Much current debate on crucial issues facing Australia – the economy, race relations, foreign affairs, for example – is conducted in the opinion pages of metropolitan daily newspapers. And ‘opinion’ pages they now are – with a vengeance. It is a symptom of the times that opinion-page editors have less and less recourse to disinterested authorities (do they no longer believe such exist?). Instead they ‘balance’ stakeholders. Mining interest, Monday. Environmental guru, Tuesday. Sometime Labor speechwriter/media apparatchik, Wednesday and sometime Coalition apparatchik/media adviser, Thursday.

There are honourable exceptions, but the trend is marked and makes for a patchwork of vested interest, for low standards of argument and scant regard for evidence. Provocative journalism – maybe. Enlightenment – rarely.

It might have been a circumstance custom-tailored for Morry Schwartz. Schwartz is a publisher with a keen sense of the market and, with his Best Australian Essays series, a shrewd sense of how to regenerate as well as exploit a market. He also has that rare quality in the world of commercial publishing: a demonstrated commitment to the substance, not just the colour and movement, of cultural debate. So it is unsurprising, though gratifying, that he should have made this latest move. With The Australian Quarterly Essay, he has resurrected one of the oldest mediums of political argument: the pamphlet. And precisely at a time when the Internet, with its overburden of un-sifted information, is paling as the fashionable recourse of intellectual choice.

For their first issue, editor Peter Craven and publisher Schwartz have chosen as their writer Robert Manne, an academic perhaps best known for his newspaper opinion pieces, media commentary, books and erstwhile editorship of the sometimes conservative, more recently (post-Manne) radical, left-wing journal Quadrant.

‘The characters which survive,’ wrote Hilary McPhee at seventeen in the copy of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native that she studied in her tiny matriculation class at Colac High in 1958, ‘are those who make some compromise with their surroundings.’

Twenty years later and five hundred miles away, I was given a book for my birthday. It was a hardback with a black-and-white photograph on the cover: a barefoot woman riding a bike through what you could somehow tell, maybe from the way the light fell on the cobblestones and on her hat, was a blindingly hot Australian day. The woman was wearing, a flowery, old-fashioned dress whose pattern had been colourised with the same musky, dusky colours of the cover design. McPHEE GRIBBLE, said the book at the base of its spine.

That first edition of Monkey Grip is still in excellent shape. It was and still is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen. The word ‘compromise’ has clearly not been used by anyone at any stage of its production. McPhee, recalling her first reading of Helen Garner’s manuscript in 1976, says ‘… here was an original voice saying something that hadn’t been said before under skies that were familiar from the opening lines …’

With her friend Diana Gribble, McPhee had established the Melbourne publishing company McPhee Gribble the previous year; a decade and a half later, caught up in the relentless advance of globalisation and the wake of the 1987 stock-market crash, the company was finally sold to Penguin Books. For all of the years between, McPhee Gribble had been a name to conjure with: fiercely independent, internationally respected, known for good relationships with their authors and with other publishers, characterised by their commitment to good Australian writing and beautiful books, and, most of all, driven by ideas and ideals. ‘We started out,’ says McPhee, ‘with an ethos rather than a profit-motive, an idea rather than a money-making venture … for most of our fifteen years we had the luxury of a workplace where other priorities ruled … All of us wore old clothes and drove small secondhand cars covered in dents … We earned around a schoolteacher’s wage most of the time. Everything else was re-invested in employing the people we needed in order to publish the books we wanted. It was a way of working as remote now as the moon.’

Other People’s Words is an intensely complex piece of writing showing that social and cultural history, autobiography and memoir really are not separable genres. As an intellectual and professional autobiography, it traces McPhee’s own progress through a liberal education to a life in publishing, but it also demonstrates in the process what sorts of obstacles a woman born in Australia in 1941 could expect to encounter by way of educational and professional training and achievement.

Given the choice, McPhee opted for matric at Colac High rather than at the ‘model school’ Tintern with its emphasis on ‘female subjects’ and its message ‘that marriage was a calling and that education was important in order to be an intelligent partner for your husband’. Her account of school and university life in the 1950s and early 1960s, of the subjects available to students and the emphases and values that were placed on different disciplines and cultures, is one of the few, and certainly one of the best, detailed accounts by an Australian (or indeed any) woman of her intellectual development that I’ve ever read.

McPhee represents her university years as exhilarating, productive, and crowded: by her own account an intellectually restless and demanding student, she also worked and performed at the Union Theatre in student productions; she travelled to the Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain in a team of assistants to an archaeologist; she and a friend started their own magazine.

And, unintentionally launching the first stage of what was to become her life’s work in the fostering and development of Australian literary culture, she went out one afternoon to an interview for a part-time job, and so began a dream apprenticeship working in the office of Meanjin with its original editor, Clem Christesen: ‘He showed me a Patrick White story, “Down at the Dump”, which had just come in, the first White had sent to the magazine.’ 

After two years at Meanjin, an Honours year studying Pacific Prehistory, an impossibly romantic boat trip in the best M.F.K. Fisher tradition, and what sounds like an idyllic year on a Greek island, McPhee moved with her first husband to London, where she went to work for a publisher and gave birth to her first child. Unlike many literary expats, and luckily for Australian writers and readers, McPhee and her husband eventually came home to Australia, and she went to work for Penguin Books Australia in Melbourne in 1969.

The story of what happened to her there, no less infuriating for being only briefly and obliquely told on tactful paddy feet, is a classic tale of gifted women in the workplace; it shows the difficulty for women not only of McPhee’s generation but of every generation that has succeeded her so far (much less those that went before) of trying to reconcile public life with private life, emotional commitments with professional goals, and family life with the right to call yourself, and to act like, an effective and autonomous citizen of the world.

The book goes on to tell the story of the McPhee Gribble partnership and the evolution of the company through the late 1970s and early 1980s into an admired and sought-after outfit with ambitions to remain an intensely localised and personalised independent publisher while at the same time valiantly attempting to change long-established patterns of international book distribution, patterns with their roots in Australia’s colonial past and mirrored by the culturally imperialist attitudes of the United States.

There are shapely, scholarly accounts of various stages in postwar Australian literary and cultural history – the ‘creative phase’ in Australian writing that Allen Lane from Penguin saw emerging in 1961; the arguments and observations in Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country; the spread of misleading misrepresentations in the 1980s of Australian culture by non-Australian artists like Werner Herzog and Bruce Chatwin – as well as of more general developments in Australian writing and publishing. These accounts, along with the episodic accounts of McPhee’s own life, provide two kinds of context for the story of McPhee Gribble Publishers; the different sections are arranged to show how inextricable from each other these three strands of narrative really are, and at moments they merge in various snapshots.

There, for instance, is McPhee reading Horne’s ‘ferocious analysis’ in The Lucky Country on a beach on a Greek island in 1964 and ‘being quite sure that Australia was a place I had left for good’. There she is in 1970, in her double role of Penguin Australia employee and the lover of its general manager, playing company hostess to visiting British directors who ‘would pretend with great dignity that they hadn’t met me and discussed new books in the office during the day. I’d light the candles and pass off Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pies as my own and the next morning would be sent flowers like the good company wife I was after hours’.

Among her many gifts, McPhee is a legendary editor, so it comes as no surprise that this mass of material should have been arranged with such intricate clarity. But what makes this book the same kind of pleasure to read as good novels is the way that she deploys single, sharply focused images as motifs to link up different epochs in her life and different eras of cultural history, motifs positioned in the text both to herald and to echo its central concerns and themes. There’s the inscription in the Hardy novel that becomes a comment on her later life; there are the European immigrant children at primary school in the late 1940s, ‘the boys with their straight backs and red cheeks and the girls in full skirts and wooden clogs’ being encouraged to sing and dance in national dress for their classmates – an image in sharp contrast to the flattening-out of cultural differences that she finds herself fighting against forty years later.

And her image for that erosion of local difference in writing, the effect she fears globalisation has already begun to have on literature, is the glittering annual party thrown by the publishing giant Bertelsmann at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair: ‘And the food tastes of nothing at all.’ The book ends in this minor key, fearing for the future of literature in general and Australian literature in particular. It’s a wonderful book, but it’s not a happy one.

Other People’s Words is a compelling ‘rise and fall’ story. It’s an un-self-centred autobiography, written with great control and clarity, by a writer with an acute awareness of herself and her life as products of her time and place. It’s an indispensable document for anyone interested in Australian literary and cultural history. And its title – coming from one of the country’s great editors – might be an echo of the McPhee Gribble publication Other People’s Children, Helen Garner’s story of the forlorn love we have for children to whom we have no claim, but whom we might still somehow be able to help make their way through the world.

Producing a new Selected Poems is always an opportunity for poets to re-evaluate the shape of the history of their work, just as it gives readers another extended exposure to the poems themselves. In the case of Robert Adamson, Mulberry Leaves: New and selected poems, 1970–2001 is not the first opportunity: there are two earlier Selecteds. The first (Angus & Robertson, 1978) was probably too early and, instead of selecting, rewrites and reorders, so that all Adamson’s work seems to be directed to Cross the Border, surely his least successful book. The second (UQP, 1990) is a much more formidable volume and an extensive enough collection to adequately represent the things going on in the first twenty years of the career.

This new selection, made ten years after the UQP one, is so radically different from the other two that it almost feels as though Adamson’s work were rich enough for quite different versions of it to be made. Some of this difference is inevitable. Adamson published six books in this decade and a number of them, like Waving to Hart Crane and Black Water, are substantial. So, inevitably, Mulberry Leaves is severely pruned: a mere five poems from Adamson’s first book, Canticles on the Skin, as opposed to the sixteen in the 1990 Selected, for example.

The problems that have bedevilled Australian literary criticism and literary history over the last twenty years have been worldwide. Histories, even quite short ones, now have to be written polyphonically, by committees of dozens of contributors. It is taken for granted that no single person could cover the whole field and the variety of critical perspectives, movements, genres, institutions and ideologies involved. One of the recurrent phrases of recent years has been ‘pushing the boundaries’; but histories, surveys, theses, articles all depend on demarcation lines. That is why the notion of a ‘canon’ has been useful, though, of course, a canon needs to be constantly questioned and revised so as not to become stagnant and restrictive.

Andrew Sayers has one large and important idea that distinguishes his account of Australian art from all others: the story must include equal attention to Aboriginal art and to the art of white European settlement. However commanding and commendatory the idea, it will not, I suspect, be a popular one.

There will be lamentation heard from Balmain to Port Melbourne when Sayers’s book is scanned and scoured, for he perforce has to omit much to make room for his account of Aboriginal art. Such major, if disparate, figures as Roger Kemp and Sam Fullbrook go unmentioned. Whole generations, such as the large group of gifted artists who emerged in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1960s, receive equally short shrift. Nigel Lendon and Peter Booth alone survive to tell the tale; only Lendon is vouchsafed an illustration.

In 1978 the writer John McPhee, accompanied some geologists on a field trip to the American West, and in order to express their insights into the vast processes that had formed the present landscape, he coined the evocative and durable term ‘deep time’. With a sharp Australian eye, Tim Flannery has now done the same for the entire continent in this remarkably ambitious yet highly readable book. As an active research palaeontologist, he has a profound sense of the history of his discipline, and has the ability vividly and sometimes whimsically to put himself and the reader into the places of discovery and into the mindsets of the often testy pioneers in this fossil game.

Peter Singer occupies a distinguished position at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and is frequently described as the most influential of living philosophers. The front cover of this new selection of his writings couples him with Bertrand Russell and, in some respects, the comparison is sensible. Both philosophers have written clearly and simply on issues that are of interest not only to specialists. They have attracted a wide reading public and achieved the kind of celebrity and notoriety rarely associated with philosophers. Both have been activists – Russell mainly in the cause of pacifism and nuclear disarmament, Singer in the cause of animal liberation and the preservation of the environment – and both have stood for parliament. Each has been the object of energetic campaigns to have major academic appointments in America rescinded, as well as of public protests and demonstrations, threats, violence, and vilification. Of course, things have been worse for philosophers: they have been burned, shot, and hanged. But in this century, anyway, the more peremptory measures were usually remedies for their extracurricular activities, not for their teaching. So the animus against Russell and Singer has been unusual in focussing less on their political activism than on the expression of their moral views: in Russell’s case, principally the advocacy of a more casual attitude to free love, and in Singer’s, principally a more casual attitude to killing people.

Teresa Petersen’s study of Christina Stead’s fiction is littered with startling assertions about Stead’s sex life. Petersen suggests that Stead did not actually love her life partner, Bill Blake, in a sexual sense and that a yearning for fatherly love drove her forty-year relationship with him. She maintains that Stead struggled with her own lesbian desires throughout her life, and, unable to come to terms with her homosexuality, recreated herself in her fictional characters. While Petersen stops short of saying that Stead engaged in lesbian relationships, she contends that Stead’s novels are infused with lesbian eroticism in a displacement of Stead’s own desires onto her women characters. If Stead’s life with Bill was so happy, as Stead consistently maintained, why, Petersen asks, didn’t she portray positive heterosexual relationships between men and women?

For those who haven’t yet discovered the riches of New Zealand poetry, this anthology should provide an appetite-whetting introduction. Edited by one of New Zealand’s finest poets, the late Lauris Edmond (1924–2000), it bears the stamp of a thoughtful mind and a judiciously discriminating sensibility, evident in her own work as in her selection from that of others. For she has neither lost her nerve and opted out of inclusion nor claimed any undue space. Yet her own work is central to the nature of the volume. When I came to write this review, after reading steadily from page one to page 257 and closing the covers, I knew that there were certain phrases, images and poems that had struck root, were memorable for me, and were shaping my responsiveness to the volume. Interestingly enough, I didn’t always remember which poet was responsible – for the structure of this anthology (of which more later) is such that it is an anthology of poems first, and poets second.

One memorable phrase I knew to be Edmond’s – ‘I only know that we have come / to quarrelling’ – a phrase from ‘Late Starling’ that epitomises, in the simplest of language, the intertwining of bewilderment and clarity informing those poems about love’s erosion that appear in the section called ‘Time slipped through our fingers’. There was, however, a related poem remembered for the way it refreshed its conventional opening trope of lovers lying ‘in the long grass on the hill’. There are several instances of alfresco lovemaking in the anthology, but these lovers are companionable readers whose enjoyment of spring’s ‘fragile sun’ is shadow-disrupted when ‘the mountain /suddenly reached up and took it. / So early –’. An ordinary enough occurrence: what the lovers cannot know is that

Is it possible to admire a novel, to have enjoyed it on both first and second readings, yet to remain unconvinced that one can with confidence say what it is about? Isn’t that rather the complex response that poetry excites? Here it might be noted that John Scott, who subtitles The Architect not ‘a novel’ but ‘a tale’, is a poet turned novelist, as is his friend David Brooks, of whose House of Balthus something similar might be said. ‘Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,’ as Wallace Stevens opined.

Photography in ABR

Dear Editor,

When beginning this message, I came upon my last message from Helen Daniel; it was an eerie and sad moment. So I add my voice to the many who feel her loss: it was always a pleasure to work with her.

I am writing now to say how pleased I am with ABR’s new design and Peter Rose’s initiative as editor in accessing the photography collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. It will provide the ABR with excellent material for its cover and give wider exposure to the NGV’s collection.

This will be interesting indeed to follow, as many Australian photographers hold the view that the major photography collections in Australian art galleries are strong in collecting work up until the 1970s and very poor in their collection of wide bodies of contemporary work produced during the last thirty years. One has only to examine the catalogues of recent major exhibitions such as ‘Federation – Australian Art and Society 1901-2000’ at the National Gallery of Australia or ‘Worlds without End – Photography and the 20th Century’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to confirm this view.

The National Library, I think you’ll find, holds the best collection of literary portraits in the country, and the state libraries have often filled the gap left void by the major public collections. This situation is very different from that in the United States, where contemporary photography finds a highly significant place in the major collections and exhibitions of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in the collections of museums across the country.

I was pleased to find so many interesting photographs published in the last issue of ABR, including an Aboriginal and a Malay opening shells, and the witty portrait of Alfred Hitchcock, but surely the creators of these images have names. Could photographers be credited for their work in future issues?

I welcome the new editor’s enthusiasm for photography. Surely it will serve ABR well and create further appreciation of the medium of photography within our culture.

Meanjin

Dear Editor,

As one who, with the late Dr Geoffrey Serle, had something to do with the survival of Meanjin to the present time (as a former board member and original shareholder in the Meanjin Company), I am concerned with the position made public in the Age report of 7 April 2001: in particular, that the new university-controlled board has seen fit to depart from past practice in relation to a continuing appointment. Under this latter system, the editor had the freedom to develop a fresh and individual style without the limitation of a twelve-issue conspectus (the first two issues being dominated by material already in hand). The quality of the work of past editors seems to show the strength of this approach.

The system now introduced seems to me to carry with it a major change to the way the magazine develops in the future. The normal approach of a board seeking change is to sit down with an editor and develop a new forward plan. As I understand it, there has been no indication of dissatisfaction with the magazine as produced by Ms Stephanie Holt.

It is to be hoped that we are not entering into a new period of judgment ad hominem (or is that ad feminem?) that in past years originated from areas external to the university; or perhaps, even worse, that the editorship is seen as just another part-time lectureship that has to be advertised every three years.

Again, as a long-time supporter, I wish the new editor well and hope that he gets more than three years to mould Meanjin along his own lines.

Ray Marginson, Melbourne, Vic.

The composer Richard Mills and the poet and novelist Peter Goldsworthy have renewed their collaboration to produce an opera based on the Wreck of the Batavia (Previously, the pair adapted Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll for the opera stage.) The new work will be premiered at the Melbourne State Theatre on May 11, in an Opera Australia production. It depicts the notorious events that followed the famous shipwreck off the coast of Western Australia in 1629.

Now is the season of shortlisted content! In recent weeks, so many awards have been decided – or at least shortlisted – that ABR would need a supplement to list them all. Awards, everyone knows, have their limitations and anomalies, but few people would object to the highlighting of writers’ latest works or the supplementing of their often modest incomes. One first novel that has attracted notice is Arabella Edge’s The Company, based on the Wreck of the Batavia. The author is currently in Africa, picking up the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best first novel in South-East Asia and the South Pacific region. The Company has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award (of which I am a judge). On her return, Ms Edge will visit Melbourne to take part in a discussion about the notorious shipwreck and the new Australian opera Batavia. Jointly sponsored by ABR, Opera Australia, and Reader’s Feast, this will take place at the Reader’s Feast Bookstore in Melbourne (see page seven for details). At this public forum, I shall also be introducing Peter Goldsworthy and Richard Mills. It is one of several literary events that ABR is planning with major organisations and institutions.

You are going to Singapore, they said. Yes, but which way? was the natural response. If I’m flying to the island-city, my flight should take in something with a more exotic range of scenery, perhaps even a sniff of nature. Birds and stuff. So the painter and I decided on Portugal: and why not throw in Spain? My own travels had never taken me further than Catalonia, which so determinedly is, and is not, Spain. Off, then, for the long flight west with good books and red wine; en route I looked down on Cairo for the first time in my life. The Ptolemaic map of lights spread out as though forever.

Movies are often criticised for their lack of fidelity, for not keeping faith with their sources, especially novels, their audience, or their glorious antecedents. Infidelity is also a key plot device, especially of genre films: melodrama, comedy, crime, even the western. We keep going back to the movies partly because they don’t give us what we want. The New York poet Frank O’Hara suggests this in ‘An Image of Leda’, his breathless adaptation of the myth of Leda and the Swan as an allegory for watching films:

This book, My Other World, is in Margaret Whitlam’s words, ‘the story of my travels as the leader of group study tours around the world’ in the 1990s. It is also another episode in the life journey of a remarkable woman who has the capacity and the vitality to go on inventing new lives. Previously a swimming champion, social worker, suburban mother, prime minister’s and ambassador’s consort, advocate for adult education, Margaret Whitlam in her seventies embarked upon a new career as a travel guide, leading her companions not only into Britain, France and Italy, but also into China and Central America and the Russia and Siberia of the early 1990s. Now in her eighties, she has begun another life, writing her first book.

You tend to notice things when away from home. For instance, I have always been struck by how many people on trains and buses in Paris have their noses buries in books. So when I spent a couple of weeks there in March, I tried as often as decently possible to sneak a look at what Parisians were reading.

The results were interesting. I saw two twenty-something women engrossed in Harry Potter. A few elderly ladies were obviously spellbound by American schlock. The large majority, however, had brought along much weightier stuff: serious fiction, French classics, philosophy, and sociology – even poetry. Perhaps the Métro line I usually took had something to do with this: it cuts across most of the Left Bank, stopping at several of the stations servicing the Sorbonne’s numerous campuses. Yet elsewhere too, on bus and train routes feeding the suburbs, the reading matter seemed to be of a generally high quality. The conclusion to be drawn from this might impress some as naïve. It seems to me unquestionable, nevertheless, that the French (or at least Parisians) have a far greater interest in matters cultural, literary, and intellectual than Australians.

A collection of interviews with women about friendship? Well, we are all experts on the topic, and all have stories to tell. The women interviewed by Suzy Baldwin for this collection all speak fluently on the topic of friendships present and past: with women, sexual and not; with men, gay and straight; and with their partners, mothers, sisters, brothers, and children. Baldwin’s elegant introductory essay begins and ends autobiographically, but also ranges historically and philosophically amongst a number of writers about friendship, male and female, asking what is specific to women’s friendships.

Forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia: this is a five-star title for a three-star book of essays. Several of the essays are slight and pedestrian, and overall the subject of gold gets a patchy treatment; the contributors write about their specialties and we are not given much help to reach a new understanding of the whole phenomenon. But there is much that is interesting here; and some of the material is arresting. The editors have fulfilled their modest intention – ‘to illustrate, amplify, complicate or update’ well-traversed themes.

Only one essay, the first, deals broadly with the history of gold in Australia. Among several stimulating suggestions, David Goodman points out how quickly social order was re-established after the initial turmoil of the first rushes. Conservatives were worried about the collapse of deference and the hierarchy of ranks, but the capitalist market soon reimposed its discipline. The gold-miners, too, looked on mining as a means to an end, in particular the acquisition of land, not as a permanent life. ‘It was only in late nineteenth-century nostalgia for the “roaring days” that the passing of gold-rush conditions became a matter for lament.’

Neither the agapanthus nor the tango is native to Australia: their juxtaposition, when an Argentinian man and the Austrian woman he possibly loves dance amongst the plants on a remote property in the Riverina, suggests the kinds of familiar patterns we are dealing with here. Like their dance, the dancers are displaced; they find the Australian bush alien; they have endured disappointments in getting here, and one of them is going to go mad as a result. ‘Agapanthus tango’ is a conceit, a contradiction that represents the nonsensicality (to foreign sensibilities) of Australia.

These are ideas of which we have seen a great deal in recent Australian writing. Yet this novel for the most part steers round the clichés. It is a strange and exciting blend of elements that seem always fresh. Whenever it threatens to become too baroque for its own good, it moves on, the usually sure prose leading us quickly away into something new.

The book opens startlingly enough as the narrator watches a young woman exercising a horse on the Delaware Shore. It is 1955. Short segments are intercut with what is apparently an earlier scene, as the narrator looks on as his mother lies dying, strapped down to a bed by his father, on their Riverina property. Then, his mother dead and buried without ceremony, the narrator, now twelve, finds himself under the bed as his father takes solace from a young woman who works on the property with the horses. Soon, the boy flees.

As the soil is heaped on the hessian-wrapped body of the narrator’s mother, who was once an opera singer in Vienna, we could be back in the weirdly melancholy bush we know so well. And the young boy fleeing an oppressive father (whom, it turns out, the son has terribly wounded), puts us in the familiar territory of fairy tale. Yet events on the Delaware Shore keep reminding us that this will be no bush yarn, that there is always more going on.

In this part of the story Callie, the woman riding the horse, is obscured by fog and then reappears, without the horse. It has swum out to sea, Callie throwing herself from it and swimming back in. As Callie and the narrator drive away, leaving the drowned horse washed up on the beach, they have this exchange:

 ‘What’ll you tell Mrs Voumard? ‘ I ask her.
 ‘I’ll tell her he couldn’t swim,’ she says ...
 ‘I can’t swim either,’ I tell her.
 ‘You didn’t grow up around water,’ she says.
 ‘Neither did the horse,’ I say. I put my foot up on the glove box and look at the trees.

The narrator asks Callie if she thinks about dying: ‘I’ll have time to think about that when I’m dead,’ she replies, before noting, apparently randomly, that her father has had time to think about it, having been dead six years. The narrator remarks that he does not know whether his own father is still alive. ‘When I think of him dead,’ he reflects to himself, ‘it’s dragged from a horse through a tussocky paddock, his foot twisted up in the stirrup, the side of his face bumped through the sand then draped in dirt as the horse stands still at a trough.’ It is page twenty-four and this novel is flying.

The deadpan exchanges of Callie and the narrator are typical. The style throughout is flat, cool, yet descriptive enough when necessary. There is a good balance between deadpan observation and action, and the temptation to balance cool prose with exaggeratedly violent events is resisted. This is, in fact, a violent book, but its emotional extremes and revelations are released in an understated way. With its floating horses, its opera diva left to her lonely death in the bush, a drowned man found up a tree with his horse when the water subsides, this is a book that could have gone gothic yet manages to keep that in check too. Its revelations emerge for the most part quietly, without gothic histrionics. There are moments when it seems that it might all go out of control, when the lure of the baroque bush tale seems as if it might be too much. But Francis pulls back successfully from this temptation.

Agapanthus Tango may reveal some of the hallmarks of the first novel, in its simple structure, its experiment with basic fairy-tale elements, and a small cast of characters. But this book has far more assurance than most first novels. It is a very successful and original debut. It represents what might be a growing trend, in which the period after World War II has become as interesting to Australian writers as the period before and after Federation always has been.

Anthony Hill begins his biography of Jim Martin by describing Martin’s death. Beginning the story of a person’s life by going straight to the end is unusual but wholly appropriate in this case because Jim Martin’s fame lies solely in the fact that his death at the age of fourteen, at Gallipoli, makes him the youngest known Australian soldier ever to die in a war.

At first, it would seem impossible to write the life story of an early twentieth-century, working-class teenager. Jim, in his short life, did not have the time to amass the life experiences – or the papers, letters and diaries – normally deemed necessary for a biography. By necessity, Hill has made assumptions to fill the gaps in the small amount that is directly known of Martin’s life. While he describes the result as a ‘biographical novel’, his speculations are generally plausible.

Jim Martin had an unremarkable childhood in the Murray River town of Tocumwal, New South Wales, and in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, where his mother, Amelia, ran a boarding house. Hill shows well how Jim was surrounded by the values of empire loyalty and martial pride in his schooling, in the Federal Government’s compulsory military training scheme for boys aged twelve and over, and in the frenzy of patriotism that followed the outbreak of war in 1914. These values came to the fore in early 1915 when Jim decided, following his father Charlie’s failed attempt to enlist, that he should go in his stead. Jim was already five feet six inches tall, and knew he could pass for eighteen. He told his parents that he was going to join up: if they told the Army he was eighteen he would promise to write letters to them, but if they did not give permission he would join up using an assumed name and they would not hear from him at all. Faced with this horrible dilemma, Amelia wrote a note giving consent for Jim’s enlistment.

This excellently produced little paperback from a new Australian publisher, Common Ground Publishing, comes with a story behind it. Dusan Velickovic may be remembered by some Australians; he came to this country for several months back in the mid-1980s under a Literature Board Familiarisation scheme, and on his return to Belgrade he did much to publicise Australian writing. Frank Moorhouse, B. Wongar, Robert Drewe and myself were published in translation in the then Yugoslavia as a result of his promotion, and there were probably others. Then, in the late 1990s, silence fell.

Sometime after the American bombing of Belgrade, I received, out of the blue, an email from Velickovic. As a literary editor and author, his voice had been stifled for some years, but he was still there, still alive, and had just started up a journal on the Web, called ALEXANDRIA, devoted to keeping Serbian writers in contact with the wider world, and re-knitting contacts. He e-mailed me a manuscript of his own, Amor Mundi, which was a diary of his day-to-day experiences in that battered city during the bombing. I found it terse, funny, erudite and very moving. I sent a copy to my agent, Rose Creswell, and this publication is the result.

This lengthy analysis of Catholics and the anti-Communist struggle in Australia during the 1950s uncovers important and previously unreleased primary sources. In line with the author’s background as a Catholic Redemptorist priest, this particularly applies to material from Australian church archives and those of the Vatican, and from the files of B.A. Santamaria’s anti-Communist ‘Movement’. At the time, Santamaria’s ‘crusade’ against the atheistic and allegedly revolutionary Communist Party was strongly supported by the Redemptorist order, especially in Victoria.

Another strength of Father Duncan’s book is the painstaking way in which he details the intrigue and conflict about the Movement within the Catholic Church in Australia. This primarily centred on whether Santamaria’s ultimate aim was not just to defeat the Communists but was also a clandestine bid for political power. In any event, the Sydney hierarchy opposed what they took to be an unwarranted extension of the Movement’s goals. Yet even after they succeeded in obtaining Vatican intervention, Santamaria and his great patron, Melbourne’s Irish-born Archbishop Daniel Mannix, continued to resist Roman efforts to separate the connection between the Movement and the Catholic Church in Australia.

‘A king had a beautiful daughter,’ begins David Foster’s new book: 204 pages between grey boards, a reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Madonna con Bambino e due angeli on the covers, the author’s name itself visible only on the acknowledgements page, in rather small writing.

A king had a beautiful daughter. She was so beautiful that any man who saw her at once wanted to marry her. Well, the poor old king got so fed up with this he locked his daughter in a round tower where an old monastery had once stood. Round towers have a door about four metres off the ground and this one was no different. If you want to know what a round tower looks like, there are sixty-five left, in part or in ruins, through Ireland, a few in Scotland, one on the Isle of Man

Now, the king has lost the key to that tower, and has proclaimed that any man who can get the door open can have his daughter’s hand, and lo!, one day a poor woodcutter decides that he will give it a go.

I know I’m going to sound like a boring old fart, but are we becoming a disposable culture, or what? We throw out everything from old cars to ex-prime ministers. This is a Bad Thing. Our continued growth as a lively, vigorous society depends on our having strong foundations. There could have been no Kylie Minogue had there not been a Little Pattie. No Brett Whiteley without a Sidney Nolan. No Anson Cameron without a Joseph Furphy (literally as well as artistically – they are related).

I can only write my books because Nan Chauncy and Joan Phipson went down the path before me. And no doubt they, in their turn, read Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner.

As members of a reading and writing community, we have an obligation to keep alive the best stories of our predecessors. Now that I’ve turned fifty there’s probably a bit of self-interest at work too. I don’t want to end up like David Martin who, late in his life, said to me, rather sadly: ‘I wish they’d still invite me to literary festivals, just so I can have the pleasure of refusing.’

We’re always whingeing about publishers not supporting anything that’s more than six months old, but perhaps it’s because we book-buyers don’t show enough interest in our literary forbears. I hope this new series pushes the pendulum back the other way a little.