Wednesday, December 29th, 2004:

Ugh: today I realised Colleen McCullough’s latest book (her fifteenth), Angel Puss, which ABR sent to me several weeks ago, needs to be read, reviewed and dispatched by January 3. The dust jacket précis reveals that this novel is ‘exhilarating’ and ‘takes us back to 1960 and Sydney’s Kings Cross – and the story of a young woman determined to defy convention’. Last week I tried to borrow The Thorn Birds from Glebe Library. Was astonished to discover it was published as long ago as 1977 and sold ten million copies worldwide! I got the 1987 title, The Ladies of Missalonghi (TLOM), instead, it being the shortest of the few books on the shelf. I’ve not read it, either. This evening, after turkey pastizio for dinner (must do that again next year!), I settled down with Angel Puss. I discovered that the young woman is called Harriet Purcell and has curly dark hair and ‘seductive breasts’. On ‘Friday, January 1st, 1960 (New Year’s Day)’ she starts a diary (‘What a good idea this diary is!’ – and that goes for both us). Straight up, she decides to chuck in her handsome fiancé, who has good prospects, because she’s tired of being a virgin and he won’t even kiss her properly. Then she lands herself a job as a senior X-ray technician at Sydney’s Royal Queens Hospital, because she’s a clever lass. At the hospital, she befriends Pappy, who takes her to Kings Cross to meet her awesome landlady, Mrs Delvecchio Schwartz, ‘a good six foot four’, with a face ‘dominated by her eyes, which look straight into [Harriet’s] soul’. Next thing, she shocks her family by moving to the Cross and into the ‘House’ – in which also live Toby the painter, Bob and Jim the lesbians, Klaus the cook and the malevolent Harold. Oh yes, and also Flo, Mrs Delvecchio Schwartz’s mute but prophetic four-year-old daughter who enables her mother to be a reputable crystal-ball gazer. Pappy, it turns out, is a nymphomaniac.

Thursday, December 30th, 2004:

I’m absolutely floored and more than a little worried, with just under half the book to go. It’s proving to be no good at all. It reads like a Mills & Boon, yet it’s published by HarperCollins. Harriet has given her virginity to Dr Duncan Forsythe, the handsome honorary medical officer with the sad eyes. He’s married, but his wife isn’t giving him any. She’s a materialist clothes horse, and Harriet ends up giving her a good telling-off in a scene indescribably absurd. I always thought fiction had to take its bearings from the real world, but perhaps I’m an élitist prig. Does it do any harm that millions of people think the so-called romance novel constitutes fiction? Probably not. What bothers me is that because of McCullough’s reputation as a best-selling novelist this book will attract a great deal of notice that isn’t warranted. And many novels that try a little harder to tell us something authentic about the human condition will be ignored.

Friday, December 31st, 2004:

I can’t read a book called Angel Puss on the last day of the year (and nor on the first of the new one).

Monday, January 3rd, 2005:

Hoorah, it’s a public holiday. I have a day’s grace. I spend much of it wondering why a person as intelligent as McCullough has written this book. She is a member of various distinguished boards, as well as a Doctor of Letters at Macquarie University. The Internet turns up an article that tells me she is suffering from haemorrhagic macular degeneration, or going blind. This is terribly sad. In the same article, this evidently brave woman jokes that the loss of her sight will turn her ‘from Henry James into T.S. Eliot or something’.

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005:

Oh dear.

Thursday, January 6th, 2005:

I flick through TLOM. It’s much more convincing, even engaging, with none of the fatuous jocularity that so undermines Angel Puss. I suspect the diary format was a bad choice (and that probably applies to both of us!). To be credible, it requires a great deal more finesse than McCullough gives it here. I’m beginning to think this novel is the worst possible introduction to her work. I quite enjoyed the movie of Tim, her first book — or was that only because of the young Mel Gibson?

Saturday, January 8th, 2005:

What can I say? The eighteen-month time span of this story may have been the undoing of a writer more familiar with the epic. It will surprise no one that Harold and Mrs Delvecchio Schwartz come to a sticky end and that Flo has a bit of a bad time as a consequence. She is rescued by Harriet, who sets all women a good example by having her cake and eating it: two lovers, oodles of cash, and motherhood. The last word belongs to Eliot: ‘Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.’

What a phenomenon Bryce Courtenay is. In a world where we are constantly being told that books are on the way out, he sells them by the barrow-load. They’re big books, too. This one weighs 1.2 kilograms and is seven centimetres thick. It’s the kind of book that makes a reviewer wish she was paid by the number of words read rather than written. Perhaps that is part of Courtenay’s secret: 842 pages, even with reasonably large type, adds up to something approaching 300,000 words. The average novel is probably a quarter of this, maybe a third, but costs $25 or $30. Words per dollar, Courtenay offers value for money.

He also offers a huge amount of factual information. Brother Fish gives us the Korean War, with POW hospitals and camps, the life of a black orphan in 1950s New York, the world of White Russian refugees and Triad gangs in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the White Australia Policy. After surmounting seemingly insurmountable odds with cunning and heroism, the orphan (a Korean war veteran, nay, hero) and the White Russian end up running an international export business in partnership with the eldest son of a fisherman (another war hero) on an island in Bass Strait. Every inch of the path that led them there is explained, along with all the historical circumstances, in large undigested chunks. Nothing remains a mystery.

Except perhaps the inner life of these characters. Jacko, the first-person narrator, has the emotional life of a bright twelve-year-old. He has trouble concentrating on more than one thing at a time. For example, on page 525, Jacko becomes engaged to Wendy, an ‘exquisite’ creature who makes him ‘weak at the knees’ and so on. He can’t believe his luck. However, Jacko seems to become reconciled to the shock fairly easily: the exquisite but apparently forgettable Wendy is not mentioned thereafter until page 782, having by then become a loyal and biddable wife, helping to build up the business.

Spirit Wrestlers takes its title from ‘Doukhobors’, the name adopted by a strict religious sect that originated in Russia and that was harshly repressed both by the tsarist state and the church. The Society of Friends, attracted by the Doukhobors’ pacifist beliefs and by their prayer meetings, which reject liturgy and are dominated by the singing of a capella psalms and hymns in Russian, paid for their passage across the Atlantic. Leo Tolstoy was another supporter. Doukhobors live communally and reject several key beliefs of orthodox Christianity, as well as the use of alcohol, tobacco and animal products for food. At the end of the nineteenth century, they began to leave Russia, settling in Canada in 1899.

Tom Shapcott’s novel begins with another migration of a small group in the 1960s to Australia, to the Fassifern Valley, fifty miles from Brisbane. Central to the novel is the relationship between an Australian teenage boy of German descent, Johann, and Ivan, a member of the Doukhobor community.

Place, perceived with powerful lyrical intensity, almost assumes the role of a protagonist in the novel, shaping identities and challenging relationships. For Johann, this rural area of Queensland, where his German ancestors settled as farmers eighty years ago, speaks both of exile and of homecoming. Later, after horrific experiences in Vietnam, he returns as a matter of course to the Fassifern as the only place that can offer refuge. For Ivan, home and exile are interdependent realities, although he makes some efforts to break out of the communal chains.

In a recent feature article in the Guardian Review, William Boyd proposed a new system for the classification of short stories. He constructed seven stringently categorical descriptions and ended his article with a somewhat predictable – that is to say, canonical – list of ‘ten truly great stories’, among which were James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Spring at Fialta’ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’. Most of the writers cited were male, and the classifications were confident demarcations in terms of genre and mode (‘modernist’, ‘biographical’). It is difficult to know, and no doubt presumptuous to speculate, what Boyd would make of Frank Moorhouse’s edited collection The Best Australian Stories 2004. Garnering them ‘at large’ by advertisement and word of mouth, Moorhouse received one thousand stories, from which he selected ‘intriguing and venturesome’ texts, many of which display ‘innovations’ of form. Of the twenty-seven included, six are by first-time published writers and twenty are by women. This is thus an open, heterodox and explorative volume, unlike its four predecessors in this series in reach and inclusiveness. It is also, perhaps, more uneven in quality: a few stories in this selection are rather slight; and the decision to include two stories by two of the writers may seem problematic, given the large number of submissions and the fact that the editor claims there were fifty works fine enough to warrant publication. A character in one of the stories favourably esteems the fiction of Frank Moorhouse over that of David Malouf: this too may be regarded as a partisan inclusion.

An excuse first. This can only be a magpie’s look at a marriage – between poetry and music – that has a near-infinite history of complex living arrangements, recurrent divorces, remarriages and impromptu de facto cohabitations. I’ve chosen a few marital battles of particular interest to me, a writer for whom song is a sometime thing. I’d like to claim those battles as representative of some epochs and musical styles, at least within various Western traditions; they are certainly representative of my musical obsessions.

The first of these obsessions is this: why music? Most writers, especially most poets, tend to think that words are enough music in themselves. Words don’t need musical backings, or settings, or singings. To flog the metaphor: why get married to a composer at all? Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyrics for Jerome Kern’s musical Showboat. Mrs Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, once overheard someone praise ‘Ol’ Man River’ as a ‘great Kern Song’. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she interrupted, ‘but Jerome Kern did not write “Ol’ Man River”. Mr Kern wrote dum dum dum da. My husband wrote Ol’Man River.’

So, mine will be a biased, poet’s eye view of the relationship. My starting point again: why music? We all know ‘why’ language – because nothing much that is uniquely human happens without it. We can see why a capacity for language might evolve in our brains over a million years – its survival advantages are obvious – but why a capacity for music?

Alison Rogers has shone the spotlight on a shadowy aspect of politics: the role and experiences of the media adviser. As her story is also an insider’s account of Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja’s period as leader of the Australian Democrats, its value is enhanced, both for what it tells us about Stott-Despoja, as well as its less than flattering treatment of the Democrats’ party machine.

The Natasha Factor: Politics, Media and Betrayal begins with a caveat: what follows is not intended to be an academic analysis, nor a biography. It is a snapshot of a period in time, as seen through one person’s eyes. That person openly declares herself to be close and loyal to her subject, who is also a friend. In her epilogue, Rogers returns to this theme: ‘Yes, it could be argued that I am attempting to rewrite history. But I am not pretending that these are the facts. It is up to you to decide where the truth lies.’

In a long and interesting life, Peter Ryan has been especially fortunate in getting to know quite a few influential Australians and some little-known but unforgettable characters. Brief Lives offers pen portraits of fifteen of them, all but one of them male. The solitary female, Ida Leeson, had the distinction of being the ‘presiding genius of the world-famous Mitchell Library’, held the rank of army major in World War II, and was perhaps regarded as an honorary male in the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA), a rather peculiar army unit where Ryan met her in 1944.

‘It is in love that violent desires find the greatest satisfaction,’ wrote Stendhal in On Love (1842).    Though distanced by land, sea and centuries, Sophie Cunningham’s début novel, Geography, gives contemporary testimony to the same enduring claim. Set for the most part among the suburbs and landmarks of Melbourne and Sydney during the 1990s, Geography travels back and forth in time and place between Los Angeles and Sri Lanka, establishing an expansive mise en scène for this explosive meditation on the complexities of love, sex and self-destruction.

‘“Okay,” I say. “I will tell you a love story of sorts. I’ll tell you a story about the one who drove me crazy … ”’ So begins Cunningham’s protagonist, the 37-year-old Catherine Monaghan, whose tale of longing and dejection unfolds on a Sri Lankan beach. Having befriended Ruby, a fellow solitary traveller, the two begin to share the particular journeys of their lives that have led them to this place.

McKenzie Wark’s new book consists of 388 numbered paragraphs organised into seventeen ‘chapters’, organised in alphabetic order, from ‘Abstraction’ to ‘Writings’ and going through ‘Class’, ‘Hacking’, ‘Representation’ and the like. Wark is batting for a high score, as the opening sentence, with its breezy allusion to Marx, indicates: ‘A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction.’ One of the things the format of the book suggests – not simply with the numbered paragraphs (which invoke Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as Wark’s chosen model, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) but also the whole aphoristic style – is a throwback to those Big Bad Books that were out to blow up or at least transform the world, starting by changing the way we thought about it. In this it has something in common with John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), which seeks to convince us that humanism and anthropocentrism are grand delusions and that there is no way that man can be thought of as master of his fate. Wark isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as this, but he is pretty ambitious all the same. He is trying both to call into existence and to write the blueprint for a new class, the hacker class:

Gentleman also write poems. Michael Thwaites, winner of the King’s Medal for poetry back in 1940, is resolutely old school: set subjects, square metrics, good manners. He is a quiet achiever. Even his voice is quiet, though not so quiet that you can’t hear it. Solid statements, with a minimum of flourish or divertimenti, are his rule.

Unfinished Journey: Collected Poems 1932–2004 is divided into five chronological sections, so you can follow the story of a life lived. ‘Milton Blind’, an earnest construction, wins the Newdigate Prize for 1938. There is his wartime classic, ‘The Jervis Bay’, the narration of a 1940 sea battle in the North Atlantic, which borrows from British imperial action verse while interleaving Murrayesque graphics:

Human beings have a strong need to belong, whether it be to a family, a community or humanity at large. In Belonging, Jeannie Baker explores this need. She takes the reader on a visual journey through twenty-four years in the life of Tracy Smith, her family, her community and her city. Baker also explores the importance not just of living on, but of belonging to and caring for the land that supports us and on which we build our cities.

As in her companion work Window (2002), Baker tells her story using visual narrative alone. The visual plot, and its many subplots, are supported by verbal ‘captions’ – road signs, advertising billboards, shop signs, graffiti and the memorabilia found in the casement window of Tracy’s inner-city terrace home in Sydney. However, the visual narrative should not be read at one sitting. While the plot is linear, it works on many levels. It requires multiple readings, each focusing on one specific object: the window frame, the front yard, the street, the car yard, the corner store, the end of the main road, the smash repairs shop, the apartment block across the street. Each has its own story to tell, and only a close reading will reveal all that Baker has to communicate.

Geoffrey Bardon spent just two and a half  years, from the start of 1971 until mid-1973, at Papunya, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs. While he was there, teaching art and craft as well as social studies, Aboriginal art changed. A group of Aboriginal men began painting with Western materials, transferring versions of their traditional sand designs onto boards in a way they had not before, or not in that quantity. One of the biggest questions about Bardon is how much he mattered to this new art – at crudest, would Papunya painting have happened without him?

It is a question which can be asked of many types of new art. How much initiative lies with the artists, how much with their mentors, dealers, agents, promoters and agents? Who selects particular subjects, who decides the scale of the work, who chooses the materials? These questions are ones of power as well as of creativity. Yet in the context of Aboriginal art, these questions almost always acquire another inflection. They become questions of race relations – of acknowledging, if not lauding, the white contribution to black art.

In 1954, Tom Inglis Moore established the first full-year university course in Australian literature at Canberra University College. English departments in Australian universities had until then resisted anything more than a token presence of Australian texts in their literature courses, many academics agreeing with Adelaide’s Professor J.I.M. Stewart that there wasn’t any Australian literature. Sadly, Inglis Moore’s pioneering initiative was to prove only a provisional victory in the continuing struggle for appropriate recognition of the national literature. When he retired in 1966, his Australian literature course was relegated to alternate years, and his parting plea that the Australian National University establish a chair in the national literature was ignored. In 1973, the ANU English department refused to appoint a specialist lecturer in Australian literature, prompting Dorothy Green to resign in protest. Fifty years after that first dedicated course, there are still only two established chairs in Australian literature in Australian universities – Sydney and James Cook.

I’ve always been interested in trying new things,’ Tim Jarvis declares disarmingly in the opening  line of The Unforgiving Minute, ‘and I’m not sure I know exactly why.’ Unlike Scott or Shackleton, Jarvis has no literary aspirations but is a knockabout bloke who gives motivational talks on his adventures and who believes in a gospel of personal effort, physical challenge and – trailing these two by a long margin – the wonder of the natural world. This account of a series of polar journeys is self-consciously structured using the effective journalistic device of plunging the reader into an intense situation at the opening of each chapter, and finishing each chapter with a teaser for the next. Like most accounts of polar exploration, it is a weird blend of numbing dullness and compulsive interest. Jarvis has taken the lessons of his public speaking and turned them into a pleasing book, firmly in the self-help genre, with gripping accounts of the many crises that inevitably beset extreme adventure expeditions, not to mention the prurient details of toilet habits, tooth decay and muscle wastage.

Robyn Eckersley’s provocative new study  of environmental governance reinvests belief in the  democratic state as a site of ethical action and ecological responsibility. She counters a trend in recent Green thinking to see the state, in particular the liberal democratic state, as the enemy of current and future environmental well-being. Eckersley’s own background is in political science, and she largely engages with other political theorists. However, the anti-statist perspective that she questions is common across a range of environmental disciplines, and it is refreshing to see a re-visioning of the political structures we already have rather than an imagined future ‘ecotopia’ as an answer to environmental ills.

Our age likes to think of itself as a time of constant change – leadership gurus call it ‘permanent white water’ – but how fast and fundamental were the changes around the end of the eighteenth century? In 1779, when Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii, Europeans were settled in South and Central America and the Dutch East Indies, and were nibbling at the edges of India and Africa. Jesuit missionaries had been in China for the better part of two centuries. The rebellion in Britain’s American colonies seemed to be under control, despite the instability of George III and the interference of Louis XVI – whose position, despite some economic problems, looked unassailable. No sane person would have imagined that the traders, pirates, missionaries and scientists probing remote parts of the globe were harbingers of anything more than an expansion of trade and knowledge.

In October 1843 the Russian writer Turgenev heard the opera singer Pauline Viardot perform in The Barber of Seville in St Petersburg; for the rest of his life, he remained in thrall to her in an apparently chaste relationship sustained within the framework of her existing marriage. The story of this devotion, and the view that such a love is impossible in the twenty-first century, are the pivots of Robert Dessaix’s new book, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. Dessaix never loses sight of his central argument. But he is not a linear thinker, nor a simple writer. He swoops and dives, deft and sharp as a wattlebird, over a range that is spiritual and intellectual as well as geographic and temporal. His book concerns itself with much beside the significance of the relationship between Turgenev and Viardot: a distinctively Australian apprehension of Europe; the experience of travel; the ways in which loving relationships can bring depth to travel and vice versa; the links between history, tourism and imagination; economic and social upheavals in Russia; and the nature of civilisation, to mention only a few.

When I was twelve, newly returned to Fiji after World War II, I happened to see a brawl break out in a hotel bar. Two squads of police arrived at the double to break up the fracas, and I noticed that one was composed entirely of indigenous Fijians while the other was Indo-Fijian. When I asked why two squads were needed and why they were divided by race, I was told that if an Indo-Fijian policeman laid hands on an ethnic Fijian, or an ethnic Fijian tried to arrest an Indo-Fijian, the brawl would turn into a race riot. This was an example of the racial discrimination engendered by a system that looked back to the days of indentured labour, when Indian girmitiyas were brought to Fiji to work the canefields. As the Indo-Fijian population increased, pressure mounted for a share in government and the right to own land rather than leasing it. This pressure resulted in the coups of 1987 and 2000.

From his precocious youth in inner-city Sydney until his death – still in harness at the age of seventy-five – the Australian photographer Frank Hurley lived for ‘adventure and romance’. By any standards, his was an extraordinary career. Yet the individual delineations of its great landmarks have blurred in the factual catalogue of Hurley’s achievements in two Antarctic expeditions during the cradle period of exploration in that great southern continent; in his work as an official photographer during the two world wars; in his pioneering of filmed documentaries and as a cinematographer in the making of major Australian feature films in the 1930s. In the last twenty years of his career, Hurley travelled the length and breadth of his own country, celebrating its people and eulogising what he saw to be the heroic Australian landscape. Always restless, always yearning for the next challenge, Hurley was a citizen of the world. He was drawn to record the cultures of the ancient world and, closer to home, aspects of New Guinea and the Pacific.

David McKnight made the first of many field trips to Mornington Island in 1966, when the old people could still remember how it was before the white men came. The Lardil largely escaped the violence that accompanied white intrusion, and had kept possession of their land, although in time they were made to share it with survivors from the region. A mission, established in 1914, had preserved them from further predation, but at a cost: hunter-gatherers were rounded up and made to live cheek-by-jowl in a ‘supercamp’ close by the mission, and their children were taken to be raised and educated by the missionaries, with only casual contact with their parents.

The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.

This book fulfils two objectives. Within popular culture’s contribution to concepts of national identity,  it energises a gap left in cinema studies by taking the contemporary discussion from the 1990s through to Japanese Story (Brooks, 2003). Secondly, it attempts to place films produced in the last ten years within the context of what the authors clearly believe to be the single most important recent event in the positioning of a dialogue between white and Aboriginal populations about belonging. That event is the Mabo decision of 1992 by the High Court that native title did exist at the time of the British invasion in 1788. The authors contend that this decision marks a watershed in the political unconscious of the nation. The assumption of terra nullius, that the land was not occupied and therefore entailed no transaction of settlement rights, was overthrown. More contentiously, they argue that this decision has caused a deep trauma in the white community, symptoms of which may be seen in the movement for reconciliation. At the heart of their study is the idea that this trauma is entangled in the major themes of most, if not all, the films produced locally post-Mabo.

n The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of 3 November 2004, Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing argued that young scholarly writers have been ‘abandoned by the academy’. Tom Griffiths replies to her article, which was titled ‘Let’s End This Dissertation Dissipation’:

A fevered imagination

Dear Editor,

In his review (ABR, December 2004–January 2005) of my recent book on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Herzl’s Nightmare: One Land, Two People, Colin Rubenstein comments that I write ‘well’. I’m intrigued by that observation as I find it near impossible to believe that he’s actually read the book. His judgements about it range from the fanciful to the preposterous.

We had agreed to meet at the Frick Collection. My train from New Haven was late, but there they were – Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Father Peter Steele SJ – waiting at the trim and modest entrance of one of New York’s noblest institutions. I had looked forward to a day of gallery-hopping with two poets and old friends, both with an appetite and an aptitude for the visual arts. What would their take be like on a pleasantly random group of shows?

As the late Susan Sontag noted, interpretation tends to fall into two opposing camps. The first kind, ‘aggressive and impious’, treats works of art as landscapes concealing mineral ore: it ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’. The other, by contrast, resembles less the pit-worker than the more distractible traveller who, so thrilled by the picturesque surrounds, decides to remain awhile: it ‘see[s] more, to hear more, to feel more’. These critical tendencies are still at war, forty years on. In a nutshell, this is the contestation between academic and journalistic writing. Australia’s interdisciplinary periodicals are the ambulances – and the ambulance-chasers – scrambling back and forth across its frontline.

It is apparent that, for Ivor Indyk’s HEAT, taking sides in this struggle is a no-brainer. Backing touristic curiosity and pleasure against dull but worthy travail is a clear case of good versus evil. The new issue kicks off with a piece by Adrian Martin that is as plain a plea for a sensual approach to criticism as Sontag’s own. Martin wants it to be acceptable to riff about Deleuze and Guattari, Bob Dylan, Anatomy of Hell and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the first person and the same breath, and still be taken seriously. He argues that film critics would do well to relay the medium’s visceral pleasures in a language of equal passion, and to avoid circumlocutions and disavowals. Martin’s piece stands sentinel in HEAT’s front pages like an article of faith.

Why are there so few new and exciting voices in Australian fiction? Why do Australian novels so consistently fail to capture the imagination of the reading public? What was the last Australian book you really liked? Where is the next generation of Australian authors going to come from? Who are three Australian writers under the age of thirty or forty?

Any reader of weekend newspapers will be familiar with this barrage of questions. Contemporary Australian fiction, we are told, is in trouble. It would seem that this is a problem facing the art form in all its incarnations. At this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the annual celebration of the short story was couched in terms of the crisis facing it. Australians don’t like short stories, we are told by publishers and media. They don’t want them, they don’t read them, and, crucially, they don’t buy them. While the short story should not be treated as some stylistic precursor to a cultural main event, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that if there were more opportunities for new writers to experiment with shorter projects – to test the boundaries, to fail and try again – the Great Australian Novel might seem like less of an impossibility.

These two exceptional books should be sent to every household in Australia free of charge. They would be a perfect curative after the federal election. The campaigns of the conventional parties demonstrated how far indigenous Australia has fallen off the political radar screen. Fortunately, the independent creative work of Aboriginal thinkers, writers and artists continues to set high standards and often leads the way in the exploration of social, political and philosophical issues that many in mainstream culture are still unable to face.

Lionel Fogarty and Samuel Wagan Watson represent different generations of Aboriginal poetry. Fogarty’s first book, Kargun, appeared in 1980, while Watson’s first poem appeared in 1995 (Ulitarra 8). In 1999 Watson won the David Unaipon Prize for his unpublished manuscript, of muse, meandering and midnight (2000). In stylistic, rhetorical and perhaps experiential terms, their work is utterly distinct. Fogarty’s new book confirms him as one of the most significant and challenging poetry innovators in Australia today. Watson’s new collection demonstrates mastery of more readerly poetic idioms and techniques, drawn mostly from modern traditions galvanised by the Generation of ’68. Their distinctiveness signifies a progressive Aboriginal poetic culture that deals in complex ways with contemporary life – but it is in the sheer strength and clarity of their voices that Fogarty and Watson present a singular challenge to Australian literature.

On 9 October 2004, 13,098,461 electors were enrolled to vote for the federal parliament. The Australian Electoral Commission’s website records 11,715,132 electors having voted for the House of Representatives on a two-party preferred result. So much for voting in a federal election having been compulsory since 1911. And not a few will have left the polling booth wondering, ‘Why bother?’

Run, Johnny, Run is Mungo MacCallum’s personal account of the 2004 election. A Win and a Prayer is the latest in the UNSW Press’s ‘Briefings’, ‘a series of topical books exploring social, political and cultural issues in contemporary Australia’. For those of us who grew up with Nation Review and MacCallum’s ironic, humorous, partisan and occasionally vicious style, his political views come as little surprise. To MacCallum, The Hon. John Winston Howard MP, prime minister of Australia since 11 March 1996, has various nicknames, ‘many of them scatological, a number pertaining to body orifices, others involving the lower genera of the animal kingdom, some ironic and a few merely insulting’. But the nickname that most appeals is ‘the Stonefish’:

‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’

       (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre,

       ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929)

I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what  scholarship there was then about its history and development, its types and practitioners. So I am probably an atypical reader (and reviewer) of these two books. I read them with the pleasure of familiarity and recognition, being reminded of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. No little part of that pleasure lies in seeing how others assemble and weigh the components of this genre’s history.

Both of these books are excellent one-volume guides to the large literature and long history of crime fiction. They are the product of an explosion of scholarly attention to crime fiction since 1980. Stephen Knight and Martin Priestman are both professors of English literature, and Priestman’s contributors are academics in English or related disciplines. Knight’s book (2004) cites Priestman’s (2003), and Priestman’s has a chapter by Knight. The books relate a similar story and cover much the same ground, and in so doing provide a snapshot of contemporary academic orthodoxy on their subject.

On the back cover of Don Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, the entry for ‘absolute certainty’ is reproduced: ‘1. Beyond a doubt; scout’s honour; on impeccable authority, irrefutable evidence; watertight, ironclad; London to a brick; bet your arse (or ass) on it. 2. Not necessarily the case.’ The first definition offers the standard, transparent meanings; the second offers its ‘weasel-word’ meaning – what it means when it is minced through the minds of ‘the powerful, the treacherous and the unfaithful’, particularly bureaucrats and politicians. A citation from Vice President Dick Cheney on 2 September 2002 demonstrates weaseling or weasling in action (see Kate Burridge’s discussion of the process of haplology in her book Weeds in the Garden of Words for the likely transformation of ‘weaseling’ into ‘weasling’): the weaselly vice president says: ‘We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to build a nuclear weapon.’

The Dictionary of Weasel Words is a follow-up to Watson’s highly successful Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003). That was an elegantly stylish, passionate and witty essay on the way the language of managerialism and bureaucracy has stifled the English language to such an extent that it is now ‘a dead language: devoid of lyric or comic possibility, incapable of emotion, complexity, or nuance’. This new book is a dictionary of these death-like words, many examples of which were sent to Watson by readers of the first book.

I was delighted to find an entry for ‘closure’, one of those buzzwords that seem to have infected all levels of the language: ‘1. Finish, conclusion, completing the circle. 2. Notion deriving from Gestalt theory that “completion” is a primary human need (or “want” that has grown into a need) replacing paradox, doubt, enigma, vagaries of fate, the essential unknown, the existential dilemma, the Book of Job, etc.’ The jargon of managerialism is subjected to satire: ‘client’, ‘decruitment’, ‘greenwashing’, ‘growing the client base’, ‘negative patient outcome’ (my pet hate), and so on. The term ‘level playing field’ gets the definition it deserves: ‘cf. Tooth Fairy, Yeti, Min Min Light, etc.’ The language of recent world events, especially the Iraq war, is dissected: ‘attrited’, ‘coalition of the willing’, ‘deconflicted’, ‘embedded’, ‘axis of evil’, ‘security contractors’ and ‘torture lite’. The definition of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ is typical of the analysis: ‘Thingamebobs, jiggers, hoozits, doodads, watchamecallits, wigwams for a goose’s bridle, etc. Weaponish sorts of things. Destructive sorts of things. Destructive items possibly related to weapons. Weapons developed by countries that are not free.’

There is trenchant wit and satire, but underlying it, I think, is a profound sadness. The book laments not just the death of public language but also the death of those values that give meaning to public life. This is especially true of the Australian material. Thus ‘anti-American’ has the obvious sense of exhibiting dislike for the US, but in this dictionary it also means ‘2. The ABC’ and ‘3. un-Australian’. ‘Border protection’ has some relatively neutral meanings, but by sense 4 we find: ‘Xenophobia. Wedge politics. Scare campaign. To incite fear and loathing.’ The first sense of ‘the bush’ is: ‘The country. Rural Australia. Not the city. Not Sydney. That with which all Australians should be in touch’. There is gentle wit here, but by sense 3 the traditional icon is a Desert of Despond: ‘A dangerous place, hated by Henry Lawson, the dark side of the psyche, home to sociopaths, murderers, cannibals, etc. (Matthew Brady, Kelly Gang, Ivan Milat, Snowtown murderers, etc.). A place for incarcerating asylum seekers; exploding nuclear weapons, dumping nuclear weapons; dumping rubbish, dumping car bodies, dumping human bodies. A dumping ground.’ I leave it to readers to see what Watson does with ‘Anzac’.

When the general public thinks about the issue of the death of language, this often has to do with the notion that language is becoming corrupted by errors – errors that conservative speakers see as evidence that all social values are collapsing and the end of the world is possibly nigh. Much of Burridge’s book deals with this more popular notion of language death: the ‘weeds’ of the book’s title, which surface as wrong pronunciations (whatever happened to the ‘k’ of ‘knit’ and ‘know’ or the ‘g’ of ‘gnaw’ and ‘gnash’?), wrong spellings, wrong grammar (is it ‘less’ or ‘fewer’, is it computer ‘mice’ or ‘mouses’?), and so on. But the title is double-edged, for what is a weed to one gardener is a flower to another.

There is an interesting example of a lexical weed in Watson’s entry for ‘absolute certainty’: the phrase ‘London to a brick’. It is generally acknowledged that this phrase was the invention of the Sydney racing commentator Ken Howard. It appears in the form ‘London to a brick’ in the Australian National Dictionary (AND, 1988). (In this and the later mention of AND, I am happy to declare my close association with the Australian National Dictionary Centre, the Centre that edits AND; I edit the Centre’s newsletter, Ozwords.) ‘London to a brick’ means ‘it is absolutely certain’. But the first citation in the Australian National Dictionary demonstrates that the original phrase cannot have been ‘London to a brick’. The phrase is first recorded in Frank Hardy’s Yarns of Billy Yorker (1965): ‘“Close: but Magger by a head,” the course announcer Ken Howard says, “London to a brick on Magger”.’ The original phrase must have been ‘London to a brick on’. Howard did not mean that the chances were ‘a million to one’ that Magger won the race; he meant that the odds were ‘a million to one on’ – so overwhelmingly certain that you would have to gamble London to win a beastly ‘brick’. But the precise gambling reference is lost to users of the phrase in the form ‘London to a brick’. And I bet few people who know or use the phrase realise that we are not dealing with real-estate metaphors – a ‘brick’ was £10, from the colour of the £10 note. Should we be enraged by these changes? Should we despair at the fact that so many Australians have lost their grasp of the language of gambling? Should we berate those same Australians for not knowing what ‘brick’ meant in Australian English until the introduction of decimal currency ‘on the fourteenth of February 1966’?

Probably not. But we certainly need books of the Burridge kind, which examine much of the history of changes in the English language. I was interested to see that towards the end of the book Burridge deals with some of the issues raised by Watson’s book, examining some really pernicious weeds of the kind it exposed. Some of her examples are from Australian history, as when ‘disperse’ was used in the nineteenth century as a euphemism for slaughtering Aborigines, and when a report of a ‘collision’ between police and Abori-gines was invariably a euphemism for killing.

In a sense, then, there is nothing new about ‘weasel words’. But it is their present ubiquity that rightly disturbs Watson. In the introduction to his book, Watson explains the title. He writes: ‘In As You Like It, Jaques says he can suck “melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs”.’ Many of the words in his dictionary have been sucked dry of meaning: ‘They are shells of words: words from which life has gone, facsimiles, frauds, corpses.’ As a counterpoint to this, it is pleasing to see two books that cater to a playful delight in language. Richard Glover’s Dag’s Dictionary is a collection of words that do not exist but that are necessary to describe many of the experiences of contemporary life. Some of them come from listeners to Glover’s ABC Sydney Drive programme, but most of them are Glover’s inventions. Thus a ‘brick teaser’ is ‘a person who goes to “open for inspection” houses with absolutely no intention of buying, but merely to have a stickybeak’; and a ‘woofhead’ is ‘a person whose hairstyle is modelled on that of their dog’. Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Third Book of Words is a similar collection of flamboyantly unlikely words, although this time the words are real: ‘aichmophobia’, ‘ceroscopy’, ‘gugusse’ (‘According to Mrs Byrne’s amazing dictionary [Josefa Heifetz Byrne, Mrs Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words (1976)] a gugusse is “a young, effeminate man who trysts with priests”. Can such things be? And can you say “trysts with priests” three times quickly?’), ‘kennebunker’, and ‘lipostomy’ (‘atrophy of the mouth’). Bowler also offers sage advice on how these very superior words might be used in everyday conversation: ‘Useful term for cursing an overly loquacious sibling: “May you have lipostomy ’ere nightfall!”’ Like Glover, Bowler at one point makes up his own word. On the pattern of ‘lapsus linguae’ (‘a slip of the tongue’) and ‘lapsus calami’ (‘a slip of the pen’), he creates ‘lapsus pictorae’, a term especially used to describe moments of anachronism in films: tyre marks in Stagecoach; a zip fastener in a medieval romance; television aerials in nineteenth-century epics. (What sort of lapsus, Bowler asks parenthetically, was ‘the American college-student’s assertion in an exam paper that “Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis”?’)

Julian Burnside, in a chapter called ‘Black Holes’ in his book Wordwatching, similarly laments the fact that, while English is a remarkably rich language that has borrowed wantonly from many languages, there remain some significant gaps. Where is the word ‘for the sensation of disaster narrowly averted and later remembered from the vantage point of safety’? And where is the word for the ‘instantaneous sensation when, for example, you are pulled over by a booze bus, and have not had a drink for two weeks! Despite demonstrable innocence, there is a flash of guilt.’ Burnside’s book is similar in structure to Burridge’s, with each chapter addressing historical aspects of the English language or aspects of contemporary usage. The best chapter is ‘Doublespeak’, where Burnside draws on his experience as an outstanding refugee-rights advocate and offers a devastating analysis of the language used to describe refugees in Australia in the past few years: ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’, who are imprisoned in camps surrounded by razor wire and electrified fences (‘energised fences’ in the language of the bureaucracy), and who, when driven to suicide or atrocious self-harm, are accused of indulging in ‘inappropriate behaviour’. In this chapter, Burnside could be writing a section of Watson’s book.

Wordwatching is subtitled ‘Field Notes from an Amateur Philologist’. Given that caveat, I suspected it was London to a brick on that there would be some problems. And there are. I offer three examples. Burnside draws his evidence about the history of Australian words from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). But the most up-to-date record of Australian words is AND. So, in a section on obsolete Australian slang, Burnside gives the OED’s earliest date of 1945 for ‘Prince Alberts’ in the sense ‘foot rags worn by swagmen or tramps’, when AND has it from 1892; ‘boko’, meaning ‘blind in one eye’, is similarly given as 1945, when AND has it from 1847. And so on. In Chapter 4, ‘Bushrangers’, Burnside examines part of Ned Kelly’s Jerilderee letter: ‘He [Kelly] discusses the idea that police witnesses regularly perjure themselves and adds that “it was by that means and by hiring cads they get promoted”. This use of cad is puzzling. According to OED2, cad means: “An assistant or confederate of a lower grade, as a bricklayer’s labourer (dial.); a familiar, chum”. Neither of these senses makes much sense in the context of the Jerilderee letter.’ Burnside goes on to argue that Kelly’s ‘cad’ comes from ‘cicada’: ‘Cad was Australian slang for a cicada, now out of use. It seems likely that the reference was to police informers who, like a cicada, will make a lot of noise when prompted.’ E.E. Morris, in Austral English (1898), has ‘cad’ as a slang term for ‘cicada’ in Queensland, although there is not much evidence for this unlikely phonetic reduction. But Kelly’s use of ‘cad’ is clearly in keeping with the OED’s fifth meaning: ‘A fellow of low vulgar manners and behaviour. (An offensive and insulting appellation.)’ We need look no further.

In Chapter 26, ‘Obscene Words’, Burnside discusses ‘fuck’ and its paltry English synonyms and euphemisms. He notes Chaucer’s use of ‘swive’ and proceeds to recommend Chaucer’s use of ‘hump’ in the Manciple’s Tale. He quotes the passage: ‘Never tell any man, through all your life, / How that another man has humped his wife.’ Now my ear immediately told me that there was something odd about this couplet. Did Chaucer really write as clumsily as this? I checked my Chaucer and discovered that he wrote: ‘Ne telleth nevere no man in youre lyf / How that another man hath dight his wyf.’ Here was the couplet-mastering Chaucer, and a Chaucer who never used ‘hump’ in this sexual sense. Shakespeare knows about the ‘beast with two backs’, but it is not until the late-eighteenth century that observers of couples in the missionary position started to call the procedure ‘humping’. Did it occur to no one who read the book at its various stages of editing that this does not look like Chaucer at all; that it is in fact a modern translation? Alas, the death of our literary heritage! And alas, too, Don Watson – it was Shakespeare’s ‘Jaques’ (not ‘Jacques’) who first told us about weasel words!