One of the benefits of a Collected is that it places individual poems within the context of the poet’s whole oeuvre, with often dramatic consequences for their interpretation. When Leonie Kramer brought out David Campbell’s Collected Poems in 1989, more than half of the volume was made up of poems written in the last decade of the poet’s life. What one had taken to be the definitive Campbell – the metaphysical ballads and courtly pastoral lyrics – now appeared an innocent prelude to his real achievement, the surreal intensity and urgent compression characteristic of that late outpouring.

In John Forbes’s Collected Poems, it is the early appearance of his ode ‘Goodbye Memory’ that took me by surprise. In his New and Selected Poems (1992), the ode appears quite late, next to the poems of public and personal scorn from The Stunned Mullet (1988). Certainly, its portrait of the poet in all his imagined inadequacy, comic and scathing at the same time, is more like the later Forbes than the earlier, at least as one had thought of him, writing those brilliant, speedy, celebratory poems of the 1970s, such as ‘Ode to Tropical Skiing’ and ‘Rrose Selavy’. In the exquisitely turned bathos of ‘Goodbye Memory’, on the other hand, disappointment in love and the failure of poetic ambition are the primary elements:

Goodbye memory & you my distances 
Calling love me across the vast golf course 
to the greens whose flags no wind will ever ruffle 
Goodbye memory & goodbye 
to the sheets held against hot windows 
on days when the morning’s blue intensity so crushes me 
I breathe with the gasps of a fat sprinter & only
a teenybopper’s crystal sigh answers, so dumbly,
the immense chances the collision of deckchairs 
from the briefcase full of words insomnia unpacks endlessly 
Goodbye memory …

Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling that, apart from the fresh face of Natasha Stott-Despoja, there’s nothing new around; no new ideas, no articulated vision of where the country might be in ten or twenty years’ time, nothing inspirational. Perhaps something might emerge before the next election. But no one’s holding their breath. All the signs, surveys, focus groups, radio talk-backs, flirtations with maverick independents show that Australians are looking for something better from Canberra. And they have vestigial hope. So the word ‘new’ in the title is not so stupid after all. It’s based on the theory that hope usually triumphs over experience. People might buy the book hoping for the revelation of a ‘new Liberal’.

Passions have always run high in the Wagner dynasty. Richard, the patriarch, waged a lifelong battle to impose his vision of a purified German art – freed of decadent foreign influences – on a sceptical, at times overtly hostile, culture. His great-grandson Gottfried, who bears a striking physical resemblance to his forebear, is equally dedicated to his mission in life: to alert the world to the intrinsic evil and pernicious influence of Wagner’s works. The cost has been considerable. As he recounts in his obsessive autobiography, The Wagner Legacy (Sanctuary Publishing, 1998 and 2000), he has been disowned by his father, Wolfgang (who has been sole Director of the Bayreuth Festival since 1966), reviled by Wagner enthusiasts in Europe and America, denied every opportunity of working in theatres and opera houses, slandered and even hounded, on occasions, by death threats. Yet, in circumstances where others might have been tempted to throw in the towel, he continues to roam the world, delivering lectures, participating in seminars and discussion- groups with a single-minded aim – to atone for the great evil his family unleashed from their stronghold in the pleasant, nondescript little town of Bayreuth, where the faithful gather each summer to worship the Master, and perhaps to remember the Master’s greatest disciple, the Führer, the intimate friend of Winifred Wagner, Gottfried’s grandmother.

Such views are by no means uncommon: they have been aired often enough in the last fifty years. Where Gottfried Wagner departs from the norm, or at least from received wisdom, is in his uncompromising condemnation of what came to be known as the ‘New Bayreuth’. When the Festival reopened in 1951 – after the theatre had been desecrated by variety shows for US army personnel – the composer’s grandsons (Wieland, who died in 1966, and Wolfgang, Gottfried’s father) allegedly set out to strip their grandfather’s work of extraneous ideological trappings, those celebrations of Teutonic might and superiority which directors and designers conveyed by means of winged helmets, heroic posturings, and yards and yards of braided golden hair. According to Gottfried Wagner, however, altering the staging of the music dramas, so as to highlight their abstract and symbolic nature, was only window-dressing. The old attitudes and obsessions survived, as they remained fundamentally unchanged in later years when his father invited such left-wing directors as Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer, as well as Jewish musicians (most notably James Levine and Daniel Barenboim), to work at Bayreuth. In short, the new spirit on the ‘Green Hill’ is no more than a cynical exercise in tokenism and in the manipulation of public opinion.Dr Wagner’s sincerity is beyond question, but the intensity of his dedication to his cause can prove unsettling. I met him in Sydney in June 2001 at a seminar on Wagner’s politics organised by a Jewish cultural group. What he had to say on that afternoon was familiar enough, encapsulated by a comment that runs through the text of The Wagner Legacy: the road from Bayreuth to Auschwitz is direct and clearly signposted. He rehearsed the often recounted details of his relatives’ misdeeds: his great-grandparents’ ingrained anti-Semitism, reflected in Wagner’s stage works as much as in his ranting tracts and pamphlets; the dalliance between Winifred Wagner and Hitler; Winifred’s dedication to the memory of ‘USA’ (unser seliger Adolf; our blessed Adolf) in the years after the collapse of the Third Reich.

The Bayreuth Festspielhaus auditorium

Most of the audience at that seminar seemed, understandably, pleased by what Dr Wagner had to say, particularly by his unqualified support for the unofficial ban on his great-grandfather’s music which has been in force in Israel for half a century or more. Yet I noticed one or two people expressing misgivings and some discomfort. They seemed to be elderly Central Europeans, people who probably came to Australia as youngish adults after World War II. It struck me that they may have well brought with them something of the widespread adulation of Wagner among urban European Jewry in the first half or so of the twentieth century, which they had inherited, perhaps, from their parents and grandparents. The frequently secular and assimilated Jews of that generation –

 my father’s family among them – must have known about the vile racist doctrines nurtured in Bayreuth during their lifetime, yet the knowledge left them indifferent, it seems, where the glories of Wagner’s music were concerned.

That is a conundrum which Gottfried Wagner addresses, with oblique tact, in his lectures and in his autobiography. To this day, he remarks, some of his most fervent antagonists, those who are determined to block his career as an opera director, are Jews – Daniel Barenboim’s name crops up several times in The Wagner Legacy. What he does not say is something that has been said by others on many occasions: the cult of Wagner among European Jews was a sign of the folly (or worse) of people who turned their backs on their heritage and its traditions and attempted to merge into the gentile world.

Daniel Barenboim performing at the Teatro Colón in 2015 (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Some contemporary Jews are deeply troubled by that anomaly – a rabbi called Julia Neuberger, for instance, who contributed a preface to the revised translation of Gottfried Wagner’s autobiography. ‘Many Jews,’ she wrote, ‘remain Wagnerians – indeed my own grandfather was a keen enthusiast. Is it that they refuse to see? Or are they – as I am sometimes myself – so carried away by the animal appeal of the music that they will forgive its creator anything?’

Others, including my father if he were alive, would, I suspect, put it rather differently. Forgiving the creator is not the question; rather, what is at stake is the acknowledgment that the intentions and personality of the artist have little bearing in the long run on works of art. On that topic, as on most others, Gottfried Wagner seems to hold uncompromising attitudes. The distinction between Wagner the man and Wagner the artist will not hold, he insists. Apart from anything else, there are the texts, the libretti, to consider – and these, he continues, together with certain musical characteristics, reveal unambiguous evidence of ideological contamination.

He mentions (as many others have in the past) the allegedly Jewish cadences of the music Wagner wrote for the grasping, treacherous Mime of The Ring. He reminds his readers and listeners that Beckmesser, the arriviste town clerk of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, is a caricature of the celebrated Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, a Jew. The most telling evidence he offers, however, is Wagner’s last work, the ‘Sacred Festival Stage Play’ Parsifal, which will be performed in Adelaide later this month.

With that work, Gottfried Wagner argues, his great-grandfather’s theoretical obsessions reached a particularly objectionable culmination. Many would agree heartily: despite its innovative musical language – which exerted remarkable influence over the music of the first half of the twentieth century – and magnificent choral writing, and despite several highly striking and effective episodes, Parsifal breathes a cloying religioso air, a sentimental coyness about sexuality and the erotic, all of which render it, even in the eyes of some fervent Wagnerites, a disappointing conclusion to a remarkable career. The Wagner family’s endeavours, especially those of the composer’s widow, Cosima, to bolster the work’s mystique by their attempts to retain exclusive performance rights for the Bayreuth Festival (which Cosima succeeded in ensuring until 1913) and such childish rituals as discouraging applause during performances of the work, particularly after the first act, seem only to highlight the shortcomings of this misguided essay in marrying opera with pseudo-ecclesiastical rites.

For Gottfried Wagner, however, such aesthetic flaws are rendered insignificant by the pernicious racial and cultural doctrines Parsifal promotes and embodies. This long, static fable of how the community of the Holy Grail was restored by ‘the pure fool’ Parsifal, how the evil of Klingsor, the selfcastrated fallen knight, came to be annulled, and how Kundry, the wild woman who had laughed in the face of Christ as he suffered on the Cross, found redemption reveals for him unambiguous evidence of his great-grandfather’s anti-Semitic fury, a determination to Aryanise Christ and to locate moral, ethical and cultural health in a typically Germanic notion of brotherhood – of the kind that led to the formation of the SS.

The clincher, he always insists, as he did on that Sunday afternoon when his voice rose higher and higher and as his clenched fist pounded the lectern, is the absence of Jews from Wagner’s dramatis personae or indeed his failure to refer to Jews anywhere in his libretti. The argument is tortuous and somewhat unconvincing. Why should the absence of Jews indicate deeply ingrained anti-Semitism? Might it not suggest, indeed, that the composer-poet’s imagination was rather more subtle and humane than his theoretical and political diatribes? But Dr Wagner will have none of that. For him, the absence itself is the most powerful confirmation. So, in his autobiography, he takes his father to task for departing in his most recent production of Parsifal from Wagner’s explicit stage directions for the conclusion of the opera. Wagner called for Kundry’s death after she had achieved forgiveness and redemption, because (his great-grandson implies) even a redeemed (that is to say, perhaps, converted) Jew must not be accepted into the newly forged community of holiness and cultural health. Wolfgang Wagner, in order to mask his own complicity in the persistence of Nazism in contemporary Germany, his son suggests, made the tiny adjustment of allowing Kundry to survive so as to disarm his critics and to permit him to continue in his fundamentally unregenerate ways.

Such attitudes and preoccupations reveal a characteristically European, indeed specifically German, cast of mind. The seriousness with which Gottfried Wagner approaches his great-grandfather’s works and their influence betokens a respect for culture and a recognition of its potency to influence large-scale political and social phenomena which other societies might do well to emulate. Yet, as I left that intense and emotion-charged seminar, a sceptical imp somewhere in my mind kept insisting that all this was to place too high an importance on what are, when all is said and done, merely striking, at times magnificent, at others tedious and bombastic, operas. That Wagner provided a model and an inspiration for those who committed a great outrage is undeniable. Yet many roads besides the one from Bayreuth led to Auschwitz and Treblinka, Belsen and Theresienstadt – and some of them were far broader, and better paved.

And that, in turn, suggested something else. Gottfried Wagner will not accept the proposition that works of the imagination may transcend the intentions of their creators or the uses to which they are put by the unscrupulous or the exploitative. Yet the history of culture reveals many instances where precisely that has happened. Who, for instance, now thinks of Macbeth as agitprop for Stuart legitimacy? Time and the fundamental ambiguity of works of art – as opposed to the ambitions of mere propaganda – usually ensure that even the most ideologically driven novel, poem, play or musical work can transform itself into something rich and strange, and far removed from its creator’s overt intentions.

Richard Wagner in 1871 (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Has that happened with Wagner? I think it has, and I think furthermore that the process started long ago, when cultivated Europeans – many of them Jews – recognised that, for all their bombast and tedium, Wagner’s works are the products of an extraordinary musical and dramatic imagination that achieved far more than the animal appeal Rabbi Neuberger mentioned in her preface to The Wagner Legacy. I am sure that my grandparents – who had the good fortune to hear Mahler conduct Wagner in Budapest and Vienna – could not forgive Wagner for his appalling ideals. But their cultural confidence, or sophistication if you like, ensured that they recognised a distinction which seems far more difficult to draw in the contemporary cultural and political climate.

That is hardly surprising, in one way: my grandparents’ generation did not, at the time, know about the road to Auschwitz. We, in our time, do not possess that privilege. Yet we should be on our guard against fulfilling, in an oblique albeit significant way, the ambitions of Wagner the ideologue and of all those who embraced with enthusiasm his pernicious theories of racial purity. Gottfried Wagner, for understandable reasons, demonises his great-grandfather and his works. That, to my mind, is merely the reverse-side of adulation. Away from the hothouse cultural atmosphere of Europe, particularly the endless internecine disputes of the Wagner clan, more moderate and civilised attitudes may flourish.

They flourished, for me at least, three years ago when The Ring came to Adelaide in a restrained and elegant production from Paris. In a place and a culture far removed from the obsessions of Bayreuth, the tetralogy disclosed itself as a great, though inevitably flawed, work, arguably the nineteenth century’s most notable cultural monument. Something similar will happen, I hope, when Parsifal (a lesser, though still striking, achievement) is performed there. And if the audience should decide to clap after the first act – as a few people did in Bayreuth in 1995 when the great Plácido Domingo sang the title role – we will not have to endure (I trust) the furious hissing which accompanied that infringement of the silliest of the many silly rituals of the Green Hill.

My first thought on seeing the title was that Delaware Carpenter, the loveable ‘Professor’ in An Accommodating Spouse (1999) had made a comeback. While An Accommodating Spouse had a predominantly humorous tone, this new novel is serious. On one level, An Innocent Gentleman is a Bildungsroman for a married couple in which both need to be shaken out of their arrested development. All the usual ingredients are there: a father–son and mother–daughter conflict, an avuncular friend, an epiphanous journey from the provinces to a great city, a clash of cultures, illicit sex, the discovery of a Lebenslüge against the backdrop of World War II (the result of England’s Lebenslüge) and optimistic closure as a relationship is redefined. On another level, the novel continues to explore a familiar Jolleyesque motif: the Oedipal father–daughter and daughter–mother relationships, illustrated by the Persephone and Electra conflicts, respectively. In Jolley’s novel Foxybaby (1985), Miss Peycroft advises the novelist Miss Porch: ‘and for heaven’s sake don’t lose sight of the Oedipus and Electra complexes.’ Well, Jolley never did. They are thematic concerns in Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983), where the middle-aged Mr Frome marries the big-breasted Gwenda who is all of sixteen; in The Sugar Mother (1988), where Leila, another voluptuous teenager, is sold by her mother to the elderly and childless professor Edwin as a surrogate mother; and, most importantly, in My Father’s Moon (1989), which constructs a most complex Oedipal scenario that has the central character, Vera, seduce her (surrogate) father and betray her mother. In this new novel, however, those two complexes exist outside the narrative and refer to Jolley’s own troubled relationship with her mother and father.

Without the slightest hint of irony, Jewel Kilcher, the young Alaskan poet and singer whose first volume of free verse, A Night without Armor, was published to popular acclaim a year or two ago, quotes Dylan Thomas in her preface: ‘A good poem is a contribution to reality.’ Thomas, thankfully, was right, and although we might argue, as poets often do, about the shape reality might take, it remains true to this day that good poetry contributes more to what we know, as individuals and as communities, and helps provide the ground for knowing what our realities can become.

London 1999. I’m in a draughty slum in Hackney, the poor part of the East End, shared with a mini-UN of students, squatters, drifters and a junior investment banker. Feeding five-pound notes into the gas meter, keeping an eye out the window for the television licence detector van, we’re doing what everyone who comes to cool Britannia does most evenings – watching the BBC ‘cos we can’t afford to go to the pub. Suddenly, the screen seems to widen and there’s Sydney Harbour in all its luminescent glory, with an expert panel of worthies – Bob Hawke, Bill Hayden, Geoffrey Robertson – arrayed before it.

Aged twenty-two, I set out for Mexico, with, like Rousseau in Italy, a ‘heart full of young desires, alluring hopes and brilliant prospects’. I was determined to leave the confines of the sleepy metropolis that is Canberra, much as Isabella Bird, though infinitely more adventurous and literate, desired to escape her cloistered Victorian world. This ‘inner compulsion’, as Robyn Davidson describes it in her introduction to The Picador Book of Journeys (something her own books attest to powerfully), is a factor which gives travelogues ‘the power to reconnect us with the essential’. And if, by essential, one means illuminating the human condition in the way that any literature worth the name achieves, Davidson’s anthology gives us a sizeable sample.

There is little here that is contemporary, which is not surprising, given that Davidson laments that much travel writing today merely ‘accommodate[s] a longing for the exotic in an increasingly homogenised, commercialised and trivialised world’. This is a nostalgic view, but it is none the less often true (with some honourable exceptions: Neal Acherson, Redmond O’Hanlon, Peter Robb, to name just a few). This anthology is distinctive precisely because Davidson brings to our attention much exceptional, quirky, fascinating writing that one would not necessarily classify under the already elastic boundaries of the genre.

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare is referred to as the happy hunting ground of all minds which have lost their balance. He is also referred to by Buck Mulligan, even less reverently, though with a distinct nationalist tilt, as ‘Shakespeare. I seem to recall the name. Ah, to be sure, the fellow who writes like Synge.’ Well, there probably are analogies between the greatest of all dramatists, who could also, as Donald Davie pointed out, use any word in the language he chose (and hence manipulated an extended diction), and the chap who set the Abbey Theatre stage on fire with the dynamic stylisation of Irish peasant speech in The Playboy of the Western World. Just as there are analogies between the poet who could write King Lear and the lonely Jesuit who wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains: cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer no-man-fathomed: / Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there’, and all those tragic sonnets. Not to mention the fellow who posed in front of the bookshop sign in Paris.

I am not sure why the Irish should be invoked at this point apart from their odd domination of modern literature and hence of whatever corner of the Imaginary Museum it is from which we see Shakespeare. Arguably, the Irish have an inwardness with and distance from the Englishness of Shakespeare that is analogous to our own as Australians. Shakespeare in Australia is the topic I have been assigned, and there are moments when it can seem as absurd as Norway and the Pineapple. Of course, it is symptomatic because we Australians use the nation as a frame for any reality we can construe, almost as if we doubted our bearings, as if we doubted any place on the map that we could call our own in the eyes of the world.

It was another Irishman, W.B. Yeats, who said (in a phrase that haunted my youth, though I have never known what it means): ‘In the eyes of Shakespeare the world must have seemed as empty as it seems in the eyes of God.’ Perhaps Yeats meant that the world to Shakespeare was a blank piece of paper on which he could sketch imaginative possibilities which made the world he beheld and experienced paltry by comparison. Who knows? Thirty years ago, it was tempting to take Yeats’s statement and use it as a candle by which to read Macbeth’s great ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech because that speech is a signification of ‘nothing’ which nevertheless moves with such a power of music that the spectator is not depressed by the nihilism it articulates. Perhaps it brings us close to what Germaine Greer meant when she said that Macbeth is a man who tries to kill his soul but cannot succeed. And maybe Yeats encourages intimations of some spirituality immanent in such moments in Shakespeare, whether the enchantment of illusion or the truth of higher dream we must judge for ourselves. Such things can seem as implicit in Macbeth’s desolation as they do in Prospero’s ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ and all the last plays’ concern with awakening faith, fathers and daughters and the tragedy of Lear reversed.

Yeats used also to say, when he was less intent on sounding the depths of the Bard as God, that, to an Irishman, England was faeryland. To an Australian, everywhere is, everywhere but here. The first thought ‘Shakespeare in Australia’ is likely to stir in us is something a bit like the words in the Neil Young song, ‘Everybody knows this is nowhere.’

Nowhere very relevant to Shakespeare, though, not (when it all comes down to it) vice versa. I think it’s probably true that I first became aware of Shakespeare, as a child and young adolescent, at a time when Shakespearean acting and production was at some kind of peak, or just after it, and when the criticism of Shakespeare’s plays was, if not at quite this zenith, at least capable of making the reader (in Johnson’s phrase, though Johnson thought it unlikely) ‘more useful, happier and wiser’.

Let’s take the latter first, because it can seem more ephemeral. When I was seventeen and in the last year of high school, I read Morris Weitz’s Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, not a world-shattering book but one of those works of literary theory that have vanished from the face of the earth to be replaced by their gorgon-like namesakes. As I recall, Professor Weitz, a Wittgensteinian, was attempting to make sense of literary criticism by making sense of the language that critics had used about the play. I remember he was very unfair to that most imaginative of Shakespeareans, old Wilson Knight, who sees Hamlet as the ambassador of death and a figure of preternatural morbidity, impelling everyone around him into the graveyard of his own consciousness, that rank, unweeded garden, indeed, but also into the literal one of dying: the Queen and Claudius and Ophelia and Laertes and Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. All ‘go to it’. What’s Joyce’s phrase? – ‘Stagnant and sumptuous exaggeration of murder’.

But if Wilson Knight represented an extremity of creative criticism that a taxonomic surveyor of theoretical bent thought unsound (A.L. French, that redoubtable Leavisite who taught first at Sydney and then at La Trobe, used to say to his students that his experience of Wilson Knight was the opposite of his experience with Scotch whisky: it didn’t improve with age), there was certainly a wilderness of mirrors in the criticism of Hamlet, as in most of Shakespeare’s plays, to delight and instruct young souls. I remember ploughing with delight through the thickets of historical jungle in John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet and the very different accounts of the play in Derek Traversi and L.C. Knights. The latter had launched the attack on the character-oriented criticism of A.C. Bradley, the author of Shakespearean Tragedy, with his essay about how many children Lady Macbeth had, but it was hard not to like Knights, one of the only critics who took a dim view of Hamlet’s ghost.

I would not, as a seventeen-year-old, have read William Empson’s essay on Hamlet, but I recall how, in the essay on King Lear in Structure of Complex Words, he says that he had forgotten how supple and inclusive and persuasive Bradley’s account of the play was. My own enthusiasm back then was divided between shimmering pieces of eloquence such as C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Prince or the Poem’ lecture (he opts for the poem but succeeds in invoking the Prince anyway, with the riches of the earth falling from his hands) and even more so for the kind of American criticism represented by Maynard Mack’s ‘Jacobean Shakespeare’ essay, or Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet, a book that I adored as the last word in sophistication, a full-length study of the play in the grand scholarly critical postwar manner by the Harvard professor who had edited The Essential James Joyce and written The Gates of Horn, a study of the French novel from Stendhal to Proust.

There’s no need to make the highest claims for this criticism – the kind of criticism a secondary school student in the 1960s might read before going to university – to think, however uncharitably, that Shakespeare criticism has fallen into the hands of knaves and fools.

The more or less useful new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margaret de Grazia and Stanley Wells, has a chapter on Shakespeare criticism in the twentieth century by R.S. White of the University of Western Australia, in which the kind of criticism alluded to here is placed in the context of ‘materialist’ Shakespeare, ‘feminism and gender studies’ and ‘intertextuality’. The tone, not the argument, can be indicated from random quotation:

As the women’s movement (or more properly movements) has over the last thirty years addressed new issues, so these changes are reflected in Shakespeare studies. One direction was an assault on Shakespeare’s plays as repositories of male, heterosexual attitudes which have harmed subsequent generations of women and gay men ... The focus is no longer on Shakespeare as one writer among a multitude of others, all building upon a host of earlier writers, in something like a conversation across centuries. On this view any work is a patchwork quilt of echoes importing other contexts, but like any good quilt something new is made in the creative assembling.

White is at pains to emphasise continuities between the modernist (Empson presumably) and the postmodern (Stephen Greenblatt and his New Historicism), but, even allowing for the fact that he is surveying a field and, by necessity, being inclusive, it is hard to recognise the vitality of the best modern Shakespeare criticism from his account and all too easy to see the kind of thing Shakespeare criticism has been pressured by. White is an accommodator with a summarising brief, and it’s not his fault that his chapter in the Cambridge Companion hardly compares well with that by Anne Barton (the woman who wrote Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play), who has an expert and urbane chapter on Shakespeare and London, ‘City and Court’.

Companions tend to a certain blandness, not least when they attempt to cover a field through the uncoordinated activity of divers academic hands. This one is more useful when sifting factual matters, however hypothetically: E.A. Honigmann on Shakespeare’s life, Leonard Barkan on what sort of classical education he had. Honigmann speculates about Shakespeare’s father being a recusant and the theory that Shakespeare was, at one point, attached to a Catholic household. Barkan says that Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin’ was probably greater than that of present-day honours graduates in Classics.

One of the questions that the rash of Shakespeare criticism books which have landed on my desk raises is what kind of perspective on Shakespeare a student of literature with an interest in the subject is likely to have – in Australia, if you like – when she graduates with an honours major in English from one of our universities.

It also raises the question (in terms of this topic) as to whether the Australian accent is unspeakable when it comes to questions of Shakespeare, so let’s sketch a cartoon of a bygone history. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Shakespeare was, as you might expect, a mighty force in the land. Those who like to survey that precious burial ground, the history of our English departments, tend to say that, at this period, Shakespeare was a site of contestation for academic power plays. Many heavyweight academic figures made Shakespeare and his contemporaries their field. That would be true of G.A. Wilkes at Sydney University, editing his Jonson and teaching Shakespeare with one hand, and developing the study of Australian literature with the other. And it would be true, very differently, of the man Germaine Greer described as one of the greatest teachers she ever encountered, S.L. Goldberg, who retired from Sydney, went to Melbourne and established a notable ‘Leavisite’ school. There was a range of academic Shakespeareans in Australia. This is the period when Andrew Riemer published his Sydney monograph about Antony and Cleopatra and when David Malouf lectured on Shakespeare and the Jacobeans at Sydney in what the poet John Forbes, a hardened sceptic in these matters, thought was a more impressive manner than anything else he had seen in a literature department.

There were other approaches, too. Dennis Bartholomeusz, at Monash, in Macbeth and the Players, a book commended by Frank Kermode, was looking at the interplay between literary criticism and the insights that could be gleaned from stage history, somewhat in the manner of Marvin Rosenberg in The Masks of Othello and the rest of his books that play on the mirror-show between criticism and theatrical interpretation.

It’s a tricky business and one that can easily dissolve itself into treacheries of metaphor. As Peter Holland says, rather intelligently, in the Cambridge Companion, it is easier to say what a production looked like than it is to say what it sounded like. Still, I believed Bartholomeusz when he said, confirming Kenneth Tynan – though Tynan was one of his sources – that the Glen Byam Shaw production of Macbeth in the mid1950s with Olivier and Vivien Leigh (Keith Michell, the Australian actor, told me that as Macduff he narrowly missed being blinded by Olivier in rehearsal) was the best of the twentieth century.

One of the difficulties with O Brave New World, an anthology of pieces about Shakespearean production in Australia, is that it tends to refer rather than present. This at least has the advantage that it can allow us to know what it is that we remember, but it has obvious drawbacks of methodology and emphasis, not least because it is a survey book, again by divers hands, that is more intent on tabulation than description. It is good to be reminded that Warren Mitchell, in the 1970s, played King Lear in Queensland, but it would make more sense to quote a description of the performance (which sounded so good that it tempted me to hitchhike to Brisbane) than to tell us what we already know, that he was Alf Garnett on television. It is pleasing to have the estimable Harold Love doing archaeology about ‘Male Superstars of the Melbourne Stage, 1850–1870’ or to read speculation about John Bell’s attempts to create a vernacular style of Shakespeare performance, but the difficulty with this is that they will always pale in comparison with theatre criticism which tends, not surprisingly, to be a matter of the Mallarméan dictum: paint not the thing but the effect of the thing in the mind.

For instance, Bell’s Hamlet, in the early 1970s, seemed to me least successful in its rather campy Oz mannerisms (the patter with Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) than it did in the stillness and spaciousness, the very ‘classical’ technique that he brought to the soliloquies. And I think it’s at least arguable that, as an actor–manager with the Bell Shakespeare Company, Bell has become increasingly mannered, playing off a kind of fey Australianism with a kind of adeptness of technique that he does not seem to communicate to the younger actors he often chooses to share the stage with. It’s certainly true that John Bell seemed to keep his head while all about were losing theirs in the execrable and overpraised Barrie Kosky Lear, and he provided snatches of stillness and poise as Ulysses in the unhappy Bogdanov production of Troilus and Cressida last year, but none of his Shakespeare work in recent years has been a patch on the superb James Tyrone he did a couple of years ago, partnering Robyn Nevin in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The finest work apart from this which we have seen in more than a decade of Bell Shakespeare was the English-born Richard Piper as Henry IV and the spate of performances, raw but soaring, a few years back from the maestro’s daughter, Lucy Bell, who does not go at the verse terrier-like in the manner of her dad, with an Australianised version of the Olivier snap and bite, but who can, on a good day, possess it like a birthright.

The difficulty with reducing the historical study of theatre to iconography and ideation is, as I suggested earlier, that it dispenses with effect. For instance, the Currency volume (subtitled Two Centuries of the Australian Stage) has a very up-to-date colour pic on its back cover of John Stanton as Prospero, in eighteenth-century dress, menacing his Aboriginal Caliban with a thunder stick. The climax of this Melbourne Theatre Company production, directed only a couple of months ago by Simon Phillips, whom I do not usually admire, had Prospero admonished into goodness by a chorus of Aboriginal spirits as he said the words ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’, as if – with absolute difficulty – he, the ghost of colonial British Australia, had come to feel the deep moral imperative of the need for an Apology. It was a moment in the theatre of some grandeur, and I would not have believed that this piece of ‘postcolonial’ sentimentalism would have worked, but it did. Of course, it only worked because Stanton is such a good actor. The trouble with archaeological surveys of Shakespearean productions is that a moment like this is reduced to the bright idea behind it, and ideas in the theatre are normally bad ideas; or rather, like most substructures of privacy in literature (Joyce’s Homeric correspondences, say), they are there for the sake of the director, not for the sake of the audience.

I am old enough to have seen the granddaddy of all ‘directorial’ productions of Shakespeare, Peter Brooks’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s therefore irritating to see that masterpiece of stage minimalism, that empty space in which the poetry could whirl and fly, reduced – as it is in one of the books I have just looked at – to the claptrap of its Jan Kott influences, about bestiality and donkeys’ dicks and what have you. Dame Helen Gardner wrote a funny account of seeing the production ‘innocently’, without reading the programme notes, in what was a more or less concerted attack on director’s theatre. She was no doubt half right: a couple of years ago, Elijah Moshinsky said, penetratingly enough, that it was interesting (in the analogous field of opera) that some of the most highly regarded productions of modern times (he cited Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli) actually belong to the period before the individualistic director’s production. That’s fair enough but, at its best, ‘directorial’ Shakespeare works not to impose its will in the face of a text it distorts but as so many metaphors for theatre. Brooks’s Lear, which I know only from the film and from its expansion into the complete Caedmon spoken-word version, with all the Godhaloed quotes restored (a recording I feel privileged to know intimately), is not great for its Beckettian analogues, mediated through Kott – they were bound to be part of how we would see that play in the time of Endgame – but because of the overpowering force, the almost unbearably moving quality of Scofield’s acting. That is the kind of thing we need to retain a sense of, because that is what is integral to a sense of Shakespeare’s plays and the dramatic poetry that constitutes them.

Shakespearean theatre and the record of theatre, Shakespearean criticism and the analysis of these texts that tease us out of thought. The experience of the plays – the magic of those moments, all too rare on an Australian stage – when these plays which are immeasurably greater than anything we can dream of actually work, live, in the flesh, before our eyes. There is the further idealisation, not to be despised, in an age of mechanical reproduction where we can see what Gielgud made of Cassius with Brando (whom he defended against all snobbery) beside him as Antony. Or Olivier gargoyling his way through Richard III with Ralph Richardson as the most urbane of Buckinghams. Or, very differently, the chiaroscuro and imagistic brilliance of Orson Welles’s Othello with his magnificent Irish Iago, Michael MacLiammoir.

And then beyond that – with far greater richness if you can tolerate the medium, certainly with more variegation and fullness – the spoken-word recordings: Gielgud’s Hamlet and Leontes and Richard II, Olivier’s Othello (which is also on video), Burton’s Hamlet and Coriolanus, Vanessa Redgrave’s Rosalind (and her Olivia, to Siobhan McKenna’s Viola) and her Ariel to Michael Redgrave’s Prospero, a magic of family resemblance that brings a deep enchantment.

The list goes on. In the last stretch, we have seen the resurgence of Shakespeare on film post-Kenneth Branagh and then, with dazzling commercial success, Baz Luhrmann. All of which awaits the budding Shakespearean on video and DVD.

One of the greatest paradoxes of recent academic criticism is that, although it has been keen to deflate Shakespeare as a constructed icon and agent of authoritarianism, as the Greatest of the Great Writers we had to have, it has proved difficult for the Cultural Studies people to bypass Shakespeare because in the age of Ken and Baz and Leo he has proved commercially viable, if not hot. It is one of the sad facts of cinema history that, when Olivier wanted to film his Macbeth with Vivien Leigh, the Rank organisation failed to back him. Not even the erstwhile Scarlett O’Hara and the future suave villain of Kubrick’s Spartacus could ensure any prospect of commercial success to the backers. Now, of course, everyone from Callista Flockhart to Mel Gibson can make films of Shakespeare for a pluralised niche market. Not only can Laurence Fishburne make a fair stab at Othello (though not the Moor one would dream of seeing memorialised: James Earl Jones with Christopher Plummer’s Iago), but, in the case of the Branagh Much Ado and the Luhrmann R & J, we have Shakespeare films everybody goes to see.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, is the child of this proliferation and it has its points. It’s certainly interesting in telling us what films earn (the uncut Branagh Hamlet, for instance, didn’t make money; his Henry V certainly did). The difficulty, as with some fraction of academic writing in the area of entertainment, is a lack of savvy and the tendency for the pomposity of dead ideas to intrude. One contributor opines that, in the Joseph Mankiewicz Julius Caesar, everyone, including Marlon Brando, attempts to speak English English. This is simply not true. Brando listened over and over to recordings of Olivier to get the ‘style’. (John Cleese said once, accurately enough, that no one would know how to do Shakespeare if they hadn’t heard it done. It would be mere national self-hatred to say that only in this country has this feat been attempted.) The effect, however, although ‘toney’ and beautiful, is not English. My late father was not wrong to say that Brando did ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ like a wharfie.

And his delivery of Antony’s soliloquy over Caesar’s body, ‘O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth’, is one of the most electric pieces of verse delivery in modern history, utterly Brandoesque and method-like but with a classical precision and an improvisatory swerve away from it that explain why Scofield, as well as Gielgud, defended the performance. In the film of Julius Caesar, Gielgud and James Mason (along with Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr) speak in the ‘British’ voices that were theirs. Louis Calhern (Caesar) and Edmond O’Brien (Casca) speak in the American accents native to them.

There is a similar bit of cant, a more direct snobbishness, when another of the contributors suggests that the variations on Shakespeare’s Henry IV in Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho represent the worst of all possible worlds. On the contrary, the reanimation of a Shakespearean matrix of language in this dazzling masterpiece about boy prostitutes is one of the only examples I know of a postmodern appropriation which not only works but melds with the thing it plays with. In My Own Private Idaho, van Sant has River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves doing what Joyce only pretended to have Stephen and Bloom doing in Ulysses. The effect, which is transfiguring even as it partakes of parody, is one of ‘metempsychosis’. It’s much more Shakespearean – as well as much more scarifying and poignant – than Baz Luhrmann.

So where is Australia in all this, and where is literary criticism? One divertingly futile book that came my way recently was The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin. The former wants to talk about eucharistic controversies and notions of ‘essence’ and ‘substance’ in the language of the plays in order to shadowbox with the Catholic–Protestant dialectics that shadow the real and politico-religiously dangerous world that produced them. Dr Yachnin, on the other hand, is exercised by the idea of the ‘populuxe’ theatre. This is based on his neo-Marxist theory that Shakespeare’s representation of kings and lords allowed the Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoer to experience vicariously the world of the court in a way that was analagous to the French eighteenth-century cult of mass-producing cabinets and chests of drawers for the common people that mimed an aristocratic refinement, in the way Josiah Wedgwood saw the advantage in producing china of ‘fashion’ over ‘quality’.

Is there an analogy to all this in the Australian apprehension of Shakespeare? I don’t think so, though it’s not hard to see how the narkier kind of Marxist or populist could make a case. Remember Les Murray saying, ‘A degree in English made you a second-class Englishman’ – one of Les’s very viable sneers that won’t quite stand up to analysis.

Let me put this as baldly as possible. I suggest the finest criticism I have read of Shakespeare by an Australian is Sam Goldberg’s book-length study of King Lear, a book by a man who seems to have had ‘the very English manner of Australian academics’ noted by Peter Porter (though he was a man who left Oxford refusing to write his D.Phil., which turned into The Classical Temper, the famous study of Ulysses). Goldberg’s book on Lear is not written with great essayistic colour, and it has a fair amount of the characteristic Leavisite severity. He says, at one point, that in the latter section of the play he doesn’t think Shakespeare’s mind was on much apart from Lear and Cordelia. But it is, as I recall it, an absolutely coherent account of the play, looking at it from every critical angle. It’s not Empson or Harold Bloom or Harold Goddard, but it’s a better piece of Shakespeare criticism than the supple work of that onetime adoptive Australian, Howard Felperin, the man who introduced poststructuralism into this country together with a particular variety of American academic cosmopolitanism, a critic who can look almost impossibly ‘literary’ by today’s academic standards.

When it comes to Shakespearean performance, most of the great Shakespeare I have seen on stage, in this country, has been British, whether it was as a young adolescent seeing the tears roll down John Gielgud’s face as he performed the ‘Howl’ from Lear at the end of his one-man show, or Judi Dench doubling as Hermione and Perdita in a Trevor Nunn production of The Winter’s Tale.

The kind of pleasure I have got from visiting British classical companies (the English Shakespeare Company doing the whole of the Histories, the Adrian Noble/RSC Dream – not on a par with Brook, but delightful anyway) has in practice left for dead almost all of the local product. Of course, a few years ago there was that Neil Armfield production of Hamlet with Richard Roxburgh as the Prince, Cate Blanchett as Ophelia, and Geoffrey Rush (luxury casting there) as Horatio. It was good. If it was flawed, it was because Roxburgh moved through the gaps and vacancies of the part, those abysses of psychological indeterminacy, without filling them with his own personality as almost all Hamlets do. It was intensely interesting without being a great Hamlet.

For me, the Hamlets that live in my mind are performances I have heard rather than seen, so that, as an Australian enthusiast for Shakespeare, I have, as it were, travelled blind. Is this an example of Cultural Cringe or of Complex Fate?

For what it’s worth, it is my conviction on these matters that our lack of a first-rate classical theatre is an example of cultural slovenliness, not inevitable national second-rateness in this area. I think that when Tyrone Guthrie was investigating the possibility of a national theatre so many – is it fifty? – years ago this was the way to go, and that the State Theatre Companies’ frequent ineptitude in the face of Shakespeare is part and parcel of their inability to realise the potential of the dramatists who came to prominence with the Pram Factory in the 1970s.

Still, though they are as scarce as hen’s teeth, it is possible to read intelligent modern academic criticism and it is possible to see wonderful Australian Shakespearean acting. In Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, Russ McDonald tries to come to grips with why Shakespeare was a great poet even though he is burdened with the kind of theoretical nonsense that insists in talking about ‘pleasure’ rather than aesthetics. He’s impressive, though, when he talks about that strange, marvellous half-ruin of a play, Pericles. He talks about that line – dramatically climactic and overpowering – ‘I am great with woe and shall deliver weeping’. It’s in Shakespeare’s most baroque, most Crashaw-like late manner, though the effect is far from embroidered. McDonald relates this image of a man pregnant with grief to the incest riddle in the play and to the concentration on images of metamorphosis, sexual and familial. It’s intelligent criticism in the face of discouraging general practice.

And what a play Pericles is. ‘A terrible childhood hast thou had, my dear ... My wife was like this maid.’ I saw it done once, in general very roughly, in some Melbourne hall, in a production that had – transfiguringly, like a miracle of reality— a Pericles of absolute emotional authenticity and authority in Robert Menzies. It was a triumph against the odds, and it was very moving. I know Scofield’s recording, and this was on a par.

So Shakespeare survives, flickeringly, even when theatre is bad, here in Australia, even when criticism has lost its moorings – in so much of the world.

‘A pox on the GST!’ wrote one of our many new readers last month when filling in her subscription form. ABR has long been famous for its feisty correspondence (never more so than last month). This editor is not about to disagree with our new subscriber. The imposition of GST on books and magazines surely rates as one of the crasser political acts in recent years. Anyone unsure of its effect on literature in this country should ask booksellers and publishers what sort of a year they had in 2000. Readers weren’t unscathed, either.

Back in April, when Peter Rose asked me to write an irregular column for ABR on the campaigns that the Australian Society of Authors runs on behalf of writers, it seemed perfectly clear what the subject of my first column should be. At that time, after years of hints and veiled threats, the Government had finally revealed its hand and introduced a Bill into Federal Parliament to allow the parallel importation of books. The Government wanted this legislation passed before the end of the financial year – it was a priority item.

This is one of the most satisfying and fascinating monographs on an Australian artist that I have read. Only Franz Philipp’s monograph on Arthur Boyd can be compared to it, and for quite other reasons. Catalano, lucidly and meticulously, unravels the complex physical and intellectual life of Rick Amor from the time of his boyhood. He discloses how Amor’s paintings depend on his ability to make his past the vehicle and inspiration of his creative achievements. It is a reflexive art embodying the omnipresent power of a memory touched with a redolent melancholy. His past is revealed as a strange presence that is not to be found in the work, in my experience, of any other Australian artist.

Any book documenting the life and work of a famous artist invariably paints a picture of an era. This autobiography by the outstanding Australian contralto Lauris Elms is no exception. The postwar years in Australia saw the emergence of so many talented young singers that one can’t help but label that period a ‘golden age’. At a time when many of them, almost by necessity, departed for Europe or the UK, their combined successes on the world opera stage never ceases to amaze. An enviable standard was set which has been maintained to this day, even if the individual successes are not quite so spectacular.

This is not an easy book to read. It is crammed full of ideas, literary and musical allusions, and theories about law and justice. The author’s basic thesis – that law is a concept imperfectly realised, continuously reinterpreted, and always in flux – is not really controversial in legal circles in Australia today, let alone novel. The most influential legal scholar in Australia’s history, Professor Julius Stone, taught that simple truth to generations of law students in Sydney between the 1940s and the 1980s. Now, Desmond Manderson is the first director of the Julius Stone Institute for Jurisprudence at Stone’s old law school at the University of Sydney. He has taken up Stone’s grand theme, adding some fresh insights of his own. He has done so in this handsome book, beautifully published by the University of California Press. And there is much that is good and useful in it. But his gems are sometimes maddeningly hidden in a torrent of words that succeed in obscuring the ideas the author wants to get over to the reader.

For some of us, it is hard to believe that Neil Finn is on the verge of middle age. Recruited in 1977 by his older brother Tim to replace Phil Judd in Split Enz, Neil first entered public consciousness as a teenager who apparently had never before played electric guitar. Within two years, he was the lead vocal on ‘I Got You’, the song that propelled Split Enz to the top of the charts not just in Australasia but in Britain, too. Significantly for a band that had relied on Tim as the songwriter, it was Neil’s song. In the twenty-one years since then, Neil has fashioned a reputation as a master of conventional popular songcraft, chiefly through the post-Split Enz trio, Crowded House, and, more recently, as a solo artist.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s new book, By and Large, is, despite its hundred pages, a thinner book than most of his recent volumes. The familiar features are there: a baroque and intense intellectual ambit combined with playfulness; a deep love of the sharp ‘thinginess’ of the world combined with a love of the expressiveness of the words we use to contain it; and, last but far from least, enjoyable phrasemaking. It is just that, in By and Large, the reader’s pleasure seems more attenuated.

What stands out as a new departure is an intriguing forty-sonnet sequence called ‘Modern Times’, the second of the book’s three sections. Given that the third section is called ‘One Life’, we might expect a simple division of authorial attention: one to look at the world and the other to look inwards. In reality, things are a bit more complex than that.

There has been so much media hoopla about Roger Sandall’s The Culture Cult that its broad features are already well known. Sandall claims that a relativist mafia, whom he dubs the Culture Cult, holds unchallenged sway over contemporary anthropological discourse. As a result, academic anthropology is shot through with romantic primitivism, a bohemian vice that the cult inherits from Rousseau and Herder. Romantic primitivism is infatuated with difference, championing the irreducible idiosyncrasy of traditional cultures (the plural is emphatic) over the oppressive singularity of rational-progressive bourgeois Civilisation. In keeping with romantic-primitivist dictates, anthropology celebrates tradition over reason, stasis over development, gerontocracy over equality, the collective over the individual, and so on – the litany is a familiar one. As if this weren’t enough, romantic primitivism is also contagious. Anthropologists transmit it to their tribal objects of study, who fall over themselves to fit into the hidebound traditionalist cap that romantic primitivism has fashioned for them. Alarmingly for Sandall, this contagion can lead to land rights.

Masculinity isn’t what it used to be. To begin with, it has gone forth and multiplied to become masculinities, for it is a requirement of a pluralist culture that diversity not only be acknowledged but cultivated. What has happened, of course, is that as women’s history has given way to gender studies, masculinity, which was formerly taken for granted as part of the dominant culture, is being put under the microscope.

Ten days in Australia in July brought a remarkable round of studio visits plus an exhibition of new Australian painting, Phenomena, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Painting has had a hard time of it lately. Michael Wardell, curator of Phenomena, goes further: ‘throughout the twentieth century, painting has been under threat,’ claims the slightly melodramatic opening sentence of his otherwise modest and useful catalogue. The claim became even more of a reach at the AGNSW where, on the floor below Phenomena, you could see the pictures from the Orangerie with superb Cézannes, Picassos, Soutines and Rousseaus. None of them looked particularly threatened to me.

Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling that, apart from the fresh face of Natasha Stott-Despoja, there’s nothing new around; no new ideas, no articulated vision of where the country might be in ten- or twenty-years’ time, nothing inspirational. Perhaps something might emerge before the next election. But no one’s holding their breath.

At last a history, thirty-two years after the event, of the Australian Performing Group (APG), albeit in the form of highly personal ‘recollections’ from Tim Robertson, one of the group’s stalwarts. The Pram Factory is a handsome, large-format book, containing many wonderful photographs recording the young radicals of the 1970s who created Australian theatre history.

It is a mixture of enthusiastically recalled and possibly exaggerated recollections of unique creative practice, and useful facts in its appendixes, including a chronology of productions, and a Who Was Who alphabetical list. The latter is fun to read, full of comic wit and irony, but, in persistently wisecracking, Robertson ducks the opportunity to demonstrate how pervasive the influence of the group, through subsequent careers of all kinds, has been on Australian cultural life.

At dawn, we scraped the ice from the windscreen and fled Quorn: a name redolent of the shires, as was the congealed gravy on the overcooked lamb the previous night, but inadequate for the immensities of the Willochra Plain, magnified by the winter light and punctuated by the stumpy teeth of the Flinders Range – ‘zu Raum wird hier die Zeit’. Melrose was prettily sleepy and closely shuttered: the possibilities of both Zeit and Raumsenza cappuccino loomed. A shriek from the back seat alerted us to a curl of smoke rising from the low roof of the Old Bakery, Wirrabara, and we ground our long-suffering Mitsubishi to a halt.

In his amusing essay, ‘The More Things Change’, John Birmingham writes:

Sydney will always confound, infuriate, engage and seduce. It is a provider/destroyer, madonna/whore and prophet of the main chance. It is hated, feted, loved and envied. It cares not. Self-obsessed and cosmopolitan, tacky, shallow and deeply serious, it knows its own worth and vainly overstates it at every turn – as when one speaker at the last (sic) Premier’s litfest dinner favourably compared the old tart with the Florence of Michelangelo. The gasps at the dinner tables were probably in surprise that anyone could think to bracket Sydney with such a provincial backwater.

While, I hope, ironic, this observation could be said to be indicative of the attitude behind many of the individual chapters in this anthology.

The title of this book suggests that it will be less concerned with industrial aspects of Australian cinema than with ideological, but, as if this might limit its scope and resonance, Peter Malone’s subtitle suggests that other lines of inquiry and response might be accommodated as well. This proves to be the case.

Such interview books – and I know this from experience – throw up certain inevitable problems. What exactly is the status of the information they yield? ‘Directors in their own words,’ says the subtitle. Yes, but all their own words – with all the repetitions and half-finished sentences left in? (There are some of these.) Does anyone seriously want the purist recording of oral testimony? If editing has taken place, as, mercifully, it seems to have here, have the interviewees approved the edited version of their responses? (It’s not clear if this is so.) If they have given such approval, does this mean they have watered down their spontaneous replies and are thus on their best public behaviour? (One or two seem to be so.)

On May 24 this year, a memorial service was held in the Great Hall of Parliament House. The great and the good were there in force. They were marking the death of Sir Arthur Tange, widely regarded as the last of the great public service mandarins who flourished from the 1940s to the 1970s. Although the usual partisan conflicts were temporarily suspended, an element of controversy intruded. In his eulogy, Malcolm Fraser lamented that changes to the public service meant that ministers today and tomorrow would not have the benefit of the frank, fearless, non-partisan ad-vice of the kind that he had received from Tange. The next eulogist, Alexander Downer, felt compelled to give an unscripted response, asserting that he and his ministerial colleagues did indeed receive advice of comparable quality and independence from their departmental secretaries. The third eulogist wisely stayed clear of the debate, although his views would have been highly relevant, for Dr Allan Hawke occupies the last position held by Tange, that of Secretary of the Department of Defence.

The issue that unexpectedly raised its head is the subject of this book. The ‘mandarins’ are those who used to have the title of ‘permanent heads’ of the departments of the Australian federal government, but whose status has been steadily whittled away since the 1970s. They are now ‘departmental secretaries’, and both Labor and coalition governments have taken considerable pains to ensure that, in both word and fact, they are seen to be subordinate to the ministers they serve. It is no accident that much of this process of downgrading the mandarins has coincided with the popularity of the television series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. The image of Sir Humphrey Appleby and his colleagues constantly circumventing Jim Hacker and his fellow ministers, lies close to the heart of many of the changes to the Australian Public Service in the 1980s and 1990s.

Susan Mitchell’s Tall Poppies first shared their stories with her in 1984. Seventeen years later, her subjects have grown even taller. Between them, Anne Summers, Eve Mahlab, Sallyanne Atkinson, Fabian Dattner, Maggie Tabberer, Pat O’Shane, and Robyn Archer head corporations, shape legislation, run million-dollar organisations and commandeer swathes of print space in the national dailies. And yet, according to Mitchell, younger women are hardly aware of their existence. ‘Who knows the real stories of these Warrior women and their lives?’ she asks. ‘Certainly not the young women in the country who have benefited from their struggles and their passion. Every woman who gets a bank loan or a credit card, who isn’t sacked when she becomes pregnant or who wants to be an engineer or a plumber or prime minister is indebted to them.’ Warming to her theme, Mitchell paints her younger sisters as being sadly devoid of a sense of either community or higher purpose. Reduced, apparently, by the greed-is-good 1980s into aspirationalist drones, thirty-something women are ‘always complaining about how tired they are ... And why do they work such long hours? So they can have a lifestyle like the ones in Cleo, Marie Claire and Vogue Living. All the right labels on their backs, the designer body, the designer home, the designer dinners, the designer partner.’

Reading Australian novels is often like gazing through an album of snapshots taken by various photographers attending the same party. The subject matter will depend on what stage of the evening the photos were taken – all the way from pre-dinner drinks to the finale of a Bacchanalian brawl – and it will depend, of course, on who is taking the photos. What is the photographer looking for? Who are the subjects that captivate?

Catherine Jinks and Georgia Blain live in the Blue Mountains and Sydney, respectively, and it is fascinating to observe their different attitudes to partygoing. Jinks is a versatile and robust writer who has written for children and the medieval murder mystery market, but her forte is the satiric novel. Her antecedents lie in Jane Austen and the Amises. Jinks’s previous excursions into this genre include An Evening with the Messiah (1996) and Little White Secrets (1997). With Bella Vista, I think she has reached her peak.

The picture book format is the workhorse of children’s literature. It is expected to entertain and enlighten audiences ranging from infants and toddlers to young adults. Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the quintessential picture book for very young readers, introduces some basic concepts through simple text and colourful collage. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Isobelle Carmody’s fantasy novel, Dreamwalker, published earlier this year with illustrations and design by graphic artist Steven Woolman, has sophisticated teen appeal.

Pat Flynn’s Alex Jackson: Grommet gets off to a confused start: no less than fifteen named characters in five pages, and a narrator determined to cram in as much background information as possible. Eventually the story starts to sort itself out. When it does, as the title itself indicates, we are in Lockie Leonard territory. The surfboard is a skateboard, Dad is a retired boxer instead of a policeman and, like Tim Winton’s eponymous hero, Alex is having trouble adjusting to his first year of high school and coping with his raging hormones:

Alex Jackson snuck a look at Becky Tonella for the 9th time since recess. She sat two rows in front, one aisle across – perfect perving position … When he turned around to have a geek … he got busted big-time by Mr Mackle.

A question of genocide

Dear Editor,

Defending Inga Clendinnen against my criticisms (ABR, July 2001), John Clendinnen attributes to her a controversial view about the nature of moral judgment. I don’t hold it and, if I were to judge solely by her practice, I would be surprised if she does. Be that as it may: I’ll try to put my points by keeping philosophical assumptions down as much as possible.

John Clendinnen says that I take Inga Clendinnen to task for her ‘general thesis that moral evaluation of any action will be best served by identifying, as fully possible, its relevant features’. I don’t recall commenting on such a ‘thesis’, even implicitly, but, if it comes down to the idea that whenever possible one should support one’s moral judgments by specifying as clearly as one can what it is about the action (person, policy etc.) that inclines one to make those judgments, then, of course, I agree with it.