Brett D’Arcy’s novel, arrestingly titled The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks, is one of the most unusual and accomplished to be published in Australia for years. The setting is a decaying town called the Bay on the coast of Western Australia, south of Perth. Its abattoir and tanneries have long since closed. The locals are sufficiently hostile to have fended off development – so far. They endure the summer invasion of the ‘townies’ who come for the great surfing. During the rest of the year, they enjoy it without interruption.

Their leader is the Old Man, who is, ‘where surf history is concerned, a final authority’, especially so with his layabout band of mates, the Cronies. D’Arcy concentrates on one strange family: Tom (the Old Man) and his wife, Adelaide, an older son Eddie, the infant Sal and Floaty-boy, the eleven-year-old from whose point of view the story is told. Floaty-boy is afflicted with ‘some imbalance in his head’. From time to time, he ‘suffers a gap’, feels himself ‘slipping into a vacancy’. To his father’s astonishment and chagrin, he won’t surf with a board. School is a pointless blur to him. His talent is with cameras, although when his mother says, ‘It’s all feel with you’, he resents her hexing with words that which he does instinctively.

‘ … the dead stay everlastingly present among us, taking the form of palpable vacancies that only disappear when, as we must, we take them into ourselves.’

Harry Mathews, Cigarettes

John Scott began his publishing life as a poet of considerable distinction (albeit as John A. Scott, as the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature will not let him forget) and then changed brumbies in midstream to publish pure prose. Between 1975 and 1990 Scott delivered eight volumes of poetry; since then (there is a slight overlap), he has released five ‘novels’ (pardon nomenclatural nerves), if we include the present Warra Warra.

Hannah Arendt pronounced the Eichmann trial a ‘necessary failure’; it dramatised historical trauma but revealed, fundamentally, a narrative insufficiency. The gap between testimony and history, between jurisprudential protocols and the all-too-human and inhuman complexities of murder, left behind anxieties of incomprehension, reduction, and representational limitation.

The Hamilton Case, Michelle de Kretser’s magnificent second novel, also takes as its philosophical focus this opposition of forms of knowledge, but presumes from the outset that fiction knows more than the law does. Its modes of inquiry – following casuistically the odd detail, the quirky story, the ineluctably precious registers of affect and memory – reveal what in stricter forms is inadmissible. Significantly, the ‘case’ itself is given little narrative space; what preoccupies the author are the lives loosely constellated around its historical moment, and the ramification of themes of witness, judgment, and loss.

The ‘detective’ of the case is one Sam Obeysekere, a Ceylonese lawyer, pompous, self-righteous, and insufferably smug, a mimic-man of the comprador class in whom the Empire fostered obedience founded on culture-envy and denigration of indigenous identifications. Obeysekere is an extraordinary creation: to him the dark-skinned are ‘savage races’; women have ‘primitive minds’; he crassly describes the death of a servant in a well as ‘a welcome bump in the monotonous graph of our routine’. His life is one of stinginess, contempt for others, and the gradual understanding of his own human deficiency. Yet he is not portrayed as cartoonishly evil: rather, one of the exemplary achievements of this text is the illustrative density and circumspection with which he is realised. Sam’s character is utterly plausible as the outcome of the historical and ideological contradictions of British imperialism; and the specificity of his experiences is unerringly compelling. ‘The unbearable thought that everything might have been different’ torments Sam in old age as he looks back on a lonely life lived in pathological self-enclosure.

The crime of the Hamilton case – the murder of a white planter – is one that Sam ‘solves’, somewhat dubiously, by invoking his own genres of prejudice. Ironically, his role in the case stymies his ambition for an appointment to the Bench, since he is deemed to be disloyal to the British (by nominating an English perpetrator) and disfavoured by the rising Sinhalese, since he is seen to have protected the Tamils who were the original suspects. This conundrum neatly encapsulates the shifting political dramas of the island during the pre-independence period: Sam is the dupe of historical forces that no degree of arrogance or wealth can obviate. Corrupted by Anglophilia, demented by misrecognition, de Kretser’s character betokens a wider cultural analysis: Ceylon is represented as a ventriloquist state, populated with figures for whom the ‘bally nonsense’ and ‘whatnots’ of miscommunication signify a country in which, as one character puts it, ‘quotation had become our native mode’. Complicity with Empire is degeneration; Sam is dismantled and punished by his own foreign artifice.

The narrative, it must be added, is not entirely focused on Sam, nor is the Hamilton case the only crime. Infanticide, both actual and metaphorical, is at the basis of a series of repressed or barely acknowledged griefs that deform all the central characters in the text. Maude and Claudia, Sam’s mother and sister, are both wracked by what cannot be acknowledged, and the tragic melancholy of the text settles principally in their stories. The dissolution of Maude – once a promiscuous socialite, fabulously charismatic and hyperbolically sexual – involves some of the most brilliant writing in the book; she begins as a figurehead of hieratic disdain, and ends up isolated, longing for company, and driven to compulsive writing to recover in language the fulsomeness of community. The lyricism of the women’s stories is often extravagantly beautiful; in these sections, de Kretser departs from wry social comedy and charges her text with a kind of yearning delirium of maternity. Against political and public intrigue, then, forms of female suffering are wrought in humid interiors of devastating claustrophobia. Fraying nerves seem to be the author’s specialty: the march of Ceylonese history towards independence is paralleled in allegorical inversion with inner ruination and pervasive eruptions of lunacy.

For all this, the novel is crucially concerned with redemption. There is no epiphanic moment; instead, and more modestly, we are offered an outright assertion that narrative retrospection is one of our means of coping. It was Ricoeur who argued that suffering obliges narration; and it is instructive that Sam is brought to reconsider his past and his function in the Hamilton case by reading a fiction that challenges his own version of events. In a clever demonstration of atonement through narrative reconsideration, the text enters a series of deconstructive manoeuvres that suspend the Hamilton case in unresolvability, but affirm in its place the humane compassion of a minor character who reminds us that generosity in judging others is a form of the invention of love.

In one of those felicitous coincidences of academic life, I was reading Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious when de Kretser’s book arrived. In it I discovered a Levinas quote: ‘Must not human beings, who are incomparable, be compared? … But it is always starting from the face, from the responsibility for the other, that justice appears.’ The Hamilton Case is an eloquent, sophisticated, and immensely satisfying work of art. But its chief claim lies in its intelligent consideration of the ethics of judgment, and a process in which (dare I say it?) the serendipitous imaginary recovers the faces that defeat the faceless barbarities of history.

After only four annual volumes, The Best Australian Essays has reached the point where the law of increasing expectations begins to kick in. By now the series has done so much that we want it to do everything. Speaking as an Australian who lives offshore, I would be well pleased if each volume could contain, on every major issue, a pair of essays best presenting the two most prominent opposing views. This would give me some assurance that I was hearing both sides of the national discussion on each point, despite my being deprived of access to many of the publications in which essays, under one disguise or another, nowadays originate. (I leave aside the probability that most Australians living in Australia are deprived of access, too, the time having long passed when any one person could take in all the relevant print.) But the editor, Peter Craven, could easily point out that my wish is a pipedream.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson were both wise and fortunate in their choice of Thomas Keneally to write a study of Abraham Lincoln for their Lives series. He in turn gifted them, and us, with a story that listens closely to Lincoln’s words and sees some shape in the internal and external demons that so often troubled his life. Keneally’s narrative moves quietly alongside the Illinois rail-splitter as Lincoln transforms himself from local small-time politician to President of the USA.

Keneally’s book is a short one: about 60,000 words, no footnotes, eight pages of ‘Sources’. As a compact volume, it might be perceived to be ‘potted Lincoln’, a quick read for a general audience. This is not accurate. Keneally has found a path in writing about Lincoln that has eluded numerous others. Many contributors to the vast library of Lincolniana have agreed that Lincoln transformed himself into the man who won the presidency in 1860 and then, reluctantly resupplying Union forces at Fort Sumter in April of 1861, turned the threat of secession into reality. He issued the proclamation freeing the slaves of the South and won re-election in 1864. But the same writers have often diminished Lincoln’s agency in making his career by invoking destiny. Subtly, they have given an undue explanatory force to Destiny or Tragedy. There is Carl Sandburg’s lonely country boy, his prairie language, his being earthed in both the pro-slavery of southern Illinois and the anti-slavery of the state’s north. Sandburg’s already doomed Lincoln: crossing the state talkin’ up slavery and talkin’ it down.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.

Australia has received several serves from Castro in the past for not being that kind of country. In an elegant little book of essays, Looking for Estrellita (1999), he wrote about a gathering of the world’s top writers in Atlanta, Georgia, an ‘intellectual Olympics’ that included eight winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Australia, he implied, is not a member of that intellectual or artistic league: it does not put great value on intellectual production. In Asia, he warned, to be modest about your collective intellect is to be taken at your own valuation. In Hong Kong, where Castro grew up, a backslapping egalitarian tradition is not admired, but is seen as weakness or rudeness. Other ‘Asians’ (he was thinking of Chinese) regard Australians – teetering on the cultural median-strip, and hesitant to cross over to Asia – as people of no great interest.

Like Antonio, his fictionalised self in Shanghai Dancing, Castro is heir to six nationalities and three religions. His father was Portuguese, Spanish and English; his mother English and Chinese. He speaks three languages fluently. Castro’s family was always on the move – up, down or sideways economically and politically. This hybrid background, says Castro, plants him in a fluid mental space that is richer than a world of static identities. In Shanghai Dancing, as in all his writing, he interweaves language and uses ethnic hybridity to send up race-based assumptions. Castro has compared his novels to holograms, in which the action moves between several spaces and times, containing several people’s voices. Demanding, always ironic and often parodic, he parades his copious literary memory. Castro began to use black-and-white photographs to reinforce his essays in Looking for Estrellita, something he continues to do in Shanghai Dancing. He adds sections of italicised or interlined text that seem to ask to be recited or sung. It’s as if he wants to take hold of us by all our senses and shake us out of our torpor.

Stepper, Castro’s last novel, published in 1997, evoked the frivolity, decadence, and menace of the 1930s in China and Japan. It can now be seen as the fictional precursor to Shanghai Dancing, which begins earlier, with the arrival of British missionaries in China, and ends later, with their descendants settling in Australia. Thus the new novel sandwiches Stepper’s rich filling. Castro has done his research for Shanghai Dancing as thoroughly as for Stepper. He describes the flotsam of Hong Kong harbour, the jetsam of Macao, the tenements, apartments, hotels and brothels frequented by Castro’s extended family, the cars they drove, the planes they flew, and the drinks and other drugs they took.

And the band his father led begins to play. With Antonio leading, Castro sets off at a fast pace in a whirling dance. Music metaphors multiply, with side excursions into foot and shoe fetishism, skirt-lifting and much more. Here’s one scherzando movement, slightly abbreviated:

He wakes at three in the afternoon with dancing on his mind and waltzes to the brothel at 52 Kiangse Road ... and he tangos along Soochow Creek with a girl, paying by chit, then he charlestons stoned on pink opium pills and ducks into an arcade as Chinese gangsters roar past on some kidnap mission … or he jazzes until midnight in some absinthe-soaked bed and then foxtrots on to supper clubs and ends at the palatial mansion of one of his partners … or furious waltzing, the girls in voile blouses, spinning transparently, the points of their breasts rouged, and in the summer night he studied the business far into the small hours, fever rearing up in three-four time, the girl bob-haired and shaped like a boy beneath blowing kisses in his ear and he heard the sea, the sea, yes, thanks for the memory.

When young Antonio needed his father, he was never there; his mother was, but she was often out of it; his four half-sisters fought each other and him; his Chinese grandmother tormented him; his English grandmother couldn’t hear him. Antonio’s father, grandfathers and uncles led colourful lives of dubious legality and diminished responsibility. The blended Wing and Castro families display the natural, uncontrived multiculturalism and unfettered entrepreneurialism that thrive in Hong Kong, but they don’t set much of an example of ‘Asian values’. However, Australia is certainly not the promised land: merely a place where Antonio survived forty years. Both nakedness and self-interest, often simultaneous, drive these lives and this extended family. Yet what strings this tangled novel together and stops it unravelling is Castro’s capacity to hear all the resonances between them and to demand the same from us.

Anyone who remembers the amiable host of the ABC’s television show Backchat, which he compèred for eight years from 1986, will not be surprised to learn that Tim Bowden has written a breezily readable memoir. Its pages seem to turn of their own volition. In the foreword, Maeve Binchy daringly asks: ‘Who are the right people to do a memoir?’ Actually, it’s probably not so daring, as Binchy had no doubt read Bowden’s chronicle and knew he qualified as one of the ‘right people’. Two criteria leap to mind. The writer needs to exhibit a character and personality you’d be happy to keep company with for 300 or so pages. In addition, the reader – this one, anyway – wants a complementary sense of the times of the life in the foreground.

In 1958 Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, whose demolition of C.S. Lewis in a Union debate a few years earlier was said to have driven that colleague to fiction, turned her sights on a bigger target: modern moral philosophy. The then-dominant notions of obligation and duty ‘ought to be jettisoned’, she declared, as they make no sense in the absence of a lawgiver, or at least of some external source of value, and these days their presence is no longer assumed. But ‘If there is no God,’ said Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, ‘then anything is permitted.’ If reason, religion and utility can’t field our moral questions, what tells us to not lie and steal?

Those of us who walk across bridges in support of reconciliation, and sign Sorry Day books, do so because we feel an obligation to recognise and apologise for the destructive legacy of past practices. Sometimes we can speak directly to those people who were taken away; often we are addressing their descendants. As the prime minister continues to point out, many of us are apologising for something for which we are not individually responsible. So what is the source of this sense of obligation, and how can saying sorry make a difference?

Is the great white middle class endangered in Australia? If it is, does it matter greatly? Michael Pusey answers ‘Yes’ on both counts. He argues that we are seeing a ‘hollowing out of the middle’. If he is right, this hollowing out has significant consequences. Both major political parties have spent decades courting the wannabe middle class – from Robert Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ to Gough Whitlam’s outer suburbanites, and from Mark Latham’s ‘aspirational’ voters to the recipients of John Howard’s tax welfare and handouts for private schools. A significant contraction of this constituency would create political shock waves. In addition, the decline of the middle class would throw an interesting light on our current prime minister who, more than anyone since Menzies, has represented middle-class values and aspirations while championing the radical economic restructuring that Pusey sees as leading to the decline of the middle class.

When I was about ten, I used to devour the books of an English children’s author named Noel Streatfield. The most famous was called Ballet Shoes, which took young antipodeans onto the stage and into the wings of another world, the London theatre scene. Galina Koslova, a Russian-born émigrée to South Australia and the heroine of The Snow Queen, gives Ballet Shoes to a step-granddaughter, correctly designating it a classic. I wondered whether Mardi McConnochie’s novel was designed to fill the gap left on adult bookshelves by long-abandoned copies of Ballet Shoes, even if our reading requirements have matured.

‘He looks a bit like Marty Feldman with two good eyes.’ So wrote a journalist of Geoffrey Blainey in 1977. In The Fuss That Never Ended, a collection of essays on Blainey arising out of a Melbourne symposium, Bridget Griffen-Foley no less irreverently compares the historian to a character played by Steven Seagal in a movie she saw on television – not because he shares Seagal’s ‘fake tan, ponytail, high-pitched voice, rippling muscles, kickboxing prowess or lurid, technicolour knee-length leather coat’, but because of his ‘style of investigation’ as a young historian. Blainey, she suggests, was neither bookworm nor archive rat. He went into the field, spoke to real people, visited historical sites. His work even helped his first employer, the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, to exploit long-forgotten mineral deposits. Since producing his history of that company in his early twenties, he has been Australia’s leading mining historian, and one of that industry’s staunchest defenders. It has probably been easier for most people to swallow Blainey’s historical and economic arguments in favour of mining than Hugh Morgan’s biblical ones.

This books has a number of admirable qualities. In times when open subscription to a social justice agenda runs the risk of ridicule, it is a brave book. It does not shy away from identifying the universities – specifically, the sandstones – as integral to any explanation of why Australian secondary education is inequitable. And both authors work in one: the University of Melbourne. The book also builds a compelling case for curriculum and structural reform. Through the careful analysis of issues such as retention and dropout rates, the relation between poverty and achievement, and between gender and achievement, it argues potently that our education system is disturbingly riven by persistent inequalities of opportunity.

In a number of guises, the question ‘why’ reverberated throughout my reading of Whatever the Gods Do: A Memoir. This book opens with Patti Miller describing her sadness at the departure of ten-year-old Theo, who is leaving for Melbourne to live with his father. We soon discover that the author has been Theo’s substitute mother for the past seven years since the tragic death of Dina, his birth mother and Miller’s friend. Dina suffered a brain haemorrhage when Theo was two years old. She spent thirteen months in a virtually immobile state before her death at thirty-eight. Why the vibrant, attractive Dina should have been struck down when she had so much to live for is a legitimate question, but, of course, an unanswerable one. Why Miller should choose to write about her own life through this incident is also worth asking. Few are more qualified than Miller to address the reasons for, and benefits of, life-writing: she has run ‘life stories’ workshops around the country for more than ten years. In her bestselling manual Writing Your Life: A journey of discovery (1994), she identifies various motivations for, and rewards of, life-writing, including healing and self-understanding, recording family and social history for future generations, remembering happiness and sharing one’s wisdom.

In his foreword to this reference work, Andrew Motion says that such books ‘exist to provoke argument’. In their preface, editors Willhardt and Parker suggest that ‘to compile such a volume as this may seem absurd; to do so successfully may be impossible’. Forewarned is forearmed, it would seem.

Despite all this, the book is useful – about the only adjective to which a reference work should reasonably aspire. Of course, it may also seek to construct an honour roll for posterity or update the canon. Or it might simply be part of a continuing battle for ‘cultural space’. In many ways, reference works like this are the counterpart of anthologies, which are also reviewed in terms of ‘who’s in and who’s out’.

Empire is everywhere. You can see it in the shanty towns of São Paulo and on the coffee tables of the well-heeled in Boston and Sydney. It made us, in its British form, in the antipodes via the expeditions of Cook and Banks, and all that followed. Now it dominates our newspapers and television screens in the form of war.

With the growing politics of fear focused on Islam, and the pervasive ‘Othering’ of Muslims both nationally and internationally, this book on the everyday lives, beliefs, and practices of Australian Muslims is an important social antidote. Abdullah Saeed, a leading Australian Muslim scholar of Islam, provides us with a readily accessible book that introduces the basics about the religion of Islam, and a short social and cultural history of Muslims in Australia. It explores Islamic religious organisations and leadership in Australia, the diversity of Muslim communities, common stereotypes and misunderstandings about Islam as well as the difficulties and discrimination Muslims have experienced in Australia. This is a clear, concise, culturally sensitive and diplomatic little book for a general readership.

It has been raining all week, persistent drizzle unlike the brief downpours that are more typical of Beirut. The city is slumbering. I am staying with my parents. My father goes out less often. My mother is snuggled under the blankets. She hopes the war won’t happen. The kettle is boiling like a purring cat. The house is quiet. Rain is the soporific of cities.

Stephen Edgar’s fifth volume, Lost in the Foreground, is a book of marvels, both technically and in the elegant, magisterial reach of its content. He is wonderfully inventive, and his complex rhyme schemes and forms are achieved with such precision and finesse that one can only conjecture as to how long each piece must have taken to become so lovingly and artfully realised.

Important political issues sometimes cut across traditional party lines, making it harder for us to confront and debate them. The ‘children overboard’ affair, for example, raised important questions about the relationship between public servants and their ministers. Some of these questions were blurred in the subsequent debate, however, for a simple reason. Since the 1970s, governments from both sides of politics have had, in effect, a common policy of restricting the independence of the public service, especially of heads of departments, in the name of accountability and responsiveness. Ministers now have departmental secretaries who can be dismissed for no stronger reason than that they have lost the minister’s confidence. The powerful mandarins who, it used to be said, ruled Australia from the lunch tables of the Commonwealth Club in Canberra are a distant memory. Political influence now affects appointments down to middle managers in ways that those mandarins would have thought totally improper.­­­

Recently, New South Wales had its fifth election since 1988 in which shrill law and order promises – tougher sentencing, more police, and the like – constituted the most prominent feature of the major parties’ campaigns. During those fifteen years, NSW witnessed its biggest prison-building programme in more than a century and a rise of more than fifty per cent in its prison population. An obvious lesson is that prison-building programmes and rising criminal justice expenditures do not reduce crime or enhance feelings of public safety and confidence in legal institutions, and that those who argue otherwise are chasing phantoms. Yet the terms of political discourse around law and order seem to be impervious to the facts. What would commonly be taken as incontrovertible evidence of the failure or limits of a policy in other areas yields more of the same in relation to crime control, such is the treadmill of penal populism.

Media history is an oddly underdeveloped area. Historians who work in media history are frequently reminded that such work exists at the margins of their discipline, and media does not feature at all in many accounts of political and social history. To take one example, Alastair Davidson’s otherwise impressive From Subject to Citizen: Australian citizenship in the twentieth century (1997) contains one reference to Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, but none to the role of media in forming the identities of Australian citizens in the twentieth century.

Many people regard cyberculture as the territory of boffins, sci-fi enthusiasts, and ‘itinerant wanderers’, and inescapably limited to computer technology. However, the term is also applied to a field of research, one that has always been interdisciplinary: traversing philosophy, mathematics, physiology, biology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, physics, and sociology. Prefiguring Cyberculture: An intellectual history exemplifies this cross-disciplinary approach.

The looter held a sign in one hand as he pushed a trolley overflowing with stolen goods in the other. His sign read, ‘Thank you, Mr Bush’. It was not, I suppose, the kind of gratitude George W. Bush had expected. The next day’s looting was not likely to raise a smile: private homes, great museums, and hospitals were ransacked. Vigilantes exercised rough and sometimes cruel justice. There will be worse to come when mobs catch Saddam Hussein’s brutal functionaries. Again, we will be reminded that oppression does not even make people noble, let alone good.

This beautiful book showcases the botanical orchid illustrations of John Riley, a retired shearer whom some regard as Australia’s finest living botanical illustrator. Riley started drawing Australian orchids in the 1970s, and this volume includes subjects that date back to 1992. It lists 150 works. Those who take book titles literally will assume that this volume contains illustrations of all our native orchids. This is not the case. We have a rich flora of about 1,200 species. This, therefore, is the first in a planned series intended to describe and illustrate all our orchidaceous flora.

In our postmodern age, when everything travels and travel is a metaphor for everything, travel and travel writing have become the subject of intense scholarly interest and debate. Travel, once largely the domain of geographers, and travel writing, previously relegated to the status of a sub-literary genre, now engage attention from literary studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, and, most fruitfully, from gender and postcolonial studies. Conferences and publications abound.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, through a series of succinct essays, provides a guide to travel writing in English since 1500, and draws a clear and accessible map of the terrain and of current orientations. The essays are accompanied by a chronology that juxtaposes important events and texts from 1492 and Columbus’s voyages to North America, up to 2001, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

The essays are grouped into three sections. The first, ‘Surveys’, comprises five essays offering a broad historical coverage and charting the principal shifts in travel writing since 1500 – odysseys, pilgrimages, grand tours, scientific discovery, exploration, the quest for the exotic, and the primitive. Both Helen Carr, covering 1880–1940, and Peter Hulme (1940–2000) argue that a major development in modern times is the emergence of travel for the sake of writing. Travel writing, beginning with the generation of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, and continuing down to that of Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin, gained new prestige because of the standing of its authors and its literary qualities.

The second section, ‘Sites’, contains seven essays that focus on particular geographic areas – Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Ireland, Calcutta, the Congo, and California – and the third, ‘Topics’, is composed of three essays that cover the most fashionable areas of current academic interest: travel writing and gender; travel writing and ethnography; and travel writing and its theory.

The La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture

The Mildura Writers’ Festival is always one of the most congenial and stimulating events on our literary calendar. Clive James, our lead reviewer this month, has just agreed to attend this year’s festival and to deliver the 2003 La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture. The lecture will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, 25 July, and the festival will follow that weekend (July 26–27). Clive James (pictured below) will also deliver the lecture in Melbourne soon after the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Full details of both events will follow in the June/July issue. ABR subscribers will be entitled to attend this major lecture gratis.

Sydney Writers’ Festival

May 19–25 sounds like a good week to spend in Sydney, with thirty international and 150 Australian authors taking part in 100 events at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Guests include Janette Turner Hospital, Jonathan Franzen and William Dalrymple. For information about the programme, phone (02) 9252 7734 or visit the website: www.swf.org.au.

Going Down Auctioning

Last December, Going Down Swinging launched its twentieth annual issue. Unfortunately, some non-swinger purloined the entire door-takings – $1400. Such a loss is close to disastrous for any magazine, and Going Down Swinging needs to recoup this money. Co-editor Stephen Grimwade informs us that the journal is organising a literary auction. Among the many items up for auction will be a copy of ‘the infamous GDS #1 (1980)’; a copy of Jeff Kennett’s Dog Lovers’ Poems, autographed and endorsed by his successor, Steve Bracks; a bundle of new releases from Allen & Unwin valued at more than $450; prose and poetry manuscript assessments by Sophie Cunningham and Kevin Brophy, respectively; and subscriptions to ten literary magazines (including, naturally, ABR). The auction will take place at the Old Colonial Inn, 127 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 15. For more information, to subscribe, or to return the missing $1400, call Stephen Grimwade on 0425 766 288 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Magazine chairs

It’s hard to keep up with all the changes in Australian magazines. Eureka Street, as we have already noted, is now edited by Marcelle Mogg, while her predecessor, Morag Fraser, becomes a most welcome new board member of ABR. Philip Harvey, a regular contributor to our magazine, becomes the Poetry Editor of Eureka Street. The Adelaide Review, edited for many years by Christopher Pearson, is now edited by Peter Ward. Katherine Wilson and Nathan Hollier have taken over as Editors of Overland. Their first issue, ‘Bludgers’, is now available. Meanwhile, the ABC has announced that Limelight, a new monthly arts and entertainment magazine, will absorb 24 Hours magazine in July.

Training course for writers

Writers ‘who have had some publishing success’ might be interested in an intensive four-day training course that will be hosted by the SA Writers’ Centre from 22–25 July. Guest speakers will include Christine Harris (‘Breaking into Interstate Markets: An SA Perspective’), Tom Shapcott (‘Taxation, Accounting and Effect Record-keeping’) and José Borghino (‘Contracts and Copyright’). The cost is a mere $100 for members, or $180 for non-members.

Writers in focus

Raimond Gaita, our La Trobe University Essayist this month, is always worth hearing. On May 6, he will be in conversation with Stephanie Dowrick at the State Library of Victoria. The cost is $12 ($10 concession). Bookings: (03) 8664 7016.

Dangerous times

‘We live in dangerous times,’ writes Greg Mackie in introducing the prospectus for this year’s Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Indeed we do. All the more reason not to miss this festival, which will run from 10–13 July. Overseas speakers will include Robert Fisk and George Monbiot, from the UK. Australian guests will include Dennis Altman, Peter Beilharz, and Fiona Stanley. To apply for a detailed programme of events, send an e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Ringing the changes

The NSW Writers’ Centre has a new Chair and Deputy Chair: Angelo Loukakis and Pat Woolley, respectively. Meanwhile, the Centre’s events programme continues apace. Over the next few weeks, Patti Miller, whose new book, Whatever the Gods Do, is reviewed in this issue of ABR, will conduct a course in life-writing. The cost is $150 for members, $180 for non-members. Full details of the Centre’s programme are available on (02) 9555 9757 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Spreading the word

Finally, inside this issue you will find a copy of our new promotional flyer. If you already subscribe, why not help us spread the word by giving it to a friend? We would be more than happy to send you more flyers if you can use them. Flyers are available from the Office Manager, Dianne Schallmeiner, on (03) 9429 6700 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

It’s not by that contraption, nor inside

            The worm holes to be bored

Through outer darkness to its farthest reaches,

That this tight knot of noon will be untied

And loose the morning’s bonded hours toward

The otherwhile your constant prayer beseeches.

Who would believe that now – poised plainly over

            The harbour’s wintry haze,

As far off in the littered blue inane

Mir, error-prone, still manages to hover,

While west and north, despite the massed berets,

The old deals are all brokered yet again;

Shares do their magic on the stock exchange;

            While to consolidate

Some fly-blown tyranny the usual slaughters

Fall to the usual goon squads to arrange;

While sleek yachts ride, as though absolved of weight,

Tinkling upon the pleasure-blinded waters;

While mountains stand still as their photographs

             Somewhere beyond the edges

Of cities that turn earth to neighbourhood;

And though the papers press their epitaphs,

Babies will drink the white lie that milk pledges

And sleep on it, dreaming the world is good –

Who would believe this moment now might hold

            A past remoter than

The pyramids? that like the bright, oblique

Plume of the comet falling unforetold,

An era that is yet unknown to man

Comes plunging into the middle of next week?

Wisps writhe above the river’s fancied rind

           As though it might soon boil.

Patience. Be still. Your wishes will appear.

That pebble in your shoe; what lies behind

The hand clasped to your forehead; the blue voile

Of the elapsing vista: name your year.

‘I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else’

                                                                                    Dr Johnson

Down on your knees in the street as if a goldsmith

           pouncing the metal, you still alarm us,

for all that your yard-and-a-bit of bones are buried.

I remember a student calling your ‘Song to David’

           a berserk thing, and though he was wrong

the fling of a raw, unkenneled heart had caught him,

as it could many. You found the trace of its music

            when stashed and barred for exhibition

in your century’s nightmare, the foetid warren of Bedlam,

and rejoiced, though God knows how, at seeing the Lamb,

           all radiant victim and focal creature,

where knave and fool and we the bewildered are welcomed.

So I too would be glad to pray, if you came

            to this other world, where the mettlesome stars

patch the darkness after a different fashion

of the thing we call the cosmos, meaning always

            something beautiful, something entire:

glad to be taught by someone unguarded, the lilt

of jubilation practised at every hour,

            and the coarse roads conceived as channels

of grace, that naked investment of love. So come,

for a season at least, to a country of goshawk and ibis,

            where the diamondbird flickers in tilted leaves

and the needletail swift feeds and drinks on the wing,

where reindeer moss, and sea tassel, and fireweed

            come out with archaic flair, and leopard

and tiger and waxlip are so many orchids, and heal-all

and hound’s-tongue and bulrush and running postman

            are out for show with the black swans,

the crimson rosellas, the wedge-tailed eagles, and the swallows:

come down, little man, in your dirty linen, and your need

            for help back from the alehouse, and your love

of the one whose beauty sent you to sea for pearls.

‘Down with Beauty! Long Live Death!’

Two gods share a single breath.

Their warriors can all agree

on how to circumscribe the free

and are themselves in turn confined

by being of the one small mind.

A Muslim and a Catholic phrase

may equally distress our days;

the latter from the Spanish war,

the former sure the hip’s a whore.

‘Down with Beauty! Down with Life!’

All throats are naked to the knife.

As holy men sweep up the dead

their two gods shake a single head.

The missing five years

Dear Editor,

Kerryn Goldsworthy’s valuable piece on the early years of ABR (‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’, ABR, April 2003), giving details of Australian Book Review under Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton from 1961 to 1973, does not mention what caused its disappearance from 1973 to 1978, when John McLaren and the National Book Council revived it. Perhaps it is time for the explanation to be given.

When the Literature Board of the Australia Council was inaugurated in early 1973, one of the early decisions of that Board was to create a monthly journal of review and comment, rather in the style of the New York Review of Books. Contributors would be paid appropriately. In the ensuing discussion, it was suggested that the already existing Australian Book Review could be acquired by the Board and developed along these lines. The Board was enthusiastic and approached Max Harris, negotiating a price, which he gladly accepted. He promptly ceased work on any forthcoming issues. But there was one unexpected snag. The Australia Council might be up and running (with heady enthusiasm), but the Australia Council Act had not been passed through legislation.

By the time the financial implications of this were made known to the Board – it could not acquire any property – months had passed, and ABR was no longer. It was not until 1974 that the Act finally became legislation. Max Harris and co-editor Rosemary Wighton did not have the heart (nor, most probably, the finance) to revive the journal, which had now lapsed as a going concern. The Literature Board backed out of the initial deal and put in some money for a ‘book pages’ review section in the new ABC monthly, 24 Hours, and that was that. A sad gap existed until 1978, when John McLaren persuaded the National Book Council to revive the journal – with assistance from the Literature Board of the day.

Tom Shapcott, Adelaide, SA

ABR forever!

Dear Editor,

Marx annoyed Fred Engels by complaining that he [Marx] was a machine condemned to devour books. Fred, for his part, merely had to foot the bills. Here, one hundred and fifty years later, there is still room for a review of nothing but books, as symbols of our lives. Glory to god, and pass the ABR! ABR is as useful as the TLS – you can carry it anywhere, no batteries required, and when your bus or plane is late, you can simply start over, read it again. Thanks, and happy birthday for issue 250.

Peter Beilharz, Bundoora, Vic.

Superior laid

Dear Editor,

Richard Travers’s interesting letter (ABR, April 2003) is a real compliment to MUP, which opted for 115 gsm Euro Matt Art paper for Ann Galbally’s book. It is fascinating that good modern papers, produced mechanically, in this way mimic certain types of early (and superior) laid, as opposed to cheaper woven, papers, whose fibres tend to point in any old direction.

Come to think of it, some fine handmade Japanese papers also contrive to arrange the fibres in parallel, for ease of opening and closing scrolls. Conservators have to fill gaps and holes in old paintings with tiny pieces of new paper that match the disposition of the original fibres. Otherwise, the thing won’t roll up properly. Goodness knows how they manage it.

Angus Trumble, Canberra, ACT

After Ned Kelly, the story of Burke and Wills ranks high among Australians’ favourite tales of heroic failure. Simpson and his donkey are on the list, followed closely by any number of stories from the locker rooms of sporting clubs both great and small. There are strict conventions governing the telling of these stories. However pointless, futile, and even bloody they may have been, they are handed down as stories of romance. Kelly, Simpson, and Bradman all had a final stand. The hero, in his final stand, is alone on a pedestal. The other people around at the time are reduced to the role of extras. It’s a pity. Arthur Morris, the man at the other end when Bradman was dismissed for a duck in his final innings, went on to make 196. Nobody much remembers. Joe Byrne, Kelly’s closest ally and confidant, happened to speak Cantonese. An addict, he had picked it up among the opium traders of Beechworth. Byrne’s acquisition of a Chinese language is far more interesting than the dreary question that has been provoked by yet another movie version of the Kelly story – whether or not Ned spoke with an Irish accent.

If you like business bodice-rippers, these are blissful days. After the host of books that emerged from the dot com Götterdämmerung, another wave of cautionary tales has hit the shelves. I reached for Mark Westfield’s HIH after reading my third book about Enron, Mimi Swartz’s Power Failure, and was struck at once by a casual coincidence: that both Enron’s Ken Lay and HIH’s Ray Williams insisted on being referred to as ‘Doctor’. In Lay’s case, this was on account of his PhD in economics. Williams laid rather flimsier claim to his honorific, after Monash University rewarded him for various endowments with an honorary doctorate in laws in 1999.

There are other similarities. Both grew up in humble circumstances in the 1940s, had formidable work ethics, arriviste tastes, and a weakness for gratifying them with shareholders’ money. But the pretence of those titles seems somehow emblematic of their claimants and the companies they hammered together: the claim to be something that one is not. Enron’s balance sheet resembled one of those eerily perfected Hollywood bodies: assets toned and chiselled, liabilities tastefully liposuctioned away.

Renée Goossens, born in 1940, is the youngest daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Married three times, he had three daughters with Dorothy Millar, and two more with his second wife, and Renée’s mother, Janet Lewis. His third marriage, to Marjorie Foulkrod, was childless. It is characteristic of this memoir that Renée Goossens remarks early in the narrative that she never met one of her half-sisters and that it was decades before she met the other two. Her life seems to have been marked or scarred by a series of disappearances on the part of significant family members and by unexplained absences.

This important book succeeds in forcing us to see and hear the individuals hidden from knowledge and understanding behind the razor wire of Australia’s detention centres. The opening chapter, ‘The Iron Curtin’, presents material that, even if familiar to some, still has the power to shock. I was jolted once more by the cold facts of our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.

This opening chapter is well placed and gives a wide-ranging exploration of the detention centre in Curtin, Western Australia. It sets the context for the much more personal stories that follow, creating a frame through which we can comprehend Morteza’s youthful rage, and be surprised by the restraint, resilience, and quiet endurance of many of the people we meet.

Val Plumwood, the author of a highly praised defence of eco-feminism, Feminism and Mastery of Nature, presents in this book a critique of ‘rationalist culture’ and explains why it harms nature as well as so many people. Plumwood’s criticism of rationalism centres on the thesis she advanced in her earlier book. From Plato onward, it has been regarded as rational to divide the world into polarised and homogeneous conceptual categories (reason/emotion, culture/nature, spirit/matter, masculine/feminine) and to regard things falling under the first term of these dichotomies as superior to those belonging to the second. This way of thinking, Plumwood argues, has given rationalists a licence to ignore the needs of beings deemed to be inferior – to dominate and exploit them for the sake of their ‘superiors’. In particular, it has been used to justify the domination of nature and of women.

In Environmental Culture, this critique joins with other critiques of rationality – for example, the Frankfurt School’s analysis of instrumentality rationality – for an assault on economic rationalism, the logic of globalisation, technoscience, liberal democracy, ecological planning and commodification. These manifestations of rationalism not only disregard the needs of beings – humans as well as other creatures – who fall on the wrong side of the dichotomies. They are also short-sighted. By failing to take into account the well-being of ecological systems on which they depend, the masters of the world threaten their own well-being. Rationalism is profoundly irrational, as well as immoral.