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Absolutely Revolting

August 2004, no. 263

Welcome to the August 2004 issue of Australian Book Review.

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Article Title: Black Inc. and the attorney-general
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Defamation is easy. Australia has any number of good defamation lawyers who will ‘legal’ a manuscript if you pay them enough. But if your manuscript threatens to transgress the National Secrets Act, you are on much shakier ground. Axis of Deceit, Andrew Wilkie’s ‘story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq’, was always going to be hot. Our investigations didn’t turn up a single Melbourne lawyer who could advise us if we had crossed the line, so we asked David Wright-Neville, a Monash academic and ex-spook (like Wilkie, he had been an analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency), to check the manuscript. He read it thoughtfully and suggested chopping a dozen or so offending passages, which was acceptable to both Wilkie and Black Inc.
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Defamation is easy. Australia has any number of good defamation lawyers who will ‘legal’ a manuscript if you pay them enough. But if your manuscript threatens to transgress the National Secrets Act, you are on much shakier ground. Axis of Deceit, Andrew Wilkie’s ‘story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq’, was always going to be hot. Our investigations didn’t turn up a single Melbourne lawyer who could advise us if we had crossed the line, so we asked David Wright-Neville, a Monash academic and ex-spook (like Wilkie, he had been an analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency), to check the manuscript. He read it thoughtfully and suggested chopping a dozen or so offending passages, which was acceptable to both Wilkie and Black Inc.

Read more: ‘Black Inc. and the attorney-general’ by Morry Schwartz

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Article Title: Shirley Hazzard in Naples
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Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.
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Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.

Silhouetted against the hood of the volcano skulks a US aircraft carrier. A regatta of pleasure boats move across the bay, just beyond partly submerged Roman ruins. Glancing at the warship, Hazzard speaks scathingly of the Bush presidency and of Bush’s corruption of the language, of words drained of meaning such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

Read more: ‘Shirley Hazzard in Naples’ by John Slavin

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James Bradley reviews ‘The Gift of Speed’ by Steven Carroll
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Nostalgic Textures
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I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.
Book 1 Title: The Gift of Speed
Book Author: Steven Carroll
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, 320pp, $27.95 pb
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I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

Steven Carroll’s The Gift of Speed inhabits a similar territory, a place poised on the brink of be-coming, in this case the outer suburbs of Melbourne over the summer of 1960–61. Michael, the twelve-year-old of Carroll’s Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Art of the Engine Driver (2001) is now sixteen, his father Vic is also four years older and dreams of escape from his life and his marriage, while the mother Rita simply hopes for things to be better.

Read more: James Bradley reviews ‘The Gift of Speed’ by Steven Carroll

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James Ley reviews The Last Love Story by Rodney Hall
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Article Title: Trapped by Their Own Defences
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There is often a speculative dimension to Rodney Hall’s fiction. Throughout his long career, he has tended to build his novels around alternative histories or unusual possibilities. Past works have imagined scenarios as diverse as Adolf Hitler arriving on the south coast of New South Wales and (where does he get his ideas?) Australia becoming a republic. The Last Love Story is in some respects unrepresentative of Hall’s vivid and expansive body of work. Compared to some of his earlier novels, it is concise and the natural flamboyance of his writing seems a little subdued. The novel does, however, develop from a typically interesting ‘what if?’
Book 1 Title: The Last Love Story
Book Author: Rodney Hall
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $22 pb, 256 pp
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There is often a speculative dimension to Rodney Hall’s fiction. Throughout his long career, he has tended to build his novels around alternative histories or unusual possibilities. Past works have imagined scenarios as diverse as Adolf Hitler arriving on the south coast of New South Wales and (where does he get his ideas?) Australia becoming a republic. The Last Love Story is in some respects unrepresentative of Hall’s vivid and expansive body of work. Compared to some of his earlier novels, it is concise and the natural flamboyance of his writing seems a little subdued. The novel does, however, develop from a typically interesting ‘what if?’

Read more: James Ley reviews 'The Last Love Story' by Rodney Hall

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Contents Category: Science and Technology
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Article Title: The Father of Australian Geology
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The leading early geologist in Australia was Reverend William Branwhite Clarke (1798–1878). His father was a blind schoolmaster in a Suffolk village, and the family was not well off. Still, they managed to send William to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied to enter the church. During his time as a student, he came under the influence of the redoubtable professor of geology Adam Sedgwick and took up geology seriously. Nevertheless, he became a clergyman and held a series of minor ecclesiastical positions, besides teaching at his father’s old school for a period. He also undertook geological studies, was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society and published a number of (fairly minor) papers in Britain.
Book 1 Title: The Web of Science
Book 1 Subtitle: The Scientific Correspondence of the Rev. W.B. Clarke, Australia’s Pioneer Geologist (2 Volumes)
Book Author: Ann Moyal
Book 1 Biblio: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1340 pp, $200 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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The leading early geologist in Australia was Reverend William Branwhite Clarke (1798–1878). His father was a blind schoolmaster in a Suffolk village, and the family was not well off. Still, they managed to send William to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied to enter the church. During his time as a student, he came under the influence of the redoubtable professor of geology Adam Sedgwick and took up geology seriously. Nevertheless, he became a clergyman and held a series of minor ecclesiastical positions, besides teaching at his father’s old school for a period. He also undertook geological studies, was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society and published a number of (fairly minor) papers in Britain.

Read more: David Oldroyd reviews 'The Web of Science' edited by Ann Moyal

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Daniel Thomas reviews Through Artists’ Eyes: Australian Suburbs and their Cities, 1919-1945 by John Slater
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Article Title: Bi-hemispheric View
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The tempting cover leads to a feast of 164 colour pictures, which you will fall upon with delight. Despite the title, almost all are of Melbourne and Sydney, places most Australians know well enough to enjoy pleased shocks of recognition. There are two highly specific Perth roofscapes, but a futurist speeding tram in Adelaide could be anywhere, and so could the industry at Yallourn, or sexual and racial tension at Townsville in 1942. Even if you come from the bush, you will know the city markets, cathedrals, law courts, showgrounds, Circular Quay and Harbour Bridge, Flinders Street Station and Collins Street trams, Town Hall concerts, Tivoli showgirls, Manly, St Kilda, racy Kings Cross lats, a frisson of ‘slums’. The author says he chose the works of art solely for their subject matter, yet he certainly appreciates aesthetic force. It’s a lively anthology of transport and other social nodes, parklands, beaches, building construction, shopping, entertainment. It makes the familiar look unexpectedly interesting.
Book 1 Title: Through Artists’ Eyes
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian Suburbs and their Cities, 1919-1945
Book Author: John Slater
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $69.95 hb, 238 pp
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The tempting cover leads to a feast of 164 colour pictures, which you will fall upon with delight. Despite the title, almost all are of Melbourne and Sydney, places most Australians know well enough to enjoy pleased shocks of recognition. There are two highly specific Perth roofscapes, but a futurist speeding tram in Adelaide could be anywhere, and so could the industry at Yallourn, or sexual and racial tension at Townsville in 1942. Even if you come from the bush, you will know the city markets, cathedrals, law courts, showgrounds, Circular Quay and Harbour Bridge, Flinders Street Station and Collins Street trams, Town Hall concerts, Tivoli showgirls, Manly, St Kilda, racy Kings Cross lats, a frisson of ‘slums’. The author says he chose the works of art solely for their subject matter, yet he certainly appreciates aesthetic force. It’s a lively anthology of transport and other social nodes, parklands, beaches, building construction, shopping, entertainment. It makes the familiar look unexpectedly interesting.

Read more: Daniel Thomas reviews 'Through Artists’ Eyes: Australian Suburbs and their Cities, 1919-1945' by...

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Paul Hetherington reviews ‘Toccata and Rain’ by Philip Salom
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Article Title: Memory Reel
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Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.
Book 1 Title: Toccata and Rain
Book Author: Philip Salom
Book 1 Biblio: FACP, $24.95pb, 302pp
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Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

Read more: Paul Hetherington reviews ‘Toccata and Rain’ by Philip Salom

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Oliver Dennis reviews Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems by Luke Davies
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Love’s Stillness
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Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.
Book 1 Title: Totem
Book 1 Subtitle: Totem poem plus 40 love poems
Book Author: Luke Davies
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $21.95pb, 85 pp
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Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

Read more: Oliver Dennis reviews 'Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems' by Luke Davies

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Patrick McCaughey reviews ‘What’s wrong with contemporary art?’ by Peter Timms
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Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Quite who is to blame for this occupies much of the first half of Timms’s book. Artists hell-bent on having careers rather than seeking vocations are part of the problem, and so are curators of contemporary art who nourish the artist’s every need. Art schools are next, where cultural theory has replaced the teaching of art history. The superficialities and the susceptibility to trendiness in the Australia Council are further contributors.
Book 1 Title: What’s wrong with contemporary art?
Book Author: Peter Timms
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $29.95 pb, 184pp
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Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Read more: Patrick McCaughey reviews ‘What’s wrong with contemporary art?’ by Peter Timms

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Chris McConville reviews Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History edited by Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within by Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow
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Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.
Book 1 Title: Radical Brisbane
Book 1 Subtitle: An Unruly History
Book Author: Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier
Book 1 Biblio: Vulgar Press, $50 pb, 329 pp
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Book 2 Title: Radical Melbourne 2
Book 2 Subtitle: The Enemy Within
Book 2 Author: Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow
Book 2 Biblio: Vulgar Press, $50 pb, 251 pp
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Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.

Read more: Chris McConville reviews 'Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History' edited by Raymond Evans and Carole...

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Felicity Bloch reviews Gang of Four by Liz Byrski and Poppys Return by Pat Rosier
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Custom Article Title: Return of the Repressed
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Zeitgeist or coincidence? Spinifex and Macmillan have both just published novels with middle-aged women centre stage. In marketing terms, they have launched a niche product, targeting the middle-aged female consumer. Poppy’s Return, by New Zealand author Pat Rosier, and West Australian Liz Byrski’s Gang of Four boldly foreground women’s midlife issues. Their protagonists bravely confront the multiple challenges of their own ageing, in addition to the care of elderly relatives.
Book 1 Title: Gang of Four
Book Author: Liz Byrski
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $30 pb, 399 pp
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Book 2 Title: Poppy's Return
Book 2 Author: Pat Rosier
Book 2 Biblio: Spinifex, $27.95 pb, 206 pp
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Zeitgeist or coincidence? Spinifex and Macmillan have both just published novels with middle-aged women centre stage. In marketing terms, they have launched a niche product, targeting the middle-aged female consumer. Poppy’s Return, by New Zealand author Pat Rosier, and West Australian Liz Byrski’s Gang of Four boldly foreground women’s midlife issues. Their protagonists bravely confront the multiple challenges of their own ageing, in addition to the care of elderly relatives.

While these themes are the staple of lifestyle and leisure sections of the media, they have hardly begun to infiltrate the arts. Audiences at writers’ festivals and other cultural events confirm that middle-aged women are a significant, perhaps even predominant, demographic among arts consumers, yet until now our mainstream and popular culture remain youth-oriented. The return of the repressed is overdue, on stage and screen, as well as in fiction. Wrinkles and sagging flesh notwithstanding, the invisible majority want their names in lights, and their stories told back to them.

Read more: Felicity Bloch reviews 'Gang of Four' by Liz Byrski and 'Poppy's Return' by Pat Rosier

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Joy Hooton reviews A Tuesday Thing by Kate Shayler and Gods Callgirl by Carla van Raay
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Custom Article Title: Degrees of Exploitation
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Accounts of past child abuse and the inability or unwillingness of those in positions of authority to confront its reality are amongst the hottest of topics in today’s media. Generally, the story is about the perpetrators and their punishments, or about the impact of disclosures on church leaders forced to retire because of their negligent or political mishandling of cases brought to their attention. But what about the victims? Rules of privacy generally mean that we never learn at firsthand what it must be like to live with the knowledge of a childhood tainted by sexual abuse on the part of some adult with authority. Still less are we likely to know what that knowledge must be like when the abuser was also a much-loved family relation, such as, or especially, a father. For that reason, memoirs such as these are valuable in that they initiate the reader into the long-lasting effects of abuse with graphic emotional immediacy.
Book 1 Title: A Tuesday Thing
Book Author: Kate Shayler
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $22.95 pb, 509 pp
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Book 2 Title: God's Callgirl
Book 2 Author: Carla van Raay
Book 2 Biblio: HarperCollins, $29.95 pb, 441 pp
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Accounts of past child abuse and the inability or unwillingness of those in positions of authority to confront its reality are amongst the hottest of topics in today’s media. Generally, the story is about the perpetrators and their punishments, or about the impact of disclosures on church leaders forced to retire because of their negligent or political mishandling of cases brought to their attention. But what about the victims? Rules of privacy generally mean that we never learn at firsthand what it must be like to live with the knowledge of a childhood tainted by sexual abuse on the part of some adult with authority. Still less are we likely to know what that knowledge must be like when the abuser was also a much-loved family relation, such as, or especially, a father. For that reason, memoirs such as these are valuable in that they initiate the reader into the long-lasting effects of abuse with graphic emotional immediacy.

Both these accounts are finally ‘triumphal’, leaving the reader when the narrator has come to terms of a sort with her childhood trauma. But the journey for the reader can be long, grim and tiring. Tedious is not the right word, given the intense testimonial nature of these narratives, but the tortuous windings and frequent frustrations of both narrators as they search for a stable self make claims on the reader’s stamina. In the case of the latter sections of God’s Callgirl, these are large claims.

Read more: Joy Hooton reviews 'A Tuesday Thing' by Kate Shayler and 'God's Callgirl' by Carla van Raay

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Philip Clark reviews Economia: New economic systems to empower people and support the living world by Geoff Davies and How Australia Compares by Rod Tiffen and Ross Gittens
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Australians like to believe they live in the best country in the world. Plenty of space, abundant  natural resources and lots of sunshine for this nation whose inhabitants have come from all corners of the earth to a land of opportunity. It’s an appealing national smugness that has comforted generations of Australians as they looked with tolerant amusement at the congested societies of industrialised countries elsewhere in the world. Aren’t we lucky!

Occasionally, there may have been some nagging doubts as we looked at the growing wealth of the Asian economies and the technological sophistication of overseas manufacturing. Are we as smart as they are? Do we work hard enough? Are we falling behind? Is this the land of the long weekend? In recent years, have we become hard-hearted and lazy? Good questions, and easier to answer anecdotally and instinctively rather than empirically. Generally, we thanked our lucky stars.
Book 1 Title: Economia
Book 1 Subtitle: New economic systems to empower people and support the living world
Book Author: Geoff Davies
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $39.95 pb, 498 pp
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Book 2 Title: How Australia Compares
Book 2 Author: Rod Tiffen and Ross Gittens
Book 2 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $49.95 hb, 282 pp
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Australians like to believe they live in the best country in the world. Plenty of space, abundant  natural resources and lots of sunshine for this nation whose inhabitants have come from all corners of the earth to a land of opportunity. It’s an appealing national smugness that has comforted generations of Australians as they looked with tolerant amusement at the congested societies of industrialised countries elsewhere in the world. Aren’t we lucky!

Occasionally, there may have been some nagging doubts as we looked at the growing wealth of the Asian economies and the technological sophistication of overseas manufacturing. Are we as smart as they are? Do we work hard enough? Are we falling behind? Is this the land of the long weekend? In recent years, have we become hard-hearted and lazy? Good questions, and easier to answer anecdotally and instinctively rather than empirically. Generally, we thanked our lucky stars.

Read more: Philip Clark reviews 'Economia: New economic systems to empower people and support the living...

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Susan Varga reviews The Master Pearlers Daughter: Memories of my Broome childhood by Rosemary Hemphill and Bullo: The next generation by Marlee Ranacher
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Here are two engaging books that trade on the romance and exoticism of northern Australia. Neither makes much demand on the reader nor offers profound insights, but both in their different ways abound in atmosphere and a genuine ‘feel for place’.

Rosemary Hemphill’s childhood was one of extreme contrasts. Her father, the product of Jewish Orthodox parents and Sydney Grammar, washed up in Broome with the dream of becoming the master of a pearling fleet. As so many do, he fell in love with the place and stayed until forced out by the fall of the pearling industry. He served in World War I and, while recuperating from wounds in England, fell in love with the beautiful and cultured daughter of a conventional upper-middle-class couple. The English in-laws insisted that he convert in order to marry their daughter. Back in Sydney, his father declared ‘my son is dead’, as is the custom of Orthodox Jews whose progeny ‘marry out’, and forced the rest of the family to cut ties as well. Louis Goldstein, now Louis Goldie, returned to Broome with his wife and pursued the half-glamorous, half-arduous life of the ‘master pearler’. The life was harder on the women, who were forced to battle the extreme physical conditions, isolation and monotony.
Book 1 Title: The Master Pearler's Daughter
Book 1 Subtitle: Memories of my Broome childhood
Book Author: Rosemary Hemphill
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $30 hb, 270 pp
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Book 2 Title: Bullo
Book 2 Subtitle: The next generation
Book 2 Author: Marlee Ranacher
Book 2 Biblio: Random House, $29.95 pb, 295 pp
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Here are two engaging books that trade on the romance and exoticism of northern Australia. Neither makes much demand on the reader nor offers profound insights, but both in their different ways abound in atmosphere and a genuine ‘feel for place’.

Rosemary Hemphill’s childhood was one of extreme contrasts. Her father, the product of Jewish Orthodox parents and Sydney Grammar, washed up in Broome with the dream of becoming the master of a pearling fleet. As so many do, he fell in love with the place and stayed until forced out by the fall of the pearling industry. He served in World War I and, while recuperating from wounds in England, fell in love with the beautiful and cultured daughter of a conventional upper-middle-class couple. The English in-laws insisted that he convert in order to marry their daughter. Back in Sydney, his father declared ‘my son is dead’, as is the custom of Orthodox Jews whose progeny ‘marry out’, and forced the rest of the family to cut ties as well. Louis Goldstein, now Louis Goldie, returned to Broome with his wife and pursued the half-glamorous, half-arduous life of the ‘master pearler’. The life was harder on the women, who were forced to battle the extreme physical conditions, isolation and monotony.

Read more: Susan Varga reviews 'The Master Pearler's Daughter: Memories of my Broome childhood' by Rosemary...

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Josh Wilson reviews three books
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War stories are never extrinsic to war. The us-and-them plots, domino theories and governing metaphors, the operational jargon and vast naming schemes, even the post-hoc synopses (we won, we should have won, another win like that and we’re finished): these are not patterns laid over something real; they stream from the enabling code.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Australian Task Force Vietnam administered its own war in Phuoc Tuy, a province south-east of Saigon. The Australians had their own allocation of enemy (D445 local guerrilla battalion and elements of the NVA 5th Division), their own style (US gear and fire-support, Vietnamese patrol tactics) and, of course, their own story. They were the latest Anzacs. Right?
Book 1 Title: Shockwave
Book 1 Subtitle: An Australian combat helicopter crew in Vietnam
Book Author: Peter Haran
Book 1 Biblio: New Holland, $19.95 pb, 212 pp
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Book 2 Title: Flashback
Book 2 Subtitle: Echoes from a hard war
Book 2 Author: Peter Haran and Robert Kearney
Book 2 Biblio: New Holland, $24.95 pb, 237 pp
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Book 3 Title: The Year I Said Goodbye
Book 3 Author: Peter Winter
Book 3 Biblio: Wakefield Press, $27.50 pb, 269 pp
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War stories are never extrinsic to war. The us-and-them plots, domino theories and governing metaphors, the operational jargon and vast naming schemes, even the post-hoc synopses (we won, we should have won, another win like that and we’re finished): these are not patterns laid over something real; they stream from the enabling code.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Australian Task Force Vietnam administered its own war in Phuoc Tuy, a province south-east of Saigon. The Australians had their own allocation of enemy (D445 local guerrilla battalion and elements of the NVA 5th Division), their own style (US gear and fire-support, Vietnamese patrol tactics) and, of course, their own story. They were the latest Anzacs. Right?

Read more: Josh Wilson reviews three books

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Sue Turnbull reviews three crime fiction books
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About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.
Book 1 Title: Malicious Intent
Book Author: Kathryn Fox
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $30 pb, 345 pp
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Book 2 Title: The Walker
Book 2 Author: Jane Goodall
Book 2 Biblio: Hodder, $29.95 pb, 362 pp
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Book 3 Title: Queen of the Flowers
Book 3 Author: Kerry Greenwood
Book 3 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 279 pp
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About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

In terms of crime fiction and television crime series, Crichton is, of course, right. Forensics appears to exert a particular fascination for the lay reader and viewer. Consider the popularity of the books of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, and of the obsessively revelatory CSI franchise, which by means of computer-generated effects often takes us on a joyride through the body, tracking the trajectory of a bullet. Author Kathryn Fox, herself a doctor with an interest in forensic medicine, is therefore right on the money with her first crime novel.

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Margaret Robson Kett reviews A Life in Childrens Books by Walter McVitty
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The Lu Rees Archives of Australian Children’s literature is a collection of children’s books and manuscripts whose stated purpose is to ‘provide resources for the study and research of Australian authors and illustrators, including both the literature and the historical and cultural context in which it was created’. Officially owned by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and housed in the University of Canberra’s library, the collection of about fourteen thousand items provides a ‘particularly rich and comprehensive overview of Australian children’s literature, its creation and publishing endeavour’. Lu Rees, a foundation member of CBCA, started the collection with her own substantial holdings, and the collection encourages donations. Walter McVitty has made a gift of more than 3000 books and the entire archive of his publishing company, Walter McVitty Books, which existed from 1985 to 1997. In order to aid future researchers who might find the vast array of material in that archive bewildering, McVitty wrote explanatory notes of about twenty thousand words. He has expanded these into this book, which Lothian (the company that bought his imprint) has published.
Book 1 Title: A Life in Children's Books
Book Author: Walter McVitty
Book 1 Biblio: Lothian, $39.95 pb, 226 pp
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The Lu Rees Archives of Australian Children’s literature is a collection of children’s books and manuscripts whose stated purpose is to ‘provide resources for the study and research of Australian authors and illustrators, including both the literature and the historical and cultural context in which it was created’. Officially owned by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and housed in the University of Canberra’s library, the collection of about fourteen thousand items provides a ‘particularly rich and comprehensive overview of Australian children’s literature, its creation and publishing endeavour’. Lu Rees, a foundation member of CBCA, started the collection with her own substantial holdings, and the collection encourages donations. Walter McVitty has made a gift of more than 3000 books and the entire archive of his publishing company, Walter McVitty Books, which existed from 1985 to 1997. In order to aid future researchers who might find the vast array of material in that archive bewildering, McVitty wrote explanatory notes of about twenty thousand words. He has expanded these into this book, which Lothian (the company that bought his imprint) has published.

Read more: Margaret Robson Kett reviews 'A Life in Children's Books' by Walter McVitty

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John Rickard reviews A Life of Unlearning: Coming out of the church - one mans struggle by Anthony Venn-Brown
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In the era of gay liberation, ‘coming out’ has for many taken on the character of a religious experience. Gays and lesbians in the US draw easily on a religious culture of personal salvation even while denying the sometimes oppressive institutions it has created. In Australia, we are not given to the same public display of emotional and spiritual commitment, but ‘coming out’ has nevertheless come to be regarded as a gay rite of passage.
Book 1 Title: A Life of Unlearning
Book 1 Subtitle: Coming out of the church: One man's struggle
Book Author: Anthony Venn-Brown
Book 1 Biblio: New Holland, $27.95 pb, 319 pp
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In the era of gay liberation, ‘coming out’ has for many taken on the character of a religious experience. Gays and lesbians in the US draw easily on a religious culture of personal salvation even while denying the sometimes oppressive institutions it has created. In Australia, we are not given to the same public display of emotional and spiritual commitment, but ‘coming out’ has nevertheless come to be regarded as a gay rite of passage.

Anthony Venn-Brown’s A Life of Unlearning offers an unusual perspective: his coming out was a protracted affair involving a tortuous conflict between his vocation as a preacher in the Assemblies of God and his unstable sense of gay identity. The book comes with a foreword by our most eminent ‘out’ homosexual, Justice Michael Kirby, in which he remarks that, while ‘heterosexuals do not generally feel a need to proclaim their sexual identity as such’, for gays and lesbians the journey to ‘self-acceptance’ is often a spiritual one. Venn-Brown has no doubt that his is ‘a story of inspiration for those who are seeking a higher purpose and meaning in their lives’.

Read more: John Rickard reviews 'A Life of Unlearning: Coming out of the church - one man's struggle' by...

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Vesna Drapac reviews A Social History of France 1789-1914 Second Edition by Peter McPhee
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France in 1914 was in many ways almost completely different from how it was in 1789. In the 1780s France was an ‘agrarian pre-capitalist society’ in which the ‘location of most industry and the sources of power and most wealth were rural’. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a capitalist society in which ‘an urban, bourgeois and republican culture had become as hegemonic as had been that of the Church and the aristocracy under the ancien régime’. The second edition of Melbourne academic Peter McPhee’s remarkable book, A Social History of France 1789–1914, explains why and how this occurred.
Book 1 Title: A Social History of France 1789-1914
Book 1 Subtitle: Second Edition
Book Author: Peter McPhee
Book 1 Biblio: Palgrave, $56 pb, 359 pp
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France in 1914 was in many ways almost completely different from how it was in 1789. In the 1780s France was an ‘agrarian pre-capitalist society’ in which the ‘location of most industry and the sources of power and most wealth were rural’. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a capitalist society in which ‘an urban, bourgeois and republican culture had become as hegemonic as had been that of the Church and the aristocracy under the ancien régime’. The second edition of Melbourne academic Peter McPhee’s remarkable book, A Social History of France 1789–1914, explains why and how this occurred.

Between 1789 and 1914 the Revolution played itself out in various ways through, and sometimes in spite of, various régimes (three republics, two empires, a ‘restored’ and a constitutional monarchy) and upheavals (two further revolutions and the last significant insurrection of the ‘long nineteenth century’, the Commune of 1871). The revolution ‘came to port’ around the time of the celebration of its centenary, though there is some debate about the timing of the final triumph of republicanism, which had been refashioned and made more palatable in the course of the nineteenth century.

Read more: Vesna Drapac reviews 'A Social History of France 1789-1914 Second Edition' by Peter McPhee

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Custom Article Title: Advances | August 2004
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An evening with J.M. Coetzee

ABR (in association with La Trobe University and the City of Melbourne) is delighted to be able to invite all our readers, but especially our subscribers, to what promises to be one of our major events for the year, when the masterly novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee will read from his work. This rare opportunity for Victorians to hear the Nobel Laureate and author of Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K will take place at the Melbourne Town Hall at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, August 4 (we suggest you arrive at 5.30 to ensure you get a seat). Full details appear on page 5. This is a free event. La Trobe University will also confer the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) on J.M. Coetzee during his visit to Melbourne.
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An evening with J.M. Coetzee

ABR (in association with La Trobe University and the City of Melbourne) is delighted to be able to invite all our readers, but especially our subscribers, to what promises to be one of our major events for the year, when the masterly novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee will read from his work. This rare opportunity for Victorians to hear the Nobel Laureate and author of Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K will take place at the Melbourne Town Hall at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, August 4 (we suggest you arrive at 5.30 to ensure you get a seat). Full details appear on page 5. This is a free event. La Trobe University will also confer the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) on J.M. Coetzee during his visit to Melbourne.

The sound and the fury

Reviewing, some doubters might say, is a mug’s game: underpaid, vulnerable to editorial whims and less cosmically influential than some reviewers (and some sensitive authors) believe. We at ABR maintain, as you might expect, that forthright criticism is central, not secondary, to a healthy literary culture. But it is a changing genre, and questions can be asked about its present independence and vitality. Peter Rose (Editor of ABR) proposes to test some of them in a workshop at the Victorian Writers’ Centre on Saturday, August 7. (For more details, contact the VWC on 03 9654 9068.) Peter Rose will address related themes when he delivers the 2004 Barry Andrews Lecture at 5.30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 8. The title of his lecture is ‘The Sound and the Fury: Uneasy Times for Hacks and Critics’. The venue, not altogether inaptly, is the Military Theatre at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra.

Read more: Advances | August 2004

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Sylvia Lawson reviews Memo for a Saner World by Bob Brown
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Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constitution in favour of the environment; Les Verts have been doing pretty well in the European elections. Labor lassoes Peter Garrett. Even John Howard, while giving much aid and comfort to the fossil fuel industries, tries to sound as though he really supports renewable resources.
Book 1 Title: Memo for a Saner World
Book Author: Bob Brown
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $24.95 pb, 281 pp
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Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constitution in favour of the environment; Les Verts have been doing pretty well in the European elections. Labor lassoes Peter Garrett. Even John Howard, while giving much aid and comfort to the fossil fuel industries, tries to sound as though he really supports renewable resources.

Senator Brown would say that’s all so much greenwash, his word for pro-environmental rhetoric unmatched by substance. He whirls us through real statistics: for the destruction of timber that has taken centuries to grow, Tasmanians now get about one per cent of the gain to the Japanese paper-millers: $1000 per tonne. The woodchip export industry dominates; there is little yield now of sawn timber or veneer. Brown takes us to Farmhouse Creek, the Bay of Fires and the Styx Valley – the imperilled Valley of the Giants, the home of the world’s tallest hardwoods, now ‘being slaughtered’ by immensely powerful bulldozers and chainsaws ‘at the greatest rate in history, for the lowest return in history, for the fewest jobs in history’. This ‘massive sell-out’ (Brown’s term) was legalised by the Regional Forest Agreement, which John Howard signed in 1997.

Read more: Sylvia Lawson reviews 'Memo for a Saner World' by Bob Brown

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Rod Beecham reviews Back on the Wool Track by Michelle Grattan
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Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.
Book 1 Title: Back on the Wool Track
Book Author: Michelle Grattan
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $24.95 pb, 352 pp
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Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.

Michelle Grattan has been reporting on Australian politics since 1971. Her desire to retrace the steps of Charles Bean and to write about the experience stems from a combination of things: the impression made on her by On the Wool Track; a family connection with the country; an assignment she did for The Age in 1990; and interest from a book publisher. She writes: ‘this book attempts to give a feel for the man as well as for his outback writings, and for the country now.’ The attempt, I think, is not very successful, and the reasons for this are interesting: they seem to reveal much about the linkages between writing style, writing subject, modes of writing and the influence of writing conventions.

Read more: Rod Beecham reviews 'Back on the Wool Track' by Michelle Grattan

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Brian McFarlane reviews Bud: A life by Charles Bud Tingwell (with Peter Wilmoth)
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After a few years ago, I had occasion to interview Bud Tingwell, and I remember telling an actress friend afterwards: ‘He talked for two hours without saying anything unkind about anyone.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s famous for it.’ This testimony came back to me while reading this autobiography: clearly not everyone he has had dealings with in his busy life has been sweetness and light, but it goes against the Tingwell grain to say so. What you see with Tingwell is what you get – a craftsmanlike actor and a tolerant, kindly man. The tolerance seems real, the cornerstone of a philosophy that makes him want to think the best of the people who have populated his life. So, if you’re after the kind of theatrical/film memoir that thrives on bitchy gossip, or if you want more bite, even if it means taking in a good dose of malice, look elsewhere.
Book 1 Title: Bud
Book 1 Subtitle: A life
Book Author: Charles 'Bud' Tingwell (with Peter Wilmoth)
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $30 pb, 356 pp
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After a few years ago, I had occasion to interview Bud Tingwell, and I remember telling an actress friend afterwards: ‘He talked for two hours without saying anything unkind about anyone.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s famous for it.’ This testimony came back to me while reading this autobiography: clearly not everyone he has had dealings with in his busy life has been sweetness and light, but it goes against the Tingwell grain to say so. What you see with Tingwell is what you get – a craftsmanlike actor and a tolerant, kindly man. The tolerance seems real, the cornerstone of a philosophy that makes him want to think the best of the people who have populated his life. So, if you’re after the kind of theatrical/film memoir that thrives on bitchy gossip, or if you want more bite, even if it means taking in a good dose of malice, look elsewhere.

As well as being the quintessential nice guy, on-screen as well as in life, Tingwell also offers a highly readable account of a pretty amazing career that spans sixty years. Given his first taste of performing at school, he then became radio’s youngest announcer and lurked round the edges of Ken Hall’s Cinesound Studios in the 1930s. Like so many of his age, Tingwell had to call a halt to attractive possibilities when war broke out. He gives an evocative account of his experiences in photographic reconnaissance work, and is astute enough to realise how they ‘shaped the sort of person I became’. He recalls the dangers, without boastfulness or too-casual laconicism, understanding the demands of the time for ‘psychological survival’.

Read more: Brian McFarlane reviews 'Bud: A life' by Charles 'Bud' Tingwell (with Peter Wilmoth)

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews Changes: New & collected poems 1962-2002 by Keith Harrison
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The word ‘collected’ on a book of poems has its embedded dangers. Collected Poems are like autobiographies: they encourage readers to confuse them with the writer’s flow of life. And we can all see what’s wrong with that, I hope. That cagey old player, W.H. Auden, issued this injunction:

Great writers who have shown mankind
An order it has yet to find,
What if all critics say of you
As personalities be true?
You had the patience that survives
Soiled, shabby, egotistic lives …

He also refused to write an autobiography.
Book 1 Title: Changes
Book 1 Subtitle: New & collected poems 1962-2002
Book Author: Keith Harrison
Book 1 Biblio: Black Willow Press, $25 pb, 374 pp
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The word ‘collected’ on a book of poems has its embedded dangers. Collected Poems are like autobiographies: they encourage readers to confuse them with the writer’s flow of life. And we can all see what’s wrong with that, I hope. That cagey old player, W.H. Auden, issued this injunction:

Great writers who have shown mankind
An order it has yet to find,
What if all critics say of you
As personalities be true?
You had the patience that survives
Soiled, shabby, egotistic lives …

He also refused to write an autobiography.

Read more: Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Changes: New & collected poems 1962-2002' by Keith Harrison

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Sylvia Martin reviews Charmian and George: The marriage of George Johnson and Charmian Clift by Max Brown
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For some Australians, the exotic, exciting and ultimately tragic relationship of Charmian Clift (1923–69) and George Johnston (1912–70) has attained the mythical status of other famous literary couples of the twentieth century: F. Scott and Zelda, Virginia and Leonard, Ted and Sylvia. The combination of beautiful people, prolific and personal writing, illness and suicide makes them irresistible and seemingly inexhaustible subjects for biographers and readers alike. In the case of the Johnstons, escape to London from the conservative Australia of the 1950s, and then years on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, add another level of fascination. The dream of an idyllic island life is a resilient one: evidence that it is unattainable only serves to strengthen the myth.
Book 1 Title: Charmian and George
Book 1 Subtitle: The marriage of George Johnson and Charmian Clift
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For some Australians, the exotic, exciting and ultimately tragic relationship of Charmian Clift (1923–69) and George Johnston (1912–70) has attained the mythical status of other famous literary couples of the twentieth century: F. Scott and Zelda, Virginia and Leonard, Ted and Sylvia. The combination of beautiful people, prolific and personal writing, illness and suicide makes them irresistible and seemingly inexhaustible subjects for biographers and readers alike. In the case of the Johnstons, escape to London from the conservative Australia of the 1950s, and then years on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, add another level of fascination. The dream of an idyllic island life is a resilient one: evidence that it is unattainable only serves to strengthen the myth.

Long fascinated by the writing and life of the Johnstons, I nevertheless opened this book with some trepidation, the familiarity of the first-name title and the concentration on their ‘marriage’ sounding warning bells of voyeurism. The unusual situation of writing a review about a book whose author has recently died added to my unease.

Read more: Sylvia Martin reviews 'Charmian and George: The marriage of George Johnson and Charmian Clift' by...

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For a timber of such beauty and usefulness, red cedar has had a somewhat perverse history. Recognised for its domestic potential in the first few years of European settlement in New South Wales, it wasn’t long before supplies were so depleted around Sydney that government attempted, unsuccessfully, to regulate its logging. By the end of the century, it was all but cut out of accessible land from Sydney to north Queensland, leaving in its wake large tracts of denuded rainforest and sometimes dislocated Aboriginal communities.
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For a timber of such beauty and usefulness, red cedar has had a somewhat perverse history. Recognised for its domestic potential in the first few years of European settlement in New South Wales, it wasn’t long before supplies were so depleted around Sydney that government attempted, unsuccessfully, to regulate its logging. By the end of the century, it was all but cut out of accessible land from Sydney to north Queensland, leaving in its wake large tracts of denuded rainforest and sometimes dislocated Aboriginal communities.

Cedar’s special qualities also contributed to its own destruction; the only deciduous tree in an otherwise evergreen habitat, cedar’s new copper-red spring foliage made its location a dead give-away. And paradoxically, because of the depredations of the cedar tip moth, modern attempts to establish commercial red cedar plantations have failed in eastern Australia, while in Hawaii the tree has been so successfully imported that it can reach weed proportions. Finally, recent revelations about the extent of trade with India in the nineteenth century, and the similarity between Indian and Australian cedar, have raised conundrums for Australian furniture historians. No longer is the use of red cedar in furniture an incontrovertible indicator of colonial workmanship.

Read more: A Cedar Heritage by Anne Watson

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During the summer, Fire Island Pines, a scrubby Atlantic-facing dunescape off the southern shore of Long Island, is entirely colonised by gay men from Manhattan. Little dogs, swelling pectorals, postcards of Prince William and other clichés abound. The only way to get there is by ferry. There are no roads, just paths, jetties and boardwalks. This alone makes it worth the trip. Yet Fire Island has a distinctly ‘science fiction’ aspect, as if a cruisy gay nightclub in outer space for curious aliens and time-travellers. Here, glamorous youth and leathery, wobbling-tummied capital are exquisitely interdependent. From about four o’clock in the afternoon until six or seven, at the quayside tea dance, hundreds of shirtless men writhe to ‘Let the Sunshine in’ and other camp classics. All shapes and sizes. You can’t help thinking of those nature documentaries where colourful water birds peck grubs and insects from behind the ear of some lumbering wildebeest. I am not sure where I fit into this eco-system. It does not seem particularly fragile.
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During the summer, Fire Island Pines, a scrubby Atlantic-facing dunescape off the southern shore of Long Island, is entirely colonised by gay men from Manhattan. Little dogs, swelling pectorals, postcards of Prince William and other clichés abound. The only way to get there is by ferry. There are no roads, just paths, jetties and boardwalks. This alone makes it worth the trip. Yet Fire Island has a distinctly ‘science fiction’ aspect, as if a cruisy gay nightclub in outer space for curious aliens and time-travellers. Here, glamorous youth and leathery, wobbling-tummied capital are exquisitely interdependent. From about four o’clock in the afternoon until six or seven, at the quayside tea dance, hundreds of shirtless men writhe to ‘Let the Sunshine in’ and other camp classics. All shapes and sizes. You can’t help thinking of those nature documentaries where colourful water birds peck grubs and insects from behind the ear of some lumbering wildebeest. I am not sure where I fit into this eco-system. It does not seem particularly fragile.

Read more: Diary by Angus Trumble

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Aviva Tuffield reviews Home by Larissa Behrendt
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A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.
Book 1 Title: Home
Book Author: Larissa Behrendt
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A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.

It is significant that Behrendt, a professor of law and indigenous studies at UTS, has chosen to present her family’s story as fiction, especially since Aboriginal women’s autobiography is a well-established genre. Home is a novel, albeit a highly auto-biographical one, that traverses three generations of family history. It opens in the first-person voice of Candice, a city lawyer working on native title claims, who is clearly Behrendt’s alter ego. Candice returns with her father to her family’s ancestral home from where her grandmother, Garibooli, was stolen almost eighty years earlier. The novel then rewinds to that fateful day, capturing its full horror. In essence, the remainder of the book deals with the intergenerational consequences of this crime.

Read more: Aviva Tuffield reviews 'Home' by Larissa Behrendt

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Custom Article Title: La Trobe University Essay | 'Thanks for Takin' an Interest'
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On 30 March 2001 Helen Garner attended a Victims of Crime Rally on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House.

The sun shone on a loose crowd that was forming at the top of Bourke Street. Many of the demonstrators had attached pictures of their murdered loved ones to their T shirts … On their backs people wore the slogan MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A common poster read LET THE VICTIM HAVE THE LAST WORD IN THE SENTENCE.

Garner describes suffering faces, clumsy and sob-broken speeches, anger sharpened to ‘rough, skin-prickling eloquence’, recitations of lists of the dead, lists of crimes and sentences. At the end of the rally, Garner asked some of the speakers for their addresses. When she told a man who had impressed her with his eloquence – he wore an Akubra and his face was ‘sun-creased, sparkly-eyed and intensely like-able’ – that she was writing a book about a murder, he shook her hand and said, ‘[T]hanks for takin’ an interest’.
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On 30 March 2001 Helen Garner attended a Victims of Crime Rally on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House.

The sun shone on a loose crowd that was forming at the top of Bourke Street. Many of the demonstrators had attached pictures of their murdered loved ones to their T shirts … On their backs people wore the slogan MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A common poster read LET THE VICTIM HAVE THE LAST WORD IN THE SENTENCE.

Garner describes suffering faces, clumsy and sob-broken speeches, anger sharpened to ‘rough, skin-prickling eloquence’, recitations of lists of the dead, lists of crimes and sentences. At the end of the rally, Garner asked some of the speakers for their addresses. When she told a man who had impressed her with his eloquence – he wore an Akubra and his face was ‘sun-creased, sparkly-eyed and intensely like-able’ – that she was writing a book about a murder, he shook her hand and said, ‘[T]hanks for takin’ an interest’.

In the course of her literary career, not everyone has been so appreciative of Garner’s inquisitive persona. She portrays herself – in the stories ‘Little Helen’s Afternoon’ and ‘La Chance Existe’ in Postcards from Surfers (1985), for example – peering through windows; through windows of the soul; indeed, through any little chink or chance that presents itself. In this pursuit, she knows what ‘the first stab of real, business-like curiosity’ feels like, and is hardly slowed by being reprimanded that ‘you must realise … that this thing is not being played out for the benefit of your finer feelings’ (The First Stone, 1995). She has spoken respectfully of the ‘privilege of looking into other people’s lives’. It is an essential part of the process of what the critic Kerryn Goldsworthy describes in her book Helen Garner (1996) as Garner’s ‘opening up of narrative authority … the multiple point of view’. Nonetheless, she has often come a cropper for being a bit of a perv.

Read more: La Trobe University Essay 'Thanks for Takin' an Interest' by Evelyn Juers

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Different attitudes

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.
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Different attitudes

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.

Read more: Letters | August 2004

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Gillian Dooley reviews Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The passage to Australia by Robin Haines
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The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.

The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British assisted emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, putting their personal accounts into historical and statistical context, or rather, fleshing out the statistics with the human stories from which they are extrapolated. These emigrants are working-class people for the most part, ambitious and, of course, self-selected by their literacy, with social networks strong enough to encourage them to write their shipboard letters or diaries to keep in touch with those they had left behind in Britain. They are also, as Haines points out, self-selected for success in the new colonies, since the successful were the most likely to have descendants who would preserve the diaries and letters of their fortunate ancestors.
Book 1 Title: Life and Death in the Age of Sail
Book 1 Subtitle: The passage to Australia
Book Author: Robin Haines
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, 365pp, $49.95 hb
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The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.

The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British assisted emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, putting their personal accounts into historical and statistical context, or rather, fleshing out the statistics with the human stories from which they are extrapolated. These emigrants are working-class people for the most part, ambitious and, of course, self-selected by their literacy, with social networks strong enough to encourage them to write their shipboard letters or diaries to keep in touch with those they had left behind in Britain. They are also, as Haines points out, self-selected for success in the new colonies, since the successful were the most likely to have descendants who would preserve the diaries and letters of their fortunate ancestors.

Haines’s book comes to life in the extracts from firsthand accounts of the voyage out. It is illuminating to hear the voice of a new mother on board a ship in the 1840s describing the advantages of confinement on board: ‘I done quite as well on the mighty ocean and better than I did with my former two.’ On land, these mothers would never have been able to afford the medical attention and long periods in hospital that were provided free as part of their passage to Australia. However, the statistics do not bear out the advantages these women perceived: in this period, home births assisted by a midwife were a safer alternative, and infant mortality on the voyages to Australia remained higher than on land, although adult mortality compared more favourably.

Read more: Gillian Dooley reviews 'Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The passage to Australia' by Robin Haines

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Gideon Haigh reviews Magic Circles by Bob Mason
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A 'ground-breaking’ analysis of the Beatles through their lyrics? One is put irresistibly in mind of  the cover of Abbey Road: barefoot Paul McCartney out of step with his fellows, apparently confirming the sad circumstance at which John Lennon had hinted in the last line of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’: ‘I buried Paul.’ Except, of course, that what Lennon really slurred was: ‘I’m very bored.’ And that McCartney, far from dead, was alive, well, rich and ripe with sappy tunes sufficient to see him through another couple of decades. Scholars in the field of popular music have an unfortunate way of seeming pointlessly po-faced, rapt in the intertextual resonances of ‘A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom’. Not everyone can be Greil Marcus – sometimes not even Greil Marcus.
Book 1 Title: Magic Circles
Book Author: Bob Mason
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A ‘ground-breaking’ analysis of the Beatles through their lyrics? One is put irresistibly in mind of  the cover of Abbey Road: barefoot Paul McCartney out of step with his fellows, apparently confirming the sad circumstance at which John Lennon had hinted in the last line of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’: ‘I buried Paul.’ Except, of course, that what Lennon really slurred was: ‘I’m very bored.’ And that McCartney, far from dead, was alive, well, rich and ripe with sappy tunes sufficient to see him through another couple of decades. Scholars in the field of popular music have an unfortunate way of seeming pointlessly po-faced, rapt in the intertextual resonances of ‘A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom’. Not everyone can be Greil Marcus – sometimes not even Greil Marcus.

Bob Mason appears to be aware of this. Interpreting the lyrics of the Beatles is, to him, simply ‘a fascinating indoor game’; his Magic Circles is ‘very much a work in progress’. But both these remarks seem disingenuous. His work is neither playful nor amusing, nor can a book once published claim consideration as a work in progress. In fact, Magic Circles is the very opposite of the songs it purports to describe: great pop is disposable yet somehow lasts; Mason’s book is heavy, earnest and instantly forgettable.

Read more: Gideon Haigh reviews 'Magic Circles' by Bob Mason

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David Gilbey reviews Museum of Space by Peter Boyle
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‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.
Book 1 Title: Museum of Space
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‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.

The title poem for example, which opens the collection, heralds a kind of manifesto: ‘In the museum of space you open the lost codes.’ It is a kind of proffering of possible new ways of knowing for the reader – and for the artist, who ‘sits in primordial solitude’. We are invited (and I think of Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Trust me’ at the beginning of In the Skin of a Lion) into this museum, which ‘opens onto the silent and inexhaustible corridors of the brain’ and in which ‘no art work is ever completed’ to explore teasing, beautiful fragments.

Read more: David Gilbey reviews 'Museum of Space' by Peter Boyle

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Rosamund Dalziell reviews Passion for Peace: Exercising power creatively by Stuart Rees
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It all seems so obvious. So why is the practice of non-violence, peaceful negotiation and conflict resolution so hard? ‘To realise a vision of peace with justice requires inspiration and commitment,’ writes Stuart Rees, in an affirmation that shapes his inspirational new book, Passion for Peace. Rees explores the complexities and possibilities of peacemaking from varied perspectives: political, sociological, legal, biographical and, not least, literary. Rees’s text is studded with quotations from poets: the great Romantics, Wordsworth and Shelley; Denise Levertov; war poet Wilfred Owen; Australian poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson – more than fifty all told.
Book 1 Title: Passion for Peace
Book 1 Subtitle: Exercising power creatively
Book Author: Stuart Rees
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95pb, 304pp
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It all seems so obvious. So why is the practice of non-violence, peaceful negotiation and conflict resolution so hard? ‘To realise a vision of peace with justice requires inspiration and commitment,’ writes Stuart Rees, in an affirmation that shapes his inspirational new book, Passion for Peace. Rees explores the complexities and possibilities of peacemaking from varied perspectives: political, sociological, legal, biographical and, not least, literary. Rees’s text is studded with quotations from poets: the great Romantics, Wordsworth and Shelley; Denise Levertov; war poet Wilfred Owen; Australian poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson – more than fifty all told.

The powerful quotation from Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage, with which Rees’s book opens, goes some way to explaining the attraction of conflict as opposed to peace: the views of Brecht’s sergeant have a disturbingly contemporary resonance:

What they could do with round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organisation. And when do you get organisation? In a war. Peace is one big waste of equipment.

Rather than advocating ‘peace running wild’, Rees makes a persuasive case for the importance of patience, clarity, commitment and humour in the process of peacemaking. What is somewhat understated is that peacemaking is also fraught with danger and requires great courage. While reading Passion for Peace, I was also examining Mother Courage with a class of students. Both Brecht’s and Rees’s texts became agonisingly relevant when a young relative of mine, a humanitarian aid worker, was shot while protecting a fellow worker. Her passion for peace had led her to work with displaced children traumatised by war in one of the world’s less frequently reported regions of conflict. She is recovering, and will not, as it was feared, suffer the loss of a leg. Her supportive family and friends are of course deeply shaken and asking themselves difficult questions about the cost of commitment.

Read more: Rosamund Dalziell reviews 'Passion for Peace: Exercising power creatively' by Stuart Rees

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Alisa Bunbury reviews Place Made: Australian Print Workshop edited by Roger Butler and Anne Virgo
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In the long tradition of printmaking, print workshops have played a critical and often unacknowledged role in encouraging, supporting and teaching artists to become printmakers, providing facilities and technical expertise, and, above all, producing prints. It is well known that Picasso’s unconventional experimentation with print techniques was often directly inspired by his printers’ abilities, while the rise of interest in lithography in America in the mid-twentieth century was due to lithographic workshops established by printers such as Tatyana Grosman and June Wayne. Nevertheless, the printer’s part in the creation of a print is still often overlooked.
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Book 1 Subtitle: Australian Print Workshop
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In the long tradition of printmaking, print workshops have played a critical and often unacknowledged role in encouraging, supporting and teaching artists to become printmakers, providing facilities and technical expertise, and, above all, producing prints. It is well known that Picasso’s unconventional experimentation with print techniques was often directly inspired by his printers’ abilities, while the rise of interest in lithography in America in the mid-twentieth century was due to lithographic workshops established by printers such as Tatyana Grosman and June Wayne. Nevertheless, the printer’s part in the creation of a print is still often overlooked.

Since its formation in 1981, the Australian Print Workshop (originally named the Victorian Print Workshop) has played an increasingly important role in Australian printmaking. First housed at the now defunct Meat Market Craft Centre, since 1985 the APW has resided in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. From humble beginnings, the services it now offers are manifold: access facilities for printmakers; custom printing (that is, collaborations between printmakers and skilled printers, who provide technical knowledge and assistance), and a gallery and retail outlet for prints published at the Workshop. It has commissioned folios and artworks, offers classes, and tours exhibitions that promote Australian printmaking nationally and internationally. Numerous young printmaking graduates have consolidated their print training through scholarships or employment as assistant printers, and many artists have made their first prints there. Mike Parr, for example, created his first print in 1987 at the APW; this print ‘spawned the avalanche’, as his collaborator-printer and the APW’s first director, John Loane, can testify. The APW’s ink-stained fingers now reach across the country. Since 1994 the APW has run numerous workshops in remote communities from Kalumburu to the Tiwi Islands, which have resulted in an extraordinary output of lithographs, etchings and linocuts – some of the most exciting prints currently being made in Australia. Many of the indigenous artists involved are unlikely to have made prints without this initiative.

Read more: Alisa Bunbury reviews 'Place Made: Australian Print Workshop' edited by Roger Butler and Anne Virgo

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While we are apart I will
wear no shoes, walk barefoot
over Nevada sands, tune my heart
to 33 kilohertz, synchronise
my inner ear to terra firma, and,
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While we are apart I will
wear no shoes, walk barefoot
over Nevada sands, tune my heart
to 33 kilohertz, synchronise
my inner ear to terra firma, and,

Read more: 33 Kilohertz by Joel Deane

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While my brother milks
I return to mist drifting up the fence posts.
The night’s sheet slowly evaporating
giving in to day – already a process of action.

Cows backing off the platform
make their way up the track –
the stumps of their tails flicking at flies
they regard me with surprise.
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While my brother milks
I return to mist drifting up the fence posts.
The night’s sheet slowly evaporating
giving in to day – already a process of action.

Cows backing off the platform
make their way up the track –
the stumps of their tails flicking at flies
they regard me with surprise.

Three heifers bolt past the day’s paddock
their routine has been damaged
eventually they will find their way back
as I have

Read more: A Breather by Brendan Ryan

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The summer night is dangerous and deep.
I lie, dead still, aware of the tiniest sounds
Being so full of joy I cannot sleep.

The night is dangerous, so many lives.
I love my husband well. A sharp moon
Rubs the spine of the barn. Nothing moves.
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The summer night is dangerous and deep.
I lie, dead still, aware of the tiniest sounds
Being so full of joy I cannot sleep.

The night is dangerous, so many lives.
I love my husband well. A sharp moon
Rubs the spine of the barn. Nothing moves.

So many lives for the small years that remain.
My skin more wrinkled than a withered prune,
I study my hand and no word can explain.

Read more: An Old Woman Sings in Her Bed but Makes No Sound by Keith Harrison

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(for David)

 

je ne sais quoi
but it is written in the sound of this melange
of consonants and vowels that a blind
old impressionist defeats Duchamp
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(for David)

 

je ne sais quoi
but it is written in the sound of this melange
of consonants and vowels that a blind
old impressionist defeats Duchamp

what a faux pas for freud

minä rakastan sinua
you see I do agree with igloos
but I can’t recall the language now I’m afraid
I’ve lost my Nordic goddess

but we share this music you and I

Read more: Minimalism with the Abstract

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Janna Thompson reviews Racism in Mind edited by Michael P. Levine and Tamas Pataki
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The anthropologists of some future galactic civilisation, sifting through the remains of human life on earth, will find much to puzzle them, but nothing more so than the propensity of supposedly rational creatures to denigrate, hate or even murder those who are perceived to be different in race. How should we understand racism? Where does it come from, and how can it be eradicated? The editors of this book have assembled an impressive collection of philosophers and psychologists to tackle these questions. Their wide-ranging and often conflicting answers do not make racism less puzzling, but, like all good philosophical investigations, this book has the effect of making the reader puzzle more profoundly.

The editors took a lot of pains with this collection. They ensured that it would be accessible to general readers, as well as scholars. The introduction, by Tamas Pataki, is particularly helpful in providing a framework for the discussion. The editors encouraged contributors to read and comment on each other’s work. The result is a discourse in which participants with different approaches and perspectives cooperate to tackle a matter of serious concern.
Book 1 Title: Racism in Mind
Book Author: Michael P. Levine and Tamas Pataki
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The anthropologists of some future galactic civilisation, sifting through the remains of human life on earth, will find much to puzzle them, but nothing more so than the propensity of supposedly rational creatures to denigrate, hate or even murder those who are perceived to be different in race. How should we understand racism? Where does it come from, and how can it be eradicated? The editors of this book have assembled an impressive collection of philosophers and psychologists to tackle these questions. Their wide-ranging and often conflicting answers do not make racism less puzzling, but, like all good philosophical investigations, this book has the effect of making the reader puzzle more profoundly.

The editors took a lot of pains with this collection. They ensured that it would be accessible to general readers, as well as scholars. The introduction, by Tamas Pataki, is particularly helpful in providing a framework for the discussion. The editors encouraged contributors to read and comment on each other’s work. The result is a discourse in which participants with different approaches and perspectives cooperate to tackle a matter of serious concern.

The first item on the agenda is the conceptual question, what is racism? Michael Dummett finds the answer ready to hand. Racism, he says, is prejudice against a racial group that manifests itself in hostile behaviour. Others do not think that his definition goes deep enough or encompasses everything that counts as racism. J.L.A. Garcia sees racism as a moral vice, an indifference to the feelings and well-being of people of a different racial group. A person can be a racist even if he or she never behaves in a hostile way toward people of other races. Michael Levine thinks that hatred and hostility are symptoms of deeper psychological states and that by identifying the cause we will understand what racism really is. Sally Haslanger thinks that an adequate understanding of racism has to encompass social institutions and practices that impose disproportionate burdens on members of particular racial groups. A history of injustice can put people into a position where they are more likely to be put into prison or have their children taken away even when institutional rules are being impartially administered by people who do not have racist attitudes.

Read more: Janna Thompson reviews 'Racism in Mind' edited by Michael P. Levine and Tamas Pataki

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Paul de Serville reviews Robert Hoddle: Pioneer Surveyor, 1794-1881 by Berres Hoddle Colville
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Of the two groups who opened up Australia to settlement, the squatters have created about their persons a huge library, both admiring and critical. The surveyors, who followed in their footsteps, have rarely captured the imagination (with the exception of Sir Thomas Mitchell and Colonel Light) but their influence, especially in metropolitan Australia, has been incalculable. The site of Melbourne was chosen by a governor, but it was surveyors who laid out the grid plan of the square mile, imposing it on a hilly site, bounded by a narrow river to the south and swamps to the west. Principal among the Melbourne and Port Phillip surveyors was Robert Hoddle, who ended a long career as the first Surveyor-General of Victoria (1851–53).
Book 1 Title: Robert Hoddle
Book 1 Subtitle: Pioneer Surveyor, 1794-1881
Book Author: Berres Hoddle Colville
Book 1 Biblio: Research Publications, $79 hb, 324 pp
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Of the two groups who opened up Australia to settlement, the squatters have created about their persons a huge library, both admiring and critical. The surveyors, who followed in their footsteps, have rarely captured the imagination (with the exception of Sir Thomas Mitchell and Colonel Light) but their influence, especially in metropolitan Australia, has been incalculable. The site of Melbourne was chosen by a governor, but it was surveyors who laid out the grid plan of the square mile, imposing it on a hilly site, bounded by a narrow river to the south and swamps to the west. Principal among the Melbourne and Port Phillip surveyors was Robert Hoddle, who ended a long career as the first Surveyor-General of Victoria (1851–53).

Hoddle (1794–1881) joined the British Army as a cadet surveyor and draftsman. One of his teachers, Robert Dawson, revolutionised topographical drawing, and Hoddle’s later sketches have proved to be important historical records of an altered Australian landscape. Like many army men, he was put on half-pay in 1817, despite which he married in 1818; and again, like many of the middle classes, he decided to emigrate, chancing his arm as a surveyor at the Cape Colony, leaving his wife and daughter to live frugally with his parents. Hoddle’s years at the Cape were not a success: ‘The more I see of Africa, the less I desire to see.’

Read more: Paul de Serville reviews 'Robert Hoddle: Pioneer Surveyor, 1794-1881' by Berres Hoddle Colville

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Malcolm Cook reviews The Battle for Asia: From Decolonisation to Globalisation by Mark T. Berger
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This book, The Battle for Asia, is the most recent and ambitious contribution from the group of Australian political economists, formerly based at Murdoch University, working on East Asian political economy. This book upholds the group’s Marxian structuralist orientation and advances its critique of ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. The book’s ambition to integrate post-World War II international political economy, Asia’s development trajectories and US hegemony widens this group’s analytical lens and deepens its links with the anti-globalisation movement. For Mark T. Berger, ‘many of the organizations and individuals involved [in the movement] are asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction’.

Berger shares with this movement the belief that the US is the single hegemonic power driving the global economy. He presents capitalism as an inherently unequal system prone to crisis and monopolisation. Global corporations, leading states, mainstream intellectuals and international bureaucrats are its shapers and main beneficiaries. All others are its excluded subjects.
Book 1 Title: The Battle for Asia
Book 1 Subtitle: From decolonisation to globalisation
Book Author: Mark T. Berger
Book 1 Biblio: Routledge Curzon, $69 pb, 343pp
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This book, The Battle for Asia, is the most recent and ambitious contribution from the group of Australian political economists, formerly based at Murdoch University, working on East Asian political economy. This book upholds the group’s Marxian structuralist orientation and advances its critique of ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. The book’s ambition to integrate post-World War II international political economy, Asia’s development trajectories and US hegemony widens this group’s analytical lens and deepens its links with the anti-globalisation movement. For Mark T. Berger, ‘many of the organizations and individuals involved [in the movement] are asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction’.

Berger shares with this movement the belief that the US is the single hegemonic power driving the global economy. He presents capitalism as an inherently unequal system prone to crisis and monopolisation. Global corporations, leading states, mainstream intellectuals and international bureaucrats are its shapers and main beneficiaries. All others are its excluded subjects.

The Battle for Asia explains post-World War II economic history as a set of two US hegemonic projects, and critically examines their intellectual supports. Asian examples establish the power and limits of, and challenges to, these projects. This book is a critique of US capitalist hegemony. Asia is the book’s empirical palate.

Read more: Malcolm Cook reviews 'The Battle for Asia: From Decolonisation to Globalisation' by Mark T. Berger

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Frederick Ludowyk reviews The Cambridge Guide to English Usage by Pam Peters
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The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Guide to English Usage
Book Author: Pam Peters
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $75 hb, 608 pp
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The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.

There are excellent entries on matters of grammar, punctuation and style. Typical of these entries are those for relative clauses and the subjunctive, the colon and quotation marks, dangling participles and the sequence of tenses. These entries are very detailed and comprehensive, and written with great clarity. The entries dealing with divided usage are the most interesting: cookie or cooky, dietitian or dietician, funneled or funnelled, licorice or liqourice, plough or plow, pyjamas or pajamas, scallywag or scalawag, tyre or tire. As is clear even from this brief list, the fundamental divide is between British English and American English.

Read more: Frederick Ludowyk reviews 'The Cambridge Guide to English Usage' by Pam Peters

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Contents Category: Art
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Souvenir books are just that – souvenirs of a collection, usually bought as reminders of things seen and enjoyed. They also serve as introductions to a collection or to whet the appetite for a proposed visit. For some purchasers, they are introductions to an aspect of art that has fascinated them during a museum visit, or to collections not always on display. To succeed, souvenir books must be visually glamorous and enticing, and written in an accessible yet scholarly style.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s eight new souvenir books devoted to works from the international collections are exemplary and could serve as models to most museums. They represent a high point in the design of museum publications in Australia and celebrate the pride that the NGV has in its collections. I hope that we might soon see the Australian collections similarly celebrated.
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Souvenir books are just that – souvenirs of a collection, usually bought as reminders of things seen and enjoyed. They also serve as introductions to a collection or to whet the appetite for a proposed visit. For some purchasers, they are introductions to an aspect of art that has fascinated them during a museum visit, or to collections not always on display. To succeed, souvenir books must be visually glamorous and enticing, and written in an accessible yet scholarly style.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s eight new souvenir books devoted to works from the international collections are exemplary and could serve as models to most museums. They represent a high point in the design of museum publications in Australia and celebrate the pride that the NGV has in its collections. I hope that we might soon see the Australian collections similarly celebrated.

Visually seductive, these books are illustrated with beautiful photographs of individual works and ravishing details. While, in most instances, the works selected for inclusion are among the highlights of each collection, a sufficient number of unusual and unexpected works are reproduced, some for the first time in a popular publication, to make the books attractive to those familiar with the collections.

Read more: John McPhee reviews eight art books

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