poems recreate that moving stillness characteristic of figurative painting.

Glass Cathedrals begins with thirty pages of new poems followed by generous selections from Stasko’s previous volumes, Abundance (1992), Black Night with Windows (1994) and The Weight of Irises (2003). For readers unfamiliar with Stasko’s work, it is a pity that the latest work disrupts the chronology of the book and that the poet has chosen to open the volume with one of her lighter poems.

By contrast, the first two poems from Abundance, ‘Dislocation’ and ‘Femme assise pres de la fenetre’, provide a prescient introduction to all of the work that follows. Here the characteristic tone of meditation is established by way of short, unpunctuated lines predominantly organised into recognisable syntactic units, but occasionally disrupted or complicated by a line or clause that squints both backwards and forwards to add intriguing possibilities of meaning. Here, too, the dominant themes of Stasko’s work are sounded: ‘Dislocation’ deals with the emigrant’s distress (Stasko was born in the United States, of Polish and Hungarian ancestry), while ‘Femme assise pres de la fenetre’ has the poet in characteristic attitude observing a landscape through a window. The order imposed upon the landscape by the frame suggests the poet’s own transformation of the scene which in turn leads to the following disturbing question: ‘am I a Picasso / woman pieced / geometric shapes / making sense / only / on canvas?’ There are many solitary domestic interiors in Stasko’s work from which the poet peers out on landscapes and other public spaces, struggling to find a sufficient place and identity through epiphanies in nature or, more often, through the illuminations of art.

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

Some of the imagery in this scene is later echoed and reversed in one of Jones’s free-ranging academic essays, where she recounts a possibly unreliable childhood memory of walking across the ocean floor at low tide to view the wreckage of a Japanese warplane. Upon arrival, she tells us, she was disappointed, having hoped to find a skeleton resting in the cockpit; later, she imagined gathering and reassembling the bones of the lost pilot.

The aquatic museum of found objects, the sea temporarily made into land: both these vignettes conjure up a landscape founded on paradoxes and viewed from an outsider’s incomplete perspective (that of a child, or a foreigner in an occupied city). Either scene could easily have come from a film by Jane Campion, a director consistently fascinated with skewed or naive perceptions, with the conjunction of separate realities, and with mysterious kinds of ‘immersion’ that mark a passage from one state to another.

From September 1958 until his capture in August 1963, Eric Edgar Cooke conducted a terrifying campaign of violent crime in greater Perth which left eight people dead and several others permanently injured. The damage did not stop with Cooke’s arrest. A young labourer, John Button, had previously been convicted of one of Cooke’s murders: the hit-and-run killing of Button’s girlfriend., Rosemary Anderson. Button was serving ten years’ imprisonment. Neither Cooke’s confession to the murder of Anderson nor subsequent police investigations were sufficient to convince authorities that the justice system had miscarried. All of Button’s legal appeals (including one to the High Court of Australia) were dismissed. Button steadfastly maintained his innocence, even after he had served his sentence, fruitlessly petitioning politicians for a reopening of his case. For many years the injustice remained, until a chance encounter in 1992 between Button’s brother and a journalist named Estelle Blackburn. With a reporter’s nose for a good story, Blackburn began an investigation of Button’s case that was to last six and a half years and create Australian legal history.

Joanna Mendelssohn is best known as an art critic and historian. After the publication of an essay in The Griffith review entitled ‘Going Private’, Pluto Press commissioned her to write a piece for its Now Australia series. Similar to Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essays, but even more determinedly non-academic, the Pluto Press format is part of a publishing phenomenon and covers a range of political, intellectual and cultural views on public issues and debates. The authors are not necessarily experts in the area they write about, nor are their views always based on systematic, in-depth research.

A little over a year ago, the contents of George W Bush’s iPod were made public. The revelation offered momentary respite to the beleaguered president as the international press seized upon the playlist, scrutinised its contents and, much to the relief of the White House, made tallies of song titles and popular music genres instead of the latest casualties in Iraq. IPod One, as it was dubbed, was shown to be heavy on country and western music and 1970s rock, and light on just about everything else. ‘No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles,’ reported the London Times.

The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand is the thirteenth of Wallflower Press’s ‘24 frames’ series, but there is no need for the editors to feel superstitious on that account. This is a series which presents certain problems. It requires the editor(s) of each volume to choose twenty-four films that are, in some degree, representative of the titular country, or, as the case sometimes even more dauntingly is, of two titular countries – and I know whereof I speak. Having edited Wallflower’s The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005), I can sympathise with the difficulties involved in trying to achieve any sort of representativeness across not one but two film-making countries. And I might add resentfully that Canada gets a whole volume to itself. Canada!

One of the major cliches of recent years is the retiring politician’s parting statement, ‘I’m leaving politics to spend more time with my family’. Indeed, the tensions between work and family commitments have become a regular topic in the media. Newspaper articles sometimes cite the views of prominent social scientists, whose academic publications affirm the popular view that society as a whole benefits from fostering a working environment that acknowledges the importance of family and community. With Weighing up Australian Values, Brian Howe, a former deputy prime minister (1991–96), becomes the latest in a long line of Australian authors to promote public policies that encourage work-life balance.

As a minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, Howe gained much experience in portfolios that addressed community welfare issues, such as social security, health and housing. His current work as a professorial associate in the Centre for Public Policy (University of Melbourne) continues his interest in social reform: Weighing Up Australian Values is a product of Australian Research Council funded research into future directions in Australian social policy. Howe’s book presents a strong case for governments and business to take greater responsibility for the social consequences of economic policy.

Since the 1980s, Australian governments have been legislating to produce a less regulated labour market, which has created greater flexibility for business to set working conditions for employees. As Howe argues, business frequently ignores the changing social needs of workers. For example, despite the increased participation of women in the workforce, many employers have been resistant to creating working conditions that are family-friendly.

Howe’s solution to reconciling current market ideology with the social needs of a modern society is to pursue the notion of transitional labour markets (TLMs), an idea formu­lated by German social scientist Gunther Schmid. Among other things, TML policies are designed to alleviate, or at least anticipate, the risks involved when an individual combines or substitutes work with non-market activities such as caregiving, education and civic involvement. In short, Schmid and Howe believe that government has a legitimate role in investing in individuals at various stages in their careers. Such investment could turn the risks involved in transitional processes, such as phased retirement, into opportunities for a better life for the citizen and society at large.

The notion of time sovereignty in the workplace is one of Howe’s key recommendations. The author advocates time banking, whereby workers accrue credits for working intensively at certain phases of their careers, and can subsequently use that credit for extended leave or shorter hours. Howe approves of the social policies of some European countries which have leave schemes that institutionalise sabbaticals, and encourage unemployed people to gain work experience while the regular worker is on leave. Howe does not, however, explore how social policies can be developed to cope with the inevitable tensions created when the short-term worker is again placed in the dole queue when the ‘real worker’ returns.

Aside from time banking, Howe argues that workers should have the flexibility to undertake lifelong learning while gainfully employed, reasoning that, since employers have drastically reduced their commitment for internal skills training, they need to allow their employees the time off necessary to upgrade skills. The author champions the creation of lifelong learning accounts, which would involve regular salary sacrifice on the part of the employee, topped up by contributions by government and employers. The lifelong learning account could then be used by the employee for training purposes. The scheme could also be applied to the unemployed. Some unemployment benefits could be set aside for learning accounts, which could then be drawn upon by the individual.

Howe is especially focused on the contribution that governments can make to secure a fairer TLM process. The author also believes that part of Australia’s national agenda should be to ensure that maternity leave is available to all female workers. Unfortunately, Howe introduces European TLM concepts without providing the reader with a detailed blueprint for Australian reform. The extent to which Howe is content to uncritically quote and paraphrase Gunther Schmid’s writings is excessive. Many Australian social scientists, including Don Edgar and Barbara Pocock, have been grappling for several years with these issues. It is therefore surprising that much of the Australian literature on family-friendly work policies is largely underplayed in the text in favour of European examples. Moreover, while Howe makes liberal use of Australian statistics to bolster his case for reform, these figures are at times five to ten years out of date.

As Howe acknowledges, for the TLM idea to work there needs to be a change of culture in both government and industry. Such a culture would value the contribution to society of education and training, parental care and the pursuit of cultural enrichment. Yet, it might be asked, ‘How can a culture that values both work and non-work activities flourish if economic rationalism remains the dominant framework around which work is structured?’ Howe is largely silent on this question. Nevertheless, Weighing up Australian Values is a useful introduction to public policy ideas about the work-life balance that have been debated and partially implemented over the last two decades, chiefly in Europe.

The eponymous poem in Caroline Caddy’s latest collection Esperance captures a breathtaking glimpse of a bay on the Western Australian coast. Immediacy epitomises Caddy’s poetic gift. In deft strokes, she provides a vivid land/seascape, compressing an astute reflection on history, geography, and humanity’s irrepressible need to explore beyond known boundaries. The language is physical and sensuous: ‘the snowy beaches / lapped by the cold clear bracelet / that’s there then not there / around our ankles.’ There is also a metaphysical dimension, ‘with everything falling away behind / with everything falling away ahead’ mirroring ‘esperance’: a quality of hope and faith in the future.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book, Romancing Opiates, slams societal and professional attitudes to heroin addiction. Dalrymple argues that heroin users are not blameless patients, as the medical fraternity would have us believe. ln fact, he tells us, heroin users have to work quite hard to get addicted; withdrawal is about as difficult as the flu; and the support industry, which he calls the ‘addiction bureaucracy’, is ineffective and self-serving. Dalrymple contends that the heroin epidemic cannot be dealt with until it is recognised as a moral and spiritual problem rather than solely as a medical one.

The history of Cobb & Co. belongs as much in the territory of folklore as it does in the annals of business. Within forty years of its inception, the company had become synonymous with coach travel in Australia, and later became the subject of a nostalgic tribute in verse by Henry Lawson. There is much ground to cover, and this book blazes new trails as it travels between the commercial and the iconic aspects of Cobb & Co.’s operations.

The official published accounts of Captain Cook’s three great voyages (1768-79) were immense popular successes in Britain. That for the third voyage sold out within three days of publication in 1784. When the Frenchman La Pérouse sailed from Botany Bay in March 1788 into the Pacific – and into oblivion – he remarked that Cook had done so much that he had left him nothing to do but admire his work. In the previous year, the German, Georg Forster, had published in Berlin his eulogy of Cook, Cook der Entdecker (Cook the Discoverer). Cook was the first international superstar, and time has only increased his celebrity status. Major scholarly biographies continue to be published, and seminars which feature Cook in their titles are sell-outs. The name is box-office magic.

More cockles, more shells

In its short life the ABR Poetry Prize has become one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the country. Now it is even more lucrative, with combined prizes of $4000 and a first prize of $3000. Entries are invited for the fourth ABR Poetry Prize. Full details and the entry form appear on page 15 and on our website. Poets have until December 15 to enter. The previous winners were Stephen Edgar, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. Advances was pleased to see that the latter’s poem ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize, has been included in The Best Australian Poetry 2007 (UQP), edited by John Tranter.

Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal

This is the time of day when the light runs down the sky
like bluing and meets the bay, when whip-birds set acoustic
flares along the trees, when I’ll stand and listen to the yachts –
a sound as if cutlery were being replenished on table-tops;

Perhaps the most enduring memory of the Australian Wheat Board’s Iraq misadventures is the picture of its paunchy former chairman, Trevor Flugge, stripped to the waist and pointing a gun at the camera. Flugge was in Iraq, to all intents and purposes representing Australia. Selected by the Australian government with a tax-free salary package of just under a million dollars, he was there because, in the prime minister’s words ‘our principal concern at the time was to stop American wheat from getting our markets’.

Iraq was, of course, one of ‘our markets’ and a focal point for what Caroline Overington calls, in Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal, ‘the greatest trade scandal in Australian history’. Mostly, Australian trade scandals are policy driven, emerging surreptitiously from under the radar, and too diverse and complex to be easily understood. Iraq was different.

Helen Hughes was a professional development economist who worked at the World Bank from 1968 to 1983 and then, as an academic, headed the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University from 1983 to 1993. Since then, she has been a senior fellow at a conservative think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, where she initially focused on issues of development in the Pacific and, since 2004, in remote indigenous Australia.

This book’s launch was timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. Hughes sets out to assess and address the ‘Aboriginal problem’ for 90,000 indigenous people who live in some 1200 ‘homeland’ settlements established in remote Australia from the 1970s, according to Hughes. Her book focuses on the ‘homelands’, because, in her view, their occupants’ deprivation is the greatest.

Kicks and kisses

Dear Editor,

In recent years, conservative commentators have taken to spraying insults at those with whom they disagree. Personal attacks now pose as rational discussion, particularly in the news media. Even so, I did not expect to see in ABR a personal assault disguised as a review of my book Allied and Addicted (July-August 2007).

What a great ad feminam title Michael Wesley chose: ‘Screeching to the converted’. Would he have used it about Clive Hamilton or Robert Manne or Julian Burnside? If not, he proves the truth of an argument in my book: that habits of mind have revived in Australia which we tried to abandon forty years ago. I had not expected one of Australia’s rising younger academics to exhibit them. But now, it seems, academics too resort to sexism and condescension, kissing up to the powerful and kicking down the powerless, just like our government.

Omar Nassif and Enzo Cugliari are fringe-dwellers, beyond ‘white trash’. That harshest of middle-class put-downs fairly locates their distance from the outsider types who claim our interest. Omar and Enzo are anti-charismatic, their physical selves undescribed. In contrast, Ari, the angry child of migrants in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) wants drugs, sex and dancing, and inevitably his character now conjures up the sex god in the film role, Alex Dimitriades. On the top shelf there is Lord Lucan, incognito and surgically disenhanced, slumming on Tasmania’s coastal glory in Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man (2005); attractively guilt-wracked and evolved, Lucan trails glamour and enigmatic women. The actor would be Jeremy Irons.

What is to be done with David Hicks? For more than five years, this question bubbled away in Australian political discourse, ever more so as the years passed. Today Hicks sits in a South Australian prison, serving out an abbreviated sentence for supporting terrorism. In a few months he will be a free man; well as free as his notoriety and an unforgiving government will allow. Hicks’s guilty plea and his short sentence (tax evasion can land you a heftier punishment) have taken the heat out of the affair. This is probably a good thing for Hicks, and even better for the embattled Howard government.

But still the questions remain, not least the fraught issue of how to balance security and liberty in the post-9/11 world. As I was writing this review an Indian doctor was being incarcerated in Brisbane, linked (tenuously) to bomb plots in the United Kingdom. John Howard asked us to trust him, his government and the relevant authorities. Kevin Rudd, eyes on the looming poll, submitted eagerly, and the ‘war on terror’ juggernaut rolled on.

The only salutary effect, it seems to me, of the evolution of religious fundamentalism over recent decades is the current reaction of some scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals. Since the end or the Enlightenment, interest in reasoned polemic against religion (which excludes communist attempts to extirpate it) has largely waned, possibly on the false supposition that the quarry had been mortally wounded. But the emergence of ruthless Islamist ambitions and terrorism, and the malign influence of elements of the Christian right and of right-wing Jewish groups, especially in George W. Bush’s America, appear at last to have spurred intellectuals to produce books and documentaries, to confer and to organise, to engage in resistance to what is rightly perceived as a religious assault on reason and liberal values, as the dying of secular light. The most prominent of the current critics are the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Michel Onfray, the biologist Richard Dawkins and the versatile Christopher Hitchens.

Contemporary biography presents many challenges, even more so when the subject is a politician who is still in office. It is, at best, a progress report: necessarily provisional both in its analysis and its attempt to anticipate the weightier judgment of history. By its very nature, it inclines more towards journalism than towards scholarly assessment.

John Howard has been a constant presence in Australian living rooms for the past three decades, in the endless cavalcade of public life a familiar character whose fortunes we have seen fall and rise, uneven script and all. He was cast as the bit player: often irritating, sometimes inept, always earnest, but omnipresent despite a near-death experience or two. Then, suddenly, almost surreptitiously, he is centre stage: Rosencrantz as prince. A physically unremarkable figure, possessed of no discernibly distinguished intellect; articulate but unmemorable in speech; flaunter of a practised ordinariness: this man has accumulated political milage as Geoffrey Boycott scored runs – arduously, incrementally and unspectacularly. He is now, to the surprise of almost everyone, quite possibly even himself, the second longest-serving of all twenty-five Australian prime ministers, behind only Robert Menzies.

Bruce Beresford has left a greater imprint on the national sensibility than most people might think. From The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) through The Getting of Wisdom (1977) and Breaker Morant (1980), he has demonstrated a virtuoso ability to dramatise Australianness, classic and modern. His films Don’s Party (1976) and The Club (1980) mean that we are never likely to forget the idiom in which David Williamson first represented us, because Beresford has made it part of the cinematic argot of the country; a new production of a play is automatically measured by how much the actors stand up to the classic performances of Graeme Kennedy or Ray Barrett or John Hargreaves in Beresford’s vision of the plays.

Beyond all narrow nationalism, cultural or caricatured, Beresford is a film-maker of formidable elegance and economy. Long past the time anyone would have imagined that such a film could be made he directed the great Jessica Tandy, with Morgan Freeman, in Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and gave to the old-duck movie its high watermark and its abiding example of how the style and poignancy of age could animate a film and make it luminous.

Satire is more than just biting animosity or moral denunciation, though in those shapes it has made its greatest contribution to world literature – from Aristophanes and Juvenal to the first Samuel Butler and Swift. The convention only works in relatively permissive societies. During the worst excesses of censorship in the Cold War, the authorities were seldom worried by satires cleverly concealed as fables or dystopian extravaganzas. Let the cognoscenti exchange winks, their rulers knew that the mob was not interested and the state hardly threatened. The censors themselves may well have enjoyed the ingenuity of their indignant critics – so Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Andrey Voznesensky prospered without having to defect to the West. Meanwhile, satire turned into cabaret in our part of the world.

Some writers are wary of bookshops. It is not the bright lights or the sharp smell of all that new ink, increasingly mingled these days with the aroma of fresh coffee: it is just the sight of all those books – thousands of them. ‘Why am I doing this?’ they think. ‘Does the world really need yet another book? What’s the point of it all?’ But then they read a new novel – it might even be a best-seller or have won a major prize – and think, ‘No, it’s OK. I can do as well as that, and maybe if I try hard enough I can even do better.’ So they keep writing.

From what I have read about Gregory Day, and from my reading of his new novel, Ron McCoy’s·Sea of Diamonds, he seems like a thoughtful and sensitive soul who may occasionally entertain similar thoughts. But I have good news for Mr Day: his new book was well worth the writing.

One stock form of biography is attempting the rehabilitation or revision of a character whose reputation seems well settles. In theory, the most challenging of such projects is that of returning the Devil, otherwise known as Lucifer or Satan, from the lowest circle of human estimation to a more sympathetic or nuanced position. With a tip of the hat to Jack Miles’s God: A Biography (1995), Henry Ansgar Kelly constructs a diabolical life of sorts, retracing the idea of Satan across the centuries from ancient Israel to contemporary Catholicism. This is partly a popularising presentation of scholarly research on an idea and its variations, and partly the outworking of the attractive conceit, borrowed from Miles, that behind the pages of scriptural and apocryphal material lies the development of a real character.

The wandering albatross is the largest of the Diomedeidae family, with a wingspan exceeding three metres. Apart from occasional colloquies over squid or fish, it flies alone for thousands of miles, joining other albatrosses only to mate every two years, always with the same partner. It can live up to sixty years, skimming silently over the southern ocean, seemingly with little effort.

James Woodford’s first novel, Whitecap, deals extensively with these denizens of the sea. Several of his characters are obsessed with them; one of them, Digby Stuart, who is writing a doctorate on wanderers, spends many winter hours at sea waiting to capture them, place metal identification bands on their ankles and, somewhat disturbingly, spray-paint numerals in day-glo red on their snowy chest feathers. The defacement of birds in the name of science is one of many authentic and well-researched snippets of information in the novel. This rigour is unsurprising, coming from an author who was for many years an environmental and science journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and who has enjoyed considerable success with three works of nonfiction: The Wollemi Pine (2000). The Secret life of Wombats (2001) and The Dog Fence (2003).

When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press co-operative.

The collection is divided into three distinct sections that nonetheless have much in common stylistically, texturally and thematically: ‘Living in the World’ is followed by ‘Urban Elegies’, finishing with ‘Three Early Poems’. As in Brooks’s other works, pieces here find their place in juxtaposition and in the context of other pieces. He is supremely patient in the execution of a work, even if, at times, under all the poise and control of his writing, there is a tension, a restlessness that wants to break the constraints of form. His poetry induces a pause – not hesitation and not meditation (much of The Cold Front still in him), but rather a sense of caution.

There is always someone watching someone else in Belinda Castles’ Vogel Award-winning novel, The River Baptists. Most of its characters choose to live on the Hawkesbury because of the peace and seclusion, but the river setting allows a variety of vantage points and approaches to the scattered houses and rickety jellies that line the banks. It is a tranquil and picturesque setting, but Rose’s friend Ben sees it in a rather different light: ‘Subzero temperatures, mud, a pub full of guys who look like Cousin It.’

The River Baptists is a thriller that exploits tensions that exist in small communities. Rose has come to the Hawkesbury to escape. She has hidden herself away in a small waterside house belonging to her sister’s suave boyfriend, who also happens to be the father of Rose’s unborn child. She is living alone, awaiting the birth of her baby. and has her own secrets and past sadness, including a deep sense of grief for her recently deceased father. Her old life has been scaled off: ties have been cut with friends, and she has only occasional contact with neighbours. The neighbours keep a close eye on her, as they do with all newcomers, speculating about the nature of her solitary pregnancy. This collective accrual of facts and assumptions about Rose, many of which are false, feeds the novel’s voyeuristic atmosphere, particularly appropriate in a place where many of the characters have settled to start their lives anew. In this quiet environment, it is easier to eavesdrop.

Loyalty and love she lavished free
On lowly friends and well-born,
Like Murdoch, Melba and like me,
She was marvellously Melbourne

The ‘she’ is actress Coral Browne (1913-1991); the ‘me’ is Barry Humphries; the quatrain is from Humphries’ eulogy – or elegy – A Chorale for Coral, which was ‘Very Privately Printed’ in 1992 after her funeral. In his memoirs More Please, which came out the same year, Humphries recalls listening to Browne ‘in the forties’ on the Lux Radio Theatre. In his subsequent autobiographical volume, My life as Me (2002), he recounts how she ‘had come to England to further her theatrical career in the early fifties ... and she was not only a marvellous actress but an infamous wit and the author of many legendary exchanges’.

As the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum’s confident intensity is underpinned by a dazzling range of scholarship – politics history, psychoanalysis, economics, development studies, constitutional law, archaeology, comparative religion, comparative ethnology, pedagogy, gender studies, ethics – all focused in this book on intellectually annihilating a particular minority, the Hindu religious right in India and its supporters in the United States. Nussbaum’s personal background explains her fervour. Her mother’s family descend from the Mayflower, her father was a conservative Southern lawyer, and the family lived the secure life of Philadelphia’s main line. Martha rejected these satisfactions: ‘I was ill at ease with my elite WASP heritage.’ She became involved in the civil rights movement, and converted to Judaism when she married a Jewish linguist whom she met in a class on Greek prose composition. ‘I had an intense desire to join the underdogs and to fight for justice in solidarity with them.’

When the United States invaded Iraq, it invaded a country that posed no immediate threat to it. It did so at a time when the issue about weapons of mass destruction was in the process of being resolved by the United Nations’ investigations. It invaded a country that was not a major locus of al Qaeda activity (not then) and had played no role in 9/11. The invasion diverted America’s attention and resources from groups that were responsible for 9/11, undermined its moral authority in the international community and handed terrorists a propaganda weapon. True, a tyrant was deposed, but in a way that will breed more tyrants in the future. It is little wonder that so many commentators across the political spectrum have labelled the invasion America’s worst foreign policy decision.

In someone else, John Hughes gives new voice to twenty-one famous men – writers, artists and musicians – who have influenced his imagination and his outlook on life. In this non-standard homage, Huges has written a series of what he calls ‘fictional essays’. Each piece delves into aspects of an individual’s thought and creativity, but Hughes does this through the prism of his own world view, his imagination, his preoccupations. The title recalls Rimbaud’s declaration, ‘I am made up of all who have made me’. When Hughes writes about his fictional version of Marcel Proust or John Cage or Mark Rothko, he is simultaneously writing about himself.

While Hughes’s premise is intriguing, the results are mixed. Not unlike a musical album of B-sides and offcuts, there are plenty of gems, but also a few duds and fragments, and some fine ideas that never quite gel. In combination, the essays imply a world in which all knowledge and imaginative thought is somehow connected. In Calvino mode, Hughes writes:

East Timor’s former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri has a knack of hiring international advisers who win access to his inner circle then publish tell-all books on leaving his employ. First there was Lynne Minion, whose Hello Missus: A Girl’s Own Guide to Foreign Affairs (2004) lampooned him mercilessly and sold like hot cakes. Now Paul Cleary follows the pattern, but in a more respectable book, worthy of serious attention.

A former correspondent of the Financial Review, Cleary worked in East Timor between 2003-05 as a press aide to Mr Alkatiri on oil matters, a position underwritten by the World Bank. He arrived in Dili with a strong sense of mission, determined to assist the Timorese to fight what he saw as Australia’s unprincipled grab for its oil resources. Like many others, he saw it simply as a David and Goliath story: a First World nation bullying a small, impoverished nation. Cleary traces the beginnings in the Whitlam government’s backing for Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the Portuguese colony, and identifies a pattern of cynical pursuit of oil riches, which he claims continues in Alexander Downer’s dealings with the foundling nation.

Not long after he began to spend extended periods on the island, English novelist Nicolas Shakespeare wrote In Tasmania (2004), a spirited account of some of the things that he had seen and been told there. This was a rambling book, whose intention seemed unresolved. With his fifth novel, Secrets of the Sea, Shakespeare has made Tasmania his setting again. Manifold details are refined for the story, with more assurance than in the earlier book. Impressively, Shakespeare has created an unfamiliar place, alert to caricatures of itself, but much stranger. At the same time, his Tasmania seems to belong more to England than ever used to be said, and to the fictional realms of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

i.m. Bettina Gorton

i.

When I drive through freeway towns I look for you
in the sealed front doors of houses, turned away.

I look for you on the couch-grass lawns of February suburbs
between the privet hedge and standard roses with your back to the street.

When I come home from winter holidays I can tell you have been there
drinking window after window of light till it is emptied and grey.

I think once I saw you walking the curve of a disused rail line
where the track shrugged off its sleepers and climbed into the heat.

ii.

However early we woke, you were already waiting,
slippered in dawn’s sedated light,
a first glassful of distance in hand and the cards set out
with the sound of somebody closing in: step step step turn,
step step turn, step turn, turn, only you had already gone
along paths of smoke into the smoke-coloured ways
where in place of footsteps, only ash falls followed you.

Because mallee scrub is the colour of thirst
with an infrastructure of patience,
you’d been divining a path across it ever since you sat down
on the screened-in verandah in that drought at war’s end
and found even the burning days would upholster you in stillness
and the nights antimacassar your hair till you could rest without stain
upon the fine print of promises.

iii.

Out of smoke you came walking. Your face
made a cloud in that cloud-haunted absence
over the courtyard parterre where our noon
shadows snagged on our heels, planning to lengthen.
Then somebody saw the time and we left for the wake.

The lives of scholars and critics, however distinguished they may be, however resourceful their narrators, do not always make for compelling reading, let alone for an account that runs so readably to the phenomenal length of John Haffenden’s absorbing two-volume biography of the English poet and critic, William Empson. Devoted as they are to things of the mind, most academics do not, after all, generally do very much that is likely to command the attention of a wider public, or make for sparkling story. ‘A quiet life’ – the phrase in which Lord David Cecil summed up the career of the Cambridge don and poet Thomas Gray (whose one big adventure was to move, when teased insufferably by his colleagues at one Cambridge college, to the fellowship of another Cambridge college immediately over the road) – seems almost to epitomise this entire genre.