A writer leaves you with everything to say. It is in the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death …

Conversation is the raison d’être of this monumental monologue. But you might not think so if you read only the reviews. Splenetic, greensick criticism – and there has been plenty of it – insists that what Clive James has built out of a life’s voracious reading and careful noticing – his ‘notes in the margin’ – is a platform for his ego. Not so. But how ruthlessly we skin our own.

Cultural Amnesia, as I read it, is a book of invitation, not dictation. Yes, it is daunting in length and ambition: a digressive, eccentric articulation of a profoundly held credo of humanism (‘our best reason for having minds at all’). It is a prodigious amateur’s scan of the culture and politics of the twentieth century, a century made even more terrible than the calamitous fourteenth, with its plagues and wars, because our modern science and technology enabled mass murder, and because a coincidence of evil gave us human monsters avid in the systematic annihilation of their own kind. And yes, because Clive James writes about what he most loves, hates and fears rather than about his academic or professional specialism (though there is an impressive quantity of the latter in the anatomising of writing and performance), the volume of conversation is sometimes turned up so high you can’t hear your own voice. Verbal shot put takes over from Viennese café conversation. But not for long, and not for keeps. The dominie impulse in Clive James is more the reflex of an impassioned teacher than the edict of a megalomaniac. He wants to show you the whole world, not take it away from you, or take you out of it.

The more I read, the more I succumbed to the tickled reader’s urge to quote –

‘Hang on, listen to this ...’ No adjacent creature – human or animal – escaped. The lorikeet outside the study window clearly wasn’t properly appreciative of the memoirs, or indeed the dancing, of the Maryinsky darling and Diaghilev protégée, Tamara Karsavina, so while I cheered aloud at a heroine given her dues by Clive James tango dancer, the bird merely ruffled his tail feather in a riot that Leon Bakst would have admired – and copied. My husband was more receptive – this time to the insider’s analysis of Tony Curtis’s comic genius (remember his Cary Grant spoof in Some Like It Hot?), of his ‘precise way of pointing a line’. The performer applauding the virtuosity of another performer. In a rueful concluding tribute (which I will not presume to excavate for biographical insight), Clive James honours Tony Curtis thus: ‘Like the eloquent man who gets no points for the poetry he writes because he talks well anyway, Curtis was always underrated for his accomplishment because of his screen presence … however, Curtis, apart from a physical beauty that was built to last, had another gift that was rare and precious. He was a writer’s actor. When he spoke it, the language came alive.’

My response overall was delight – a legitimate response to a work, and an indicative one, but a first response. Rereading demanded more concerted thinking. What to make, for example, of the alphabetical taxonomy of such an immense compendium, in which James’s motley cast of characters butt up against one another without apparent reason. I read the individual sections before tackling the introduction, so Edward Gibbon was succeeded by Terry Gilliam, Montesquieu by Alan Moorehead, Norman Mailer by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evelyn Waugh by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Tacitus by Margaret Thatcher, without benefit of explanation. But as James speaks of his ostensible subjects (his writing is so evocative of his vocal rhythm and timing that ‘speaks’ is apt), the connections emerge like new grass, with roots spreading and meshing. Their language, and his language, comes alive, with no Babel about it.

When Miles Davis follows the romance philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, the point of intersection is Thomas Mann, who was criticised by the patriot Curtius for disloyalty to Germany when Mann went into voluntary exile after Hitler came to power. The exile and consequent disconnection from his publishers and German readers cost Mann dearly: the life of art is fragile, even for celebrated artists. Jazz trumpeter Davis, far away and secure, at least in income, is quoted as dismissing his critics like this: ‘If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and drive away’.

Of course, it is never that simple, as the artist in James knows. Davis was lucky, as well as immensely talented. Other human beings have not been so lucky. The poet Nadezhda Mandelstam, quoted by James, remarks of the Russian concentration camps, that ‘[c]aution did not help. Only chance could save you.’ And there were things Miles Davis couldn’t or wouldn’t drive away from or save himself from. James quotes Charlie Parker, who would have known, on the artistic cost of Davis’ drug addiction: ‘Anyone who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar.’

Charlie Parker leads us through Miles Davis to F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose drinking abetted the disaster of his marriage and the disintegration of his career. James’s conclusion: that ‘Fitzgerald’s prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment’. In Fitzgerald, literary style and life are tragically, intimately connected.

The detailed argument about such connections, and about the ineffable, indefinable (not necessarily redemptive) nature of genius, in music, in literature, in art, form central concerns of the book. If I sometimes found James’s view of artistic –

shall I call it licence? – too tolerant, too romantic, I would at least have a good fight on my hands were I to argue chapter and verse on particular artists. One of the glories of James’s undertaking is his detail, the depth and familiarity he brings to argument about contentious cases. And contentious many of them are. I want to be there when the French read his onslaught on Jean-Paul Sartre. Not for nothing does the acute and astute J.M. Coetzee weigh his words of printed praise on the book’s cover: ‘Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash-course in civilisation.’

A crash-course it is, with fortuitous collisions. I called James’s cast ‘ostensible subjects’, because they are more springboards for reflection than their brief biographical-format treatment promises. But that way Victor Klemperer, indispensable diarist of the life of Dresden Jews before the Final Solution, can drop into the exemplary essay on Montesquieu. Bertolt Brecht can call on the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and the Jewish Diaspora roam through the entire book.

Sometimes, though, one wants more, or more focus. When James claims, for example, that it is hard to meet the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictat that we should not be seduced by his language, one is inclined to respond that it might be worth a try. James realises that Wittgenstein was one of the most important and influential philosophers, in the analytical tradition, of the twentieth century, but after reading the section devoted to him, one wonders why. Where has the philosophy gone? In English translation, Wittgenstein was a remarkable, sometimes hypnotic writer and aphorist. In German, (and James reads him in German), he was a master. But to laud the hypnotic stylist-philosopher, ‘who matters to the writer’ over the ‘Wittgenstein that matters to the professional philosophers, but they can prove it only to each other’, is to drop the ball.

When James writes, as he does so incisively, about the rhythms or hinges of poetry, or the negatively-capable subtlety of great European criticism, or about the dynamics of American television performance and the component parts of comedy, he is in his element, and can take us with him. Why not allow the philosopher the complexity and recalcitrant difficulty of his own element? That would be better than praise. One thing: about Wittgenstein’s later detachment from everyday life James is right, and his judgment, that ‘the result was a chilling hermeticism in his frame of reference’, is also an index of James’ contrasting and full-blooded critical engagement with his, and our, turbulent times. There is something bracing and hopeful about the way Clive James runs at the world and grabs the mantle of critic as he passes. It is a moral enterprise, James says, one that requires humility, but ‘the kind of humility that needs an air of arrogance to protect its Delphic mission’.

They’ll serve as last words.

One of the hazards of election years these days is the quickie biography of the latest Opposition leader. As Simon Crean missed out on an election, so he missed out on a quickie. On the other hand, in 2004 his successor Mark Latham scored two – or three if we include Michael Duffy’s comparative study of the two political bruisers Latham and Abbott. Not that it did Latham, or probably the reputation of the authors, much good.

Perhaps we take these ephemeral quickies too seriously: they have roughly the shelf life of homogenised cheese and are almost certainly destined for that knacker’s yard for books – the remainder store – regardless of whether their subject is successful or not. Moreover, federal Labor’s recent penchant for choosing its leaders less than a year out from the election means that these books are hastily compiled confections: a regurgitation of published articles on the subject’s career – extensive but scarcely intensive personal research – plus a dollop of his speeches and writings, mixed together with a heady collection of quotes from colleagues and associates, frequently unattributed, given the paranoia that infects contemporary Labor. The icing on the cake is, of course, an interview with the leader himself.

Judith Wright and Barbara Patterson met at a gathering of the Barjai group, a Brisbane salon for young poets and artists, when Judith was almost twice Barbara’s age. Judith had not yet published her first collection, The Moving Image (1946). She read some poems and Barbara was magnetised:

It was not just that she was a poet … it was that she believed that the saddest thing in the world was that people lived unpoetically … It was that poems are a way of perceiving the world and oneself.

(Portrait, No. 8, National Portrait Gallery, 2003)

A few months after that first meeting, Barbara moved to Sydney to live with Charles Blackman. Judith wrote to thank her for a gift and Barbara wrote back. They continued to write; they wrote long generous letters to each other, decade after decade, until Judith died. It was a friendship of letters: they almost certainly spent more time writing to each other than they spent together. For the most part, this suited both of them. In her collection of autobiographical essays Glass after Glass (1997), Barbara described her friendship with Judith: ‘From time to time we meet in one city or another, shout at and steer about each other. But we really feel more comfortable page to page.’

Barbara made this remark in an essay called ‘The Pleasures of Solitude’. The letters that she and Judith wrote to each other are more companionable than diaries, and more deliberate. Nonetheless, they do read as pleasures of solitude: as though for each of them their letters became ‘a way of perceiving the world and oneself’.

When Barbara describes the two of them, ‘She of the faraway voice and I of the faraway face’, she is speaking only in part of Judith’s deafness and her own blindness. The real pleasure of reading these letters derives from the difference between these two women: Judith so self-sufficient, precise and quiet in rapture; Barbara so forthcoming, sensitive and extravagantly emotional. Yet they are both writers of such independent cast their letters show their characters and in this way give the reader equal pleasure in the balance of their friendship. ‘That’s why your letters are so good,’ Barbara remarks to Judith. ‘They read practical but they tell your story all the same.’ It is a statement that reflects on both their styles. That little phrase, ‘all the same’, suggests Barbara’s perpetual search for more-than-practical ways of holding lives together. In her first letter printed here – some have been lost – Barbara announces:

I came to Sydney and lived quietly to devour every day … I think you know of Charles Blackman … Together we have gone even a little beyond happiness. Loving is made of eyes and hands and admits two people to the creation of silence.

In the same letter, she describes Charles’s mother: ‘She loves you till she bursts into fireworks of generosity & she makes you walk the distance towards her over a bed of broken glass.’ Almost all of Barbara’s letters include passages as fully imagined as this: made of joy or lament, and fantastical observations of her family and other people.

Judith’s letters, on the other hand, are thoroughly practical and wry. In fact, they come closest to poetry when she writes, in her exact style, of work in her garden or mountain weather. Her letters note what her husband and daughter are doing and summarise her own pursuits with dry playfulness – once remarking, for instance: ‘As for that Judith Wright, she turns me up.’ For the rest, her letters are composed of responses. They show her mindful of her correspondent’s need for companionship or correction, not her own. In fact, Portrait of a Friendship shows what With Love and Fury loses when it leaves out the letters that other people wrote to Judith: responsiveness works in her letters the way formal control works in her poems; not as a limit but as a principle so evenly held it constitutes her tone of voice.

Certainly, With Love and Fury proves that she was not exaggerating when she lamented whole days spent answering letters. It includes only a selection of the letters that she wrote to Barbara and to other correspondents of long standing. And yet it still covers more than six hundred pages. From the late 1950s, Judith worked for the conservation movement and for indigenous rights and wrote a great weight of letters in support of these causes. These were letters where love took the form of shared fury; they add up to a lively history of the struggle, interest, occasional victory and frustration of the work in these years. Even – or especially – in fury, Judith remained lucid and very funny. She wrote in dismay of Menzies, for instance: ‘oh what a man all pomp and eyebrows.’

It is no wonder Judith regretted how far this correspondence kept her from her own writing. For the most part, her letters had almost nothing to do with her poetry. She did not work out ideas for poems in her letters; she did not test her ideas with other poets. If on occasion she set out ideas about poetry, she only did so to correct false claims. And if she included poems with her letters, she often explained where she wrote them – herding cattle, for instance – but otherwise added only deprecatory remarks: ‘I am in a desultory way writing a series of poems about birds which are partly for children and partly for fun ...’ On the rare occasion when she did note what she liked about a poetic form she had used – a ghazal – she made the remark in a postscript, and what she said was telling: ‘The non-sequitur method is interesting to me; you can say things without saying them.’

Jack Blight was the only poet Judith wrote to over several years. Her first letters to him are made of literary chat and intriguing insights:

For myself I’m trying to simplify more and more; to strengthen the image by ceasing to obscure it with words ... I’m reading Pound’s Cantos a lot lately. He has some new (to the West) techniques I think are very exciting. Not really difficult once one has grasped his method, which is mainly to outline his idea with immediately presented images set down in note form and very elliptically … But he certainly requires full stretch to read. He is a greater man than Eliot, though no-one will know it until they’ve forgotten he fell for Mussolini (not as a dictator but as an economic innovator, however).

These early letters show such confident intelligence and confiding interest that they give perhaps the fullest picture of Judith’s life with books. However, from about 1958, Judith’s letters to Jack fall into a smaller range. They show compassion for the neglect he suffered as a poet and generous pleasure in his late success; but they hardly mention her own writing.

Certainly, if you compare Judith’s selected letters with those of Gwen Harwood, it is striking how little Judith corresponded with other poets, and how little her letters involved her poetry. Gwen’s letters made a kind of world for her poems. She once said to Candida Baker:

I write lots of letters. My children used to read a story about Polly and the Wolf. The wolf tries to impress Polly, who says ‘I write lots of letters’. And the wolf says, ‘I write lots of letters too, and some of them even spell words. So I write lots of letters and some of them even spell poems.’

(A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943–1995, ed. Gregory Kratzmann, UQP, 2001)

Judith, on the other hand, once remarked: ‘Writers don’t need an atmosphere of sympathy and “culture” to write, or I don’t; indeed, it can interfere with your work to have people interested enough to look over your shoulder.’ These letters show what a private matter writing poetry was for Judith: something apart from friendship and from the work of daylight hours. Her poems have a controlled rapture utterly different from the practical and affectionate tenor of her letters. Her poem ‘The Lost Man’, from her collection The Gateway (1953), could serve as an image of the motive and process of her writing, for it works like a map into some experience at once intimate and impersonal:

To reach the pool you must go by the black valley
among the crowding columns made of silence,
under the hanging clouds
of leaves and voiceless birds …

In a wonderful essay about this poem, Kevin Hart suggests that it draws on the true story of a man who survived a plane crash in the mountain range near Judith’s place (‘Darkness and Lostness: How to Read a Poem by Judith Wright’). In one of the letters in With Love and Fury, Judith says that she used Jungian imagery in the poem to ‘distance’ herself from experiences that she was having at that time. The poem itself, however, creates an imaginative world apart from its sources. ‘One has to have a foundation of fact,’ she wrote, ‘but the poem is something extremely different and much more universal, if it’s worth calling a poem.’ If poetry was a private matter for Judith, this did not mean her poems were confessional. The difference between the writing in her poems and the writing in her letters is not simply the difference between private and public writing. It is more like the difference between sacred and secular writing in some imaginary religion of words.

Barbara, on the other hand, drew on her letters to write her essays, often including letters whole. It is the great charm of Barbara’s essays: they are written like letters, to the point where you could say letter writing was her natural form. She thought of them as records of her own life: ‘These papers are the artefacts. Here is evidence of a life lived’ (Glass After Glass). If for Judith rapture was created in poetry, for Barbara it was remembered there. ‘I had supposed that I was a poet,’ she wrote. ‘My friend Judith Wright pointed out to me that I was not. I was a person to whom poems happened’ (Glass After Glass).

Certainly, her life was full of happenings. ‘Have I really lived through all this?’ she exclaimed. She shared her life with the most accomplished mythmakers of Australian history: Joy Hester and the Nolans, Cliff Pugh, the Boyds, the Percevals and Barry Humphries. Her letters are full of anecdotes about them. ‘See how the public myths are made,’ she wrote, ‘how they differ from the living myth that was the person in being.’ Barbara’s letters are full of anecdotes that keep the sense of her friends as ‘living myths’: she is always acute but never undermining. In these letters she does, however, dispute some of the public myths others created. She challenges Janine Burke’s account of Joy Hester, for instance, and the art critic John Pringle’s idea of how blindness affected her husband’s art.

The historical interest of these letters should, therefore, keep them in print; but they are appealing enough in themselves to make historical interest an incidental pleasure. There is, for a start, the illumination of the writing: Judith’s description of ‘the mushroom smells of wet grass’; Barbara’s description of ‘mozzarellas shaped like piglets’. More than that, these letters give the sense of whole lives kept and lost. In 1990 Barbara wrote to Judith:

Perhaps the phrase of yours that has stuck to me the most is that past the age of fifty the shadows are all on the other side of the hill … But also the further I proceed from that point the more beautiful it is to regard those otherway-falling shadows. Looking back on past letters, past passions, past preoccupations, is a way of doing that.

In that light, it is strangest of all, perhaps, to reflect that these two almost did not meet. With Love and Fury includes a letter that Judith wrote to Jack, debating whether or not to attend the Barjai at the beginning of it all: ‘I hate these Poets’ Gatherings, but in this case perhaps some good might come of it.’

Last year, in the Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecture series, Ian Donaldson gave a sparkling talk on biography. He told us that it has emerged as something of a cultural phenomenon in recent years, with a biography section at the front of many bookshops. We now know that the genre has endless possibilities (biographers have written about London, Paris, the pineapple and the potato), and that, despite its dissenters, biography has even become acceptable within the academy. My brother, a paediatrician who works in intensive care, has been known to end telephone conversations by saying: ‘Gotta go, got lives to save.’ Ever since Ian Donaldson’s talk, with its wonderful title, ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography’ (ABR, November 2006), I have felt able to say: ‘Gotta go, got lives to write.’

This year’s Annual Lecture is once again about biography, but this time, as my title suggests, you are going to get the inside story. This is what I propose. (I take a strange delight in that expression, and I think it comes from those blackboards outside French cafés on which they write ‘On vous propose’, followed by the menu of the day.) For starters, I will talk about the skills a biographer has to develop, and why biographies really are a matter of life and death. We will then pick up our steak knives, and I will discuss my own trajectory as a biographer, with some personal reflections about existentialism, universities and public intellectuals. By this time it will be the moment to sink our spoons into something soft and sweet, and I will come out with a confession. Since I have chosen biographical subjects that have been risky, and am not someone who deludes herself about the difficulties ahead, I have often been cruelly susceptible to what Christina Stead called ‘the 3 a.m.’s’. Before we go our separate ways, I will let you know whether I feel the anguish has been worth it.

I began my first biography, on Christina Stead, in 1985, when I was a tutor in Literary Studies at Deakin University, and so I am looking back at more than twenty years of writing biography and biographical essays. From this vantage point, what do I see as the prerequisites for a biographer? It seems to me that you need to be curious about the world, to like people and be interested in their lives, and to enjoy drawing out their stories. You need to be determined and tenacious. Your research has to be scrupulously correct, or the scholars will wring your neck. You can’t invent facts: you can’t build up atmosphere by saying it was snowing in New York if it was not snowing that day; once you’ve lost your credibility, you’re a dead duck. To write serious biography, you need a strong interest in history, politics and psychology, but this knowledge is simply part of your palette, and must be woven into your narrative with skill and subtlety. I do not think you would get very far if you did not have an adventurous spirit and were not prepared to take risks. Like all writers, you have to be prepared to invest your time and energy in a very uncertain future. But ultimately, the most important thing is your writing, your storytelling ability. A good biography has to be every bit as absorbing, rich, imaginative and stimulating as a good novel or film. Even if it is about a potato.

Biographers carry a big responsibility. They have someone’s life in their hands. What’s unjust is that, if you read a dull biography, you come away thinking that person’s life was dull. In reality, it’s almost never the life that’s the problem; it’s the narration. No wonder people are wary of biographers. It’s bad enough to die; we don’t want some dullard turning our lives into insipid gruel.

It is interesting to reflect on the path that led me to biography. Looking back, I am struck by how fortunate I have been, both in terms of historical timing and my personal circumstances. I have also made some quite dramatic choices. They are complex things, choices. Existentialists would say they come from deep within us, reflecting some sort of ‘original choice’ we made in our childhood. Certain moments stand out when people said something to me that caused a click in my mind, but why these moments and not others? You have to want to hear those words; they have to strike a chord in you. Ultimately, other people influence you only in ways you choose to be influenced.

Since my early twenties, I have been deeply influenced by existentialism, a philosophy which is fundamentally a sophisticated reflection on the extent to which the individual is free or not free. The question that most interested the existentialists was: in what ways do we make ourselves out of what we have been made? In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir muses: ‘How is a life formed? How much of it is made up by circumstances … how much by chance, and how much by the subject’s own options and his personal initiatives?’

In their own biographical and auto-biographical writings, Sartre and Beauvoir examined their subject’s situation (the historical period, social class, family dynamics, the person’s physical constitution and so on), while scrutinising, as if under a microscope, any actions that were signs of rebellion or compliance. They saw these as defining moments, which reflected a deep-seated choice of being. In other words, these were moments of existential choice.

I had no say in this whatsoever, but I often think how lucky I was to have been born in the early 1950s. I am grateful to have been brought up before the Internet, mobile phones, BlackBerries and iPods made kids into jittery, easily bored, semi-autistic creatures who, by being so fanatically plugged into the virtual world, have no time left for the world of the imagination. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, my family did not have television, as a matter of principle, though we usually rented a set during the summer holidays. I was an avid reader, and it seemed to me there was nothing more noble and exciting than being a writer, having the power to transport people into another world.

From the age of nine or so, I wanted to be a writer. One summer in Adelaide, I wrote a novel with a girlfriend. We sat at a folding table beside her family’s swimming pool. One wrote while the other read or swam; then the roles were reversed and the other one took up the story. Her father handed the manuscript to Nancy Cato, the South Australian writer, who was encouraging and told us to persevere. Every summer during high school, I wrote short stories in notebooks, then typed them up on my Remington manual and sent them to magazines. They were all rejected, but even the rejection slips made me feel proud. Real writers get rejection slips.

During my student years, I wrote less for the sheer pleasure of writing. I had less time, and more distractions – such as falling in love. This was the late 1960s and 1970s, when societies all over the Western world were undergoing fundamental changes. I had been politically active from the moment I started university (the anti-apartheid campaign, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, women’s liberation). We students were convinced we were going to change the world forever. It was a heady period in which to come of age, especially for women. I remember feeling sorry for Simone de Beauvoir, who had done so much to inspire the women’s movement and would not be alive to see what I took for granted my generation would see: a complete transformation of society, with all of us working half-time (due to technological advances) and with true equality between the sexes.

I took a combined honours degree in French and German. I loved languages, and the worlds they opened up. A German fellowship allowed me to spend two years at the University of Freiburg, attending lectures, and making a start on my PhD. Then I went just across the border to Strasbourg, supported by an Australian Commonwealth Scholarship. In both Germany and France, I was active in the women’s movement. In Paris, I interviewed the woman who by this time exerted more influence on my life than anyone else: Simone de Beauvoir. Altogether I spent three years away from Australia, and this was before e-mail, before long-distance phone calls were cheap. There was no hand-holding from home. I was completely immersed in two very different cultures. A marvellous experience for a future writer.

I wrote my PhD dissertation on Beauvoir and existentialist biography. One of the many things I liked about Sartre and Beauvoir was their lifelong interest in biography. Another was their commitment to being public intellectuals who considered it their responsibility to speak out about oppression, injustice and the forces that militated against individual freedom. They were also interested in our own complicity in our non-freedom, a state of mind they called ‘bad faith’. (In The Second Sex [1949], Beauvoir shows how tempting it is for women to slip into certain roles, rather than taking the harder road, which is to assume the burden of their freedom.) After World War II – and the deaths of close friends at the front, in the Holocaust and the Resistance – Sartre and Beauvoir were highly conscious of the limitations of individual freedom. Nevertheless, they argued that individuals have a degree of choice, whatever our circumstances. This, to me, is the burning question at the core of biography. What makes it possible for a handsome, athletic man, who is struck by polio at the age of thirty-nine and never again able to take a single step on his own (and this at a time when the words ‘infantile paralysis’ and ‘cripple’ carried a severe social stigma) to become president of the United States? How does a shy, awkward woman with buck teeth and a wavering falsetto voice become one of the most effective speakers of her time, and the most outspoken, independent, courageous, admired, controversial and savagely mocked First Lady the United States has ever known? (As you may have guessed, I am currently writing a book about the Roosevelt marriage.)

A humanities PhD is, of course, great training in research and mounting a sustained argument, but whereas in the United States, a humanities PhD involves three years of coursework, followed by a dissertation, supervised by a committee of three, a humanities PhD in the British– Australian system generally involves no coursework whatsoever. At least in my time, you would sit at home or in a library or postgraduate room for four or five years incubating a thick dissertation, with occasional meetings with your supervisor. It tested your powers to withstand isolation. I suppose that is quite useful for a future writer. You came out of the experience as chastened as a monk, quivering with self-doubts. I suppose that, too, is useful for a future writer. But one thing was not at all useful for a future writer, and it still isn’t, and that is the language of the academy. English departments should impart the pleasure and power of playing one of the world’s richest languages like a musical instrument, but sadly enough, they are among the worst strongholds of academic jargon. By the early 1980s, when I was finishing my PhD, postmodernism was in vogue, and postgraduate theses clanked with words like ‘discourse’, ‘marginality’, ‘signifier’, ‘masculinist’ and ‘to problematise’. For the last thirty years, the reigning ethos in humanities subjects has been that in order to appear intelligent your sentences must be unintelligible. Fortunately for me, I was extremely resistant to this pressure. I regarded it as a nasty virus. These days, I come across English professors who use Valleygirl speak – ‘like’, ‘totally’, ‘whatever’ and ‘you know what I mean’ – those mindless utterances, emanating from the United States, that have become a worldwide plague.

My PhD was in French Studies, but I wrote it in English, and it was about history and philosophy as much as about literature. I did not want to teach in a French Department, I was not qualified to teach in an English Department, I was thirty-one, and it was not at all clear what I was going to do with my life. I did various part-time jobs, some writing, and quite a bit of worrying. And then a piece of extraordinary luck came my way. Despite the fact that we had for years been talking about ‘interdisciplinarity’, universities were still rigidly divided into ‘departments’. The very word, when you think about it, sounds like something out of Kafka. What good fortune I had in 1984 to crack a job in ‘Literary Studies’ at Deakin University, at that time probably the most interdisciplinary university in the country. The Literary Studies area was keen to employ someone who did not have a standard English Department background, and I was thrilled to have the freedom to range across disciplines pretty much as I pleased.

Deakin was regarded as the equivalent of Britain’s Open University, a progressive sort of place that offered education to working people who would not otherwise have the opportunity to study. In order to write course material for our long-distance students, we formed teams and planned the course content together. These meetings sometimes involved hefty arguments, but this was part of the stimulation. Even with our on-campus teaching, we ‘team-taught’, and I personally learned a great deal from my colleagues.

It was challenging to have two sets of students: the younger on-campus students, who mostly came from the Geelong area, and the highly-motivated mature-age students, who came from all over Victoria and sometimes from interstate, whom we met at occasional weekend schools. Deakin academics were not segregated into departments; the Literary Studies area was part of the School of Humanities, and our offices were scattered throughout the building. I shared my corridor with philosophers, sociologists and political scientists. The humanities staff was expected to attend each other’s seminars. For me, this set-up could not have been more ideal. And dare I remind you, we had six months’ study leave every three years on full pay, and provided we were presenting a paper, the university funded an international conference every year. Luckily, I was aware at the time how good these conditions were. It would have been sad to realise it only afterwards. Because we were going to look back on this as the tail end of a golden period in the academy.

Academics are expected to write books, and there was nothing I wanted to do more. I had no trouble deciding to write a biography; that had been the thrust of my PhD thesis. biography was ‘interdisciplinary’, and I would be writing for the general reader rather than the academy. But deciding on the subject proved a tortuous process. I wanted to write about a woman writer – no doubt because I was looking for some sort of model. Since coming to Deakin, I had been reading my way through Australian literature – for the first time in my life, I might add (my generation hardly touched upon Australian literature at high school) – and I wanted an excuse to dive in deeper. I was fascinated by Henry Handel Richardson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and Christina Stead. For various reasons, I whittled the choice down to Cusack and Stead. I lacked confidence, and it seemed far too daunting to take on Stead, a towering international figure. ‘She’s too big,’ I told my boyfriend. ‘Why start small?’ he said.

I have found in life that the anticipation is nearly always worse than the challenge itself. Once I got started, I was in my element. I made an appointment with Brenda Niall, a biographer whom I knew and admired, and she gave me some excellent tips. She showed me how she organised her files, one manila folder for every year of her subject’s life, and how she cross-referenced details on index cards. ‘When you interview people,’ she told me, ‘don’t just ask them about Christina Stead; ask them about themselves. After all, they are characters in your book.’ We discussed taping versus note-taking, and agreed that it depended on the situation, but it was safest to take notes anyway. The most important thing was to sit down somewhere, straight after an interview, and go through your notes while the conversation was still fresh in your mind.

I set up a reading group in Australian literature, and four of us met each month for several years – a precious memory for us all. I gave my chapters to a friend who saw it as her mission to make me throw away what she called my ‘academic boots’, and who would write ‘boring!’ and ‘cut!’ in the margin whenever she felt the narrative pace was lagging. My working conditions were perfect: a six-month study leave spent in London and New York where I conducted dozens of interviews, and long summer breaks with no teaching. In the final year of writing, I took unpaid leave. The book came out in 1993, published by Heinemann, and won the Banjo Prize for Non-fiction.

In 1994, I had another six-month study leave. Of all places to go to, I freely went, of my own volition, to Austin, Texas. I owe this experience to my friend, Frank Campbell. We were sitting in the Deakin staff club, and I told him that, much as I liked both places, I was tired of feeling lonely in New York and London. ‘Go to Austin,’ he said. ‘Why on earth would I go there?’ I said. ‘The university has a fantastic library,’ he said. ‘Oil money. I have friends there, an interracial couple, who have a kind of open-house on Sunday afternoons. Through them you’ll meet everyone interesting in town.’

Until I went to Texas, I had to some extent swallowed the myth that America is a gigantic melting pot. It looks that way on the surface, especially on the streets and in the subways of New York. In Texas, I discovered American apartheid. I saw that poverty and police abuse had a great deal to do with skin colour. I saw that even in educated circles – perhaps especially in educated circles – black people and white people rarely had dinner at each other’s houses. A notable exception was the verandah of the sprawling southern gothic house where I spent my Sunday afternoons, and where a handsome young African American told me that Richard Wright had changed his life. Little did I realise, that steamy October afternoon, that he would change mine too.

While I was in Texas, my Stead book was published in the United States, by Henry Holt, and received laudatory reviews. Over lunch in New York, on my way back to Australia, my publisher asked me what I wanted to write next. I said I would like to write about Richard Wright. She put her head in her hands and looked at me through her fingers. She asked me why. I told her that I thought race the most fraught and complex subject in America, and I wanted to try to understand it, from the inside-out. Richard Wright was such a viscerally powerful writer that he made me feel what it was like to be a black boy growing up poor in segregated Mississippi in the 1910s and 1920s, with grandparents who had all been slaves, and an uncle lynched for running a business that was too successful. Wright had felt in exile in his own country, first in the Deep South, and then in the north. In 1946 he and his wife left the United States in disgust. As they sailed out of New York Harbor, Wright wrote in his journal, ‘I felt relieved when my ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty’. They moved to Paris, and at first Wright could scarcely believe his new freedom. But it was the beginning of the Cold War, and as a black American writer who spoke out about American race relations, Wright could not escape the tentacles of the State Department. Paris was bristling with spies and informers, and Wright knew he was being closely watched. We will probably never know for certain whether his premature death in 1960, at the age of fifty-two, was natural or helped along by the CIA.

By this time, my publisher had taken her head out of her hands. ‘I like your outsider perspective,’ she said. ‘It’s fresh. And I like your passion. If you write a good proposal, we’ll publish you.’

Back in Melbourne, I was intensely aware of my hubris. Would I ever be able to understand, let alone convey, the experience of a black man in America? I was not American, I was not black, I was not a man. I struggled with the question of legitimacy, the feeling that I didn’t belong on the other side of that high invisible fence that separates black and white America. Henry Holt was courageous enough to offer me a substantial advance, but before I had signed anything, I backed out, scared. One day, the phone rang. It was Jock McCulloch, a friend of mine, then a colleague at Deakin, who had written a great deal about race. He said: ‘I’m going to say something and then hang up. Listen, Hazel. A publisher has offered you a good advance. You want to be a writer. You want to broaden your horizons. You want to know more about race. You’ve got a fascinating subject. Do you want to spend the rest of your days knowing you did not have the courage? That’s all I want to say. Think about it.’ A click, and the line went quiet.

In the next few weeks, the figure of Richard Wright loomed before me. His whole life was about courage, daring, and determination. He always grappled with the sense that he was an interloper in territory meant only for whites. He hadn’t given in, had he? Needless to say, the people at Henry Holt were not impressed by my vacillations, and I had to write a very convincing proposal to persuade them to take me back on board.

At first I thought I would take unpaid leave to research the book in the United States. But by now it was the mid-1990s, and the Australian academic world had changed. Almost overnight, universities became businesses. We were seeing the rise of the bureaucrat and the demise of the intellectual. The government decreed that universities had to prove their worth in order to gain funding, but the criteria for measuring intellectual endeavour were so ludicrous that I came to the conclusion I could not be the kind of writer I wanted to be under these conditions. At the age of forty-five, I ‘took a package’. Tied in with this decision was another, to leave Australia. I was eight when my family came to Adelaide from England; I had studied French and German; my soul has always belonged to Europe. North America was a new episode, and I would see whether I wanted to stay there or not, but at least it was closer to Europe. I sold my St Kilda flat; I sold my car. I had written an article for the Australian explaining why I felt obliged to leave the university system, and it came out on the very day I was leaving to spend Christmas with my family before departing for the United States. That morning, before my phone was cut off at midday, I received fifty-eight phone calls from academics around the country thanking me for saying what I’d said.

I was stepping into the unknown, and taking a huge risk – financial, professional and personal. But sometimes in life you know what you don’t want more clearly than what you want. It’s funny, too, how your head rattles with clichés when you make an existential choice. ‘Life is short,’ I told myself. ‘It’s now or never. Take the plunge.’ I even remembered something a Marxist boyfriend used to say, twenty years earlier in Germany: ‘Wer, wenn nicht wir? Wann, wenn nicht jetzt?’ (Who, if not us? When, if not now?)

I went to the United States on a three-year visa and had no idea what I would do when that expired. To my astonishment, I obtained a green card with remarkable ease, in a category the name of which I relish, ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. But meanwhile, I was an alien, and I had a book to write on the most fraught and emotional subject in America: race. It wasn’t just that I knew next to nothing about the subject matter; I did not know much about my readers, either. The least of my problems was to change over to American spelling. I had to find out fast what American readers knew about their history, about race issues, and how they talked about it.   I am exceedingly grateful that the Du Bois Institute in African American Studies at Harvard made me a visiting fellow, a privilege they extended year after year. Professor Henry Louis Gates welcomed scholars from Africa, Europe and elsewhere; he did not want African-American Studies to be a ghetto. We came together as a group every Wednesday for a two-hour lunchtime seminar. In that Harvard common room, among the Persian rugs, deer antlers and portraits of white men, we heard speakers from all over the world, and engaged in animated discussion about race issues.

Richard Wright took me to the black ghettoes of Mississippi, the South Side of Chicago, to Harlem. There were days when the only white person I would see was myself, in the mirror. As it turned out, it was a real advantage to be an outsider. My accent gave me licence to ask questions I could not have asked if I had been a white American. At first, my black interviewees would look at me with bemusement, but when they saw that I had done my research thoroughly and was open-minded, they talked to me more frankly than I had dared to hope. When I finished the manuscript, I gave it to American friends to vet – black friends and white friends. Nevertheless, I was scared of the reviews. Would they call me a naïve white woman from Australia?

The publisher’s blurb on the back of the book made me sound like an American. I also noticed that they had left off the author’s photograph. When I asked about it, they pretended it was a question of space. In fact, the marketing people did not want to reveal my colour.

The book came out in August 2001, and had cover reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. I was proud that the highest praise came from prominent black male intellectuals. The Washington Post reviewer, an African-American writer who lives in Paris, told me afterwards that he could tell from certain sentences that I was not American, but he had not been able to work out whether I was black or white, and the enigma had intrigued him throughout the book. (In the United States, the name ‘Hazel’ is possibly more commonly a black name than a white name.)

Two weeks after publication, a disaster occurred that took all discussion of books off the airwaves, devastated the New York theatre season, and made numerous businesses go bankrupt. September 11 reminded me what it was like for Christina Stead to publish The Man Who Loved Children in 1940.

I have sometimes compared writing biography to being in love. This sounds melodramatic, and it is not quite accurate, since it is essential for a biographer to keep her lucidity and to remain in control of her subject matter, and that is not quite akin to my experience of being in love. But there are striking parallels. My books are voyages, risky voyages, involving a great deal of passion on my part. I choose subjects that will open up new worlds for me. It has always been a harrowing decision for me to commit myself to a subject; I know I will be living with that person day and night for two to four years. Much energy and empathy goes into putting yourself in someone else’s shoes; you inevitably become obsessed. And you have to follow that person wherever he or she takes you. I write about people I deeply admire, but when you study them closely, they are always flawed, and you end up grappling with these flaws as if they were your partner’s. Rather than judging them, my energy goes into understanding them, which is something I am prepared to do only with people I love. Finally, I finish the book. Do I feel relieved? No, I feel lost. It’s the end of an affair.

To write about Sartre and Beauvoir, I moved to Paris, rented a fifth-floor walk-up looking out onto slate rooftops and terracotta chimney pots, filled it with my books and went out to talk to those who remained from Beauvoir and Sartre’s intimate circle. I found this a much easier book to write than the previous two. This time, I was writing a book where I already knew a lot about the subject matter. By now I was far more confident as a storyteller. I had fun with Tête-à-Tête: The lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, from beginning to end.

Once again, it was an advantage to be an outsider. The Parisian intellectual world, I would discover, consists of cliques, which in their loyalties and hatreds are not unlike the gangs in West Side Story. I came with credentials, which was important, but the French could not quite place me. As a foreigner, I felt less bound by what I could and could not say about this iconic French couple. It was just as well that I was a more experienced biographer, because this time I was negotiating a path between two camps, the Beauvoir camp and the Sartre camp, which on the whole detest each other. I had to be constantly aware of the viewpoint of the person I was speaking to, and had to judiciously sift everything he or she told me. When I was younger, I would have been terribly intimidated by these French intellectuals. I had been duly warned that Claude Lanzmann, the film-maker and former boyfriend of Beauvoir, would probably not consent to see me and that if he did he would be abominably rude. Well, he put me through every possible hoop before agreeing to, but he saw me several times. On the first occasion, he had me come to his vacation home on the west coast of France. He set up his tape recorder – in case he needed to sue me, he said. We would talk for two hours at most, he said, and then we would go out in his boat. Ten minutes in, I asked him something and he exploded: ‘Mais c’est une question idiote!’ I said: ‘Maybe it is, but I’d like you to answer it anyway.’ He looked at me with fury. I gazed at the sky. Two minutes passed. Finally he spoke. It was his most interesting reply.

What were the main difficulties I had writing Tête-à-Tête? Nearly all the books by Beauvoir and Sartre are doorstoppers. So are the biographies about them. I was determined to keep my story concise and rapid-moving. I wanted to write a medium-sized book that readers could hold comfortably in bed. But how to do that? I was dealing with not one central character but two, and then there was what they called ‘la petite famille’ – the friends and lovers. I was drowning in material. The answer, I realised, was selectivity. Sublime detail, but no superfluous detail. I wanted the book to leave readers hungry for more.

My other worry was more of a moral one. I was writing a book about people I admired, and I was acutely conscious of the danger of trivialising them. I wanted to tell the truth about this relationship, and I didn’t want to whitewash their behaviour in any way, but the fact is that Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s love lives do not always show them in their best light. I took pains to sketch in the broader picture – their philosophy, their incredible capacity for hard work, their courage as public intellectuals (both were, at times, the target of extraordinary hostility).

Sartre and Beauvoir have always aroused passion – admiration and hatred – and the reaction to my book shows that they still do. Some reviewers praised me for not being at all judgmental and then proceeded to dance a furious little jig themselves, denouncing Sartre and Beauvoir as monstrous, immoral and sexually depraved. A reviewer in Le Monde surmised that we were once again experiencing American puritanism. Rosemary Sorensen wrote in the Brisbane Courier Mail: ‘I do wonder if some of the animosity is envy hiding behind prissy puritanism.’ For me, the biggest surprise came when the book appeared in the United Kingdom, and a couple of reviewers in that country reacted like maddened seventeenth-century Salem witch-hunters – this time raging against me, as well as against Sartre and Beauvoir. One of the problems with biography is that it attracts reviewers who already have strong views about your subject, and sometimes, as their pontifications make clear, they scarcely even read your book.

This brings me to the question of judgement. In my last two books, I have left all judgement out of the narrative. I have done so deliberately. I see it as my task to present the facts, to tell a good story and leave it up to readers to decide what they think. You could argue that my choice of what to put in and leave out is already a kind of judgment; I am steering the reader’s opinions. I would normally agree, but the fact is my steering lands readers all over the landscape. Those who were already attracted to Sartre and Beauvoir tell me that they found my book deeply moving and that they cried at the end. Those who already disliked them tell me it made them seem thoroughly dislikeable. With Tête-à-Tête I have finally learned that my readers and I do not necessarily think the same way, and it is probably not a good idea to write a book that provides a kind of blank slate on which readers project their own feelings. For my Roosevelt book, I’ve decided to include more authorial comment – as I did in my Stead book.

One of the rewards of writing biography is that it gives you a perspective on our own times; it gives you a ‘long view’ of history. My three biographies have been about people born in the first decade of the twentieth century, and I am more and more struck by the parallels between that generation and my own. Stead was born in 1902; Sartre in 1905; Beauvoir and Wright in 1908. They came of age in the late 1920s and 1930s, when the left was strong, revolutionary Russia seemed to be a beacon of hope, and women enjoyed a new freedom. By the late 1940s everything had changed. World War II was followed by the Cold War, and the United States was in a position of global eminence.

Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover created an atmosphere of fear, conservatism and guilt by association. The left was brutally suppressed. As writers, Richard Wright and Christina Stead more or less disappeared from view. Stead’s work was too angry, too critical of society for the conservative 1950s. Richard Wright was writing nonfiction: his book Black Power (1954), about the Gold Coast (soon to become Ghana) and Pagan Spain (1957), about Spain under Franco, contained some of his best writing ever, but the Western world was deeply threatened by the independence of Ghana, and the United States had just signed an important economic and military treaty with Franco. Wright told a friend: ‘So far as the Americans are concerned, I’m worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa … Truth-telling today is both unpopular and suspect.’

As public intellectuals, Sartre and Beauvoir were famous in the 1950s, but they were widely hated, and Beauvoir writes that they felt in exile in their own country. France was fighting a vicious colonial war in Algeria, and the French press was in cahoots with the government. There was silence about the unbelievable torture methods the French army were using. The press did not even call it ‘the Algerian War’: it was ‘the Algerian question’ or ‘the troubles in Algeria’. Sartre and Beauvoir believed in Algerian independence, and their journal, Les Temps modernes, spoke out about the torture. In the early 1960s their lives were in such danger that they had to go into hiding. Sartre’s apartment was twice ripped apart by dynamite bombs.

My generation came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, a time of revolutionary change and hope. Then – it happened sometime in the 1990s – everything changed. These days, I think that most of my friends in the Anglo-Saxon world – whether we live in Australia, the United States or the United Kingdom – would say we feel in exile in our own country. With that mindless slogan ‘war against terror’, our governments have brought war and terror to Iraq, and have taken our own countries into an endless war. While our leaders jabber on about freedom and democracy, we are seeing our freedoms brutally curtailed. Kurt Vonnegut, a writer who could not contain his disgust with the Bush government and who never lost the courage to speak out, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on ... I am a man without a country, except for the librarians.’

I would say the same. I do not have a country. In any event, I have always been wary of nationalism. I gain strength and nourishment from the people I write about, people who lived in difficult times and who never gave up the fight, the struggle, the hard work. And I am inspired by public intellectuals who speak out; by independent, unembedded journalists; by publishers and newspaper and magazine editors who publish books and articles that are important rather than safe or commercially viable; and by the owners of independent booksellers who are fighting a heroic and losing battle against the chain bookshops that now determine which books ‘make it’ and which ones don’t.

I promised to end this talk with a confession. I said I would tell you whether I think the anguish of being a biographer has been worth it. How shall I put it? Writing is harrowing. Out of a spider web, a vague notion in your head, you have to create a book. You are expected to produce it on time, and it had better be a page-turner or the publishers will want their advance back. For every photograph, for every significant quotation, you have to get copyright permission, and this can take months and cost you several thousand dollars. There are always at least a couple of killer reviews, and you are supposed to take them with a shrug. If the book doesn’t sell, somehow it’s you, the author, who is to blame.

And yet, and yet … There are ups and there are downs, but as I see it, being a writer is an enormous privilege. Your life and work blur into one. Whatever you do, you can tell yourself it’s experience, and that’s what a writer needs most. While the world is full of people carrying out various forms of alienated labour, I look at my watch not because the days drag, but because they are far too short. I love visiting archives, gathering material and interviewing people. I love sitting in a room by myself, with the phone turned down, lost in my own world, writing. You cannot believe how satisfying it is when the manuscript is finished and a whole team of people – your editor, copy-editor, indexer, cover designer, and publicist – busy themselves turning it into a beautiful object that bears your name. Then your book is out there in the bookshops. You get letters from strangers thanking you for transporting them to another world. In one way, I have not changed at all since I was nine. I still think there is nothing more exciting than being a writer.

Literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, perhaps only to be hoped for under an imprint such as Australian Scholarly Publishing. Yet a search of its recent publications shows that among nineteen titles this is the only instance – and one facilitated by a Melbourne University publishing grant. Rightly so, for Cassandra L. Atherton’s is academic writing in the best sense of that abused adjective: argumentative, lucid, grounded in extensive research, sustained by a lively intelligence and harnessed to a bright idea. None of which means that I agree with everything she says, but then one function of good theoretical discourse is to provoke disagreement.

The continued success and quality of the Quarterly Essay series has done much to promote the long essay as a legitimate forum for detailed, informed and accessible political discussion. That this has occurred during the Howard era suggests that all is not lost in the quest for genuine public debate. In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr acknowledges that, ‘[s]uppression is not systematic. There are no gulags for dissidents under Howard.’ Nevertheless, His Master’s Voice is born of, and fuelled by, exasperation. Marr makes little effort to mask his personal enmity towards John Howard. And his disgust at the manner in which the federal Coalition has governed for more than a decade is palpable: ‘Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers.’

This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

       for Anne Brumley

       Amid crustless sandwiches
the talk is all of fat and fat-
       studies: at your conference
you’ll talk of Jonson, portly

       and unfashionable, who
was painted fat, ridiculed fat, and,
       we might infer, wrote fat –
his verses creeping into fat and dusty

       tomes in uninterrogated
dark corners – his jolly, fat face
       suited to lamplight
and eleven courses, while

       over coffee or in sweats
we shift to brown rice
       and choi sum, to
fluorescence, and we lament

       the nation’s pets who
by and large weigh in
       too heavy, as we try to cut
a slender line.

Our landlord’s man has let us off this time,
        We’re not expelled.
Victorians liked their mortar made with lime,
        Our walls have held.

Listen, Lesbia!
Surely you can hear.
Shake off that silly hangover
while I part the curtains
just slightly.

When Raimond Gaita’s memoir Romulus, My Father was published in 1998, the acclaim with which it was greeted was ubiquitous. The book was significant not simply because it was a strikingly revealing personal narrative written by a renowned philosopher, but because it managed to present a story that contained large doses of personal tragedy without rendering the experience of reading it either falsely uplifting or overwhelmingly depressing. While offering vivid portraits of an inconstant, depressive wife and mother, and a self-possessed husband and father struggling with his own sense of self-worth, Romulus, My Father celebrated the power of love and friendship in the most subtle, telling and deeply humane ways.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

The Greek-English overlay also comes in, curiously, when Latinate words are used. Unlike most poets writing in English, Tsaloumas does not inherently treat the Latinate as the higher diction, considering his native tongue one with respect to which even Latin, at one point, seemed vulgar. Thus a Latinate word such as ‘luminous’ is used more colloquially by Tsaloumas than it is by most other poets in English. ‘The Beautiful Lady of Merci’ strips away two-thirds of the original French phrase alluded to by the title, as if to the Greek-speaking poet it does not matter whether English or French words are used, as one language sounds no ‘higher’ than the other.

It is a treat to see ten of Laurie Clancy’s short stories collected in this volume, his third. Given their quality, it is not surprising that seven of them have already been published in magazines and anthologies. But to read them together is to see their interdependence, their thematic patterns. All deal with male experience, beginning with that of the fourteen-year-old Leo, on the brink of sexual knowledge; and moving on to stories of middle-aged men contemplating the emptiness of their lives. The collection concludes with two stories about death, one from cancer, one from AIDS.

Whoever wins the federal election later this year, it is likely that at some stage in 2008 we will be looking back and post-mortemising the Howard government. One strand in the reviews will surely be the Howard government’s impact on the quality of public debate in this country. Whether it has been a contributor to Howard’s long ascendancy (and I think it has), this government’s ability to goad large numbers of academics and commentators into unbalanced and increasingly hysterical denunciations of nearly all aspects of its operations is unprecedented in Australian political history. Among the historical documentation of the Howard years will be reams of bilious critiques of an administration that, it appears, most Australians regard with the sort of benign indifference one shows towards a competent accountant, and that was voted to office in four successive elections.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, echoes the sentiment, labelling the re-creation of remote communities ‘reverse racism’. Hughes writes: ‘a few courageous leaders are demanding an end to welfare dependence, but their voices are drowned out by articulate élites.’ Enter Noel Pearson, whom the paper’s editorial applauds, along with John Howard. The Australian also published an edited version of the fifty-page article ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’ that appears in Griffith Review 16.   ‘White Guilt’ puts flesh on Pearson’s well-known objection to welfare and his emphasis on individual indigenous ‘responsibility’. He looks to early black-American models of liberation, including those of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, for inspiration. It will surprise no one to learn that Pearson favours Washington’s approach, in which ‘blacks should secure their constitutional rights through their own moral and economic advancement’, over Du Bois’s call for ‘ceaseless agitation’. Pearson firmly believes that public policy should encourage the most disadvantaged people in society to change the way they think about themselves, rather than the way the majority thinks about them. While acknowledging that racism originates at a systemic level, Pearson argues that it is a ‘terrible thing to encourage victims … to see themselves as victims’. The consciousness of Bill Cosby, he suggests, would be a good role model. Pearson draws extensively on the black American Shelby Steele, who argues that white guilt, in the form of affirmative action, for example, erodes black agency by making blacks feel helpless: ‘agency’, Steele believes, ‘is what makes us fully human.’

According to a recent government survey of child and youth health, around five per cent of young people over the age of twelve suffer from a major depressive illness. Sources of such depression, according to the survey, include stressful events, trauma and heredity. Increasingly, the origin of the illness remains unknown. These disconcerting figures indicate the need for intelligent and accessible discussion about mental health in young adult literature. Both GriEVE and What Does Blue Feel Like? oblige. The first investigates the painful mechanisms of grief and mourning; the other, clinical depression triggered, amongst other things, by abortion.

It is remarkable how death has loomed so large in the social sciences over the past couple of decades. From mangled bodies to mediated mass killings, from the medicalisation of dying to the ‘snuff’ movies of hardcore porn: death obsesses the sociological imagination.

If among students of society, death has become an immensely fashionable topic, its broader social consequences remain, oddly, a largely ivory-tower affair. For example, whilst post-structuralist and postmodern studies of human mortality stylishly dispatch death to the remote and abstract shores of Otherness, many have remained remarkably silent on the destructiveness arising from today’s techno-industrialisation of war and the globalisation of terrorism.

If you didn’t read Meg Stewart’s gentle, courteous Autobiography of My Mother when it was first published in 1985, no matter. This second edition was precipitated by the research of others. ‘What My Mother Didn’t Tell Me’, the title of the additional chapter, is that Margaret Coen, Meg’s mother, had a long affair with Norman Lindsay in the 1930s. Lindsay was married, in his fifties; Margaret in her early twenties. The first edition is hardly altered, and only the new chapter challenges Coen’s reticence, causing us to think hard about oral history.

Congratulations to the talented winner and commended poets in the recently announced Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry from 2006 (names, titles and judges’ report by Lorraine McGuigan and Earl Livings at www.writers.asn.au).

It is pleasing to see the following publishing advice in the report: ‘a book should contain a poet’s best work. It is better to have a good, small collection than a bigger one with weak pieces that are there because of theme or because the poet liked them too much’ (or, maybe, because someone once admired them). First-timers tend to be more careful about this than some poets who have made a name. I know that major poets, in tune with their audience’s level of acceptance, will sometimes rightly present lesser and better work together, to show the spectrum. That aside, there is a myth among poets that a short book doesn’t look good, as if bulk is the proof of something. Yet the buyers of poetry are sensitive to padding – a good book, whether lengthy or not, is as long as there are strong poems for it. Has it been forgotten that such a landmark book as Judith Wright’s The Moving Image (1946) comprised just thirty-one pages of poems?

I was thinking a while back about some of the ways novels begin; not just the famous ones – ‘Happy families are alike’ etc, ‘Call me Ishmael’, ‘Unemployed at last’ – but also some contemporary examples. If I had read Michael Wilding’s National Treasure at that time, I would have conscripted it immediately: ‘Plant slipped down lower in his car seat as the man down the street was beaten up.’ Resounding first sentences often create the problem of where and how to proceed. Wilding manages very well: ‘He was quite a young man being beaten up, and the men beating him up were quite young too. So was Plant for that matter. Young. This was a young country. A young culture.’ These few lines signal quite a lot about how things are to unfold: the blandly matter-of-fact nature of the observation, so at odds with the nastiness of what is being observed; the non sequiturs breaking wildly beyond the apparent bounds of the narrative; and that isolated word ‘Young’, with its insistence, its tinge of impatience lest an obvious point be missed. My little burst of close critical reading is intended to foreshadow that among National Treasure’s various treasures is some wonderful writing.

It is such an obvious subject for a book. The two most powerful peoples in the world in the past thousand years have been the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, and in the past hundred years those speaking English have been the more influential. While Winston Churchill wrote four volumes, which were bestsellers in their time, on the history of the English-speaking peoples up to the year 1901, I know of no other book which has surveyed this century of their greatest power.

The book can’t have been easy to research and write: it is a big hamburger of a theme. The countries whose main language is English differ in size and influence, they are far apart and their loyalties are often in conflict. An historian who is a specialist on Britain is very unlikely to be also an authority on, say, the United States or New Zealand. Moreover, a historian tackling this theme has to be interested in military, political, economic and social history – now a rare combination of interests, academically.

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

In the late 1990s, when I was in Canberra, the Blast I knew was driven by the prolific Craig Cormick. The latest version of the magazine is a crisp little publication, with production values that are modest but impressive. Its clean typeface is reminiscent of some of the 1970s small magazines, and its slim margins are redolent of the economies of the same period. Issue 4 features poets such as Philip Salom, Leon Trainor, Michael Sharkey, Alex Skovron, Diane Fahey, Kevin Brophy and Graham Rowlands. Issue 5 includes Anthony Lawrence, John Millett, Jan Owen and Geoff Page, so there is no shortage of well-known Australian poets.

Patronage and ABR

We have speculated in the past about literature’s relative slowness to foster the sort of cultural philanthropy that is a mainstay of art galleries, libraries, museums, symphony orchestras and theatre companies. Why this has been the case may be of interest to literary historians, but meanwhile ABR is keen to get on with the task of generating private support for the cause of good writing, independent critique and a lively intellectual climate.

Sponsors, advertisers, government ministries, the Australia Council and, above all, our loyal subscribers keep ABR in print, but our resources are miniscule by comparison with similar national literary reviews in Europe and North America.

In order to pay our writers better, to attract new ones, to introduce new features, to present additional and more lucrative prizes, and to contemplate extracurricular publishing projects and events, we need more money – simple as that. This support is crucial if we are to maximise ABR’s undoubted potential.

Accordingly, we have much pleasure in announcing the ABR Patrons’ Scheme, full details of which appear on the tear-off form inside the magazine. We encourage our readers – indeed, all passionate believers in literary values – to consider becoming founding ABR Patrons. This discerning cohort will have the satisfaction of knowing that its generosity will help to entrench and diversify the magazine for serious readers and writers.

So it’s over to you. The Editor, Peter Rose, is available to speak to you if you require more information about this important new programme. We shall list the founding ABR Patrons in the next issue.

Alexis Wright’s ‘full-throated eloquence’

Alexis Wright is the recipient of the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel Carpentaria, published by the award-garnering Giramondo. Wright is the first indigenous Australian to receive the Award since Kim Scott’s Benang won in 2000. The judges’ decision will doubtless be a popular one; Carpentaria was highly praised by critics, including contributors to our ‘Best Books of 2006’ feature (December 2006–January 2007): Wright’s voice ‘crackles in a whisper one minute,’ wrote Nicholas Jose, ‘then bursts into full-throated eloquence the next, as she tells us story after story. Extraordinary invention combines with deep understanding, sharp and delicate detail and flashes of cheeky humour.’

Meanjin update

Much has happened since Advances became the first to report on the murky negotiations about the future of Meanjin. Where would the Sunday Age or Crikey.com have been without the increasingly heated and contradictory statements by opponents and supporters of the proposed transition of ownership to Melbourne University Publishing?

A certain calm has now descended on 131 Barry Street, Carlton, enabling Ian Britain to get back to editing the magazine, which he has done with distinction since 2001. The Sunday Age of June 17 reported that the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Glyn Davis, stated, ‘in a strongly worded email’, that ‘Meanjin is a journal of significance to the University of Melbourne, but judged the conduct of the parties being played out in the press and radio to be unsatisfactory … Until further consideration Meanjin will continue to be managed through the current corporate vehicle … The future of Meanjin will be reviewed in June 2008.’ The report also noted that the Vice-Chancellor had ‘sacked the board’, retaining only the Chair, Professor Kate Darian-Smith. The Editor will no longer serve on the board.

Unhappily for his many admirers, Dr Britain – whose publications include Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes (1997) – has decided to leave Meanjin once the September issue has been published, in order to begin work on his biography of Donald Friend, a project that is expected to take several years.

Next stop in Adelaide

Last month, Adelaideans turned out in force for Hazel Rowley’s ABR/La Trobe University Annual Lecture, ‘The Ups, the Downs: My Life As a Biographer’, which we publish in this issue (page 29). The audience grew so vast on the night that our co-presenters, the Friends of the Barr Smith Library, had to move it a bigger lecture theatre, making this a truly ‘progressive lecture’.

John Hirst will be our guest at the next ABR event in Adelaide. This will be a joint undertaking with the Flinders University Library. Dr Hirst, recently retired from La Trobe University, will speak about his new book, The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character since 1770 (Black Inc.). The venue is the Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library, North Terrace. The date is Friday, August 10. This is a free event (with refreshments), and no bookings are required. Enquiries to Gillian Dooley on (08) 8201 5238 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Changes at ABR

Emeritus Professor Peter Steele has left the ABR board after more than a decade’s service. He leaves with our collective thanks and good wishes. We look forward to presenting works by this superb poet and essayist in future issues.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Starford has been promoted to Deputy Editor.

Next issue

Don’t forget, this is a double issue, one of two such we publish each year (the other will follow in December). The September issue will appear on the first of that month.

What’s your point?

Dear Editor,

John Carmody, in the June issue, writes a letter loaded with tendentious and pejorative language to accuse me of thundering and provocation in my review of Richard J. Lane’s Fifty Key Literary Theorists (March 2007). Carmody portrays me as self-satisfied in the same breath as he refers to his own wryness. He advises me to use words more ‘clearly and carefully’, and then composes a sentence in which ‘eliding’ creates a ‘mélange’. He charges me with portentousness in a letter that consists almost entirely of windy rhetorical questions. I have only one question: what is his point?

Once upon a time, identifying a good picture book was simple: it had bright-coloured illustrations, an easy-to-read text, and it dealt with things relevant to a child’s life. While these elements are still important, the genre has developed to such an extent that simplicity is no longer the prime criterion. As some recent titles show, picture books can cover a multitude of styles and themes; however, whatever their subject, the overriding criteria should always be artistic and literary excellence, and an ability to touch the reader.

In Tyger! Tyger! (Cygnet, $27.95 hb, 32 pp), Elizabeth Stanley has definitely met these criteria. With its homage to William Blake, this book champions the idea of harmony between animals and humans. Stanley tells the story of Thai Buddhist monks who convert their monastery into a sanctuary for endangered tigers. Using the structured cadences of an Asian folk tale, her text interweaves legend, Buddhism and stark present-day realities. Her painterly illustrations echo this formal style, with classical compositions intensifying the emotional content and superb representations of the tigers capturing their vulnerability as well as their magnificence. This is a beautiful book in every way.

Rhyll McMaster established her considerable reputation as a poet in the 1970s and 1980s.  Feather Man is her début novel. In a first-person narrative, the protagonist recounts her life story from the time when she was a child living in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s until her emergence as a painter in London in the 1970s. It is a Kunstleroman divided into four parts, each named for a significant male character who shapes her relationship to art. The narrator’s name is withheld until near the end, when we learn that, somewhat ambiguously, her classically educated father named her ‘Lyce’, from Horace’s Odes on Love.

Diane Coyle has a passion for economics and believes that the object of her passion should possess a soul. She fails to convince on this point, but that is of little account. She has written an absorbing book that sets out what economists do and that provides a commentary on current thinking.

Economics claims rigour. It starts with unambiguous definitions and simple propositions that are capable of being tested through applying data to models. The basic model is that of the competitive market, comprising well-informed agents with clear preferences and motivated by self-interest. This model provides a set of tools for analysing the real world and a language with which to express results. The basic model is contentious when it is taken to be prescriptive. The ‘economic rationalist’ project aims to universalise a free and unfettered market. It is attractive to its stronger adherents partly because it is so simple and hence self-evident. This is one reason why economics is widely reviled: it is reductionist; its assumptions are simplistic, insulting, or both. (Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, famously described the selfish, calculating agents of economic theory as ‘rational fools’.) The world does not work the way economists assert it does. If it did, who would want to live in such a place? Economics also invades territories that should be none of its business. (Gary Becker was awarded a Nobel Prize for applying it to the better understanding of social issues such as drug use and marriage.)

Language shapes identity: everyone knows that, in theory. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that exact equivalents do not exist for every word. Translation cannot be perfect: something is always lost. So what happens when people, used to one linguistic identity, have to translate themselves into a new language? Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka have assembled twelve witnesses to give personal accounts. All are academics or writers who possess the intellectual resources to make sense of what they have encountered, while at the same time registering the dislocations they have experienced. All write English fluently: they are not concerned with the difficulties of learning English but of being themselves in Australian English. Some make the comment that they are perfectly comfortable writing academic English while still finding the small transactions of daily life a challenge.

Reading literary criticism can be like viewing a portrait: you are essentially subjected to another person’s vision of the subject. One can feel that the perspective is unduly harsh at some points, lavishly lenient at others. It is easy to project one’s own bias onto the work, and to take issue with the representation too quickly. This is particularly true of a critical monograph on a subject such as Christopher Koch, who has been both prominent and controversial throughout his career. It is difficult for any commentator on Koch not to be drawn into the ‘Australian Melodrama’ that Peter Pierce identified in Australian literary culture in 1995.

In this respect, Jean-François Vernay has done Koch a service in Water from the Moon: Illusion and reality in the works of Australian novelist Christopher Koch. He has avoided both the mud-slinging and the starry-eyed fandom that has sometimes characterised readings of Koch’s work, and this monograph contains some valuable insights and attempts to engage with Koch’s work theoretically. It is testament to the fine work of Cambria Press in bringing academic writing to a general audience, although the listed price will be prohibitive for most. Unfortunately, Vernay’s portrait of Koch is blurry and its purpose unclear. It also needed the attention of a thorough editor.

Our lives are awash with opinion polls. The daily newspapers, television, radio, and internet poll people on just about every subject. The survey of public opinion has become, since the 1940s, a pervasive feature of everyday life, and is now central to the political process. Sophisticated, large-scale polling of attitudes at the national level – such as the National Social Science Survey, the Australian Election Study, Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and the World Values Survey – is increasingly reported on in the newspapers, with the more complex analyses of these findings left to academic journal articles and books. Alongside regular national polling on issues and leaders by AGBMcNair, Irving Saulwick and Associates, ACNeilson, Roy Morgan Research and Newspoll, political parties commission their own secret internal polling and focus group studies in order to tailor their message to their audience. In this federal election year, we hear clear echoes of this as the ALP leadership repeatedly drops in the key words ‘clever’ and ‘even cunning’ whenever they mention John Howard.

In their new book, Divided Nation? Indigenous affairs and the imagined public, Murray Goot and Tim Rowse study opinion polling on Aboriginal issues. They address two key questions: ‘how has Australian “public opinion” on Indigenous issues been represented and what part have those representations played in the political process?’ They are sceptical about the very notion of ‘public opinion’. Polls often measure what people have no informed or significant opinions about. They feel obliged to answer pollsters’ questions, but their ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses may have little relevance to their lives. Public opinion emerges as a polling artefact. Nevertheless, Goot and Rowse believe that, when polls are read carefully and critically, we can get a sense of the broad ways that Australians think and feel about Aboriginal people and issues. Rather than being divided on issues such as reconciliation, a formal apology by the federal government, land rights, and other kinds of indigenous rights, Australians’ views are complex, contradictory and contextual, and they reveal the influence of the major intellectual traditions that shape Australian political thinking: the strong belief in equality, the influence of liberalism, respect for difference, and notions of shared responsibility.

When polling came to Australia in the 1940s (Gallup being the first such, in 1941), few questions were asked about Aborigines and Aboriginal issues. The first question was not posed until 1947, and the next ones not until the mid-1950s. This reflected the low public interest in Aboriginal affairs. However, as Aboriginal people and issues came increasingly into public focus, the polling started to proliferate. Divided Nation? presents the main findings from this scattered polling in a single volume, allowing the reader to perceive trends in reported public opinion from the 1940s to the present. The book is organised around four key moments, when polling was especially intense or significant: the 1967 referendum; the Hawke government’s failed attempt to introduce a national Aboriginal land rights policy between 1983 and 1986; the native title debate of 1993; and the reconciliation decade between 1990 and 2000.

The chapter on the 1967 referendum is especially timely, in this fortieth anniversary year of the resounding ‘yes’ vote. There have been other important works clarifying what actually happened during this referendum, including the dispelling of the common and powerful myths that it gave Aborigines citizenship or the vote. (It didn’t: all Aboriginals were citizens by 1948, and the vote was largely achieved in 1962.) Books including Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus’s The 1967 Referendum, or, When Aborigines didn’t get the Vote (1997) and John Chesterman and Brian Galligan’s Citizens Without Rights (1997) have done much to clarify these issues.

Goot and Rowse’s emphasis is different. They probe the available opinion research to reflect upon what the Australian public might have intended when it overwhelmingly voted ‘yes’, and in the process analyse the complex meanings that assimilation had for both the non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal leaderships and publics. They point to the salience of the distinction made between ‘part-Aborigines’ and ‘full-bloods’ for considerable portions of the population. While negative stereotyping of Aborigines was engaged in by many, equal numbers refused to stereotype. Non-Aboriginal Australians were happy to share public space with Aboriginal Australians, but they were less than enthusiastic about more intimate interactions and close personal relations, including marriage. On the other hand, in the 1950s and 1960s there seems to have been wide support for Aborigines having the right to vote and to be treated equally.

In previous work, Goot, a critic of the way questions are constructed in polling, analysed the different results when questions are asked differently, in a different order, or framed in different ways. The ways that questions are asked can reveal varying layers of opinion in individuals. Goot and Rowse take a similar approach here when discussing the opinion research conducted on ‘middle Australia’ by ANOP in the 1980s for the Hawke government, and in two chapters that examine the extensive public opinion research commissioned by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and other interested parties in the 1990s. Some of the latter contained ludicrously loaded questions, especially when commissioned by vested interests such as mining companies on issues like the Mabo decision and native title. Goot and Rowse give this short shrift.

Prime Minister John Howard made selective use of the polls to argue against the signing of a document of reconciliation, and also used such polling to justify his refusal to apologise to the ‘stolen generations’. After sifting through the opinion polling on reconciliation, Goot and Rowse conclude that Australians broadly accept that Aborigines were treated badly in the past but strongly believe that Aborigines should now focus on the future. They want Aborigines to take responsibility for their own lives. Non-Aboriginal Australians are committed to equality, but can support limited notions of indigenous rights, including land rights and other forms of cultural protection. This means that they are prepared to recognise both the equality and difference of Aborigines.

The chapter on Hawke’s failed land rights initiative in the 1980s is a potent reminder of the way that opinion polling can be used in the political process. In the early days of the Hawke government, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Clyde Holding suggested that there was a lurking racism in the Australian public that could be mobilised against the initiative. This proved self-fulfilling: ‘By imagining his task in a certain way, Holding – with the help of pollsters, journalists and his political opponents – turned his fearful anticipations into “facts”.’ The ‘backlash hypothesis’, which Holding legitimised in order to fight, was used for different purposes by Western Australian Premier Brian Burke and Prime Minister Bob Hawke ultimately to retreat from ALP policy. The public that had been so generous towards Aborigines in 1967 had become less generous since then, Hawke argued. Goot and Rowse argue both that the evidence from the polls does not represent a backlash, and that, in any case, the Hawke government would have done much better to proceed quietly in the area of Aboriginal policy, since land rights were not high on people’s list of concerns. Here they also question the usefulness and the meaningfulness of the category ‘middle Australia’, which was seen to be against land rights, and reject the idea that for it to succeed Labor’s land rights policy needed its support.

One gets the impression that Goot and Rowse would prefer governments to listen to a different kind of constituency, which was once thought of as ‘public opinion’. A.P. Elkin, the anthropologist and advocate for Aboriginal rights, argued in the 1930s and 1940s that government and policy makers should listen to the ‘informed public’, those who knew and felt strongly about the issues. Now governments listen to a more democratic notion of the general public’s opinion, but in Goot and Rowse’s view, that kind of opinion doesn’t really exist, any more than ‘middle Australia’ exists.    In the conclusion, a broader argument is mounted against social scientists and others constructing social categories and then assuming that they are real entities (Judith Brett and I are so accused when we refer to the people in our recent book Ordinary People’s Politics [2006] as ‘old Labor’, the ‘Old Middle Class’ or ‘young mums’). However, what is the alternative in social analysis other than to think about groups and the ways that their different and specific social circumstances influence the way they see the world, including indigenous issues? After all, while they point to the complexity of opinion, including within individuals, Goot and Rowse are also using a social category when they refer to non-Aboriginal Australians and when they characterise their general habits of thought and feeling.

After departing as minister for finance from the Hawke government in 1988, Peter Walsh began a weekly column for the Australian Financial Review under the byline ‘Cassandra’, named after the Trojan princess who was condemned by Apollo to be a teller of truths but fated not to be believed. Eventually, the bile became too much for Fairfax. Happily, Christopher Pearson offered Walsh a spot at his comely home for curmudgeonly old men, the Adelaide Review, for several more years. Walsh was marvellous. His articles were renowned for skewering the platitudes of the mushy left. He hollered like a Baptist at Country Party types aiming to get their gnarled hands into Treasury coffers.

The title poem of Michael Sharkey’s The Sweeping Plain – his first book of poetry since the retrospective History: Selected Poems 1978–2000 (2002) – is a polemic against politically conservative suburbia. The poem portrays a desert-like ‘sweeping plain’ of insularity, never-ending and utterly homogenous: ‘They look at others like themselves / in their home entertainment centres, / knowing answers to such questions as the names / of others living in that world.’ It is a pacey and rhythmic poem, with some surprising turns of imagery. The tone is measured rather than overly rhetorical, but it’s certainly not a new idea.

Ecopoetics is tricky terrain which, in these poems of ‘forest and water’, Louise Crisp encounters sometimes with agility, sometimes faltering. Perhaps that’s intended.

The cumulative effect of this collection is one of an overland trek, gradually ascending from ‘poisonous lowlands’ to the harsher, restorative air of ‘uplands’.

Exactly one hundred years before this new edition of The Evolution Revolution, by Australian palaeontologists Ken McNamara and John Long, the Rationalist Press Association promoted the first English version of The Evolution of Man (1907), by the great German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In his preface, Haeckel’s translator, Joseph McCabe, pointed out that, since the first German printing in 1874, only fifteen years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ‘fresh facts have come to light in each decade, always enforcing the truth of man’s evolution’. Thus, ‘evolution is not a laboriously reached conclusion, but a guiding truth in biological literature today’ and, as such, ‘is accepted by influential clerics ... and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of distinction in Europe’.

Haeckel was primarily an embryologist. He was at the forefront of describing the complex processes of the ontological development of the body from a single fertilised egg cell. His enduring contribution to evolutionary biology was to recognise that adaptations of an adult organism to its environment must have arisen through modification of the developmental process. Moreover, he demonstrated that animals with widely divergent adult forms may display remarkably similar stages of early embryonic development, as befits their evolution from a shared common ancestor.

Over the last thirty years, the formidable tools of molecular biology have been used to probe the genetic foundations of biological diversity. The results have been truly remarkable: we now know that common sets of genetic algorithms regulate the development of most if not all animals, from worms and insects through to chickens, mice and humans. These same genes, and the developmental programmes that they regulate, comprise much of the basic substrate upon which evolution by natural selection operates.

For all its strengths, one limitation of molecular biology is that its raw material can be obtained only from organisms living today (but even this may be changing as more and more partial sequences are obtained from fossilised sources). So, in order to study the chronology of life on earth through all its evolving forms, one must turn to the fossil record. This record is now known to stretch back more than three billion years. Despite some frustrating gaps and discontinuities, it is a vast record. There are probably hundreds of millions of fossils housed in public collections within the world’s museums and universities. Significant new fossils continue to be uncovered and reported in the international scientific literature. The unlikely partnership between palaeontologists and molecular biologists forged over recent years has been incredibly successful in providing the coherence between development and evolution that Haeckel predicted, but for which he (like Darwin) had no underlying mechanistic explanation.

Despite this wealth of information, proponents of so-called ‘Creation Science’ and its successor, ‘Intelligent Design’, assert that evolutionary biology is an unproven idea, inconsistent with their literalist interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, they have argued that biblical views of the history of life on earth, specifically as it relates to the origin of humans, have equivalent scientific status with evolutionary ‘theory’ and should have equal time within school science curricula. In the United States, the antievolutionists have exerted significant political influence on the education system, especially in the more conservative states. Since 1925, when biology teacher John Thomas Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution in a Tennessee high school, Christian fundamentalists have continued to use the courts and legislature to challenge the validity of teaching evolutionary biology (e.g. see New Scientist, 9 July 2005).

‘Intelligent Design’ posits that at least some biological mechanisms are too complex to have evolved as a result of natural selection. Such mechanisms could range from the molecular motors that underlie bacterial motility to the interactive neural circuits that mediate vision. The implication is that such systems are so complex that they could not operate at a transitional, presumably sub-optimal, level. Therefore, they could not have evolved, and some other overarching entity must have purposefully ‘designed’ their function. The problem with this position is that it is not supported by the evidence: there are abundant examples of transitional forms, either living or from the fossil record, at all scales of organisation from molecules to whole organisms. Moreover, there are many biological structures that are evolutionary remnants with no current function. Even in Haeckel’s time, this was well known, and he coined the term ‘dysteleology’ to cover such conditions.

Evolution forms the inescapable conceptual framework of all of modern biology, including its application to medicine. So it is not surprising that the argument against the anti-evolution lobby has been taken up so strongly by high-profile biologists, such as Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker [1986]; Climbing Mount Improbable [1996]) and the late Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life [1989]; Life’s Grandeur [1996]). This ongoing history of public disputation provides the context for the second, revised, edition of The Evolution Revolution: Design without Intelligence.

In their preface, McNamara and Long echo the sentiments of Haeckel’s translator a century earlier when they unashamedly admit, ‘It amazes us that many people simply ignore the overwhelming amount of data shown by the fossil record of life on Earth’. Rather than engage in a direct argument with the claims of the supporters of Intelligent Design in the manner of Dawkins or Gould, McNamara and Long describe some of the most dramatic palaeontological ‘discoveries of the past decade as well as examples of the new technologies’ that allow their interpretation. Each of the chapters is largely self-contained and focuses on a specific group of organisms that characterise a particular geological period. Many of their examples come from Australia. As such, they reinforce the increasingly strong evidence that Australia and its predecessor, Gondwana, the great southern super-continent, have been crucibles of evolutionary innovation time and time again.

McNamara and Long are both world-renowned palaeontologists and successful popular science writers. Their book generally maintains a good balance between the professional need for accuracy and the necessity to engage a wider readership. Most chapters are introduced by personal accounts of the ‘excitement and fascination’ of fossil discovery. At one level, these vignettes illustrate the difficult conditions under which palaeontologists must work to find their fossils. But at another level, these pieces reveal insights into the scientific process underpinning new discoveries in evolutionary biology. Opponents of evolution often claim that evolutionary theory cannot generate testable hypotheses, and, therefore, it is not really science.

However, a strength of The Evolution Revolution is that the authors document many cases where gaps in the fossil record have been filled by targeting exploration to specific geological formations predicted by existing knowledge. In the manner of real-world science, not all predictions are verified, leading to refinement of working hypotheses and the generation of new predictions. The discussions of this process occasionally develop into short debates about the relative merits of different interpretations of new data, employing technical terms with little if any definition, more suited to a professional journal. A simple glossary, and a few additional illustrations showing the potential ‘family trees’ linking different groups of organisms, would have increased the accessibility of these discussion to non-specialists.

The Evolution Revolution is a valuable resource for readers enquiring after the current state of knowledge about the evolution of specific groups of organisms, especially when used in conjunction with its extensive (and up-to-date) bibliography. However, readers who tackle the book as a whole will be rewarded by a contemporary view of evolutionary biology that Haeckel would admire as a genuine heir to his own ideas. I expect that he would celebrate with us the discovery in the Flinders Ranges of ancient marine faunas that experimented with strange body forms, now extinct forever. Surely he would admire the beautifully preserved fossils from China that show the halting, but ultimately successful transition from dinosaurs to birds. And he would welcome the evidence for the long evolutionary trail, with all its sidetracks, dead ends and short cuts, leading from fish-like creatures swimming in Western Australian seas nearly half a billion years ago, to the changing ecosystems of eastern Africa a few million years ago, where the first protohumans walked upright on the path to our very own species, Homo sapiens: the knowing people.

Within church circles, Melbourne’s Catholic Education Office is known as the CEO, making it sound like the boss of a company. The comparison is apt. The Melbourne CEO is nothing if not big. Indirectly, it looks after more schools and more students than a number of state education departments. So it is little wonder that the CEO has long been a turf on which ideological battles have been fought. If you cup an ear to the walls of the CEO, you won’t hear much: culture wars are fought quietly there. But bear in mind that this is an organisation that brings together two of the most contested elements in any culture war: the meaning of life and the minds of the young. Listen harder, and you will hear pulses racing.