In the military dominated world of my youth, all Spitfire movies and passages from Caesar, TLS stood for Tank Landing Ship. It seems now a truthful memory. Lumbering out and wallowing ashore come those heavily armoured and crudely effective intellectual assault vehicles Howard Jacobson and Clive James. They each write (if that is the word, spout, profude, expatterate?) at huge length as if they were reviewing a sonnet for the New York Review of Books. But they do deal with many books. James handles eight works of poetry, Jacobson kicks around fifteen packages of prose.

Jacobson manoeuvres from two fixed positions, obviously not recalling his Caesar. One, naturally, for a graduate of Downing, however distant, is Matthew Arnold. In an opening which valuably reminds readers of Leavisite critical technique, at once naive and meretricious, he ladles out a passage of Arnoldian snake oil, apparently attacking Patrick White. Then confides that this was written about Lucretius, but he has trickily substituted the name of his Australian Aunt Sally. With one wing pegged down in this intellectual bog, Jacobson takes up position in another cerebral defile by espousing the view that all good Australian fiction, to the present, is of the people, that they are really bush people, and they liked tales of a bracingly straightforward sort. What he calls ‘basic convivial narration’. The wordwright’s shop.

Jacobson’s heartily inauthentic positioning enables to him to dismiss with total confidence, bogus nationalism and ill-concealed neurosis both fiction by women (Jolly’s ‘spinsterly’ whimsy and Garner’s tremulous feminism are mentioned) and also the work of the ‘benumbed city bohemia’, persons not actually cited but apparently including, he will be surprised to hear, the ‘monomaniacal Murnane’.

Jacobson can find things grudgingly to praise in Loukakis, Bail and Keneally, though they lack a narration either basic or convivial, but his best praise and biggest reversal comes in lauding as bush bard that indefatigable experimenter in literary form, urban fantasy and gender-crossing, Frank Moorhouse.

As an inpatriate of intermittent character, Jacobson might be not so much excused as understood for having the wrong map upside down. His fellow armoured amphibian, quite crocodilian in his impermeable humour. Clive James, actually rose from the primordial Sydney exurbs, but left Sydney University a few years before Jacobson passed through in the Goldberg caravan. Poetry is a James métier, as critic in reviews and essays both well-read and over-written, and as practitioner in verse of disputed value. Like Jacobson, James knows what he likes, and it’s pretty old-fashioned, or, in the case of Les Murray, hard to miss. It’s some time since local poetry buffs will have been able to relish the standard stuff on Slessor, McAuley, Hope and Wright, here resumed as if straight from a late fifties lecture.

In the modern context it can be said, in a Jamesian nutshell, that he dislikes Alan Wearne and finds a lot to praise in Bob Ellis (another crepuscular vestige of Sydney U., a figure hard to place in a poetry review for all his frothy bardism). Determinedly lightweight judgements pervade this mixture of old notes and flicks of the journalistic wrist. Together they bring James to the end of his thousands of words; together they compose a fatally still life of Australian Poetry. Not much else to note but cheap shot at Richard Tipping, a revealing gibe at a feminist anthology with its ‘lethally po-faced’ introduction (what was lethal in Clive’s po?), genuflections towards Murray and Potter without noting their considerable differences in language, politics and sociocultural position.

Australian fiction and poetry, for many readers around the world, are laid out as misidentified bodies, a travesty of authoritative force. It’s intriguing to wonder how these writers were commissioned for these dominatingly oppressive pieces. The editor of the paper spent quite a while travelling round Australia in mid 1987. Was he too indolent to find a local for the job? Was there no-one he met of sufficient competence? They are probably the wrong questions; the choice of James and Jacobson is a positive one: they both fit and produce the posture of the TLS.

When Jeremy Treglown gave a paper about his conduct of the magazine it came out, especially under gentle pressure in questioning, that he has a mission — one of English civilisation. Defending the paper’s Anglocentric choice of texts and reviewers he ultimately said just that, that perhaps people around the world can learn something from it. The casualness, the authority, the stereotyping of the James/Jacobson technique has a long imper­ial history. The dear old tanks do carry weapons.

Elsewhere in this Australian special, other items occupy the terrain seized by the heavyweights. A lengthy review of Australian history by Alan Sykes of St Andrew’s has an interior fantasy of history as native bush notes not too wild. Guardedly mocking Manning Clark, nerving himself to devide people’s history and, women’s history, Sykes treats evident success much as Murray and Moorhouse were deployed, presenting Stuart Macintyre’s prize­winning volume in the Oxford History of Australia not as a testimony to what new history can do, but as a falsified model of antique verities, a stick with which to beat the unruly natives.

The same motif, sadly, is found in Peter Porter’s piece on Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay. Porter has seemed like the acceptable face of humanism, a sensitive, hard-working fellow of decent instincts. Perhaps it’s just not enough these professionalizing days. He essays to criticise this book in ways that take him out of his depth. He attacks Carter’s postmodernism on the grounds of ‘common sense’, which shows he hasn’t read so basic a text as Kelsey’s Critical Practice; he derides Carter’s construction of Botany Bay as the ‘other’ to Port Jackson, and that shows basic Saussurean illiteracy. A reviewer’s incompetence to handle a topic must reflect on the editor who gave the commission, and both here point to an ill-informed attempt to exercise control at a distance.

Distance need not disqualify entirely. Peter Conrad is a regularly occasional visitor who spends enough time and works hard enough here to make his piece on art history books technically precise and up to date, though showing a slightly imperious distaste for Tim Bonyhady’s role as a ‘compiler of footnotes’. More of that compilatory spirit would have helped the other reviewers. And it is certainly a great strength in Murray Bail’s fine essay on past images of Australian in art and letters. A returned expatriate. Bail has the detail of a scholar as well as creative fluency, without the self-privileging of even the most mock-modest of the other reviewers. But perhaps because he just gets on with it, the piece seems underprivileged by the paper. It starts on the note page and is soon switched to the back of the paper.

Even later comes a matching example of locally produced straight work, no faking, no fancy stuff, in Gerald Murnane’s demotically subtle account of his father and family moving and meandering through the Victorian grasslands. It’s a type of Australian art quite undescribable in terms of Jacobson’s factitious paradigm or James’s faded syntagm. At once simple and deep, traditional and modern, realist and experimental, this and Bail’s piece arc solid, absorbing texts towards comprehending an Australian culture, the proper topic of a special issue.

The reviews, by and large fail to reach that standard. With one exception. The best piece in this issue is also the shortest — or the only one of normal length. Its author is also unique, in being the only woman, and then unique for being Sylvia Lawson, with so much experience, knowledge and writing talent. Her assault on Ross Terill’s The Australians: In Search of an Identity is a mode of sharp-edged and expert reviewing; it can also stand as a summary of what is wrong with the planning and writing of this debilitating issue of the TLS.

Lawson counter-attacks Terrill for a lack of real research and being enmeshed in ‘colour supplement detail’. Alone of the reviewers, she deserves quotation. First description:

The outcome is a tourist’s haul of snapshots, very few of them in focus, with stereotypical impressionism on cities and regions, caution on multi-culturalism and Aborigines, and much hedging of bets.

Then analysis:

Dogged by an awkward presence called ‘Australia’, he tries to buy it off by wrapping up the problems in a smooth question-and-answer pack.

That, her last word on Terrill, will stand as a summary of this whole TLS, this overlordly enterprise.