Sometimes the best place to get a true picture of what Peter Carey is really thinking about his writing is in the international press coverage, in the slipstream of a book’s reception, when he is at least partly preoccupied with the next writing challenge. At such times, Carey’s sensitivities are vulnerable to exposure, as they were in an interview with Robert Birnbaum in an American regional newspaper after he won his second Booker Prize, for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey is speaking about readers and reviewers (whom he reluctantly acknowledges are also readers). Australian reviewers, he explains to his interviewer, are usually just journalists and therefore subject to literalness and plot summary, an approach that doesn’t work with his fiction.

Carey has always claimed to write for his Australian readers first and foremost, but you can’t help wondering if he is out of touch not only with the quality of Australian reviewing but with the fidelity his readers may show him. Expectations that are not met can quickly turn away the most loyal fan, one perhaps beginning to tire of the conversation they’ve been having with his characters and character types. Are Carey’s readers ready for yet another misunderstood misfit-genius from Down Under?

This novel is about the redemption of a man believed to have committed murder. E. Annie Proulx, in her discontinuous novel Postcards (1993), sympathetically traces the tragic life of a protagonist who raped and accidentally killed his lover. Heather Rose poses a similar ethical question about a protagonist who was a real person; she imagines a post-murder existence for the infamous Lord Lucan, who in 1974 was accused of murdering his children’s nanny and of violently attacking his estranged wife.

Rose’s fugitive narrates his story himself. It is almost twenty years since the inquest in which Lucan was declared guilty; since then, he has lived mostly in Tasmania. Renamed, cosmetically altered and feigning an identity as a Scotsman, sixty-year-old ‘Henry Kennedy’ has suffered great remorse for his past behaviour. His reform has meant leading the life of an ascetic and enduring harsh physical labour to achieve a hard earned self-sufficiency. He has acquired professional skills as a builder, has formed friendships with decent people and, recently, has learned to love the Vietnamese-Australian woman with whom he lives.

Much of the narrative happens in flashbacks, but we are teased with accumulating snippets of information about Lucan’s guilt or innocence. How can we respond to this character tortured by self-reproach but unable to cease deceiving those who love and trust him? Can love, hard work, and respect for others redeem us? the novel asks. And how is self-forgiveness possible? Ironically, when Lucan falls ill with cancer, the question of redemption shifts from ‘Kennedy’ to focus upon Lili and her past during the Vietnam War. This is an excellent novel, but it is somewhat overloaded. Its peripheral stories could be fully developed in their own right, but the central question Rose poses succeeds in moving the reader.

Clive James once said that the problem with being famous is that you begin by being loved for what you do and end up thinking that you are loved for who you are. Quite possibly, it is to avoid such a fate that James has returned in the past few years to the thing that got him noticed in the first place – writing dazzling prose. Absenting himself from the Crystal Bucket, he has become once more a full-time writer, popping up in the Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review with gratifying regularity. The title of his latest collection of essays refers to its first and final pieces, both of which deal with the crucial difference between celebrity and recognition, a subject currently dear to his heart, partly for the reason outlined above, partly because the current media is saturated with noisy nonentities. Since James is no doubt frequently recognised by people ignorant of the very achievement for which he really deserves recognition, his thoughts on the subject are clearly invaluable.

Shadowboxing is a collection of discrete short stories charting the arduous journey of the narrator, Michael Byrne, from childhood to fatherhood. Living in the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Carlton, Richmond, and Fitzroy in the 1960s was for many a tough proposition – and the Byrne family is no exception. Their household is headed by an embittered alcoholic whose violent tendencies are a source of constant dread. Money is always tight, and the family’s grip on any sort of security or comfort is invariably tenuous. Yet when the stories have been told, what we are left with is not a litany of woe but rather powerful examples of resilience and resourcefulness provided by the inhabitants of these impoverished communities.

The title is a fitting one, referring not only to the environment in which young Michael was raised, but also to the consequences of pursuing answers as an adult amongst the tangle of childhood memories. In ‘The Lesson’, Michael’s father provides the eight-year-old with a bloody initiation into the ways of the ring. But the ring is no match for the aggression that dwells in these parts. Violence flourishes in the local streets and homes. And it casts a long shadow.

The strength of these stories is attributable to the skilful blending of the child-narrator’s vulnerability and innocence with the adult-narrator’s sense of compassion. This affects not only the later stories where Michael cares for his derelict father but also the manner in which the earlier stories are presented. These are stories whose universal themes are brought to the fore by lucid prose that, in bearing unblinking witness to hardship, sows the seeds of poetry, if not grace.

Andrew McGahan’s first novel, Praise (1992), concludes with its narrator, Gordon Buchanan, deciding – perhaps accepting is a better word – that he will live a life of contemplation. This final revelation is significantly ambivalent. The unresponsive persona Gordon has assumed throughout the novel is something of an affectation. On one level, he is playing the stereotypical role of the inarticulate Australian male, but his blank façade is also defensive; it is a cover for his sensitivity. For Gordon, life is less overwhelming in a practical sense than in an emotional sense. His true feelings are a garden concreted over for ease of maintenance. He feels that the defining quality of human relationships is doubt, and this doubt confounds expression. ‘I’m never certain of anything I feel about a person,’ he says, ‘and talking about it simplifies it all so brutally. It’s easier to keep quiet. To act what you feel. Actions are softer. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, and emotions should be interpreted in lots of different ways.’

There is perhaps a hint of preciousness about Gordon’s inability to lead a conventional life, a touch of the egotism that lurks behind displays of humility and sensitivity, but there are religious overtones to his decision as well. There is something monastic about his retreat into indolence. Idealism drives him to embrace an ascetic existence. His rejection of materialism, of the culture of aspiration, is a calling. His life to that point has been aimless and self-destructive, governed by a moral confusion which has its roots in a vague but pervasive sense of guilt. Attempting to understand this sense of his own culpability is, he comes to realise, his first duty. Thus he is compelled to live a life that is by conventional standards a failure, but which takes self-knowledge as its ultimate goal.

Praise stakes out the emotional terrain for McGahan’s subsequent novels. The central characters in each of his four books – Gordon in Praise and 1988 (1995), George Varney in Last Drinks (2000), and the nine-year-old William in The White Earth (2004) – share an essential passivity. All of them are carried along by circumstance. They exist in a state of perpetual unease, do not fully understand the situations in which they find themselves, but lack the capacity or the will to remove themselves or take charge of their lives. They cannot act, only react. Even Last Drinks, which is generically a crime thriller, depicts George’s low-level involvement in the corruption of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland as almost inadvertent. His investigation into the murder of his former friend is driven less by any desperate need to uncover the truth than by George ‘responding, reacting, running’.

This is fundamental to the way McGahan’s narratives work. They move, in a conventional manner, from innocence to experience, from ignorance to knowledge. The process of revelation drives them forward. In the course of each novel, the central character is reluctantly introduced to his failings and his personal burden of guilt. In each case, this guilt is symbolised as a kind of disease: in Praise it is, appropriately, sexually transmitted, although Gordon’s girlfriend Cynthia is also afflicted with terrible eczema; in 1988, McGahan smites Gordon with boils; in Last Drinks, alcoholism is the defining affliction; while The White Earth’s William suffers from an undiagnosed ear infection for the duration of the novel.

With the exception of Last Drinks, in which all the major protagonists are lapsed Catholics, this guilt can be interpreted as a secular phenomenon. It is catholic with a small ‘c’ – a universal affliction that is bequeathed to McGahan’s characters by being thrust into specific social and cultural contexts. They are forced to enter into that state of emotional confusion which is the inevitable consequence of interacting with other people. This is why a state of blissful ignorance is unsustainable. It ultimately rests upon a denial of the fact that an action – which might also take the form of a decisive moment of inaction – can have repercussions which go beyond those intended. Actions might be ‘softer’ than words, but they have real consequences. The failure to accept any personal culpability shuts a person off from his common stake in humanity, something that is ultimately more corrosive than any direct confrontation with the reality of his moral responsibilities, however unsettling this may be.

This aspect of McGahan’s fiction is of interest in part because, since the insular and apolitical Praise, his novels have taken an overtly political turn. David Marr has complained that few recent Australian novels ‘address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live’, but McGahan’s work stands as a notable exception. Each of his novels, post-Praise, has addressed a specific, defining moment of cultural conflict from Australia’s recent history. And when, in June 2005, he was presented with the Miles Franklin Award for The White Earth, McGahan expressed sentiments very unlike those of his passive protagonists, sentiments that suggested that he saw the novelist’s cultural role in political terms. ‘I think there is a sense of something big coming in Australian art,’ he told the ABC. The nation, he argued, is ‘on the verge of something very dark and ugly politically, and in response to that, the arts always flourish under that repression and react against it in outrage and protest’.

Andrew McGahan at the Miles Franklin Literary Award ceremony, 2005 (photograph supplied)

Writing politicised literature can be a treacherous business. It is not the first task of a work of prose fiction to act as a vehicle for a narrow political message. Novels that attempt this are regularly disfigured by their sense of moral self-importance. Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars (1998), for example, is so distorted by its politics that it develops, absurdly, into a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, in which a naïve young man discovers that he is right about everything. There is a strong tendency in a work that takes sides in some specific political controversy for it to leach the humanity from those characters who represent the unfavoured viewpoint, and to paint them as fools and knaves. Even the best-intentioned narrative inevitably warps reality to conform to its agenda to some extent, but when this is crudely done it stifles the dissonance that is the lifeblood of fiction. The novel shrinks into itself, starts to believe in the imperviousness of its own rhetoric, and ends up being effective only if it tells you exactly what you want to hear. This renders its fictional qualities redundant: Perlman wrote a novel, but everything he had to say might have been adequately expressed in a terse letter to the editor of The Age.

Not all politicised literature needs to be so specifically focused. W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, first published in 1921, is a great poetic expression of political pessimism, striking in its prescience about the violence that was to engulf Europe in the decades that followed. Yet it says little to anchor itself to a specific time and place. Indeed, it is threatening in large part because it is so vague. Its symbolism – the widening gyre, the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem – is unnerving but indefinite, evoking a chaotic vision in which ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ As a political statement, the poem makes no attempt to reason or argue: the apocalyptic atmosphere does all the work. It is a perfect example of the manipulative power of emotive rhetoric. It strips away the complexities of its historical situation to leave a sense of pure anxiety. The memorable lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’ are stirring because they arouse a feeling of recognition. They appeal to the awareness of our own weakness, the feeling of one’s smallness set against the world’s confusing vastness. They remind us of how little we are able to influence the world, and of the discomfort of hearing others arguing vehemently for ideas we find abhorrent. And that is their trick: they flatter you into agreement. No one has ever read Yeats’s lines and felt they were among the ‘worst’. Like a clever piece of propaganda, the poem appeals to a feeling of disquiet that is already within. It draws us alongside the poet in that ‘centre’ which ‘cannot hold’. Poet and reader thus become one in their gloomy but impotent moral superiority, united against the chaos of the wider world and the general wickedness of others, a wickedness from which the poem absolves us through the act of recognition itself.

A poem with a political edge can, of course, be quite specific but still be misunderstood or appropriated in the service of a different agenda. Judith Wright, whose pastoralist family established itself in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland at approximately the same time as McGahan’s fictional White family, felt compelled to withdraw her early poem ‘Bullocky’ from poetry anthologies used in schools because she believed it was being misinterpreted as an uncomplicated affirmation of the pioneering spirit – an interpretation, she noted, that overlooked the fact that the old man in the poem is a ‘mild religious maniac’, who is described as being in thrall to a ‘mad apocalyptic dream.’ ‘Bullocky’ is not an absolute rejection of the pioneering narrative, but the ‘tone of the last two verses’, said Wright, ‘which I had seen as a gently affectionate send-up of the Vision, was missed – they became a hyperbolic celebration of it’. Furthermore, the poem only addresses one aspect of the story. Other poems, Wright felt, were ‘necessary to a proper view of “Bullocky”’. Thus, in A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990), the poem is placed opposite ‘Nigger’s Leap: New England’, which is based on an incident that Wright’s father related to her, in which a group of Aboriginal men, women, and children were driven off a cliff in retaliation for the killing of some cattle. Naturally, it presents a very different perspective on the narrative of settlement:

       be dark, O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

✦

A short lyric poem, which adopts an intimate mode of address, is in many ways a more appropriate form than a novel in which to present a singular perspective or a direct personal-political statement. The broader canvas of a prose narrative tends to require intellectual conflict on a wider scale, especially if it is to tackle a political theme. McGahan’s way of addressing this problem has been to turn toward genre. His novels can be seen as an attempt to break down Australia’s recent history into its basic structuring narratives. In this sense, even more so than Last Drinks, his latest novel, The White Earth, is a pastiche. As several reviewers pointed out, it is a gothic tale that appropriates a number of familiar motifs, such as the decaying mansion and the sinister housekeeper. It begins in an ostensibly realist mode, but by degrees comes to incorporate elements of the supernatural. More significantly, however, it sets out to manipulate a variety of national myths, playing them off each other as a way of questioning their validity.

These conflicting narratives are opposed more or less schematically. The novel’s politics centre on the issues raised by the Mabo decision. The history of the Darling Downs that John McIvor tells William is one of settlement, but is implicitly set against the counter-narrative of invasion and dispossession. The pointed absence of Aboriginal voices from the novel is an evocation of the phenomenon that the anthropologist W.H. Stanner labelled ‘The Great Silence’: the tendency to view Australian history from a white perspective that either downplays or ignores the fact that Aboriginal people were victims of colonisation, which, despite the large amount of scholarly work that has been done since Stanner made the observation in 1968, remains a live tendency in public discourse. (Observed Stanner: ‘inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absentmindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.’) Similarly, McIvor’s suspiciously strident insistence that the Aboriginal people are ‘gone’ recalls the old myth of the dying race, while his charter for the Australian Independence League – note the acronym, by the way – deliberately echoes some of the statements made in Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech to the federal parliament in 1996, sentiments which have since been incorporated into the mainstream of Australian politics as part of a backlash against the conciliatory legacy of Paul Keating’s term as prime minister.

Around this central conflict, McGahan arranges a number of familiar, contradictory themes from Australian literature and culture. The landscape around Kuran Station, for example, is ancient, beautiful, and mystically profound; but it is also alien and menacing and fraught with danger. The novel evokes the slightly paradoxical national myth of Australia as a land of natural wealth and prosperity, but one that is nevertheless populated by battlers who must struggle to survive. McIvor’s obsession with obtaining Kuran is motivated by an odd mixture of robust egalitarian sentiment and cringing status-consciousness, which is an expression of a sublimated anxiety about class that runs through the national psyche. There is, in the rift between McIvor and his daughter Ruth, a manifestation of the demographic divide between city and country, between the educated ‘élite’ and the hard-working masses. A series of iconic figures wander through the novel. The doomed explorer and the jolly swagman – both emblematic of the national tendency to celebrate heroic failure – make brief appearances, as does a bunyip. And William’s ill-fated attempt to walk to the waterhole recalls the archetypal figure of the lost child, which Peter Pierce demonstrated in The Country of Lost Children (1999) has its origins in nineteenth-century literature and can be read as ‘the symbol of essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country’:

The forlorn girls and boys, bereft, disoriented and crying in a wilderness that is indifferent, if not actively hostile to them, stand also for the older generation, that of their parents. Symbolically, the lost child represents the anxieties of European settlers because of the ties they have cut in coming to Australia ... The figure of the child stands in part for the apprehensions of adults about having sought to settle in a place where they might never be at peace.

This appropriating technique can be traced back to McGahan’s second novel. 1988 is his drollest book and probably his least accomplished, but it adopts a similar strategy to the more sophisticated The White Earth in that it also manipulates a number of recognisable cultural narratives, beginning with a parody of the anxiety about being ‘swamped by Asians’. Two Chinese students move into Gordon’s share house in Brisbane. They promptly invite two more of their friends to move in, and then another friend, and then another, and so on, until the house is overrun and Gordon decides it is easier to leave. The novel then works its way through a series of scenarios, each of which can be read as an ironic comment on a stereotypical aspect of Australian culture. Gordon’s road trip with Wayne casts the pair in the role of sightseers within their own country, ignorant of their own history to the point where their only source of information is a tourist map. Along the way they experience the inland as a vast emptiness, a nothing. When they arrive at the remote weather station, a tiny outpost complete with lawns and pathways, the novel becomes, on one level, an allegory of colonisation, with a series of representative ‘types’ parading through the novel in a rather mechanical fashion.

✦

The fact that McGahan appropriates familiar cultural motifs and paints them in broad strokes has led Malcolm Knox to claim that The White Earth is ‘the first popular commercial novel’ to have won the Miles Franklin Award: ‘At micro level it uses stock phrases, in its characterisation it presents people we’ve already read about and it dramatises an agreeable set of politically correct storylines.’ McGahan’s novel is thus not ‘original’ or ‘transformative’ in the manner Knox associates with writing of the highest order. This is true in the sense that, as a stylist, McGahan is content for his prose to be brisk and functional and no more. As a rule, he eschews ornament. The pleasures provided by his prose are usually a function of its quietly controlled rhythms, rather than the aesthetic jolt of a startling analogy or an extended passage of lavish description. He uses metaphors sparingly, and when he does it is generally in the service of the novel’s rigorous and methodical symbolism. When a character feels shame or anger, for example, it inevitably ‘burns’ or ‘flares’, linking each individual pang of negative emotion to the novel’s network of guilt and corruption. Similarly, Kuran Station is often likened to a ship and the surrounding land to a sea, reinforcing the sense of McIvor’s isolation and the obsessive, Ahab-like quality McGahan has said he wanted to give him.

But The White Earth strives to be transformative in another sense. The essence of McGahan’s art is narrative. His recent novels have turned towards genre in part because of his skill at shaping them at a macro level; they seem familiar because they are so solidly and traditionally constructed. Significantly, the move toward genre is also a move toward self-consciousness: the moment of recognition when a narrative is exposed as a purposeful, self-contained structure with its own internal logic that works to shut out conflicting viewpoints. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín once remarked upon the similarity between his nation’s history and a work of sentimental fiction, ‘full of love stories with ill-fated lovers dying with a smile’. There are times, he argued, when ‘the crucial moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth-century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is broken by the society he lives in’. The point of his observation is that once this generic quality has been recognised, it opens up the possibility of transcendence: it becomes possible to understand history in other, more realistic and nuanced ways; it becomes possible to see how history is not like a sentimental fiction. This is part of the motivation behind The White Earth’s attempt to incorporate some of the prominent themes in recent Australian history within the overarching framework of a gothic narrative. The novel wants to make us aware of these ideas’ generic qualities, the manner in which certain ways of perceiving are perpetuated, and how this influences the shape of contemporary public debate.

McGahan does not draw attention to the mechanics of his plot in an overtly ironic fashion, but it is significant that the novel skates close to self-consciousness at times. When McIvor’s political rally descends into chaos, some members attempt to highjack AIL and turn it into a version of the Ku Klux Klan, complete with white hoods and a burning cross. McIvor’s response is to shout despairingly that it ‘isn’t the Australian way. This is from somewhere else.’ Later he dismisses his former political allies as ‘imitators, and that’s the worst thing to be. They think people from overseas know better than we do.’ There is yet another distinctly Australian phenomenon being alluded to here – the cultural cringe – but the sheer incongruity of the appearance of the Klansmen draws attention to the novel as a pastiche, to the generic quality of the different political positions that are expressed in The White Earth and their underlying irrationality. In McIvor’s case, the destructive aspect of his vision is the way it isolates and blinkers him. He cannot see past the limits set by his self-created myth- ology and his correspondingly distorted view of the past. The image of McIvor holed up in the decaying Kuran House can be read, like so much of McGahan’s fiction, both on a naturalistic and a symbolic level. McIvor is inside Kuran looking out; he has only one perspective. He would rather be destroyed along with the house than give up his false but cherished beliefs – beliefs around which he has built his entire identity.

The politics of The White Earth are clearly unsympathetic to McIvor. The novel systematically exposes the dark side of his opinions. His assumptions are, one by one, revealed to be false, narrow and cruel. He believes he has earned everything he has, despite the fact that he has, as Ruth observes, ‘always been lucky with inheriting things’. He believes he understands the land, but almost everything he says about it turns out to be wrong. His view of himself as someone with a profound spiritual connection to Kuran Station is not only bleakly ironic from an Aboriginal perspective but suspiciously harmonious with his own material advancement. Yet the interest in the novel lies in the extent to which McIvor is not a villain. His opinions are thoroughly embedded in a fictionalised history of the Darling Downs. Even though McIvor’s reading of the landscape is not an accurate reflection of its true history, there is a sense in which it is valid on a personal level: it is his blood’s country, the only country he has known. His obsession, for all its passionate intensity, is humanised. Its wellsprings are very understandable failings. His ambition and his malicious streak have their origins in an unacknowledged sense of guilt, but he also feels the shame and anger that flow from a deeply wounded pride. Judith Wright once described the pastoralist society she was born into as ‘one of the most privileged in Australia and one of the most self-satisfied’; McIvor’s character, with its distinctive mix of entitlement and resentment, is shaped by his exclusion from the upper ranks of this privileged society. He imbibes from his father, and comes to take for granted, that there is a possibility he might marry Elizabeth White and inherit the station. The fantasy is brutally rebuffed:

John understood that he was witnessing something acutely personal. Elizabeth hated his father ... She said, You were only ever an employee, Mr McIvor. And for the first time in the interview her gaze flickered over John as he sat by stupidly, and he saw that her contempt embraced him as well. Your son was only ever an employee. I think you have forgotten that.

This class-based insult burns him deeply, and his politics become, as much as anything else, a manifestation of the extent to which he refuses to accept the social reality that Elizabeth sets out for him. In response, he develops his own, one-way vision of social hierarchy: he wants to move up in the world, and sees the acquisition of Kuran as a path to personal vindication. He would happily look down on others, in other words, but cannot tolerate the idea that some people might look down on him.

✦

McGahan is interested in the emotional and psychological dimension of politics as much as in the arguments themselves. He is interested in the way a private narrative can be pursued to the point where it becomes destructive. Politics, he suggests, is bound up with self-interest, but its deeply personal resonances mean it is never merely a matter of self-interest. It is part of a person’s identity; it flows from their sense of personal integrity. McIvor is not meant to be a representative figure. He is not an everyman; nor is he an ideologue, although he is a political extremist. And there turns out to be a very specific reason why his father is so hated – the tell-tale heart that beats beneath the surface of The White Earth’s gothic narrative. But McIvor does represent certain tendencies pushed to an extreme. His opinions are so deeply rooted in individual and social history that they become instinctive. He ignores their true origins. In a sense, he has devised his opinions in order to ignore their true origins, to protect himself from the pain of acknowledgement. As such, his self-belief is corrupted, turned against itself. His prejudices encourage him toward denial and the tendency to view his own actions as above reproach. He has an absolute belief in the justness of his own cause and folly of everyone else’s. This is only partly explained by egotism. To some extent, memory works like this on a fundamental level. We are constantly engaged in rewriting the past, retrospectively justifying our actions, minimising our personal culpability. But behind McIvor’s political outrage is a festering wound of negative emotions – vanity, malice, guilt. The self-justifying myth he develops to explain his desires, the leprous distilment he pours into the porches of William’s ear, is poisonous for this reason. It is, in the words of Judith Wright, ‘a doubtful song that has a dying fall’.

The corruption of McIvor’s sentiments to the point where he thinks solely in terms of acquisition and possession does not bestow purity upon those characters who would contest his claims to ownership. Ultimately, no one is innocent. Most of the adult characters in the novel have some of the same desires which ultimately destroy McIvor. With the notable exception of Ruth, most have their own quietly held aspiration to possess Kuran, while Ruth’s rejection of this ambition is itself an attempt to spite her father more than it is a matter of principle. Throughout the novel, William clings to the last vestiges of his innocence. He is open and ingenuous. His character is defined by an absolute lack of knowledge and by his total reliance for information upon the adults whose responsibility it is to care for him. Each fails him by attempting to manipulate him, to make him complicit with their own moral corruption, thus ensuring he too will inherit the guilt. The result is that he is pushed to the point where he is lost and bewildered: ‘Everywhere he looked there was haze and smoke, vague shifting shapes that could have been anything ... Nothing was solid, not the land, and even less so its history. He had been told so many stories – but which ones was he to believe?’

Guilt, a prime minister once said, ‘is not a very constructive emotion’, but guilt is the corrective to McIvor’s mad apocalyptic dream as surely as unacknowledged guilt is the disease that corrupts him. Guilt gives voice to doubts and accepts the reality of our social being. It turns the attention inward. The rhetoric of politics, on the other hand, is that of absolute, dehumanising certainty – the certainty that burns within John McIvor. It directs the attention outwards, inviting us to fix our blame or visit our anxiety upon some external object. The politics of The White Earth are clear and its conclusion accedes to the formal demands of its gothic narrative, but its purpose is more complex. It tells us something about the process of self-knowledge and the dangers of believing too absolutely in our own version of events, suggesting that the past will not easily be pushed into an agreeable shape by an act of will. The White Earth is an attempt to address the closeness of history, how the past moves beneath the surface of present in a way that has inescapably personal repercussions – how, in the words of Judith Wright:

    Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for her mariners. Now we must measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See, in these gulfs, how small the light of home.

In the last essay in this collection, Robert Macfarlane touches on the main reasons why Peter Carey’s novels ‘have proved so very attractive to academic exegetes’, in their combination of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Just how attractive is demonstrated in the sixty-page bibliography, which is sure to be one of the most used parts of Fabulating Beauty, especially by overseas readers without access to the invaluable AustLit. Editor Andreas Gaile, a young German academic, notes in his introduction that Carey is now ‘the most widely commented-on living Australian author’. While Patrick White is currently well ahead, with more than twice as many critical items published on his work, Carey is catching up fast. Visit any bookshop, whether in Melbourne, London, or New York, and you will of course find many more titles by Carey than by White. If, as Simon During has argued, White was the perfect novelist for those wishing to argue for the academic significance of Australian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, then Carey has just as obviously caught the dominant theoretical currents of the past thirty years. While Tim Winton may sell just as well and, if ‘favourite book’ polls are any guide, be more loved, no one has yet published a major critical study of his work.

Gerald Walsh’s book is an unabashed celebration of seven young Australians, golden boys who died during the first decades of the twentieth century. Five sporting heroes, one medical researcher and one soldier make up Walsh’s miniature hall of fame, early death being the common thread. The oldest of them was not quite twenty-seven when he died.

In 1993, when Victoria Haskins undertook research into the relationship between Aboriginal and white women, she was ‘plunged into the argument that white academics were only perpetuating colonialism by writing Aboriginal people’s history … that white Australians should not, could not, try to speak for Aboriginal people, nor try to represent the Aboriginal experience’. Left floundering by ‘the difficult politics of writing Aboriginal history as a white Australian scholar’, Haskins was unreceptive to her grandmother’s pleas to embark on the despised ‘trivial bourgeois pursuit’ of family history, dismissed as ‘middle-class … the province of mildly ridiculous ageing relatives, searching for the dates of their ancestors’ arrival in the colonies’. But curiosity about an old photograph of her grandmother as a fair-haired toddler with an Aboriginal nanny prompted her to root out her great-grandmother’s boxed papers, then languishing in an aunt’s garage.

Treasures exhibitions have reached epidemic proportions in Australia since the runaway success of the National Library’s ‘Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries’, which ran from December 2001 to February 2002. Now the National Library has decided to repeat its act, but this time to concentrate on home-grown exhibits. Australia’s ‘great’ libraries, it must be noted, are in this case only the national, state and territory collections, a definition that might put the noses of some of the other major Australian libraries, such as those belonging to the older universities, out of joint.

Having taught literary studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Adrian Caesar is perhaps better placed than most to understand the troubled relationship between power and culture, order and creativity. ‘All Cock Red’, one of the poems in Caesar’s fourth book of poems, High Wire, attends to such a context:

This book is a double-barrelled memoir, its two authors providing, at heart, a first- and second-generation account of the Burma Railway and its resonances down their line. It’s arc is wider though, and it’s preoccupations more universal, than a simple family history, if there is such a thing. Arch Flanagan, the patriarch and veteran, contributes five pieces, two of memoir, two short stories and an obituary. Martin, son and searcher, intersects these texts with a narrative of his own, alternately probing the spaces and interrogating the players of this history.

In his introduction to Chappelli Speaks Out, Ashley Mallett relates how he realised early on in the project that he would need to step outside the bounds of traditional biography in order to do justice to his old mate. His variation on the genre, not entirely revolutionary, is to insert passages of direct quotation into the body of the text, literally allowing Ian Chappell to address the reader.

Imagine, if you will, the blessed child of a parthenogenetic conception involving the Oracle of Delphi and Cassandra. The girl has Cassandra’s clarity, passion and a good deal of her accuracy, combined with the Oracle’s high degree of credibility but without its duplicity. What could that girl grow up to become but a theatre critic and commentator, even if she had been raised in the 1930s, in the world’s most isolated capital city? Please note, before returning to mundane reality, how diminished the myth of Cassandra would be without the Trojan War, and how little we would care for the writhing of the Pytho, the priestess at Delphi, if Oedipus had not consulted her. A public voice needs subject matter that is at once contemporary and timeless if its utterances are to transcend the ephemeral.

Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on other fronts – studying for a PhD on speech rhythms in an Aboriginal language, learning a new language (Russian being the latest) and, more recently, working on a set of prose translations from the Swiss-born French poet Philippe Jaccottet. I find there’s a wonderful sense of release and revelation in being guided by another’s voice, especially a voice as fluent, emotive and original as Jaccottet’s. My day job as a linguist with a speech-technology firm means that I also deal on a daily basis with language data – at times, two to three languages at once. I find I am a ‘globalist’ when it comes to language, and also, therefore, to poetry. I am just in love with the fact that each language brings with it a new horizon of experience; and each good poem does the same in miniature.

In fact, all of my contact with different languages has reinforced my sense of the extent to which poems exceed all the surface variations of grammar and sound in this or that language; and the pursuit of that elusive excess keeps me coming back to poems. In the poem ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, I am fascinated by an analogous excess in the painting it describes, an excess that the opening stanzas refer to as the ‘glittering eye’ and ‘breath’ of life, which somehow has survived the apocalypse that I imagine the painting depicts. There is also a deep background anxiety in this poem about our potential ability, as human beings, to annihilate ourselves: which is, perhaps, the ‘other way’ the world we know might end.

In recent years, I’ve become deeply interested in the formal aspects of poems, and especially the relationship between the poem’s visual appearance on the page and its emotional effects on the reader, as she follows the stops and starts of its rhythms, and more or less subconsciously relates those rhythms to the meanings in the poem. I spent two years in the US in a Creative Writing programme, and though such programmes in the States are regularly criticised for turning out poets all cut from the one cloth, my experience was quite the opposite: I wanted to experiment more with form, and the programme, which looked backwards to tradition and forward to the latest poetic practices, gave me a set of understandings that I could use as tools to do this more successfully.

Again, despite the criticisms, I found a deep care for the formal craft of poetry exists in the US – as it does here: but in a much more ‘underground’ fashion, perhaps.

Phil Sparrow lived and worked as a UN aid worker in pre-9/11 Afghanistan for nearly three years. Evacuated when the country was attacked by the US, he returned to Australia and worked as an interpreter for Afghan refugees in Australia. In this book, Sparrow writes about his experiences in Afghanistan and Australia, and his reading of the Australian government’s response to refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan.

If any scholar has written anything worthwhile on Australia’s early colonial history, it is unlikely to be mentioned in this book. In Michael Connor’s depiction, things have become so bad that all the historians, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and health experts, and everyone else who has written or spoken publicly about our history over the last thirty years, should be sacked immediately. So too should staff in the departments of education, in the Australian Research Council, and all their national and international academic peer reviewers. Recent PhD graduates should be asked to give back their degrees, as they have not been properly trained. Many historical research assistants should never be given jobs again. The appellations ‘associate professor’ or ‘professor’ should be removed from office doors. Historians of the Australian academy do not deserve them. The first targets should be the most prolific and popular historians. And finally, tenure and terra nullius should be banned.

Todd Alexander’s début novel, Pictures of Us, ambitiously tackles a smorgasbord of weighty issues – mortality, grief, adultery, homosexuality – through the experiences of one family. The sudden death of Marcus Apperton, husband to Maggie and father of Isabel and Patrick, forces his wife and adult children into an uncomfortable reunion. Left to piece together a fractured family past, the Appertons begin to uncover some unsettling truths about their relationship to each other.

This book seeks to bring together two late-twentieth-century obsessions: the language of human rights as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II and the so-called boom in life writing. The most obvious sites at which life narratives and human rights come together are the various tribunals and inquiries that some nations have recently held into aspects of their troubled pasts, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and our own Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Both of these sites, or ‘venues’ as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith prefer to call them, are covered in Human Rights and Narrative Lives: The Ethics of Recognition as part of a wide-ranging investigation into truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, and contemporary struggles for indigenous rights in Australia. These much-discussed cases appear alongside three less prominent ones: prisoner rights in the US; the testimonies of ‘comfort women’ exploited by the Japanese military during the Pacific War; and narratives about the ‘new China’ in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The collection of case studies, covering the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’, shows the uneven application of the language of human rights (illustrated most clearly in the chapter on prisoner rights in the US), as well as the unpredictable ways in which narrating lives might contribute to the recognition of rights.

Painting by numbers in ADB

Dear Editor,

Beverley Kingston’s riposte (ABR, March 2006) to my review of the ADB Supplement 1580–1980 (ABR, February 2006) accuses me of ‘reflecting the traditional bias of those early volumes in considering the work of the stock and station agent more worthy than that of the cookery teacher’. I do not. I pointed out that the same space allocated to a writer of a cookery book of only regional significance had also been given to three generations of proprietors of an Australia-wide family company. This was in the context of my comment that the space given to those of national significance had perforce been reduced because many entries were for those of only regional importance. Worthiness has nothing to do with it. There are thousands of worthy Australians who will never grace the pages of the ADB.

Judith Bishop wins the ABR Poetry Prize

The judges of the ABR Poetry Prize certainly earned their pastrami on rye this year! Could the short list have been closer, the final choice more difficult? Doubtful. Morag Fraser, Peter Rose and Craig Sherborne agree that a number of the six short-listed poems (which appeared in the March issue) would have made worthy winners. Such is the tyranny of competitions, they had to choose a single poem, and it took a while – longer in fact than Brendan Ryan’s marvellous road poem, ‘Back Roads, Local Roads’, took to unfold.

On December 7, the Australian parliament passed the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005. According to Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, the new legislation places ‘Australia in a strong position to prevent new and emerging threats and to stop terrorists carrying out their intended acts’.¹ Most controversially, the law introduces new sedition offences. But it also grants additional powers to the security services, most notably the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Of interest to me here are the provisions allowing the police to restrict the liberty of people who have neither been charged with an offence nor detained for questioning. The AFP may now apply to a court for control orders which could require a person to wear a tracking device, place them under house arrest, bar them from working in certain professions, or prohibit their use of the telephone or the Internet. A control order could be issued for twelve months at a time and would be renewable. Anybody contravening such an order risks a five-year jail sentence. The new law also provides a preventative detention régime. In conjunction with complementary state and territory legislation, the law allows the authorities to detain suspects for up to two weeks at a time.

After a group of small ‘l’ liberals in government ranks were able to extract some amendments, the legislation had bipartisan support in the House of Representatives but was opposed by Democrats and Greens in the Senate. Outside parliament, retired politicians and judges, journalists, artists, numerous legal experts, law societies – including the lawyers’ peak body, the Law Council of Australia – and human rights organisations strongly criticised the bill. In parliament, the government used its numbers to curtail debate and limit scrutiny by a Senate committee. Public debate was comparatively brief, and petered out quickly once the bill had been passed.

Tony Harrison is a man with a passion. The evidence is the Australian Film & TV Companion. Meticulously researched and compiled, Harrison has listed every sound feature film made in this country since 1930 and every nationally broadcast television drama series, mini-series, television movie, documentary series, comedy series and current affairs show since 1956.

It was with a degree of wonder that I leafed through this elegant tome, the low-down on the entire output of a nation’s film and television industry in my hands. I was torn between ‘is that all there is?’ and a sense of pride in the celebration of undiluted media output – a worthy time capsule of pre-Free Trade Agreement culture.

In 1936, West Australian MP Leslie Craig stated in parliament that the (then) current figure of Aboriginal ‘half-castes’ in Australia – approximately 4000 – would soon number 40,000 if something were not done to stem the tide of this growing problem. Seventy years later, in 2006, a federal member of parliament has suggested that Australia is in danger of ‘aborting itself out of existence’ and becoming ‘a Muslim nation in fifty years’ time’ – and this only a few months after the Cronulla race riots. It is clear that race-based fears are still prevalent in our predominantly white Australia. Henry Reynolds’s latest book, Nowhere People – like most of his books – is as much an analysis of our contemporary society as it is an historical examination of how international theories of race shaped Australia’s identity over the past 218 years.

The notion of ‘race’ was central to the debate that was brewing in the late 1700s – coinciding with the founding of the new English colony in New South Wales – concerning the origins of humankind. Two opposing positions had been staked. On the one hand, the monogenesists argued that all humankind is part of a single species, in which racial variations are due to social and geographical circumstances. The polygenesists, on the other hand, argued that such racial variations exist because there are in fact different and separately created races.

Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed begins, ‘… such is the realm of water. It cradles yet suffocates. Warms and cools us. Sustains, nurtures and kills us.’ Indeed, the bonds and binaries of the element are central to this narrative – not simply the presence or lack of literal water, but also fierce emotional currents that threaten to submerge its main characters.

Set in contemporary South Australia’s Murraylands, Watershed centres on ex-champion swimmer Eve Buenetti, who is lost in a barren psychological terrain following the presumed drowning of her son, David. The novel also explores her husband Marconi’s response to the tragedy, and the tangled rivalry and sexual tensions between Eve, Marconi and his brother Victorio, the womanising town mayor. As in many explorations of rural communities, tangential storylines evolve, providing a break from the Eve–Marconi narrative and insight into other town dwellers, such as cryptic newcomer Jasmine.

Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.

You can tell a lot about a journal by the kind of company it keeps. The latest issue of Meanjin throws a loving arm around the shoulders of the mud-slung translator. While there’s no mistaking the red-carpet treatment, the mood of the contributions is anything but encomiastic. The thanks here goes to the translators themselves, ‘a largely self-effacing breed’, as Ian Britain notes in his editorial. Happily, they’ve been dragged out from under the subhead to speak for themselves. All are quick to concede that, given that perfect synonymic conversion between languages is impossible, translation is, to use Umberto Eco’s words, ‘the art of failure’.

Problem: in which Australian city do you set a crime story without offending readers from the other cities? Solution: set it in three of them – Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. This is clever enough, although it soon becomes confusing as to where we actually are, prompting an ‘If it’s Tuesday, this must be Melbourne’ sensation.

You get the feeling that the author has had more than a little exposure to the business of politics. The literary baby-kissing in Dead Set even extends to other constituencies, with complimentary references to South Australian beer (Coopers) and Tasmanian beer (Cascade). For a book so informed by politics, the political message remains ambivalent, which is political in itself.

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.

Almost 100 years ago, Justice Higgins was asked to determine a ‘fair and reasonable wage’ for the average worker. In a landmark decision, Higgins declared that an unskilled labourer should receive a wage of seven shillings per day. This, he said, reflected the needs of an ordinary person living in ‘frugal comfort’ in a civilised community with the responsibilities of providing for his family. Higgins was explicit in setting this basic wage based on the needs of a worker, not the business organisation for whom he worked. ‘Fair and reasonable’ must also be something which the individual employee could not otherwise get through individual bargaining directly with employers. For, if it was, there would be no need for such regulation. Higgins’s decision shaped Australian wage regulation for the last century, and institutionalised the concept of collective regulation of workplace matters. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission thus became a ‘bedrock’ institution of Australian capitalism, civilising market forces and mitigating the adverse consequences for individuals of the uncertainties associated with them.

There is no minimal safe exposure to free asbestos fibre. It is the most lethal industrial material of the twentieth century. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are the common diseases arising from exposure to it. Mesothelioma, a cancer, is distinctively brutal in the way it causes its victims to die. Typically, there are no symptoms for as many as forty years; when the disease appears, death follows after a few excruciatingly painful months. James Hardie, a conservative icon of Australian industry, was established in 1888 and its core business was fibro-cement manufacture, the fibre being asbestos. Gideon Haigh traces the postwar success of the company and its turning away from the gathering evidence of asbestos’s toxicity. Asbestos, it dissembled, was dangerous (like many industrial materials) rather than lethal. Hardie comforted itself in the belief that the incidence of disease reflected past periods of exposure and not the current changed practices. At the same time it failed even to meet these inadequate dust standards in its workplaces.

During the 1980s Hardie developed its own replacement fibre for asbestos and it ceased production of asbestos in 1987. Sufferers from asbestos-related diseases litigated. The company paid up and continued to dissemble. It diversified with mixed success, eventually striking gold in the US, where it is the main supplier of cement sheeting and pipes, now reinforced with cellulose. By the late 1990s litigation pressure required a more comprehensive response. The new generation of management at James Hardie had not had anything to do with asbestos and, understandably, wanted to move on. This, of course, was not a luxury available to sufferers of asbestos-related disease.

… although my eyes were open

In ’68 I sported a Panic Button on my blazer –

pushed, it read ‘Things will get worse before

they get worse.’ After the assassinations, I threw

it away. On edge, we were now living on the edge.

Across the hall, Drexler, the quiet kid from Belgium,

played Procol Harum full blast whenever

1

Some day maybe I’ll catch them.

Across the quivering lake they float,

a trio of indistinct shapes,

but they are swans,

that much I know.

The future of the Australian picture book would appear to be in very good hands. The most recently published writers include familiar names such as authors Hazel Edwards, Margaret Wild and Gary Crew, and author–illustrators Deborah Niland and Roland Harvey. What makes the latest offerings stand out, however, is the plethora of new and emerging authors and illustrators who are venturing into this genre. Such a combination of experienced and innovative approaches can only be good for Australian children’s literature.

The award-winning Deborah Niland brings years of experience as an author–illustrator to the visual delight that is Annie’s Chair (Viking, $24.95 hb, [32] pp). From the pink front cover, with its illustration of a smiling child with large pink sunglasses reclining in a cane chair, to the flowery purple endpapers, Niland shows her mastery of this genre. Annie’s Chair is the simple story of a determined little girl who will do anything to protect her exclusive ownership of her chair. This is a perfect picture book for toddlers and pre-schoolers coming to grips with the frustrations of sharing. The text is to the point, and the illustrations often bounce off it with humorous twists. Niland’s design sense is impeccable, with lots of interesting variations in layout, ample white space, crisp lines and bright colours, which should keep the attention of the wriggliest toddler. She has used a wonderful 1960s palette, with bold and exuberant colours contrasted with black-and-white checks and pop-art circles. Annie has chutzpah, and her determination to have unchallenged access to her chair is matched only by that of her dog Benny – a dog with nearly as much attitude as his mistress! This is a book that demands to be shared.

The old country is, by his own admission, George Seddon’s last book. Last books are generally the products of two factors: posthumous recognition of work-in-progress, or a generous sharing of one lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. Happily, this book falls into the latter category. The opening chapter does nothing to jolt this impression; with avuncular ease, Seddon introduces his characters and stories. We sit with Uncle George at the fireside – or more realistically, given the irony of the title, around the campfire. The stream of consciousness is conversational, discursive and often intensely personal. Seddon has a gift for storytelling. While still in the roman numerals of the preface, we have a telling example: ‘The past lies at the author’s feet,’ Seddon observes epigrammatically, his boots juxtaposed over 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites at Marble Bar in Western Australia’s far north-west. We immediately under-stand that the author’s time frame is very wide indeed. We were half expecting a gardening book – or at least a book about plants, judging from its Dewey classification – but should not be surprised by this un-conventional opening gambit. ‘We live in old landscapes with limited water and soils of low fertility,’ Seddon explains, ‘yet with a rich flora that is adapted to these conditions, as we are not. There is much to learn from it, but we have been slow learners.’

One of the contestants on television’s Australian Princess last year was a stripper, the oscillation in whose carriage was queried by the judges. ‘Of course I wiggle when I walk,’ the young woman protested, ‘I’ve got booty.’ Another competitor found that the going got tough when she was called upon to make a cup of tea. ‘I’m more of a bourbon girl,’ she shrugged. We were meant to laugh and cringe, and we did, but the show, for which nearly 3000 hopefuls had auditioned, was also a ratings success, reinforcing the widespread belief that anyone can become a princess. After all, it seemed as though anyone had.

Before her fateful encounter with Crown Prince Frederik at the Slip Inn during the Sydney Olympics, Mary Donaldson wasn’t just normal, she was positively ordinary. At least that was the impression gained by the private investigators hired by the media as they sifted through the trash in her wheelie bin, a ritual that commenced as soon as the royal relationship became public knowledge. According to Emma Tom in one of the most entertaining sections of her book, among the treasure that was salvaged during this operation was Mary’s Victorian driver’s licence, which is reproduced in the plates section of Something about Mary. A rather more flattering portrait appeared subsequently on the cover of Australian Vogue and was responsible for the biggest-selling issue in the magazine’s history.

In The Rope Dancer, Rob Leach sets himself the ambitious task of using Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a template for an impassioned meditation on mountaineering, authoring one’s life and owning one’s injuries. It seems like formidably brainy material, and the novel can certainly be excavated for its philosophical underpinnings. Yet it’s equally possible to disregard them and to simply read The Rope Dancer as an engagement with the ordeal of living and the unspoken bargains one strikes with life.

Handbooks are not new to philosophy, but the twentieth century’s final decade witnessed the start of a publication flood. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks and companions began to appear in unprecedented quantities. It is tempting to attribute this phenomenon to some fin-de-siècle anxiety – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? – but the principal explanatory factor is probably more mundane: in the face of an increasingly unsurveyable range of journal articles, collections and books, there was a correspondingly burgeoning need among students for guidance, and among professionals to share the labour of keeping up. The appearance in 1998 of the ten-volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a model of inclusivity, seems only to have provoked more specialist works: name an area of philosophy, and some enterprising combination of editor and publisher is trying to corner the handbook market. An initially astounding, but not untypical, example under way at the moment is Elsevier’s production of a sixteen-volume Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, individual volumes ofwhich may be up to 1200 pages. Most alarmingly, the encyclopedias themselves are online and growing simply because the medium allows them to do so: the open-access Stanford is expanding grindingly (and unevenly) to infinity, while, because it is conceived as a ‘dynamic’ reference work which never goes out of date, its unfortunate contributors have found themselves obliged to provide four-yearly major revisions, which may involve nearly as much labour as the original; the subscription-only online version of the Routledge is expanding and revising, too. Keeping up, as well as keeping up with, just the reference literature is starting to loom large among academic tasks: The Blackwell/Cambridge/Oxford/Routledge Companion to Philosophy Handbooks may not be far off.

A thematic offering on sexuality from Australian Historical Studies (AHS) and an assortment of political history from the Australian Journal of Politics & History (AJPH). The first promises a diverse collection of articles that ‘not only speak productively to each other but also provocatively continue the project of putting historically framed sexual questions, and sexually framed historical questions, into scholarly debate’ but actually delivers something more modest. The second lacks this kind of thematic ambition, yet manages to surprise us with the weight of its straightforward historical sensitivity.

At times one cannot help but feel that gender historians live by a desire to remain at the edge of mainstream historical discourse. This special issue from AHS is no different. Each article pushes at boundaries with an unconscious, if not at times perverse, adage that the old edges are no longer edgy enough. Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, in their exploration of the complexities of relationships between Aboriginal men and white women, set these new edges far off in the distance. Unfortunately, we soon realise that they are referring to stereotyped categories and not any identification with an individual’s peculiarity. As a consequence, all we are left with is much interesting detail that is lost to their troubling, if not dangerous, methodological ambition.

To prove the fairyness of tales, this world’s relationships start at ‘Happily’ and only then progress to their trials. The Park Bench tells what happens when hope of the ‘ever after’ fades into that space bordered by numb disappointment and the aggressive need to regain sensation. In gay fiction, that place is no man’s land.

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

In 1685, in São Paulo, Brazil, a boy was born called Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão. Sent north to Bahia to study with the Jesuits, who had constructed, in the steep-cliffed port of Salvador, an amazing ‘levador’ capable of hauling goods and people from ground-level to the heights above, Bartolomeu learned as much about physics as theology. Finding the fathers’ dedication to higher things, both spiritual and material, immensely attractive, Bartolomeu became a priest who dreamed of building not just a hundred-metre lift, but the first vessel capable of sailing through the heavens. The ambition stayed with him even in Portugal.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’