John Calvin has not had a good press among the general or even the educated public. Marilynne Robinson caricatures the popular view: ‘an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism.’ Even Les Murray, who of course knows a lot of ‘religious stuff’, in a recent poem (‘Visiting Geneva’), addresses ‘John Calvin, unforgiver / in your Taliban hat’. The reasons are, no doubt, complex. Calvin has mistakenly been given sole responsibility for the fate of Michael Servetus. His relationship with Geneva has been misunderstood. Predestination has been seen as the centrepiece of his theological system, when it is questionable whether one can speak of a ‘system’ at all.

Calvin (1509–64) is a difficult subject for a biographer. Deliberately reticent about himself, he saw the turning points in his life – his conversion to the Protestant gospel, his commitment to Geneva – as acts of providence. There is no table-talk of the kind that makes Luther so engaging a character. If serious scholarship is agreed on one thing, it is that Calvin was a Renaissance humanist. But, unlike others of his kind, he did not, in that first age of the recognition of personality, project himself personally. Erasmus and Thomas More appear to us as distinctive and recognisable personalities. Calvin stands, by contrast, in dappled light. At the end he was buried in an unmarked grave, according to his wish.

A certain sub-genre of Young Adult fiction thrives on the psychology of duress – on the useful friction yielded by placing a young heroine in a near-impossible situation and asking the reader: ‘What would you do? How would you cope?’ Two recently released, formidable début novels have utilised this formula, with some impressive results.

The first is the disastrously titled Stolen: A Letter to My Captor. Sounding more like tabloid journalism than literary Young Adult fiction, Lucy Christopher’s book nonetheless manages to avoid the pitfalls of the former to resemble the latter. Stolen is the story of Gemma Toombs, a London schoolgirl who is kidnapped by a mysterious stranger (or is he?) and held captive somewhere in the deserts of remote north-west Australia. Following a disagreement with her parents at Bangkok Airport, Gemma is approached by Ty, a handsome young man with piercing blue eyes ‘too intense to stare into for long’. Her first mistake is to continue staring. Her second is to allow him to sugar her coffee.

A number of questions sprang to mind when I heard that Thomas Keneally was writing a three-volume history of Australia from its origins to the present. The first was to wonder how he would fit it into his crowded schedule. Clearly, though, this is not a problem. Keneally has just published another novel. More intriguing was the question as to what Keneally could add to the subject. After all, Australia is not lacking in colonial histories, many written by historians who are skilled writers. As Keneally is primarily a novelist, albeit one with a serious interest in our history and with several non-fiction studies under his belt, would the work reflect the conventions of historical fiction?

The new book’s title answers both these questions. It is Australians who are being explored, not Australia. By depicting Australian history through people’s stories rather than through political or economic movements, Keneally creates a character-driven narrative – or series of narratives – that suggests a novelist’s desire to animate the page using historical characters. The work, though creative, is far from fiction. Keneally is committed to accuracy and fidelity to the available sources. The focus on individual characters proves to be both the chief strength and weakness of the book.

Billy Thorpe’s story is the perennial one of an Australian artist dissatisfied with domestic success. In this account of the late pop star’s career, Jason Walker bypasses discussion of Thorpe’s music per se to present him as ‘truly Australian … a battler, a doer [and] a self-promoter’ who lusted for international recognition. While it vividly recounts Thorpe’s life (1946–2007), including enough sex, drugs and equipment fetishism to delight boyish music fans, the real strength of Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth is its profile of Thorpe’s careerist, provincial psyche and the lengths he went to in search of adoration.

Walker has compiled a wealth of quotes with which to enliven the narrative. It is these, coupled with well-researched details of Australia’s nascent music industry, that save the book from his tuneless writing and specious imaginings from Thorpe’s perspective. Walker’s ‘Thorpie’ is a ribald larrikin ‘blessed with the ability to pick the moment that define[d him] and the preternatural gumption to simply run with it’, and ‘a ball of fire who accelerated his career development from an age when most people are still kicking a football around’; yet readers might just as soon draw the portrait of a guileless, egomaniacal and less-than-brilliant musician.

Reviewing Martin Langford’s Harbour City Poems in the November 2009 issue of ABR, I remarked on the absence from the anthology of new young voices. This is a criticism that cannot be made of Robert Adamson’s selection for this year’s Black Inc. Best Australian Poems. Adamson, distinguished poet and Hawkesbury fisherman, has cast a very wide net, departing from the practice among recent editors of this fine series by including unpublished poems; some of these are from established poets, but several are from new and usually young writers whose work bears witness, in the editor’s words, to ‘the power of the incoming tide’. Thankfully, the days have gone when blokes who wrote poems selected their mates’ work when they came to edit anthologies. Adamson didn’t set out to redress any perceived gender imbalances, but more than half of his selection consists of work written by women; this has been ‘the year of the women poets’, as he says.

Fuel is Andrew Sant’s eleventh poetry collection. His previous volume was Speed & Other Liberties (2008), which included some of the new poems from Tremors: New & Selected Poems (2004), along with additional work. The epigraph to Speed & Other Liberties is Marc Bloch’s statement that ‘Contemporary civilisation differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed’. So, the titles of Sant’s last two volumes imply movement, power, freedom and forward thrust. Certainly, some of the poems in Fuel move at least as fluidly as the often fast-paced poems in Speed, impelled by a rapid accumulation of ideas and associations.

There are also other respects in which Fuel and Speed & Other Liberties read as companion volumes. For example, both contain poems in the voice of Mr Habitat, an alter ego for Sant who allows him to write with a sometimes prickly assertiveness.

A pause for thought and you lay down your pen,
Then have the inspiration to look up.
At first you’re scarcely able
To lift your focus past the coffee cup,
The paper-cluttered table.
But then the window gathers you again

This is the dangerous time, sky clouding:
lifesavers on the alert, intermittently moving the flags,
shoals of swimmers still keening the fray.

It continued snowing.
The furniture hadn’t drifted away in a removal van.
We kept Sam. We didn’t catch a taxi
to Heathrow. The hi-fi kept going.
We didn’t fly twelve thousand miles.
We stayed at home.
My father continued working in the City.
My mother lived.
She called into the morning, staccato,
‘SamSam, SamSam, Sam’ and he grew fat
on his diet of Kit-e-Kat.
I remained the ‘I’ I’d got to know.
Next winter the snow
was even deeper. 1963. Soon, The Beatles.

Patterned play

Dear Editor,

Reviewing my On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction in ABR, Lisa Gorton writes, ‘Boyd shows a troubling lack of interest in the female of the human species’ (October 2009). Yet I happily follow the evolutionary theoretician of art Ellen Dissanayake in taking the origins of art, ontogenetically, back to ‘mothers and others’, to what developmental psychologists call protoconversation, the patterned play with sound, and movement that begins between infants and mothers or others. (See, by the way, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s wonderful new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.)

On the morning of 12 August 1864, Hannah Duff sent her three children – Isaac, aged nine, Jane, seven, and Frank, almost four – to gather broom from bushes growing a short distance from their one-room slab hut in the West Wimmera district in Victoria. They walked into the mallee scrub, and that was the last their mother saw of them for over a week. By some miracle, the children survived and were eventually found on the evening of August 20 by a search party which included three Aboriginal trackers. The children had walked nearly one hundred kilometres in those nine days, including twenty kilometres on the first day and six on the last. News of the rescue swept the state and the intense press interest in the siblings and their extraordinary adventure led to the establishment of an educational fund for them, but in particular to reward Jane for her nurturing of her brothers. The Aboriginal trackers were also financially rewarded. When Jane died in 1932, the words ‘bush heroine’ were inscribed on her gravestone.

Patrick Allington

Of 2009’s emerging Australian novelists (such a silly term: emerging from what?) Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin), stands out. A dark and funny morality tale set in a 1960s Western Australian mining town, it ruminates on death, secrets, racism, dodgy parenting and adolescence. For anybody who once dreamed of sporting greatness, the cricket match is pure joy.

In a year when there were too many books written about Charles Darwin (who turned two hundred), Iain McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada: How Four Voyages to Australasia Won the Battle for Evolution and Changed the World (Viking, reviewed 3/09) offers entertaining and erudite accounts of landmark expeditions by Darwin and three men who became his great allies: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Wallace.

Reading the leaves

ABR readers, it is now abundantly clear, are great democrats and colossal readers. You love to vote, and you read like clairvoyants. We have been inundated with votes in the ABR FAN Poll – hundreds of them most days. With two weeks to go before voting closes (December 15), some clear favourites are emerging. Below we list twenty of them, in alphabetical order:

Murray Bail: Eucalyptus

Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda

Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang

Richard Flanagan: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career

Helen Garner: Monkey Grip

Kate Grenville: The Secret River

Henry Handel Richardson: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

George Johnston: My Brother Jack

John Marsden: Tomorrow, When the War Began

Randolph Stow: The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap

Ethel Turner: Seven Little Australians

Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White: Voss

Patrick White: The Vivisector

Tim Winton: Breath

Tim Winton: Cloudstreet

Tim Winton: Dirt Music

Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

If you haven’t voted yet, it’s not too late. Consult our website for more details: www.australianbookreview.com.au.

Popular Patricks

To date, voters have nominated 240 individual Australian novels. If we can find room in the next issue, we will list all the nominated titles; we will definitely post the list on our website. It’s quite instructive – a fillip to further reading. Patrick White, not surprisingly, has more works than anyone else; nine of his novels are favoured. Next come Kate Grenville, David Malouf and Tim Winton, with six titles each; and Peter Carey, Bryce Courtenay and Alex Miller, with five each.

Due recognition

The Patrick White Literary Award, established by the author with the proceeds from his Nobel Prize, is presented annually to a writer ‘who has already made a contribution to Australian literature … [but who has] not received due recognition’. Previous winners this decade have included Janette Turner Hospital and Thomas Shapcott. Beverley Farmer is this year’s recipient. Farmer, whose publications include Milk (1983) and The House in the Light (1995), was described by judge Michael Costigan as ‘an intense, meditative and gifted stylist’. A self-described ‘reclusive and a loner’, Farmer says she will spend her prize money on house repairs and a new laptop.

Iconic Aussie Films

Brian McFarlane, on page 45, argues that 2009 has been a resurgent year for Australian cinema. He cites Balibo, Last Ride, Samson & Delilah and the restored print of Wake In Fright – among other films – as proof. This month, ten new or renewing subscribers will win a DVD pack containing each of these four films, thanks to Madman Entertainment. For more information on Madman’s 2009 Iconic Aussie Films campaign visit www.madman.com.au.

Farewell to 2009

Notwithstanding the economic malaise overshadowing the start of the year, it’s been a busy and eventful twelve months at ABR. Highlights have included a new design for the magazine; an expanded and overhauled website; the APA Editorial Internship, which introduced us to Mark Gomes (now the Assistant Editor); an almost completely new staff; a regular presence on social networking sites; and the confirmation of charitable status, which has enabled us to expand our efforts in the area of private philanthropy.

Two hundred and thirty-one people wrote for us in 2009. We thank them all; they make this magazine such a pleasure to produce. My personal thanks also go to staff, the board and our wonderfully generous volunteers.

It would be disingenuous to say that these are rosy times for literary magazines. ABR has held its own in 2009, but your continued support is vital, either as a subscriber, a Patron or a smaller donor. If you enjoy the magazine, become a subscriber or renew your subscription, arrange a gift subscription for a friend or relation, or make a (tax-deductible) donation to ABR (see your renewal notice or the donation form on our website). We have big plans for 2010, but we won’t be able to realise them without your support.

This month the first ten new subscribers will each receive a signed copy of Alex Miller’s Lovesong, which Judith Armstrong, one of two dozen critics featured in our Best Books of the Year feature, describes as a ‘warm and compulsive read’.

This is one of two double issues we publish each year. We’ll be back in February. Meanwhile, stay cool and enjoy the summer. Best wishes from everyone at ABR.

In the vein of classical Hollywood films such as The Lady Eve and All About Eve, Airlie Lawson’s début novel recounts a familiar narrative involving a mysterious career woman named Eve. A kind of The Devil Wears Prada for the publishing industry, Don’t Tell Eve scrutinises the dealings of Papyrus Press, ‘a respectable, old-fashioned publishing house’ – until the arrival of the new boss, that is.

Writing about music, it is frequently said, is in a parlous state, with ever-falling word counts contributing to the dumbing down of the genre. A publication such as Extempore, focusing on Australian jazz, should be well placed to step into the breach, but its second issue struggles to assert its importance.

In her editorial for Griffith Review 26, Julianne Schultz argues that ‘the best Australian writing has always had a cosmopolitan edge, grounded yet engaged with the world …’ This argument is supported by the contributions to this issue, which are penned by a number of well-known and up-and-coming Australian writers. 

The premise of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar is inherently problematic. When your young narrator admits to being a compulsive liar, the whole narrative threatens to degenerate into a fail-safe ending – it was all just a dream! Substitute ‘lie’ for ‘dream’. Thankfully, Micah Wilkins’s narration is so seductive that readers will find themselves devouring this book in an attempt to piece together the promised, if illusive, truth. Besides, this time Micah promises to tell us the whole truth, and why would she lie to us? That truth revolves around the death of Micah’s boyfriend, Zach. Or was it murder? For that matter, were they even dating, and did she see him the night of his death? Questions pile up alongside the lies, distracting us from the fact that sometimes the worst lies are those of omission.

George Alexander’s new novel opens with a racially motivated murder, committed on Australia Day, 1998. A gang called the Cleaners abducts and executes Sly Bone, an Aborigine, whose body they dump in country New South Wales. We then jump forward a year. Australia Day looms, and the Cleaners have another target in mind. Meanwhile, journalist Alex Tolman and his colleague Larry Sheridan, investigating the crime, anticipate more violence.

In life and in literature, Peter Carey has been as attracted by the pull of the past as by realities of the present. Then there is his recurrent fascination with the two-country divide, where the lure of exile vies with the sentiment of ‘home’, and the schism between country of choice (or country that ‘chooses’ you) and country of birth means that neither is ever fully suitable.

Such equivocation he attributes to a generational impulse (Carey is now sixty-six). In his case, it meant that ‘growing up in Australia was to inhabit a colonial situation where your real place was somewhere else’. Not too much should be read into this statement, given personal and cultural changes over the past half-century, but it does offer some insight into the sense of longing for the forgone that infuses much of his work. As it does his latest offering.

Judith Beveridge is one of the most brilliant image-makers in Australian poetry. She writes of rain ‘bubble-wrapping the windows’ and yachts making a sound ‘as if cutlery were being replenished on table tops’. Her images, exuberant and fantastical, hold a balance between the real and the imagined world – as Gwen Harwood’s poem, ‘Thought Is Surrounded by a Halo’, closes: ‘Picture two lovers side by side / who sleep and dream and wake to hold / the real and the imagined world, / body by body, word by word …’

In Storm and Honey, Beveridge holds this balance between word and body not only in her imagery but also in her use of narrative. A sequence, ‘Driftgrounds: Three Fishermen’, forms the major part of this collection. This sequence of dramatic monologues tracks the working life of three fishermen, and works as a remarkable balancing act. The poems in it, always lucid, take their energy from the way they hold a line between opposing possibilities.

In what now seems to be the vanished country of the early years of my career, begun in the State Library of Victoria in the 1970s, I vividly remember John Arnold enthusing about his interest in the polymath Jack Lindsay (1900–90), son of Norman (another polymath) and one of the founders of the short-lived but gorgeously named Fanfrolico Press, whose legacy of fine books excited the keen interest of collectors. I was impressed that my precocious younger colleague had devoured Jack Lindsay’s three volumes of autobiography and had entered into an admiring correspondence with a man who in his Australian youth had found himself possessed by the written word.

‘You can say a lot more in fiction than you can say in the paper,’ Caroline Overington, journalist and author of two non-fiction books, has remarked of her decision to write a novel. In Ghost Child, she uses this extra scope to consider difficult questions often overlooked in the fast-moving news cycle.

In 1982, police are called to a housing estate in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. A five-year-old boy, Jacob Cashman, is unconscious, having been robbed and beaten, his mother tells them, on his way to the corner shop with his younger brother. A familiar scene unfolds: tearful public pleas for information, tabloid headlines, fear and outrage – until, inexorably, holes and inconsistencies emerge, the community’s sympathy turns to doubt and anger, and the mother and her boy-friend are charged with Jacob’s assault. Much is outlined in the first two pages: though the details of the crime are obscured by gossip and foggy memories, this is never a whodunit. Instead, the plot explores the fallout over the following two decades, as Jacob’s three siblings make their separate ways through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

That Homer Rieth is one of the finest lyric poets writing in Australia was apparent with the publication in 2001 of his collection The Dining Car Scene. Now, with Wimmera, his lyric strengths are displayed in epic form. Presented in twelve books and 374 pages, initially titled ‘A Locale of the Cosmos’, grand in conception and impressively detailed in execution, this is a significant achievement indeed, and a major contribution to Australian literature.

Wimmera is conceived not only in terms of specificities of place but in the company of poets. Although it is constructed without their heroic figures, gods and great battles, it acknowledges the classical epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante; its democratic spirit recalls Whitman; and, above all, its lyrical attention to landscape and nature is essentially Romantic. Fellow travellers include the primary English Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley – together with Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and John Shaw Neilson. Indeed, it may be said, the poem’s reach extends well beyond the Wimmera landscape that is its primary focus, since a European splendour, with references to Spain, Italy, Germany, France and England, is brought to bear in various ways upon the local. Operating not as ornamental intrusions but as part of the work’s informing sensibility, these references, often covert, establish connections that are philosophical, aesthetic, cultural and historical. They underscore an interplay throughout between particular and other, here and elsewhere, this time and other times, specifically Australian and broadly human.

Andrew Taylor’s latest book reprises themes common to many of his earlier poetry collections – movement between the antipodes and Europe; the natural landscape; affinities with music – but also, as the title suggests, themes of haunting and unhaunting, visitation and absence. Taylor was ill with cancer in 2003, and his confrontation with death has strongly informed The Unhaunting. The book is divided into five sections, and while the trajectory is far from linear, a sense of moving from darkness to light, from threat to release, unfolds.

The first section, ‘The Importance of Waiting’, deals explicitly with the poet’s illness, and the opening poem (‘Night by Night’) establishes concerns with darkness, surgery and the long labour of recovery. It also offers the first of many references to metaphorical and literal gates and doorways, as well as the first appearance of a shadowy other – generally a ‘she’ – that haunts the collection: ‘She will come again at 3, I know it / the way a shoulder presages rain. / 3 a.m. By the gate leading to the dark park.’

Painter Dmitri Pangalidis stares out over the baking Sydney rooftops as he waits for his partner, Choosy McBride, to come home from the gallery where she works as a curator. The city is besieged by heat and Pangalidis spends his day lounging on the couch, trying to motivate himself. The first five pages of The Silence contain no dialogue, with Pangalidis wasting yet another day at home, frustrated and filled with doubt about his art. These scenes are interspersed with those of McBride’s arduous return to the apartment across the city. Once the characters do speak, Bruce Mutard’s stark, contemplative meditation on art and beauty sets an unsettling tone that is maintained throughout.

The Silence was written and drawn over a two-year period for American imprint Image Comics, which strangely chose not to publish it. Allen & Unwin accepted the manuscript after critical praise was heaped on Mutard’s previous work, The Sacrifice (2008). That they have supported a writer such as Mutard is creditable.

If you believe the hyperbole surrounding her novel – Christos Tsiolkas has pronounced it ‘masterful, poignant, powerful and true’ – Kalinda Ashton is, at thirty-one, her generation’s answer to Helen Garner: a novelist of everyday Melbourne who makes sad, daily truths pleasurable to read because her writing is so easy to consume.

The Danger Game is, at one level, a family saga and a love story. These narratives provide the novel’s emotional depth and momentum. In them, we recognise aspects of our own familial and intimate relationships: sibling rivalry, feelings of abandonment, an inability to trust. Yet the plot is not pedestrian. Ashton tugs her reader along with unexpected and dramatic revelations until the final page. At the most basic level of storytelling, this novel works exceptionally well, début or not.

Cath Kenneally’s second novel, Jetty Road, is set in the beachside suburb of Glenelg, South Australia. Her subject is the relationship between two sisters in early middle age, and the narrative is fabricated from the daily happenings of their lives. Evie, the older sister by several years, has no children and ekes out a living in a number of part-time jobs as a child-care worker. Paula, matron of an aged care home, has two children: Bert, aged nineteen, and Rosie, six. Neither of the sisters is married.

Beginning as a voice on ABC radio, Ray Martin became a face familiar to most Australians. He reported from the United States for Four Corners in the 1960s and 1970s, was one of the original reporters on 60 Minutes from 1978, presented the Midday show from 1984 to 1993, and twice hosted A Current Affair (ACA). As he notes, he was the face of Channel 9 in the 1990s, also hosting Carols by Candlelight, election debates and assorted specials. But just in case anyone is in any doubt as to whom this book is about, Heinemann has plastered the cover with Ray: Stories of My Life: The Autobiography. Martin’s signature is added for good measure.

This is indeed a book of stories: about Martin’s life, and about the stories he himself presented on radio and television. ‘Yarns’ and ‘anecdotes’ are terms he sometimes prefers, as he tries to take the reader with him: ‘let me tell you’, and ‘let me set the scene for you’, he implores us on several occasions.

It is ironic that I am writing this review on the tenth anniversary of the comprehensive defeat of the Republican referendum in 1999. This book by Craig Wilcox sets out to tell us that the British army (the Red Coats of the title) was much more popular in the colony than we had hitherto thought. Indeed, on the evidence, it was more popular in Australia than it ever was in Britain, which, even in the nineteenth century, had no love for standing armies.

Wilcox’s thesis makes sense from the start. In the early colonies, the Red Coats represented order, some glamour with their frequent parades and marches, and could be relied upon to massacre the few Aborigines or convicts who threatened to get out of hand. Indeed, one Aboriginal leader, Bungaree, was dressed by Governor Macquarie in a red coat, and it is by no means certain that this was done for people’s amusement, or that Bungaree did not consider himself to have been honoured rather than to have been made a dupe.

It is always a pleasure to sit down with a fat book by New Zealand historian James Belich. He writes with verve and takes a big-picture view of the past, giving you plenty to think about and, better still, much to argue with. Until lately he has been mainly known for his fine-grained histories of New Zealand and its Maori Wars. Now he ascends to the stratosphere for an Olympian survey of white folks pouring in astonishing numbers into the newly accessible regions of Australasia, Africa, Siberia and the Americas during the nineteenth century. From this exalted perspective they look like nothing so much as a great swarm of bees diverging into several different streams in search of new hives. There had been nothing like this concentrated great voluntary migration in the history of mankind.

Musing on why historians have paid so little attention to this unprecedented phenomenon, Belich rightly points out that most accounts of what he calls the Settler Revolution have been parochial, folding the story of European migration into individual national histories rather than considering the worldwide movement as a whole. Thus Americans see the peopling of the West as their unique achievement, spear-headed by one hundred per cent Americans such as Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill, while ignoring the contemporaneous and quite comparable deeds of the Man from Snowy River in Australia, the Voortrekkers of South Africa or the Canadians in their Little Houses on the Prairies. Not to mention Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff in Siberia, the pieds-noirs farmers of French Algeria or the Spanish-speaking gauchos in Argentina.

This is a celebration of Aboriginal survival on the Georges River, a river which snakes through the south-western suburbs of Sydney and disgorges into Botany Bay.

Co-author Heather Goodall, a professor of history at University of Technology, Sydney, reveals that she grew up on the river unaware that she was surrounded by an Aboriginal community. This changed when, in the 1970s, she was confronted by an Aborigine named Jacko Campbell who had lived in the district all his life. He told her that they had both attended the same school; he was a student there thirty years previously. Campbell, writes Goodall, ‘wanted to know why I hadn’t heard about these extraordinary people living just a few miles away from my house’. It was a challenge. Her own participation in this book is her response.

One view of the relationship between the word and the creative act is Goethe’s admonition: ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’ – ‘Create, [the German word actually places more emphasis on the idea of shaping and forming than on artistic imagination] artist, don’t talk’. Typically, of course, his own Conversations with Eckermann (1823–32) show him frequently ignoring this precept, when the occasion (or the questioner) demands. And the last forty years have seen a proliferation of books in which actors, directors and designers talk – sometimes revealingly, sometimes unproductively – about their approach to the creative or re-creative act.

Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry is an astonishing book. Its surprise consists in its topic, style, passion, range of religious and philosophical scholarship, and its daring blend of human depth and philosophical originality. Johnston describes it as an essay that ‘gradually evolves into a sort of jeremiad’. There are plenty of complaints, and it is at times a tirade, especially in the final chapter, but the term ‘jeremiad’ does too little justice to the book’s subtlety and persuasive intelligence.

Johnston is an Australian philosopher who is currently Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He studied philosophy at Melbourne University before doing a PhD at Princeton under the legendary Saul Kripke. He has long had a reputation as an important philosopher working in the analytic tradition on complex issues to do with philosophical semantics, philosophical psychology and metaphysics, but his output has been restricted to a succession of significant articles in learned journals and many had begun to think that the major book embodying his insights might never come. This was disappointing to those who believe, understandably, that for humanities intellectuals the book is the ultimate index to achievement. Now we have Saving God and its forthcoming companion volume, Surviving Death. For the latter we must wait and see, but the mode of the current book defies earlier expectations.

Anne Manne’s publisher invites us to include So This Is Life in the classical canon of autobiographies of Australian childhood – Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. In Australian letters there has been a long tradition of autobiographical writing of childhood; this produced some of the earliest critical writing on autobiography – by Richard Coe and Joy Hooton, for example. But I remain unconvinced by the MUP blurb, for Manne’s essays do not take us back to Porter or Gaita at all. Rather, they suggest the rich and dreamy vignettes of David Malouf’s autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street or the precisely observed rural domesticity that is captured in Olga Masters’s Cobargo stories. Daisy, Lily and Ivy, Manne’s great-aunts, all unmarried, who live together in the formerly grand but now decaying two-storey house where ‘absolutely nothing happened’, recall Masters’s ‘home girls’; Manne’s affective memory of her grandmother’s linen cupboard recalls the childhood perception and memory work that Malouf captures so powerfully.

George Barrington was a fascinating man, and Nathan Garvey is his latest ‘victim’. Barrington’s life was a source of almost daily fascination to eighteenth-century contemporaries; some mystery still surrounds him. His birth date remains equivocal – was it 1755 or 1758? Church records don’t survive to help here, but it was probably the former. Were his parents artisans to the Irish gentry – a silversmith and mantua-maker – or less skilled workers? Even his name is a matter of antiquarian enquiry. The fact remains that George Barrington, the gentleman Prince of Pickpockets, well-known convict traveller to Botany Bay and putative author, appeared to the world in various celebrated guises and captured popular attention. He occupies an ambiguous place in the world of crime, history and fiction.

Caught in Barrington’s early thrall were his victims, as well as lawyers, learned judges, court reporters, publishers, common and uncommon readers, and colonial officers, probably in that order. In this engrossing study, converted from a recent doctoral thesis, the author claims to set out new ground. In significant respects this holds true, particularly in the exploration of the field of lesser-known eighteenth-century publishers and the book trade.

Could it be that there is less to Julia Gillard than meets the eye? She is a woman of fierce intelligence, Australia’s best parliamentary performer, and one of the sharpest wits in Canberra. I met Gillard a couple of times early in her political career, when she was shadow minister for immigration, and engaged her in a lengthy discussion about refugee policy. This was not long after the Tampa affair, when Labor was searching for a way back from the wilderness of electoral defeat and the party was bleeding internally from wounds caused by rank-and-file anger at its response to John Howard’s handling of the asylum seekers issue. I found Gillard to be charming, engaging and funny. She was well briefed, open to argument and ideas, but questioning and critical. I had the sense even then that her feet were firmly grounded in the reality of electoral politics: that no policy proposal would pass muster if it might constitute a serious obstacle on the path back to power in Canberra.

Like many Australians, I have followed Gillard’s rise through Labor’s ranks keenly since then, if only because she has added colour and vibrancy to federal politics (I’m not talking about her hair). So I was eager to read Jacqueline Kent’s biography. Sadly, having done so, I find the deputy prime minister rather less interesting than I did before I started.

[I]magine that a dictator had decreed that all publications in the future must be signed ‘Anon’, on pain of imprisonment. This would clear the ground of all but the most dedicated and necessary authors, allow trees to breathe more freely, and diminish the carbon imbalance. It is worth thinking about.

       Dorothy Green, ‘The Writer’

While preparing this review, I returned to Dorothy Green’s three lectures, published in Writer, Reader, Critic (1991), to savour their acerbically witty, sometimes provoking and surprisingly prescient arguments. One day I ran the above quotation, which ends ‘The Writer’ (1985), as my Facebook status update. Disappointingly, it attracted little comment. Then again, amid the virtual sound and fury of the Internet, this signified nothing much. It is not hard to imagine what Dorothy Auchterlonie Green (1915–91) might have said about Facebook and the drive to publish one’s thoughts, on a daily basis, for the edification of one’s networks – a drive that consumes precious resources, if not in trees then in carbon, and certainly in time and energy. Of course, even as I channel her likely views, I am conscious of their contradictions. Not only do we discern in the above epigraph a paradoxical blend of free-thought and authoritarianism, but in Green’s public address we can observe tensions arising between what she spurned – the narcissistic drive of more and more people to publish – and what she sought: the creation of literate, socially engaged communities.

Not surprisingly, publishers often claim that their latest offering takes the reader down a path never before trodden, to reveal new insights and understandings of well-worn topics and events. The Path of Infinite Sorrow is no exception, with the promise of a ‘whole new perspective’ on the Japanese side of the story of the Kokoda campaign in Papua during the early stages of World War II. In recent years, the status of Kokoda has challenged that of Gallipoli in the national consciousness, with a number of lengthy tomes, guidebooks, journal articles and newspaper articles, not to mention a feature movie, devoted to the campaign. But why another book, and does it offer anything new?

This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).

This retrospective collection offers an engaging study of the ways in which critical tastes have changed over the last forty years. For one thing, the magisterial, evaluative tone has transmogrified into an engaged and problematising one, as exclusively aesthetic concerns have given way to an accommodation of the political issues that Astley so presciently raised (as Leigh Dale, Paul Sharrad, and Kate Grenville note). Many of the essayists deal in nuanced ways with her difficulties in writing in the shadow of her male contemporaries, especially Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Can you imagine a critic today getting away with describing Astley’s style as ‘an iceberg way of writing’? Those critics closer to our time celebrate her cerebral analyses and are less bewildered by her metafictive moves.

Why do you write?

To find out what I know, to remember what I can, and to make sense of it all – but also to make nice patterns; to get less ignorant if not adequately wiser; and because, like all obsessives, I get morose if I don’t.

Maya Linden

Amid the proliferation of fiction inspired by supernatural themes, it is refreshing to find several débuts concerned with the more mundane – yet perhaps more pertinent – quests of adolescence. Tohby Riddle’s The Lucky Ones (Penguin) explores a period of change in the life of Tom, an aspiring artist, as he negotiates the purgatory between high school and adulthood. Told in a conversational voice, punctuated with poetic observation, it is a meditation on ‘the faint sadness that seems to underpin all things wonderful’.

In the anniversary week of Barack Obama’s election, the New York Yankees won the World Series, as all the world surely knows by now. The victory might have guaranteed a celebration, even in an America where unemployment hit ten per cent in the same week, but the glitz of the Yankees’ Friday ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s sombre but not sobered financial district was overshadowed by the news of the mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas by American-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

By Sunday, when Ari Fleisher, Yankees fan and George W. Bush’s former press secretary, wrote a rueful column about the ironies of victory for a Republican-voting baseball tragic like himself (since Eisenhower, the Yankees have only ever won the World Series under a Democrat president), the joke fell a little flat. Bad timing. Still, the New YorkTimes judged right in carrying the column: it was a salving piece of bi-partisan whimsy in a week marked by violent death, by extreme Republican naysaying in Congress, and calls for revolution from the ‘Tea Party Patriots’ rallying on the steps of Capitol Hill. Their ‘little bit of revolution’ included brandishing poster images of the piled-up dead of Dachau. That’s how some of the patriots chose to characterise Obama’s reform initiative: as ‘National Socialist Healthcare’, somehow akin to the Holocaust. Only the kinder pundits called them crazy.

Clive James has been at the business of writing now for so long that his literary activities have almost outlived the fame that used to get in the way of their apprehension. Twenty or so years ago, it was possible to think that the man who clowned around in those ‘Postcards’ travelogues on television, and who seemed to reach some apogee of self-satisfaction and self-definition chatting to celebrities on the box, was just slumming it when it came to literature; that he had bigger fish to fry than this diminished thing, even, if he was forever reminding us of the grandness of the refusal he had made.

After all, the poems that had entered (highbrow) public consciousness were essentially jokes on the whole enterprise, weren’t they? ‘Last Night the Sea Dreamed It Was Greta Scacchi’ – ‘it did not’ was the Martin Amis rejoinder – or ‘Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini’ seemed to fall, like his mate Robert Hughes’s ‘Sohoiad’, into the category of brilliant interventions from a world elsewhere, a greater world that could handle the merely literary with its left hand. It was all too easy to imagine that James, for all his manifest brilliance, had fallen, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

In 2004, Somersault, a drama of youthful coming to terms with life’s challenges, scooped the pool at the Australian Film Institute’s annual awards. It was a melancholy comment on the state of the local industry that no other films could compete with this affecting but scarcely remarkable work. How different the situation will be in 2009.

Whether one film walks off with all the major awards or not, there has not been such a line-up of notable Australian films in a single year since the 1970s revival began with Wake in Fright, now screening to considerable acclaim in a new print. I haven’t seen every Australian film this year, but those I have suggest it is an annus mirabilis. Run your eye over this list: Mary & Max, Samson & Delilah, Disgrace, Blessed, My Year Without Sex, Bastardy, The Cedar Boys, Last Ride, Beautiful Kate and Balibo. Any one of these deserves serious notice; taken as a job lot, they are extraordinary.