Every Intention has something Arbitrary.
                        Goethe

Early on, my mind was in reverse.
I read a book the name I thought was From
White Cabin to Log House, and ever after
I knew ambition must go to cancrizans.

To Carthage then I came, but this was London,
Waiting for the train from rain-veiled Tilbury.
Just as I thought, I said, coming on deck
and going below. Hell is a city just

like London, but I knew I had to find
a working hell, I’d lived too long in books.
The thing I didn’t know was that I sought
a London which was in me from the start.

Not fair to this fair city. But if hearts
can bring their darkness with them, then I brought
my dark provincial hours, verandah-lit,
to match the Mayhew shadows of these streets.

I came, I saw, I conjured. I am here.
Of my ignoble comrades, most are dead.
The end is what the end is: open sea,
if mind can cross the sand bar of its fears.

Fifty years ago I’d never have
quoted a word of Goethe’s. I gave up hope
to follow a more formal entropy.
Unchanging stars parade their hemispheres.

Coming upon the fertile fields of Mildura after miles of dry Mallee shrub you have the sense of entering an oasis. For a writer, arriving at the Mildura Festival elicits a similar response: here, at last, is a place to be refreshed and fed, metaphorically and literally. It is a friendly and delicious affair, where writers are fêted because their work is valued and where enjoyment seems raised to a fine art. If ever writing was thought to be food for the mind, then here food for the body is regarded as spiritual nourishment as well.

Over the years, this writers’ festival has evolved into a combined literary and culinary event. At the heart of the festival is the Mildura Grand Hotel – where the writers are splendidly housed and where many events take place – and at the heart of that heart is Stefano de Pieri, celebrated chef and connoisseur of fine writing. Though the festival at this point owes its existence to many people, its inception was Stefano’s idea, along with Philip Hodgins. For a long time many of us thought of it as ‘Philip’s festival’ because he was the leading spirit – both before and after he died in 1995. But if Philip is the genius loci, then Stefano is clearly the genius of the place. He has managed to raise a fledgling festival into a soaring annual event. One can only imagine the diplomatic and political skills it must take to accomplish such an organisational pièce de resistance in a rural city. But it says something too for the people of the region, for their loyal attendance at the festival speaks volumes in itself.

It’s funny about Australia and me. For the first thirty years of my life, I longed to get out of it, and now I can never wait to come back!

I have lived in England for forty-two years. I have a marvellous marriage, an English son, three English stepsons, fourteen English grandchildren, and a host of devoted English friends. I love England, the countryside and the changing seasons, from the film of green announcing spring to the glory of autumn and the magic of seeing the bones of the landscape through bare trees in winter. The sound of English birds thrills me. Were I banished, the recollection of the ‘chukka-chukka’ of pheasants (all right, I know they were originally Chinese!) going up to roost would reduce me to tears.

I live in a beautiful house and look out at a great masterpiece – Capability Brown’s landscape – which changes with every hour of the day. On summer evenings, the shadows cast long, dark fingers across Harewood’s south front and the black St Kilda sheep (no, not that St Kilda!) that live there.

I knew the moment I set foot into England that this was where I belonged. In A Passage to England, Nirad Chaudhuri writes that his preconceptions were based entirely on the English literature he had devoured all his life. Mine were coloured by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Hardy and the English history I learnt at school.

Readers will notice major changes in this second issue of ABR for 2001. The cover looks notably different, courtesy of Chong, Text Publishing’s inimitable designer. I was delighted when Chong offered to redesign our cover. Our changed masthead seems sensible, for the magazine is known widely as ABR, after all. Readers can expect more design changes in coming issues.

I’ve been trying to place love
in the exhibit for inspection
but there are fees to be perfected.

As mouths go, it must be one of the most fabled of the century past. The lips, as widely parted as they could be, suggest the contours of a distended heart. There is an upper gallery of teeth, slightly imperfect, and glazed by spittle mingling with the crystal darts and droplets of a powerful jet of water issuing relentlessly from above the face. A mottled tongue is barricaded in by the lower gallery of teeth, almost as pinned by them to the floor of the mouth. It’s a sensual, importunate mouth, the sort that might belong to a popular diva giving new life to a favourite old tune from Sacha Distel or Gene Kelly; but instinctively we know –the mouth is so legendary – that this is not the case. Those are no raindrops falling on her head. And she’s not singin’, whether in the rain or anywhere else. She’s screaming in the shower of Bates Motel, screaming for dear life as the presiding matriarch of that decaying Gothic hostelry (or so we’re led to believe) remorselessly bears down upon her with an elongated knife, and to a very different, lethally staccato tune.

The real owner of the mouth, of course, is Janet Leigh, playing the part of the set-upon blonde in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1963). The actress lives on to this day (though legend has it that since the film she’s never been able to take another shower); and the famous image of her mouth is revived once more to adorn the jacket, back and front, of an exhilarating new book, The Hitchcock Murders (Faber), by the Australian expatriate writer, Peter Conrad.

Paul Kelly is the most influential Australian political journalist of the past twenty-five years. There was a time when Kelly was merely the most perceptive chronicler of the nation’s political life, a worthy successor to Alan Reid. With the publication of his most celebrated book, The End of Certainty, he became something rather different: a highly significant player on the national stage. The End of Certainty told the story of party politics in the 1980s. More importantly, it insinuated a powerful argument in favour of the dismantling of the distinctive interventionist economic arrangements that had been established after Federation: protectionism, centralised industrial arbitration and financial regulation.

Kelly moved from The End of Certainty to the editorship of the Australian. He used this position strategically, as a means of supporting the fundamental vision of the Keating prime ministership – Australia as a deregulated, free-market economy with a generous welfare safety net, reshaped in its culture by the ideas of multiculturalism, Aboriginal reconciliation and the republic. Together, before their different falls from grace, Pauls Keating and Kelly were a formidable Irish-Australian double act.

To dinner as a guest at the Lotos Club, on East 66^th St in New York. Named apparently after Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters’ territory – ‘In the afternoon they came unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon’, not to be confused with Robert Burton’s ‘afternoon men’, who are permanently smashed. The Latos Club’s 1870 Constitution declares its intent to promote and develop literature, art, sculpture and much else. One thing caught my ear, and one my eye. It was the first time I have heard anybody speak in virtually the same breath of ‘my ancestors’ and ‘residuals’. And I was glad to see that the Club boasted yet another painting of Tom Wolfe in (so to speak) full fig, white on white – glad partly because it reminded me that of all the worthy injunctions offered me as a young Jesuit, that against becoming a ‘clerical fop’ has been obeyed triumphantly. One has to start somewhere …

What is the comparative of prolific? John Kinsella, in this latest extension of his ‘counter-pastoral’ project, manages a tricky balancing act between the extreme givens of the bush and the fashions of art gallery and English Department. A belligerent posturing is implicit in Kinsella’s term, while there is only so far a poet can be anti-Georgics or extra-Georgics or post-Georgics before the game becomes exhausted or obvious. Nevertheless, ‘counter-pastoral’ is an extended essay that takes the pastoral concerns and illusoriness of ancient and eighteenth-century Europe and tests them against our own realities: environmental degradation, both random and systematic destruction of nature by humans, and a seeming indifference on the part of many Australians to doing anything about them. In the midst of this, at least one vital concern ties us to those earlier Augustan times: liveability. At or just below the surface of Kinsella’s poetry run questions such as: what is it to live? how do we live well? how can we live with this? is this the best way to live?

How good is Shaw Neilson? The question has hung around ever since A.G. Stephens, publishing the poet’s first book, Heart of Spring, in 1919, prefaced it with comparisons to Shakespeare and Blake and declared this unknown to be the ‘first of Australian poets’. The claim provoked competitive jealousies in a possessive, parochial literary world and reviewers responded by insinuating doubts. The question remains: is Neilson the greatest Australian poet? For those who want literature to be a horse race, it is unsatisfactory that there is no declared winner, brandishing medal and loot. Neilson loved horses but he disliked the hold that the sporting mentality had over his fellow Australians – especially men. Yet like most writers he was anxious about his standing and, in his perfectionist’s concern to put his best foot forward, he probably contributed to his readers’ uncertainties. Difficulties with his singularity as a poet were compounded by Neilson’s circumstances, particularly the bad eyesight that made him dependent on others in preparing final versions of his work. That was part of a more general dependency on editors, critics, and supporters who had their own ideas of where they wanted to take him.

A Geelong psychiatrist once asked someone very like me, ‘What’s the opposite of love?’ It was a bit like a question in a tutorial (psychiatrists and academics do have a thing or two in common). The answer, of course, couldn’t be so obvious as ‘hate’. It was ‘indifference’.

This tableau could be from Alan Wearne’s pen, and indeed Wearne’s latest verse novel, The Lovemakers, is a long exposition on the theme of love as indifference's opposite. Fifteen years ago, Wearne’s The Nightmarkets won prizes and attention as that rare thing, the verse novel (receiving five review essays in Scripsi). These days, narrative poetry is all over the shop. But if the narratives of Wearne, Dorothy Porter, Les Murray, and others have anything in common, it is their stylistic idiosyncrasy. The Lovemakers is long, lacks a conventional plot or central character, and boasts conspicuously odd syntax and dialogue. It is an oxymoronic work: one voice and many voices; highly ‘poetic’ and deeply demotic; a factitious and formalist version of naturalism.

Since the Federal Parliament moved to the house on the hill, the rose garden on the Senate side of the Old Parliament House has been neglected and uncared for. Escapism, from parliament, from Canberra, from the intensity and claustrophobia of being locked up in a remote building, has always been a secret ambition of most politicians during parliamentary sittings. The rose garden used to be a beautiful and tranquil place to enjoy a reflective half-hour. On special days, like the opening of parliament, a military band would play in a marquee, and politicians, parliamentary staff and invited guests would stroll on the lawns, enjoying the music, an atmosphere of easy-going irrelevance, and the roses. It was like a scene from the last days of the Raj, filmed by Bertolucci.

The rose garden was the inspiration and creation of Robert Broinowski, then, in the early 1930s, a clerk assistant in the Senate, and the subject of his biography. ‘He wanted Senators and their friends to be able to enjoy Canberra.’ As time passed, experience triumphed over ho Senators and staff who worked in the old building owe him a permanent debt.

Here we have the first intimations of the coming flowering of the Donald Friend diaries, which are to be published by the National Library with support from Morris West’s benefaction. Friendliness was not always the same as ugliness or cleanliness when he was alive. So, it is somehow comforting that two Australian artists, so different from each other in lifestyle, should after their deaths find common cause.

Not that Donald Friend is being put through any official laundromat. The reputation of the artist will hardly be fumigated now that his talents as a writer are to be laid bare. What we can expect is a rare opportunity both to read the writing and to see the art up close and personal: an autobiographical catalogue raisonné with a minimum of curatorial intervention.

Living the queer life in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney, it is hard not to become complacent, smug even. Like a magnet, Sydney draws lesbians, gays, bisexuals, queers, you name it, from all over the country. If you’ve grown up in rural Victoria, moved to Melbourne after compulsory schooling, and then fifteen years later have hit a certain mid-gay-life ennui, where else is there to go?

Once in Sydney, the newly arrived remake themselves. Soon enough, a collective amnesia sets in and the thought of living a queer life outside the Harbour City becomes quaint, if not unimaginable. Come Mardi Gras, interstate visitors are tolerated as poor country cousins. You can see them wandering up and down Oxford Street, bedazzled by Sydney’s homosexual superiority. Imagine an East German let loose in West Berlin before the wall came down, and you get the picture.

A reviewer’s summary of this book’s first theme could be accused of political prejudice. That is one good reason for preferring its author’s summary:

When I entered the Australian parliament in 1987, it was possible to imagine that Australia would resist the seductive claims of globalisation. Australia had high levels of public ownership, including a national bank. Its telecommunications system was state-owned. It had high (albeit reducing) tariffs to protect local manufacturing. The government had put sectoral industry plans in place for the car and steel industries. Australia had the best system of public health care in the world. State education was free and there were no fees for entry to university. There were no private universities. The government had the power to regulate the money supply and maintained a fixed exchange rate for the dollar. Most revenue was raised through (steeply) progressive income taxes.

Just thirteen years later Australia has been transformed utterly. Many changes were wrought by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments … The conservative Howard government that came to power in 1996 – and has held office since – has contributed regressive social reform to the mix.

Australia now has low levels of public ownership. Successive governments have sold the national bank and the national airline, opened the telecommunications market to competition and partly privatised the national telecommunications carrier. Tariffs have been reduced to negligible levels. Industry plans have not been renewed. Private health insurance has been subsidised and the public system allowed to run down. The Federal Government now provides more funds to support private education that it provides to assist state schools. Fees or charges have been introduced for the universities. Private universities have been established. Governments have foregone the power to regulate the money supply. The Australian dollar is now a floating currency and the exchange rate is left for the market to determine. Income tax rates have been repeatedly reduced and a new regressive system of indirect taxation, the goods and services tax (GST), has been introduced.

Few people come to Gunning, NSW, population 530, for something to read. Before 1993, people came because they couldn’t avoid it. The Hume Highway used to bring 3000 semitrailers a day along the main street. ‘At least you got to read the bumper stickers,’ one resident said when I moved here’. Because it was sure as hell impossible to talk.’

The local real estate agent tells me that, when the bypass was built, farmers were compensated $1,000 an acre for the land that was reclaimed for the new freeway. The figure is so much higher than what land will bring now, it causes rancour. It keeps getting quoted by people who need some yardstick with which to measure their sense of loss. I bought a three-bedroom house for about the cost of a five-year-old family sedan without airbags. The agent told me, with surprising candour, that I might never get my money back.

It isn’t difficult to establish conversational tone in writing. And since a column about language and usage ought to be a conversation, we’ll go for that tone. Let’s start with a workout for a current, overused device. There’ve been three of them before this sentence: four now. You’ll find them if you look (Five.) Yes, we’re looking at the conversational contraction, and it’s time to stop counting.

Time for a deep breath. That first paragraph obviously over­egged the pudding, but it was not too far away from what you are likely to find these days in chatty newspaper columns, or in serious newspaper commentary and argument. The main difference is that the negative contractions – ’can’t’, ‘don’t’, and so on – will be more strongly represented than in my playful sample.

It would be harsh, and erroneous, to insist that it is inherently wrong to use contractions in conversational prose. But the habit is getting out of hand. An eminent figure in Australian letters told me the other day he had encountered ‘needn’t’ve’ in a current Australian novel – not in a passage of direct speech. He was appalled, but another friend thinks he should not complain: he should be grateful that it was not ‘needn’t of.

The easiest thing to say about the habit is that it is a lazy path to conversational tone. Perhaps that does not matter much, but it is often also a form of intellectual fudging. ‘The chance is not likely to come again’ has an air of heavy finality. ‘The chance isn’t likely to come again’ is more genial in tone. But the opinion is the same. What does the writer want to do: make the call, or be nice?

And there we have it. Contraction-laden prose is so nice, so cosy, that you glide through it as easily as you let time drift while luxuriating in a warm bath, and with a similar result. Nothing registers. And that is not entirely consistent with the purpose of writing something down for others to read.

In the midst of transition to the information economy, there is a need for thinking about learning in ways that will help us to reconstruct the education system, while enhancing its critical and reflective role, and improving equality of opportunity. This new book by Mark Latham, a Labor MHR, isn’t it, though at first glance many will think it might be. Consciously or otherwise, it’s a substantial surrender to new Right ways of thinking. Worse, it’s intellectually sloppy and rife with obvious and unresolved contradictions.

The Frank Hardy I Knew

Dear Editor,

Frank Hardy was a larrikin. It was probably one of his most endearing qualities, but he did tell me once that his membership of the Australian Communist Party enabled him to become something more than a larrikin. He didn’t always pay his debts, except for the one big debt and the only one worth remembering: the debt of living, to the end, a writer’s life. For a boy brought up amongst working-class Irish Catholics in the potato belt in Victoria, that was no mean feat.

He was also an addictive gambler and was found dead with the Racing Guide open in front of him, still trying to pick a winner. He couldn’t have had a more fitting epitaph.

The second Adelaide Festival of Ideas will happen in mid-July. Local participants will include Tim Flannery, Raimond Gaita, Marcia Langton, and Ronald Wilson, and, from overseas, John D. Barrow and Vandana Shiva. The advertised themes are water, population, reconciliation, addiction/intoxication, and cosmology – something for everyone.

The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, now in its twenty-first year, is on again. Entries must be lodged by the end of May. You don’t have to be twenty-one to enter – just under thirty-five. Winners are guaranteed publication by Allen & Unwin, and a cheque for $20,000.

Tim Curnow, managing director of Curtis Brown Australia, one of our biggest literary agencies, has retired. Curnow, the son of the great New Zealand poet Allen Curnow, has worked in the book trade for four decades in Australia and New Zealand.

In 1995 Robert Birrell gave us an interesting book called A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and nation-building in federated Australia. It traced the growth of a nationalist consciousness in the 1890s and the translation of that Australian nationalism into the forms of Federation and the early shape of the Australian Commonwealth. He argued that there was something distinctively Australian about the ideals and structures created between 1890 and 1910, that far from being a self-interested arrangement devised by lawyers and businessmen, the Australian people were actively engaged and committed to creating the Commonwealth. Now reissued as Federation: The Secret Story by ‘Bob’ Birrell, with a cover based on Arthur Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, it has a new introduction and conclusion and some corrections to the text.

Among the achievements of the Federation decades that Birrell thinks have been obscured are an independent approach to defence, legislation to protect Australian industries and jobs, and the development of an egalitarian and participatory concept of citizenship. The ideas of citizenship pursued both by colonial liberals like Alfred Deakin, and by the Australian labour movement, led to the adoption of welfare as a universal right, but it also led William Morris Hughes to regard military service as a universal duty for men. Legislation to protect Australian industries and jobs created a high standard of living and an economy that was in part self-sustaining, but it also required a rigorously exclusionist immigration policy (the now much reviled White Australia Policy), and it led eventually to isolationism, complacency and a host of increasingly inefficient business and labour practices.

Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb is one of the  great ‘what ifs’ of Australian history. Until now it has also been one of the greatest unknowns. According to Historian Wayne Reynolds, a convenient fiction has arisen which holds that all that really happened was that the Anglophile Menzies government allowed Britain to test its bombs at Maralinga to no great effect, except a legacy of radiation poisoning and contamination. The truth, he says, is much more complex, interesting and profound.

Although Australia did not end up acquiring nuclear weapons, the strenuous efforts made by Canberra, in the three decades following the end of World War II, to acquire them had far-reaching consequences for the economy, education system and foreign policy. The weapons programme advanced the creation of such projects as the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme and the establishment of the Australian National University. It led to an unprecedented investment in postgraduate scientific research. It even influenced sensational events such as the Petrov affair. Australia’s diplomatic relations with Britain and America were shaped by a deep desire to join the nuclear club.

Poisonous, profiteering physiotherapist Sue Mindberry is making a packet by charging seven gullible, fifty plus women $1000 per head for thirteen three-hour sessions of hydrotherapy. They are variously brain-damaged, hugely obese, psychically astray and arthritic. Sue Gough believes with Germaine that even such as these do not deserve the invisibility that age is supposed to confer. She gives them each a story – or rather, stories – invented by Beverley, a stroke victim, who hates her post-traumatic paralysis so much that she tries to disappear into the imagined lives of her fellow sufferers in the pool (its roof rolled back so that as they lie in the water supported by floaties each can identify with her own personal star or goddess).

After a three-month journey to Madagascar by steam-ship, the first thing to greet the newly married missionaries Thomas and Elizabeth Rowlands were fields of wet sugar cane. Brightly painted wooden cottages surrounded the harbour; former slaves and Arab, Indian, and Chinese traders filled the streets. ‘Rain fell heavily, but covers of rofia cloth, which swelled and thickened in the wet kept the travellers dry.’ Their granddaughter, Joan Rowlands, describes their inland journey in Voluntary Exiles. Crossing crocodile-infested rivers, bearers held the Rowlands aloft, ‘shouting and beating [the waters] with branches and poles to ward off attack’.

The main character in Renata Singer’s novel, The Front of the Family, says ‘What’s past is passed.’ We only have a brief encounter with her before she slumps over dead in her old terry-toweling dressing gown in front of the television. But, in the tradition of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the narrative continues to revolve around the present absence of Zosha Feldman, her past, her life and her complicated relation­ship with her two daughters, Felunia and Miriam. Indeed, the central question of the novel is whether the past is ever past. As another character remarks, ‘some things you can’t talk about. You can only talk about what you can think about. Better not to think about some things.’

            I shot an arrow into the air,
            It fell to earth in Taylor Square
            Transfixing, to my delight
            A policeman and a sodomite.

This amusing doggerel, furnishing the epigraph to ‘On Queer Street’, the eighth chapter of this book, neatly sums up the status that Oxford Street currently enjoys as an emblem of, and shorthand reference to, the large and vibrant Sydney gay world. Its campy note evokes an older gay world of queens and drag (what in fact the US slang term gay originally meant in the 1920s and 1930s), which was how gay Oxford Street began in the late 1960s. That all receded but did not vanish with the advent of macho fashions and behaviours, clonery, leather, and Muscle Maries in the 1980s, which marked the second wave of US influence following the willing embrace of gay liberation in 1970 and after. Oxford Street is now known to the world as the site of the Mardi Gras parade, far and away the largest street celebration in Australia and probably the largest gay and lesbian street celebration in the world.

Lively and cheerful, these three books aimed at young readers are sure to persuade their potential audience that reading is fun, language can be powerful and magical, and life in books is more exciting than the lived version. What more enticing motivations to read can there be for those starting out?

The Lenski Kids and Dracula, originally published in 1992 makes a welcome return in this Aussie Bites edition. The three Lenski siblings ­– Noel, aged ten, Samantha, eight, and Craig, five ­– are deliciously horrible and rude, with their booby traps, bating of adults, and nasty pranks. However, they meet their match in the oh-so-cool Kim Kip, the next-door neighbour/babysitter who is not at all fazed by their plots. With clever twists, Kim organizes a satisfying revenge on behalf of all who have suffered at Lenski hands, and manages to tame their behaviour enough to please the reader, but not so much  that they become uninteresting paragons.

Despite attempts, revived in recent weeks, to discredit the term ‘stolen generations’, what cannot be denied in the semantics of that debate are the excruciatingly painful experiences of the children involved. While the meanings of such terms as ‘removed’ and ‘abandoned’ are complicated in a racist culture by indigenous peoples’ disenfranchisement, poverty and illiteracy, the devastating nature of separation from family in childhood must never be overlooked or underestimated.

Kate Shayler, in The Long Way Home, deals with such a separation experience as a ‘homes kid’ – one of many white children brought up in children’s homes across Australia in the three decades following World War II. While we are familiar with the accounts of the stolen generations and the ‘orphans of empire’ (British child migrants), less is publicly known of these homes kids. Such children ended up in homes for a multitude of reasons, including family breakdown, the death of one or both parents, court orders or abandonment. Whatever the cause, the result was the same: loss of affection, identity and rights; a restricted life of rules, discipline and loneliness; and frequently some form of abuse.

This book, John Croaker, is a work of convict biography. Its authors are of the opinion that we could do with a deal more convict biography. But convict biography with a difference. Though ‘a well-established medium’, the need is, we are told, to go beyond assessments of ‘colonial figure-heads’, for ‘it is time to examine the men and women on whom the lime­light only flickered’.

I agree. We will only really understand the nature of our national and regional origins when we cease to see early colonial history as a story exclusive to the powerful, the colourful, and the otherwise idiosyncratic. We will know how it was (as far as it can be known) when we can add the perspective of those who have hitherto been ‘sub-history’ ­– the clerks and labourers and small farmers, often convicts but sometimes not, who went to lonely graves in a far and foreign land, and from whom a great many of us are descended.

So who are these authors, Booker and Craig, who have gone to bat for such a radically democratic historical praxis? Well, one is the Group Archivist for Lloyds TSB Group in London, and the other is Professor of Accounting at ANU, that’s who. And they have produced a meticulous and beautifully written work of democratic history, exhaustive (but not exhausting) in its attention to detail.

There is a slight problem here, though, and it points strongly at why so little biographical work is done within the lowly realms of colonial sub-history. This is the inevitable lack of anything approaching a full life-record for one’s subject, a problem about which nothing can now be done. Thus Booker and Craig are, more often than the reader might prefer, forced to fall back upon speculation. As plausible as most of this is, one occasionally raises an eyebrow and wonders whether the envelope is perhaps being pushed too far. And this in the case of a man who was only just sub-history, for the subject of this biography, John Croaker, had sufficient skill and connection to be granted a ticket-of-leave immediately upon landing. He subsequently held important clerical offices within government whilst simultaneously speculating (and eventually losing) with at least moderate prominence within the heady financial and industrial world of early-1820s Sydney. If there are maddening gaps in the record for John Croaker, how must it be in the case of someone within the ranks of the even less visible?

Which brings me to a dilemma I have concerning this book, one I have yet to resolve to my complete satisfaction. Should I recommend it to the non-specialist, well-rounded reader? This is, in one sense, a specialist work; as well as colonial biography it is a book on economic history. Why have Booker and Craig chosen John Croaker as their particular representative for explication of the colonial ‘middle ground’ (their own phrase)? It is because Croaker introduced the double-entry system of book­keeping to the colonies. More particularly, he introduced it to the infant Bank of New South Wales (which, critics of today's banks might care to note, thereafter treated him appallingly).

Thus there is, in the book’s middle chapters in particular, a great deal of descriptive explanation of arcane, largely obsolete banking procedures. Should I tell Australia’s non-specialist readership that it absolutely must read this material? I could perhaps use myself to benchmark my dilemma.

Far from being an economic historian, I cannot even penetrate the mystery of my own simple household finances. And whilst I’ve read the relevant parts of the book, I’d be incapable of passing an exam on them. Yet, at the time, I felt I understood what was being told me well enough, and I certainly was not bored. I think I will recommend it to that general readership.

There is, in any case, much else of interest. There are fascinating insights into the brewing industry in both early nineteenth-century England and New South Wales, as there are into aspects of the justice systems in each domain. Life on the convict transports is skilfully evoked, and the hook supplies an entertaining window into the standards of public morality in early-1820s New South Wales, as well as the impact of the visit of Commissioner Bigge. And there is a rattling good yarn of a final chapter, as the authors try, unsuccessfully it must be said, to clarify John Croaker’s mysterious death somewhere in or about South America in the aftermath to a shipwreck suffered whilst our subject was voyaging ‘home’.

I found myself, finally, wishing for two things absent from John Croaker, one of which may be held to be a failure of the authors, and one which is emphatically not.

The first of these is the curious absence of a face and personality for the book’s chief protagonist. John Croaker never emerges as a man of dear character or as a person for whom we can sketch a face. Enough emerges from his career for us to know that he was able and ambitious but woefully lacking in judgement. But a nuanced personality never surfaces.

And the second concerns the book Booker and Craig have not written. The nation’s archives contain a modest but substantial trove of unpublished convict memoirs remarkable for the power of their personal articulations of hatred and anger, and for their subversive analyses of colonial experience. This is a literature that is most visible in the neglected person of Frank the Poet. At a time when much attention is being accorded Peter Carey’s Jerilderie Letter-inspired True History of the Kelly Gang, little attention has focused upon the debt Ned Kelly himself owed Frank in the drafting of the Letter, or the more general extent to which Kelly’s utterances fall within an articulated tradition of dissident colonial experience. When next the hand of an able historian is set to ‘examine the men and women on whom the limelight only flickered’, I want to read of the psychologies of desperation and anger that were surely such a defining component of early colonial society. Then we will be on our way to the heart of the matter.

Given its present rise in popularity, if you haven’t been to Broome recently, you’re obviously hanging out with the wrong crowd. Even the Queen – always so prescient – visited Broome in 1963. Broome has suddenly undergone another rebirth: as a tourist destination, historical and cultural centre, and as the home of Magabala Books. While Sydney has Williamson and White, Broome has given us the immortal musicals Bran Nue Day and Corrugation Road.

Funny things happen in children's books, and there are some odd things happening to them, too. Robert Newton and Moya Simons clearly seek to tickle the funny-bone of twelve-year-olds; Marguerite Hann Syme, on the other hand, raises questions that are more likely to preoccupy adults, and there are no wisecracks in her offering. The funny thing is that all three are published as books for young adults, and the cataloguing-­in-publication suggests that all three are ‘juvenile literature’.

This issue marks the start of a new feature for ABR, with covers reproducing some of the finest Australian photographs held by The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). ABR is a journal that critically engages with a broad range of creativity, so it seems fitting that it should also highlight photography, a medium that is not only one of the leading art forms of the modern era but also an area in which Australian artists consistently excel.