From short stories Peter Carey has proceeded to long novels. This is his third. It is dense with incident and meticulously delineated characters who drop in and out of the narrative, always with a purpose. In some ways it is as surreal as Bliss, in others as naturalistic as Illywacker. But it is like neither of these novels. It cannot be said to be ‘better’ than either, if this mode of comparison can be used legitimately in a literary sense.

What can be said is that it is a marvellous piece of storytelling, which doesn’t stop there. Its theme explores and exploits, and to some extent explains, a time around the halfway mark of the nineteenth century, which bears an extraordinary resemblance to our own.

Of course, there was a certain innocence, lacking now, or at least Carey conveys the feeling of innocence in fine prose which gives the book a lustrous surface. Here is Mr Ahem, who lives at Parramatta, walking from his Pitt Street hotel to see Lucinda in her Longnose Point (Balmain) farmhouse on a Sunday morning:

There was in this long slow walk a kind of conceit. For to soak one’s shoes in dew-wet grass, to pick one’s way along a foot-wide path of the meandering type more often made by cattle than by humans was, in Mr Ahern’s mind, evidence of a kind of honesty; he could see himself as a man with a staff on the road, a traveller in a parable

It is the landscape that is innocent, not Mr Ahem, and the Mr Ahems have not changed with the landscape. Lucinda did not wish to see this representative of that ‘peculiar combination of ignorance and bull­like confidence’, which she noticed in men.

Lucinda does not actually turn up until page 77, after her father, a farmer, has been killed when his horse rears and throws him to the ground during a ceremonial procession on Palm Sunday in Parramatta. Her mother continues to run the farm until Lucinda is eighteen, when she dies of influenza. Lucinda – naïve, strong-willed, independent, but not convinced that women think as clearly as men – is on her own with a bit of money. She goes to Sydney, then to London for a visit, returning on the ship Leviathan.

Meanwhile, Oscar is growing up in a Devon village with his widowed father, a fundamentalist cleric whose hobby is the collection of aquatic invertebrates. Oscar defects from his father’s brand of religion to a loony Anglican clergyman named Stratton, goes to Oxford, is ordained and takes ship for Australia and a curate’s job. On the Leviathan, Oscar and Lucinda, fatefully meet.

If Oscar and Lucinda is about the strange bedevilled love of one for the other, it is also about gambling, a passion which they share, and about glass. An incident in Lucinda’s childhood turned her on to glass. She is fascinated with the idea of glass but also hopes it will make her fortune.

The evidence of Carey’s research into gambling and glass is formidable, to the extent that he makes you believe every word he writes. Perhaps publication (February here, April in Britain, May in the United Kingdom) will bring argument from racing buffs, card players, and the Association of Glass Manufacturers. (I am sure there is one.) But listen to Carey on glass as Lucinda buys the factory at Darling Harbour with her inheritance:

Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all but a liquid; an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top; and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone; that it is invisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

The first- and second-class passengers on the Leviathan mixed a bit, and continue to do so when the voyage ends. One of them is Mr Smith, the quintessential liberal who lets things happen, hopes for the best, stands aside when blacks are murdered and clergyman kicked, but rallies with speed and violence when he realises he can help his friend Oscar and pay off old scores. Mr Smith is perfectly believable. But then, so is everybody. Except perhaps Oscar. Could Oscar be as physically and mentally repellent as depicted, and still attract the love of Lucinda and the reluctant friendship of a few at Oxford and afterwards? Pale, gangling, unwashed, timorous, Struwelpeter Oscar? When the curacy fails, Lucinda gets him work in the business of a well-to-do friend, finally takes him from his squalid lodgings to the farmhouse towards which Mr Ahem walked with such a sense of purpose and righteousness.

Remarkable as Lucinda and Oscar are in their different ways, there are a dozen or more characters who could qualify for a novel of their own: Mr D’Abbs, born Dabbs, who entertained at cribbage in a mansion where the furnishing were relentlessly second-rate; Mrs Burrows, who was entertained there, and who then entertained presentable young men in her bedroom; Mr Stratton, who having been steered towards the track by Oscar goes for broke, then hangs himself from the rafter above his pulpit; Oscar’s father Theophilus, bereft of wife and son, and Oscar’s fellow theological student at Oxford, the egregious Wardley-Smith who turns up in Sydney in time to miss Oscar as the latter sets off on an expedition to the Bellinger River with Lucinda’s presentation church, made entirely of glass.

The critics were right: the congregation would scorch in it on summer days, and there was nowhere for the parson to change his vestments in privacy. The account of the expedition from Sydney to the north, and its terrible finale, makes one of the most memorable passages in a novel that has many of great set pieces, such as Lucinda’s ‘trot’ from Balmain to Chinatown, in her gig, to join a pak-a-pu game and her visit to the glassworks to find them garlanded with cornflowers, lachenalias, poppies, yellow daisies as a token of reconciliation (for all the wrong reasons) with her management and staff.

If the novel is about gambling and Christianity (or its representatives) and glass and the independence of women it is also about accidents. It confirms the domination of accidents in life, not accidents celebrated by the newspapers and television in which petrol wagons overturn on the highway and linesmen are electrocuted but accidental happenings that change the course of events, such as missed glances at social gatherings and missed appointments and hints not taken and allusions not picked up.

I hope nobody will see Oscar and Lucinda as simply a very long costume drama or period piece, suitable for publication in the year of the Bi. Any year that it was published would be a good year.

A small postscript: since the language is everywhere under siege, one could wish that the author would not use ‘careening’ and ‘cohort’ in the way he does, even although the Concise Oxford Dictionary, gives grudging permission.

Some of the narrators of Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories tend to view oceans and coastlines with the fear and loathing of flat earth believers. Just the whiff of the sea breeze is enough to spoil the day for them, the grit and the glare of sun-touched sand distresses them and they speak with contempt of the ‘idiot noise’ of the sea and of those who swim and play in the waves and on the beaches. Seaside holidays, they imply, are for frivolous people stupidly turning a blind eye to the ocean’s treachery – its dark moods, its black holes, and its sinister capacity to gnaw at and dissolve something as solid as rock.

What am I, as a self-employed, middle-aged, male with several generations of Celtic forebears supposed to celebrate in 1988?

Nothing about 1788 itself appeals, since unlike the US American Bicentennial, we are being asked to excite ourselves over something done to this continent and its occupants by the British Empire. In 1976, the US Americans could celebrate something they had done to the British. Hence, 1988 is not such a special date for European Australians.

David Ireland has been writing for us nigh on twenty years now and this, his ninth novel, more than slightly autobiographical one suspects, allows a perspective on his corpus in all the ambiguity of the term.

The book has a complexly simple dedication – ‘to the liberation of God’ – which is one reason for remarking that Ireland has been writing ‘for us’.

Blair, it has been suggested to me, is a roman a clef. I can't pretend to have the key, but that doesn’t matter, in the long run. Who remembers the characters upon whom Lucky Jim was based? Who cares? Blair is an amusing novel about English academics stationed in Australia in the past twenty years. Perhaps there really are such characters – anxious readers of the Times Literary Supplement, riders of red Harrods’ bicycles, exiles in a far country, eccentric experts in arcane areas of Eng Lit who carry toothbrushes in their pockets against the chance of intimate contact with alluring undergraduates. It might have been so, some twenty or thirty years past in the major universities, and it probably is so in the far-flung provincial colleges and universities. But John Scott’s novel focuses, to my mind, perhaps too much on these ratbag types.

Geoffrey Dutton assailed similar expatriates in his underrated novel about English adventurers in Adelaide several years past. Dutton’s characters recognised their phony credentials and borrowed mannerisms. but managed to adapt themselves to contemporary conditions. John A. Scott’s characters are more lightly sketched-in, caricatures fleshed out to resemble stock butts of jokes about hopeless Poms in Australian academies. It’s nice that someone has had a go at such space fillers, but I emerged from my reading with a wish that he could have been more acerbic, less inclined to give them characteristics related to muddling through. The world of the novel is too limited to convey a sense of the real issues at stake in Australian academic circles – the desperate plight of the non tenured, the wastage of talent and the contempt for achievement by the native-born. Such matters surface only in jokey remarks by the English-born who occupy English Departments about the pity that so-and-so is not English-born and thus is destined to go chase a career elsewhere.

These books are about the American Empire and its influence, with the first taking Australia as its focal point. Kolko’s monumental study of Vietnam and its War, and the American role therein and elsewhere, doesn’t even mention Australia. Fair enough, for we were only one of the cosmetic effects employed by Washington to try to cover the hideous face of the War she was conducting.

Dennis Phillips, born in Alamosa, Colorado, but teaching American history and politics at Macquarie since 1972, paints a picture of a still decent, but woefully vulnerable Australia, drifting in a global sea starting to be too rough for it. One question he raises by implication, is whether we haven’t left it all too late to regain control. As to what to do about the situation he outlines and deplores, Phillips has little of particular use to say: this is not a criticism.

Regional Courtesies

1 When you go to the Salamanca Festival in Hobart remember to take a suitcase of factory-made clothing and household items. The migration of weavers, potters, glassblowers, and carvers down to Tasmania means that the people down there have only craft-made things to wear and to eat with and will kill to get their hands on a factory-made, perfectly symmetrical, cup and saucer. You can do some good deals in polyester clothing — most Tasmanians arc suffering from goats’ wool and shaggy weave clothing. With wine say, ‘I hear you are making a few decent whites now.’ But don’t necessarily order them. Refer to the ‘mainland’ or to ‘the Big Island’, not to ‘Aus­tralia’. Remember to refer to the importance of Island Perspective in Australian writing. Don’t make jokes about i*c**t. Talk about the quality of the light in Hobart.

There is in the annals of Australian media reporting of international affairs, a dominant tradition of what one might well describe as the ‘Biggies’ school of journalism. ‘Pace’ Damien Parer, Blanche D’Alpuget, John Pilger, Peter Hartings and others, the ‘Biggies’ school has provided a paradigm broken but rarely.

Detailed description of actions or their settings; unspoken assumptions of blind belief in western values; plenty of punch-ups; an obsessive concern with the dynamics of events almost as a substitute for analysis of background, policy or historical process; these are the hallmarks of this well-worked ‘Biggies’ school. It has characterized the presentation and interpretation of the world beyond Australia’s shores, by cohorts of stabled journalists over the many decades now, of Australian external relations.

From short stories Peter Carey has proceeded to long novels. This is his third. It is dense with incident and meticulously delineated characters who drop in and out of the narrative, always with a purpose. In some ways it is as surreal as Bliss, in others as naturalistic as Illywacker. But it is like neither of these novels. It cannot be said to be ‘better’ than either, if this mode of comparison can be used legitimately in a literary sense.

What can be said is that it is a marvellous piece of story-telling, which doesn’t stop there. Its theme explores and exploits and to some extent explains a time – around the 19th century half way mark – which bears an extraordinary resemblance to our own.

Alas there must be ten sentences in Ronald Conway’s autobiography which begins with ‘Alas’. Yes, it is a buoyant, if absurd book, not a dirge, and the most interesting lass in it is 'a lady named Audrey’ (no surname), a reputed psychic and palmiste (excuse me, ladies!), who gave Conway a ‘reading’ in 1958 (he was then over 30) and told him that he ‘wore ... a sinister aura of mental disturbance’. However, not to worry', this aura was not his but belonged to a person he had previously been with. Fortunately this was not Archbishop Mannix but a former student whom Conway was counselling and who subsequently killed his mother. Lady Audrey Whatshername told Conway ‘crisply’ that he would ‘become very well known ... a doctor of the mind who will help a great many people. You will be an instrument in the hands of God’. Conway, who is almost Dickensian about his ‘humility’, says ‘the reader can decide’ whether Audrey was just guessing or not (p. 70).

At that time Conway was a Catholic secondary school teacher where he ‘used corporal punishment … usually sparingly but without apology’, although he says he had ‘a knack for telling repartee’ and could make his students ‘look dolts if I chose’ (pp. 60-1). He believes himself to have been a superb teacher of History' and English, so much so that he lights up his chapter, ‘Not Quite Mr. Chips’, with this epigraph from Schiller:

Elizabeth Jolley strikes dread into her Australian reader in 1988 as she makes due acknowledgement of the auspices under which Sugar Mother was written:

I must thank the Australian Bicentennial authority for commissioning this hook as a contribution to the celebration of the Australian Bicentenary in 1988.

Women’s fashions change every year. History fashions change every decade. When I was at school and at University history books told me to be grateful for being British. Out on the streets I was told ‘Buy British and be proud of it!’. Times change, brother – as Colin Cartwright, Barry Humphries’ creation, pointed out. Now, in the season of the sere and yellow leaf, I am asked to read a history quite different from what I read when young.

This first volume in McPhee Gribble’s four-volume People’s History of Australia is a measure of the revolution in the writing of history in this country. In my youth the History of Australia began with Captain Cook, quickly followed by the story of the great gift the continent of Australia was about to receive – the benison of British institutions: individual liberty, the rule of law, tolerance and decency; or a code of what to think and what to do; a list of who were the ‘goodies’ and who were the ‘baddies’.

Australians are said to be an unreflective artless lot, not given to intensive self-examination in the personal or political sense, living lives of stoical self-denial or frank hedonism. This national ideology of course assumes that ‘Australian’ is synonymous with ‘male’, and our literary ‘tradition’, whose quintessential form is the short realist narrative, carries that ideology.

As a writer, an editor, and a commentator on the 'state of the art’ of story telling and of living in Australia, Frank Moorhouse has been prominent in a widespread reaction against the restrictions on writing and reading implied by that Lawsonian tradition. In the early ’70s, Tabloid Story formalised that reaction against what Michael Wilding in ‘The Tabloid Story’ saw as the reduction of short fiction in Australia to ‘the single mythic line of the outback story’. In the push to radicalise the narrative space ‘Australian literature’, however, Moorhouse remained interested in developing the social realist story as a form for its political potential.

Less than a week after the publication of this book, the federal government gave notice that it intended to give legislative recognition to its major thrust – that is, the government said it would acknowledge that Australia’s aborigines once owned Australia.

The Government’s announce­ment created something of a furore. The Opposition complained that if implemented the decision could have vast legal ramifications and could undermine the constitutional framework. Without canvassing the merits of that claim, it should be noted that what the government appeared to give in the way of recognition of prior aboriginal title to Australian land, it also seemed to remove. What the Government had proposed was that legislation which would create a new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission would include in its preamble the acknowledgment that ‘the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia were the prior occupiers and original owners of this land.’ But the same preamble would declare that these- peoples ‘were dispossessed of their land by subsequent European occupation and have no recognised rights over it other than those granted by the Crown.

As the newly appointed Editor of a well-respected magazine, I feel a speech coming on. ABR is the result of hardworking commitment by John McLaren, John Hanrahan and most recently Kerryn Goldsworthy, who has left me with what she calls a thriving baby.

It is now my job to push ABR into adolescence with all the controversy and disruption that this may bring to our current readers. Any outbreaks (dermatological or otherwise) should not be seen as disregard for these readers, but rather as an attempt to bring a more varied choice of Australian books to the attention of the general reading public. ABR will aim at a more up to date response to the publishing of new books. We want to be part of the debate, at the time of the book's publication when the first newspaper reviews appear.

Sydney writer, Richard Lunn has won the $2000 Age Short Story competition with his story ‘Tennis With My Father’. Lunn’s story was chosen from an astonishing 1647 entries.

Co-ordinator of the mammoth judging task was Laurie Clancy, a Melbourne writer and Chairman of the local PEN. Clancy read every one of the stories entered and with other PEN members produced a short list of 45 stories from which the winner was chosen by Clancy, Thea Astley and Age literary editor, Rod Usher.

A dense, experimental, postmodern, lesbian-feminist novel, Remember The Tarantella will be referred to by future generations as a landmark in Australian literary history. The book is not without problems, but in language and form it attempts to recover and recreate women’s history and culture and by doing so, challenges notions of a singular, dominant authorial voice, plays with narrative expectation and demands at all times the active participation of its reader.

The book’s focus (and dominant metaphor) is the frenzied ‘pagan’ Dance of the Tarantella (still performed by peasant women in the ‘festas’ of Italy) and in ‘remembering’ this Dance we are asked to ‘remember’, that is, to ‘give back the limbs/power’ to women’s culture. In recent centuries (Christian) the Dance was said to be the only cure for the bite of the tarantula spider (the ‘curative’ tarantella). However, there is no evidence that the spider was poisonous and it is assumed that the notion of the ‘bite’ was simply an excuse for people of all classes to once again enjoy ‘pagan’ pleasures.

Some institutions thrive on the blank signification of initials. As with NATO, ACT or indeed ACTU. Cultural items too can have the same austere vitality. OED is an English nonword of high authority (though also the Welsh for ‘age’). Like the American military, the new Australian bureaucracy is much enamoured of dehumanised acronyms and academic life bristles with technical crassness from CTEC to CRASTE.

How appropriate then (HAT) that the major literary journal of record in the Anglophone Literary World should by robotic consensus be known as the TLS. And how very gratifying (HVG) that this deverbalised wordthing should have just in a special issue (actually a special section squeezed between Rupert Brook and memories of the Raj) produced its authorised version of Australian culture — a version itself compounded largely of initial and inert responses.

Dear Editor,

Mark Rubbo in his Starters & Writers column (December 1987) discusses the Literary Arts Board and its assistance to publishers since its inception in 1973.

It is nearly thirty years since Bernard Smith’s classic European Vision and the South Pacific opened the eyes of regional historians to anew range of perceptions: his latest book continues our education in a manner always informative and stimulating and very often most entertaining.

The Death of the Artist as Hero comprises twenty-six essays, beginning in 1946 but two-thirds from the 1980s, dealing with such themes as the relations of art anti history, Marxism, the Museum, society at large. There is an interlude on ‘The Antipodean Intervention’ of 1959 – its Manifesto is a lovely piece of polemic – and the book concludes with eight ‘Reflections on Australian Art’, the last of which, ‘On Cultural Convergence’, is nothing less than a most thought-provoking survey of the strands which enter into the complex tapestry of our multiculture, with special reference to the Aboriginal heritage. Even in the most occasional pieces there are deep soundings, and the more substantive ones would each need at least the length of this review for an adequate critique. Here is God’s plenty, and, especially for a lay reviewer, the difficulty is to know where to start.

In many respects this is a heroic, even triumphant book. The product of ten years’ reading and thinking, of discussions here and in USA, with Jungian scholars. It offers the definitive archetypal reading of Patrick White’s fiction. After this no more can be said – at least in this vein. Patrick White is placed, pronounced on and then, in a sense, dismissed. Now we know it all. ‘The last of our colonial writers’ for whom ‘the disjunction between society and Native is experienced as an acute psychological dissociation’. He has been ‘living next door to a hostile ghost, caught up in a fatal entanglement of spirit and matter’ and victim of the Dark Mother, he represents the Australian as neurotic. Underneath what Tacey calls ‘our happy-go-lucky egalitarian mask’, there lies what he discerns in White’s work, deep but also dark processes at work in the psyche. But there is worse to come. Admirers will regret to hear that White suffers from ‘an acute absence of the intellect and lack of reflection in relation to his symbolic material, and a blind faith entrusted to the imagination’. As a result, he is not really ‘in charge of his characters’ but is duped by his unconscious and unable to recognise its dangers. Therefore we must not trust his view of his novels or of their purposes and if we see him invoking a Christian frame upon his work, we had better not believe it. White’s Christianity is phoney. ‘Instead of being broadened and challenged by the discovery of anew deity’, he clings to Christianity as a kind of cosmic Linus blanket, choosing ‘to view it all as a rediscovery of what parental figures told him to believe’. Add to this the ‘morbid and dark streak’ Tacey discovers and the verdict that his most recent work is both ‘inept and vulgar, high camp, sado-masochistic ritual in religious dress’, and White is left, as one of the epigrams to The Twyborn Affair puts it, like ‘someone with nothing on but a band-aid’.

All this is very interesting, and I, for one, do not have the psychological knowledge to dispute it – indeed Tacey is full of scorn for types who dare to intrude on what is after all an area of complex and complicated scholarship. But this kind of knowledge seems to me beside the point which engages and has traditionally engaged literary critics. To put it simply, Tacey’s concern seems to be with the sources of White’s fiction, not with the fiction itself, with the teller, if you like, and not the tale. In a sense, of course, he would admit this. It is precisely the method of archetypal criticism, as he outlines it in the introduction, to proceed in two stages: first ‘complete receptivity to the imaginative material about’, the process of amplification relating it ‘to an appropriate mythological context’, establishing ‘the archetypal frame within which the psychic product is operating’.

Helen Daniel is one of outmost distinguished reviewer critics. Particularly through her contributions to The Age. she has proven herself not just an intelligent and scrupulous reader, but an open and pluralistic one. These qualities inform this very important book.

Liars is a serious and scholarly study of a generation of Australian metafictionists, or fabulists, or what you will, in the contexts both of their own individual achievements and the achievement of the body of work of this unwitting ‘school’. It is, to use a metaphor that is central to Dr Daniel’s study, a topography of the ‘most beautiful lies’ in Australian fiction in the last twenty’ years. It is not a history, not an aetiology, but a cartography.