November 2008, no. 306

Welcome to the November 2008 issue of Australian Book Review.

Peter Rose reviews The Henson Case by David Marr

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Photography

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Book 1 Title: The Henson Case

Book Author: David Marr

Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $24.95 pb, 149 pp, 9781921520037

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Display Review Rating: No

Panic, David Marr has stated since the publication of this book, is what he writes about: why people panic, what they panic about, and how they express it. Clearly, with his investigative skills and his access to different worlds, Marr was the ideal person to examine the so-called Henson affair.

The story itself is by now depressingly familiar, but few if any saw it coming. Bill Henson, a Melbourne photographer, had been practising his art since the mid-1970s. A few years ago, in Sydney and Melbourne, more than one hundred thousand people saw a major exhibition that featured studies of nude models, some of them quite young. There were no complaints, no public outrage. Henson’s work has been exhibited abroad, several handsome catalogues have appeared, and he has cultivated a number of influential supporters, David Malouf and Edmund Capon among them.

Everything changed with Henson’s latest exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, in Sydney. The invitation featured a portrait of a naked girl who is now referred to as ‘N’. Roslyn Oxley had reservations about the choice of image (‘I was always a bit worried about it. I thought, “Bill aren’t you going a bit far?”’), but the artist prevailed. The choice, in hindsight, seems almost Wildean in its daring, its provocation, however unconscious.

Some people found the image perturbing. ‘The Henson invitation has few friends,’ Marr writes; many copies, according to legend, went straight into the bin. The first person to raise the alarm was the arts editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, who thought it was ‘a bit off’. In her SMH column on May 22, the day of the opening, Miranda Devine cited the invitation and decried the sexualisation of children. Within hours, the thunderers of 2GB became involved, and with this any civility, any balance, any nuance, any respect for a renowned artist, went out the window. Chris Smith (‘one of Sydney’s most aggressive broadcasters’, according to Marr) led the charge: ‘It is disgraceful. It is disgusting. It is pornographic. It is woeful.’ His colleague Philip Clark was equally adamant later that afternoon: ‘I was appalled when I saw these photographs, I really was … Look, people go to jail for possession of images such as these … Don’t tell me they’re not pornographic because they are … And wankers walk around with glasses of champagne and call it art.’

Inevitably, given 2GB’s grim sway with politicians, one of them quickly obliged. Barry O’Farrell, Leader of the Opposition in New South Wales, became the first politician to denounce Henson (though he had been through the retrospective in 2005 without being troubled by any of the works). Morris Iemma, the serving premier, followed suit: ‘As a father, there is no way in the world I’d want my daughter to be in that position.’ Before long, Hetty Johnston, executive director of the child protection lobby group Bravehearts and scourge of Archbishop Hollingworth as governor-general, became involved, offering a brisk new definition of art: ‘Pictures portraying sexualised imagery of young girls can never be called art. It is child pornography, child exploitation and it is a crime.’ When the police were alerted, an inspector asked a guard at the Art Gallery of New South Wales if they had any ‘nude underage art works’. The best line in the book goes to Ben the guard: ‘I’ve only just started here … but it is an art gallery so there have to be some nudes.’

So inflamed was the situation that the opening was quickly postponed. ‘The jocks at 2GB had done well,’ Marr observes; closing down an exhibition none of them had seen. The cognoscenti repaired to the Oxleys’ house on the tip of Darling Point. Here, Marr’s trademark dryness is to the fore. While local silks ‘were delivering Opinions gratis on the lawn’, the Melburnians consoled themselves that such things could never happen down south.

Worse followed in the morning, with the prime minister’s intervention. Shown the images on national television (thick bars covering N’s nipples and heavily shaded genitals), Kevin Rudd said, ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen them. I think they’re revolting … Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids, you know’ (my emphasis). Marr notes: ‘Rudd was the only [politician] to declare after a cursory examination on a television monitor that they were without any artistic merit at all.’ A different kind of leader might have found subtler ways of expressing concern without belittling a serious artist. Marr expresses many people’s disappointment with Rudd, though the analogy with John F. Kennedy (‘… with these remarks on Today, Rudd killed Camelot’) is not entirely persuasive. ‘My name is Kevin, I’m from Camelot, and I’m here to help’ doesn’t have the right ring.

Among the politicians, only Malcolm Turnbull, not yet the federal Leader of the Opposition, emerged creditably, reminding journalists that we live in a free society and that freedom of artistic expression is rather important.

In the upshot, twenty police descended on the Oxley Gallery and seized several photographs. Shrewdly, the Oxleys employed a spin doctor, Sue Cato, whose tactic, as Marr notes, was ‘to starve the media into silence’. Henson, mystified by all the fuss and indifferent to public concerns about the internet (a creative and liberating medium, in his view), made no statements while he waited to see if he would be charged. Major art institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, were raided by the police. Marr notes that the NGA’s director, Ron Radford, and AGNSW’s Edmund Capon himself – dependent on federal and state funding, respectively – chose to remain silent about Henson. The National Gallery of Victoria was more vocal in support of the photographer. Allan Myers QC, president of the trustees, remarked: ‘I don’t think Australia has been very tolerant of artistic expression – ever. I don’t think things have got worse, they are still bad.’

The resultant furore dragged on for weeks, rarely edifyingly or predictably. The chapter in the book about the ‘creative’ veterans of the 2020 conference and their efforts to reach consensus is not very riveting. Elsewhere, a number of minor artists became involved, drawing attention to their own work.

In the end, of course, no charges were laid against Henson or the Oxleys. Still, commentators queued up to have their say on the OpEd pages. None of the responses was more bizarre or sententious than that of the Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong, who, writing in the Australian on October 10, informed readers that the New South Wales police had asked him to help with ‘the central question: What is art?’ (really, the scene is worthy of Joe Orton). Armstrong then advanced the risible notion that, because Goethe, ‘recognising the common standard of the society in which he lived’, suppressed certain poems that might have given offence to ‘good people’, Bill Henson (despite the fact that ‘he has not done anything illegal’ and ‘has not harmed any of his subjects’) should ‘sacrifice his artistic project, in this area ... stop photographing children and concentrate on other valuable and beautiful work’. Warming to his woolly, antediluvian theme, Armstrong went on:

For a long time, art has lost its way, and this is a disaster for not only what is called the art world, but for the whole of society ... The true task of art is to show us ideals ... Its task is to civilise us, to make us sweeter, wiser and more noble, and to do so in ways that catch hold of the deep longings in ourselves to be like that. When art goes astray, when it gives itself lesser goals, all of society is vulgarised.

Sweeter and nobler, indeed. And who said art has ‘lost its way’ or has some kind of responsibility to ‘civilise’?

Marr, throughout, is clear-eyed – no ‘apologist’. Interestingly, he had never met Henson before writing this book. The portrait of Henson, with his immense self-assurance, is absorbing. The tape is rolling, and the artist has his head:

It never occurred to me that I’d ever be in this situation. You have got to bear in mind that, for better or worse, my work has been pretty much at the centre of the visual arts culture in this country for a long time … [When] your images are fluttering from one end of Macquarie Street and Martin Place to the other … you are pretty much as central to the debate on arts as can be. Next stop is footy.

Henson goes on to discuss his search for new models. ‘Look, just Google me, and I’d be very interested in photographing your daughter or son,’ he tells interested parents. But even Henson (‘not a man to volunteer mistakes’, according to Marr) must now regret his revelation that he has looked for models in primary schools, a further entrepreneurial use of public schools. This revived the affair on the publication of this book, generating obloquy that may prove even harder to staunch than was the case in May. But what of churches and sporting groups and talent scouts that ‘scour our schools’? And what of Kevin Rudd (freshly revolted all over again by this passage in The Henson Case)? Do his regular visits to schools distract pupils from their studies? Is parental permission always sought for the cloying footage on the evening news?

In this enthralling little book, David Marr is less spiky than usual. He is too worried to be mordant. He has reason to be. More was endangered after May 22 than a few contentious photographs. Wowserism, philistinism, censoriousness – never far below the surface in Australia – were given new life. Much became clear in the aftermath: politicians’ contempt for modern art; the readiness of the media to defame an artist without looking at his work; the refusal to distinguish between nudity and sexuality; the advent of a new puritanism; and the eagerness to jeopardise hard-won values and rights in a liberal society.

Something has gone awry here. It reminds us of one of Bill Henson’s moody, enigmatic photographs of a long curved road leading into menacing night, shadowily peopled.

Write comment (0 Comments)

James Ley reviews The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Book 1 Title: The Slap

Book Author: Christos Tsiolkas

Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $32.95 pb, 496 pp, 9781741753592

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/VEPGE

Display Review Rating: No

In early 2018, Christos Tsiolkas published a long essay as part of a series commissioned by the Sydney branch of PEN, an organisation dedicated to freedom of expression. ‘Tolerance’, which appeared in Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear (2008), is an interesting document, not least for the way it highlights how compelling yet exasperating a writer Tsiolkas can be. Like much of his work, it is fired by passionate political commitment and is roughly but emotively written. The analysis seems to come at you, like a berserker, from every direction at once. Tsiolkas is particularly cavalier with the term ‘liberal’, whose many shades of meaning are badly trampled in the onrush of argument. I suspect that Christopher Hitchens, to take one example, would be none too pleased about being called the L-word.

Yet the essay bludgeons its way toward a basic stance that reflects some of the urgency of Tsiolkas’s fiction. It bristles at the pieties of polite society, the self-satisfaction of supposedly ‘liberal’ attitudes that paper over real cultural differences. There is indeed something mealy-mouthed about elevating ‘tolerance’ – a word that conveys more than a whiff of resentment – to the status of civic virtue. Tsiolkas considers himself a man of the left but is impatient with what he sees as the complacency, prim hypocrisy, and ineffectual nature of his own side of politics. Much of the energy of his writing is generated by the friction between a frustrated idealism of the left, which sets itself against inequality and exploitation and prejudice, and a tough-minded realism that wants to insist upon the regressive impulses that perpetuate these social evils. More than any other contemporary Australian novelist, he has a powerful sense of humankind’s capacity for hatred. His fiction acknowledges its primal allure, its negative validation; his characters often experience a surge of excitement when they allow themselves to think a vicious or bigoted thought. On this point, he is a furious moralist for whom the truths most in need of telling are hard, un- palatable truths. A writer, he argues, has a duty to be ‘blasphemous’ (his emphasis), to adopt ‘a position beyond the bourgeois politeness that taints the liberal’s conception of free speech, and also a position at odds with the redemptionist hope that defines the socialist and feminist ideal of art’.

No one who has read Dead Europe (2005), his most fully realised work and one of the most horripilating novels ever published in this country, could accuse Tsiolkas of being tainted by bourgeois politeness; there is not much chance of him being mistaken for a feminist either. But some of the erratic quality of his work can be attributed to the desire to provoke. In both content and form, his fiction tends to be blunt to the point of brutality. You will search long and hard for a finely turned phrase or even a metaphor in his writing, and he spares the reader no ugly detail. His fiction is thrown down as a challenge and, when it works, it has a remarkable energy: it is angry, intense and genuinely provocative. But when the tension slips, the bluntness can seem puerile and sordid. That the distinction is largely in the eye of the beholder is, to a significant extent, the point. The only option not on the table is indifference.

The Slap is thus notable for being Tsiolkas’s mildest book to date. It is that old-fashioned thing, a panoramic social-realist novel. In his essay on tolerance, Tsiolkas imagines a hypothetical dinner party with a motley assortment of guests from across Australia’s cultural and political spectrum; The Slap begins with a more plausible version of the same concept. The opening chapter describes a barbecue, hosted by Hector and his wife, Aisha. It is attended by people from a diverse range of backgrounds, such as one might well encounter in Melbourne’s multicultural northern suburbs. There are the children of Greek and Indian migrants, an Anglo-Australian couple, a Jewish woman, an Aboriginal Muslim convert, a heterosexual teenage girl, and her homosexual male friend. (Ari, from Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded, 1995, also makes a cameo appearance.) The afternoon ends acrimoniously when Hector’s cousin, Harry, slaps the brattish three-year-old child of the Anglo-Australian couple, Rosie and Gary, who react with outrage and threaten to press charges.

The novel’s initial point of conflict is perfectly targeted. There is hardly a more sensitive subject than how people choose to raise their children. Children are at the centre of every moral panic, and the ‘parental anxiety’ gland is forever being massaged by our political leaders. The slap – and indeed The Slap – is a strike at middle-class sensitivities. The novel explores the way that the preciousness and anxiety that surround child rearing is symptomatic of broader cultural tensions. As the consequences of Harry’s action unfold, The Slap inhabits the points of view of eight of the guests and develops into a multi-sided, multicultural, multi-generational portrait of a section of Australian society at the tail-end of the Howard years. Childishness, in the sense of naïveté and selfishness, becomes a motif, and the identity of each of the major adult characters is, in a sense, defined around children. Hector and Aisha, in their early forties, are struggling to be reconciled to their domesticity; Anouk has opted out of child rearing altogether, preferring to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist; the upwardly mobile Harry projects his aspirations onto his only son; and the elderly Manoli, Hector’s father, whose joyless marriage has curdled his private views into a sour misogyny, clings to a traditional sense of family loyalty in the face of the complexities of modern life.

The Slap, a long novel, contains some ragged writing, but its multiple perspectives work together to illuminate the difficulties of the issues it raises, and its length is justified by the breathing space it permits its characters. Tsiolkas has the dramatic sense to know when to step back and allow them to argue among themselves, and there is a great deal of topical interest in a work that features robust exchanges on issues such as public education and women wearing veils.

But there is also an insistent quality to the novel. Rosie and Gary, in particular, embody all the sins of bourgeois morality that Tsiolkas dislikes, and are very harshly treated. Gary, disagreeable and alcoholic, harbours frustrated artistic ambitions that are viewed with scorn; Rosie is self-righteous but fragile. Their indignation at their son’s rough treatment is seen by most of the other characters as an overreaction and serves to alienate them. Most significantly, the novel hammers the point that they are raising a mollycoddled, disrespectful child with an inflated sense of his own entitlement.

Part of the novel’s intention is to direct the reader back to his or her assumptions. One’s response to The Slap is likely to coalesce around the question of whether or not one believes a grown man slapping a three-year-old is appalling, or whether one harbours a sneaking suspicion that it might just do the brat some good. I would incline to the former view (thus my bourgeois morality); the book’s sympathies appear to lean the other way, even though the slapper, Harry, is the novel’s most unpleasant character. There is, occasionally, an unhappy sense that the palpable disapproval of Rosie’s overprotectiveness spills over into an implicit endorsement of an unappealingly Spartan alternative. This is moderated somewhat by the novel’s sympathetic portraits of the teenagers Connie and Richie as they fumble their way through the sexual awkwardness of adolescence. Both of them are on the cusp of entering into genuinely adult relationships, and are portrayed with sensitivity and a respect for their capacity to think for themselves and make their own mistakes. The final chapter is, significantly, given over to Richie as he completes high school and looks to the future with a sense of anticipation and optimism.

That Tsiolkas’s fiction speaks from the political margins and addresses itself to the future invests it with a vaguely prophetic tone. In Dead Europe, this manifests itself in the notion that the injustices of the present will be repaid by the return of the ancient superstitions and religious hatreds of the past. This is given dramatic force by the novel’s appropriation of the conventions of the horror genre and, on another level, the suggestion that the narrative was a mythical journey through hell, with all of Europe transformed into a vast underworld of festering resentment and exploitation. In The Slap, the prophetic note sounds, in a more understated way, in the implication that the presumptuous universalism represented by Rosie’s middle-class values cannot survive. The novel’s multiple perspectives deliberately marginalise her moral certainty, making it merely one of a host of competing views. Her family’s fortunes are in decline. The world of the novel is one in which the most selfish and brutal character, Harry, is also the most materially successful and living in opulent vulgarity in his bayside home.

The Slap is less immediately compelling than Dead Europe, partly because the prospect of a recurrence of murderous anti-Semitism is a lot scarier than demographic drift, and partly because the multiple points of view make for a looser dramatic structure and a less direct work. But it is an engaging and stimulating book: rough, irascible, and contentious. Tsiolkas, I am sure, would not want it any other way.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

‘Ice is everywhere,’ observes the narrator of Ice, Louis Nowra’s fifth novel, before succumbing to a bad case of the Molly Blooms and giving us a few pages of punctuation-free interior monologue. No wonder he’s so worked up: ice, in Ice, really is everywhere. It is subject, motif, organising principle, and all-purpose metaphor; it is death, life, stasis, progress; it is seven types of ambiguity and then some. For variety’s sake, Nowra occasionally wheels out a non-frozen alternative – taxidermy, waxworks – but the design is clear: these are merely different nuclei around which the same cluster of metaphors gather.'

Book 1 Title: Ice

Book Author: Louis Nowra

Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $32.95 pb, 336 pp, 9781741754834

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Display Review Rating: No

Structuring a novel around one all-encompassing conceit is risky. A carefully spun web of affinities might intrigue at first, but how easily it can degenerate into laboured contrivance. Thematic resonance, striven for so keenly, is drowned in a puddle of nebulous ‘meaning’; the conceit comes to mean everything, therefore it means nothing.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Geordie Williamson reviews Wanting by Richard Flanagan

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

For the inhabitants of mainland Australia, ‘history’ is often complicated by the sheer fact of geography. Instead of one central node, European colonisation expanded from multiple centres, each isolated in space and founded on differing socio-political premises over staggered periods of time, and each with populations too various in background to allow much in the way of agreement about some völkisch collective past.

Book 1 Title: Wanting

Book Author: Richard Flanagan

Book 1 Biblio: Knopf, $35 hb, 256 pp, 9781741666557

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Display Review Rating: No

But Tasmania is different. Its relative heterogeneity and modest scale make it a crucible for happenings. It is a compact vessel in which historical events are subjected to a rigorous testing; the one place, perhaps, where the implications of our wider actions may be clearly discerned.

Richard Flanagan is a historian by training, and even his wildest fictional imaginings are shaped by the earnest desire, in Croce’s words, ‘to create a true discourse of the past’, particularly for his home state. His narratives are not parochial, however – they proceed in keen awareness of Tasmania’s role as a microcosm – nor are they didactic: the historian in Flanagan may collect and arrange static fact, but it is the creative writer who sets them in motion.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Christina Hill reviews Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Custom Highlight Text:

In his latest novel, Everything I Knew, Peter Goldsworthy uses this famous quotation. Indeed, it is so apposite that it might well have provided the epigraph. Everything I Knew is, in part, a self-conscious reworking of Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). The first-person narrator, Robert Burns, is a naïve fourteen-year-old boy in desperate thrall to a young woman. But where the emotional life of Hartley’s boy protagonist is destroyed by the precipitate arrival of sexual knowledge, Everything I Knew subverts this notion.

The year is 1964 and the setting is Penola, a country town in South Australia. Robbie is a Year Seven schoolboy, precociously intelligent, restlessly pubescent. His father is the town policeman and his mother a well-meaning but stolid housewife. The community is narrow; everyone knows everyone else. At the beginning of the novel, Robbie is beginning to outgrow Billy, his best friend from primary school, an Indigenous boy with a reputation for getting into trouble that Robbie, to a lesser extent (being white), shares.

Book 1 Title: Everything I Knew

Book Author: Peter Goldsworthy

Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $32.95 pb, 294 pp, 9780241015339

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Display Review Rating: No

‘The past is another country. They do things differently there.’

L.P. Hartley

Write comment (0 Comments)

Adrian Mitchell reviews The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

It is quite extraordinary how often in this country we resort to caricature in our cultural expression. Think of the hammy acting in Australian films and television, the switches in levels of reality in Patrick White’s novels and plays, the new lead William Dobell gave to modern Australian painting or Keith Looby designs for Wagner. Peter Carey has made his fortune from it; Bill Leak has made it his trademark. And no, we won’t start on the politicians, thank you.

Book 1 Title: The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Book Author: Colleen McCullough

Book 1 Biblio: HarperCollins, $49.99 hb, 470 pp, 9780732287221

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Display Review Rating: No

We happily mingle different kinds of representation, as though there are no categories worth acknowledging. Why should that not be the case, when you consider our native species, botanical and zoographical? The natural order of things is upset here. Ours is a country to break all illusions; only mirages are real. We have our own inherent transgressive reality (to use the idiom of today’s students) and aesthetic.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Biography: The Past has a Great Future by Richard Holmes | 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Biography

Custom Article Title: Biography: The Past has a Great Future

Review Article: No

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Biography: The Past has a Great Future

Article Subtitle: 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Just before I flew to Australia to deliver this year’s HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography, I heard an ABC broadcast on the BBC World Service. The Australian commentator was talking about the centenary of the birth of Donald Bradman, the ‘great Don’ with his famous Test batting average of 99.94 runs. He said that Bradman was a peculiarly Australian role model because he was a sporting hero and because he knocked the hell out of the British bowling. Slightly carried away by the moment, he added: ‘We still need those founding fathers – we’ve had no George Washington, no Abraham Lincoln ... Don Bradman fills a biographical gap.’

Display Review Rating: No

I am interested by this idea of filling the biographical gap. I want to address the importance of the great tradition of popular biography, both in Australia and in Britain. It has proved significant in shaping our different national identities, giving us role models, but also questioning the nature of our societies.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Lyndon Megarrity reviews ‘Behind the Exclusive Brethren’ by Michael Bachelard

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Non-fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: The power and the process

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Behind the Exclusive Brethren is the story of a religious group that goes to extraordinary lengths to remain ‘apart from the world’ but whose very ‘unworldliness’ is maintained by very worldly means. Journalist Michael Bachelard’s readable and balanced account of the Exclusive Brethren in Australia is informed by a broad understanding of the church in its international context.

Book 1 Title: Behind the Exclusive Brethren

Book Author: Michael Bachelard

Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $32.95 pb, 314 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

In the course of writing his book, Bachelard interviewed and corresponded with a large number of past and present Brethren, ultimately presenting a picture of a religious hierarchy more obsessed with power and process than with what is beneficial for its ‘flock’. The author provides many heartbreaking accounts of families being torn apart because of the doctrine of separation: Brethren members are strongly urged to avoid contact with those who leave or are removed by order of sect leaders. For all the solemn certainties of Brethren life, it seems that God sometimes changes his mind. In more recent times, dissenting Brethren are less likely to be ‘withdrawn from’ than in the past, but for many victims of this somewhat arbitrary doctrine the pain and trauma of the experience remain visceral.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘Children’s Literature: A reader’s history, from Aesop to Harry Potter’ by Seth Lerer

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Literary Studies

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: From papyrus to Harry Potter

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

‘Dress me and put my shoes on; it is time, it is the hour before dawn, so that we should get ready for school.’ This colloquy, probably from Gaul in the third or fourth century, prescribes the ideal child’s conversation, from waking and greeting his parents politely to walking home, with his slave, from school at noon.

Seth Lerer’s history of children’s literature starts with papyrus and ends with Harry Potter. It is called a ‘reader’s history’ because Lerer does not only look at literature written for children – a comparatively recent phenomenon. He also looks at what children actually read: abecedaria, excerpts from Virgil and Homer, versions of Aesop, lists and plays, folktales, prayers and psalters, boy scout manuals, magazines, and chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe.

Book 1 Title: Children’s Literature

Book 1 Subtitle: A reader’s history, from Aesop to Harry Potter

Book Author: Seth Lerer

Book 1 Biblio: University of Chicago Press (Footprint Books), $45.95 hb, 394 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Commentary

Review Article: No

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: A ‘Change Election’

Article Subtitle: The US presidential campaign

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

It has been an extraordinary political war. Conventional wisdoms and long-standing assumptions have flown out the window. The final choice is remarkable: a young, ‘cool’ and detached African American who abjures commitment versus a decided, indeed hot-tempered, maverick whose entire essence is commitment. Long gone is the ‘inevitable candidate’ whose gender is now represented on the opposition ticket, as a vice-presidential candidate no one came close to predicting.

Display Review Rating: No

Along the way, the political process has been energised. Unlike the caucus system in Australia, which restricts the choice of leader to elected members of parliament, the American process has been, well, American: wide open, breezy and totally unpredictable. As against those 226 parliamentarians in Canberra who chose the leaders of all of Australia’s political parties, nearly sixty million Americans voted in the 2008 primary elections to choose their leaders, a greater engagement of the citizenry than in any previous presidential contest. And they chose unconventional outsiders – on both sides.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Commentary

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Reflections on a revival of the Doll

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

I hesitated before deciding to see Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at La Boite in Brisbane this year. Revivals, even under ideal circumstances, can be chancy. The author, Ray Lawler, had reservations about the presentation of his signature work in the round, and so did I. More than fifty years had passed since he wrote it and since I saw it performed behind a conventional proscenium arch in Brisbane, with Lawler himself playing Barney. A story about manual cane-cutters would seem to my children as remote in time and place as one about stokers on a steamboat would have to me, when I first saw the play. Then, there were few, if any, mechanical cane harvesters. There was still plenty of work for rural, manual workers. These were hard, strong men who bankrolled themselves in the season in order to take their leisure afterwards in the big smoke: not just cane-cutters but also shearers, drovers, fencers, fruit pickers and contract miners in Mount Isa and Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill and other distant places.

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Sylvia Martin reviews Dame Joan Hammond: Love and Music by Sara Hardy

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Biography

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: A jealous mistress

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

My mother, a fine mezzo soprano, had three all-time favourite singers: Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas and our own Joan Hammond. When I was a child, my parents took me to see the famous diva perform Tosca in Melbourne – standing room only at the back of the circle. I remember red velvet, a thrilling voice, my own tired legs and a sense that I was in the presence of greatness. Sara Hardy’s biography of Joan Hammond (1912–96) is a timely publication. The number of people who remember the Australian soprano is dwindling, her fame eclipsed by another Dame Joan (who once, early in her career at Covent Garden, understudied Hammond in Aida).

Book 1 Title: Dame Joan Hammond

Book 1 Subtitle: Love and Music

Book Author: Sara Hardy

Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $49.95 hb, 328 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Jo Case reviews ‘Dissection’ by Jacinta Halloran

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: One easy mistake

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Dissection was recently launched by Helen Garner, who described it as a novel like no other she had read. This impressive first novel is indeed astonishingly polished. Like Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), it dissects morally complex issues of life and death with a deceptively simple touch, using telling domestic detail to bring its characters and settings vividly to life on the page. The prose is clean, crisp, precise; as if carved by a scalpel. It might be the instinctual approach of a writer used to dealing with weighty issues in succinct fifteen-minute blocks.

Book 1 Title: Dissection

Book Author: Jacinta Halloran

Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $27.95 pb, 233 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Jacinta Halloran is a Melbourne general practitioner, and she writes about one here. Dr Anna McBride’s life is crumbling under the weight of an innocent but costly mistake. She failed to diagnose a rare cancer in a seventeen-year-old patient, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Now she is being sued for negligence; the case has dragged on for three years. Meanwhile, her every utterance to patients is first sifted through an exhausting internal filter, to ensure that she protects herself – particularly exhausting because her natural instinct (and training) has always led her to consider her patients’ interests first. Her ongoing conversation with herself puts her at a remove from the rest of the world, even her loved ones, creating a kind of invisible force field that she must push through. Everything is coloured by this internal filter – her private language of fault and neglect, disclosure and exposure. This language of lawyers has seeped into her everyday life, infecting not only her consultations with patients but her behaviour at home. (Noticing that her husband Paul’s hair is thinning at the crown, she ponders whether it’s her ‘duty of disclosure’ to tell him, in case he wants to consider early treatment.)

Write comment (0 Comments)

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Science and Technology

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: The B-word

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

On 17 July 1990, President George Bush Snr declared the 1990s as the ‘Decade of the Brain’, with the primary aim ‘to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research’. These benefits included better understanding of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and psychiatric disorders. In addition, remarkable advances occurred in functional brain imaging. This still-evolving technology reveals which parts of the brain are active while people carry out tasks of varying complexity, ranging from the manipulation of objects or the processing of sensory information, through to the analysis of problem solving, the voluntary control of emotional responses, or the reconstruction of imaginary events. Faced with a wealth of new experimental data, disciplines such as linguistics and philosophy can no longer develop theoretical models that treat the brain as a black box within which structure and function do not matter.

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Maria Takolander reviews ‘Blue Dog Vol. 7 No. 13’ edited by Grant Caldwell

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Journal

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Blue Dog, the Journal of the Australian Poetry Centre, has a democratic approach to Australian poetry. Submissions are judged anonymously by a team of editors from each state and territory. The journal, as the two reviews of small-press publications reveal, shows no preference for big names. The results, however, are mixed.

Highlights include Andy Jackson’s ‘Severance’, which provides a measured expression of nostalgia. The poem reflects on a childhood marked by sexual misadventure – ‘You and I were the first in our group to buy porn, / though it took us two attempts – we’d assumed Playboy / couldn’t cost much more than TV Week. Honestly, / it was the soft light palming pale curves / that drew us, not the shock of shallow gynaecology’ – and loss – ‘Years before, / our legs patterned with gum tree shadows, / we sat on either end of a bench, waiting for your mum / to come again to comfort you in your homesickness’.

Book 1 Title: Blue Dog Vol. 7 No. 13

Book Author: Grant Caldwell

Book 1 Biblio: Australian Poetry Centre, $12.95 pb, 66 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Editor

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Maria Takolander reviews ‘HEAT 17: A Dodo Idiom’ edited by Ivor Indyk

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Journals

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

In an excellent essay on the poetics of art criticism in this issue, Robert Nelson writes of the nature of rapturous poetic perception: ‘Suddenly the world is larger, more meaningful … one reality gives onto another and the world is seen as an extension of the ways that you might imagine it.’ HEAT consistently provides its readers with opportunities for such aesthetic insights.

Book 1 Title: HEAT 17

Book 1 Subtitle: A Dodo Idiom

Book Author: Ivor Indyk

Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 224 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Editor

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Tim Howard reviews ‘Heavy Allies’ by Wayne Grogan

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

The Nugan Hand merchant bank was the nexus of one of the most significant criminal conspiracies in Australian history. Established in Sydney in 1973, Nugan Hand was backed by the CIA in concert with domestic and international crime organisations. It acted as a front for a plethora of illegal activities, including gun-running, money laundering and tax fraud, most of which were ancillary to the main business: drugs, specifically heroin. Its legacy lives on in the heroin market that the bank helped to build and entrench.

Book 1 Title: Heavy Allies

Book Author: Wayne Grogan

Book 1 Biblio: Brandl & Schlesinger, $26.95 pb, 296 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Maria Takolander reviews ‘Meanjin Vol. 67 No. 3’ edited by Sophie Cunningham

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Journals

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

The new Meanjin, edited by Sophie Cunningham, is exciting to behold. With its varied font, though, it runs the risk of being like Federation Square: striking to look at but difficult to negotiate. The small, faint font made this issue taxing to read. Perhaps younger readers, targeted by some of the content (such as the serialisation of a graphic history), will have less difficulty.

Book 1 Title: Meanjin Vol. 67 No. 3

Book Author: Sophie Cunningham

Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $24.95 pb, 205 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Editor

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Lisa Bennett reviews ‘The Daughters of Moab’ by Kim Westwood

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

The Australian landscape boils with lava and shudders with quakes; acid rain scars its parched surfaces. It provides little succour to human survivors; cockroaches outlive other animal species. Adapt or die, the story commands, though enforced adaptations (personified by the transfected Daughters of Moab) are considered the source of the apocalypse.

The narrative is haunted, riddled with nostalgia and regrets. It jumps between fascinating points of view: Assumpta’s human/dingo hybrid single-mindedness; Eustace’s calculating duplicity; Easter’s ex-sanguinated hallucinations; Angus’s longing for his unblemished homeland. Scenes change abruptly; the narrative transforms and folds in on itself unexpectedly, like a surrealist film. Readers must adapt or they will become lost in the plot, stuck in the molasses of Kim Westwood’s prose. She entices us with her unique treatment of the themes of loneliness, Stolen Generations, climate change, misplaced religious fervour, and searching for identity. Her world and her characters are attractive, but her dense prose can often be off-putting.

Book 1 Title: The Daughters of Moab

Book Author: Kim Westwood

Book 1 Biblio: HarperCollins, $22.99 pb, 387 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Chad Habel reviews ‘Where I Stand’ by Serge Liberman

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Short Stories

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Serge Liberman’s new book contains a series of short stories and one novella, all narrated by Dr Raphael Bloom, a Melbourne physician who variously plays the roles of healer, confidant, confessor and counsellor to patients and their families. In doing so he explores existential and theological problems which often revolve around the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and the post-memory of second-generation migrants. For members of this traumatised community, brushes with illness and mortality raise the spectre of that terrible event and show how the past is not easily laid to rest.

Book 1 Title: Where I Stand

Book Author: Serge Liberman

Book 1 Biblio: Hybrid, $32.95 pb, 263 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Katie Wright reviews ‘Making the Cut: How cosmetic surgery is transforming our lives’ by Anthony Elliott and ‘Skintight: An anatomy of cosmetic surgery’ by Meredith Jones

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Science and Technology

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Drastic plastic

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

In Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives, Anthony Elliott casts an unforgiving eye over the astonishing growth of ‘cosmetic surgical culture’. No longer the province of the rich and famous, Botox and skin peels, laser surgery and liposuction, face-lifts and breast augmentations have become part of the fabric of everyday life. Elliott’s analysis lays bare the culture of nip and tuck, and the era in which ‘many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships’. Yet what compels people to act upon the desire for self-improvement in such drastic and sometimes life-threatening ways? Elliott identifies celebrity, consumerism and globalisation as fundamental to the increasing popularity of surgical solutions to social and personal dilemmas.

Book 1 Title: Making the Cut

Book 1 Subtitle: How cosmetic surgery is transforming our lives

Book Author: Anthony Elliott

Book 1 Biblio: Reaktion Books (Footprint Books), $45.95 pb, 255 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Book 2 Title: Skintight

Book 2 Subtitle: An anatomy of cosmetic surgery

Book 2 Author: Meredith Jones

Book 2 Biblio: Berg Publishers (Footprint Books), $65 pb, 222 pp

Book 2 Author Type: Author

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Jenny Gregory reviews ‘Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1826’ by Geoffrey Bolton

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Australian History

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Under the apple tree

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Scattered across Lake Ballard, a vast salt lake north of Kalgoorlie, are fifty-one androgynous abstracted cast-iron alloy figures created by British artist Antony Gormley in 2002, all based on scans of the inhabitants of a tiny goldfields settlement. Gormley described his figures as ‘strangers in a strange land’. It is not too wild a stretch of the imagination to see them as explorers or prospectors driven by powerful dreams to wander endlessly across a shimmering landscape. One of these figures provides an evocative cover image for Land of Vision and Mirage.

Book 1 Title: Land of Vision and Mirage

Book 1 Subtitle: Western Australia since 1826

Book Author: Geoffrey Bolton

Book 1 Biblio: UWAP, $34.95 pb, 270 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Stuart Macintyre reviews ‘Manning Clark: A life’ by Brian Matthews

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Biography

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Behind the mask

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

This life begins with a ritual its subject practised through the 1960s and 1970s. Manning Clark would visit St Christopher’s Cathedral, Canberra, kneel before its shrine of the Virgin, ask assistance in fighting his need for alcohol, and beg forgiveness and peace. While Clark’s funeral was a requiem mass at St Christopher’s, and a preoccupation with the Catholic faith became increasingly evident in his later years, this is not a beginning that those who read his history or became familiar with his public appearances would expect.

In relating these regular visits to the shrine, Brian Matthews signals the themes that run through this life of Clark. There is his susceptibility to alcohol and the way that it exacerbated his erratic behaviour. There is the fraught character of his most intimate relationships, and his persistent torment of anguish and guilt. There is his intellectual ambition, his need for reassurance and vulnerability to criticism. And there is his constant search for faith.

Book 1 Title: Manning Clark

Book 1 Subtitle: A life

Book Author: Brian Matthews

Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $59.95 hb, 510 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Wendy Walker reviews ‘Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950’ by Tracey Lock-Weir

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Art

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Provocative tones

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Curated by Tracey Lock-Weir, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 at the Art Gallery of South Australia presented a re-evaluation of Max Meldrum (1875–1955) and the influential Australian tonalist phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. This recent exhibition was accompanied by an elegant publication in which Lock-Weir’s substantial essay (divided into readily digestible chapters) makes the claim that Meldrum and his tonalist doctrine had a more far-reaching impact than has previously been recognised. Accordingly, paintings by Meldrum and his followers – including Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan, A.D. Colquhoun, John Farmer, Polly Hurry, Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason, A.E. Newbury and Hayward Veal – were augmented by the work of artists more fleetingly influenced by his ideas, such as Roy de Maistre, Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin. Although William Frater and Arnold Shore produced a number of tonalist paintings, Lock-Weir observes that by 1926 they had ‘broken away into colour and line’, later becoming the leading proponents of modernism in Melbourne.

Book 1 Title: Misty Moderns

Book 1 Subtitle: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950

Book Author: Tracey Lock-Weir

Book 1 Biblio: AGSA, $39.95 pb, 143 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Patrick Allington reviews ‘Mother Land’ by Dmetri Kakmi

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Memoir

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Worlds beyond reckoning

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Mother Land is a vibrant and charming yet sombre and brutal account of Dmetri Kakmi’s childhood on the Aegean island of Tenedos, now known by its Turkish name of Bozcaada. The book opens with the adult ‘Dimitri’, accompanied by his Turkish friend Sinan, standing on the mainland and surveying through binoculars places he has not seen for thirty years: ‘Three islets sit low on the water ... As a boy, I used to be captivated by their aloofness and solitude. When I’d had enough of people, I yearned to build a hut and live on one of them, alone, separate and untouched by a world that, even at that age, seemed capricious and delinquent beyond reckoning.’

Book 1 Title: Mother Land

Book Author: Dmetri Kakmi

Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $29.95 pb, 280 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Jonathon Otis reviews ‘Nothing to Be Frightened Of’ by Julian Barnes

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Memoir

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: The titular nothing

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

‘Let’s get this death thing straight’, declares Julian Barnes in his recently published memoir-cum-meditation Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He sets out to confront mortality, the titular ‘nothing’, but manages only to peer at it through parted fingers. He takes short peeks, which calls to mind the title of his death-haunted novel Staring at the Sun (1986).

Book 1 Title: Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Book Author: Julian Barnes

Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, $55 hb, 250 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Barnes’s death awareness, discovered at ‘13 or 14’, strikes him daily. Nocturnal attacks leave him punching his pillow and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO in an endless wail’. This image conjures the great poem ‘Aubade’ by mortal terror exemplar Philip Larkin about waking at 4 a.m., staring around the bedroom and seeing unresting death.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Peter Menkhorst reviews ‘Koala: Origins of an icon’ by Stephen Jackson and ‘Koala: A historical biography’ by Ann Moyal

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Biology

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Political animals

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

The koala is one of the most recognised animals in the world. Its beguiling, teddy-bear appearance, inoffensive nature and seeming indifference to the world around it have endeared it to adults and children worldwide. In Australia it is considered a national icon, due in no small part to two characters from popular children’s books: Bunyip Bluegum in Norman Lindsay’s evergreen The Magic Pudding, published in 1918 and never out of print since, and Blinky Bill from Dorothy Wall’s series of the same name, the first of which was published in 1933.

Book 1 Title: Koala

Book 1 Subtitle: Origins of an icon

Book Author: Stephen Jackson

Book 1 Biblio: Jacana Books, $35 hb, 337 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Book 2 Title: Koala

Book 2 Subtitle: A historical biography

Book 2 Author: Ann Moyal

Book 2 Biblio: CSIRO Publishing, $39.95 hb, 256 pp

Book 2 Author Type: Author

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Ruth Starke reviews ‘Goodbye Jamie Boyd’ by Elizabeth Fensham, ‘Saltwater Moons’ by Julie Gittus and ‘Murderer’s Thumb’ by Beth Montgomery

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Young Adult Fiction

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Missing persons

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

It is no easy task to write a good crime novel that features a youthful sleuth. Too young to drink, to drive, to wander the mean streets or to have a wasted past, young sleuths also have parents lurking in the background, ever ready to assert their authority about meals and bedtimes. Full credit, then, to Beth Montgomery for overcoming these obstacles and writing a gripping mystery. In Murderer’s Thumb, fourteen-year-old Adam Statkus and his mother have relocated from the city to the country in yet another effort to escape an abusive husband and father. Rosemary Statkus, jittery and terrified, is in no state to assert any authority over her son, beyond instilling in him the necessity of keeping a low profile. That becomes harder to maintain when Adam finds the decomposed body of a teenage girl buried in a silage pit. Then he stumbles upon a hidden diary that contains clues to the murder. Others would also like to get their hands on it. The diary is a McGuffin, and the climactic exposure of the murderer a bit hammy, but Adam is a tough, credible and appealing protagonist, and the evocation of a close-knit farming community and the build-up of tension are terrific.

Book 1 Title: Goodbye Jamie Boyd

Book Author: Elizabeth Fensham

Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $16.95 pb, 88 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Book 2 Title: Saltwater Moons

Book 2 Author: Julie Gittus

Book 2 Biblio: Lothian, $17.99 pb, 268 pp

Book 2 Author Type: Author

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):

Book 3 Title: Murderer’s Thumb

Book 3 Author: Beth Montgomery

Book 3 Biblio: Text, $19.95 pb, 299 pp

Book 3 Author Type: Author

Book 3 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 3 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews ‘Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton’ by Sandra Hall

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Biography

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Crooks, cronks and crawthumpers

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Phillip Knightley, Murray Sayle and other authors of the Daily Mirror’s historical feature used to relish their days sitting in the Sydney ‘public library’ researching and writing pieces on rape, pillage, sexual betrayal and murder most foul. Decades later, in the early 1990s, I began spending days sitting in what had become the State Library of New South Wales wading through yellowing copies of Sydney’s tabloid press. On one such day in the late 1990s, I stumbled across a card in a catalogue for an index to the Daily Mirror’s muckraking stablemate, Truth. The discovery or creation of a new newspaper index is always a thrill for media historians. I immediately submitted a call slip for the index, and up came a hefty ledger of alphabetical references to Truth for the late 1920s. Lodging more call slips, I ended up surrounded by ledgers ranging from 1925 to 1947. They were all handwritten, and presumably laboriously compiled by a librarian at Ezra Norton’s company, Truth & Sportsman Ltd. Who knows what went through the librarian’s mind as he or she indexed stories of divorce, rape, incest, prostitution, white slavery and cocaine rackets covered by one of Australia’s most notorious newspapers.

Book 1 Title: Tabloid Man

Book 1 Subtitle: The life and times of Ezra Norton

Book Author: Sandra Hall

Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $35 pb, 335 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Neal Blewett reviews The Costello Memoirs: The age of prosperity by Peter Costello and Peter Coleman

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Memoir

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: ‘None but the brave’

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

For Labor ‘true believers’, the night of 24 November 2007 was one to cherish. In the north, Brough the Rough was despatched and a host of lesser figures swept away, pork barrels and all; in the very heartland of the Howard battlers, the Wicked Witch of Penrith and her minions perished in a jihad of their own devising; above all, in his fortress of Bennelong, the Vampire King was slain by the Good Witch of the ABC. What a night! At the beginning of Peter Costello’s memoir is the challenge: ‘How did it come to this? How did a government that had created such an Age of Prosperity, such a proud and prosperous country, now find itself in the wilderness?’

Book 1 Title: The Costello Memoirs

Book 1 Subtitle: The age of prosperity

Book Author: Peter Costello and Peter Coleman

Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $55 hb, 386 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Gig Ryan reviews ‘The Golden Bird: New and selected poems’ by Robert Adamson

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Poetry

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Into the light

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

From his first book Canticles on the Skin (1970) to his twelfth, The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006), Robert Adamson’s poetry has undergone many transformations, but The Golden Bird, his new and rather large Selected Poems, modifies or disguises those changes by arranging the poems thematically, not chronologically, except for the last section, which contains new poems. Many of Adamson’s early themes have remained throughout his career. Strangely, the sharply witty ‘Sonnets to be Written from Prison’ (‘If I was in solitary I could dream – a fashionable bore, / writing books on drugs, birds or revolution’), from his third book Swamp Riddles (1974), are excluded along with other fine poems, such as ‘Sibyl’ and ‘The Thoughtless Shore’, his elegy to Michael Dransfield, as well as the chapbook Theatre (1974), a response to Yves Bonnefoy’s work of that name.

Book 1 Title: The Golden Bird

Book 1 Subtitle: New and selected poems

Book Author: Robert Adamson

Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $27.95 pb, 306 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Brendon O’Connor reviews The Limits of Power: The end of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Politics

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: ‘Drill, baby, drill’

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Andrew Bacevich, a former lieutenant colonel in the United States army and self-avowed conservative, has emerged in recent years as one of the most incisive and far-reaching critics of American foreign policy and of the Bush administration. His two previous books, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2004) and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2006), argued that the Bush administration has followed a path laid down by earlier administrations. In short, it is not an aberration. In his latest book, The Limits of Power, Bacevich not only holds little hope of foreign policy change from a McCain or Obama administration but also questions whether either would have any intention of changing the broad direction of American foreign policy. In an interview that I conducted with Bacevich recently in Boston, he described Barack Obama’s foreign policy as ‘thoroughly conventional’, a description certainly not meant as a compliment.

In American Empire, Bacevich attempted to justify his claim that continuity, not change, predominates recent American foreign policy. He did so by arguing that both the Clinton and Bush administrations have chosen as a central goal an open-door policy, where American businesses have greater access to foreign markets and where the American military has greater reach and more foreign bases. He presented these policies as thoroughly imperial and bipartisan.

In The New American Militarism, he showed how Bush drew on, rather than constructed, a culture that reveres military endeavours and military equipment in a way that profoundly misunderstands the sensible role of a military in a society. More generally, Bacevich, in his recent articles and Op-Eds, has frequently claimed that, like many other American presidents, Bush’s promotion of a ‘freedom agenda’ is a candy-coated justification for American expansionism. Bacevich views this combination of hubris and self-interest, backed up by overconfidence in America’s military strength and primacy, as disastrous.

In The Limits of Power, Bacevich takes up these themes once more, this time in a more direct and less academic manner than in his earlier books. Bacevich’s early works drew significant inspiration and analytical purchase from the writings of the left-wing scholar William Appleman Williams. In his new book, Bacevich uses the realist Reinhold Niebuhr as a lighthouse to guide the reader to wisdom in these worrying times; many passages begin with a quote from Niebuhr, who in the last paragraph is even referred to as ‘our prophet’.

The wisdom that Bacevich dispenses is often deeply pessimistic about America’s ability to recognise the errors of its ways. At its worst, this pessimism echoes the metaphor of the demise of Rome to predict the fate of the American Empire, recently overused by Chalmers Johnson and others. This is a small criticism, however. When compared to other root and branch critiques of the follies of the American empire, this book has much to recommend about it. Although not in the same league as Anatol Lieven’s brilliant America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (2005), The Limits of Power is certainly one of the best critiques of American foreign policy written in recent years. Its sobriety, directness, largely evidence-based attacks, and attempts to offer solutions (even if the author sees little chance that they will be taken up) all make for compelling reading.

The central argument presented in the book is that American culture and government do not have a healthy respect for limits. As a people, Americans have a ‘shop till they drop’ mentality, using credit that is widely available and even more widely abused. ‘He who has the most toys wins’ is the motto of this profligate culture.

Given that responsibility and limits are frequently ignored by many Americans, Bacevich asks why the government would be any different. As evidence of this shallow culture, where consumption is king and sacrifice is someone else’s problem, Bacevich quotes President Bush telling the American people after 9/11 that they faced a long war against Islamo-fascism and that the appropriate response was to ‘get down to Disney World in Florida’ and ‘go shopping more’. Furthermore, this culture of accumulation has always driven Americans outwards seeking gold and oil, which has in turn created an American empire.

Bacevich’s distaste for American mall culture and his call for personal limits reminded me of an author not mentioned by name, but one certainly respected by Bacevich: the late Christopher Lasch. Although I found Bacevich’s cultural critique at times too sweeping, and incomplete in its understanding of the allure of consumer culture, his anti-materialism has much that is admirable.

The later chapters on the political and military crises afflicting the United States are similarly hard hitting in pointing out the rot at the centre of America’s institutions of state. Evidence was sometimes light on the ground in these chapters; I hope that Bacevich turns his considerable talents to developing these arguments in future works.

His discussion of the political crisis has many targets: the deficient role of Congress, the imperial presidency, James Forrestal, NSC 68 and Paul Wolfowitz. The central message is that the inflation of threats is one of the unfortunate legacies of the Cold War; it continues to be used by ambitious advisers and imperial presidents to mute dissent and pervert American democracy.

Along with the political crisis, Bacevich details a military crisis which he believes has been created by deficient civilian decision-makers and an underwhelming military hierarchy that fails to appreciate that ‘the utility of armed force remains finite’. Bacevich believes that the American government has yet to realise the fundamental truth, as once colourfully put by Norman Mailer, that ‘Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whore-house to get rid of a clap’.

Bacevich argues that for the United States to move forward it would do best to concentrate on two policies: nuclear disarmament (of itself first and foremost) and preservation of the planet (where it should lead by example). He does not totally dismiss the threat of Islamic extremism, but argues for a defensive policy of containment rather than an offensive and pre-emptive approach. However, this book offers more critique than prescriptions for future presidents.

Bacevich’s discussion of the history of the American quest for independence from foreign oil seemed particularly apt after the rhetoric of the recent Republican Party convention. American leaders have promised this independence many times: Jimmy Carter most presciently in his so-called ‘malaise speech’; Ronald Reagan and Bush most vacuously, and every candidate in the current presidential campaign. At the Republican Party convention, Sarah Palin’s speech was regularly (and depressingly) punctuated by chants from the crowd of ‘Drill, baby, drill’.

Bacevich’s book offers a matter-of-fact critique of consumer culture and imperial politics, and for this he should be congratulated. However, the benefits of America’s restlessness and its search for more (and something better) is undervalued. For traditional conservatives, the United States has often been seen as disruptive and shallow; however, I would contest that this ‘feverish ardour’, as Tocqueville called it, played a crucial role in breaking down class barriers (particularly social class distinctions), promoting democracy at home (and, yes, abroad, beginning with Europe) and promoting the notion of individual human rights.

It cannot be denied that the United States has used the language of freedom too often to mask self-interest, and fine-sounding words have frequently been used to justify crude social engineering of the type that Paul Bremer attempted in Iraq. However, without this often blundering force for change in the world, many people would be more exposed to the cruelties of local dictators and customs. As imperfect as America’s record has been, a globally engaged United States seems to me more desirable than the realist vision for American foreign policy presented by Bacevich. I argue this because ‘greed and folly’ is not only an American syndrome.

The great weakness of Bacevich’s analysis is that he does not consider the comparative dimension of international affairs. In other words, he fails to deal with the reality that, bad as American conduct often is, it is frequently better and more transparent than that of other nations, all of which have their own national pathologies and transnational desires.

Book 1 Title: The Limits of Power:

Book 1 Subtitle: The end of American Exceptionalism

Book Author: Andrew Bacevich

Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $24.95 pb, 224 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Robert Gibson reviews ‘Wagner Beyond Good and Evil’ by John Deathridge

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Music

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Yes and no

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Yet another book on Wagner. Given the title, you might expect it to be an investigation of Wagner’s complex relationship with Nietzsche or, failing that, a study which, like Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), attempts to push the examination of a given subject beyond the limits to which it hitherto has been confined. The blurb on the dust jacket appears to suggest the latter: ‘Deathridge engages the debates that have raged about him [Wagner] and moves beyond them, towards a fresh and engaging assessment of what Wagner ultimately achieved.’ Well, yes and no.

Book 1 Title: Wagner Beyond Good and Evil

Book Author: John Deathridge

Book 1 Biblio: University of California Press (Inbooks), $65 hb, 324 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Write comment (0 Comments)

Paul Hetherington reviews ‘White Knight with Beebox: New and selected poems’ by Peter Steele

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Poetry

Review Article: Yes

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: ‘Light as breath itself’

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge.

Book 1 Title: White Knight with Beebox

Book 1 Subtitle: New and selected poems

Book Author: Peter Steele

Book 1 Biblio: John Leonard Press, $24.95 pb, 252 pp

Book 1 Author Type: Author

Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):

Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):

Display Review Rating: No

Peter Steele’s White Knight with Beebox, published by one of Australia’s enterprising small independent publishers, the John Leonard Press, is a book of this kind. It collects most of the best of Steele’s poems, which are lyrical, questing and metaphysical.

Write comment (0 Comments)

Free Article: No

Contents Category: Advances

Review Article: No

Show Author Link: Yes

Show Byline: Yes

Article Title: Advances - November 2008

Online Only: No

Custom Highlight Text:

Jonathon Otis – a true believer

The winner of the 2008 ABR Reviewing Competition is Jonathon Otis for his review of Julian Barnes’s memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Mr Otis receives $1000 and future commissions in the magazine. Second prize, valued at $250, goes to Elizabeth Campbell for her review of Brook Emery’s poetry collection Uncommon Light. Third prize, a set of Black Inc. books, goes to Alexis Harley for her review of Janet Frame’s novel Towards Another Summer.

The competition attracted 150 entries – a forty per cent increase from 2005. The selection of subjects under review was impressively vast, ranging from national and international fiction to ethics, the economy and even gastronomy. Religion, notably, was a popular subject; we received numerous reviews of Christopher Hitchens. There were multiple reviews of Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee. Interestingly, death was a popular subject.

Peter Rose judged the competition with Rebecca Starford. The Editor remarked: ‘This competition gets better and better. I’m pleased we attracted more entries, but the main purpose of this competition is to foster greater interest in the art of reviewing, to encourage new reviewers and to replenish the ranks of Australian critics. The standard this year was markedly higher than in previous years; the long list was extensive. We have identified about two dozen new reviewers for ABR. We’ll certainly present this award again in 2009.’

Jonathan Otis, a Melbourne-based writer with an abiding interest in genre, had this to say on learning of his win: ‘I feel a quiet, comforting elation. I am a true believer in literature’s life-affirming qualities. For me, ABR exemplifies vigilance through art in Australia. I am thrilled to have won the competition and for the opportunity to contribute to such an esteemed literary review.’

Jonathon Otis’s review appears on page 42. He will write for us again in 2009.

Display Review Rating: No

Jonathon Otis – a true believer

Do we need them?

Dear Editor,

The Council of the Order of Australia is responsible for determining the rank of each honoree (OAM, AM, AO, AC), and it is this aspect of the present system that is most open to criticism, because too often our highest honours acknowledge, for example, formidable acts of philanthropy ($$$), or senior ambassadorial, judicial or gubernatorial rank (ex officio), or the leavings of some political hack, and not commensurate levels of attainment in cultural matters. The Council does its best to insure that assessments are fair, but there are complications. Some people evidently use the opportunity of supplying a confidential written recommendation on behalf of a nominee to shaft a colleague against whom they harbour some private grievance, safe in the knowledge that this devious act will never be discovered. Other people decline honours when they are proffered, either out of genuine humility or because they do not wish to state in writing that they are willing to receive an honour from the queen. Occasionally this is made known, but not by the Council. It is worth remembering that many of the professed republicans who sport those thrilling post-nominal letters have at one time or another written such a letter.