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Absolutely Revolting

July–August 2010, no. 323

Welcome to the July–August 2010 issue of Australian Book Review.

Melinda Harvey reviews The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric
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The Book of Human Skin details the trials and tribulations of an innocent Venetian noblewoman named Marcella Fasan, a girl ‘so sinned agin tis like Job in a dress’, Gianni delle Boccole, loyal family servant and bad speller, explains. Marcella’s principal antagonist is her older brother Minguillo, who, out of filial jealousy and a desire to be the sole heir to the family’s New World fortune in silver, makes her a prisoner, a cripple, a madwoman, and a nun. Think Jacobean tragedy meets Gothic novel, then add some – namely a crazy Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta, who, in between fasting and self-flagellation marathons, terrorises the saner sisters at the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. It is these four characters – Gianni, Marcella, Minguillo, Sor Loreta, plus the kindly Doctor Santo Aldobrandini, a specialist in skin and its maladies – who, unbeknown to one another, take turns narrating this novel.
Book 1 Title: The Book of Human Skin
Book Author: Michelle Lovric
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $32.99, 500 pp
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The Book of Human Skin details the trials and tribulations of an innocent Venetian noblewoman named Marcella Fasan, a girl ‘so sinned agin tis like Job in a dress’, Gianni delle Boccole, loyal family servant and bad speller, explains. Marcella’s principal antagonist is her older brother Minguillo, who, out of filial jealousy and a desire to be the sole heir to the family’s New World fortune in silver, makes her a prisoner, a cripple, a madwoman, and a nun. Think Jacobean tragedy meets Gothic novel, then add some – namely a crazy Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta, who, in between fasting and self-flagellation marathons, terrorises the saner sisters at the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. It is these four characters – Gianni, Marcella, Minguillo, Sor Loreta, plus the kindly Doctor Santo Aldobrandini, a specialist in skin and its maladies – who, unbeknown to one another, take turns narrating this novel.

Read more: Melinda Harvey reviews 'The Book of Human Skin' by Michelle Lovric

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Cheryl Jorgensen reviews The Grand Hotel: A novel by Gregory Day
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According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.
Book 1 Title: The Grand Hotel
Book 1 Subtitle: A novel
Book Author: Gregory Day
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $32.95 pb, 470 pp
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According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

All three novels have themes and motifs in common. There is also nostalgia for an Australia which is fast disappearing. In an interview with Michael Shirrefs for Radio National on 21 May 2008, Day said, ‘we’re definitely vulnerable when we lose our stories and we lose the sense of where we came from’. During the Howard era, he claimed, people became dismissive of the Australian vernacular, when, ironically, the prime minister was making political mileage out of so-called ‘mateship’. In his work, Day wants to ‘document the inner life of those accents and those dialects’. So it is not surprising to discover characters in his novels who seem authentically Australian. Blokes such as the guest at the Grand Hotel who brags about his sexual exploits are all too recognisable.

Read more: Cheryl Jorgensen reviews 'The Grand Hotel: A novel' by Gregory Day

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Ben Eltham reviews After America by John Birmingham
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John Birmingham’s After America is the second book in what is clearly intended to be a trilogy of page-turners – a follow-up to his Axis of Time trilogy, the swashbuckling alternative history which saw a US carrier battle group transported back in time to the middle of World War II. After America, the sequel to Without Warning (2009), is set in a decidedly dystopian alternative present, the result of a mysterious energy wave that wipes out most of the human and animal life forms in North America in 2003. As one might expect, chaos ensues. A global ecological catastrophe has accompanied the human disappearance, a civil engineer from Seattle (the only big US city to survive the wave) has been elected president, Israel has launched nuclear strikes on its Middle East neighbours, and groups of well-organised pirates from Lagos have taken over New York City.
Book 1 Title: After America
Book Author: John Birmingham
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $32.99 pb, 535 pp
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John Birmingham’s After America is the second book in what is clearly intended to be a trilogy of page-turners – a follow-up to his Axis of Time trilogy, the swashbuckling alternative history which saw a US carrier battle group transported back in time to the middle of World War II.

After America, the sequel to Without Warning (2009), is set in a decidedly dystopian alternative present, the result of a mysterious energy wave that wipes out most of the human and animal life forms in North America in 2003. As one might expect, chaos ensues. A global ecological catastrophe has accompanied the human disappearance, a civil engineer from Seattle (the only big US city to survive the wave) has been elected president, Israel has launched nuclear strikes on its Middle East neighbours, and groups of well-organised pirates from Lagos have taken over New York City.

Read more: Ben Eltham reviews 'After America' by John Birmingham

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Susan Gorgioski reviews Book of Lost Threads by Tess Evans
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When Miranda Ophelia Sinclair, ‘Moss’ to her friends, discovers a document featuring the name of her heretofore unknown father, she sets out to find him and to discover her genetic roots. Her complicated family history is gradually exposed when she finds her father, Finn, living as a near-recluse in a town called Opportunity. Finn’s next-door neighbour is Lily Pargetter: aged, lonely, haunted by memories and ghosts. Her nephew, Sandy, is a middle-aged man-child, ineffectual but harmless. This eccentric cast of characters could easily hold its own against Alexander McCall Smith’s creations; however, Evans sets her protagonists on a predictable and fairly scripted path, resulting in a message-driven narrative.
Book 1 Title: Book of Lost Threads
Book Author: Tess Evans
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $27.99 pb, 356 pp
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When Miranda Ophelia Sinclair, ‘Moss’ to her friends, discovers a document featuring the name of her heretofore unknown father, she sets out to find him and to discover her genetic roots. Her complicated family history is gradually exposed when she finds her father, Finn, living as a near-recluse in a town called Opportunity. Finn’s next-door neighbour is Lily Pargetter: aged, lonely, haunted by memories and ghosts. Her nephew, Sandy, is a middle-aged man-child, ineffectual but harmless. This eccentric cast of characters could easily hold its own against Alexander McCall Smith’s creations; however, Evans sets her protagonists on a predictable and fairly scripted path, resulting in a message-driven narrative.

The novel is too long and overreaches itself in several ways. In its quest to be contemporary and savvy, Evans weaves narrative connections to include a Benedictine monastery, the United Nations, and the atrocities that took place in Kosovo. In order to accommodate the novel’s ambitious agenda, the narrative relentlessly plods toward a predictable conclusion, without pausing to give these topics the expository depth they demand and deserve. There is no dialectic of generational confusion, guilt, accusation, and change; no translating, questioning, or problematising the concepts of identity and society. In fact, there is surprisingly little confrontation and discovery – all complexity vanishes in that fictional town called Opportunity. Evans’s heavy-handed use of that word overburdens it, and asks it to perform as metaphor, device and social-realist signpost, preventing her readers from discovering possible subtexts.

In a novel that ostensibly seeks to explore the complicated ties between parents and children, a potentially interesting relationship between Finn and Moss, two likeable but not fully realised characters, is sidelined by Evans’s quest to spin a complex tale. A book with fewer threads would have made for a stronger yarn.

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Laurie Steed reviews The Good Daughter by Honey Brown
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At its best, popular fiction is almost cinematic. As readers, we know what to expect but still gasp in awe as the rug is pulled from under us in pursuit of thrills, chills, and narrative twists. Honey Brown’s second novel, The Good Daughter, is a fine example of the modern ethos. It reads like a classic girl-gone-bad screenplay. Rebecca Toyer, from the wrong side of the tracks, meets Zach Kincaid, a rich boy with skeletons in his closet. They are drawn together, but family secrets threaten to drive them apart. When Zach’s mother goes missing, Rebecca is implicated in her disappearance. During the course of the narrative, she encounters drug dealers, crooked cops, and her fair share of sex, lies, and betrayal. Zach struggles to cope with his family legacy. From early on, he is the powder keg that threatens to ignite the book’s narrative.
Book 1 Title: The Good Daughter
Book Author: Honey Brown
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $32.95 pb, 293 pp
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At its best, popular fiction is almost cinematic. As readers, we know what to expect but still gasp in awe as the rug is pulled from under us in pursuit of thrills, chills, and narrative twists. Honey Brown’s second novel, The Good Daughter, is a fine example of the modern ethos. It reads like a classic girl-gone-bad screenplay. Rebecca Toyer, from the wrong side of the tracks, meets Zach Kincaid, a rich boy with skeletons in his closet. They are drawn together, but family secrets threaten to drive them apart. When Zach’s mother goes missing, Rebecca is implicated in her disappearance. During the course of the narrative, she encounters drug dealers, crooked cops, and her fair share of sex, lies, and betrayal. Zach struggles to cope with his family legacy. From early on, he is the powder keg that threatens to ignite the book’s narrative.

The Good Daughter is a guilty pleasure. Filled with more lowlifes than a sports bar on Friday night, and brimming with tense scenes, it is more than willing to dwell in the uncomfortable aspects of the human psyche, if they can deliver a necessary narrative kick.

Rebecca is very believable; sassy, rebellious but self-destructive, seemingly hell-bent on placing herself in bad situation after bad situation. Her father is less credible, having left his sixteen-year-old daughter alone for weeks in a town filled with sleazes and petty criminals. The male characters, with few exceptions, are borderline psychotic. Will such a simplification of masculinity hold this book back? Will such overblown dramatics mar its literary reception? I don’t think Honey Brown cares, and I can’t say I blame her; this book is unapologetically pulp, but engaging as hell.

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Kate Holden reviews My Dirty Shiny Life by Lily Bragge
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Lily Bragge, performer and arts writer, has had what you might call a dramatic life, the sort that makes people say, ‘You should write a book’. It involves almost every kind of catastrophe that may befall a young woman in suburban Australia: sexual abuse, parental violence, emotional instability, depression, drug addiction, ill-fated romances, unexpected pregnancy, cancer, bereavement, domestic violence, loss of custody, suicide attempts, a great deal of partying and … well, you get the idea. In My Dirty Shiny Life, her first book, Bragge tells in braggadocio style the troubling and fulsome tale of a life lived far beyond the limits of ordinary endurance, one that makes for a riveting but disorienting read.
Book 1 Title: My Dirty Shiny Life
Book Author: Lily Bragge
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $32.95 pb, 258 pp
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Lily Bragge, performer and arts writer, has had what you might call a dramatic life, the sort that makes people say, ‘You should write a book’. It involves almost every kind of catastrophe that may befall a young woman in suburban Australia: sexual abuse, parental violence, emotional instability, depression, drug addiction, ill-fated romances, unexpected pregnancy, cancer, bereavement, domestic violence, loss of custody, suicide attempts, a great deal of partying and … well, you get the idea. In My Dirty Shiny Life, her first book, Bragge tells in braggadocio style the troubling and fulsome tale of a life lived far beyond the limits of ordinary endurance, one that makes for a riveting but disorienting read.

Read more: Kate Holden reviews 'My Dirty Shiny Life' by Lily Bragge

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Peter Pierce reviews New Guinea Days by Michael OConnor
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In the literature of Australia, our vast and mysterious nearest neighbour – now Papua New Guinea – has had a more significant place than is usually recognised. It was in this country that James McAuley saw war service and later converted to Catholicism. About New Guinea he wrote some of his most beautiful poetry, as when he summoned a bird of paradise to ‘[leave] your fragrant rest on the summit of morning calm’. Numerous novels – sagas of Japs and the Jungle – issued from their authors’ wartime experiences, among them Tom Hungerford’s The Ridge and the River (1952) and David Forrest’s The Last Blue Sea (1990).
Book 1 Title: New Guinea Days
Book Author: Michael O'Connor
Book 1 Biblio: Australian Scholarly Publishing, $39.95 pb, 165 pp
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In the literature of Australia, our vast and mysterious nearest neighbour – now Papua New Guinea – has had a more significant place than is usually recognised. It was in this country that James McAuley saw war service and later converted to Catholicism. About New Guinea he wrote some of his most beautiful poetry, as when he summoned a bird of paradise to ‘[leave] your fragrant rest on the summit of morning calm’. Numerous novels – sagas of Japs and the Jungle – issued from their authors’ wartime experiences, among them Tom Hungerford’s The Ridge and the River (1952) and David Forrest’s The Last Blue Sea (1990).

To the literature by war correspondents in this theatre George Johnston contributed New Guinea Diary and Kenneth Slessor ‘New Guinea: The Twilight War’ (both 1943). Randolph Stow drew on his time as a patrol officer in New Guinea for his novel Visitants (1979). Trevor Shearston was a teacher in New Guinea, and at Mount Hagen in 1977 he saw the Australian flag lowered for the last time. Two of his novels are set there, Sticks That Kill (1983) and Dead Birds (2007), the latter narrated by a severed head.

Read more: Peter Pierce reviews 'New Guinea Days' by Michael O'Connor

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Rick Hosking reviews Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India edited by Bruce Bennett et al.
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Article Title: India's teeming plenitude
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Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India has been assembled by several of the stalwarts of this particular cultural exchange, all based in Australian or Indian universities. Bruce Bennett and Santosh Sareen have played leading roles over the last two or three decades in establishing Australian Studies in India, most notably through the Indian Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
Book 1 Title: Of Sadhus and Spinners
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian Encounters with India
Book Author: Bruce Bennett, Santosh K. Sareen, Susan Cowan and Asha Kanwar
Book 1 Biblio: HarperCollins Publishers India, $25.95 pb, 206 pp
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Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India has been assembled by several of the stalwarts of this particular cultural exchange, all based in Australian or Indian universities. Bruce Bennett and Santosh Sareen have played leading roles over the last two or three decades in establishing Australian Studies in India, most notably through the Indian Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

The punchy title suggests the ends of a rather masculine spectrum that captures something of the way many (most?) Australians think of India, with holy men at one end and cricketers at the other, the sacred and the profane, reinforcing the endlessly invoked line ‘India is a land of contrasts’ from just about every postcard or text message from travellers and tourists in India.

Read more: Rick Hosking reviews 'Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India' edited by Bruce...

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Sarah Kanowski reviews Mr Isherwood Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood and the Search for the Home Self by Victor Marsh
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Article Title: Exclusivist claims
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Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).
Book 1 Title: Mr Isherwood Changes Trains
Book 1 Subtitle: Christopher Isherwood and the Search for the 'Home Self'
Book Author: Victor Marsh
Book 1 Biblio: Clouds of Magellan, $29.95 pb, 310 pp
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Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).

Less well known is the life the writer lived in California from 1939 until his death in 1986, or the subject which preoccupied much of his work there: religion. Isherwood became a devotee of Vedanta, a religious practice based on the study of ancient Indian scriptures, intended to inspire a sense of universal oneness. Isherwood lived for a period at the Ramakrishna Order’s Hollywood centre and for almost forty years was a student of the guru Swami Prabhavananda. He published translations, explanatory guides, an official biography of Sri Ramakrishna, and his own spiritual autobiography.

Read more: Sarah Kanowski reviews 'Mr Isherwood Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood and the Search for the...

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Contents Category: Tribute
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Since its official opening in March 1910, Sydney’s Mitchell Library has become one of Australia’s pre-eminent cultural assets. This remarkable institution was named in honour of the reclusive bachelor collector and bibliophile David Scott Mitchell (1836–1907), whose private library sits at its heart and whose fortune provided a rich endowment to support its continued growth and enrichment.
Book 1 Title: One Hundred
Book Author: Richard Neville and Paul Brunton
Book 1 Biblio: State Library of New South Wales, $24.95 pb, 136 pp
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Since its official opening in March 1910, Sydney’s Mitchell Library has become one of Australia’s pre-eminent cultural assets. This remarkable institution was named in honour of the reclusive bachelor collector and bibliophile David Scott Mitchell (1836–1907), whose private library sits at its heart and whose fortune provided a rich endowment to support its continued growth and enrichment.

In the care of successive generations of dedicated and ambitious (in the best sense) staff, the Mitchell is the jewel in the crown of its parent body, the State Library of New South Wales; and it is the asset not just of the state and people of New South Wales, but of Australia itself. It is appropriate therefore, one hundred years on, that there should be a program of celebrations to commemorate that event, to honour once more the founding genius of David Scott Mitchell and to take stock of the ways in which the Library has grown and flourished.

Read more: John Thompson reviews 'One Hundred: A Tribute to the Mitchell Library' by Richard Neville and Paul...

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Daniel Vuillermin reviews Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy by Helen MacDonald
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Article Title: Secrets of the cadaver trade
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In 1543, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, in De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), wrote: ‘the violation of the body would be the revelation of its truth.’ Three hundred years later, English, Scottish and Australian anatomists, anatomy inspectors, museum curators and seemingly anyone involved in the business of bodies adopted the credo of violation to the extent of also violating the truth. The revelation of their contravention of laws and desecration of the dead is the subject of Helen MacDonald’s second book on the cadaver trade.
Book 1 Title: Possessing the Dead
Book 1 Subtitle: The Artful Science of Anatomy
Book Author: Helen MacDonald
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $39.99 pb, 289 pp
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In 1543, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, in De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), wrote: ‘the violation of the body would be the revelation of its truth.’ Three hundred years later, English, Scottish and Australian anatomists, anatomy inspectors, museum curators and seemingly anyone involved in the business of bodies adopted the credo of violation to the extent of also violating the truth. The revelation of their contravention of laws and desecration of the dead is the subject of Helen MacDonald’s second book on the cadaver trade.

Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy is a worthy companion to MacDonald’s first book, the award-winning Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (2005), which explored dissection as a ‘cultural activity’ through the study of those who became ‘things for surgeons’. In Possessing the Dead, however, the focus is on the regulation of the cadaver trade; in particular, the transgressions of the British Anatomy Act 1832. Regulation is perhaps too strong a word, as the Act didn’t have loopholes but rather chasms. It was devised largely in response to the prevalence of body snatching and the infamous anatomy murders executed by William Burke and William Hare, where seventeen victims were sold (for between £10 and £15 per corpse) for the purpose of dissection.

Read more: Daniel Vuillermin reviews 'Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy' by Helen MacDonald

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Don Anderson reviews Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits, and Unruly Episodes by Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill
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Witnesses as diverse as Plato in the Republic, James Joyce in Ulysses and Lewis Mumford in The City in History have testified that ultimately, in some metaphorical if not metaphysical sense, the City is, above all else, an expression of love. Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill, luminaries of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, currently associated with the University of Wollongong, are assuredly in love with Radical Sydney, a city which may or may not be with us still. There is, however, a whiff of Yeats’s ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave’, as there is of Beckett’s borrowing from the French: ‘The only true Paradises are lost Paradises’. Yet Irving and Cahill are anything but Romantics. Radical Realists, rather. They are not afraid to quote those who disagree with them: for example, the head of the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence who described the Sydney of the 1950s as ‘a stinking city, one of the most corrupt in the world’. Indeed, as the soundtrack of Underbelly insists: ‘It’s a jungle out there.’
Book 1 Title: Radical Sydney
Book 1 Subtitle: Places, Portraits, and Unruly Episodes
Book Author: Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 368 pp
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Witnesses as diverse as Plato in the Republic, James Joyce in Ulysses and Lewis Mumford in The City in History have testified that ultimately, in some metaphorical if not metaphysical sense, the City is, above all else, an expression of love. Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill, luminaries of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, currently associated with the University of Wollongong, are assuredly in love with Radical Sydney, a city which may or may not be with us still. There is, however, a whiff of Yeats’s ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave’, as there is of Beckett’s borrowing from the French: ‘The only true Paradises are lost Paradises’. Yet Irving and Cahill are anything but Romantics. Radical Realists, rather. They are not afraid to quote those who disagree with them: for example, the head of the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence who described the Sydney of the 1950s as ‘a stinking city, one of the most corrupt in the world’. Indeed, as the soundtrack of Underbelly insists: ‘It’s a jungle out there.’ As the authors state:

This book is about remembering, and about restoring some of the radicals, some of the unruly, to the history of Sydney. It discovers the street corners where they spoke, their union offices and lecture halls, and the pubs and cafes in which they socialised.

Read more: Don Anderson reviews 'Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits, and Unruly Episodes' by Terry Irving and...

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Ian Gibbins reviews The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
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What would it be like to possess two brains, each with its own view of the world and each with its own personality? Which one would be in control? Which one would be ‘you’? Of course, none of us literally has two brains. Yet we have two cerebral hemispheres, a right and a left, that in many important respects are duplicates of each other. Normally, the right and left hemispheres communicate extensively with each other, mostly via a large fibre tract known as the corpus callosum. Despite overall similarities in their organisation, there are marked left–right asymmetries in the details of how the hemispheres operate. Compelling evidence for brain asymmetry initially came from two groups of patients: those who have had a stroke affecting just one hemisphere; and those, the so-called ‘split-brain’ patients, who lack a functional corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres, either because of a congenital defect, or as a result of surgery to ameliorate otherwise intractable epilepsy.
Book 1 Title: The Master and His Emissary
Book 1 Subtitle: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Book Author: Iain McGilchrist
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press (Inbooks), $64.95 hb, 608 pp
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What would it be like to possess two brains, each with its own view of the world and each with its own personality? Which one would be in control? Which one would be ‘you’? Of course, none of us literally has two brains. Yet we have two cerebral hemispheres, a right and a left, that in many important respects are duplicates of each other. Normally, the right and left hemispheres communicate extensively with each other, mostly via a large fibre tract known as the corpus callosum. Despite overall similarities in their organisation, there are marked left–right asymmetries in the details of how the hemispheres operate. Compelling evidence for brain asymmetry initially came from two groups of patients: those who have had a stroke affecting just one hemisphere; and those, the so-called ‘split-brain’ patients, who lack a functional corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres, either because of a congenital defect, or as a result of surgery to ameliorate otherwise intractable epilepsy.

Read more: Ian Gibbins reviews 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western...

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Simon West reviews Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
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Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.
Book 1 Title: Why Translation Matters
Book Author: Edith Grossman
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, $39.95 hb, 160 pp
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Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.

In this comprehensive sense, translation is a process that we all encounter daily, whether we read books or not. Indeed, as Octavio Paz says, when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate, for any attempt to communicate, even with someone in the same language, involves interpreting the non-verbal world in words. Translation is of vital importance to everyone.

Read more: Simon West reviews 'Why Translation Matters' by Edith Grossman

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Amy Baillieu reviews Sugar Sugar by Carole Wilkinson
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Set in the early 1970s, prolific children’s and Young Adult author Carole Wilkinson’s latest novel, Sugar Sugar, follows the adventures of Jackie, an Australian girl who dreams of being a fashion designer. After leaving her home in Semaphore to travel to London with her friend Colleen, Jackie finds herself working at the snooty fashion boutique Konundrum; waiting to be noticed by the fashion world. She soon realises that the ‘swinging London’ she’d been searching for ‘had pretty much swung’. After accidentally spilling hot tea over Julie Christie, and Konundrum’s most expensive evening dress, Jackie catches the hovercraft to Paris for the weekend hoping to impress French fashion designer André Courrèges with her design folio.
Book 1 Title: Sugar Sugar
Book Author: Carole Wilkinson
Book 1 Biblio: Black Dog Books, $18.99 pb, 339 pp
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Set in the early 1970s, prolific children’s and Young Adult author Carole Wilkinson’s latest novel, Sugar Sugar, follows the adventures of Jackie, an Australian girl who dreams of being a fashion designer. After leaving her home in Semaphore to travel to London with her friend Colleen, Jackie finds herself working at the snooty fashion boutique Konundrum; waiting to be noticed by the fashion world. She soon realises that the ‘swinging London’ she’d been searching for ‘had pretty much swung’. After accidentally spilling hot tea over Julie Christie, and Konundrum’s most expensive evening dress, Jackie catches the hovercraft to Paris for the weekend hoping to impress French fashion designer André Courrèges with her design folio.

Read more: Amy Baillieu reviews 'Sugar Sugar' by Carole Wilkinson

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Brenda Niall reviews The Cambridge Companion to Childrens Literature edited by M.O. Grenby and Andrea Immel
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Prepare to be affronted, or perhaps just a bit miffed. Although it does not confine itself to works by British writers, you will look in vain for Australian authors in the new Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Among many titles from the United States, Little Women gets its due, as does Little House on the Prairie. Canada’s Anne of Green Gables is there, and so is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Scan the index and you will find works of European origin, such as The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. The latter two, of course, could be given honorary citizenship because of their immense popularity in English translation.
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature
Book Author: M.O. Grenby and Andrea Immel
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $59.95 pb, 324 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Prepare to be affronted, or perhaps just a bit miffed. Although it does not confine itself to works by British writers, you will look in vain for Australian authors in the new Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Among many titles from the United States, Little Women gets its due, as does Little House on the Prairie. Canada’s Anne of Green Gables is there, and so is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Scan the index and you will find works of European origin, such as The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. The latter two, of course, could be given honorary citizenship because of their immense popularity in English translation.

But, for a moment, let’s play the ‘whatabout’ game. Why no mention of Seven Little Australians (1894) or The Magic Pudding (1918)? Or from the 1960s on, how is it that none of the works of Ivan Southall or Patricia Wrightson caught the Cambridge eye?  What about John Marsden, whose books reach international audiences in millions? Or Sonya Hartnett, winner of the most prestigious international prize, the Astrid Lindgren award?

Read more: Brenda Niall reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature' edited by M.O. Grenby and...

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David Hansen reviews Robert Dowling: Tasmanian Son of Empire by John Jones
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Dowling revisited
Article Subtitle: Reversing the neglect of settler art history
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The settler art history of Australia is not a long one – not much more than two hundred years – so it is all the more surprising that the literature of its first century should remain so riddled with holes. It is a sad reflection on the priorities of the academic and curatorial professions that (certainly as far as concerns that conventional, fundamental professional resource, the monographic study) some very significant artists have been neglected or completely ignored. To give just a few examples, it is years since there was anything new or substantial on Augustus Earle, S.T. Gill, Nicholas Chevalier or Louis Buvelot, while there have never been focused, extended studies of first-generation early colonial artists such as the surveyor-explorer G.W. Evans and the natural history painter John Lewin, of Benjamin Duterrau, artist of The Conciliation (1840), Australia’s first history painting, or of the 1860s and 1870s landscapists J.H. Carse, Thomas Clark and Henry Gritten.
Book 1 Title: Robert Dowling
Book 1 Subtitle: Tasmanian Son of Empire
Book Author: John Jones
Book 1 Biblio: National Gallery of Australia, $49.95 hb, 192 pp
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The settler art history of Australia is not a long one – not much more than two hundred years – so it is all the more surprising that the literature of its first century should remain so riddled with holes. It is a sad reflection on the priorities of the academic and curatorial professions that (certainly as far as concerns that conventional, fundamental professional resource, the monographic study) some very significant artists have been neglected or completely ignored. To give just a few examples, it is years since there was anything new or substantial on Augustus Earle, S.T. Gill, Nicholas Chevalier or Louis Buvelot, while there have never been focused, extended studies of first-generation early colonial artists such as the surveyor-explorer G.W. Evans and the natural history painter John Lewin, of Benjamin Duterrau, artist of The Conciliation (1840), Australia’s first history painting, or of the 1860s and 1870s landscapists J.H. Carse, Thomas Clark and Henry Gritten.

Read more: David Hansen reviews 'Robert Dowling: Tasmanian Son of Empire' by John Jones

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The sky is silent. All the planes must keep
Clear of the fine volcanic ash that drifts
Eastward from Iceland like a bad idea.
In your apartment building without lifts,
Not well myself, I find it a bit steep
To climb so many stairs but know I must
If I would see you still alive, still here.
The word is out from those you love and trust –
Time is so short that from your clever pen
No line of verse might ever flow again.
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Peter Porter b. Brisbane 1929, d. London 2010

The sky is silent. All the planes must keep
Clear of the fine volcanic ash that drifts
Eastward from Iceland like a bad idea.
In your apartment building without lifts,
Not well myself, I find it a bit steep
To climb so many stairs but know I must
If I would see you still alive, still here.
The word is out from those you love and trust –
Time is so short that from your clever pen
No line of verse might ever flow again.

Read more: 'Silent Sky' by Clive James

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Andrew Sant reviews Phantom Limb by David Musgrave
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Carphology, in case you have forgotten, is the ‘delirious fumbling with bedclothes’, as stated in the epigraph to David Musgrave’s poem of the same name, which is not about a pathology but, energetically though bleakly, about passion and sleep. The epigraph to the book as a whole is taken from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, fragment C1: ‘God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merchant.’ Tongue in cheek, but Musgrave does indeed have wares and they are finely assembled configurations of words. The poems in Phantom Limb often suggest, rather than explicitly display, Musgrave’s erudition. There is a communicative ease about the enterprise, if this can be said about poems that continue to declare themselves after multiple readings. In them there are elusive depths combined with surface pleasures.
Book 1 Title: Phantom Limb
Book Author: David Musgrave
Book 1 Biblio: John Leonard Press, $24.95 pb, 68 pp
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Carphology, in case you have forgotten, is the ‘delirious fumbling with bedclothes’, as stated in the epigraph to David Musgrave’s poem of the same name, which is not about a pathology but, energetically though bleakly, about passion and sleep. The epigraph to the book as a whole is taken from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, fragment C1: ‘God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merchant.’ Tongue in cheek, but Musgrave does indeed have wares and they are finely assembled configurations of words. The poems in Phantom Limb often suggest, rather than explicitly display, Musgrave’s erudition. There is a communicative ease about the enterprise, if this can be said about poems that continue to declare themselves after multiple readings. In them there are elusive depths combined with surface pleasures.

Read more: Andrew Sant reviews 'Phantom Limb' by David Musgrave

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Jill Jolliffe reviews The Circle of Silence by Shirley Shackleton
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Article Title: 'Courage in your own'
Article Subtitle: Maintaining the rage over the Balibo Five
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Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.
Book 1 Title: The Circle of Silence
Book 1 Subtitle: A Personal Testimony Before, During and After Balibo
Book Author: Shirley Shackleton
Book 1 Biblio: Pier 9, $34.95 pb, 392 pp
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Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.

In tune with its unpopular policy of appeasement towards President Suharto’s dictatorship, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government had denied that the invasion was occurring. Had they lived and brought home the incriminating footage, the Five might well have changed the course of history and the East Timorese might have been spared a twenty-four-year military occupation which left around 183,000 dead and thousands of others traumatised by war and their experiences in Indonesian-installed torture chambers.

Read more: Jill Jolliffe reviews 'The Circle of Silence' by Shirley Shackleton

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Morag Fraser reviews The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President by Taylor Branch and The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr by Ken Gormley
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Article Title: The Great Divider
Article Subtitle: Inside the White House with Bill Clinton
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While Americans squirmed or vented self-righteous outrage at the revelation of their president’s escapades with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the world seemed bemused. Oxford history fellow, George Cawkwell, who knew William Jefferson Clinton in his 1960s Rhodes Scholar days, was worldly in defence of his former student: ‘I think the truth is that people behave in sex matters in a way they’d never behave in anything else.’ He counselled English discretion: ‘We don’t attack our monarchs all the time. It wouldn’t have been good for people to have known every bit about Henry the Eighth.’
Book 1 Title: The Clinton Tapes
Book 1 Subtitle: Wrestling History with the President
Book Author: Taylor Branch
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $49.99 hb, 707 pp
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Book 2 Title: The Death of American Virtue
Book 2 Subtitle: Clinton vs. Starr
Book 2 Author: Ken Gormley
Book 2 Biblio: Crown Publishers (Random House), $59.95 hb, 790 pp
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While Americans squirmed or vented self-righteous outrage at the revelation of their president’s escapades with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the world seemed bemused. Oxford history fellow, George Cawkwell, who knew William Jefferson Clinton in his 1960s Rhodes Scholar days, was worldly in defence of his former student: ‘I think the truth is that people behave in sex matters in a way they’d never behave in anything else.’ He counselled English discretion: ‘We don’t attack our monarchs all the time. It wouldn’t have been good for people to have known every bit about Henry the Eighth.’

Readers of Hilary Mantel’s splendid novel Wolf Hall, which in its fictional way does let on a fair bit about Henry VIII’s behaviour in sex matters, could argue that the revolution might have come sooner if the British people had known the whole truth. But hierarchical and monarchical cultural habits have a long half-life, as the recent history of the House of Windsor demonstrates. There are still persuasive pragmatic arguments for keeping sex out of politics and squinting at any sexual indiscretion that does not compromise matters of state. Australians have accepted this realpolitik moral reasoning for much of their history. As have Americans. So why not now? The affairs of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy never threatened to derail a presidency. Why did Bill Clinton’s infidelities cause such national angst?

Read more: Morag Fraser reviews 'The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President' by Taylor Branch...

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Richard Harding reviews Ciaras Gift: Grief Edged with Gold by Una Glennon and Murderer No More: Andrew Mallard and the epic fight that proved his innocence by Colleen Egan
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Article Title: Prime suspect
Article Subtitle: The limits of justice in Western Australia
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In 1996–97, three young women were abducted from the nightclub area of Claremont in Perth, and murdered. One of them was a young lawyer, Ciara Glennon. Her mother, Una Glennon, has written a memoir of her passage from despair, anger and grief to a mature and rounded understanding of the complexity of the human condition. Her book is a wise and beautiful one – written sparingly, without unnecessary personal embellishment. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ she says, quoting Kierkegaard.
Book 1 Title: Ciara's Gift
Book 1 Subtitle: Grief Edged with Gold
Book Author: Una Glennon
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $29.95 hb, 115 pp
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Book 2 Title: Murderer No More
Book 2 Subtitle: Andrew Mallard and the epic fight that proved his innocence
Book 2 Author: Colleen Egan
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 303 pp
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In 1996–97, three young women were abducted from the nightclub area of Claremont in Perth, and murdered. One of them was a young lawyer, Ciara Glennon. Her mother, Una Glennon, has written a memoir of her passage from despair, anger and grief to a mature and rounded understanding of the complexity of the human condition. Her book is a wise and beautiful one – written sparingly, without unnecessary personal embellishment. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ she says, quoting Kierkegaard. Thirteen years after Ciara’s death, Una Glennon has reached the point where she can write:

Never had I felt so much pain, yet never had I felt so much joy in the simple pleasures of life. Never had I felt so dead inside, yet never had I felt so alive to the external world around me. Never had I felt God so present in my life and so mysteriously a part of what I was experiencing ... A shift had occurred and I was finally able to accept Ciara’s death. The stranglehold of grief loosened and … I emerged a different person with a different perspective on life.

Read more: Richard Harding reviews 'Ciara's Gift: Grief Edged with Gold' by Una Glennon and 'Murderer No...

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Deryck Schreuder reviews A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock by Jim Davidson
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Article Title: ‘Attachment, justice and span’
Article Subtitle: The doyen of Australian historians
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Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.
Book 1 Title: A Three-Cornered Life
Book 1 Subtitle: The Historian W.K. Hancock
Book Author: Jim Davidson
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $59.95 hb, 624 pp
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Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.

‘W.K. who?’ We have always favoured the military and the sporting over the intellect in our national pantheon. Even this splendid study of Professor Sir William Keith Hancock – A Three-Cornered Life – has the unusual subtitle: The Historian W.K. Hancock. It is hard to imagine a biography of ‘The Don’ informing us that it is of ‘The Cricketer Donald Bradman’.

Read more: Deryck Schreuder reviews 'A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock' by Jim Davidson

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Jeffrey Grey reviews Anzacs In Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia 1918-19 by Michael Challinger
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The Great War fractured the Europe of its day, and the ripples of the calamity it represented continued to be felt years after the formal hostilities ended in November 1918. Former combatants carried their experiences throughout the rest of their lives; some found it difficult to ‘let go’, while others who had seen little or nothing of the war at first hand felt compelled for various reasons to experience the untidy aftermath of conflict where this continued to play itself out. Russia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, was one such venue.
Book 1 Title: Anzacs In Arkhangel
Book 1 Subtitle: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia 1918-19
Book Author: Michael Challinger
Book 1 Biblio: Hardie Grant Books, $35 pb, 285 pp
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The Great War fractured the Europe of its day, and the ripples of the calamity it represented continued to be felt years after the formal hostilities ended in November 1918. Former combatants carried their experiences throughout the rest of their lives; some found it difficult to ‘let go’, while others who had seen little or nothing of the war at first hand felt compelled for various reasons to experience the untidy aftermath of conflict where this continued to play itself out. Russia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, was one such venue.

The tangled story of the Western intervention in the Russian Civil War is broadly known in outline, though there remains still no really good account of this curious episode in its full, multinational dimension. That small numbers of Australians found themselves in Russia as part of the British effort to throttle Bolshevism in its cradle is also generally known, and Michael Challinger acknowledges the various authors (this one included) who have written about it.

Read more: Jeffrey Grey reviews 'Anzacs In Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of...

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Craig Munro reviews Barbara Hanrahan: A biography by Annette Stewart
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Article Title: Rediscovering Hanrahan
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The career of one of Australia’s most talented novelists, Barbara Hanrahan (1939–91), was cut short by illness, and her work has now largely slipped from view. I edited several of her novels in the late 1970s for the University of Queensland Press. Whereas other UQP authors of the time, such as the gregarious Olga Masters, enjoyed media attention, with the introspective Barbara Hanrahan it was a struggle to build the readership her talent deserved.
Book 1 Title: Barbara Hanrahan
Book 1 Subtitle: A biography
Book Author: Annette Stewart
Book 1 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $39.95 pb, 244 pp
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The career of one of Australia’s most talented novelists, Barbara Hanrahan (1939–91), was cut short by illness, and her work has now largely slipped from view. I edited several of her novels in the late 1970s for the University of Queensland Press. Whereas other UQP authors of the time, such as the gregarious Olga Masters, enjoyed media attention, with the introspective Barbara Hanrahan it was a struggle to build the readership her talent deserved.

This illuminating biography is therefore doubly welcome, for Barbara was not only a brilliantly original novelist but also a highly accomplished visual artist. Annette Stewart’s first book about Hanrahan, Woman and Herself, a work of literary criticism, was published by UQP in 1998, alongside The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, edited by Elaine Lindsay. Now, drawing on Hanrahan’s often confronting diaries and more than a dozen autobiographical novels, Stewart movingly charts the artist’s dual career. Her remarkable creative life was without compromise on either front, as this fine biography reveals.

Read more: Craig Munro reviews 'Barbara Hanrahan: A biography' by Annette Stewart

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Maya Linden reviews Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James
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Article Title: Everyday tragedy
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Our response to tragedy strangely mingles pain and pleasure,’ notes Terry Eagleton in Sweet Violence (2003). ‘The feelings being released are painful in themselves but the act of easing them is pleasurable.’ While reading Rebecca James’s Beautiful Malice, I was reminded of this passage, and of Eagleton’s suggestion that the ambivalent combination of fear, pity and relief in our reaction to works of tragedy is what makes them so enthralling.
Book 1 Title: Beautiful Malice
Book Author: Rebecca James
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $24.99 pb, 296 pp
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Our response to tragedy strangely mingles pain and pleasure,’ notes Terry Eagleton in Sweet Violence (2003). ‘The feelings being released are painful in themselves but the act of easing them is pleasurable.’ While reading Rebecca James’s Beautiful Malice, I was reminded of this passage, and of Eagleton’s suggestion that the ambivalent combination of fear, pity and relief in our reaction to works of tragedy is what makes them so enthralling.

Read more: Maya Linden reviews 'Beautiful Malice' by Rebecca James

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Felicity Plunkett reviews Home Truth edited by Carmel Bird
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We are often far / From home in a dark town’ writes Charlie Smith in his poem ‘The Meaning of Birds’. Home Truth explores dark towns both literal and figurative. The pieces in any anthology are jigsaw-like, forming an overarching image. In this case, it is a sense of home as an entity most powerfully felt in exile; the place we look to from our darkest places. In her perceptive essay, Carmel Bird, scrutinising her immediate thoughts about home, finds in them much that looks like ‘a series of clichés and stereotypes’. Concepts of home, she suggests, may be ‘tinged with the glow of nostalgia, shadowed by poignant reminders of the ideal past’. If this is the face of the anthology’s jigsaw, it proves palimpsestic. Its deeper vision is the idea of resilience and of making a home from a position of exile.
Book 1 Title: Home Truth
Book Author: Carmel Bird
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $29.99 pb, 304 pp
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We are often far / From home in a dark town’ writes Charlie Smith in his poem ‘The Meaning of Birds’. Home Truth explores dark towns both literal and figurative. The pieces in any anthology are jigsaw-like, forming an overarching image. In this case, it is a sense of home as an entity most powerfully felt in exile; the place we look to from our darkest places. In her perceptive essay, Carmel Bird, scrutinising her immediate thoughts about home, finds in them much that looks like ‘a series of clichés and stereotypes’. Concepts of home, she suggests, may be ‘tinged with the glow of nostalgia, shadowed by poignant reminders of the ideal past’. If this is the face of the anthology’s jigsaw, it proves palimpsestic. Its deeper vision is the idea of resilience and of making a home from a position of exile.

Read more: Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Home Truth' edited by Carmel Bird

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Patrick Allington reviews HEAT 22: The Persistent Rabbit edited by Ivor Indyk
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As with most issues of HEAT, The Persistent Rabbit is consistently excellent. Still, there are degrees of excellence. Compare the essay by Barry Hill with those by Chris Andrews and Stuart Cooke. Hill’s discussion of Ezra Pound’s Orientalism is proof (which these days we need) that scholarly rigour need not be obscure and, conversely, that accessibility doesn’t equal dumbing down. Plus, Hill writes majestically and, when appropriate, with sardonic wit or bluntness. Andrews and Cooke have both written fascinating, commendable essays, Andrews on the Argentinean novelist César Aira, and Cooke on two Mapuche (indigenous Chilean) poets, Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla. But in contrast to Hill’s essay, their pieces are less alive, less complete, less exhilarating.   In this issue, the fiction resonates more powerfully than the poetry (although the poetry is uniformly solid, the best of it potent and playful). Michelle Moo’s ‘New Gold Mountain’ is a taut satire of colliding voices set in a colonial goldfield, Mireille Juchau offers a beautifully observed story about a girl and her family, and Julia Sutton delivers a sharply funny tale about an artist who is, or isn’t, being threatened by a terrorist. Best of all is Barbara Brooks’s poignant ‘fictional memoir’ about the narrator’s grandfather, a veteran of colonial India lost in his memories. 
Book 1 Title: HEAT 22
Book 1 Subtitle: The Persistent Rabbit
Book Author: Ivor Indyk
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $26.95 pb, 224 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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As with most issues of HEAT, The Persistent Rabbit is consistently excellent. Still, there are degrees of excellence. Compare the essay by Barry Hill with those by Chris Andrews and Stuart Cooke. Hill’s discussion of Ezra Pound’s Orientalism is proof (which these days we need) that scholarly rigour need not be obscure and, conversely, that accessibility doesn’t equal dumbing down. Plus, Hill writes majestically and, when appropriate, with sardonic wit or bluntness. Andrews and Cooke have both written fascinating, commendable essays, Andrews on the Argentinean novelist César Aira, and Cooke on two Mapuche (indigenous Chilean) poets, Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla. But in contrast to Hill’s essay, their pieces are less alive, less complete, less exhilarating.   In this issue, the fiction resonates more powerfully than the poetry (although the poetry is uniformly solid, the best of it potent and playful). Michelle Moo’s ‘New Gold Mountain’ is a taut satire of colliding voices set in a colonial goldfield, Mireille Juchau offers a beautifully observed story about a girl and her family, and Julia Sutton delivers a sharply funny tale about an artist who is, or isn’t, being threatened by a terrorist. Best of all is Barbara Brooks’s poignant ‘fictional memoir’ about the narrator’s grandfather, a veteran of colonial India lost in his memories. 

Read more: Patrick Allington reviews 'HEAT 22: The Persistent Rabbit' edited by Ivor Indyk

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Chris Flynn reviews Known Unknowns by Emmett Stinson
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Emmett Stinson has been fiction editor of Adelaide’s Wet Ink magazine since its conception, and came to prominence when his story ‘All Fathers the Father’ won The Age Short Story Competition in 2004. That story is included here in his first collection, as are ‘The Russians are Leaving’ and ‘Great Extinctions in History’, which appeared in the Sleeper’s Almanac in 2007 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Stinson’s story ‘Clinching’ was included in the inaugural edition of Kill Your Darlings. A compendium of his short fiction has thus been in the offing for some time, and it came as little surprise to see his name on the list of writers Affirm Press is showcasing in its interesting new short story series.
Book 1 Title: Known Unknowns
Book Author: Emmett Stinson
Book 1 Biblio: Affirm Press, $24.95 pb, 224 pp
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Emmett Stinson has been fiction editor of Adelaide’s Wet Ink magazine since its conception, and came to prominence when his story ‘All Fathers the Father’ won The Age Short Story Competition in 2004. That story is included here in his first collection, as are ‘The Russians are Leaving’ and ‘Great Extinctions in History’, which appeared in the Sleeper’s Almanac in 2007 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Stinson’s story ‘Clinching’ was included in the inaugural edition of Kill Your Darlings. A compendium of his short fiction has thus been in the offing for some time, and it came as little surprise to see his name on the list of writers Affirm Press is showcasing in its interesting new short story series.

Read more: Chris Flynn reviews 'Known Unknowns' by Emmett Stinson

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Barry Hill reviews Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill by Helen Vendler
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Article Title: Binocular vision
Article Subtitle: A brilliant undresser of poems
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Helen Vendler, a supreme partridge among American critics of poetry, has written a third shining book on style – which she has made her métier, rather after Theodor Adorno, the philosopher-critic of music and the aesthetic high road. In her first, The Breaking of Style (1995), about Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, she revealed how poets ‘can cast off an earlier style to perform an act of violence on the self’ – extending mastery. Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) was about the mature self-making of Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath. Both books delivered the pleasures to which we have become accustomed: the feeling that we are in the company of a most brilliant undresser of poems, a critic who knows their stitching so well that she can lay their song and soul truly bare. Her powers of elucidation, with its enshrining of techne, have long brought joy to poets and their readers.
Book 1 Title: Last Looks, Last Books
Book 1 Subtitle: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Book Author: Helen Vendler
Book 1 Biblio: Princeton University Press (Footprint Books), $29.95 hb, 152 pp
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Helen Vendler, a supreme partridge among American critics of poetry, has written a third shining book on style – which she has made her métier, rather after Theodor Adorno, the philosopher-critic of music and the aesthetic high road. In her first, The Breaking of Style (1995), about Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, she revealed how poets ‘can cast off an earlier style to perform an act of violence on the self’ – extending mastery. Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) was about the mature self-making of Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath. Both books delivered the pleasures to which we have become accustomed: the feeling that we are in the company of a most brilliant undresser of poems, a critic who knows their stitching so well that she can lay their song and soul truly bare. Her powers of elucidation, with its enshrining of techne, have long brought joy to poets and their readers.

Last Looks, Last Books completes the logic of this sequence. Her great poets are inspected by reference to death, as their ‘last words’ contend with the mortal coils of bodies and time. What happens then? Vendler wants to know. As poets of a secular modernising age, by what means does the poem contend with the absence of the consolation available to the earlier greats? ‘The poet, still alive but aware of the imminence of death, wishes to enact that deeply shadowed but still vividly alert moment; but how can the manner of a poem do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit.’ Such a poem, Vendler proposes, is one that can sustain what she calls a binocular vision.

Read more: Barry Hill reviews 'Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill' by Helen...

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Open Page with Lisa Gorton
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Why do you write?

It is the one ambition I’ve ever had. Some bleak days I think that my desire to write is no more than an unshakeable habit. On other days I think that writing allows me to have and make other worlds. All the difficulty of writing is in service to this freedom. Also, the habit of writing renews experience: it makes me notice things with a new distance and curiosity, and wonder how they might work in writing; it means that I always have something to think about on the train.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, but my most vivid dreams are nightmares. They make me glad to wake. I miss the dreams of flying that I had when I was growing up.
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Why do you write?

It is the one ambition I’ve ever had. Some bleak days I think that my desire to write is no more than an unshakeable habit. On other days I think that writing allows me to have and make other worlds. All the difficulty of writing is in service to this freedom. Also, the habit of writing renews experience: it makes me notice things with a new distance and curiosity, and wonder how they might work in writing; it means that I always have something to think about on the train.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, but my most vivid dreams are nightmares. They make me glad to wake. I miss the dreams of flying that I had when I was growing up.

Read more: Open Page with Lisa Gorton

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The kindness of patrons

Early last month we launched our Patrons Scheme. One hundred friends and supporters celebrated the event in style at ‘Cranlana’, in Melbourne. A full report appears on page 5, next to a list of all our Patrons. For ABR, as we have already reported, private philanthropy is absolutely essential. Without it we can’t grow, can’t take the odd risk, can’t introduce many new features.
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The kindness of patrons

Early last month we launched our Patrons Scheme. One hundred friends and supporters celebrated the event in style at ‘Cranlana’, in Melbourne. A full report appears on page 5, next to a list of all our Patrons. For ABR, as we have already reported, private philanthropy is absolutely essential. Without it we can’t grow, can’t take the odd risk, can’t introduce many new features.

Because of this recent munificence, we can announce the creation of the first ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, worth $5000. This program is intended to reward outstanding Australian writers, to enhance ABR through the publication of major works of literary journalism, and to advance the magazine’s commitment to critical debates and literary values. We hope to offer two or three Fellowships each year.

Read more: Advances - July-August 2010

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Many adults who grew up the 1980s doubtless remember a hairy, conical-shaped creature with very big feet that lived in the Australian bush, as well as a large hippopotamus that lived on a little girl’s roof and ate cake. The conical creature was, of course, Grug. Ted Prior’s Grug books were small, affordable paperbacks featuring simple but entertaining stories about this unflappable creature. The series is now being republished, and it includes new titles such as Grug and the Circus and Grug Learns to Read (Simon & Schuster, $4.99 pb, 32 pp).
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Many adults who grew up the 1980s doubtless remember a hairy, conical-shaped creature with very big feet that lived in the Australian bush, as well as a large hippopotamus that lived on a little girl’s roof and ate cake. The conical creature was, of course, Grug. Ted Prior’s Grug books were small, affordable paperbacks featuring simple but entertaining stories about this unflappable creature. The series is now being republished, and it includes new titles such as Grug and the Circus and Grug Learns to Read (Simon & Schuster, $4.99 pb, 32 pp).

These are endearing tales that are highly accessible to small children. They deal with things that children love to do, such as performing circus tricks or learning how to read. The bright illustrations are uncluttered, and the text is pared down into manageable bites. The illustrations echo the text, allowing the child to get the sense of the story through both words and images. With their naïve main character and child-sized format, these are encouraging and welcoming stories for young children who are learning to read.

Read more: Stephanie Owen Reeder reviews children's books

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Across the decades, on both sides of the Great Divide and at campfires and barbecues, in pubs and public halls and class-rooms, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and C.J. Dennis have been recited, selectively quoted, and parodied. Their most popular works have migrated into Australian folklore; hardly surprising, as what they wrote largely derived from the tradition of bush ballads and bush yarns. Theirs have become our stories, familiar, reassuring of our cultural roots and attitudes. To some extent, they are a kind of comfort literature.
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Across the decades, on both sides of the Great Divide and at campfires and barbecues, in pubs and public halls and class-rooms, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and C.J. Dennis have been recited, selectively quoted, and parodied. Their most popular works have migrated into Australian folklore; hardly surprising, as what they wrote largely derived from the tradition of bush ballads and bush yarns. Theirs have become our stories, familiar, reassuring of our cultural roots and attitudes. To some extent, they are a kind of comfort literature.

That being the case, what can Jack Thompson do for them, and for us, in this series of recordings from Fine Poets? The question for him is whether to try to make them new or to reinforce what we already know. Thompson, of course, wears the impress of Australia, and I do not mean his rakish, persuasively bashed Akubra. He has become a kind of cultural icon, a marker of popular authenticity, a walking, talking seal of approval. Unlike Bill Hunter, Thompson does not resort to a flat growl to assert his nationality. He takes care with his vowels, and modulates his lines. Unthinkable once, Thompson’s approach amounts to a paradigm shift in the national type; and, more interestingly, an adjustment to this cultural tradition.

Read more: Adrian Mitchell on Jack Thompson's recordings 'The Bush Poems of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson', 'The...

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Article Title: Bouncing on the trampoline of fact
Article Subtitle: Biography and the historical imagination
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Biography seems relatively easy to produce, but difficult to write well. It is therefore treated with a certain amount of suspicion by academics. Historians tend to regard it as chatty, not primarily concerned with policy or the identification of social factors; literary people are more sympathetic, but, in order to blot out the prosy or the fact-laden, tend to revert to a default position. Biography for them is basically about writers, and best written by literary academics.
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Biography seems relatively easy to produce, but difficult to write well. It is therefore treated with a certain amount of suspicion by academics. Historians tend to regard it as chatty, not primarily concerned with policy or the identification of social factors; literary people are more sympathetic, but, in order to blot out the prosy or the fact-laden, tend to revert to a default position. Biography for them is basically about writers, and best written by literary academics.

This leads to some anomalies. Jenny Hocking’s biography of Gough Whitlam (2008) is more fully achieved than her biography of Frank Hardy (2005), yet, as a political biography, would probably be disregarded, or merged with various quickies. Again, literary techniques may not in themselves be sufficient to illuminate a life, whatever they reveal about the inner one – as Brian Matthews demonstrates in parts of his recent biography of Manning Clark (2008).

Read more: 'Bouncing on the Trampoline of Fact: Biography and the historical imagination' by Jim Davidson

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Why on earth should Australian filmmakers want to try replicating Hollywood? No one can do Hollywood as well as Hollywood can, and the attempts to emulate it have usually, perhaps inevitably, led to flavourless or otherwise misbegotten enterprises. I know that this is the era of international co-productions, and that where the money comes from is undoubtedly influential, but where the creative personnel come from is surely still more so. I want to argue for the cultural significance of the small-scale filmmaking that doesn’t depend on US funding and thereby isn’t subject to the sorts of compromise that such involvement may entail.
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Why on earth should Australian filmmakers want to try replicating Hollywood? No one can do Hollywood as well as Hollywood can, and the attempts to emulate it have usually, perhaps inevitably, led to flavourless or otherwise misbegotten enterprises. I know that this is the era of international co-productions, and that where the money comes from is undoubtedly influential, but where the creative personnel come from is surely still more so. I want to argue for the cultural significance of the small-scale filmmaking that doesn’t depend on US funding and thereby isn’t subject to the sorts of compromise that such involvement may entail.

It is always going to be difficult for Anglophone cinema, whether Australian, New Zealand, British or Canadian, to establish a viable place for themselves in domestic – let alone global – markets in the face of the all-conquering Hollywood product. As someone once remarked, if Americans spoke Chinese it would be easier for, say, Australia to maintain a sturdy film industry. For Anglophone films to be commercially successful, they need to break into the American market. There’s nothing new in that sort of ‘wisdom’. But is this the only sort of cinema that can justify itself? Is an Australian film (I use ‘Australia’ as a metonym for those other English-speaking countries referred to above) only worthwhile if it attracts audiences from Seattle to Dallas to Boston?

Read more: 'Finding ourselves in Australian films' by Brian McFarlane

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Article Title: Furore in Israel
Article Subtitle: Suspicion and defensiveness after the 'Freedom Flotilla'
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As with so many of the events that mark Israel’s history, the deadly attack on the Gaza flotilla in late May seemed frustratingly – and tragically – to encapsulate many of the arguments, insecurities, defences, and emotions that swirl around the enduring conflict in the Middle East.
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As with so many of the events that mark Israel’s history, the deadly attack on the Gaza flotilla in late May seemed frustratingly – and tragically – to encapsulate many of the arguments, insecurities, defences, and emotions that swirl around the enduring conflict in the Middle East.

At first, the result and immediate consequences of the confrontation aboard the Mavi Marmara appeared relatively straightforward. Israeli troops had killed nine pro-Palestinian activists, leading to a further decline in its reputation and to deeper international isolation, and relations with its closest ally in the Middle East, Turkey, were damaged beyond any foreseeable repair. But the event quickly become mired in the seemingly inevitable tug-of-war over facts, causes, perceptions and the competing claims to morality and justice in the Middle East.

Read more: 'Furore in Israel: Suspicion and defensiveness after the 'Freedom Flotilla'' by Jonathan Pearlman

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Article Title: Mindscapes of the artist
Article Subtitle: Visiting Randolph Stow
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I visited Randolph Stow on impulse. We had corresponded briefly and since I was passing through London in February 1975, I asked if I might meet him. He kindly invited me to spend the day with him in East Bergholt, a village in Suffolk, two hours from London. Stow had been living there, in Dairy Farm Cottage, for some six years. Six years later, he moved to nearby Harwich.
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I visited Randolph Stow on impulse. We had corresponded briefly and since I was passing through London in February 1975, I asked if I might meet him. He kindly invited me to spend the day with him in East Bergholt, a village in Suffolk, two hours from London. Stow had been living there, in Dairy Farm Cottage, for some six years. Six years later, he moved to nearby Harwich.

I did not visit Stow with any particular intent – no interview or article – but rather out of admiration for his work and because of a certain curiosity that had been piqued by a couple of intriguing letters he had sent me in my capacity as Editor of Australian Literary Studies (ALS). In 1973, Stow, aged thirty-seven, had sent for publication a note titled ‘The Australian Miss Havisham’. It argued that there was an Australian source for the famous Dickens character – a certain Miss Donnithorne. Stow, presenting the note as ‘a postscript’ to an earlier one (1963) by J.S. Ryan, commented: ‘it is unlikely now that it will ever be possible to prove by direct evidence that Dickens knew of the Miss Donnithorne affair’. While Stow claimed that his discovery, made through a note in the Dickensian (1966) and a related reference in James Payn’s Recollections (1884), ‘seemed to put the matter almost beyond dispute’, he scrupulously offered two ‘complications’, concluding that ‘all three candidates … made their contributions to the final portrait’. Stow’s reply appeared in ALS (October 1974), along with an addendum suggested by him: ‘Miss Eliza Donnithorne (c.1827–1886) lived at Cambridge Hall, 36 King Street, Newtown, Sydney, and after being jilted on her wedding day in 1856 adopted a life style remarkably like Miss Havisham’s.’

Read more: 'Mindscapes of the artist: Visiting Randolph Stow' by Laurie Hergenhan

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Busted

Dear Editor,

In his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ (May 2010), David Hansen focused on the politics around the Benjamin Law busts of Truganini and Woureddy. As an aside, he mentioned that ‘Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost’. It is ironical that, as Hansen’s essay was going to print, Gareth Knapman (Museum Victoria) and Olga Tsara (State Library of Victoria) located one of the George Augustus Robinson busts in the State Library of Victoria.
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Busted

Dear Editor,

In his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ (May 2010), David Hansen focused on the politics around the Benjamin Law busts of Truganini and Woureddy. As an aside, he mentioned that ‘Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost’. It is ironical that, as Hansen’s essay was going to print, Gareth Knapman (Museum Victoria) and Olga Tsara (State Library of Victoria) located one of the George Augustus Robinson busts in the State Library of Victoria.

As the Protector of Aborigines in Tasmania, during the 1830s, Robinson persuaded the Aboriginal community to surrender into government protection, an approach mythologised as the ‘conciliation’, but one that resulted in the Aboriginal population being exiled to Flinders Island. By 1835 Robinson had achieved his mission of ‘conciliation’ and chose to represent his importance as a public figure by commissioning Benjamin Law to produce what was an archetypal Victorian-era bust of himself. Draped in a toga, Robinson appeared in neoclassical grandeur. The bust provides an insight into Robinson’s desire for self-promotion. Rather than inscribing the bust as ‘protector’ or ‘conciliator’, Law – probably at Robinson’s direction – inscribed it as ‘pacificator’ of Aborigines, suggesting that Robinson saw conciliation as an imperial ruse.

Read more: Letters to the Editor - July-August 2010

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