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Absolutely Revolting

October 2000, no. 225

Welcome to the October 2000 issue of Australian Book Review. 

Thuy On reviews The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham and Black Hearts by Arlene J. Chai
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Set in the 1950s in a tiny Australian country town called Dungatar, Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker explores the rippling effects of chaos when a woman returns home after twenty years of exile in Europe. Tilly Dunnage was expelled from Australia in a fog of hate and recrimination; her neighbours have never forgiven her for an act Tilly thought was predicated upon self-preservation, but others chose to see as manslaughter. Returning to look after her senile mother, Tilly sits in a ramshackle house atop a hill while the town people below bitch and snipe at her with rancorous glee. This is a story about loose lips and herd mentality bullying in a town where everybody knows your past. The dressmaking title refers to Tilly’s fabulous seamstress skills (she learnt the trade overseas). But even her ability to transform the frumpiest shapes into figures of grace does not mellow the unforgiving hearts of her neighbours.
Book 1 Title: The Dressmaker
Book Author: Rosalie Ham
Book 1 Biblio: Duffy & Snellgrove, $18.95 pb, 296 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WB9e3
Book 2 Title: Black Hearts
Book 2 Author: Arlene J. Chai
Book 2 Biblio: Random House, $18.60 pb, 400 pp
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Set in the 1950s in a tiny Australian country town called Dungatar, Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker explores the rippling effects of chaos when a woman returns home after twenty years of exile in Europe. Tilly Dunnage was expelled from Australia in a fog of hate and recrimination; her neighbours have never forgiven her for an act Tilly thought was predicated upon self-preservation, but others chose to see as manslaughter. Returning to look after her senile mother, Tilly sits in a ramshackle house atop a hill while the town people below bitch and snipe at her with rancorous glee. This is a story about loose lips and herd mentality bullying in a town where everybody knows your past. The dressmaking title refers to Tilly’s fabulous seamstress skills (she learnt the trade overseas). But even her ability to transform the frumpiest shapes into figures of grace does not mellow the unforgiving hearts of her neighbours.

Read more: Thuy On reviews 'The Dressmaker' by Rosalie Ham and 'Black Hearts' by Arlene J. Chai

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Martin Harrison reviews Blackout by John Tranter
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Blackout is a poem written (deliberately, I think) in transition – or even perhaps in transit. Structured such that it lacks a singular, personal voice, it could be read as a response to the question: What is a poem in the era of digital media? Or more particularly, more precisely –Where does such a poem start? What’s its language, how does it end? Blackout, for example, is left unfinished: after the ninth section it just breaks off with a colophon indicating that there could be more words one day, or perhaps not. It’s left unfinished too in the sense of being a work which never resolves into a coherent narrative or even a coherent thought-structure. The polyphony of the text is left jagged and juxtapositional, much in the manner of block music. Or more likely in the manner of a downloaded text where many voices have criss-crossed in a many-timed, interactive way.
Book 1 Title: Blackout
Book Author: John Tranter
Book 1 Biblio: Vagabond Press, $16.50 pb, 21pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Blackout is a poem written (deliberately, I think) in transition – or even perhaps in transit. Structured such that it lacks a singular, personal voice, it could be read as a response to the question: What is a poem in the era of digital media? Or more particularly, more precisely –Where does such a poem start? What’s its language, how does it end? Blackout, for example, is left unfinished: after the ninth section it just breaks off with a colophon indicating that there could be more words one day, or perhaps not. It’s left unfinished too in the sense of being a work which never resolves into a coherent narrative or even a coherent thought-structure. The polyphony of the text is left jagged and juxtapositional, much in the manner of block music. Or more likely in the manner of a downloaded text where many voices have criss-crossed in a many-timed, interactive way.

Read more: Martin Harrison reviews 'Blackout' by John Tranter

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Contents Category: Editorial
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Cosy was the word Cassandra Pybus preferred when asked if Australian reviewing is too bland – the topic of this month’s symposium. Something intimate and specially friendly. In identifying the cosiness of some Australian reviewing, Pybus makes a telling point, if droll, certainly not excluding ABR from the offenders. I have to say that among the other responses were some that were bland, in a way that made me feel I have proved my point.
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Cosy was the word Cassandra Pybus preferred when asked if Australian reviewing is too bland – the topic of this month’s symposium. Something intimate and specially friendly. In identifying the cosiness of some Australian reviewing, Pybus makes a telling point, if droll, certainly not excluding ABR from the offenders. I have to say that among the other responses were some that were bland, in a way that made me feel I have proved my point.

Read more: 'Editorial' by Helen Daniel

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough
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I recently took part in a forum on contemporary Australian fiction, a discussion during which the publisher on the panel talked about popular and/or ‘middlebrow’ fiction, and about her ire with reviewers who either simply trashed such novels, or else insisted on emphasising their status as ‘popular fiction’, and on discussing them within the context of its generic expectations and limitations.
Book 1 Title: Morgan’s Run
Book Author: Colleen McCullough
Book 1 Biblio: Century, $43.85 hb, 608 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/YggVrm
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I recently took part in a forum on contemporary Australian fiction, a discussion during which the publisher on the panel talked about popular and/or ‘middlebrow’ fiction, and about her ire with reviewers who either simply trashed such novels, or else insisted on emphasising their status as ‘popular fiction’, and on discussing them within the context of its generic expectations and limitations.

The weakness in this latter point is the fact that if judged by the same criteria and standards as ‘high culture’ literary fiction, most popular or middlebrow fiction would suffer cruelly, if only for its lack of originality. The reviews that don’t take generic differences into account are precisely the ones that give populist writers the hardest time. The work of a populist writer, especially if it works within well-defined genres – the historical novel, the detective novel, the saga, the romance, the western, or whatever – deserves to be analysed in its class, by its own rules and standards.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Morgan’s Run' by Colleen McCullough

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Laurie Clancy reviews Henry Handel Richardson: The letters edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele
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The status of Henry Handel Richardson as a writer in Australia has always been somewhat problematic. Some people put that down to the fact that she was an expatriate. Leaving Australia at the age of eighteen, she returned only once, very briefly, in 1912. Expatriates, however, have often been paranoid about their reputation in this country and inclined to imagine that the Australian public is punishing them for leaving whereas in most cases it is indifferent to or even ignorant of that fact.
Book 1 Title: Henry Handel Richardson
Book 1 Subtitle: The letters
Book Author: Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $88 hb, 660 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/9WWVb0
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The status of Henry Handel Richardson as a writer in Australia has always been somewhat problematic. Some people put that down to the fact that she was an expatriate. Leaving Australia at the age of eighteen, she returned only once, very briefly, in 1912. Expatriates, however, have often been paranoid about their reputation in this country and inclined to imagine that the Australian public is punishing them for leaving whereas in most cases it is indifferent to or even ignorant of that fact.

The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Richardson wrote in a stubbornly naturalistic style during a period when modernism was all the rage. A professor of English in Australia once told me that he admired Richardson far less after discovering that her work was much more recent than he had thought, a statement I found extremely puzzling.

Read more: Laurie Clancy reviews 'Henry Handel Richardson: The letters' edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele

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Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews Compulsive Viewing by Gerald Stone
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If Gerald Stone had gone to a publisher with a proposal for a book about Channel Seven or Channel Ten, it is doubtful whether it would ever have seen the light of day. But Stone – who would have endured more than a few pitches in his time as a television executive – had the sense to propose a book about his former employer, Channel Nine, and Compulsive Viewing is the result.
Book 1 Title: Compulsive Viewing
Book Author: Gerald Stone
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $43.80 hb, 536 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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If Gerald Stone had gone to a publisher with a proposal for a book about Channel Seven or Channel Ten, it is doubtful whether it would ever have seen the light of day. But Stone – who would have endured more than a few pitches in his time as a television executive – had the sense to propose a book about his former employer, Channel Nine, and Compulsive Viewing is the result.

The Nine Network is arguable of more interest to the average Australian than any other commercial television station. TCN-9 was the first station to go to air in Australia; TCN-9 in Sydney and, later, GTV-9 in Melbourne have been presided over by three generations of the legendary Packer family; and, as Stone notes, the network increasingly sees itself as the national broadcaster, now programming federal election debates and election night results without commercials.

Read more: Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'Compulsive Viewing' by Gerald Stone

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Philippa Hawker reviews The Horror Reader edited by Ken Gelder
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Horror. It’s a word you are forced to utter emphatically, almost to expel. On the page, it seems to contain a form of typographical echo – it looks as if it is repeating itself. The term has tactile, physical associations; it once meant roughness or ruggedness, and it also describes a shuddering or a shivering movement. (There’s a wonderful word, horripilation, a synonym for the phenomenon also known as gooseflesh.)

Corporeal sensations, outward and internal – the frisson of creeping flesh, the visceral clutch or contraction of the bowels. Horror is the response and that which causes it, the emotion of disgust or repugnance which provokes a shudder or a shiver. Instinctive, immediate, something that can’t be moderated or regulated. But there is also a dynamic of attraction and repulsion in and around horror: it is both what you cannot bear to contemplate and cannot bear to look away from.
Book 1 Title: The Horror Reader
Book Author: Ken Gelder
Book 1 Biblio: Routledge $47.30pb, 413pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-horror-reader-ken-gelder/book/9780415213561.html
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Horror. It’s a word you are forced to utter emphatically, almost to expel. On the page, it seems to contain a form of typographical echo – it looks as if it is repeating itself. The term has tactile, physical associations; it once meant roughness or ruggedness, and it also describes a shuddering or a shivering movement. (There’s a wonderful word, horripilation, a synonym for the phenomenon also known as gooseflesh.)

Corporeal sensations, outward and internal – the frisson of creeping flesh, the visceral clutch or contraction of the bowels. Horror is the response and that which causes it, the emotion of disgust or repugnance which provokes a shudder or a shiver. Instinctive, immediate, something that can’t be moderated or regulated. But there is also a dynamic of attraction and repulsion in and around horror: it is both what you cannot bear to contemplate and cannot bear to look away from.

Read more: Philippa Hawker reviews 'The Horror Reader' edited by Ken Gelder

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John Docker reviews Greene on Capri: A memoir by Shirley Hazzard
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Why I’m gripped by this book I don’t know. Well, I do know. When I was in Vietnam late last year, on a gourmet tour, I purchased a pirated copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, my first Greene novel. (Why I hadn’t read Greene before I also don’t know, though I’d loved his wonderfully bizarre script for The Third Man.) In Saigon I took green tea in the Hotel Continental, imagining I was sitting where Greene might have sat in the early 1950s. At last, I thought, I’m doing a bit of cultural geography. When I returned to Canberra, I read it, and immediately decided it was a great novel, extraordinarily prescient of the Vietnam War. What also impressed me was the sensibility of Fowler, the English narrator, resigned to knowing himself undignified, unkempt, duplicitous, lying, opium-enveloped, absurdly deluded in love; an active accomplice in murder, of Pyle the appalling American intelligence agent come to do good in Southeast Asia, and always innocent in his own eyes, whatever he disastrously does.
Book 1 Title: Greene on Capri
Book 1 Subtitle: A memoir
Book Author: Shirley Hazzard
Book 1 Biblio: Virago, 149 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WDNq1O
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Why I’m gripped by this book I don’t know. Well, I do know. When I was in Vietnam late last year, on a gourmet tour, I purchased a pirated copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, my first Greene novel. (Why I hadn’t read Greene before I also don’t know, though I’d loved his wonderfully bizarre script for The Third Man.) In Saigon I took green tea in the Hotel Continental, imagining I was sitting where Greene might have sat in the early 1950s. At last, I thought, I’m doing a bit of cultural geography. When I returned to Canberra, I read it, and immediately decided it was a great novel, extraordinarily prescient of the Vietnam War. What also impressed me was the sensibility of Fowler, the English narrator, resigned to knowing himself undignified, unkempt, duplicitous, lying, opium-enveloped, absurdly deluded in love; an active accomplice in murder, of Pyle the appalling American intelligence agent come to do good in Southeast Asia, and always innocent in his own eyes, whatever he disastrously does.

Read more: John Docker reviews 'Greene on Capri: A memoir' by Shirley Hazzard

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Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right? by Raimond Gaita
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‘We’ve given Ayers Rock back to the Aborigines!’ Perhaps I remember those words so clearly because a friend spoke them to me over the telephone when I was in England, surprised almost daily at the reforms of the Whitlam government and at the international interest they excited. Years later I reflected on the meaning of that ‘we’. Had he said the same words to an English person, the meaning of it would have been different. Addressed to me, that ‘we’ wasn’t so much a classification that included or excluded me: it was an invitation to be part of a community whose identity was partly formed by its relation to Australia and its past and by its preparedness to accept responsibilities for what head been done to the Aborigines – at that time (before we knew about the stolen children), the taking of their lands and desecration of their sacred places. Had I thought about it, that would partly have answered the question I did ask him. ‘What does giving it back mean?’ He couldn’t say. In fact no one I asked could. No one was interested. Everyone was heartened by the generosity expressed in the gesture and enthusiastic in their hopes for a new era.
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‘We’ve given Ayers Rock back to the Aborigines!’ Perhaps I remember those words so clearly because a friend spoke them to me over the telephone when I was in England, surprised almost daily at the reforms of the Whitlam government and at the international interest they excited. Years later I reflected on the meaning of that ‘we’. Had he said the same words to an English person, the meaning of it would have been different. Addressed to me, that ‘we’ wasn’t so much a classification that included or excluded me: it was an invitation to be part of a community whose identity was partly formed by its relation to Australia and its past and by its preparedness to accept responsibilities for what head been done to the Aborigines – at that time (before we knew about the stolen children), the taking of their lands and desecration of their sacred places. Had I thought about it, that would partly have answered the question I did ask him. ‘What does giving it back mean?’ He couldn’t say. In fact no one I asked could. No one was interested. Everyone was heartened by the generosity expressed in the gesture and enthusiastic in their hopes for a new era.

Read more: 'Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right?' by Raimond Gaita

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R.J. Thompson and Sue Turnbull review Eye to Eye by Caroline Shaw
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In last year’s Cat Catcher, Caroline Shaw established her detective heroine, Lenny Aaron, as one of the most original characters in recent Australian crime (Cat Catcher was runner-up for the Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for best first novel). Gaunt, weird looking, an obsessive compulsive with a phobia about being touched and a serious addiction to over-the-counter drug cocktails, Lennie is in the tradition of dysfunctional and damaged investigators muddling their way through recent crime fiction.
Book 1 Title: Eye to Eye
Book Author: Caroline Shaw
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam, $19.70 pb, 314 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In last year’s Cat Catcher, Caroline Shaw established her detective heroine, Lenny Aaron, as one of the most original characters in recent Australian crime (Cat Catcher was runner-up for the Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for best first novel). Gaunt, weird looking, an obsessive compulsive with a phobia about being touched and a serious addiction to over-the-counter drug cocktails, Lennie is in the tradition of dysfunctional and damaged investigators muddling their way through recent crime fiction.

Read more: R.J. Thompson and Sue Turnbull review 'Eye to Eye' by Caroline Shaw

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Andrew Kaighin reviews Jeff: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon by Tony Parkinson
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Political biographies are renowned as being notoriously difficult to write. Given the peculiar role of authorisation this is not surprising. The ‘authorisation’ – the act of writing – of a political biography is diminished and crowded out by a subject who not only defines the work’s content, but can literally refuse to authorise the text. In this context, Tony Parkinson’s biography of Jeff Kennett, Jeff: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon, runs up against a subject who is particularly adept at controlling the manufacture of his personal and public self. Parkinson’s biography is unauthorised, but has survived its subject’s scrutiny.
Book 1 Title: Jeff
Book 1 Subtitle: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon
Book Author: Tony Parkinson
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $45 hb, 471 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Political biographies are renowned as being notoriously difficult to write. Given the peculiar role of authorisation this is not surprising. The ‘authorisation’ – the act of writing – of a political biography is diminished and crowded out by a subject who not only defines the work’s content, but can literally refuse to authorise the text. In this context, Tony Parkinson’s biography of Jeff Kennett, Jeff: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon, runs up against a subject who is particularly adept at controlling the manufacture of his personal and public self. Parkinson’s biography is unauthorised, but has survived its subject’s scrutiny.

Read more: Andrew Kaighin reviews 'Jeff: The rise and fall of a political phenomenon' by Tony Parkinson

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Don Anderson reviews The Arch-Traitor’s Lament by Garry Satherley
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The note from Text’s publicist read: ‘Hope you enjoy this.’ I did. I did. (I read it twice.) The note continued: ‘There’s no other Australian novel quite like it.’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to agree with that. Garry Satherley’s (as in ‘satherley buster’, no doubt) first novel suggests, to my perhaps over-convoluted consciousness, Murray Bail’s Homesickness, Anthony Macris’ Capital: Volume 1, Glenda Adams’ Dancing on Coral and, drawing a long bow, Henry Handel Richardson. I will let Text Publishing and anyone else interested chase up the resemblances, which are casual rather than causal. That The Arch-Traitor’s Lament more pertinently suggested to me Czech novelists such as Josef Škvorecký and Ivan Klíma, for example, was a different matter, they not being Australian, and they have earned their right to their political fictions on the decks of those two dreadnoughts, hardship and censorship. That was my grumpy not-quite-convinced first reading. My second reading convinced me that Satherley was doing something quite different from the Iron Curtain callers. He was writing an Australian novel (well, he was born in New Zealand, but we are masters of ethnic appropriation across the Tasman) with European facts and fictions as pan of its subject matter.
Book 1 Title: The Arch-Traitor’s Lament
Book Author: Garry Satherley
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $27.50 pb, 308 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The note from Text’s publicist read: ‘Hope you enjoy this.’ I did. I did. (I read it twice.) The note continued: ‘There’s no other Australian novel quite like it.’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to agree with that. Garry Satherley’s (as in ‘satherley buster’, no doubt) first novel suggests, to my perhaps over-convoluted consciousness, Murray Bail’s Homesickness, Anthony Macris’ Capital: Volume 1, Glenda Adams’ Dancing on Coral and, drawing a long bow, Henry Handel Richardson. I will let Text Publishing and anyone else interested chase up the resemblances, which are casual rather than causal. That The Arch-Traitor’s Lament more pertinently suggested to me Czech novelists such as Josef Škvorecký and Ivan Klíma, for example, was a different matter, they not being Australian, and they have earned their right to their political fictions on the decks of those two dreadnoughts, hardship and censorship. That was my grumpy not-quite-convinced first reading. My second reading convinced me that Satherley was doing something quite different from the Iron Curtain callers. He was writing an Australian novel (well, he was born in New Zealand, but we are masters of ethnic appropriation across the Tasman) with European facts and fictions as pan of its subject matter.

Read more: Don Anderson reviews 'The Arch-Traitor’s Lament' by Garry Satherley

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Richard Lunn reviews The Fighting Spirit of East Timor: The life of Martinho da Costa Lopes by Rowena Lennox
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As bookshops and bestseller lists fill up with new biographies about celebrities, criminals, tycoons, and sporting heroes, Pluto Press has come out with the story of a small, fat, generally unheard-of priest, Monsignor Martinho da Costa Lopes. Unlike the mega-books it fails completely to surprise us with the sexual preferences of the famous or inform us how to make a million dollars over lunch. Its subject, Dom Martinho, is free of such ordeals as poorly executed facelifts, nosy tax officers or greedy agents. His main concerns are cruder – how to stay alive and to help others stay alive when faced with the brutality of an oppressive, harsh regime.
Book 1 Title: The Fighting Spirit of East Timor
Book 1 Subtitle: The life of Martinho da Costa Lopes
Book Author: Rowena Lennox
Book 1 Biblio: Pluto Press, $32.95 pb, 287 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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As bookshops and bestseller lists fill up with new biographies about celebrities, criminals, tycoons, and sporting heroes, Pluto Press has come out with the story of a small, fat, generally unheard-of priest, Monsignor Martinho da Costa Lopes. Unlike the mega-books it fails completely to surprise us with the sexual preferences of the famous or inform us how to make a million dollars over lunch. Its subject, Dom Martinho, is free of such ordeals as poorly executed facelifts, nosy tax officers or greedy agents. His main concerns are cruder – how to stay alive and to help others stay alive when faced with the brutality of an oppressive, harsh regime.

Read more: Richard Lunn reviews 'The Fighting Spirit of East Timor: The life of Martinho da Costa Lopes' by...

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Lesley Beasley reviews The Last Race by Celeste Walters and Juice by Katy Watson
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It had to happen – a rush of books about the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad or that they won’t last now that the fuss is over. Celeste Walters’ The Last Race, her second book for young adults, should certainly be around for a while. The cover alone could sell the book and word of mouth should do the rest.
Book 1 Title: The Last Race
Book Author: Celeste Walters
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $16.95 pb, 208 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Juice
Book 2 Author: Katy Watson
Book 2 Biblio: FACP, $14.95 pb, 192 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
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It had to happen – a rush of books about the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad or that they won’t last now that the fuss is over. Celeste Walters’ The Last Race, her second book for young adults, should certainly be around for a while. The cover alone could sell the book and word of mouth should do the rest.

Read more: Lesley Beasley reviews 'The Last Race' by Celeste Walters and 'Juice' by Katy Watson

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Thomas Shapcott reviews The Model: Selected writings of Kenneth Seaforth Mackenzie edited by Richard Rossiter
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This is both an exciting and a sad collection. Kenneth Mackenzie, like those later Western Australian writers Randolph Stow and Tim Winton (and, I might add, Griffith Watkins), first appeared in print with work composed at a remarkably young age and which was extraordinary in its poetic intensity and command of language. And like Stow and Watkins (but not, fortunately, like Winton) the early achievement was matched only in fits and starts by the later work. Griffith Watkins committed suicide in his thirties, Randolph Stow has been beset by long periods of silence, and Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in a river near Goulburn, aged forty-one. He had become an alcoholic.
Book 1 Title: The Model
Book 1 Subtitle: Selected writings of Kenneth Seaforth Mackenzie
Book Author: Richard Rossiter
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Press, $38.45 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This is both an exciting and a sad collection. Kenneth Mackenzie, like those later Western Australian writers Randolph Stow and Tim Winton (and, I might add, Griffith Watkins), first appeared in print with work composed at a remarkably young age and which was extraordinary in its poetic intensity and command of language. And like Stow and Watkins (but not, fortunately, like Winton) the early achievement was matched only in fits and starts by the later work. Griffith Watkins committed suicide in his thirties, Randolph Stow has been beset by long periods of silence, and Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in a river near Goulburn, aged forty-one. He had become an alcoholic.

Read more: Thomas Shapcott reviews 'The Model: Selected writings of Kenneth Seaforth Mackenzie' edited by...

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Miriam Manne reviews The Murder of Madeline Brown by Francis Adams
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Harold Bloom’s comment on one of Poe’s stories that ‘the tale somehow is stronger than the telling’ came to mind during my reading of the nineteenth century mystery, The Murder of Madeline Brown. In spite of unevenness in the writing and some irritating Latin affectations, the story has a haunting quality which lingered long after the reading.
Book 1 Title: The Murder of Madeline Brown
Book Author: Francis Adams
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $19.95 pb, 160 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Harold Bloom’s comment on one of Poe’s stories that ‘the tale somehow is stronger than the telling’ came to mind during my reading of the nineteenth century mystery, The Murder of Madeline Brown. In spite of unevenness in the writing and some irritating Latin affectations, the story has a haunting quality which lingered long after the reading.

Read more: Miriam Manne reviews 'The Murder of Madeline Brown' by Francis Adams

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Peter Nicholls reviews The Nameless Day by Sara Douglass
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This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.
Book 1 Title: The Nameless Day
Book Author: Sara Douglass
Book 1 Biblio: Voyager (HarperCollins), $36.95 hb, 584 pp
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This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.

Read more: Peter Nicholls reviews 'The Nameless Day' by Sara Douglass

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Article Title: The Postponement of Judgment
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On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work.
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On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work.

Read more: 'The Postponement of Judgment' by John Mateer

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Robyn Sheahan-Bright reviews Water Colours by Sarah Walker and Bad Girl by Margaret Clark
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Sometimes ‘good’ girls just have to be ‘bad’. The ‘heroines’ of both these novels desperately want ‘to fit in’, but eventually discover that ‘fitting in’ involves accepting yourself for who you are, not changing into someone else. This seems an obvious lesson, but of course it’s one of the hardest to learn. Both books are jacketed in gorgeous fashion; the matte photographic images are enticing and every bit as seductive as the CD cases and video clips they emulate. But where one is brash and vibrant the other is muted and subtle – a description which could aptly be applied to the plots, too. For Walker and Clark deal with the age-old concern of self-identity in very different ways.
Book 1 Title: Water Colours
Book Author: Sarah Walker
Book 1 Biblio: Hodder Headline, $16.50 pb, 188 pp
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Book 2 Title: Bad Girl
Book 2 Author: Margaret Clark
Book 2 Biblio: Random House, $16.40 pb, 192 pp
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Sometimes ‘good’ girls just have to be ‘bad’. The ‘heroines’ of both these novels desperately want ‘to fit in’, but eventually discover that ‘fitting in’ involves accepting yourself for who you are, not changing into someone else. This seems an obvious lesson, but of course it’s one of the hardest to learn. Both books are jacketed in gorgeous fashion; the matte photographic images are enticing and every bit as seductive as the CD cases and video clips they emulate. But where one is brash and vibrant the other is muted and subtle – a description which could aptly be applied to the plots, too. For Walker and Clark deal with the age-old concern of self-identity in very different ways.

Read more: Robyn Sheahan-Bright reviews 'Water Colours' by Sarah Walker and 'Bad Girl' by Margaret Clark

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Article Title: 'Religion – Who Doesn’t Need It?' by John Docker
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It’s usually said that Australians are uninterested in the metaphysical. Where in America the lines between the secular and religious are notoriously blurred, not least in their politicians or sporting heroes invoking God on almost every conceivable occasion, Australians by contrast are held to be a godless lot, their mythologies entirely secular in form and meaning. God is rarely publicly invoked, except by ministers of religion whose particular business it is duly to do so.
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It’s usually said that Australians are uninterested in the metaphysical. Where in America the lines between the secular and religious are notoriously blurred, not least in their politicians or sporting heroes invoking God on almost every conceivable occasion, Australians by contrast are held to be a godless lot, their mythologies entirely secular in form and meaning. God is rarely publicly invoked, except by ministers of religion whose particular business it is duly to do so.

Sometimes, in more dyspeptic moments, and especially when the Australian obsession with sport reaches heights never before scaled by humanity as in this Olympics year, I am tempted to agree with an observation of Freud in his Moses and Monotheism concerning the ‘brutality and the inclination to violence which are usually found where athletic development becomes the ideal of the people’. Yet it appears that schoolkids are now very interested in religion, religious studies are doing very well in universities, and hundreds of people turned up at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for a debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Read more: 'Religion – Who Doesn’t Need It?' by John Docker

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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: A Poet of Process
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From Masefield to Beaver, the anapaestic metre of a double unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is often used in poems about the sea. It reproduces the rhythm of waves and also suggests a reflective but eager mood. Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection is often based in anapaestic metre (‘a pelican, flying a loose ellipse / … sets his head / and great hooked wings lift him into sleepy light’) which tightens into iambic (single down stress plus up stress) when he wishes for a feeling of conclusion. One would not normally begin a review by discussing metre, but in this case I felt the metre was intrinsic to the authorial tone and perhaps reveals why the work’s effect is of much memorable insight, beauty, and precision in conflict with strategic monotony.
Book 1 Title: and dug my fingers in the sand
Book Author: Brook Emery
Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $16.45 pb, 110 pp
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From Masefield to Beaver, the anapaestic metre of a double unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is often used in poems about the sea. It reproduces the rhythm of waves and also suggests a reflective but eager mood. Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection is often based in anapaestic metre (‘a pelican, flying a loose ellipse / … sets his head / and great hooked wings lift him into sleepy light’) which tightens into iambic (single down stress plus up stress) when he wishes for a feeling of conclusion. One would not normally begin a review by discussing metre, but in this case I felt the metre was intrinsic to the authorial tone and perhaps reveals why the work’s effect is of much memorable insight, beauty, and precision in conflict with strategic monotony.

The monotony is strategic because the conflict comes at points in the poetry where the persona suggests his existential tension: ‘Inside my parked car dark converges / on the radio’s illuminated dial / and music’s caught between the window glass.’ The persona rests his ‘hands against the wheel’ and leans back to listen as the windscreen starts to fog. / I can’t hear my heart or breath and tapping / makes a hollow sound.’

Read more: Jennifer Maiden reviews 'and dug my fingers in the sand' by Brook Emery

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Evelyn Juers reviews Lucias Measure by Angela Malone
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Article Title: And when did you last see a giant?
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While she was writing her novel, Angela Malone pinned a panorama photo of Hill End, the small NSW goldmining town, over the window near her desk. The photo seemed empty of life until Malone took to it with a magnifying glass and – as authors do – playing the giant game, discovered shadowy traces of some of her characters. No wonder, since the town lies on a bed of quartz which common wisdom invests with certain powers of invocation, much like the magic of the silver particles of photography. Hill End became the novel’s Reedy Creek, a place infinitely embroidered with the history and folklore of its predominantly Irish community.
Book 1 Title: Lucia’s Measure
Book 1 Subtitle: The Story of a Giantess
Book Author: Angela Malone
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $17.95, 197 pp
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While she was writing her novel, Angela Malone pinned a panorama photo of Hill End, the small NSW goldmining town, over the window near her desk. The photo seemed empty of life until Malone took to it with a magnifying glass and – as authors do – playing the giant game, discovered shadowy traces of some of her characters. No wonder, since the town lies on a bed of quartz which common wisdom invests with certain powers of invocation, much like the magic of the silver particles of photography. Hill End became the novel’s Reedy Creek, a place infinitely embroidered with the history and folklore of its predominantly Irish community.

The image on the cover is of a large hand cradling a small violin. This inversion introduces us to the free play of dreams, childhood, or folklore. The work offers an abundance of peeping through fingers, hair ribbon tied to branches, or dandelions blown to the wind for wishes to come true, of giants reaching through tiny windows as a child might reach into a doll’s house, or a dreamer into the past. Lots of hair, velvet, cutting and sewing, and tape measures, of mesmeric sensuality built into domestic work routines. Lots of sneaking around, keeping secrets, being discovered. There’s even a heroic horse called Biddy Silver to round off this girl’s-own universe.

Read more: Evelyn Juers reviews 'Lucia's Measure' by Angela Malone

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Inga Clendinnen reviews Bruising: A Journey Through Gender by Mischa Merz
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Article Title: A Warrior’s Pride
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I have always been puzzled by society’s readiness to send their young men into battle, and that the young men go, and then tell such lies when they get home about what they saw when they looked on the face of battle. I hadn’t wondered about women, except to be glad that they were exempt from combat. Now comes Mischa Merz’s Bruising, which is about fear, aggression, and courage, and written out of her experience of one-to-one combat in the boxing ring.
Book 1 Title: Bruising
Book 1 Subtitle: A Journey Through Gender
Book Author: Mischa Merz
Book 1 Biblio: Picador $20.78 pb, 255 pp
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I have always been puzzled by society’s readiness to send their young men into battle, and that the young men go, and then tell such lies when they get home about what they saw when they looked on the face of battle. I hadn’t wondered about women, except to be glad that they were exempt from combat. Now comes Mischa Merz’s Bruising, which is about fear, aggression, and courage, and written out of her experience of one-to-one combat in the boxing ring.

I know Mischa. We share beaches and cups of tea over Anglesea summers. We have talked a bit about women’s boxing, but I didn’t have my heart in it: I was embarrassed by her fascination with the business of wilfully battering the faces and bodies of strangers, in public, with men looking on. It seemed a small step above mud wrestling to me. I was relieved and disappointed when I missed a sparring session she and her husband Peter staged one afternoon up at their beach house. My grandchildren, who saw it, were shocked by its ferocity.

Read more: Inga Clendinnen reviews 'Bruising: A Journey Through Gender' by Mischa Merz

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Peter Pierce reviews Investigations in Australian Literature by Ken Stewart
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No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.
Book 1 Title: Investigations in Australian Literature
Book Author: Ken Stewart
Book 1 Biblio: Shoestring Press pb, 205 pp
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No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.

He begins with an earnest characterisation of himself as a bemused, youthful stumbler across the field of Australian literature, one who confessed to ‘an almost paranoiac sensation that something had been going on that I should have been told about’. As a student of naturalism in the 1960s, Stewart began to ask himself where was the account of ‘a colonial literature and its cultural context’? Moving to Henry Handel Richardson, he wondered why no-one had tried to place her father (Dr Walter Richardmn, in part the model for Richard Mahony) in such a context. After all, as he writes later, in the 1870s ‘In the Melbourne of unfinished palaces, Or Richardson was a figure of some public eminence’. Where, then, was the analysis of a society ‘equipped with an intelligentsia, literati, critics, poets, novelists, controversies, conflicts, theatre, music’?

Read more: Peter Pierce reviews 'Investigations in Australian Literature' by Ken Stewart

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Geoff Page reviews The Olive Tree: Collected Poems by Mark OConnor
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Article Title: Mapping Australia
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Mark O’Connor is a poet who has been in the news lately. Following in the steps of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, he was appointed (by the Australia Council) as ‘official’ Olympic poet – though it seems inevitable that much of his work will concern only the Olympic flame on its way to the Games and the events to be seen on TV since neither SOCOG nor the Australia Council saw fit to give him a journalist's pass. Unfortunately, all this Olympic fuss has tended to obscure his work of three decades up to this point, a journey well represented in his recent The Olive Tree: Collected poems.
Book 1 Title: The Olive Tree
Book 1 Subtitle: Collected Poems
Book Author: Mark O'Connor
Book 1 Biblio: Hale & Iremonger $27.45 pb, 272 pp
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Mark O’Connor is a poet who has been in the news lately. Following in the steps of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, he was appointed (by the Australia Council) as ‘official’ Olympic poet – though it seems inevitable that much of his work will concern only the Olympic flame on its way to the Games and the events to be seen on TV since neither SOCOG nor the Australia Council saw fit to give him a journalist’s pass. Unfortunately, all this Olympic fuss has tended to obscure his work of three decades up to this point, a journey well represented in his recent The Olive Tree: Collected poems.

O’Connor is well-known for his lifetime project of mapping in verse all the major regions of Australia. The survey began with his Reef Poems (1976) and has continued with poetry on the Queensland rainforests, Central Australia, the Blue Mountains, the Snowy Mountains, and more recently Kakadu and the Top End. Earlier detours have included four years in Europe and a residency at the Museum of Victoria. The book’s editor (noted anthologist, John Leonard) has sensibly arranged all this material into several clearly defined regional sections. He has also included a group called ‘Sources’ which includes some key poems about the poet’s childhood and other important pieces which don’t fit the regional paradigm. It is significant and, in a way, disconcerting that some of the book’s best poems occur in this seemingly anomalous section.

Read more: Geoff Page reviews 'The Olive Tree: Collected Poems' by Mark O'Connor

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Jenny Harrison reviews 7 books of poetry
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Article Title: Six New Poets
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The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There is forthrightness; the language is clear, attentive, and contemporary. Best of all, the poems aren’t dull.
Book 1 Title: Why I am Not a Farmer
Book Author: Brendan Ryan
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The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There is forthrightness; the language is clear, attentive, and contemporary. Best of all, the poems aren’t dull.

Read more: Jenny Harrison reviews 7 books of poetry

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