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Absolutely Revolting

November 2009, no. 316

Welcome to the November 2009 issue of Australian Book Review.

Chris Womersley reviews Truth by Peter Temple
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In Peter Temple’s phenomenally successful The Broken Shore (2005), detective Joe Cashin wonders what the right result might be in the case of murdered businessman and philanthropist Charles Bourgoyne. Lawyer and romantic interest Helen Castleman’s answer is succinct: ‘The truth’s the right result.’ The truth of The Broken Shore was murky, disturbing and came with a price ...
Book 1 Title: Truth
Book Author: Peter Temple
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $32.95 pb, 386 pp, 9781921520716
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/72P2Q
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In Peter Temple’s phenomenally successful The Broken Shore (2005), detective Joe Cashin wonders what the right result might be in the case of murdered businessman and philanthropist Charles Bourgoyne. Lawyer and romantic interest Helen Castleman’s answer is succinct: ‘The truth’s the right result.’ The truth of The Broken Shore was murky, disturbing and came with a price.

Several years later, a minor character from The Broken Shore, Stephen Villani – Joe Cashin’s best friend – takes centre stage as head of Homicide in Melbourne. Truth is marketed as a sequel to The Broken Shore, but it’s not; the only connection is that several other minor characters from the previous work reappear here. Readers will recognise Detective Paul Dove, as well as Detectives Birkerts and Finucane. Cashin hovers on the outskirts of the action, and Jack Irish, from an earlier series of novels, makes a cameo appearance. Women have walk-on roles and, naturally, there is a love interest, but this is a dark, violent world of troubled men and their obsessive allegiance to the dead; men who have not learned from those who came before. ‘I’m several generations flawed,’ Villani says with characteristic self-hatred. ‘The object will soon be unusable.’ Fans will also recognise the gallows humour, the brutal violence and the whiff of decay that rises from the pages.

Read more: Chris Womersley reviews 'Truth' by Peter Temple

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Judith Armstrong reviews Lovesong by Alex Miller
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Alex Miller has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature, a rich award given triennially to a Victorian author for a body of work. It is hardly surprising that a writer who has twice won the Miles Franklin Award and frequently been the recipient of, or short-listed for, other prizes should be among ...
Book 1 Title: Lovestong
Book Author: Alex Miller
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $35 pb, 354 pp, 9781742371290
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Alex Miller has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature, a rich award given triennially to a Victorian author for a body of work. It is hardly surprising that a writer who has twice won the Miles Franklin Award and frequently been the recipient of, or short-listed for, other prizes should be among this group of contenders; Lovesong is Miller’s ninth novel since the publication of Watching the Climbers on the Mountain in 1988. He was then in his early fifties, had written poetry and plays, helped found the Anthill Theatre, and taught creative writing. The sustained period of prose fiction which followed has earned the author not only celebrity but affection.

While there is great variety in Miller’s novels, readers know that they can expect thoughtful treatment of significant but non-apocalyptic themes, among them attachment to land or country; displacement to new settings; deeply valued family life, often in conflict with other, equally honourable aspirations, such as the artistic vocation. Few people, of course, choose books for the sake of theme alone; what is most reliable is Miller’s gift for inclusiveness. As readers, we feel instantly drawn into the lives of his characters, at home in their homes.

For this reason, I am willing to bet that Miller is a favourite with book clubs – far from a put-down. Where would literary fiction be without its constant readers? These stalwarts must be the bread and butter of the publishing industry, tackling each month or so a work not necessarily of their personal or preferred choice. Committed to the literary ‘fair go’, they will bravely take on the likes of Booker prize-winners that have confounded the critics and puzzled the public. But how relieved they are when the choice falls on a work that is both sympathetic and stimulating, inclusive and interesting, thought-provoking yet able to be read in bed. The faithful will feel well rewarded by Lovesong.

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Open Page with Andrea Goldsmith
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Why do you write?

For the language, for the ideas, for the pleasures of the imagination, for the unorthodox hours, for the solitude.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

To dream you need to sleep, and sleep, like sport, is not a skill I have mastered.

Where are you happiest?

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The Unsentimental Bloke: Kenneth Cook and Wake in Fright by Jacqueline Kent
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Kenneth Cook was always a little surprised by the success of Wake in Fright. He dismissed it as a young man’s novel, as indeed it was; he published it in 1961, when he was thirty-two. Among his sixteen other works of fiction he was prouder of Tuna (1967), a partial reimagining of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea set off the coast of South Australia, and The Man Underground (1977), which dealt with opal mining. Perhaps he preferred them because he had enjoyed the research involved. It is true that both are better crafted, more assured, than the novel that made his name. But he could never quite accept that Wake in Fright delineated grim truths about the bush and its inhabitants that his other novels do not capture.
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Kenneth Cook was always a little surprised by the success of Wake in Fright. He dismissed it as a young man’s novel, as indeed it was; he published it in 1961, when he was thirty-two. Among his sixteen other works of fiction he was prouder of Tuna (1967), a partial reimagining of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea set off the coast of South Australia, and The Man Underground (1977), which dealt with opal mining. Perhaps he preferred them because he had enjoyed the research involved. It is true that both are better crafted, more assured, than the novel that made his name. But he could never quite accept that Wake in Fright delineated grim truths about the bush and its inhabitants that his other novels do not capture.

So Ken’s best-known novel did not figure largely in his personal pantheon. He was peeved that so much of his other work – the novels, texts on creative writing, books of photographs, television and stage plays, and a large quantity of journalism – was relatively unknown. Making a living as a writer during the 1960s and 1970s was almost impossible – it is not exactly easy now – so he did a lot of other things to, as he said, earn a quid. His first wife and their four children were largely supported by his company Patrician Films, one of the first independent low-budget film production houses in the country, which for many years made and sold short films, mostly for ABC television.

Read more: 'The Unsentimental Bloke: Kenneth Cook and Wake in Fright' by Jacqueline Kent

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Mateship, Friendship and National Identity by Ronald A. Sharp
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A year ago, I came to Australia prepared to spend the first half of my sabbatical leave completing a book on John Keats. Never having been to Australia, I was eager to spend some time here: five months in all. When I participated in the 2008 Mildura Writers Festival, it became clear to me that something both delightful and extraordinary was at work. There was a fine group of writers, including Les Murray, David Malouf, Alice Pung, Alex Miller, Sarah Day, and Anthony Lawrence. But what made the festival remarkable was the combination of conviviality and serious talk about literature and ideas that surpassed anything in my previous experience, which included far more such events than I could begin to count.
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A year ago, I came to Australia prepared to spend the first half of my sabbatical leave completing a book on John Keats. Never having been to Australia, I was eager to spend some time here: five months in all. When I participated in the 2008 Mildura Writers Festival, it became clear to me that something both delightful and extraordinary was at work. There was a fine group of writers, including Les Murray, David Malouf, Alice Pung, Alex Miller, Sarah Day, and Anthony Lawrence. But what made the festival remarkable was the combination of conviviality and serious talk about literature and ideas that surpassed anything in my previous experience, which included far more such events than I could begin to count.

In the months that followed I developed friendships with a few of these writers that already feel to me like the kind of friendships one is lucky to find once in a decade. For someone like myself, who had been teaching and writing about friendship for the last quarter century, this was simply unaccountable. How, in just five months, had I developed new friendships of such depth and delight, the kind that I feel certain will last a lifetime? And by what quirk does it turn out that one of those new friends has written more searchingly and perceptively about friendship than any fiction writer I have encountered in years? Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell, as I argued in the July 2009 issue of the Australian Literary Review, is the most subtle and profound treatment of friendship in any contemporary novel I know, Australian or other-wise.

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Sarah Kanowski reviews In Two Minds: Tales of a psychotherapist by Paul Valent
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‘I am interested to know all about you: who you are, how your life developed, from the time your mother was pregnant with you, till today. Are you willing to tell me?’ This request, made by Paul Valent to one of his first patients, is as seductive as it is impossible. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century approached their characters with the same voracious desire to know everything, to explain everything, to have everything revealed. But the psychotherapist’s mission is far more daunting than the novelist’s, for the secrets he aims to uncover are those the subject hides from himself.
Book 1 Title: In Two Minds
Book 1 Subtitle: Tales of a psychotherapist
Book Author: Paul Valent
Book 1 Biblio: University of New South Wales Press, $39.95 pb, 349 pp
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‘I am interested to know all about you: who you are, how your life developed, from the time your mother was pregnant with you, till today. Are you willing to tell me?’ This request, made by Paul Valent to one of his first patients, is as seductive as it is impossible. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century approached their characters with the same voracious desire to know everything, to explain everything, to have everything revealed. But the psychotherapist’s mission is far more daunting than the novelist’s, for the secrets he aims to uncover are those the subject hides from himself.

Read more: Sarah Kanowski reviews 'In Two Minds: Tales of a psychotherapist' by Paul Valent

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Peter McLennan reviews Killer Company: James Hardie exposed by Matt Peacock
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Big business is a hard country. Matt Peacock tells the story of the James Hardie company and its venality as the manufacturer of fibro cement products in Australia. The fibro shack has been as iconic a domestic symbol as the Hills hoist, and Australia used more fibro per head than any other developed nation. However, the fibre in fibro for much of the twentieth century was asbestos, exposure to which is lethal.
Book 1 Title: Killer Company
Book 1 Subtitle: James Hardie exposed
Book Author: Matt Peacock
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $35 pb, 330 pp
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Big business is a hard country. Matt Peacock tells the story of the James Hardie company and its venality as the manufacturer of fibro cement products in Australia. The fibro shack has been as iconic a domestic symbol as the Hills hoist, and Australia used more fibro per head than any other developed nation. However, the fibre in fibro for much of the twentieth century was asbestos, exposure to which is lethal.

Asbestos was first associated with lung disease before World War II. Postwar, the evidence accumulated rapidly. James Hardie’s culpability lies in its dissimulation and obfuscation in relation to these facts. Peacock demonstrates how well informed James Hardie’s management was from the outset. However, it was not until 1980 that asbestos began to be phased out. If the real reasons were known, there might have been panic or government intervention. The last asbestos was produced in 1987, a generation after management became fully aware of its repercussions.

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews Killing the Black Dog by Les Murray
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Lawrence warned us not to trust the teller, but to trust the tale. Nevertheless, all writers are apt to suffer the fate of being confused or conflated with their works. Maybe it is part of what Goethe entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit. If truth is going to be let into poetry, many readers want to know the facts about the poet: both the jubilant facts and the disconcerting ones. This is not merely irritating nosey-parkerhood. The shimmering glamour of writers is inevitably part of their stock-in-trade. A Byron, a Plath, a Rimbaud, Dickinson or Dylan Thomas has become inseparable from that poet’s reported life, dazzle, sex and dirt. An early death helps no end. It is an example of fatedness which Al Alvarez explored years ago in The Savage God (1971), a title he derived from Yeats talking about Charles Conder and his decadent allies of the 1890s.
Book 1 Title: Killing the Black Dog
Book Author: Les Murray
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $24.95 pb, 88 pp
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Lawrence warned us not to trust the teller, but to trust the tale. Nevertheless, all writers are apt to suffer the fate of being confused or conflated with their works. Maybe it is part of what Goethe entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit. If truth is going to be let into poetry, many readers want to know the facts about the poet: both the jubilant facts and the disconcerting ones. This is not merely irritating nosey-parkerhood. The shimmering glamour of writers is inevitably part of their stock-in-trade. A Byron, a Plath, a Rimbaud, Dickinson or Dylan Thomas has become inseparable from that poet’s reported life, dazzle, sex and dirt. An early death helps no end. It is an example of fatedness which Al Alvarez explored years ago in The Savage God (1971), a title he derived from Yeats talking about Charles Conder and his decadent allies of the 1890s.

What is true about dead writers is also true about living ones, poets in especial. All walk around trailing shawls of personality, which cloak or enhance their work, however much they may yearn for Keatsian impersonality: for the desirable objectivity of art.

Read more: Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Killing the Black Dog' by Les Murray

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Kylie Mirmohamadi reviews Literary Melbourne: A Celebration of writing and ideas edited by Stephen Grimwade
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Every now and again, the future of the book emerges as a topic of anxious discussion among literary types. Will books become obsolete, discarded in favour of electronic reading devices with sleek design and smooth contours, or merely lose relevance given all the digital distractions? Literary Melbourne is one publication which betrays no such anxieties. Published to mark Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, it is not only a celebration of all things literary but an assertion of the history, relevance and power of books, writing and ideas. Yet, like the city whose literary culture it celebrates, this volume speaks rather than shouts. The muted tones of its cover, echoed throughout in shades of sepia, brown and grey, announce that this is no flamboyant publication: for all its evocation of city streets, it is an ‘indoor’ book, inviting reflection and discussion. Above all, as indicated by small courtesies such as the ‘Ex Libris’ label on the endpage and the ribbon bookmark, this is a book for booklovers, for those hopeless addicts who like to own, hold and return to their books.
Book 1 Title: Literary Melbourne
Book 1 Subtitle: A Celebration of writing and ideas
Book Author: Stephen Grimwade
Book 1 Biblio: Hardie Grant Books, $24.95 hb, 254 pp
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Every now and again, the future of the book emerges as a topic of anxious discussion among literary types. Will books become obsolete, discarded in favour of electronic reading devices with sleek design and smooth contours, or merely lose relevance given all the digital distractions? Literary Melbourne is one publication which betrays no such anxieties. Published to mark Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, it is not only a celebration of all things literary but an assertion of the history, relevance and power of books, writing and ideas. Yet, like the city whose literary culture it celebrates, this volume speaks rather than shouts. The muted tones of its cover, echoed throughout in shades of sepia, brown and grey, announce that this is no flamboyant publication: for all its evocation of city streets, it is an ‘indoor’ book, inviting reflection and discussion. Above all, as indicated by small courtesies such as the ‘Ex Libris’ label on the endpage and the ribbon bookmark, this is a book for booklovers, for those hopeless addicts who like to own, hold and return to their books.

Read more: Kylie Mirmohamadi reviews 'Literary Melbourne: A Celebration of writing and ideas' edited by...

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Barry Everingham reviews Queen Elizabeth: The Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross
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To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.
Book 1 Title: Queen Elizabeth: The Queen Mother
Book 1 Subtitle: The Official Biography
Book Author: William Shawcross
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $59.99 hb, 1,120 pp
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To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.

Read more: Barry Everingham reviews 'Queen Elizabeth: The Queen Mother: The Official Biography' by William...

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Kate Holden reviews Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire
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It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.
Book 1 Title: Smoke in The Room
Book Author: Emily Maguire
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $29.99 pb, 282 pp
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It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.

In her work on contemporary feminism, Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity (2008), Maguire made a call for women to respect each other’s choices. In Smoke in the Room, she gives us a female character who is difficult to like, at least in the beginning. Katie is the landlady’s granddaughter. When we meet her, she is a skittish, immature creature of impulse – baffling impulse – and aimless self-absorption. She drinks too much, collects tabloid magazines and mulishly resists her grandmother’s advice to get a job. Indeed, she seems an unlikeable and shallow young adult with not much in her head except boredom and the urge to provoke.

Read more: Kate Holden reviews 'Smoke in the Room' by Emily Maguire

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James Ley reviews Sons of the Rumour by David Foster
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At the end of her insightful critical study David Foster: Satirist of Australia (2008), Susan Lever quotes several rather despondent-sounding letters from her subject. In one, he claims to have lost his taste for satire; in another, he declares that he is ‘over’ literature. Yet he also expresses a continuing desire ‘to write books that are strange and beautiful’, and reveals he is at work on a new novel, his first since The Land Where Stories End (2001), one that draws on the framing tale of Arabian Nights and explores his ‘twin obsessions’: sexuality and mysticism.
Book 1 Title: Sons of the Rumour
Book Author: David Foster
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $39.99 hb, 431 pp
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At the end of her insightful critical study David Foster: Satirist of Australia (2008), Susan Lever quotes several rather despondent-sounding letters from her subject. In one, he claims to have lost his taste for satire; in another, he declares that he is ‘over’ literature. Yet he also expresses a continuing desire ‘to write books that are strange and beautiful’, and reveals he is at work on a new novel, his first since The Land Where Stories End (2001), one that draws on the framing tale of Arabian Nights and explores his ‘twin obsessions’: sexuality and mysticism.

Read more: James Ley reviews 'Sons of the Rumour' by David Foster

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Melinda Harvey reviews Spiel by David Sornig
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Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front stalls documenting this apocalyptic vision.
Book 1 Title: Spiel
Book Author: David Sornig
Book 1 Biblio: University of Western Australia Press, $26.95, 245pp
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Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front stalls documenting this apocalyptic vision.

Spiel locates itself self-consciously alongside A.L. McCann’s underrated Subtopia (2005) and Christos Tsiolkas’s acclaimed Dead Europe (2005). Sornig’s novel, frequently vivid and often perplexingly abstract, is its own dramatisation of eschatology. Like Subtopia, it is haunted by the ghosts of Berlin’s calamitous last century. Like Dead Europe, it features a suburban boy caught in the eternal loop of European savagery. Add to these titles Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) and Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007) and we have something approaching a micro-genre.

Read more: Melinda Harvey reviews 'Spiel' by David Sornig

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Dennis Altman reviews The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane
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How does one review a serious academic study of 950 pages that covers two thousand years of political history? In this case I shall be upfront and declare that I am only reviewing part of Keane’s thesis, and will leave it to historians to discuss the remainder of his book. If I concentrate on the last 300 pages, this is because they contain more than enough material for even the keenest reader, let alone a harassed reviewer.
Book 1 Title: The Life and Death of Democracy
Book Author: John Keane
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster, $49.99 hb, 958 pp
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How does one review a serious academic study of 950 pages that covers two thousand years of political history? In this case I shall be upfront and declare that I am only reviewing part of Keane’s thesis, and will leave it to historians to discuss the remainder of his book. If I concentrate on the last 300 pages, this is because they contain more than enough material for even the keenest reader, let alone a harassed reviewer.

The Life and Death of Democracy is divided into three distinct sections, which allows Keane to explore three models of democracy: assembly, representative and monitory. The first two will be familiar to anyone who has done an introductory course in political philosophy, and are typified by the Athenian and Westminster models. One of the strengths of this book is to point to the far greater variety of origins and forms taken by democracy than the standard Western accounts explore. These sections will be of particular use for students of both political theory and history, containing as they do a number of useful correctives to the myth of both Athenian and American claims for the uniqueness of their contribution to the development of democracy.

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Wilfrid Prest reviews The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst
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The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.
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Book Author: John Hirst
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The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.

Read more: Wilfrid Prest reviews 'The Shortest History of Europe' by John Hirst

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Jane Goodall reviews Reframing Darwin: Evolution and art in Australia edited by Jeanette Hoorn
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‘The Darwin industry’, now a term with Wikipedia status, refers to the accelerating production of books on Charles Darwin and Darwinian evolution in the last half century. Like any cultural enterprise engaged in mass production and distribution, this industry has its targeted consumers: those who are educated, environmentally concerned, scientifically curious, intelligently sceptical and averse to ‘fundamentalisms’.
Book 1 Title: Reframing Darwin
Book 1 Subtitle: Evolution and art in Australia
Book Author: Jeanette Hoorn
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $39.99 pb, 270 pp
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‘The Darwin industry’, now a term with Wikipedia status, refers to the accelerating production of books on Charles Darwin and Darwinian evolution in the last half century. Like any cultural enterprise engaged in mass production and distribution, this industry has its targeted consumers: those who are educated, environmentally concerned, scientifically curious, intelligently sceptical and averse to ‘fundamentalisms’.

To be interested in Darwin is to signal that you are all or most of these things. Yet most of the books pumped out by the Darwin industry are essentially a stir-fry of received notions, with little science in the mix and even less history; riddled with fond adherences to the belief that Darwin single-handedly introduced atheism to the European consciousness, and shocked the bejesus out of his contemporaries with the suggestion that there was a family resemblance between apes and humans. If everyone who published on Darwin were required to read at least 100,000 words of his work and at least the same amount of writing drawn from a range of works by his peers and predecessors – about as much as one would expect of a student in an undergraduate course – the field of commentary would be transformed.

Read more: Jane Goodall reviews 'Reframing Darwin: Evolution and art in Australia' edited by Jeanette Hoorn

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Kate McFadyen reviews The Australian Long Story edited by Mandy Sayer
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Ebb and flow
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Literary definitions often have an indeterminate quality. To state the precise formal characteristics of the novel or the short story is almost impossible. There are some basic tenets, but these forms are fluid; open to interpretation and experimentation. Is there, then, any grounds for conceiving of the ‘long story’ as a distinct entity? Caught somewhere between two already amorphous forms, it seemingly occupies a negative space, defined by what it is not.
Book 1 Title: The Australian Long Story
Book Author: Mandy Sayer
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $39.95 pb, 538 pp
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Literary definitions often have an indeterminate quality. To state the precise formal characteristics of the novel or the short story is almost impossible. There are some basic tenets, but these forms are fluid; open to interpretation and experimentation. Is there, then, any grounds for conceiving of the ‘long story’ as a distinct entity? Caught somewhere between two already amorphous forms, it seemingly occupies a negative space, defined by what it is not.

Mandy Sayer’s lively and thoughtful introduction to this new anthology addresses the technical and stylistic nuances of the long story. Taking her lead from Richard Ford’s Granta Book of the American Long Story (1998), she argues that the long story has a complexity that enriches narrative possibilities, enabling it to ‘embrace more than one point of view without becoming a novella: that is, without diverging into subplots’. She arrives at enough of a definition to give her selection aesthetic unity while remaining fluid enough to include an interesting range of authors and styles.

Read more: Kate McFadyen reviews 'The Australian Long Story' edited by Mandy Sayer

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Kevin Gillam reviews Apples With Human Skin by Nathan Shepherdson
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Shards of meaning
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Apples with Human Skin is a collection of taut but detached poems. Well crafted, with superb use of diction coupled with tight and inventive forms, the poems remain, however, unrelated to anything in modern-day usage or consciousness. There is a coolness to the writing which can become relentless. Imagery and line structure are evocative and precise, and Shepherdson successfully invents a minimalist syntax in each of the longer chaptered poems. There are also shards of social comment hidden amongst the granite-like structures.
Book 1 Title: Apples With Human Skin
Book Author: Nathan Shepherdson
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 153 pp
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Apples with Human Skin is a collection of taut but detached poems. Well crafted, with superb use of diction coupled with tight and inventive forms, the poems remain, however, unrelated to anything in modern-day usage or consciousness. There is a coolness to the writing which can become relentless. Imagery and line structure are evocative and precise, and Shepherdson successfully invents a minimalist syntax in each of the longer chaptered poems. There are also shards of social comment hidden amongst the granite-like structures.

Read more: Kevin Gillam reviews 'Apples With Human Skin' by Nathan Shepherdson

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Article Title: Curating Oz Lit
Article Subtitle: Creating the Australian Classics Library
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Perhaps the most influential guide to ‘theory’ in Australia in the 1980s was Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The cover of my paperback edition features a detail from Jan Vermeer’s painting Mistress and Maid, in which a respectful domestic servant hands a document to her mistress, who is seated at a writing table. I take this to be a visual allusion to Alexander Pope’s formulation in An Essay on Criticism that ‘Criticism [is] the Muse’s Handmaid’. Eagleton’s polemical refusal of that secondary and facilitating role was influential in turning a generation of Australian literary critics from ‘criticism’ to ‘critique’. From Graeme Turner’s National Fictions (1986) and Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush (1987) to my own Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995) and Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines (1995), the cultural-nationalist and new-critical canons alike were supplemented by alternative canons – feminist, realist, postcolonial and ‘popular’ – as texts were subjected to rigorous ideological critique for their representations of class, race, gender and nation. Criticism was no longer the handmaid to literature; a hermeneutics of scepticism and suspicion prevailed.
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Perhaps the most influential guide to ‘theory’ in Australia in the 1980s was Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The cover of my paperback edition features a detail from Jan Vermeer’s painting Mistress and Maid, in which a respectful domestic servant hands a document to her mistress, who is seated at a writing table. I take this to be a visual allusion to Alexander Pope’s formulation in An Essay on Criticism that ‘Criticism [is] the Muse’s Handmaid’. Eagleton’s polemical refusal of that secondary and facilitating role was influential in turning a generation of Australian literary critics from ‘criticism’ to ‘critique’. From Graeme Turner’s National Fictions (1986) and Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush (1987) to my own Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995) and Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines (1995), the cultural-nationalist and new-critical canons alike were supplemented by alternative canons – feminist, realist, postcolonial and ‘popular’ – as texts were subjected to rigorous ideological critique for their representations of class, race, gender and nation. Criticism was no longer the handmaid to literature; a hermeneutics of scepticism and suspicion prevailed.

Read more: 'Curating Oz Lit: Creating the Australian Classics Library' by Robert Dixon

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters - November 2009
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Endemic yowling

Dear Editor,

A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowling’, according to Miles Franklin), and a reminder of the then image of English departments and their hangers-on as ‘the Garrison’. J.I.M. Stewart was another. Maybe the problem is endemic.
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Endemic yowling

Dear Editor,

A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowling’, according to Miles Franklin), and a reminder of the then image of English departments and their hangers-on as ‘the Garrison’. J.I.M. Stewart was another. Maybe the problem is endemic.

Jill Roe, Pearl Beach, NSW

Read more: Letters - November 2009

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Gay Bilson reviews Of Sugar and Snow: The History of ice cream making by Jeri Quinzio
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Article Title: Emperors of ice cream
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A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.
Book 1 Title: Of Sugar and Snow
Book 1 Subtitle: The History of ice cream making
Book Author: Jeri Quinzio
Book 1 Biblio: University of California Press, $43.85 hb, 286 pp
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A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.

Read more: Gay Bilson reviews 'Of Sugar and Snow: The History of ice cream making' by Jeri Quinzio

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Claudia Hyles reviews Piano Lessons by Anna Goldsworthy
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Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.
Book 1 Title: Piano Lessons
Book Author: Anna Goldsworthy
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $27.95 pb, 224 pp
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Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.

Anna Goldsworthy’s beautifully written memoir tells the story of the Melbourne pianist’s coming of age through music. ‘It was my grandfather who found her,’ the first line reveals. Reuben Goldsworthy chanced upon Eleanora Sivan, who was teaching in a western suburbs high school. Mrs Sivan described him as ‘a man of natural authority’. He said, ‘You will teach my granddaughter.’ At the time, Anna was aged nine. After her success in the First Grade exam, he said it was time for a change in teacher. Thus began a remarkable and affecting partnership. Mrs Sivan, as she is known throughout the book, unlocked a musical universe and taught her attentive young student how to appreciate both the composer and the composition.

Read more: Claudia Hyles reviews 'Piano Lessons' by Anna Goldsworthy

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David Trigger reviews The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus by Peter Sutton
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Article Title: Sustaining fictions
Article Subtitle: Challenging the politics of embarrassment
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This is a complex book from an anthropologist who has carried out research and established close relationships with indigenous people for four decades. Peter Sutton has lived through and participated in the Aboriginal protest movement from the early 1970s onwards, done extensive studies in support of securing tradition-based rights in land, and faced firsthand the well-publicised tragedies of many indigenous communities.
Book 1 Title: The Politics of Suffering
Book 1 Subtitle: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus
Book Author: Peter Sutton
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 280 pp
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This is a complex book from an anthropologist who has carried out research and established close relationships with indigenous people for four decades. Peter Sutton has lived through and participated in the Aboriginal protest movement from the early 1970s onwards, done extensive studies in support of securing tradition-based rights in land, and faced firsthand the well-publicised tragedies of many indigenous communities.

Contrary to what some of Sutton’s critics say, this is no superficial rendering of post-colonial race relations. The author acknowledges the apt demise of the ‘old culturally oppressive, chauvinist and racist [government] policies of the control era’, the ‘arrogance of many manifestations of assimilationism in years gone by’, and the major educational achievement of overturning simplistic colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal people as ‘savages’. However, he is also concerned about silences in policy and related discussions, which derive from fear that stereotypes about ‘primitive societies’ and victim blaming will arise again. If the fear is justified, the author’s point is that this is nevertheless no excuse for ‘turning away from the partially cultural and “traditional” underpinnings of disadvantage, and from looking clear-eyed at successful interventions’, particularly in relation to the remote communities where health and welfare problems are so entrenched.

Read more: David Trigger reviews 'The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal...

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Contents Category: Poem
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Article Title: To Music
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Only the young can wholeheartedly love ancient music.
It is fancy-dress, sound pared to its bones
As if the naughty flesh were simply the prop
for the idea of fabulous costumes, or sackcloth and ashes
Such as we never dream of today.
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Only the young can wholeheartedly love ancient music.
It is fancy-dress, sound pared to its bones
As if the naughty flesh were simply the prop
for the idea of fabulous costumes, or sackcloth and ashes
Such as we never dream of today.
                                                                        Knives flash
Among brocades or muskets make rude noises;
Perhaps even peasants thump out obvious rhythms –
It’s all predictable but safely contained
In our superior sense of what might be.
We live in a world of synthetic synthesised sound
All blurred into our ears as if we had some say in it,
The manipulators nod and we are nodding too –
It’s no surprise but it’s not much enterprise either.

Read more: 'To Music' a poem by Thomas Shapcott

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Article Title: Arrival
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Where the mind comes from,
where it goes,
when the moon rose,
where among the stars the light was seen
as you were born:
if it glistened in the tracks
stamped on leaves across the park
where we walked the early afternoon, alert,
listening up,
hearing how the plovers
pipe back and forth across the grass …
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Where the mind comes from,
where it goes,
when the moon rose,
where among the stars the light was seen
as you were born:
if it glistened in the tracks
stamped on leaves across the park
where we walked the early afternoon, alert,
listening up,
hearing how the plovers
pipe back and forth across the grass …

Read more: 'Arrival' a poem by Judith Bishop

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Article Title: Judith Wright Arts Centre
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My office! My office at the Judy! The Judy
at the head of Fortitude Valley – Happy Valley! –
the ex-tea and -coffee warehouse, but reformed, reformed!
The industrial brick carcass full of arty bees,
sphinx of a building couchant on the crest of the hill,
the infra-red elevator mysteriously redolent of cloves,
restaurant smuggled into one corner, café in another,
and the whole dipped in chocolate and tile.
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My office! My office at the Judy! The Judy
at the head of Fortitude Valley – Happy Valley! –
the ex-tea and -coffee warehouse, but reformed, reformed!
The industrial brick carcass full of arty bees,
sphinx of a building couchant on the crest of the hill,
the infra-red elevator mysteriously redolent of cloves,
restaurant smuggled into one corner, café in another,
and the whole dipped in chocolate and tile.

Read more: 'Judith Wright Arts Centre' a poem by Michael Hofmann

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Jeffrey Poacher reviews The Right by Matthew Karpin
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Article Title: The pyre of ambition
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After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.
Book 1 Title: The Right
Book Author: Matthew Karpin
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattman, $28 pb, 322 pp
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After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

Read more: Jeffrey Poacher reviews 'The Right' by Matthew Karpin

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Michael Shmith reviews The Point of the Baton: Memoir of a conductor by John Hopkins (with William Cottam)
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My memory of John Hopkins – in fact, the memories of most of my generation of Australian music-lovers – goes back to the Proms he conducted in Sydney and then Melbourne from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. Hopkins was, to young audiences of the day, an anti-establishment musician who dared to strip the furniture from the stalls and, in the process, also strip away what he calls the ‘dynamic conservatism’ of the then Australian Broadcasting Commission. ‘Hoppy’, as he was known, was a hero – the Sir Henry Wood of the Great Southern Land. He was, after all, English, with a broad Yorkshire accent.
Book 1 Title: The Point of the Baton
Book 1 Subtitle: Memoir of a conductor
Book Author: John Hopkins (with William Cottam)
Book 1 Biblio: Lyrebird Press, $66 pb, 259 pp
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My memory of John Hopkins – in fact, the memories of most of my generation of Australian music-lovers – goes back to the Proms he conducted in Sydney and then Melbourne from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. Hopkins was, to young audiences of the day, an anti-establishment musician who dared to strip the furniture from the stalls and, in the process, also strip away what he calls the ‘dynamic conservatism’ of the then Australian Broadcasting Commission. ‘Hoppy’, as he was known, was a hero – the Sir Henry Wood of the Great Southern Land. He was, after all, English, with a broad Yorkshire accent.

Of course, from the vantage point of a tartan picnic rug on the dusty hardwood of the Melbourne Town Hall, we all looked up to John Hopkins: that balding, toothy, eternally cheerful fellow in a white tuxedo who filled our long, hot summers with music by composers whose names we didn’t know and couldn’t spell, and which were speckled with curious foreign accents: György Ligeti, Luboš Fišer, Edgar Varèse, Witold Lutosławski. Then there were other composers, more easily spelt and without the accents, who were just as challenging, even though they were closer to home. Where would Australian music have been without Hoppy to bring to our attention works by Peter Sculthorpe, Nigel Butterley, Richard Meale, Margaret Sutherland, Don Banks and a legion of mid twentieth-century Australian or Australian-born composers?

Read more: Michael Shmith reviews 'The Point of the Baton: Memoir of a conductor' by John Hopkins (with...

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Patrick McCaughey reviews I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s adventures in art by Edmund Capon
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Article Title: Capon’s gallimaufry
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Over the past three decades, Edmund Capon has transformed the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Before he arrived, you could have swapped the contents of the Sydney gallery with Ballarat’s and nobody would have noticed the difference. How a city of that size, wealth and international ambition could have wound up with such a provincial collection puzzled the mind. No more. Capon has thrown out new wings, created a distinguished Asian collection virtually ex nihilo, attracted the generous benefaction of some remarkable old master paintings from James Fairfax, and acquired major twentieth-century and contemporary works. As importantly, he has made the AGNSW the liveliest of the state galleries. Even a wet Tuesday morning sees the central court thronged. Often Capon installs a medley of works there which would look inchoate in most other galleries but which emerge as resounding and triumphant. I once saw the big Kirchner Three bathers hung with the august Max Beckmann’s Mother and daughter and Picasso’s crackling Seated nude from the mid 1950s. Collectively, they gave off the whack and weight of modernity more excitingly than any other display in Australia.
Book 1 Title: I Blame Duchamp
Book 1 Subtitle: My Life’s adventures in art
Book Author: Edmund Capon
Book 1 Biblio: Lantern (Penguin Books), $49.95 hb, 396 pp
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Over the past three decades, Edmund Capon has transformed the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Before he arrived, you could have swapped the contents of the Sydney gallery with Ballarat’s and nobody would have noticed the difference. How a city of that size, wealth and international ambition could have wound up with such a provincial collection puzzled the mind. No more. Capon has thrown out new wings, created a distinguished Asian collection virtually ex nihilo, attracted the generous benefaction of some remarkable old master paintings from James Fairfax, and acquired major twentieth-century and contemporary works. As importantly, he has made the AGNSW the liveliest of the state galleries. Even a wet Tuesday morning sees the central court thronged. Often Capon installs a medley of works there which would look inchoate in most other galleries but which emerge as resounding and triumphant. I once saw the big Kirchner Three bathers hung with the august Max Beckmann’s Mother and daughter and Picasso’s crackling Seated nude from the mid 1950s. Collectively, they gave off the whack and weight of modernity more excitingly than any other display in Australia.

There has been substance and ambition behind such key acquisitions as Braque’s 1908–09 landscape, the most important cubist picture in Australia and, more recently, the fine Cézanne, which must be the most expensive work of art acquired by an Australian art gallery since Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles.

Read more: Patrick McCaughey reviews 'I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s adventures in art' by Edmund Capon

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Stuart Macintyre reviews Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard
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Article Title: A to Z of the West
Article Subtitle: The new reference to Western Australia
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In the closing years of the twentieth century, historians combined to produce large reference volumes of national history. Some were stimulated by anniversaries, notably the dictionary, atlas, gazetteer and chronology, guide to sources and compilation of statistics that were published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon for the Bicentenary. Some were initiated by publishers, such as the Companion to Australian History (1998) that Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and I edited for Oxford University Press.
Book 1 Title: Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia
Book Author: Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard
Book 1 Biblio: University of Western Australia Press, $99.95 hb, 1044 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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In the closing years of the twentieth century, historians combined to produce large reference volumes of national history. Some were stimulated by anniversaries, notably the dictionary, atlas, gazetteer and chronology, guide to sources and compilation of statistics that were published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon for the Bicentenary. Some were initiated by publishers, such as the Companion to Australian History (1998) that Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and I edited for Oxford University Press.

In the opening years of the present century, the historical profession has turned its attention to states and cities. The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History appeared in 2001, then the Companion to Tasmanian History and the Encyclopedia of Melbourne in 2005. A similar work for Sydney is being prepared, and no doubt others will follow.

Read more: Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia' edited by Jenny Gregory...

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John Byron reviews Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone With The Wind to The Passion of The Christ by Thomas Leitch
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Article Title: The colour of his breeches
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If the past is a foreign country, Hollywood is another planet: they sure do things differently there. Just how differently is the predictable and tedious obsession of far too much adaptation scholarship, fixated on the degree of fidelity of a film to its adapted literary Urtext. This practice, boring and unimaginative, diverts the attention from what art can tell us about ourselves to what it can tell us about the colour of the breeches worn in the novel by that odd fellow in the twelfth chapter. Thomas Leitch, for one, is sick of it, and he has set out to shake up film scholarship and inject new life into the study of adaptation in this wide-ranging and acutely observed treatment.
Book 1 Title: Film Adaptation and its Discontents
Book 1 Subtitle: From Gone With The Wind to The Passion of The Christ
Book Author: Thomas Leitch
Book 1 Biblio: Johns Hopkins University Press, $52.95 pb, 354 pp
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If the past is a foreign country, Hollywood is another planet: they sure do things differently there. Just how differently is the predictable and tedious obsession of far too much adaptation scholarship, fixated on the degree of fidelity of a film to its adapted literary Urtext. This practice, boring and unimaginative, diverts the attention from what art can tell us about ourselves to what it can tell us about the colour of the breeches worn in the novel by that odd fellow in the twelfth chapter. Thomas Leitch, for one, is sick of it, and he has set out to shake up film scholarship and inject new life into the study of adaptation in this wide-ranging and acutely observed treatment.

Leitch, a prominent figure in American film studies, has recently developed a niche in the sub-discipline of literature-to-film adaptation. He has spent the last few years railing against the most simplistic approaches and encouraging those who look beyond specious questions of infidelity and transformation. I have seen him in action – engaging in good-natured but passionate debate with old friends and new colleagues alike – at the Literature/Film Association annual conference in the United States. Despite the cheerful urging of Leitch and his fellow travellers, though, critical practices are frustratingly slow to change. As he remarks in one of his endnotes: ‘Adaptation theorists regularly deplore the principle of using fidelity to a putative original as a measure of a given adaptation’s success even as many of them do exactly that themselves.’

Read more: John Byron reviews 'Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone With The Wind to The Passion of...

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Rosaleen Love reviews Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity by Mike Hulme and Quarry Vision: Coal, climate change and the end of the resources boom (Quarterly Essay 33) by Guy Pearse
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Contents Category: Climate Change
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Article Title: Climatic quarrels
Article Subtitle: The new social meteorology
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Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.
Book 1 Title: Why We Disagree About Climate Change
Book 1 Subtitle: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity
Book Author: Mike Hulme
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $39.95 pb, 431 pp
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Book 2 Title: Quarry Vision
Book 2 Subtitle: Coal, climate change and the end of the resources boom (Quarterly Essay 33)
Book 2 Author: Guy Pearse
Book 2 Biblio: Black Inc., $16.95 pb, 129 pp
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Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.

Climate change and why we disagree about it are two major issues of our times. Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, finds that such talk is universal, in science, the arts, law, business and government. He takes climate change to mean a past, present or future change in climate, some of which may be caused by humans. Climate change is both a physical and a social reality. What also matters is the meaning of climate change, and what happens to this idea as it enters the social repertoire of our quarrelsome species. Why can’t we begin to agree about such a serious issue and thus do something about it? Why can’t we all play nicely together?

Read more: Rosaleen Love reviews 'Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding controversy, inaction...

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Hugh White reviews A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901–23: Volume Two – Australia and World Crisis, 1914 – 1923 by Neville Meaney
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Article Title: Tricky business
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War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.
Book 1 Title: A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901–23
Book 1 Subtitle: Volume Two – Australia and World Crisis, 1914 – 1923
Book Author: Neville Meaney
Book 1 Biblio: Sydney University Press, $80 pb, 551 pp
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War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

This is perhaps most true of our biggest war. Take Les Carlyon’s The Great War (2006). It runs to more than 750 pages, but devotes just a single paragraph to explaining the policy purposes for which Australia decided to go to war with Germany, before dismissing them as essentially irrelevant to the stirring stories he retells so vividly. ‘Passions rather than interests led Australia into the Great War,’ Carlyon concludes. This is the generally held view: for four long years, Australia sent fifteen per cent of its entire population to an appalling war for no clear purpose, driven only by misguided imperial loyalty among those at home, and a sense of boyish adventure among those who went.

Read more: Hugh White reviews 'A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901–23: Volume Two –...

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Alison Broinowski reviews Between Stations by Kim Cheng Boey
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The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.
Book 1 Title: Between Stations
Book Author: Kim Cheng Boey
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $27.95 pb, 320 pp
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The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

Three generations ago, around the time when Quong Tart sailed from Canton to Australia, Boey’s people left for Malaya. Observing the tea merchant’s success in Sydney and the honours he received on visits to China, Boey speculates that they may be related. How different, he thinks, his father’s life might have been if his ancestor had gone on to Sydney with Quong Tart. But dukes, as the proverb goes, don’t migrate.

Read more: Alison Broinowski reviews 'Between Stations' by Kim Cheng Boey

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Michael Farrell reviews Crab & Winkle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007 by Laurie Duggan
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In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.
Book 1 Title: Crab & Winkle
Book 1 Subtitle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007
Book Author: Laurie Duggan
Book 1 Biblio: Shearsman Books, £10.95 pb, 163 pp
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In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.

Read more: Michael Farrell reviews 'Crab & Winkle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007' by Laurie Duggan

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Chris Thompson reviews Fill Out This Application and Wait Over There by Ruth Starke
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Hailee Moxie, aged seventeen, has just left high school. On New Year’s Eve her boyfriend dumps her, by SMS – not an auspicious start to the year but a good opening for Ruth Starke’s new novel, Fill Out This Application and Wait over There. Hailee records the events of the next twelve months in her diary as she applies for jobs intended to augment the paltry balance in her ‘Escape to Asia’ bank account.
Book 1 Title: Fill Out This Application and Wait Over There
Book Author: Ruth Starke
Book 1 Biblio: Omnibus Books, $19.99 pb, 310 pp
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Hailee Moxie, aged seventeen, has just left high school. On New Year’s Eve her boyfriend dumps her, by SMS – not an auspicious start to the year but a good opening for Ruth Starke’s new novel, Fill Out This Application and Wait over There. Hailee records the events of the next twelve months in her diary as she applies for jobs intended to augment the paltry balance in her ‘Escape to Asia’ bank account.

The diary form is popular in teenage fiction but can sometimes offer too limited a perspective on the fictional world and the characters who populate it. In Starke’s witty novel for young adults, the narrative is raised well above those limitations by a combination of Hailee’s infuriating, endearing, self-centred charm and the way in which the writing assumes an intelligent reader. It expects us to look beyond Hailee’s view of the world. In most of the situations Hailee describes, our understanding of the bigger picture and our ability to read between the lines are crucial elements of the complete unfolding of the story.

Read more: Chris Thompson reviews 'Fill Out This Application and Wait Over There' by Ruth Starke

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Gregory Kratzmann reviews Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788–2008 edited by Martin Langford
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‘Sydney in verse’: this anthology, arranged chronologically, presents the country’s oldest European settlement in a variety of guises – from place of exile (‘Botany Bay’) to site resistant to the colonising discourses of English Romanticism (W.C. Wentworth, Charles Harpur) to new city viewed through the lenses of symbolism (Christopher Brennan) and modernism (Kenneth Slessor), and from there to the locus of the universal, crossnational themes of joy, suffering and loss.
Book 1 Title: Harbour City Poems
Book 1 Subtitle: Sydney in Verse 1788–2008
Book Author: Martin Langford
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattman, $29.95 pb, 226 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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‘Sydney in verse’: this anthology, arranged chronologically, presents the country’s oldest European settlement in a variety of guises – from place of exile (‘Botany Bay’) to site resistant to the colonising discourses of English Romanticism (W.C. Wentworth, Charles Harpur) to new city viewed through the lenses of symbolism (Christopher Brennan) and modernism (Kenneth Slessor), and from there to the locus of the universal, crossnational themes of joy, suffering and loss.

Like any anthology worth its salt, this one presents a pleasing variety of subjects and styles, just as it charts most of the major shifts in the nature of poetic form and style over two centuries. The poets have been chosen not on the basis of residence but rather on their choice of Sydney as theme and idea. This results in some felicitous inclusions, such as the English poet Charles Causley’s resonant war poem ‘HMS Glory at Sydney’.

Read more: Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788–2008' edited by Martin Langford

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Free Article: No
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The first issue of The Warwick Review, a quarterly magazine published by the Writing Program at the University of Warwick, appeared in March 2007. The journal has maintained a high standard and a commendable variety ever since. Like previous issues, the March 2009 edition is divided into sections that focus on certain kinds of writing, or certain places from which writing has emerged.
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The first issue of The Warwick Review, a quarterly magazine published by the Writing Program at the University of Warwick, appeared in March 2007. The journal has maintained a high standard and a commendable variety ever since. Like previous issues, the March 2009 edition is divided into sections that focus on certain kinds of writing, or certain places from which writing has emerged.

The opening section, ‘Reading America’, begins with a review by Nick Lawrence that makes a strong case for Paul Auster’s dislocated and disrupted recent novel, Man in the Dark. It is followed by a diverse series of reflections by various writers on what they see as cultural priorities and prospects for Americans under President Obama.

Read more: Paul Hetherington reviews 'The Warwick Review, Volume III No. 1, March 2009' edited by Michael Hulse

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Contents Category: Picture Books
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Article Title: Graphic adventures
Article Subtitle: New trends in children’s picture books
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The line between picture books, graphic novels and comic books is becoming increasingly blurred as picture books adopt elements from a wide range of graphic forms of storytelling.
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The line between picture books, graphic novels and comic books is becoming increasingly blurred as picture books adopt elements from a wide range of graphic forms of storytelling.

With The Hero of Little Street (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 hb, 32 pp), Gregory Rogers reprises the successful graphic-novel format of his Boy Bear series. The boy, whom we first met in The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard (2004), escapes from a gang of boys whose soccer ball he has inadvertently kicked into a fountain. He miraculously disappears inside Vermeer’s painting A Lady Seated at a Virginal, accompanied by a small scruffy dog that has found its way out of van Eyk’s painting The Arnolfini Portrait. The dog and the boy have many adventures together in seventeenth-century Holland, not least of which involves saving the dog from a butcher’s block.

Read more: A survey of recent children's picture books by Stephanie Owen Reeder

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Tony Smith reviews The Contract by Brett Hoffmann
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Stella Sartori and Jack Rogers, both Australians, work for a New York bank. Their boss, Frank Spiteri, sends Stella and her team to Peoria to report on the takeover of Collins Military Systems by the Kradel company. Spiteri’s friend Daniel Cross, now head of Kradel and formerly head of CMS, complains that Stella has stolen an important file. Spiteri promotes Jack from the market floor to the mergers and acquisitions section, and sends him after Stella and the file. Cross’s aggressive behaviour convinces Stella of the accuracy of her intuitive belief that the file is very sensitive indeed. Jack keeps an open mind about her motivation and does not accept Cross’s claim that she wants to profit from the theft. At the core of Stella’s concern is a poem ‘The Virgin’s Secret’, written in the 1960s, which seems to hold the key to Cross’s past.
Book 1 Title: The Contract
Book Author: Brett Hoffmann
Book 1 Biblio: Michael Joseph, $32.95 pb, 475 pp
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Stella Sartori and Jack Rogers, both Australians, work for a New York bank. Their boss, Frank Spiteri, sends Stella and her team to Peoria to report on the takeover of Collins Military Systems by the Kradel company. Spiteri’s friend Daniel Cross, now head of Kradel and formerly head of CMS, complains that Stella has stolen an important file. Spiteri promotes Jack from the market floor to the mergers and acquisitions section, and sends him after Stella and the file. Cross’s aggressive behaviour convinces Stella of the accuracy of her intuitive belief that the file is very sensitive indeed. Jack keeps an open mind about her motivation and does not accept Cross’s claim that she wants to profit from the theft. At the core of Stella’s concern is a poem ‘The Virgin’s Secret’, written in the 1960s, which seems to hold the key to Cross’s past.

Read more: Tony Smith reviews 'The Contract' by Brett Hoffmann

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Belinda Burns reviews Paradise Updated by Mic Looby
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Paradise Updated, Mic Looby’s first novel, is a scathing satire on the tourism industry, in particular the guidebook business. Looby, who worked for many years as an editor and author at Lonely Planet, seems to know his stuff; his novel reads like a thinly veiled dig at his former employer, now a global enterprise.
Book 1 Title: Paradise Updated
Book Author: Mic Looby
Book 1 Biblio: Affirm Press, $29.95 pb, 288 pp
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Paradise Updated, Mic Looby’s first novel, is a scathing satire on the tourism industry, in particular the guidebook business. Looby, who worked for many years as an editor and author at Lonely Planet, seems to know his stuff; his novel reads like a thinly veiled dig at his former employer, now a global enterprise.

Paradise Updated is witty, slick and funny in parts. Looby’s imagination goes to town in the creation of Maganda, a fictitious tourist trap of an island in the Pacific, complete with hordes of backpackers, littered beaches and a totalitarian régime. The stage-like unreality of his descriptions undermines any serious point that Looby may want to make about the deleterious impact of tourism on a nation’s spirit and culture.

Read more: Belinda Burns reviews 'Paradise Updated' by Mic Looby

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Karl James reviews Bardia: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of Anzac by Craig Stockings
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With the sun’s morning rays glinting off their bayonets, the Australian soldiers rushed headlong towards the Italian fortress of Bardia in Libya. They sang as they advanced. Although there were isolated pockets of resistance, within hours the Australians had broken through the perimeter and Italian troops were beginning to surrender in their thousands. The capture of the supposedly ‘impenetrable’ fortress of Bardia in early January 1941 by the 6th Australian Infantry Division, fighting its first battle, was a major success that led to the capture of more than 40,000 Italian soldiers. The resounding victory by these sons of the original Anzacs was held to prove the inherent combat prowess of Australians. Major General Iven Mackay, the 6th Division’s commander, afterwards commented there was the notion ‘that the Australian is a born soldier and that, once given the weapons, he is alright’. Or so the myth goes.
Book 1 Title: Bardia
Book 1 Subtitle: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of Anzac
Book Author: Craig Stockings
Book 1 Biblio: University of New South Wales Press, $59.95 hb, 496 pp
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With the sun’s morning rays glinting off their bayonets, the Australian soldiers rushed headlong towards the Italian fortress of Bardia in Libya. They sang as they advanced. Although there were isolated pockets of resistance, within hours the Australians had broken through the perimeter and Italian troops were beginning to surrender in their thousands. The capture of the supposedly ‘impenetrable’ fortress of Bardia in early January 1941 by the 6th Australian Infantry Division, fighting its first battle, was a major success that led to the capture of more than 40,000 Italian soldiers. The resounding victory by these sons of the original Anzacs was held to prove the inherent combat prowess of Australians. Major General Iven Mackay, the 6th Division’s commander, afterwards commented there was the notion ‘that the Australian is a born soldier and that, once given the weapons, he is alright’. Or so the myth goes.

Read more: Karl James reviews 'Bardia: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of Anzac' by Craig Stockings

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Article Title: Advances - November 2009
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The ABR FAN Poll

Film-makers are forever squabbling over the Top Ten films of all time – a kind of Raging Bullfight – and the symphonists had their sonorous say recently, when ABC Classic FM invited listeners to nominate their classic 100 symphonies. So we thought it might be fun – instructive too – to poll our readers with regard to their Favourite Australian Novel.
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The ABR FAN Poll

Film-makers are forever squabbling over the Top Ten films of all time – a kind of Raging Bullfight – and the symphonists had their sonorous say recently, when ABC Classic FM invited listeners to nominate their classic 100 symphonies. So we thought it might be fun – instructive too – to poll our readers with regard to their Favourite Australian Novel.

Read more: Advances - November 2009

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