David Malouf’s The Complete Stories brings together the three and a bit books, spanning twenty-five years, that constitute his forays into shorter fiction: Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000), and Every Move You Make (2006), along with two stories that accompanied his novella Child’s Play (1982). Given that this is a collection rather than a selection – no stories are cut from the earlier books – the quality ebbs and flows, both from story to story and from book to book. Despite its slight imperfections, The Complete Stories confirms that Malouf is, at his best, a masterful exponent of short fiction. The book is a monument, a sort of literary Big Pineapple, to Malouf’s virtuosity and to his Queensland origins (though the hefty and handsome hardback is let down by its flimsy boards, which rub and bump almost to the touch). Malouf incorporates the lives and foibles of his characters – more often, and more satisfyingly, men – into his bigger vision of the world. He contrasts individuals’ inner worlds with their public façades, then connects them, with thin but unbreakable threads, to their local communities, to magnificently reconstructed landscapes, and ultimately to major historical events and global trends.

The subtitle of Janet Malcolm’s new book (published in Australia by Melbourne University Press) is Gertrude and Alice. Few names of literary couples can be so confidently trimmed. Scott and Zelda, Ted and Sylvia, George and Martha … all those happy couples. Gertrude and Alice has been used before, as the main title of Diana Souyhami’s joint study (1991), and will doubtless be used again. Their fame is an achieved and bankable thing, notwithstanding the fact that Gertrude Stein (1874– 1946) – whose books included Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans (1925) and the wonderfully titled A Long Gay Book (1932) – remains perhaps the least read of the modernists.

Now Janet Malcolm, the celebrated author and New Yorker journalist, has added to the vast Stein–Toklas literature. We are never quite sure why, for she evinces no great liking for her subjects. Two Lives, while highly readable and diverting, has little of the drama or intrigue of Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994). The author never becomes as philosophically engaged as she did in her unlikely but absorbing book about Sheila McGough, a small-time lawyer who went to jail because of her legal fundamentalism and literalism (The Crime of Sheila McGough [1999]).

Malcolm opens with an account of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), the book that made Toklas famous as more than just the minatory figure often posed a few feet away from Gertrude Stein. The young Malcolm and her cohort of ‘pretentious young persons’, full of distaste for middlebrow American culture, seized on the eccentric cookbook, loving its waspishness and hauteur. This was in the late 1950s, when General Eisenhower (the Great Golfer, as Gore Vidal dubbed him) was still in the White House, and when ‘Liz and Eddie’ were breaking Debbie Reynolds’s heart.

Malcolm read Stein much later, often with difficulty. To the dismay of the Steinian scholars whom she interviews for Two Lives, Malcolm prefers the ‘audience’ (accessible) writing to the ‘real’ (experimental) stuff. Although she acknowledges that the writing ‘possesses a glitter that keeps one reading long past the time when it is normal to stop reading a text that makes no sense’, illustrating this with the mesmeric ‘An Acquaintance with Description’ (‘Let it be when it is mine to be sure let it be when it is mine when it is mine let it be …’ and so on), Malcolm baulks at the 925-page The Making of Americans, ‘believed to be a modernist masterpiece, but … not felt to be a necessary reading experience’. Malcolm finally conquers the book by slicing it up into several volumes and diligently rereading each sentence, as did John Ashbery, another recent convert.

Malcolm is not alone in her ambivalence. Even Edmund Wilson, so important in Stein’s rehabilitation, wondered in Axel’s Castle (1931) if it were possible to read The Making of Americans in its entirety. Malcolm is funny about Stein’s small vocabulary: ‘When she uses a new word it is like the entrance of a new character.’ Stein, of course, defended her method: ‘Using a word I have not been using in writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling … There are only a few words and with these mostly always I am writing that have for me completely entirely existing being …’

Any reader of Stein is struck by her whimsical guise – not to mention the cascade of present participles. Her non sequiturs have a weird logic: ‘Apollinaire was very attractive and very interesting. He had a head like one of the late roman emperors. He had a brother whom one heard about but never saw.’ Throughout Two Lives, Malcolm’s admiration grows: ‘every writer who lingers over Stein’s sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.’

Malcolm begins her characteristically short book with a series of questions. How did the elderly Jewish lesbians (long resident in Paris) escape the Nazis? Why didn’t they return to the safety of the United States? Why did Alice Toklas (1877–1967) never mention her or Stein’s Jewishness? Although Malcolm admits that coyness about homosexuality and Jewishness was not exactly unusual or impolitic in the twentieth century, especially during World War II, these issues trouble Malcolm. She can barely tolerate Stein’s egomania. Yet she acknowledges that ‘of all writers [Stein] may be the one whose work most cries out for the assistance of biography in its interpretation’.

Two Lives is unlike anything else written about this astonishing couple. The fabled salon at 27 rue de Fleurus is barely mentioned. Nor is F. Scott Fitzgerald, a favourite of Alice’s. Pablo Picasso – Gertrude’s soulmate, interlocutor, portraitist, frequent guest – has a minor role, though he was a constant in her life, the first of the brilliant men whose youth and masculine vigour aroused Gertrude’s mind. Alice once said that if Picasso and Stein had, as rumoured, been lovers, then incest would have to be part of the scandal. Interestingly, Ernest Hemingway, another devotee, on first meeting Stein, wrote: ‘Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.’ Decades later, Hemingway declared in a letter: ‘I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it’, a line that betrays, as Malcolm notes, ‘the sort of macho showing off one expects of him and only half believes’.

Clearly, Stein’s allure for her contemporaries was potent. So were her expectations, her vainglory. This was the woman who, when she ghost-wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), proclaimed: ‘The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead’ – emphatically in that order. ‘Hurrah for gloire,’ Stein said on learning of her belated fame in the United States. Wars I Have Seen (1945) – written during World War II and perhaps Stein’s most accessible book – begins with remarkable candour about her childhood in Pennsylvania:

…from the beginning there was no doubt that I was the youngest of the children and as such I naturally had privileges the privilege of petting the privilege of being the youngest one. If that does happen it is not lost all the rest of one’s life, there you are you are privileged, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and that is the way I still am, and anyone who is like that necessarily liked it. I did and do.

Malcolm writes of ‘life’s evident inability ever to say no to Gertrude Stein’. When her beloved brother Leo went to Harvard, Gertrude enrolled at Radcliffe. William James considered her the most brilliant female student he ever had. Later she went to medical school at Johns Hopkins, intent on a career in psychology. Examinations, not surprisingly, did not suit this individualist. In 1903 she followed Leo to Paris and joined him in the rue de Fleurus. Obsessively, the siblings analysed their friends’ characters and then told them what the problem was. Even Alice Toklas, who entered their circle in 1907, wasn’t spared at first. Stein wrote in a notebook:

She is low clean through to the bottom crooked, a liar of the most sordid, unillumined, undramatic unimaginative prostitute type, coward, ungenerous, conscienceless, mean, vulgarly triumphant and remorseless, caddish, in short just plain rotten …

Toklas’s rejoinder, fifty years later, on being shown the notebook, was very classy: ‘At least she didn’t accuse me of disloyalty.’

Leo moved out in 1914, five years after Alice had joined the household. Alice, always alert to rivals (sexual or intellectual), had replaced Leo as Gertrude’s amanuensis and general worshipper. Leo had begun to criticise Gertrude’s writing (he felt she wrote the way she did because she couldn’t write decent English). The siblings remained hostile until the end. Stein, like most egotists, eventually quarrelled and broke with nearly all her close friends.

Toklas was different, literary but unambitious, shy and adoring. In most of the photographs she is off to one side, strained, often obscured or averting her gaze. Raised in San Francisco to be a perfect hostess by a father who gave her the immortal advice, ‘If you must do something, do it badly’, all her life she remained devoted to Stein and her legend – truly the keeper of the flame. Her psychology, in many ways, is the more interesting of the two – passionate, tremulous, fanatical – whereas Stein emerges as a kind of freak: brilliant, preposterous. Their sexual life generally resists the prurient because of the discretion of their age. We know that Alice (middle name, incriminatingly, Babette) called Gertrude ‘Baby’, but she may not have been the first person to so address her lover. We have Stein’s erotic poetry, which speaks of her ‘marriage’ to Toklas. It is clear that Stein – after her early doubts and case study – was besotted with her ‘bride’: ‘Pet me tenderly and save me from alarm … I love my love and she loves me … She can be responsible for me and I can see this responsibility.’ Sadomasochistic games may have been part of the repertoire. Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (1964), gave us a posthumous insight into their relationship. As a young visitor to 27 rue de Fleurus, totally naïve about homosexuality, he once overheard Gertrude and Alice upstairs:

I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, never.

Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, Don’t, pussy. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.

Again, Malcolm notes the common scepticism about Hemingway’s motives: the old man of the sea was indignant at Stein’s subsequent dismissal of his work (‘He looks like a modern and he smells of the museums’). But given Toklas’s ruthlessness towards her rivals, and given the violence with which Toklas once forced Stein to excise all references to an earlier lover from her poetry, Malcolm begins to trust Hemingway’s account.

The advent of the Nazis was perilous for the two women, and for their fabulous art collection. They thought of returning to the United States but opted to stay in their country house in Bilignin. Another guardian intervened to protect Stein. Bernard Faÿ, installed by the Vichy régime as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, persuaded Marshal Pétain to ensure that the two Jewesses remained untouched. Stein, a political conservative (she loathed Roosevelt and admired Franco), was grateful to Faÿ. After the war, she wrote in his defence, but the collaborator was still imprisoned. Wars I Have Seen contains no reference to the Holocaust or to her Jewishness. After the liberation, Stein told an American journalist that these had been the happiest years of her life. How many readers of Wars I Have Seen (published three months after Germany’s surrender) would have appreciated the author’s whimsy about the haphazardness of the German’s destruction of statues in Paris, ‘They certainly are funny people, the Germans’?

Peace for Stein was short-lived. In 1946 she was diagnosed with cancer. Because of her grave condition, the doctors refused to operate, but she commanded a young surgeon to proceed: ‘I order you to operate. I was not meant to suffer.’ She died on the operating table.

Toklas’s widowhood lasted for more than twenty years. She wrote her books, penned amusing letters and tended Gertrude’s reputation like a grave. Her devotion never wavered, nor her servitude. ‘If there were still not things to do for Gertrude,’ she wrote to Mercedes de Acosta in 1956, ‘there would be no reason for me to live on.’ Her circumstances were straitened because of the curiosities of Stein’s will (‘Wills are uncanny and electric documents,’ Malcolm writes in a brilliant passage). The ruthless wife of Stein’s nephew and heir removed all the pictures; Toklas returned to the apartment one day to find their outlines on the walls. Toklas, almost blind, ended up in a small flat, living in relative poverty. She converted to Catholicism and looked forward to meeting Stein in Heaven (slightly tricky, since the unbaptised Stein was locked in limbo).

Some authors we read for the sweetness or the satire or the syntax or the sex. Janet Malcolm’s forte has always been her cast-iron technique, so influential for other writers, Helen Garner included, who has acknowledged her debt. Malcolm’s interviews with the Steinians are often funny and always beautifully observed. She can be very dry at times. Of an earlier biographer, she writes: ‘[Elizabeth] Sprigge was a woman of her time [the 1950s], which may not have been the best time to be a woman.’ An impressive holder of a grudge, Malcolm is relentless and deterministic. She is like Patricia Highsmith, without the pistols.

Usually, there is an aleatory quality to Malcolm’s projects: a stray remark or letter or invitation that turns into a three-year quest. By now we are very familiar with the technique. At some point, Malcolm will fly to another city or meet someone for coffee to glean more clues about the mystery at the heart of her book. It can feel like reading a thriller.

This time the crucial witness is Leon Katz, a mysterious American scholar who in 1948 discovered Stein’s intimate notebooks from 1902–11, and who went on to engage Toklas in a series of remarkable interviews about their contents and about the woman who had broken Stein’s heart. This is virgin territory for Steinians. Katz is barely mentioned in James R. Mellow’s Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and company (1974) or in Linda Simons’s The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (1977). But on this occasion, the rendezvous is aborted: Katz changes his mind and declines to meet Malcolm. It all feels rather anticlimactic, and the other Steinians, desperate to get their hands on the material that Katz has sat on for half a century, are appalled. But Malcolm is philosophical about Katz’s wariness. He still has a magnum opus to write (though he is leaving it late). She has experienced ‘narrative theft’ herself, so ‘[Katz’s] fear of being ripped off was not irrational’.

These are perhaps the most interesting pages in the book. Malcolm has already written about the ruthlessness and inefficacy of biography, in Reading Chekhov: A critical journey (2001). Now she reflects on the instability of human knowledge: ‘Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are told remains the same when retold.’

What Alice knew may yet remain unknown, in limbo, ‘flowing and flown’.

Quite when the figurative usage of ‘companion’ as ‘a work of reference ... that is presented as a friend to be consulted with whenever needed’ came into fashion is uncertain. I well remember my first companion, the third edition of the invaluable Oxford Companion to English Literature, from my student days in the 1950s. Oxford University Press now has a large stable of companions – some seventy titles at last count – covering everything from Christian thought to jazz to baroque music. The latest addition to the Oxford stable is a doorstopper: The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (OCAP). Together with its sister volume, The Oxford Companion to Australian History, first published in 1998, it should become an indispensable, if expensive, tome in the library of any thinking Australian.

What can we make of the fact that, of the forty-seven stories selected by Robert Drewe for this year’s The Best Australian Stories collection, thirty-three are written in the first person? The influence of Creative Writing classes has to figure in any stab at an answer. It would be interesting to do the rounds of the universities to discover whether the teachers of such courses actively encourage the use of ‘I’, or if it happens obliquely, resulting from the way that writing exercises are structured. One wonders, too, if that old saw, ‘write what you know’, is discussed in the first week of these courses, and if such a practice contributes to the writer’s feeling more comfortable and secure when deploying the first person.

Fashions of publishing may also play a part. Many of the most talked-about books in recent years have been riffs on the memoir theme. The notoriety of those who have cheated on the veracity of the memoir, and created bestselling hybrids, may, paradoxically, have encouraged experimentation with such writing, particularly from new writers.

Given the Howard government’s recent proposal to include the compulsory study of selected aspects of Australian history for secondary school students, perhaps it is time for more educators to follow the lead of Nicholas Jose and others in urging that Australian literature occupy a more prominent place in the school curriculum. Literature – and poetry in particular – does not have the political buzz that history possesses (especially since the recent ‘history wars’ have worked their way into public discourse), but there is a need for some healthy consciousness-raising about the flourishing state of Australian writing, which is often better understood beyond our shores than it is at home.

Dennis Altman

This year I have read too many American political quickies, and large numbers of somewhat more satisfying detective stories. Amid the revelations about Hillary Clinton’s childhood, and the equally fictitious accounts of intrigue in Istanbul and Venice, a couple of books stand out. Andrew Wilson’s The Lying Tongue (Text) and Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) are ‘gay books’ that speak to themes other than sexuality, and deserve to be better known. Although ultimately too improbable, Andrew McGahan’s Underground (Allen & Unwin) evokes rather well a left-wing dystopia, centred on a Howard-like government. As for nonfiction, Tony Judt’s Postwar: Europe since 1945 (Heinemann), while telling us more about Poland and less about Spain than we need know, is a fascinating reminder of the Cold War era, evoked for the other side of the Atlantic in Thomas Mallon’s novel Fellow Travellers (Pantheon).

Judith Armstrong

Why was Graham Robb’s uninspiringly titled Discovering France (Picador) so utterly enthralling and my nomination for best book of 2007? Because it so convincingly makes us aware of how little we really knew about a country most of us have studied, holidayed in or lusted after, even when it is but the background to a bike race. Robb, known previously as the superb biographer of French authors, prises apart many idiosyncratic strands of language, class, food and everyday life, then knits them back together to show how they became the seamless Paris-centred country of this century. His disclosure of an earlier, fragmented and more fascinating version of la belle France is amazing. I would also recommend the hybrid work of argument and memoir by Maria Tumarkin called Courage (MUP). Never less than energetic, and sometimes wilfully explosive, it tackles an important human subject with verve and, well, courage.

Nicholas Birns

Graeme Kinross-Smith’s Long Afternoon of the World (Wakefield Press) is a visceral memory-text, with the flash of a webpage and the depth of philosophical autobiography. Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James Books), poems by an Iraq War soldier, renders daily life amid carnage, hope and struggle, and is responsive to Iraqi history and culture, a striking difference from Vietnam War poetry in the United States. David Rowbotham fought in World War II; Rogue Moons (Picaro Press) mixes history, melancholy and linguistic awareness and continues to bear witness to a world, as Turner’s work shows, no less troubled than when Rowbotham’s career began. The two periods converge in Clare Wills’s That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War (Harvard University Press), which reconsiders a twentieth-century enigma in a twentyfirst century light, and, methodologically, is prescient in its unabashed and equal interest in politics and literature.

Geoffrey Blainey

I have just read John Adamson’s lucid The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Enlisting and rearranging new or often-ignored evidence, he analyses the background of the English Civil War of the 1640s. Here is an acute mind at work: arguing, suggesting, contradicting and explaining. The name of our own Commonwealth largely derives from this dispute. Perhaps we unintentionally cloud and even belittle our history by knowing less and less about vital episodes in British history. I was taken by the prose and alertness of Gideon Haigh in The Green & Golden Age: Writings on Australian Cricket Today (Black Inc.). Also impressive was T.W. Edgeworth David: A Life (National Library of Australia), an illuminating study by David Branagan of a versatile geologist and explorer.

Neal Blewett

Is late-onset sexuality, like late-onset diabetes, an affliction of the old? Four of my favourite books this year – a biography, a diary, a memoir and a novel – are focused on sex. I read with fascination, and a tinge of repulsion, Hazel Rowley’s cool and non-judgmental Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Chatto & Windus). Similar responses were evoked by the remarkably uninhibited and self-doubting fourth and final volume of The Diaries of Donald Friend (National Library of Australia), which covers his sybaritic years in Bali and the bleak last years in Australia. With this beautifully produced fourth volume, the National Library and Paul Hetherington have brought to a triumphant conclusion the publication of one of the outstanding diaries of our time. Bruce Benderson’s memoir, The Romanian (Snowbooks), and Neil Bartlett’s novel Skin Lane (Serpent’s Tail) have an identical theme: the obsession of a middle-aged man with a younger man. To indicate that I am not completely depraved, I found Antony Beevor’s revisionist but balanced account of the Spanish Civil War, The Battle for Spain (Phoenix), a masterly piece of narrative history.

Pamela Bone

Ian McEwan may be becoming too popular for his own good (he’s probably already too popular to win the Booker), but he is good, very good. On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape), his sad short novel about wasted love (‘they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’), is as good as anything he has written. A close second favourite must be David Malouf’s subtle, perceptive short stories Every Move You Make (Chatto & Windus). The reader may know much about the lives of Malouf’s subjects – a woman in a Tuscan villa, undergoing chemotherapy, a mother who fails to be impressed by Ayers Rock – because of what is left out. By contrast, Andrew Anthony leaves out very little in his polemic The Fall-out: How a guilty liberal lost his innocence (Jonathan Cape). This book could give any guilty liberal second or even third thoughts.

Ian Britain

Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose may have nothing more in common with Anthony Powell’s Nicholas Jenkins than an Eton education (and even that’s only hinted at), but the Melrose chronicles of upper-class cavortings are surely shaping up to be a Dance to the Music of Our Time. I swallowed the latest instalment, Mother’s Milk (Picador), in one appalled and delighted gulp. I also couldn’t put down Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin). Part mystery thriller, part family chronicle (if the milk’s slightly less curdled than in St Aubyn, a mother’s other bodily fluids are unsparingly anatomised), it represents de Kretser’s first foray into Australian territory, and proves as dazzlingly sure-footed as her earlier ventures into revolutionary France and late-colonial Ceylon. Post-colonial northern India is the principal setting of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton). Another bleak family chronicle (but with a father–son relationship that seems almost sentimentalised by St Aubyn’s standards), it also deftly addresses some highly topical political themes: a War and Peace for our time, maybe, though the scale and tone are more Chekhovian.

Paul Brunton

This year brought two Aussie bobby-dazzlers. Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (Picador) – the product of a lifetime’s thought – is erudite, wise, witty and profound. It is guaranteed to expand your mind. The quality of Peter Cochrane’s writing in Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian democracy (MUP) is such that the reader becomes an eyewitness in the gripping tale of the nineteenth-century battle for responsible government. It is meticulously researched (even the endnotes are enthralling) and sets a benchmark for how Australian history should be written. Do not die before you have read both these books several times. Donald Jackson Kerr’s Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, colonial bookman and collector (Oak Knoll Press and Otago University Press) is a fascinating study of that engagingly eccentric specimen, the book collector.

Morag Fraser

Following East of Time (Brandl & Schlesinger), which is both searing and whimsical about the savage extremes of human action, Jacob Rosenberg continues his biographical journey in Sunrise West (Brandl & Schlesinger) – and as irresistibly. The Holocaust survivor bears with him to Australia a lode of unimaginable memories. He doesn’t transform or blur them. Instead, he lives through them again in the radiant epiphanies of his prose. And so do we. Both books are a triumph of humanity and of literature. Their natural corollary is Richard Freadman’s zestful, wide-ranging study of Australian Jewish autobiography, engagingly titled This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish autobiography (UWA Press), which includes chapters on Rosenberg and other Australian Jewish writers, both the celebrated and the previously unknown. Freadman honours them all by writing with analytic deftness and the finest kind of critical sympathy. This is particular scholarship for Australians in general – and wonderfully readable. So what’s a nice Catholic girl doing delving into Jewish literature? The answer: happily getting in deeper and deeper. Roger McDonald recommended that I read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, (HarperCollins) so I did. From Rosenberg’s Melbourne to Chabon’s threatened ‘Israel’ in Alaska is an exhilarating leap. But do take it. And no parachutes.

Lisa Gorton

I like Brendan Ryan’s A Paddock in His Head (Five Islands Press) for its unromantic but meditative poems about family and farming life. Colm Tóibín’s uneasy stories in Mothers and Sons (Picador) stayed in my mind. I also enjoyed two memoirs with oddly compatible names: Craig Sherborne’s Muck (Black Inc.) and Richard Wollheim’s Germs: A memoir of childhood (Black Swan) – a strange, slant, snobbish account of his parents and their time.

Fiona Gruber

One of the most stimulating books of the year has been Roger Deakin’s Wild Wood: A journey through trees (Hamish Hamilton). As a lyrical excursion into the arboreal realm, it stands alone, being part travelogue, part nature writing, part history and art history, and, in the best, non-preachy sense, a very spiritual work. From rambles around Britain and Europe to the central Australian desert, and tall yarns in Leatherarse Gully, the Victorian goldfield’s home to artist John Wolseley, the book will make a tree-hugger out of everyone who reads it. The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser, also features forests, in this instance the damp dark Gippsland ones. A dog goes missing, chasing a scent, and we go sniffing after lost leads and unreliable tales, from India last century to contemporary Melbourne. Henry James is a strong influence, especially his engagement with haunting and the haunted. Subtle and mysterious.

Barry Jones

William Empson achieved high recognition as a critic with his early work Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), lived and worked in China and Japan, and for the BBC, and was an acclaimed poet with a turbulent private life. The second volume of John Haffenden’s biography, William Empson: Against the Christians (OUP), nearly 800 pages long, may have repelled potential readers through its sheer prolixity, but the story is fascinating, funny, touching and horrifying by turns. J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (Text) has had wonderful British reviews, grudging ones here, but it made the hairs on my neck stand up because it reinforced deep reflections about creativity, aesthetics, human relationships and making sense of the world. Peter Temple, like Coetzee a transplanted South African, is a formidable novelist, masquerading as a crime writer. The Broken Shore (Text) is a dark saga of life and violence in Victoria’s Western district. The New York poet, translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger, author of What Happened Here: Bush chronicles (Verso), has a Pascalian gift for expressing complex concepts in a few paragraphs, with laser-like penetration.

Gail Jones

Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave (University of Chicago Press) was one of my delights of 2007. It opens with an account of his visit to Benjamin’s grave at Port Bou in 2002, his childhood in Sydney, essays invoking Bataille and Mauss to think through his own ethnographic experiences. This is virtuosic writing, consistently interrogative of the weirdness of our humanity. More sober, but no less inspiring, Susan Sontag’s At the Same Time (Hamish & Hamilton), essays and speeches published posthumously, begins with a moving foreword by her son, David Rieff, who laments that his mother was writing on torture at the very end of her life. Aphoristic, opinionated and passionately intellectual, Sontag’s pieces are bound by her argument that literature is a form of moral reasoning. David Malouf’s The Complete Stories (Knopf) is a deeply inspiring volume; it has been my companion for weeks now, like a persistent dream. Each will remind you of Malouf’s peerless intelligence and the artful declarations with which he enters and retells the world.

Nicholas Jose

In a year in which I’ve read more unpublished fiction than published, a few books have stayed with me, palpable and questioning as other works have faded. Cate Kennedy’s short fiction, in Dark Roots (Scribe), is one. A spirited inventiveness grows from the finely observed details and deeply pondered dilemmas of contemporary life in these superbly crafted stories. The capacity of short fiction to get up close to how we live in the world and in our minds was demonstrated by David Malouf last year in Every Move You Make, which is splendidly reprised in company with the author’s lifetime’s practice of the form in The Complete Stories. On a larger canvas, Sorry (Vintage), by Gail Jones, has an audacity of narrative approach – stark, economical, figurative – that I found liberating and moving.

John Kinsella

Some superb poetry titles in the English language came out around the world in 2007. To my mind, the most lyrically investigative and dynamic was American poet Peter Gizzi’s The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press). British poet Sean O’Brien’s Forward Prize-winning volume of poems The Drowned Book (Picador) is a model of technical virtuosity and understated elegiac intensity. Locally, I have no hesitation in pointing to Gabrielle Everall’s Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys (privately published with assistance from ArtsWA), which, as I said in a brief preface to the book, is a masterpiece of poetic narrative unlike any other published in Australia: ‘It turns pornography into love and love into pornography.’ David Brooks’s poems in Urban Elegies (Island Press) resonate with an imagistic intensity that keeps them on the edge of perception long after reading. For a poetic tour de force to take us truly out of our intellectual safety zone, try J.S. Harry’s enigmatic Not Finding Wittgenstein (Giramondo), ‘starring’ Peter Henry Lepus (‘more-over, a rabbit’). Finally, a book I edited and introduced, but feel so strongly about as a significant title that I should mention it, is Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s powerful Just Like That and Other Poems (Fremantle Press). Though her work has appeared in major anthologies, this is the first time that Papertalk-Green’s compelling and direct poetry has been collected in book form.

James Ley

Paddy O’Reilly’s first novel, The Factory (ASP), was good, but her short story collection, The End of the World (UQP), is even better. Beautifully crafted and often very funny, O’Reilly’s stories have a distinctive aesthetic, capable of moving fluently from some amusingly offbeat premises to genuine pathos. Having just read Michelle de Kretser’s new novel, The Lost Dog, which riffs smartly on everything from cultural identity to art and literature, I am inclined to rank her among the best stylists in the country. Her satirically barbed observations of Melbourne’s inner-city artistic community are deadly. This year I also belatedly discovered the work of the American writer Richard Powers. His latest novel, The Echo Maker (Heinemann), is a brilliant meditation on the elusive and fragile thing that is human consciousness and a work of understated emotional depth. Finally, Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (Fourth Estate) is a compelling work of fiction based on the experiences of a real Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achek Deng. In marked departure in tone from his earlier work, Eggers writes in the voice of Achek and crafts an exciting story that is also an affectionate and appealing study in character.

Lyn McCredden

Four books in 2007 will remain with me: Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (Black Inc.) and Geoff Page’s Lawrie & Shirley (Pandanus) are described as ‘a novel in verse’ and ‘a movie in verse’, respectively. True, Fredy Neptune was first published in 1998, but reissued in 2007. It is a magnificent, demotic, sprawling projection of human spirit in mongrel Australian form. Out into the anarchic world during and between the world wars goes unforgettable, mythic Fredy. Lawrie & Shirley is Australian in a totally different way, a witty, poignant story of love – its embarrassments and its hunger – at an ‘advanced’ age. A must read for (brave) baby boomers. Aileen Kelly’s The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983–2006 (John Leonard Press) is quiet, intense and observant. And so to The Lost Dog. Through the tiny, unexceptional details of ordinary creatures and things, Michelle de Kretser presents us with a profound and moving meditation on contemporary Australian life.

Peter Mares

Among the non-fiction titles that I read in the course of my radio work this year, a standout was Judith Ajani’s The Forest Wars (MUP). The arguments in Australia’s forest debate are well rehearsed. Ajani brings a new perspective, analysing the changing economic structure of the timber industry and concluding that plantations can replace native forests to provide Australia with wood and paper products. Equally thought-provoking is Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved: Markets, power and the hidden battle for the world food system (Black Inc.). Patel’s hourglass metaphor for the operation of the global food system is compelling: large numbers of farmers at the bottom produce food for large numbers of consumers at the top, while in between, a handful of corporations reap power and the profit on the route from farm to table. Finally, veteran Tasmanian writer Geoffrey Dean excels at the unfashionable art of the short story. Dean’s seventh collection, Under the Mountain (Esperance Press), is a series of chronologically and thematically linked stories that provide an engaging account of growing up in Hobart on the slopes of Mt Wellington.

Brenda Niall

It might be enough to choose my best reading from collections of newly published letters. I began the year with Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (ed. Peter Sussman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and I am ending it with Selected Letters of Ted Hughes (ed. Christopher Reid, Faber). Hefty volumes, both of them, but their emotional range, their energy and their distinctive voices put them at the top of my list. There is more in Jessica Mitford’s experience than the overworked story of the six wayward daughters of a dotty English peer. Nor should Ted Hughes be seen only in the dark shadow of Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Mitford’s letters reveal an observant witness of social change with an irresistible comic sense. Hughes, as poet, husband, lover, father and friend, is his own most severe and eloquent critic. Bryony Cosgrove’s finely edited selection from the letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright, Portrait of a Friendship (MUP), gives both sides of a correspondence and a fascinating interplay of personality.

Peter Porter

My four choices are all Australian poetry books. First, David Malouf’s Typewriter Music (UQP), in which the master of what goes on inside the mind of cultured classicists returns to poetry, with scalpel-precise elegies and anatomies. In J.S. Harry’s Not Finding Wittgenstein, the Mental Traveller takes us to both Iraq and the Wonderland of Philosophers. There is joy all round as poetry clears its desk of the detritus of two hundred years. In Les Murray’s The Bi-Plane Houses (Black Inc.), something happens to the syntax from time to time, but it contains one immaculate poem, ‘Bright Lights on Earth’. Next is Robert Gray’s Nameless Earth (Carcanet). Gray’s seeing is microscopic, but now his feeling has become barometric. The language settles down like an entry in Linneaus. Besides poetry, I enjoyed Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian opera (University of Chicago Press). Gossett is a professor as much at home in the opera house, the rehearsal room and the intendant’s office as he is in a university library. This is a splendid rebuke to all who find nineteenth-century Italian opera just melodrama with warbling added.

Angus Trumble

This year I was moved by two books which demonstrate that classical studies are flourishing more than ever: Denis Feeney’s analysis of the fractured state of Greco-Roman chronology, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient time and the beginnings of history (University of California Press), and Richard Sorabji’s engrossing Self: Ancient and modern insights about individuality, life, and death (University of Chicago Press). Both shed powerful shafts of new light on the later Roman world. Easily the most exciting exhibition catalogue was Patinir (Museo del Prado), a brilliant effort in Madrid to reconstruct, from only twenty-nine panels, the life’s work of Joachim Patinir, a sparsely documented early sixteenth-century Flemish painter whose finest pictures clearly identify him as the epoch-making grandfather of European landscape. Closer to home, Philip Jones’s Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield Press) is a model of scholarship in what is nowadays called ‘material culture’, and deserves to be published as widely as possible outside Australia.

Shirley Walker

Two novels stood out for me. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach is a breathless account of the wedding night of two young innocents. The woman is pathologically terrified by physical intimacy; her husband is inexperienced and eventually affronted. McEwan retraces the previous evolution of each character within a tightly crafted drama of regret. In Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin), three striking characters – an ageing German historian, a feisty female Aboriginal academic and an Aboriginal elder, the sole inheritor of the story of a massacre – converge in a desolate Queensland mining town: marvellous characters, dynamic interaction and a steady view of history. Attracted as ever to life writing, I appreciated Patrick Morgan’s B. A. Santamaria: Your most obedient servant: Selected Letters 1938–1996 (Miegunyah Press/SLV), best read in conjunction with Brenda Niall’s wonderful ABR review/memoir in March 2007.

Geordie Williamson

Muck, the second volume of Craig Sherborne’s memoir of childhood, boyhood, youth, not only measures up to his first, Hoi Polloi (Black Inc.), but builds on it. Together they represent the best work of Australian life writing since Clive James contemplated the view from his Kogarah dunny. Like James, Sherborne traces an evolution: from miniature anarch to priggish teenage egotist. He, too, wrings humour from Rousseauesque moments of moral midgetry. And like James, Sherborne makes poetry from the poetic anti-matter of antipodean suburbia. But where James maintains a tender contempt for his younger avatars, Sherborne just has contempt. Sherborne’s earlier portrait of his parent’s arriviste’s progress through 1970s Sydney was merciless. In Muck, which nudges our hero’s story forward a few years, the passage of time has given their pantomime of class a tragic gloss. Here, it is up to the son and heir to take centre-stage and heckle himself. The result is a heartbreak disguised as a piss-take.

From the horror of ‘traumascapes’ – the eponymous subject of Tumarkin’s first book (2005) – to the noble quality we call courage is one of those small steps that equate to giant leaps. Having spent a long time thinking and writing about the devastation caused to particular sites during the harsher episodes of recent history, Tumarkin has moved on to the human sentiments associated with those acts. Courage is not the only one, but because it appears so positive and universal it is a prime subject for interrogation, even deconstruction. (Yes, Maria, I know this is the theory-speak you disdain, but like the language of science, its vocabulary can lead to clarification as well as obfuscation.)

There is only one verse in the Koran that deals with suicide. Its content seems pretty clear: ‘Do not kill yourselves’ (4:29). Of course, the verse has not stopped waves of Muslim suicide bombers in the past twenty-five years. Nor has it stopped a smattering of extremist Muslim clerics from using the Koran to promote or justify suicide missions. Their somewhat contorted reasoning usually goes like this: the Koran promises an afterlife to so-called martyrs who die ‘struggling in the way of God’ (2:154); therefore, those who are killed in Allah’s way are not considered dead but ‘are alive, are provided sustenance from their Lord’ (3:169). Thus, suicide bombers have not transgressed verse 4:29 but are martyrs who have died defending Islam and will live on in the afterlife.

That some Muslim scholars have been able to twist themselves out of the prohibition on suicide hardly comes as a surprise. All canonical texts can bend to interpretation; this is, in part, what keeps them alive for so long. The Koran – like the Old Testament, the New Testament or the works of Marx or Shakespeare – has formed the basis for countless competing interpretations. Does ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ promote vengeance or just compensation? Did Das Kapital lead to Pol Pot? Can The Taming of the Shrew be rescued from its misogyny?

Consider the plight of the established novelist. The readership (that’s us) comes to recognise a particular style, a particular set of themes, and presumably that is one of the reasons to go on buying the writer’s books. Should the next book always be in the same mould – in which case we might become a tad bored – or should there be something quite out of character, causing us to gasp with disbelief? After all, it is usually disastrous when a diva starts singing popular songs. Christopher Koch’s new book sets up these kinds of tension. Something new about what is remembered? It is his old territory: the narrative starts in Tasmania, where the light is different and the telegraph posts go marching off across the terrain; it lands in various parts of Asia, much of it seen indoors or by night; fetches up in Canberra; and ends prospectively in India. There is acknowledgment of the allure of fascination itself, of innate qualities such as grace, the special efficacy of the spirit, intuitive recognition of the other, and the twin soul; and other circlings around matters of deep consequence. At times, so driven is Koch to press his intimations of ‘the mysterious zone beyond the ordinary that can never be netted in words’ that he forgets his own warning, and tumbles over into something like self-parody: everything becomes grist to the mill, even cicadas: ‘ancient heralds of mysterious rebirth, [they] had emerged from their underworld to dominate the day until now, only subsiding when the sun went, as though cicadas and the earth were linked on the same astral journey.’ He does not often exaggerate his material like this; but he is intent on elevating it.

Western Australian Crown Law Department, 1951; Assistant Crown Prosecutor, 1954; Chief Crown Prosecutor, 1959; WA Solicitor-General, 1969–79; High Court judge, 1979–89; Royal Commissioner on WA Inc., 1991–92; President, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (‘HREOC’), 1990–97.

Australian Student Christian Movement, 1946–49; Secretary, WA Council of Churches, 1951–56; Moderator, WA Presbyterian Church, 1964–65; Moderator, WA Uniting Church, 1977–79; President, Uniting Church in Australia, 1989–91.

These are parallel careers, and Antonio Buti’s biography of Ronald Wilson (1922–2005) is much concerned with the connections and contradictions between them. The book blazes into life whenever it touches on Aborigines: its framing device is the 1997 Reconciliation Conference in Melbourne, when delegates turned their backs on John Howard and what the Herald Sun called his ‘hectoring rant’. Wilson regretted their incivility, yet wondered whether Howard’s behaviour gave it justification. In 1969 a speech by ‘Nugget’ Coombs inspired Wilson to join the New Era Aboriginal Fellowship, and later to help establish the WA Aboriginal Legal Service. In 1985 he worked for three weeks as a builder’s labourer on an Aboriginal community centre. Four years later, he visited communities in Arnhem Land. Then there are the apology stories: Wilson’s ‘pilgrimage to Mapoon’ in 1990, to apologise for church acquiescence when the settlement was dispersed in 1963 to make way for bauxite mining, and his joinder with Dorothy McMahon in apologising for her momentary brusqueness towards Aborigines at a World Council of Churches assembly in 1991.

The climax, of course, is Bringing Them Home, the 1997 report of the HREOC inquiry into the ‘stolen generation’, chaired by Wilson along with Mick Dodson. The report and its aftermath take up three chapters, almost a quarter of the book. We are reintroduced to the personal stories that made the report so harrowing, to the government’s attempts to discredit it and to the feral irrationality of its media critics. The report’s call for a national apology is defended and reaffirmed. Protestations about unwarranted assumption of ‘guilt’ are rebutted by Wilson’s insistence that the point is not ‘guilt’ but ‘redemption’: ‘The only people who have talked about guilt are those who oppose the reconciliation process.’ Buti allows this material to speak for itself, but sometimes shifts his ground. He dismisses terminological quibbles about the phrase ‘stolen generation’ by adopting Robert Manne’s point: this is simply the term that Aborigines ‘have embraced for their collective tragedy’. Yet Buti later concedes that the word ‘stolen’ was indeed problematic: ‘separated’ might have been better.

So, too, with the conclusion that the policy satisfied the legal definition of ‘genocide’: the forcible removal of children ‘with intent to destroy’ a racial group. At first, Buti carefully explains the basis for that conclusion, quoting policy statements from the 1930s to demonstrate that the crucial element of ‘intent to destroy’ was indeed present. Later he retreats to Manne’s more nuanced position: that a policy aimed primarily at children of mixed descent does not itself entail racial destruction; that any direct evidence of intention is limited to the 1930s; and that even then the intention stopped short of effective implementation. Eventually, both Buti and Wilson appear to have accepted Mick Dodson’s view that the charge of ‘genocide’ was a strategic mistake.

The chapters on Wilson’s legal career are inevitably less compelling. Typically, the focus is on possible inconsistencies with Wilson’s commitments to Christianity and human rights (especially Aboriginal rights). For example, was his prosecution of criminal cases too ruthless? If so, was this because of his religious zeal and self-righteousness, or because he kept religion and law in separate compartments? The argument focuses in particular on three notorious cases: Darryl Beamish, convicted of murder in 1961; John Button, convicted of manslaughter in 1963; and Eric Cooke, hanged in 1964 while persistently confessing to several murders, including those ascribed to Beamish and Button. Attempts to reopen the Beamish and Button convictions in 1964 failed, but in 2002 (for Button) and 2005 (for Beamish) the convictions were finally quashed. Wilson’s role as prosecutor was central to all the original hearings, and his handling of cross-examination and evidence has been criticised on several grounds. Buti reviews the arguments, but leaves us to judge for ourselves.

As solicitor-general in the 1970s, Wilson had to argue before the High Court for ‘states’ rights’ at a time when such arguments could have little success. Buti dwells rather on Wilson’s activities outside the courtroom: his successful insistence that, uniquely, Western Australia should have its own Family Court to administer the Family Law Act; and his leading role in the negotiations that in 1980 secured Commonwealth legislation allowing each state to take control of its own territorial sea, to that extent reversing the practical effect of the High Court decision in the Seas and Submerged Lands Case (1975).

The background of that issue, from 1969 onwards, should have been more fully explained, though one welcomes the story of Wilson’s belief that it all would have worked out differently if only he had raised the issue in 1964. More puzzling is the treatment of Oteri v The Queen (1976), where the Privy Council held that the English Theft Act applied in Western Australian waters. Buti hails this as evidence of Wilson’s success: ‘It was as if Wilson had written the judgment for their Lordships.’ Yet one wonders if this extends to their Lordships’ extraordinary claim that Commonwealth legislative power ‘does not extend to criminal law’. Oteri is usually seen as an embarrassing example of the Privy Council’s ignorance of Australian constitutional law.

As for Wilson’s years as a High Court judge, the main focus is on two cases where his dissenting judgments went against the Aboriginal plaintiffs: Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982) and Mabo v Queensland (No 1) (1988). Buti explains both judgments as founded on ‘legal positivism’ or ‘black letter law’; but this is far too simple.

In Koowarta, Wilson and two other dissenters, including Chief Justice Harry Gibbs, would have held that the Racial Discrimination Act was invalid, on the ground that the Commonwealth’s ‘external affairs’ power, when used to give effect to international treaties, must be limited by respect for ‘states’ rights’. But restricting the constitutional text by importing political values such as ‘state’s rights’ is precisely what positivism forbids. In Koowarta – as in the Tasmanian Dam Case (1983), where Wilson also dissented – ‘positivism’ is more accurately imputed to the majority view. Besides, both Gibbs and Wilson emphasised in Koowarta that the Commonwealth did have power to legislate specifically to protect Aborigines against discrimination. (Wilson, perhaps in a typographical slip, asserted that this was possible even under the ‘external affairs’ power.)

Mabo (No 1) is another story. The eventual recognition of native title in Mabo (No 2) came in 1992, after Wilson had left the High Court (though with his approval). It was while that litigation was pending that the Queensland government, though denying that indigenous peoples had any legal claim to ‘native title’, also enacted legislation purporting to extinguish any such claim if it did exist. The High Court majority (4:3) used the Racial Discrimination Act to hold the extinguishment legislation invalid. Wilson’s dissent used extraordinary logic to argue that extinguishment of indigenous claims did not involve unequal treatment, since such claims were not precisely equivalent to non-indigenous property claims. Buti explains this as settling for ‘formal’ rather than ‘substantive’ equality; but Wilson well understood that distinction, as his later work in HREOC shows. What was involved in Mabo (No 1) was more like insistence on substantive equality, at an irrelevant and inappropriate level.

Again, the real explanation is Wilson’s solicitude for states’ rights. The practical effect of his judgment would simply have been to save state legislation from being overridden by a Commonwealth law – exactly what he achieved, again with tortuous logic but with more politically correct results, as one of the majority in Ansett Transport Industries v Wardley (1980, saving Victorian sex discrimination provisions) and Commercial Radio Coffs Harbour v Fuller (1986, saving NSW environmental law).

The real point is that any assessment of Wilson’s judicial contribution requires a far wider sampling of his diverse and often ingenious judgments – including, at the very least, his critique of Commonwealth ‘tied grants’ in the DOGS Case (1981), and his remarkable change of mind in Baker v Campbell (1983), with its emphasis on the common law as ‘serving the ends of justice’.

The book is uneven. Names are sometimes misspelt (Hal Wootten, Graham Fricke). Dates are sometimes wrong (a prison visit to Cooke was in 1964, not 1963; the Perth ‘stolen generation’ hearings were in 1996, not 1997). Imperfectly executed editorial changes sometimes leave grammatical oddities. The opening chapter, recalling Wilson’s orphaned and impoverished boyhood, fails to capture the poignancy and pathos of the material. Yet the closing account of Wilson’s decline and death, set against the background of Bringing Them Home, is profoundly moving. Like Wilson himself, the book is most powerful when the issues are most important.

The resounding metaphor in The Low Road is that of a bullet wound and ‘the shock waves it sends through the body, often creating a cavity ahead of where the bullet stops. Almost as if the body accommodates the object’s anticipated trajectory and manufactures its very own injury.’ Chris Womersley’s intentions are suitably applicable to this laparoscopic image: to examine the cycle of crime, social alienation and despair, set against an uncanny dystopian landscape.

With a bullet lodged in his stomach, Lee awakes one evening in a seedy room with ‘a bloodshot cast to it’, grimy yellow paint and aluminium window frames; he has been dumped at the ironically named ‘Parkview Motel’. In the room, Lee also finds a suitcase full of cash and Wild, a morphine-addicted doctor, who is cleaning his wound. The men forge an unorthodox connection through their mutual transgressions: Lee, recently released from prison, is being hunted by a gangster associate; Wild, awaiting criminal conviction, has skipped bail. Wild, ill qualified to treat Lee, suggests travelling to the countryside where he knows another, discreet doctor, who can properly attend to Lee whilst supervising Wild’s own drug rehabilitation.

There is much to admire about this bleak novel. The language of Lee is affecting, albeit monosyllabic and vernacular. Womersley is equally impressive in the evocation of multi-sensory imagery: ‘a sound like a knife shredding cabbage.’ The violence, in particular, is powerfully done: Lee flogging a horse to death is a scene of lasting horror. Wild, who could easily have become a feeble and inconsequential character, is portrayed with almost endearing nuances; he is like ‘the car nobody drove anymore’.

The Low Road, though long, is a satisfying journey. It comes as a welcome change from the undistinguished pseudoautobiography lately emerging from some début novels. Only the occasional burst of trite Hobbesean rhetoric taints this impressive work.

Until this morning
I’ve been woken up
by a red wattle bird
flinging himself
at the glass
of my half-open window
calling throatily
with raucous cheek
as he prances the wood
of my balcony rail

As the size of Jennifer Strauss’s two-volume scholarly edition of Mary Gilmore’s verse attests, Gilmore (1864–1962) is one of the most prolific poets in Australian literature. At around 800 pages, Volume 2 complements the first volume (which Vivian Smith reviewed in ABR, February 2006). Together, these two volumes represent the most detailed editing of an Australian poet to date. Rayner Hoff’s bronze statue of Gilmore’s head on the cover signals the consolidation of Gilmore’s reputation in the last thirty years of her life. (In 1933 Gilmore became a life member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers; five years later, she was made Dame of the British Empire.)

The third full-length English-language study of the films of Jane Campion is a book that will probably be of more interest to the dedicated student than to the general reader. The American scholar Kathleen McHugh is a stiff though clear and conscientious writer who takes care to make her research visible and to spell out any possibly unfamiliar ideas. She has the academic knack for seizing upon parallels, oppositions and ironies, and working through their permutations. Writing, for example, of Campion’s early preoccupations with ethnography and surrealism, she notes that ‘the two form a matched set, ethnography setting out to make the strange ... familiar, surrealism endeavouring to make the familiar strange’. Having set forth a handful of ‘reversible’ concepts of this kind, McHugh goes on to apply them to each of Campion’s films in turn: the bulk of the book proceeds chronologically from the early shorts to the recent In the Cut (2003), incorporating extensive plot summary and ‘thick description’.

Dogs’ tails and other trivia

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Daniel Thomas for pointing out errors and inconsistencies where they exist in my book Australian Pastoral: The making of a white landscape (November 2007). In a work of 90,000 words and 600 footnotes, there will inevitably be some errors. However, most of what Thomas says are errors are not. My reference to ‘Lady Jane Franklin’ follows the Australian Dictionary of Biography. ‘Walter Baldwin Spencer’, although often called Baldwin Spencer, follows his biographers and the ADB. ‘James Stuart Macdonald’ is referred to thus in the first reference and then as ‘James Macdonald’ or ‘J.S. Macdonald’. All are correct and hardly hanging offences, but Thomas, who has known me for more than twenty years, spells my own name in two different ways, one wrongly, in his review. ‘Claude Lorraine’ is not a spelling mistake but accepted usage (The Oxford Companion to Art).

Thomas carelessly reproduces errors contained in an earlier review of my book by Frank Campbell. Referring to Campbell’s comments about my discussion of S.T. Gill’s ‘Winter’ picture, Thomas says, ‘Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s’. But the experts agree with me. Appleyard, Fargher and the current director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, in their authoritative S.T. Gill’s The South Australian Years 1839–1852 (1986), say, as I do, that it is a fox’s tail. They note the hunting of dingoes in the colony, but nevertheless state: ‘In this watercolour, Gill portrays a hunter in his pink coat and riding boots with a fox’s brush in hand’. On the dates of Gill’s Months and Seasons, Thomas again follows Campbell. But Gill did not date these pictures, so there is no ‘correct date’. I followed those supplied by the National Library as a condition of reproduction, while pointing out politely in a footnote that I dispute the library’s dating. I state they were ‘almost certainly painted five years earlier’. The National Library has now adjusted the dates in my favour. No one knows when foxes were introduced, but if we did, it wouldn’t settle the matter, as Gill may have followed the conventional iconography of the hunt regardless.

‘Australianisms’, according to Thomas, ‘are misused’. He claims that Shearing the rams ‘is not an “outback” subject’. However, William Moore, in his famous two-volume Story of Australian Art, selects it as one of the ‘most characteristic pictures of outback life’, describing it as ‘typical’. Today, reproductions and tapestries are on display at the Stockman’s Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre in Longreach and at Shear Outback, The Shearers Hall of Fame in Hay, attesting to its popularity as an outback image. The date of the appearance of ‘pastoralist’ to describe a sheep farmer is not relevant as I am talking about the way contemporary historians use the term.

Thomas has made a number of factual errors. He says that I have ‘ignored’ Glover’s Mills’ Plains picture. This is completely incorrect: I discuss its composition on page 86. His dismissive comment, ‘cattle-grazing fails to interest Hoorn’, is particularly odd: I refer to cattle and their grazing no less than forty-three times. I propose new arguments about their depiction, as in the lengthy discussion presented about the bulls in Bushy Park on pages 130–31. This lack of ‘interest’ in cattle-grazing has, according to Thomas, led to my neglect of Nolan. But Nolan was not a major painter of the pastoral, nor is he known to be a painter of grazing cattle. It is disappointing that my substantive and original arguments are not addressed. They have been neglected in favour of dogs’ tails and other trivia.

Jeanette Hoorn, Melbourne, Vic.

Academy Editions of Australian Literature

Dear Editor,

I refer to the call in ‘Advances’ for scholarly editions of Australian literature (October 2007). I remind you that such a library was inaugurated by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, with its Academy Editions of Australian Literature.

The first of twelve titles was published by UQP in 1996: Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. Under the general editorship of Paul Eggert, and with the cooperation of many scholars throughout Australia, a beautifully crafted series of library-shelf-enhancing volumes resulted from the page layout designed by the late Alec Bolton. The series includes Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest and The Getting of Wisdom, edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele; novels by Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under Arms), Marcus Clarke (His Natural Life) and Catherine Martin (An Australian Girl); a volume of colonial plays; Annie Baxter Dawbin’s journal; and the collected verse of Mary Gilmore, in two volumes. Charles Harpur’s poetry and Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils are in preparation.

Details of the project may be found at: www. humanities.org.au/Publications/AEAL/AcademyEditions.htm.

Regrettably, the series will not emulate the Library of America; neither do the volumes meet your inexpensive requirement. Academy efforts to find ongoing government or corporate sponsorship failed, while financial stringency and meagre media notice necessitated small print runs. Evidently, cultural sponsorship fares better in the United States.

John Mulvaney

Honorary Secretary Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1989–96

was all it said

just a tiny message

to let me know

that all the way over there

where she was

and I wasn’t

it was raining

so that if I could

remember rain

remember Wollongong

it would almost be

as if I were there too

with her

both of us sharing

that rain

that rain all day

in Wollongong.

Advance Australia … Where? is such an eye-catching pun on Australia’s national anthem that it is no wonder that it has been used, with slight variations, as the title of at least eight books and pamphlets since World War II. Such publications have tended to express an individual author’s vision for the nation. In contrast, the latest Advance Australia … Where?, written by Hugh Mackay, mainly discusses current trends in public opinion, although it includes a few cautious predictions about the future and a number of suggestions for social reform.

Eighty-four is a good age. To die then is not a tragedy, or at least no more than that the knowledge we must all die is the great human tragedy (some might think the alternative, to live forever, would be an even greater one). Donald Horne does not consider his death a tragedy, in this account of his dying. What pervades this thoughtful book, written by Donald Horne and his wife, Myfanwy Horne, is the sadness that comes from the endings of things; in this case, the ending of the life they shared. They both know the end is inevitable, but it is no less sad for that.

The World of the Book is an offshoot of the State Library of Victoria’s permanent ‘Mirror of the World’ exhibition, which uses major works from the SLV’s collections to present a global history of books and ideas. The exhibition itself is a testament to the depth and diversity of the SLV’s collections, and the book is thus part exhibition catalogue, part ‘Treasures’ book.

In one of the most famous, free-flowing and deceptively careless paragraphs in his second novel, On The Road (1957), Jack Kerouac (1922–69) writes with disarming honesty about his relationship with ‘Dean Moriarty’ (Neal Cassady) and ‘Carlo Marx’ (Allen Ginsberg), each of whom would later become, like Kerouac himself, central figures in the mythology of the ‘Beat Generation’:

Ten years in the making, Matthew Condon’s vibrant modern epic, The Trout Opera, has been worth the wait. It has an expansiveness and generosity of spirit that has become uncommon in Australian fiction (unless we think of an altogether different book, but on a similar scale, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, 2006). Sent in 1996 to report on the slow death of the Snowy River, Condon met the storied old-timer Ron Reid, who in his more than eighty years had rarely left the Dalgety region. From Reid’s yarns came the germ of a novel. Essentially, it is an affectionate and many-stranded variation on that old cultural chestnut in Australia: the search for the original of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’.

Are ambassadors anachronistic these days, or do top-secret cables and personal finesse still outflank headlines and blogs? In his new book, Richard Woolcott, one of Australia’s most experienced former diplomats, quotes a French colleague who believes that ‘we have become a combination of travel agent, messenger boy, and inn keeper’. Yet Woolcott’s autobiography, The Hot Seat (2003), exemplifies historian Charles Webster’s definition of diplomacy: ‘… obtaining the maximum national interest with a minimum of friction and resentment’ – a rather more significant role. Perhaps this is because Ambassador Woolcott’s career spanned most of the second half of the twentieth century (he retired in 1992), when individuals found it easier to make an impact on what he calls ‘probably the world’s second oldest profession’. 

In his poem ‘Reunion’, Mike Ladd takes us back to his old school in Adelaide. Three stanzas recapitulate the journey before another four talk us through the fate of the poet’s former schoolmates. Some of these outcomes are predictably neat: ‘How the wild girl became a matron, / and the prim one, a single mum, at seventeen.’ The ‘cop’s son’ ‘was shot dead in Afghanistan, / a mercenary, picked off by sniper fire’, while ‘the thin and gormless one / made a fortune dealing stocks’. All this and more is prelude to the finale:

Three Companions

It is now thirteen years since OUP Australia published the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (nine years after ‘Whitlam, Edward Gough’ launched the first edition). Peter Pierce, generally welcomed OCAL2 in his ABR review (‘A bountiful companion’, December 1994– January 1995): ‘The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature may be a touch too reverential towards its subject, but has enriched its study.’

OUP tells Advances that it has ‘no plans at this stage for a revision of OCAL’. Let’s hope it isn’t long before one is underway. A major revision of this kind takes two or three years to prepare (OCAL2 runs to 850 pages and more than 3000 individual entries). All reference works, however venerable – and OCAL is indispensable – date fast. Many celebrated and award-winning writers are not represented in OCAL2. Here are just a few of them: Delia Falconer, Richard Flanagan, Raimond Gaita, David Marr, Sonya Hartnett, Gail Jones, Hazel Rowley, Kim Scott, Peter Temple, Christos Tsiolkas, Alexis Wright and, of course, J.M. Coetzee, who didn’t call Australian home in 1994. Then there are the major contemporaries whose oeuvres are discussed in OCAL2, but only up to 1992 or 1993. Think of the recent works of authors such as Peter Carey, Helen Garner, Peter Goldsworthy, David Malouf, Alex Miller, Les Murray and Peter Porter.

If and when OCAL3 does appear, though, it’s a fair bet that it will still close with one ‘Zwicky, Fay’.

The view from America

At least we have a new companion to Australian literature, this time from Camden House, Rochester, New York. The editors are Nicholas Birns (who nominates his favourites books in ‘Best Books of the Year’ on page 18) and Rebecca McNeer, Associate Dean at Ohio Southern University. Unlike the Oxford tome, A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 is not an alphabetical reference work. It is divided into five parts (Identities; Writing across Time; International Reputations; Writers and Regions; Beyond the Canon). There are thirty-two contributors. Peter Pierce, who is now editing The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (for publication in 2008), will review the Birns– McNeer companion in early 2008.

‘Rudd, Kevin’

Happily, OUP Australia has just added to its long list of Australian companions. Neal Blewett reviews The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts) on page 10 of this issue. Doubtless tantalisingly for the editors, OCAP (OUP is fond of acronyms) went to press long before the November 24 federal election. Playing it safe perhaps, they reserved an entry for ‘Rudd, Kevin’. 

The Calibre Prize

Due to the large number of new titles that we wanted to review or briefly note in the summer issue, we have decided to announce the winner of the Calibre Prize – and publish the winning essay – in the next issue. This will appear in February.

Vale Andrea Stretton 1952–2007

We don’t have a surfeit of arts broadcasters in this country, especially on television – not helped by the fact that ABC TV is chary in its coverage of books (literature as burlesque, if you like). Andrea Stretton, who has died suddenly at the age of fifty-five, was a pioneering television presenter of literary news and ideas. Beginning in the 1980s, she co-hosted (with Dinny O’Hearn) The Book Show on SBS television, an influential model that has spawned several literary programs, some informative, some regrettable. From 1998 to 2001 Andrea Stretton presented the ABC TV program Sunday Afternoon. She was artistic director of the 1998 and 1999 Olympic arts festivals. Her warm and equable manner, her high standards of preparation, her wide interests, were much admired.

Danny Boy

ABR is a tiny outfit, with two editors and an office manager (two of whom work part time). Given our modest resources, the contribution our volunteers make is invaluable. This month we salute one of our longest-serving and most popular volunteers, Danny Toner, who heads off in the New Year to his beloved Dublin – to write, to genuflect at every available Samuel Beckett monument, and quite possibly to carouse. The Melbourne office won’t be the same without Danny, who, in addition to editing the magazine with us, has kept us apprised of trends in heavy metal music, Collingwood’s fortunes and the tribulations of the heart. Happily, he will continue to write for us from Ireland.

In one of the most haunting phrases contained in Inside Outside (1992), the Australian Jewish autobiographer Andrew Riemer comments on the persistent sense of loss that still shapes him, many years after his entry to Australia as a child immigrant. He writes, ‘exile seals your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and your sense of loss will permit’. Earlier, Riemer reflects on his longing for a vanished world, ‘a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies’. With the undercutting of his own position, so characteristic of his writing, he writes: ‘Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging ... is shared by many …’ And yet, he adds, the experience of migration ‘brings that predicament into sharper focus than might otherwise be the case’.

Until the last decade, there has been very little serious scholarly interest in Australian book publishing. Indeed, when I began lecturing in this discipline in 2001, there was no historical or contemporary overview that could be recommended to my students beyond the entry in the Australian Encyclopedia. However, with the recent dramatic growth in Communications courses, and spurred on by projects such as the History of the Book in Australia (HOBA), this situation has suddenly changed. UQP has already published two of the three promised HOBA volumes on the history of Australia’s print culture. Now we have, from the same publisher, a new collection of scholarly articles, which is undoubtedly superior to Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946– 2005 (2006), the HOBA volume that dealt inter alia with contemporary publishing. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing is less impressionistic and more systematic in its approach.

Peter Doherty, an Australian biomedical researcher, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996 and accordingly has substantial credibility among members of the international scientific community. This book, however, has been carefully crafted for a more general audience, and might well be enjoyed while sitting (hatted and sunscreened) on a beach. The blurb suggests that the contents provide an entertaining, albeit informative, account of the ways in which natural resources such as air, water and hydrocarbons have been harnessed by human ingenuity. But Doherty has a more serious intent, which he deliberately takes time to unfold. The subtext to his light-hearted explanations of how candles, light bulbs and refrigerators work, and how we use a variety of fuels to heat, cool and light our lives, is that this planet is running out of non-renewable energy sources. He suggests that we need to use brainpower and research to find alternatives sooner, not later, if we are to ensure the survival of our children.

Doherty has a gift for making the complex appear straightforward. In lucid prose, uncluttered by diagrams, he explains how everyday devices, appliances and vehicles are currently powered, and compares today’s fuels with those used in the recent past. Deep-water whaling, for example, owed its raison d’être to the eighteenth-century discovery that whale oil, which burned cleanly and brightly, was a wonderful fuel for domestic lamps. Switching on a modern electric light is, of course, even better. In describing how we survived, worked, travelled and played before we had access to modern energy sources, Doherty’s emphasis is on how technological developments since the Industrial Revolution have resulted in a cleaner, safer and more convenient environment, at least for those of us who live in the developed world. The cost is ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuel reserves, the production of more greenhouse gases, and resulting global warming and political instability.

A devotee of the writings of Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, 1975), Doherty gift-wraps his messages in personal anecdotes. In the main, this approach works well. He is at particular pains to cajole the reader into following the simple chemistry that makes one greenhouse gas different from another. However, it is the crisp vignettes – the regular Saturday testing of the tornado sirens mounted on school houses in Tennessee, or the human deaths that occurred during the European heatwave of 2003 – that best emphasise the lack of control we have over the forces of air, sun, wind and rain. Interspersed through the book are reminders of the havoc that unexpected weather patterns, whether the result of naturally occurring planetary cycles or accelerating man-made climate change, can wreak upon us.

Although Doherty, unashamedly Australian, tells entertaining stories of time spent in Scotland and the United States, his text is anchored in local experiences. Older Australians will enjoy his memories of the ‘Silent Knight’ kerosene-powered refrigerator and his explanation of the workings of the Coolgardie safe; well-travelled Australians will appreciate being reminded of a common refrigerating device in wintry northern climes: the outside window ledge. Some may not share Doherty’s evident enthusiasm for trains, steam engines and turbines, but most will enjoy his accounts of manned flight, from the hot-air balloon to the Concorde. Especially engaging are his tales of the legendary wartime pilots who flew early aircraft such as the Sopwith Camel and the Fokker triplane.

In a discussion of the eagle, a symbol of flight and power that has been used since Roman times and that was co-opted by the Nazis, amongst others, Doherty describes a pivotal personal insight that hit him ‘like a thrown brick’ on a trip to Berlin. The realisation that a sophisticated pre-war populace with a liberal and rational bent had been so strongly influenced by evil orators pushing a divisive and spiteful polemic as to embrace the Holocaust and a global war appalled him. His distrust of present-day rantings by extremists of any description, talk-back radio aficionados and political lobbyists included, is manifest. His strong preference for the gentle art of persuasion is evident in every chapter of this book.

Doherty projects an affable and self-deprecating persona, but he is not afraid to speak his mind. Although he combines moderation with understated scholarship (a bibliography, a glossary and an index are included at the end of the book), his position is clear. Eschewing rhetorical hot air, he makes plain the dangers inherent in burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate. What we are doing is very likely to end badly. Perhaps he hopes that if he can only bring his horses to water, then they will drink. For readers who need no convincing by his arguments, A Light History of Hot Air nonetheless provides a wealth of small pleasures and insights into the workings of the world.

In this novel, Victoria Hammond, an art historian, describes the architecture, painting and music of Naples in the early modern period, and, more generally, excels at what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls ‘thick description’. The context of The Devil and Maria d’Avalos is late sixteenth-century Naples, and the narrative brims with historical specificities. The author’s preface informs us that her novel is based upon a true story: the brutal double murder of Maria d’Avalos and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, the duke of Andria, an honour killing perpetrated by Maria’s husband, Carlo Gesualdo, the prince of Venosa.

Rock’n’roll romanticism can stand in for many things: the sense of lost authenticity, lost freedom, lost youth, the good old days before music was composed by machines and performed by underwear models and all the pubs were turned into gambling venues. The passion, the music, the soul: Venero Armanno’s new novel is about all that, though one of its main faults is that it is always telling you what it is about rather than making you feel it. It is not primarily self-congratulatory – Armanno makes fun of rock wannabes always on the verge of failure – but that note is never far off, and the book still seems to be trying to write its own blurb.

In 1994, I stood at the foot of the mighty Athabasca Glacier in the heart of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. At places more than 300 metres thick, the ice was treacherous, riven by great fissures and studded with rocky debris carried down from the Columbia Icefield, seven kilometres away. We had parked our car outside the chalet, a kilometre or so behind us, and traversed the moraine stretching across the treeless valley. As I waited for a break in the clouds before taking a photograph, it was disconcerting to consider that, one hundred years earlier, my vantage point would have been compressed under tons of slowly flowing glacial ice. Indeed, the glacier then extended beyond the site of the current Chalet carpark. This was my first direct experience of global warming. With such compelling evidence of climate change, it is not surprising that award-winning photo-journalist and environmentalist Gary Braasch begins his book on global warming with matched images of the Athabasca Glacier taken in 1917 by A.O. Wheeler, and in 2005 by Braasch himself.

Ocean Road ruminates on the abrupt demise of a marriage. Narrated by the only child of the union, the account is detailed and poignant. Toby, now a young adult, attempts to settle his parents’ competing claims to his allegiance, and finds himself drawn into the world of their past. Striving to represent his parents impartially, he realises that much of their story is also his. The few years since the collapse of the marriage have brought Toby independence as well as the chance, if not the need, to revisit the events that propelled him into adulthood.

Kevin Gillam is director of music at Christ Church Grammar School, in Western Australia. The musician’s lexicon and mindset permeate Permitted to Fall, revealing a life lived through music, as in ‘Not Clockless’: ‘as a kid, from the back / seat, power lines were staves, sky unplayed.’ The acts of playing and performing music also feature thematically, as in the narrative poem ‘The Possibility of Silence’, in which the protagonist finds consolation and catharsis in the act of playing an instrument: ‘she wanted to be a musician, / took up the cello for its tactility, / warmth, its lacquered song.’ If music is often audible behind the poetry, then silence also features prominently. The book’s opening poem, ‘Veldt’, begins, ‘there are times when silence / is very very loud’. It is a weak start to a poem that builds to its own crescendo of sorts. In ‘Harbour’, music is the antidote to silence: ‘music answering the / silence of the stars.’

Scattered throughout this collection are gloomy love poems. Often these poems feel intimate, sometimes too intimate, giving an impression of sincerity at which Oscar Wilde might cringe. For example, in ‘Earliest Birds’: ‘i was / flamed by you. you were excitement and fury’ and ‘you / fucked and made basil pesto with elegant ur/ gency’. There are self-conscious references to poetics, and even the local politics of poetry in ‘Melbourne Poets’: ‘the Melbourne Poets come in hats – / a swanky fisherman’s number, / trilby with feather, / black beret’ … ‘make rollies for next readings, / clap with fat palms, / read them anyway and / sit at one table’.

In the years before steamships gained supremacy of the oceans, sailing ships became faster and were able, for two decades, to outrun the primitive new technology. This book concentrates on the clippers built in North America and used on the run from Liverpool to Melbourne during this period.

Unlike previous works on the subject, Ralph P. Neale’s book is proudly ‘written from an Australian viewpoint’. Melbourne newspapers have been fruitfully mined for advertisements and reports on the activities of the captains and crews while in port. Neale has also included accounts of the ships’ American builders and Liverpool owners, reckless men who overreached themselves to take advantage of the Victorian gold rush and the Crimean War, and who suffered bankruptcy when business fell off afterwards.

Neale is enthusiastic and makes liberal use of exclamation marks. He is not shy about ascribing similar excitement to contemporary witnesses: ‘When the pilots of the Port Phillip Pilot Service … first saw the Sovereign of the Seas, they must have gasped in admiration,’ he writes. More troubling is the frequent (and unattributed) use of phrases like ‘it has been suggested’ and ‘it is said’. There are some continuity problems with the narrative, often caused by the multiple strands of events that Neale is dealing with. The sentence construction is sometimes clumsy to the point of exasperation.

Neale is clearly a competent artist: his paintings of the ships, as well as useful maps and diagrams, illustrate the book. The glossary is helpful, but omits several terms unfamiliar to landlubbers. Appendices give information about the ships and the major characters. But, despite the huge amount of research involved, one might expect a more careful approach to sources and editing, and some explanation of the author’s credentials, from Australian Scholarly Publications.

Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol, which won the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript, follows a self-professed adolescent ‘monster’ as he dabbles in drugs, crime and violence while peddling ‘The New Punk’ philosophy. The pharmaceutical drug of the title is used by the narrator and his ‘rape squad’ to sedate and assault women.

William Willshire was Officer in Charge of the Native Police in Central Australia from 1884 to 1891, when he was charged with the murder of two Aborigines. He was acquitted, but was regarded by his superiors from then on as something of a liability, ending his career in an uneventful posting in Cowell on the Yorke Peninsula. He wrote three books about his life as an outback hero, glorifying himself as an anthropologist and sentimental champion of the people he had policed with ignorant brutality.

Nettelbeck and Foster allow Willshire to condemn himself by his own words and actions. He was not unusual, of course. As they point out, ‘Some of the worst violence on the Central Australian frontier coincided with Willshire’s tenure as Officer in Charge of the Native Police, but to explain that violence with reference to Willshire alone, as a consequence of his personality, would be a mistake. Willshire was an aberrant personality, egotistical and narcissistic, but these traits better explain the extraordinary nature of the record he left to posterity, than the actions he undertook as a Mounted Constable,’ which ‘had the tacit approval of [his] superiors and were in accord with a well-established frontier tradition.’

It is not known how many Aborigines were killed on this frontier during this period. Contemporary records say about forty-four, but ‘a broader range of evidence suggests a figure closer to 650’. His colleagues were equally violent, but Willshire’s literary activities mean that it is his career which is now being examined and adjudged, with ample justification, as criminal and appalling – though Nettelbeck and Foster are admirably measured, and thus effective, in their expressions of abhorrence: the quoted passage is unusually strong.

Of the many damning revelations contained in this book, the fact that Allan Dulles, the CIA’s longest serving director (1953–61), would assess the merits of intelligence briefings by their weight is among the most startling. Coming in at 700 pages, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is sufficiently hefty to have commanded Dulles’s attention. Were he alive today to read this searing indictment of the institution he did so much to construct, however, it is doubtful that Dulles would find much cause for cheer.

Zygmunt Bauman has a talent for metaphors. When, in the late 1980s, he entered the fray of the modernity/postmodernity debates, he suggested that, while premodernity had been presided over by ‘gamekeepers’ managing a disorderly nature and society, modernity was presided over by ‘gardeners’ obsessed with creating order out of messy reality. In his most recent work, beginning with Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman uses the metaphor ‘liquidity’ to depict modernity’s contemporary phase, in the process leaving behind his previous flirtation with the concept of postmodernity.

As Anthony Elliott explains in the introduction to his new edited volume, The Contemporary Bauman, unlike other protagonists in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s, Bauman had never seen postmodernity as a new historical phase marking the end of modernity, but rather as existing alongside modern strategies of mastery, the dream of purity, the creation of order, and the rejection of uncertainty and ambivalence. With his new writings on ‘liquid modernity’ Bauman confirms that there is no ‘beyond’ to modernity, only a new, lighter phase, less solid, more focused on speed and movement, short-termism and the ongoing revision of all things, including social relations and intimate relationships, institutions, and group and selfidentities. It is characterised by two main features: first, the collapse of any illusion that there will be an end point, any final resting place for society; and second, the deregulation and privatisation of modernising tasks and duties. In ‘liquid modernity’, the state is less concerned with creating and administering societal order; it is left up to individuals to administer and create themselves. The public has been thoroughly privatised.

The Contemporary Bauman gathers together American, European and Australian authors to reflect upon different dimensions of Bauman’s ‘liquid turn’. Elliott places this in the context of Bauman’s general writings, and other essays in the collection also adopt this approach. The nine main essays appear in three thematic parts (‘Liquid Modernity’, ‘Liquid Love’ and ‘Liquid Life’), each of which begins with a selection from the prolific Bauman’s recent books: Liquid Modernity (2000), The Individualized Society (2000), Society Under Siege (2002), Liquid Love (2003), and Wasted Lives (2003). The book ends with Bauman’s own reflections on ‘doing and writing’ sociology, which he tells us is ‘aimed at disclosing the possibility of living together differently, with less misery or no misery: the possibility daily withheld, overlooked or unbelieved’.

Each essay treats Bauman’s ideas seriously, but none is simply homage, and some are sharply critical. Elliott’s first chapter lays the foundations, explaining Bauman’s arguments about ‘societal liquidisation’, which involve both the liquefaction of the largest social structures, including the capitalist system, and of everyday life-worlds, rendered ‘increasingly fluid, fractured, flexible and frail’. Elliott situates Bauman’s more fragmentary and impressionistic forays within the intellectual context of the theories of Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Richard Sennett and Cornelius Castoriadis. In what he terms a sympathetic critique, Elliott raises issues concerning the overuse of the liquid metaphor, thus missing the complexity of Western modernity and major distinctions between First and Third Worlds, North and South, and the postcolonial. In a different vein, Larry Ray strongly criticises Bauman for being too metaphorical in his thinking and for neglecting sociological evidence. Iain Wilkinson accuses Bauman of failing to develop a language appropriate to human suffering. Janet Sayers, in an essay on the manic individualism and consumerism emphasised in Liquid Love, returns to psychoanalysis in order to better understand this social ill.

Other essays in this collection are far more appreciative and suggest the deep insights and continuities of Bauman’s work. In one of the most interesting contributions, Michael Hviid Jacobsen traces the movement of utopian thinking within Bauman’s work since the 1960s. Charles Lemert and Makenna Goodman, in their elegant essay, alert us to the fact that liquids always have the capacity to return to solids, and also that Bauman’s work could be usefully supplemented by a consideration of ‘haunting’, of the ghostly presences that follow us as we live, in the present, the reconstructed social structures of the past.

Keith Tester, stressing the influence of literature on Bauman’s sociological thinking, points to the powerful irony pervading his work. He makes a distinction between the ‘sociological imagination’ (C. Wright Mills) that Bauman has in abundance, and doing ‘proper’ sociology, which, ironically enough, can be carried through systematically by people who lack a sociological imagination. Tester emphasises Bauman’s consistent commitment to a sociological imagination that involves respectfulness towards ordinary humanity, and outrage at human suffering and at that which humiliates, being a constant irritant to the powers that be and to the way things are, and being guided by a concern to ‘emancipate the ambiguous human adventure from the constraints of common sense, power and fashion’.

Writing about Bauman’s take on gender and sexuality, Ann Branaman points to the important distinction between the tendencies that he illustrates, and the more prosaic realities of everyday life where gender and sexual norms are not necessarily up for grabs in the way that liquid modernity might suggest. Poul Poder makes a similar criticism when discussing the world of ‘flexible work’, preferring to see Bauman’s account as pointing to possible futures rather than contemporary realities.

Bauman, who has recently turned eighty, continues to develop his oeuvre at a time when most other people wind down their careers. Provocative, stimulating. Bauman as a thinker keeps moving. The Contemporary Bauman is an excellent collection for the reader wanting to know about this latest stage of Bauman’s career.

This marvellous first novel may be historical fiction, but its themes and concerns are by no means limited to the past. Sara Knox interweaves questions of gender and identity, sexuality, class and the overarching issue of morality in times of war.

England during World War II proves the perfect setting for exploring these issues, and for the relationships at the heart of the novel. Olive and Evelyn grew up together in rural Australia, along with Evelyn’s brother Duncan. The trio are close-knit, but Olive and Evelyn share a curiously close bond, peppered with hints and innuendo that grow in frequency and intensity as the novel develops. The unresolved sexual tension underlying much of the action, not just between the two women, but threaded through various relationships, is cleverly done. Knox keeps the reader guessing throughout; her finely directed barbs, subtlest of nuances and sudden revelatory flashes show her to be a mistress of the art of literary flirting: ‘The awful situation in Europe and the friend she’d never been able to manage merged in [Olive’s] mind: both invited things to happen that were exceptional to the rule; both were bound to be a source of compunction where she was concerned.’

The first two numbers of the Australian Journal of French Studies (AJFS) (Vol. XLIV, No. 1, 2007 and Vol. XLIV, No. 2, 2007, edited by Brian Nelson and Françoise Grauby, $25 pb, 83 pp and 99 pp) for 2007 reflect a long-standing policy of mixing miscellaneous collections of essays with numbers focused on a specific theme. In this instance, No. 1 offers six pieces on a variety of subjects, which provide a good illustration of the scope and complexity of what French studies mean today. Subjects covered include the traditional high-literary genres of poetry, theatre and novel, but also detective fiction and cinema. And the field reaches into the cultures of French-language communities beyond France, as in Etienne Beaulieu’s study of the iconic Canadian film-maker Pierre Perrault.

The latest issue of Meanjin (Vol. 66, No. 3, 2007: On Crime and Law, edited by Ian Britain $24.95 pb, 233 pp) is excellent. Ian Britain and his co-editor, Jennifer Digby, have assembled a group of learned contributors to address the theme of ‘Crime and Law’. The interaction between their wide range of experiences and orientations – professional, personal, poetic – makes the journal a fascinating read. The essays are strong, diverse and engaging.

Justice Michael Kirby’s affecting meditation on the significance of the 1957 Wolfenden report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution is both an erudite professional opinion and a personal account of how devastatingly the law can impinge on individual liberty in the name of religious morality. Despite the forceful recommendations of the report, widespread law reform on the decriminalisation of homosexuality was slow to occur. Australia only began to see legislative change on this issue as a part of Don Dunstan’s reforms in South Australia, in 1975. Drawing upon the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Kirby argues that ‘criminal law, with its heavy-handed punishments, stigma and shame, [is] not to be deployed on the basis only of scriptural texts and private sensibilities’.

There has been talk recently about the loss of regionalism in Australian literature and culture, and about the decline of Australian literature generally, but these two novels suggest that not only is Australian fiction flourishing but it is finding new ways to engage with the cultures of the region. They represent innovative interactions between Australia and Asia, for a popular audience.

Lian Hearn’s Heaven’s Net Is Wide is the fifth book in the Tales of the Otori series. It is a prequel, bringing the narrative full circle by telling of the upbringing of Shigeru Otori, the inheritor of an embattled clan who must face a cruel and despotic opponent as well as treachery among his family and friends. The novel, which will appeal to fans of the series, fully develops the background to the main trilogy and is deeply woven into the broader narrative.

Pam Macintyre

Top of my list is Sonya Hartnett’s bitter-sweet story of love and loss, The Ghost’s Child (Viking), for its emotional punch, mixture of realism, fairytale and magic realism, and exquisite prose. Also written with emotional clout is Bill Condon’s witty and frank Daredevils (UQP). Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin), by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, gives sheer pleasure in a double-double writing act: Earls writes the wannabe Matthew Reilly contributions to a joint school writing task, while Sparrow has Cat channelling Jane Austen. The consequences of the uneasy school and personal relationships between the two, their increasingly intertwined lives, and the story they create are hilarious.