J.M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores is a collection of twenty-nine primarily literary essays dating from 1986 to 1999. It offers an impressive range of subjects, including a reappraisal of T.S. Eliot’s famous quest for the definition of a classic, a tracking down of Daniel Defoe’s game of autobiographical impersonations, and a biographical evaluation of Dostoevsky’s most productive period, his so-called ‘miraculous years’ between 1865 and 1871, when he wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils. Rilke, Kafka, Musil, Skvorecky, Brodsky, Borges, Rushdie, Gordimer, and Lessing are some of the other writers whose life and work appear under Coetzee’s microscope. Biographical/literary correlations are always his keenest points of focus.

On first impressions, the pieces are well written, well argued, and contain a wealth of educated knowledge and insight. Many were originally published as reviews in the New York Review of Books. Even in those first conceived as lectures, essays, introductions, or afterwords, there is an abundance of review-style rather than essay-style pedantry and flourish. Accordingly, the index of the third volume of Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky ‘manages to get most of the page numbers wrong’ and the fourth volume, on which one of Coetzee’s essays is based, is said to have longueurs. While Doris Lessing, in her autobiography, ‘must be admired for broaching … unfashionable questions’, such as those arising from her long commitment to socialist ideals, her answers are judged to be inadequate: ‘she knew she was behaving badly [but] cannot get to the bottom of why she did what she did’. Discussing English renditions of Kafka’s prose, one of the most recent translators, Mark Harmann, ‘would do well to recognise that, if a striving for elegance … marks the Muir translation as of its time, then, in its very striving towards strangeness and denseness, his own work … may, as history moves on and tastes change, be pointed towards obsolescence too’.

Joseph Benedict Chifley enjoys a special place in the Australian pantheon – an icon of decencies almost extinct. Born in 1885, Chifley was raised in Bathurst, where he joined the NSW Railways in 1903. One of the youngest-ever first-class locomotive drivers at the age of twenty seven, Chifley was among those who struck for six weeks in 1917 against new management practices in the railways. They lost. He was demoted to fireman, and his union, the Federated Engine-drivers and Firemen’s Association of Australasia, deregistered. He was soon restored to engineman.

Chifley’s night study and reading equipped him as a labour movement activist: an advocate and witness for his union in industrial tribunals, an office-bearer and state delegate for the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen. In 1928, he won the seat of Macquarie for the Labor Party. As a minister (Defence) in the Scullin government, Chifley supported the Premiers’ Plan, a recipe for recovery from the Great Depression that was condemned by Jack Lang’s New South Wales Labor government. Langite working-class voters dumped Chifley in 1931.

I first encountered the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia long before I heard its name. Readers who  were at primary school in the late 1960s or early 1970s will know what I’m talking about — those illustrated booklets (a treasure trove for school projects) on Australian history, put out by the Bank of New South Wales, with pompous, triumphalist titles such as ‘Endeavour and Achievement’.

One image, in particular, haunted me: the explorer Edmund Kennedy, arms splayed like Jesus, torso stuck full of spears, while a demonic savage leers from the shadows of the surrounding jungle. Kennedy led a party of thirteen to explore Cape York in 1848. Ten died, including Kennedy himself; his ‘native assistant’ Jacky Jacky took the expedition’s papers and continued on until he reached the relief ship. The story was illustrated with Frank Mahony’s drawing of ‘The Death of Kennedy’ from the Picturesque Atlas. It is an overtly religious image — seventy years before Voss, the Explorer as Martyr. As Tony Hughes-d’Aeth describes it:

The dichotomy between civilised and ‘wild blacks’ is represented iconographically, with the noble Jacky Jacky on one side … and the sinister face of a ‘wild black’ sketched in the darkness of the forest on the other … The cruciform pose of the ‘spear-pierced’ Edmund Kennedy signifies the self-sacrificial actions of the ‘lionhearted explorer’.

When did Australia grow up? Australian historians have accepted, almost as an obligation of their trade, that they must declare the moment when the child reached mature adulthood. Was it, as Justice Murphy proclaimed in splendid isolation on the High Court bench, at the moment of the adoption of the Commonwealth Constitution in 1901? He was, admittedly, an amateur historian. Was it with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, when the Dominions were given the right to have their own defence and foreign policies? Or in 1942, when Prime Minister Curtin looked to the United States ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom’? Or with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951? Or is the safest thing to stick with the election of the Whitlam government in 1972?

Australia grows up many times and equally often reverts to childishness. At the wish of Australia, the Statute of Westminster is not to operate in Australia until Australia decides to have it – which it does not do until 1942. By the end of his prime ministership, Curtin is looking to create a stronger British Commonwealth and appoints the duke of Gloucester to Yarralumla – certainly a very childish appointment. The signing of the ANZUS treaty is shortly followed by the tour of the young Queen Elizabeth, who is greeted with rapture by her Australian subjects. And for all that Gough Whitlam gave us Al Grassby and ‘Advance Australia Fair’, he gave new life to the Queen under the title Queen of Australia – to the great benefit of latter-day monarchists. Of course, in modern republican eyes, Australia is still not properly grown up.

Stuart Ward throws out this baby and all the muddy water and urges us to think of Australia free of any traditional images of growing up and maturation. His history runs like this: Australians’ primary allegiance was to a British race patriotism and remained so until the British decided to apply for membership of the European Common Market (EEC) in 1961. Prior to this, all the conflicts with Britain, all the ‘turnings-away’– to America for defence and Japan for trade – all the ‘growings-up’ in different spheres had not disturbed the fundamental commitment of Australians to be British and to live within the worldwide community of British people. So, Australia did not grow into nationhood; it was pushed into it. Only after the shock of the British decision to join the EEC and abandon its trade preferences to Commonwealth countries does an exclusive Australian nationalism emerge.

These large claims surround a detailed account of the British decision to join the EEC and Australia’s response. Ward casts his net widely. We follow the internal deliberations not only of the British and Australian governments but of the French, who were suspicious of the British move, and of the Americans, who were warmly supportive. It is interesting to learn the French views of the Commonwealth. It is fascinating to watch British policymakers deliberate on how best to screw the Commonwealth countries without their screaming too loudly. The central player in Britain is Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. His diaries and personal letters allow Ward to show him in all his guises – hard-headed in his own circle; a supporter of the new Commonwealth for the Canadians; sentimental about the old Commonwealth before the ‘blacks and yellows’ joined it when he is buttering up Menzies.

The deliberations within the Australian government and community are used by Ward for his wider purposes. It takes the Australians some time before they realise what is happening. They are used to conflict with Britain, which they expect to be resolved by goodwill, the British gift for compromise and the commitment to the wider British loyalty. That Britain’s interests are opposed to Australia’s, and that Britain is willing to pursue them at the expense of Australia’s, are the realisations that rock the foundations like nothing else before. The Fall of Singapore was a blip compared to this.

The first man to step forward in defence of Australia was John McEwen, ‘Black Jack’, the Minister for Trade, leader of the Country Party and deputy prime minister. He was tough, relentless, well-informed. They were his people – the growers of fruit, the keepers of cows – whose livelihood would be imperilled unless Britain fought for some concessions from the Europeans and the Europeans were brought to agree. McEwen travelled to London and Washington and made an impression but brought home no reassurance.

Then it was Menzies. He emerges in Ward’s account as a massive, tragic figure. He had to worry about the economic consequences for his country of Britain in Europe, but his chief concern was that Britain would be swallowed up in a European federation and unable to lead the British people around the globe. He, more than any other individual, had the power to stop the British move. He was the elder statesman of the Commonwealth with immense prestige in Britain. Macmillan’s nightmare was that Menzies would appeal over his head to the British people. Then his worried backbench would have a champion and the European project would unravel.

Menzies had the power – but he could not use it. How could he? He wanted a Commonwealth whose prime ministers, as of old, sat around a table and resolved their differences, not a Commonwealth where one government campaigned against another. He carried with him the External Affairs brief that warned of the dangers of Australia making itself objectionable to the governments of Britain and the USA, whose help might soon have to be called on against Indonesia. He might have gone into battle for the old Crown Commonwealth, but not for a Commonwealth of Nehru and Nkrumah and ‘a nest of republics’.

Much thought had been given over the years to how Britain and Australia might separate. Even in colonial times, it was clear that Britain would not fight to keep the Australian colonies; if they wanted to leave, they would leave peacefully. The end of the relationship, with Britain’s defeat in war, had been clearly envisaged, and Australians twice went to Europe to fight for her. But no one had thought that the Empire would end by Britain abandoning it – and requiring Australia’s consent to do so. And the consent was finally given by the prime minister who was British to the bootstraps.

Ward’s book was originally a thesis. It has the virtue of proclaiming a thesis – an argument about historical process, not a ‘reading’ of texts. It is still too much the thesis in its repetition and summaries and in the need to quarrel with everyone else who has written on this topic. It has the due caution of a thesis when it comes to deal with the emergence of the new, more exclusive nationalism of the 1960s and beyond. Of course, Ward concedes, Britain’s move into Europe did not cause this in any direct, simple way. But, if there was an Australian national tradition ready to be drawn on, then we might have to return to the image of a child growing up and becoming more confident. I don’t think maturation can be left out of the story, but the book remains a stunning and challenging contribution to the core question of Australian historiography.

Most of us are familiar with an image of David Unaipon, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, gazing steadily beyond the spatial dimensions of our $50 note. He wears a tie, and the collar of his shirt is evenly turned. Over his right shoulder is the little church at Raukkan; floating over his left are three of his inventions, including the shearing handpiece that no one would lend him the money to patent. And there is his signature, underneath the words: ‘As a full-blooded member of my race I think I may claim to be the first – but I hope, not the last – to produce an enduring record of our customs, beliefs and imaginings.’

This statement, written in 1924 or 1925, when Unaipon was in his early fifties, appears in the preface of Unaipon’s Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. The Tales have already sold widely since 1930, in many editions, in Australia and overseas. However, the latest, very handsome and sensitively edited Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines is the first to appear under the name of David Unaipon, rather than that of William Ramsay Smith (Sir), anthropologist and Chief Medical Officer of South Australia (who died in 1937).

Last year, escaping the Olympics in Europe, I was amazed at the media coverage overseas, which always included Australian Indigenous motifs, art, dance and music. It seemed that, beyond Australia, its Indigenous people have a prominence and clout never realised at home. I hope that, in addition to the earnest German and Japanese backpackers who might use it, many Australians will read and employ this bargain of a book to discover some of the cultural wealth it encompasses.

From its opening – the splendid AIATSIS map of Aboriginal Australia – the book trumpets the diversity and splendour of Indigenous Australia. The first third is by far the best part, almost exclusively written by Indigenous writers, giving general information on some quite difficult and sensitive issues. Philip Morrissey’s ‘Literature’ survey is particularly fine, and his contributions on ‘History’ throughout the book are models of summation and power. There are many other illuminating contributions in this section, and throughout the book in boxed sections.

In common with the entire book, though, there is a lack of overview of the ongoing effects of dispossession, and less emphasis on community-controlled organisations than there might be. The rollcall of activists does include Mansell, but where is Yunupingu Galarrwuy in this context, let alone Dixon, McGuinness, Foley, Watson and many more? The even more grassroots role of many Indigenous matriarchs could have received more attention too.

The book’s individual state guides are even more divorced from the grassroots. The authors are mainly non-Indigenous and, in places, seem to have garnered less information from Indigenous organisations and more from regional tourism authorities. While one of the remarkable things about Indigenous Australia is its diversity, emphasised by many writers, the Lonely Planet format flattens that diversity. Every place sounds very similar when reduced to guidebook format: nearly every destination mentioned has a local tour, an art gallery, a walking trail and so on. Cultural differences are homogenised, and local social centres and meeting places, as well as Indigenous people, seem strangely absent.

In spite of the occasional reference to ‘dry’ communities, the harsh realities of Indigenous life in Australia are given little coverage. Astute visitors will find out soon enough. Years ago, a visiting South African dance troupe was scrupulous in not making public comments about local politics. One member could not resist, on visiting Alice Springs, saying, ‘They call this a tourist attraction!’ Things have not changed much since then.

It is a very delicate matter to balance a justified triumphalism (‘We have survived’) against a realistic view of the problems still to be faced. Certainly the book’s colour sections are splendid: on visual arts, bush medicine and tucker, weaving, Kakadu, Uluru and Kata Tjuta, dance and ceremony, and sport. Against these positive and vibrant sections, a little more that reflects the perspective of Anna Haebich’s monumental Broken Circles, with its detailed accounts of real lived lives, wouldn’t hurt.

Differences of opinion or conflicts between Indigenous individuals and groups are also glossed over. Some might be unprintable but, if the guide is to be truly helpful, it should give a more realistic picture of differences at all levels. Diversity is more than a lot of subheadings in a book. The section ‘Our Indigenous Gay and Sistergirl Scene’ is another recognition of this diversity, though some of the pain is missing from the positive spin in this account.

On the level of epochs rather than lifespans, the debates about how long Aboriginal people have been here do not deserve too much space. The academic jury is still out, and many Aboriginal people seem not to give much credence to any of the theories. They’ve been right before.

But the book is a guidebook, not an encyclopaedia, and to expect it to reflect the complexity of Australian Indigenous societies is a bit unfair.

On a purely practical level, there is little to differentiate humdrum small-town attractions from significant places such as Mungo or Mutawinji. While mass tourism to such places is perhaps best not encouraged, a guidebook should prioritise more than this one does. Similarly, though the guide does not deal with travel, accommodation or eating places, which are covered in other Lonely Planet guides to Australia, a few suggested routes could be included for the tourist who wants to focus on Indigenous Australia.

The representation of Western Australia seems too limited. Perhaps fewer tourists go to there, but its Indigenous significance and heritage was sold short. The project might have run out of money, energy or space by then, but this should be rectified in subsequent editions.

And this is the first edition. Like all Lonely Planet guidebooks, there will be many additions and corrections in later editions. Any reader with local knowledge will find errors. These are inevitable in a ground-breaking book such as this, through haste, misinformation or the many hazards that beset a book of this scope. Readers should point out errors to the publishers.

The book opens thus: ‘This is the first edition of a book that started as a bright idea back in 1998. The plans were ambitious, and despite being told we were crazy by everyone we asked for advice, we went ahead’. I must admit to being thanked in the Acknowledgments for contributing just that advice. It is a miracle and tribute to the energy of many people at Lonely Planet that the book appeared at all.

By the time I arrived in Canberra in the late 1970s, Mungo MacCallum was already a legend in his own lunchtime, which, as he admits in this latest book, ‘frequently dragged on towards sunset’. He was famed for introducing a new style of political journalism into Australia: irreverent, opinionated, witty, at times scurrilous. He was impatient of cant, and punctured pomposity. These qualities are all apparent in Mungo: The Man Who Laughs. It is avowedly neither autobiography nor history. It is an odd hybrid, divided distinctly into two parts: a set of autobiographical sketches devoted to his early life, laced with politics and laughter; and a personalised chronicle of the age of Gough Whitlam.

Sneer tactics

Dear Editor,

Perhaps you will allow me to reveal that this is the second letter I have written to ABR in response to Richard King’s review in the November 2001 issue under the heading ‘One Long Giving Away’. The first letter was rejected because it was too long, because it quoted two short poems from the poets under attack, because of references to an earlier article I had written, and because of a comment about the review’s tone.

The first letter was long because I believe that the only way to deal adequately with a review which depends for its effect on sneers and sweeping generalisations is to refute the attacks point by point. I don’t have space to do that here, so let me just point out the tactics King uses: tactics which indicate that the reviewer is either incompetent, ill-intentioned or both.

One of the major techniques King employs is the sneer: the books come recommended if only by the blurbs on their own back covers; these blurbs border on the hysterical; when Bruce Dawe writes that Kirkby’s (poetic) mechanisms ‘are merely hidden’, King sneers, Hidden, that is, to all but Bruce Dawe. And that’s just in the first paragraph. The tone he establishes there pervades the whole review.

Next, King sets up his Aunt Sally: all these poems, he claims, embody the belief that ‘some content is so important as to require no technique at all’. Now, many of us are concerned about the contemporary tendency to chop up what is fairly flaccid prose into equally flaccid lines of poetry. King seeks to damn all six of these poets by associating them with that tendency, and he does it by quoting lines out of context, by making claims about the poetry that are not supported by the poetry he quotes, by making sweeping generalisations for which he advances no evidence at all, by making no attempt to provide a context for the poetry. And, of course, by the sneers that spike his review.

I do not claim that every one of the poems in all six books is perfect, but they do represent a very considerable achievement by poets whose work will be remembered long after King’s sneers are forgotten. To claim, as King does, that there is no good poetry to be found in any of them, to claim, as he does, that ‘this isn’t poetry’ (his emphasis), does not indicate either fairness or good will.

I do not claim to know what King’s motives were in writing this review. I do know, however, that if readers of ABR were to take him seriously, if they did not recognise the stratagems he has employed, then the effect of this review would be to seriously damage the reputations of these six new poets. I ask you then whether you believe this to be a fair review, the kind you want for ABR?

Ron Pretty, Five Islands Press, Wollongong, NSW

The first version of this letter ran to almost 2000 words, much longer than the review he criticises, and far too long for these pages. As mentioned above, ABR welcomes ‘concise’ as well as ‘pertinent’ letters. Richard King will continue to review for ABR in 2002. Ed.

Unhappy Anniversary

Dear Editor,

It has taken me close to a year to respond to John Mateer’s review of my collection of poetry The Actor Is Happy. When one receives an opinion as negative and dismissive as his (ABR, August 2000), it is probably best to keep quiet.

Mr Mateer feels that my work ‘should not be associated with actual poetry’ and, with no specific reference to any-thing positive or negative in my collection, takes one short, sharp paragraph to write it all off as an adolescent might when forced to read Jane Austen in Year 9. I am happy with criticism, but it needs to be considered and substantiated.

I would like Mr Mateer to know that more people have probably read my book than his review. I do not think he has any given right to define for us what poetry is and who or what it should be associated with. This is literary despotism. Not everybody reads poetry swinging pompously from an intellectual perch.

I am, one year after the review, content that someone like Mr Mateer does not wish to associate with my concerns or issues, since, quite frankly, I do not wish to be associated with his. For many people, his review was as trivial as he claims my poetry to be.

George Huitker, Curtn, ACT

Lauris Elms responds to Alastair Jackson

Dear Editor,

Dr Alastair Jackson’s résumé of my autobiography (ABR, September 2001) contains some factual errors, and I write to correct these mistakes. John Shaw did not sing with the Sutherland–Williamson Opera Company in 1965. He was in London at that time. I did not sing Julius Caesar with the national company, but with Young Opera, a company founded by the very young Richard Divall and Brian Donavon in the early 1970s. Subsequently, Richard went to Melbourne to take over the emerging Victorian Opera Company. This name was correct in 1973, but the company suffered many changes of name and management over the years. Gertrude Johnson’s National Theatre Opera Company was the great forerunner of several attempts to build a Melbourne-based opera company. I later sang Julius Caesar with VOC under Richard Divall, and also with the State Opera of South Australia, with Denis Vaughan conducting. It could be inferred that I sang both Orfeo of Glück, and Mrs Sedley in Britten’s Peter Grimes, with the National Company, but this is not the case.

The Singing Elms was written to contribute a personal history of opera and singing in the years between 1950 and 1990.

Lauris Elms, Newington, NSW

Dear Editor,
Reading the Chopper

The most incisive work by far
On Chopper Read, in ABR, 
Is published there as bold as brass;
Ironic, cogent, lots of class,
By Simon C, whose Safe Retreat
Perhaps will shield him from the Heat.
For now that Chopper’s back in town,
Will Caterson have gone to ground?

But then again – the prospect pales!
Perhaps he’s puffing Brandon’s sales?

Paul Lindsey, Seville, Vic.

Welcome to our final issue for 2001! Our summer issue – arrestingly illustrated on the cover – is a double one, and longer than previous ones this year. Funds permitting, we hope to be able to publish more eighty-page issues in 2002, especially in the second half of the year, when so many Australian books, both general and scholarly, are published. This expansion allows us to add new features: ‘Best Books of the Year’ column (children’s as well as adult books); short fiction; and a ‘Summer Reading’ column, containing brief reviews of worthy titles for which we haven’t been able to find the wonted page or two. Columns such as ‘Best Books of the Year’, in which various critics nominate two favourite books of the year and one ‘surprise’, are certainly not intended to be the last word on the subject. Such columns are inevitably subjective. But it is interesting to hear from some of our regular critics and contributors about their assessment of quality publications here and overseas. If it points some readers to fine books they may have overlooked, I think it is worthwhile.

The public legacy of the art patrons John and Sunday Reed endures in various ways. Their influence is a strand in the story of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ literary hoax. They played a major role in the emergence in the 1940s of an important circle of Melbourne modernist painters, including Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Arthur Boyd. Against the forces of conservatism and resistance, John Reed, in particular, was a public advocate in Australia for contemporary art from the 1940s until the end of his life. Janine Burke and the curator Deborah Hart have reminded us that the friendship and hospitality of the Reeds at Heide helped give expression to the untamed talent of the young Joy Hester. In 1979, John Reed remembered Hester at twenty: ‘a funny little synthetic blonde hoyden with very naïve ideas about the world.’ But, he added, she ‘was a rare and lovely person, one of our most beautiful artists and a natural poet’. Hester’s story, important in its own right, is inextricably a part of the larger story of John and Sunday Reed.

Don Anderson

Donald Home’s Looking for Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years (Viking) gives us an octogenarian social commentator in youthful form. Unlike our leaders, Home translates difficult ideas into something with connections to human lives. John Forbes’s Collected Poems (Brandl & Schlesinger) is an invaluable collection of work by a major poet – Sydney’s finest since Slessor. Southerly (edited by David Brooks and Noel Rowe) is a senior citizen reborn. Decades ago, an eminent Catholic historian described Southerly as ‘the undertakers’ journal’. It is now firmly in the land of the living, and balances scholarly essays, matters of record, and imaginative literature.

It is too heavy to read in bed or on an aeroplane, too handsome to besmirch at the beach, would court disaster if tackled at the kitchen table, and there’s no room on my always-littered desk. It’s the sort of book that, in its size and splendour, is aimed at the coffee table. Yet volumes like this seem more at home on television, their contents rendered into documentaries introduced by David Attenborough.

New Year’s Day 2002 marks the centenary of Warwick Windridge Armstrong’s Test cricket début for Australia. At the age of twenty-two, the promising all-rounder carried his bat in both innings on the Melbourne Cricket Ground against Archie MacLaren’s English side. Almost twenty years later, a much heavier and more famous Armstrong, then aged forty-one and nicknamed ‘The Big Ship’ because of his size, captained Australia for the tenth time in his fiftieth and last Test match, played at The Oval in London.

ART

Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A guide to the rebirth of an ancient culture by Susan McCulloch

Allen & Unwin, $39.95 pb, 248 pp

Contemporary Aboriginal Art (first published in 1999) contains a wealth of information for those interested in the history, practice, and culture of Aboriginal art. By its very nature, Aboriginal art is constantly changing and evolving, and, in this revised edition, Susan McCulloch details new developments in already well-established communities, and the emergence of some entirely new movements. McCulloch, visual arts writer for The Australian, has travelled extensively to the Kimberley, Central Australia, Arnhem Land and Far North Queensland, and her book provides first-hand accounts of Aboriginal artists and the works they are creating.

Beautifully illustrated, Contemporary Aboriginal Art also contains a comprehensive directory of art centres and galleries, a buyer’s guide, and a listing of recommended readings.

What do we do with literary magazines? How do we read these more or less accidental collections of literary fragments? How can we say that they matter? It would be nice if we could hold on to the heroic model of the modernist little magazine always ‘making it new’, forging a space for the advance guard, with what Nettie Palmer once called a ‘formidable absence of any business aims’. But, in the age of state subsidy and university support, and with large publishing houses intervening in the magazine market place, this would be sheer nostalgia – though in a form that might still motivate new magazine projects.

Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg’s potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from that hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his reality, is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn’t exist.

This handsome set of volumes – this ‘library’, it might almost be said – is one of the finest large publishing projects undertaken in Australia over recent years. Dedicated to ‘those who have served in the defence of Australia, 1901–2001’, it is brought triumphantly to a conclusion by the recent issue of its Volume VII, An Atlas of Australia’s Wars. This climactic volume, lying open on your desk, spreads eighty centimetres wide and is a splendidly presented treasury of geographical and logistical information. Now we can make better sense of, for example, the plethora of existing individual unit histories. Many of these (despite their wealth of fine detail and personal information) have baffled our broader understanding. Now we have, set out before us, the land (or the sea, or the airspace) where the fighting took place, and can appreciate reality in a new dimension.

‘Dick Downing had a keen sense of what would make Australia a better country – for a strongly welfare minded economist – the knack of being in the right place at the right time.’  Thus Nicholas Brown, in his subtle and intelligent account of one of the shapers of Australia in the twentieth century.

What would Samuel Johnson have made of sports writing? Not much, I suspect. He believed literature should strike bold notes of moral activism, of ‘Truth’ with a capital T, be an edifier, not merely entertainment. That’s asking a lot of sports writing. Or it may just be asking a lot of Australian sports writing. I mention Johnson only because I happened to be reading his Lives of the English Poets before I began this lump of a book. I know it’s quite an imaginative leap from Johnson’s book to a sports writing anthology, but they are both, in their own way, catalogues of dead and forgotten people and their forgotten deeds. Whoever remembers John Pomfret or Thomas Sprat, seventeenth-century stanza-makers once thought worthy of Dr Johnson’s attention? Who remembers Clarrie Grimmett or Bob Tidyman, sportsmen of eras past, once thought worthy of the Australian media’s attention? Not even Johnson, writing at his verbally ornate best, could make an enthusiastic poetaster like me to want to bother with the Pomfrets and Prats. As for the Grimmetts and Tidymans – I’m a sportstaster with a quick thumb for flicking tiresome pages.

This publication (BAL) represents the first section of a general bibliography, which the general editors describe as one of the major projects of the Bibliography of Australia Project (BALP) of the National Key Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. It includes, as a lengthy appendix, Kerry White’s bibliography of Australian Children’s Books 1989–2000 A–E.

The question remains – where is St John the Baptist’s head? David Dale and Glenn A. Baker are both formidable travellers and reliable chroniclers. Both claim to have been in close proximity to the detached cranium of this biblical hero, but in different countries: Dale in the north of France, Baker in Damascus.

Both of these travel books (Jan Morris, who endorses Baker’s book in glowing terms, once bridled when I described her as a ‘travel writer’) are collections of previously published pieces, although Baker has tossed in a couple of fresh essays. Dale’s ‘The Perfect Journey’ gets an extra tick from this reviewer, since it has an index. A rough calculation indicated that Dale’s book came in at around 74,000 words, and Baker’s at 78,000. I mention this because On the Road to Damascus is a more generously formatted book with double-spaced lines, a boon to ageing eyes or to those who read the Daily Telegraph with their lips moving. The latter would find themselves mumbling some very fine prose and engaging quotes.

(i)

What remains barely the weather report: sentencing labours of history

against all beginnings, the maples

leafless, the houses barely porous.

(ii)

I ride roads I am not familiar with,

a figure of speech, chrome strips

between windows. To the south,

burial mounds. Resolution

deep and simpatico. Northwards:

 the lake effect, the snow plough.

(iii)

Deer go down to bow and gun,

roadkill is a ‘cull’: beauty

in the eye of rhetoric

keeps the engine

ticking over.

(iv)

Cornstalks like rotted Ceres’

thin black teeth. To end with this.

A season of political arrangements,

remnant snow quarried

like that pitiless ocean.

(v)

The driver must resist

all beauty, the smell

of an unfamiliar passenger.

A door rattles, the car

is almost new.

It is shut properly. Speed limit.

Farm machinery. A (solitary)

white field enclosed

by thawed pages.

(vi)

Maples, oak ... all kinds.

A tornado ripped through here

 three months ago and didn’t

touch the houses either side.

Birds warble in the engine

cavity. A cord of wood

stretches out below

the kitchen window.

He says we listen

differently.

I fear for Fred’s life. It has been three days since the bite and still he has not moved. I am saving the crusts from the huge pasties Dr. Darnell’s housekeeper brings me each day, but he just lies – eyes unseeing. He has not eaten or drunk.

Blessed are the compilers of dictionaries, writers of reference books and encyclopedia entries – how would we access knowledge without them? But if they work in the Australian university system, they are not blessed by the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which awards no research points whatsoever for such activities. Lindy Abraham’s esoteric-sounding dictionary of alchemical imagery is a fine example of the kind of scholarly labour that doesn’t fit well with bean-counting bureaucrats’ notions of ‘productive’ research. With her assistance, we gain access to a world-view that had its roots in Hellenistic Egypt in 300 BC but, during the Renaissance, re-emerged as a powerful intellectual force: a precursor to modern science, as well as a systematic form of philosophy.

This is a book about pain. In December 1999, Arthur Reilly was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. The methods of relief offered to him, principally morphine, had drastic side-effects which undermined what pleasure he might have found in living. For four months, he lost weight and showed little interest in his usual activities. He became depressed and contemplated suicide.

Nikki Gemmell’s third novel, Love Song, set in both Australia and England, is a striking and memorable work. The style is sharp, jagged even, but so energetic that it sucked me in. I had to read it twice to know more than the fact that I had thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a story written to an unborn child by a mother who seems, at first, both old and young, something which proves to be the case. She is Lillie, a girl who has survived the eccentric, cult-like community that incarcerated her, and who has survived the loss of her lover, the child’s father. She has survived a short life dogged by false accusation. She is also a young woman who, at the point of writing that old person’s document, her memoirs, is scarcely into her adulthood and is still inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her voice is fresh, young and oddly wise.

On the front cover of Wendy Orr’s new novel, we are advised: ‘This [book] is a treat for fans of Tyler, Wesley and Trollope.’ Apart from any predisposed posed feelings you may have for the work of Anne Tyler, Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope, this small sentence is a useful positioning statement for the potential reader.

We are in the realm of books as a treat, where reading is an indulgent pleasure and readers are devotees of books that are commonly identified as ‘domestic fiction’. From what I can gather, the hallmarks of domestic fiction are stories, primarily written by women, with a focus on relationships and families, in a ‘highly readable’ style that features ‘acute and perceptive observations’, ‘warmth’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘humour’; in short, the literary equivalent of SeaChange.

In Australia, despite having Indonesian as one of the languages commonly available to students in primary and secondary school, and despite having departments of Indonesian Studies in all the major universities, the literature of the world’s third most populous country and ‘our closest neighbour’ is not well known. It is mostly the province of academic specialists, not general readers. The reason for this is partly cultural in that Australian readers, particularly readers of poetry, tend to be more interested in American, European or British poetry, and partly a consequence of the poor support given to the art of translation. Yet two of the best-regarded translators of Indonesian literature, Harry Aveling and Max Lane, reside in Australia.

Clare Bradford is an Associate Professor in Literary and Communication Studies at Deakin University. She writes from within her discipline, and addresses other academics. Reading Race, despite its broad title, is principally a discussion of forms of racism that the author identifies in books published in colonial times, compared with contemporary examples.

Bradford’s thesis is that the sins of the past are still echoed in the present and are likely to be so in the future. She begins with a lengthy discussion of eight pre-1900 texts in which she establishes her criteria for forms of racism, which range through ‘colonial’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘Aboriginalist’, ‘ecofeminist’ and several others. These criteria become the basis for analysing a number of later publications. The first chapter, ‘Colonial Discourse’, includes an informative discussion of pre-1960 non-fiction texts, notably the South Austral-ian, New South Wales and Victorian School Readers, whose colonialist racism she sees as a pervasive influence in the education of John Howard’s generation. There are five pages on Mary Grant Bruce’s ‘Billabong’ books, three pages on Rex Ingamells’s Aranda Boy (which she dismisses as ‘romanticist’ and ‘Aboriginalist’) and a good analysis of Jeannie Gunn’s influential A Little Black Princess, but the ‘bush westerns’ that succeeded the pre-Federation adventure tales are ignored, as are such widely read titles as Frank Dalby Davison’s Children of the Dark People and Axel Poignant’s Piccaninny Walkabout.

Australians have always played their sports hard. We who would have given a soft part of our anatomy to have worn the baggy green for Australia love a winner or a victorious team. Our sporting aristocracy has often been characterised by a gimlet-eyed, thin-lipped determination and ruthlessness: Don Bradman is the apotheosis of these champions.

Yet we reserve a special place in our pantheon of sporting heroes for men and women who play stylishly and, more importantly, graciously. These are the ones who transcend their sports and thus raise sporting achievement to a transcendental level, a glimpse of grace and humanity in action. We prize, for these qualities, Betty Cuthbert, Ron Clarke, Cathy Freeman, John Landy, Ian Thorpe and Pat Rafter. They seem somehow to represent the best in us, and to be our best representation of ourselves to the world. John Eales is one of these.

There is something irresistible about trying to trace a connection between notorious lover and memoirist Casanova and notorious lover and poet Lord Byron in Venice – the seductive city where both men worked their way through galleries of women. Casanova estimated that he had had more than one hundred and thirty in 1798, the year of his death, although that was his lifetime’s count, not just the Venetian episodes. Byron, on the other hand, reckoned that he had got through more than two hundred in Venice alone – and in less than two years – before he stopped counting. Between their frenzied trysts was a tantalisingly small gap of thirty-odd years: Casanova was sent into his final exile from Venice in 1782, before Byron was born; Byron arrived in 1816. People who had known the Italian must have met the Englishman.

Mardi McConnochie’s first novel is a strange strain of literary adaptation. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys manufactured a life for Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, Bertha Rochester. McConnochie goes one step further and hijacks the Brontë sisters themselves, transplanting them from their Yorkshire home to an island called Coldwater somewhere off the colony of NSW. There the sisters are literally and metaphorically imprisoned; Coldwater is a penal settlement and their father is the prison warder. Desperate to escape their probable futures as ‘bush wife, town wife or military wife’, the sisters decide they fancy their chances as authors. Coldwater facilitates this ambition by providing a backdrop where fact and fantasy can be unhappily wedded. The idea is that the collusion of isolation, violence and romance will offer these quasi-Brontës the requisite inspiration for future books. Hence a new prisoner, Finn O’Connell, ‘feral, untamed, unbowed, yet somehow noble’, becomes the prototype for Heathcliff and the desolate, inhospitable island is reconstituted as the whispering Yorkshire moors.