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Absolutely Revolting

December 2006–January 2007, no. 287

Welcome to the December 2006–January 2007 issue of Australian Book Review. 

Neal Blewett reviews A Thinking Reed by Barry Jones
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Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of ...
Book 1 Title: A Thinking Reed
Book Author: Barry Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $55 hb, 572 pp, 978174114387X
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Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of which Jones himself is aware. There is little in his political career to explain this phenomenon. An assiduous figure in the Victorian Labor Opposition for five years, he was a junior minister for six years in the Hawke government, in his own words ‘a minister low in the food chain … [who had a] chequered career as Minister for Science’; he was then ‘defenestrated’ as a minister by his own Centre-Left faction, only to be resurrected as National Party President on and off during the years of Labor’s decline and fall. How does this scarcely stellar political career translate into such enduring popularity?

A clue may lie in parallels with Pauline Hanson, whose ‘preliterate approach’ to politics Jones despised. Both Hanson and Jones radiate a kind of childlike quality, innocents abroad in a world of feral adults. Yet despite her naïveté, Hanson shook the liberal verities of Australian politics, while, despite his innocence, Jones has been a remarkable accumulator of political patronage. Moreover, just as Hanson’s popularity derived from her ‘not being one of them’ (a politician), so his derives from being so much more than a politician. In an age in which politicians rank low in public esteem, being more than, less than or just not one of them is an invaluable political asset. And Jones is perhaps the most extraordinary polymath ever to have sat in an Australian parliament.

Quiz king, politician, ambassador, author, traveller, cultural commissar in the arts, education and film, adjunct professor, Cambridge college fellow – the range of his roles boggles the imagination. He was a seminal figure in the revival of the film industry in Australia in the 1970s; his book Sleepers, Wake! (1982) is one of the more important works published by an Australian in the latter part of the twentieth century; The Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (1981, 1986, 1989) was a monumental achievement; and for a decade he was at the heart of UNESCO, first as Australian executive board member, and then as ambassador.

Read more: Neal Blewett reviews 'A Thinking Reed' by Barry Jones

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Fred Ludowyk reviews A Conga Line of Suckholes: Mark Latham’s book of quotations by Mark Latham
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Article Title: ‘Young ambition’s ladder’
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This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.
Book 1 Title: A Conga Line of Suckholes
Book 1 Subtitle: Mark Latham’s book of quotations
Book Author: Mark Latham
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $24.95 hb, 246 pp
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This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

Read more: Fred Ludowyk reviews 'A Conga Line of Suckholes: Mark Latham’s book of quotations' by Mark Latham

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Contents Category: Books of the Year
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Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.
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Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

Read more: Books of the Year 2006

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Joel Deane reviews Days Like These by Michael Gurr
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Article Title: The legendary ‘Fuck!’ speech
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Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Gurr’s speech for the 1999 campaign – one made famous by the unexpected defeat of Premier Jeff Kennett – was launched in Ballarat. The 2006 campaign will be launched in Ballarat. Gurr is known in Labor circles as a ‘creative type’ (read: prolific, award-winning playwright of works such as Jerusalem and Sex Diary of an Infidel). I am also known as a ‘creative type’ (novelist and poet). And yet, despite all these coincidences and intersecting lines, not to mention the backbench of associates we have in common, Gurr and I had never met when a speech request landed on my desk a while back with the title ‘Michael Gurr book launch’. Of course, I knew of Gurr. Sort of.
Book 1 Title: Days Like These
Book Author: Michael Gurr
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $24.95 pb, 296 pp
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Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Read more: Joel Deane reviews 'Days Like These' by Michael Gurr

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters - December 2006 – January 2007
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Tamas Pataki opens his review of Antony Loewenstein’s My Israel Question (October 2006) with a lengthy denunciation of the recent war in Lebanon. He decries Israel’s counterattack against Hezbollah as an ‘atrocity’, citing the ‘awful statistics’ of Lebanon’s larger casualty toll as evidence of the Jewish state’s nefariousness. But this is a curious calculus that ignores questions of who breached the peace by attacking whom, and the ethics of using civilians to shield military operations. The fatuousness of Pataki’s moral yardstick becomes apparent when it is applied to World War II. Germany suffered far greater casualties than the Western Allies. Surely this did not confer upon Nazism the status of righteous victim in that conflict. Pataki uncritically parrots Loewenstein’s contention that Israel’s ‘illegal occupation’ is the ‘cause of legitimate Palestinian resistance’. If by ‘occupation’ he means the territories captured by Israel in 1967, the timeline of conflict tells a different story. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was founded in 1964 with the goal of Israel’s destruction. Arab violence against Jewish communities in the Holy Land even preceded the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. So it seems that the ‘cause’ of terrorism is, after all, not Israel’s presence in the West Bank but, rather, Israel’s presence in any form.
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Parroting Loewenstein

Dear Editor,

Tamas Pataki opens his review of Antony Loewenstein’s My Israel Question (October 2006) with a lengthy denunciation of the recent war in Lebanon. He decries Israel’s counterattack against Hezbollah as an ‘atrocity’, citing the ‘awful statistics’ of Lebanon’s larger casualty toll as evidence of the Jewish state’s nefariousness. But this is a curious calculus that ignores questions of who breached the peace by attacking whom, and the ethics of using civilians to shield military operations. The fatuousness of Pataki’s moral yardstick becomes apparent when it is applied to World War II. Germany suffered far greater casualties than the Western Allies. Surely this did not confer upon Nazism the status of righteous victim in that conflict. Pataki uncritically parrots Loewenstein’s contention that Israel’s ‘illegal occupation’ is the ‘cause of legitimate Palestinian resistance’. If by ‘occupation’ he means the territories captured by Israel in 1967, the timeline of conflict tells a different story. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was founded in 1964 with the goal of Israel’s destruction. Arab violence against Jewish communities in the Holy Land even preceded the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. So it seems that the ‘cause’ of terrorism is, after all, not Israel’s presence in the West Bank but, rather, Israel’s presence in any form.

Read more: Letters - December 2006 – January 2007

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Contents Category: Books of the Year
Custom Article Title: Best Children's and Young Adult Books
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Kathy Kozlowski

The Library Lion (Walker), by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes, is an almost perfect traditional picture book about a gentle creature who becomes enamoured of his local library. It tells a riveting story of misunderstandings made right, and has a really satisfying ending. Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything (Allen & Unwin) is an elegant little book, told from the perspective of a sensitive child, whose family is saved from the power of angry religious fervour by neighbourly kindness and common sense. 
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Kathy Kozlowski

The Library Lion (Walker), by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes, is an almost perfect traditional picture book about a gentle creature who becomes enamoured of his local library. It tells a riveting story of misunderstandings made right, and has a really satisfying ending. Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything (Allen & Unwin) is an elegant little book, told from the perspective of a sensitive child, whose family is saved from the power of angry religious fervour by neighbourly kindness and common sense. I love the modern fable The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Candlewick), by Kate DiCamillo, a great family read-aloud and a moral fable for all ages narrating the travels and adventures of a haughty china rabbit. Last, but not least, Simmone Howell’s Notes from the Teenage Underground (Pan Macmillan), in which three suburban teenagers relieve summer boredom with ‘alternative, underground stuff’, is raw and edgy, and full of sharply observed characters. 

Read more: Best Children's and Young Adult Books 2003

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Sylvia Lawson reviews Building a Masterpiece: The Sydney Opera House edited by Anne Watson
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Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998).  It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contributions and in her orchestration of others. She has understood that there can be many sides to such a story; the way politics and culture have been entangled in this building’s history gives rise to questions worth unpacking indefinitely.   
Book 1 Title: Building a Masterpiece
Book 1 Subtitle: The Sydney Opera House
Book Author: Anne Watson
Book 1 Biblio: Powerhouse Publishing, $55 pb, 191 pp
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Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998).  It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contributions and in her orchestration of others. She has understood that there can be many sides to such a story; the way politics and culture have been entangled in this building’s history gives rise to questions worth unpacking indefinitely.          

Sarah Gregson begins her chapter with Bertolt Brecht’s lines: ‘Who built the seven towers of Thebes? / The books are filled with the names of kings. / Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?’ She records that between 1959 and 1973 some ten thousand people, of thirty-two different nationalities, worked on the Opera House, and that Bennelong Point, like the Snowy River a decade earlier, was a place where Australians of many origins learned to live together. It wasn’t far up Macquarie Street to the state Parliament House, and in a period marked by incessant political and industrial action, ‘[that] short distance’, Gregson comments, ‘was a road well-trodden’.

Read more: Sylvia Lawson reviews 'Building a Masterpiece: The Sydney Opera House' edited by Anne Watson

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Peter Rose reviews ‘The Oxford Book of American Poetry’ by David Lehman
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Thirty years have passed since Richard Ellmann’s magisterial New Oxford Book of American Verse: a hard act to follow. Now David Lehman – poet and founder of the Best American Poetry series – has produced a successor. It is even longer than the Ellmann, and similarly generous in its individual choices. There is no stinting here, no mark of the tyranny of permissions that blights so many anthologies. Walt Whitman gets seventy poems; Emily Dickinson (who published a handful in her lifetime) has forty-three, including the cautionary ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man’.
Book 1 Title: The Oxford Book of American Poetry
Book Author: David Lehman
Book 1 Biblio: OUP, $75 hb, 1189 pp
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Thirty years have passed since Richard Ellmann’s magisterial New Oxford Book of American Verse: a hard act to follow. Now David Lehman – poet and founder of the Best American Poetry series – has produced a successor. It is even longer than the Ellmann, and similarly generous in its individual choices. There is no stinting here, no mark of the tyranny of permissions that blights so many anthologies. Walt Whitman gets seventy poems; Emily Dickinson (who published a handful in her lifetime) has forty-three, including the cautionary ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man’.

Read more: Peter Rose reviews ‘The Oxford Book of American Poetry’ by David Lehman

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Peter Rose reviews ‘Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir’ by Robert Hughes and ‘North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs, Volume IV’ by Clive James
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In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)
Book 1 Title: Things I Didn’t Know
Book 1 Subtitle: A Memoir
Book Author: Robert Hughes
Book 1 Biblio: Knopf, $55 hb, 513 pp
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Book 2 Title: North Face of Soho
Book 2 Subtitle: Unreliable Memoirs, Volume IV
Book 2 Author: Clive James
Book 2 Biblio: Picador, $32.95 pb, 264 pp
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In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)

Read more: Peter Rose reviews ‘Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir’ by Robert Hughes and ‘North Face of Soho:...

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Michael McGirr reviews Church Alive! Pilgrimages in faith 1956–2006 by Greg Dening
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There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.
Book 1 Title: Church Alive!
Book 1 Subtitle: Pilgrimages in faith 1956–2006
Book Author: Greg Dening
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $44.95 hb, 289 pp, 0868408433
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There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

Read more: Michael McGirr reviews 'Church Alive! Pilgrimages in faith 1956–2006' by Greg Dening

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Brian McFarlane reviews Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
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‘As far as books are concerned, I find life no help at all. Books grow out of other books.’ So said the great Ivy Compton-Burnett, and her comment is at least partly pertinent in relation to Lloyd Jones’s luminous Mister Pip, trailing as it does clouds of Dickensian glory. Increasingly, there seems to be a sub-genre of novels that have their roots in other novels. Some of these are vile, like Emma Tennant’s vulgarly opportunist Pemberley Revisited: or Pride and Prejudice Continued (2005) and Emma in Love (1996), which traduce two great novels. Others work more evocatively, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a post-colonial reimagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the madwoman in the attic, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which, with elliptic brilliance, re-situates Magwitch at the heart of the narrative of Great Expectations (1860–61).
Book 1 Title: Mister Pip
Book Author: Lloyd Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $29.95 pb, 220 pp, 1921145579
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‘As far as books are concerned, I find life no help at all. Books grow out of other books.’ So said the great Ivy Compton-Burnett, and her comment is at least partly pertinent in relation to Lloyd Jones’s luminous Mister Pip, trailing as it does clouds of Dickensian glory. Increasingly, there seems to be a sub-genre of novels that have their roots in other novels. Some of these are vile, like Emma Tennant’s vulgarly opportunist Pemberley Revisited: or Pride and Prejudice Continued (2005) and Emma in Love (1996), which traduce two great novels. Others work more evocatively, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a post-colonial reimagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the madwoman in the attic, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which, with elliptic brilliance, re-situates Magwitch at the heart of the narrative of Great Expectations (1860–61).

Read more: Brian McFarlane reviews 'Mister Pip' by Lloyd Jones

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John Rickard reviews The Patrician and the Bloke: Geoffrey Serle and the making of Australian history by John Thompson
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On the eve of the recent history summit, Education Minister Julie Bishop told an audience, which included some notable historians, that history was not peace studies, nor was it ‘social justice awareness week’, nor, for that matter, ‘conscious-raising about ecological sustainability’. History, she declared, was simply history: though when she went on to assert that ‘there was much to be proud of in the history of Australia’, it did seem that she might have an agenda of her own tucked away in her ideological handbag
Book 1 Title: The Patrician and The Bloke
Book 1 Subtitle: Geoffrey Serle and the making of Australian history
Book Author: John Thompson
Book 1 Biblio: Pandanus, $34.95 pb, 397 pp, 1740761529
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On the eve of the recent history summit, Education Minister Julie Bishop told an audience, which included some notable historians, that history was not peace studies, nor was it ‘social justice awareness week’, nor, for that matter, ‘conscious-raising about ecological sustainability’. History, she declared, was simply history: though when she went on to assert that ‘there was much to be proud of in the history of Australia’, it did seem that she might have an agenda of her own tucked away in her ideological handbag. If given the opportunity, some of the historians assembled at the summit could have told her quite a bit about how the study of Australian history has evolved, and what the significance of that enterprise has been for different generations of historians. But oxygen can be in short supply at a summit, and Ms Bishop had only a day to spare for history. It would be good, however, if she or her advisers could find time to read John Thompson’s The Patrician and the Bloke: Geoffrey Serle and the Making of Australian History, for it would give them some understanding of the kind of issues that have been involved in the teaching and writing of Australian history.

Read more: John Rickard reviews 'The Patrician and the Bloke: Geoffrey Serle and the making of Australian...

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Aviva Tuffield reviews The Travel Writer by Simone Lazaroo
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Anyone who has read Simone Lazaroo’s novel The Australian Fiancé (2000) will find many echoes in her latest work, The Travel Writer. That earlier book follows a young Eurasian woman, who had been kept by the Japanese as a comfort woman during the war, while she is being courted by a wealthy Australian. He lures her back to Broome with the promise of marriage, but the relationship collapses under the twin burdens of Australian racism and her traumatic past, which comes back to haunt her in devastating ways.
Book 1 Title: The Travel Writer
Book Author: Simone Lazaroo
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $32.95 pb, 310 pp, 0330422561
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Anyone who has read Simone Lazaroo’s novel The Australian Fiancé (2000) will find many echoes in her latest work, The Travel Writer. That earlier book follows a young Eurasian woman, who had been kept by the Japanese as a comfort woman during the war, while she is being courted by a wealthy Australian. He lures her back to Broome with the promise of marriage, but the relationship collapses under the twin burdens of Australian racism and her traumatic past, which comes back to haunt her in devastating ways.

In The Travel Writer, Lazaroo once again focuses on the experiences of Eurasian women at the hands of white men, weaving a dual tale that shuttles back and forth in time. One strand, set in London in 1985, is narrated by Isabelle de Sequeira, whose mother, Ghislaine, is dying of cancer. Isabelle, who has a young daughter and has recently separated from her husband, divides her days between hospital visits, her horticultural job at Kew Gardens, and an ongoing yet futile affair with her middle-aged writing tutor. The other narrative thread, entitled ‘The True Body’ and occupying the bulk of the novel, recounts Ghislaine’s life and that of her parents in Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s. As Malaccan Eurasians – mixed-race descendants of the sixteenth-century Portuguese colonisers – Ghislaine’s family embodies the legacy of imperialism; they are considered outsiders by both the Malays and the white expatriates. While still at school, Ghislaine becomes enchanted by an English travel writer more than twice her age. Her father sends her off to the Cameron Highlands to escape his influence, where she is soon unhappily married to an ageing British tea planter, but the travel writer’s spell has been cast, and his words and presence will shape her life.

Read more: Aviva Tuffield reviews 'The Travel Writer' by Simone Lazaroo

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Robert Phiddian reviews The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s adventures in Australia by Mark Twain, with an introduction by Don Watson
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Reading Mark Twain on Australia in the 1890s is a bit like watching Shane Warne bowl these days: you sense the playing up to the audience and an undignified element of hustle; a tendency to rely on the old tricks to fill the space and manufacture the laughs/wickets. And yet there’s no doubting the copiousness of the art, no resisting the tarnished genius on display. Sure, it would be nice to have more of the early Twain’s concentrated wit, and less reliance on showmanship, but to unwish this account of his antipodean travels would be aesthetically, emotionally, even morally wrong.
Book 1 Title: The Wayward Tourist
Book 1 Subtitle: Mark Twain's adventures in Australia
Book Author: Mark Twain, with an introduction by Don Watson
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $29.95 hb, 206 pp, 0522853129
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Reading Mark Twain on Australia in the 1890s is a bit like watching Shane Warne bowl these days: you sense the playing up to the audience and an undignified element of hustle; a tendency to rely on the old tricks to fill the space and manufacture the laughs/wickets. And yet there’s no doubting the copiousness of the art, no resisting the tarnished genius on display. Sure, it would be nice to have more of the early Twain’s concentrated wit, and less reliance on showmanship, but to unwish this account of his antipodean travels would be aesthetically, emotionally, even morally wrong.

Twain came to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania in 1895 as part of a world tour designed to clear debts. He was nearing sixty, with a global literary fame only defeated by the sort of business sense that usually leads people into university administration. Just before he settled near London to write about the whole journey, he learned that his daughter Susy had died of spinal meningitis back in New York. So the biographical evidence suggests that he came to the colonies tired and motivated by a need to turn fame into dollars; that he wrote the passages reproduced in The Wayward Tourist in a state of deep depression. Moreover, the colonies were only beginning to recover from the depression of the early 1890s, and the countryside was showing early signs of the Federation drought, the one whose records are only now being surpassed. All the ingredients for a jeremiad were present.

Read more: Robert Phiddian reviews 'The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s adventures in Australia' by Mark Twain,...

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Alison Broinowski reviews Us and Them: A journalist’s investigation of media, Muslims and the Middle East by Peter Manning
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The timing of Peter Manning’s book, in which he seeks more Australian empathy with Muslims, was exquisite. The mufti of Australia in September urged the opposite, telling his flock that Jews and Christians were ‘the most evil of God’s creation on the face of the earth’. He also had colourful things to say about women being responsible if men turn to crime, or commit rape or adultery. Of course, the media overlooked Taj Din al-Hilaly’s interesting view that the axis of evil is Jewish and Christian. They also ignored his peculiar take on criminology. As usual, sex was what sold, giving the government a useful diversion from its floundering on climate change and the quagmire in Iraq.
Book 1 Title: Us and Them
Book 1 Subtitle: A journalist’s investigation of media, Muslims and the Middle East
Book Author: Peter Manning
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $34.95 pb, 313 pp, 009183693X
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The timing of Peter Manning’s book, in which he seeks more Australian empathy with Muslims, was exquisite. The mufti of Australia in September urged the opposite, telling his flock that Jews and Christians were ‘the most evil of God’s creation on the face of the earth’. He also had colourful things to say about women being responsible if men turn to crime, or commit rape or adultery. Of course, the media overlooked Taj Din al-Hilaly’s interesting view that the axis of evil is Jewish and Christian. They also ignored his peculiar take on criminology. As usual, sex was what sold, giving the government a useful diversion from its floundering on climate change and the quagmire in Iraq.

Young Muslim men are now serving record sentences for widely publicised gang-rapes in Sydney, but more child molesters, gang rapists, serial killers, wife and child murderers, batterers, threateners and stalkers in Australia are non-Muslims. It wasn’t Muslims who were responsible for the Sutton forest backpacker murders, the Queensland hostel fire, the Port Arthur massacre, the Snowtown barrel bodies, the Peter Falconio shooting, the Norfolk Island killing or the cruise ship drug death. What do these have in common? Obviously, not that Muslims were culpable, but that men did them, somewhere in Australia.

Read more: Alison Broinowski reviews 'Us and Them: A journalist’s investigation of media, Muslims and the...

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Donald Friend (1915–89) was one of Australia’s most prolific and widely travelled artists. Forty-four of his diaries are held in the National Library of Australia’s Manuscript Collection (individual diaries are held by the National Gallery of Australia and the James Hardie Library of Australian Fine Arts at the State Library of Queensland). The National Library also has items that are part of the important body of work that Friend produced in handcrafting thirteen lavishly illustrated manuscripts, largely in the last two decades of his life: ‘Birds from the Magic Mountain’; ‘Ayam-Ayam Kesayangan, Volume 3’; and ‘The Story of Jonah’ and ‘Bumbooziana’. These projects saw him develop the skills that he had honed for nearly forty years, in his illustrated diaries and earlier publishing ventures, into a highly sophisticated artistic practice, not unlike that of a medieval calligrapher but with the licence to do as he wanted.
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Donald Friend (1915–89) was one of Australia’s most prolific and widely travelled artists. Forty-four of his diaries are held in the National Library of Australia’s Manuscript Collection (individual diaries are held by the National Gallery of Australia and the James Hardie Library of Australian Fine Arts at the State Library of Queensland). The National Library also has items that are part of the important body of work that Friend produced in handcrafting thirteen lavishly illustrated manuscripts, largely in the last two decades of his life: ‘Birds from the Magic Mountain’; ‘Ayam-Ayam Kesayangan, Volume 3’; and ‘The Story of Jonah’ and ‘Bumbooziana’. These projects saw him develop the skills that he had honed for nearly forty years, in his illustrated diaries and earlier publishing ventures, into a highly sophisticated artistic practice, not unlike that of a medieval calligrapher but with the licence to do as he wanted.

Read more: Antipodean Boswell by Paul Hetherington

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Kate McFadyen reviews Southerly, Vol. 66, No. 1, Health Lines edited by David Brooks and Noel Rowe and Griffith Review 13: The next best thing edited by Julianne Schultz with Marni Cordell
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One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not all young people today fit the conservative–materialist stereotype the media is so fond of.
Book 1 Title: Southerly
Book 1 Subtitle: Vol. 66, No. 1, Health Lines
Book Author: David Brooks and Noel Rowe
Book 1 Biblio: Brandl & Schlesinger, $26.95 pb, 203 pp, 1876040815
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Book 2 Title: Griffith Review 13
Book 2 Subtitle: The next best thing
Book 2 Author: Julianne Schultz (with Marni Cordell)
Book 2 Biblio: $19.95 pb, 286 pp, 0733319386
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One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not all young people today fit the conservative–materialist stereotype the media is so fond of. He cites contrasting images of long-haired bellbottom-clad protestors ‘confronting Special Branch detectives in brown suits and unruly sideburns’, with snaps taken from a 1967 issue of the University of Queensland’s student newspaper, Semper Floreat, depicting masses of male students in the ‘refec’ wearing ties. The ‘young fogey’ tag, which is regularly attached to Generation Y, is similarly false and self-serving:

Whichever way youth is represented, it’s a problem. The emotional appeal in the picture of the ‘Howard youth’ reaches beyond the conservative commentators. Phillip Adams fans can comfort themselves with another stereotype – they, the original radicals, knew how to do youth better than the young.

It is precisely this possessive stake in youthful experiences which makes this such a potent topic. It feels good to reflect nostalgically upon past experiences, importing them into the present as evidence of how good it was then, even when it was bad. The danger lies in seeking comfort in easy clichés and failing to respect varieties of experience. The best pieces in this issue, including those by Tara June Winch, Sally Breen and Hazel Dooney, resist nostalgia and seek a more nuanced understanding of social trends.

Read more: Kate McFadyen reviews 'Southerly, Vol. 66, No. 1, Health Lines' edited by David Brooks and Noel...

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 80 Great Poems: From Chaucer to now edited by Geoff Page
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Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.
Book 1 Title: 80 Great Poems
Book 1 Subtitle: From Chaucer to now
Book Author: Geoff Page
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press $34.95 pb, 335 pp, 0868409243
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Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.

That dismantling of the literary canon, which had seemed so important thirty years ago, has done its job: it has enabled the voices of women writers and of writers from ethnic subcultures to be heard. But now it lingers, rather more as a nuisance than as an opening of the doors. In the absence of some sense of literary canons or main traditions, some awareness that certain works are immensely better than most others, it is damned hard to teach, hard to learn any-thing substantial, because the relevant books are not kept in print, and the relevant anthologies cannot be found: unless the shapelessly huge Norton volumes are called upon, expensively.

Read more: Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews '80 Great Poems: From Chaucer to now' edited by Geoff Page

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Those who come after

Nine months ago, in association with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), ABR announced the creation of a major new annual essay prize. In doing so we were conscious of the importance of the genre and of ABR’s long commitment to its preservation and promulgation. We set out to attract entries from the widest range of Australian writers (not just celebrated essayists). In order to entice a distinguished field, the Calibre Prize was valued at $10,000.
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Those who come after

Nine months ago, in association with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), ABR announced the creation of a major new annual essay prize. In doing so we were conscious of the importance of the genre and of ABR’s long commitment to its preservation and promulgation. We set out to attract entries from the widest range of Australian writers (not just celebrated essayists). In order to entice a distinguished field, the Calibre Prize was valued at $10,000.

We can now report that Calibre, in its first year, is a success. We received almost 120 entries. Inevitably, not all of them were of the highest order. Some functioned (may even have been written) as academic exercises; others read like chapters in a life-writing exercise, admittedly with subjective interest, but with little of the essay’s discrete, rounded appeal. Defining an essay, of course, is the quickest route to madness. The three judges – Kerryn Goldsworthy (a former Editor of ABR), Peter Rose (the current Editor) and Imre Salusinszky (editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Essays) – were liberal in their view of what constitutes an engaging, pertinent essay. Voice … address … lightness … compactness … reread-ability… these terms came up often in their conversations, as they set out to identify the most outstanding essay.

Read more: Advances | December 2006 - January 2007

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Mary Eagle reviews Bert & Ned: The correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan edited by Patrick McCaughey
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A book of letters between ‘Bert’ and ‘Ned’ resonates nicely with the famous letters of Smike to Bulldog, published in 1946, the year young Albert Tucker completed his first images of Modern Evil, and Sidney Nolan began his first Ned Kelly paintings. The fascination of this correspondence, between artists destined to be as famous for their period as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts for theirs, is that it shows them flirting. ‘Bert’ tries to be graceful, ‘Ned’ to be scrupulous; both with an eye to history.
Book 1 Title: Bert & Ned
Book 1 Subtitle: The correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan
Book Author: Patrick McCaughey
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $49.95 hb, 263 pp, 0522852610
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A book of letters between ‘Bert’ and ‘Ned’ resonates nicely with the famous letters of Smike to Bulldog, published in 1946, the year young Albert Tucker completed his first images of Modern Evil, and Sidney Nolan began his first Ned Kelly paintings. The fascination of this correspondence, between artists destined to be as famous for their period as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts for theirs, is that it shows them flirting. ‘Bert’ tries to be graceful, ‘Ned’ to be scrupulous; both with an eye to history.

Nolan, in Patrick McCaughey’s words, ‘possessed great charm, and was socially easy, light of touch, witty but a withheld self, easy to get along with and hard to know’. Whereas Tucker, in the words of Robert Hughes, was ‘difficult … brutally shrewd, obsessed with reputation … the victim of his own abrasive honesty, a man with no mask. “Why should I try to get on with people? … I don’t like people! Most of them are destructive bastards!”’ Their painting styles were no more likely to merge than their personalities: hence their friendship – surprisingly for these notoriously difficult men – was unruffled by rivalry.

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Tom Griffiths reviews Burn: The epis story of bushfire in Australia by Paul Collins
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In November 2002 Paul Collins fulfilled ‘that dream of the urban middle class’ and bought a bush block and a shack in the Snowy Mountains ‘where I could be close to the environment’. In late January 2003 his block was scorched by probably the most widespread bushfire since European settlement, and certainly the worst one since the horrific bushfires of 1939. Those two archetypal fires – Black Friday 1939 and the alpine fires of 2002–03 – are the events around which the author has shaped a narrative of bushfire over two hundred years. His strong account of the Canberra fires of 2003 reminds us that they were the outer edge of a massive alpine event.
Book 1 Title: Burn
Book 1 Subtitle: The epic story of bushfire in Australia
Book Author: Paul Collins
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $35 pb, 420 pp, 1741750539
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In November 2002 Paul Collins fulfilled ‘that dream of the urban middle class’ and bought a bush block and a shack in the Snowy Mountains ‘where I could be close to the environment’. In late January 2003 his block was scorched by probably the most widespread bushfire since European settlement, and certainly the worst one since the horrific bushfires of 1939. Those two archetypal fires – Black Friday 1939 and the alpine fires of 2002–03 – are the events around which the author has shaped a narrative of bushfire over two hundred years. His strong account of the Canberra fires of 2003 reminds us that they were the outer edge of a massive alpine event.

Drawing especially on newspaper accounts, Collins offers a vivid narrative of bushfires in which he focuses on the human dimensions of the drama. His history is full of personal heroism and tragedy. The author is determined that the awesome force of nature that is fire should not overwhelm the particularities of human suffering and survival. This was, for me, the most impressive feature of the book. Collins tells the individual stories – a myriad of them – and together they effectively carry the central argument of the book, which is that fire is ‘part of the very fabric of our continent’, a positive and renewing force that Australians must learn to live with. The writing is clear and compelling, and the relentless cascade of human drama in the face of fire confronts one with its ubiquity and power.

Read more: Tom Griffiths reviews 'Burn: The epis story of bushfire in Australia' by Paul Collins

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Mandy Swann reviews A Poets Life 1963-2005 by Marjorie Pizer
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A Poet’s Life is a selection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry that covers forty-two years of writing and the filaments of love, grief and quotidian beauty that are emblems of her work. Drawing together poems from fifteen previous volumes, A Poet’s Life merges this Sydney poet’s characteristic themes and styles, fulfilling its promise to be the ‘definitive collection’. Throughout her career, Pizer writes of hidden worlds where ‘invisible rays’ bind microcosm to macrocosm, and where individuals are gently fused in an interdependent unity. However, she frequently returns to hidden disunities: wars, stolen children, environmental calamities and emotional wounds. Pizer offers up poetry as the keeper of the dead; the keeper of those questions and answers bequeathed to us by our ancestors and our descendants.
Book 1 Title: A Poet's Life 1963-2005
Book Author: Marjorie Pizer
Book 1 Biblio: Pinchgut Press, $30 pb, 122 pp, 0975810960
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A Poet’s Life is a selection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry that covers forty-two years of writing and the filaments of love, grief and quotidian beauty that are emblems of her work. Drawing together poems from fifteen previous volumes, A Poet’s Life merges this Sydney poet’s characteristic themes and styles, fulfilling its promise to be the ‘definitive collection’. Throughout her career, Pizer writes of hidden worlds where ‘invisible rays’ bind microcosm to macrocosm, and where individuals are gently fused in an interdependent unity. However, she frequently returns to hidden disunities: wars, stolen children, environmental calamities and emotional wounds. Pizer offers up poetry as the keeper of the dead; the keeper of those questions and answers bequeathed to us by our ancestors and our descendants.

Read more: Mandy Swann reviews 'A Poet's Life 1963-2005' by Marjorie Pizer

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Jay Thompson reviews Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements by Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer
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Activist Wisdom is the latest addition to the field of studies about Australian social movements. The authors, Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, are academics who aim to take ‘knowledge from the streets back into the academy’. They try to do this by considering how ‘practical knowledge’ (that is, the knowledge that activists have gained ‘from experience’) has contributed to the survival of different movements.
Book 1 Title: Activist Wisdom
Book 1 Subtitle: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements
Book Author: Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 284 pp, 0868406864
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Activist Wisdom is the latest addition to the field of studies about Australian social movements. The authors, Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, are academics who aim to take ‘knowledge from the streets back into the academy’. They try to do this by considering how ‘practical knowledge’ (that is, the knowledge that activists have gained ‘from experience’) has contributed to the survival of different movements.

Throughout the book, Maddison and Scalmer provide excerpts from interviews with a range of activists. These include feminists, indigenous rights campaigners, gay and lesbian liberationists, and those under the (albeit rather broad) rubric of ‘anti-capitalists’. The authors use these interviews to help determine the ‘thoughts and ideas that drive social movements’. They also investigate the ways that activists pass on important ‘skills and strategies’ to one another.

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Annie Condon reviews Allnighter edited by Cardigan Press
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Cardigan Press’s third offering, Allnighter, promises to keep its reader’s attention all night long, with ‘fiction that burns at both ends’. With forty-four short pieces in this beautifully designed book, the challenge is not to devour the book all at once, but to give each story the time and consideration it deserves.

One of the joys of this anthology is that the stories are of varying length, ranging from two to eleven pages. This allows the writers to demonstrate a feel for their story and characters. Another advantage is that many of the writers are unknown and not constrained by theme, number of words, or the weight of expectations. Their stories are vivid, playful and unusual.
Book 1 Title: Allnighter
Book Author: Cardigan Press
Book 1 Biblio: Cardigan Press, $22 pb, 294 pp, 0958130434
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Cardigan Press’s third offering, Allnighter, promises to keep its reader’s attention all night long, with ‘fiction that burns at both ends’. With forty-four short pieces in this beautifully designed book, the challenge is not to devour the book all at once, but to give each story the time and consideration it deserves.

One of the joys of this anthology is that the stories are of varying length, ranging from two to eleven pages. This allows the writers to demonstrate a feel for their story and characters. Another advantage is that many of the writers are unknown and not constrained by theme, number of words, or the weight of expectations. Their stories are vivid, playful and unusual.

Read more: Annie Condon reviews 'Allnighter' edited by Cardigan Press

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Rebecca Starford reviews Emails from the Edge: A journey through troubled times by Ken Haley
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Expulsion from Syria on suspicion of terrorism; an encounter with someone who might be Osama bin Laden in a Tehran bazaar; expulsion from the Hungarian parliament in hand-cuffs; an interview with the editor-in-chief of al-Jazeera: this gripping sequence of events reads more like a synopsis of a John le Carré novel than Ken Haley’s two-year journey, as detailed in Emails from the Edge. In this extraordinary collection of reminiscences by the Walkley Award-winning journalist, Haley exhibits courage and gusto in travelling through the Middle East, Asia and Europe in a wheelchair.
Book 1 Title: Emails from the Edge
Book 1 Subtitle: A journey through troubled times
Book Author: Ken Haley
Book 1 Biblio: Transit Lounge, $32.95 pb, 350 pp, 0975022830
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Expulsion from Syria on suspicion of terrorism; an encounter with someone who might be Osama bin Laden in a Tehran bazaar; expulsion from the Hungarian parliament in hand-cuffs; an interview with the editor-in-chief of al-Jazeera: this gripping sequence of events reads more like a synopsis of a John le Carré novel than Ken Haley’s two-year journey, as detailed in Emails from the Edge. In this extraordinary collection of reminiscences by the Walkley Award-winning journalist, Haley exhibits courage and gusto in travelling through the Middle East, Asia and Europe in a wheelchair.

Read more: Rebecca Starford reviews 'Emails from the Edge: A journey through troubled times' by Ken Haley

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George Dunford reviews Silent Parts by John Charalambous
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Australian novels about World War I are typically tales of youth sacrificed and innocence destroyed in foreign lands for the Commonwealth. A good example is David Malouf’s coming-of-age novella, Fly Away Peter (1981). Nation and character matured simultaneously in the necessary baptism of fire. From the outset, John Charalambous’s second novel, Silent Parts, proves itself to be atypical and complex, with a forty-something anti-hero caught up in the not-so-Great War.
Book 1 Title: Silent Parts
Book Author: John Charalambous
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Australian novels about World War I are typically tales of youth sacrificed and innocence destroyed in foreign lands for the Commonwealth. A good example is David Malouf’s coming-of-age novella, Fly Away Peter (1981). Nation and character matured simultaneously in the necessary baptism of fire. From the outset, John Charalambous’s second novel, Silent Parts, proves itself to be atypical and complex, with a forty-something anti-hero caught up in the not-so-Great War.

Read more: George Dunford reviews 'Silent Parts' by John Charalambous

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Ryan Paine reviews The Island of Four Rivers by Christopher Morgan
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Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.
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Book Author: Christopher Morgan
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Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.

Both Morgan’s and Huxley’s main characters make their way to an exotic island to rescue it from degradation, only to fall in love with a native woman. Huxley’s character, Dr Poole, has a reason for undertaking his trip – botany, on a rescue mission to the United States after World War III – but Morgan’s Crabby Davis just sets off in his spare time to play the roles of hero, intellectual and romantic gardener, as the plot requires. We find out the premise for his journey toward the end of the book, 272 pages too late. Huxley’s novella is at least a surface-level dystopia; Morgan seems unsure whether he is telling an adventure story, an ethical thriller or a comical drama. The consistent tone of silly humour is unrelenting and undermines any serious theme that the book might have been dealing with – without ever being funny.

Read more: Ryan Paine reviews 'The Island of Four Rivers' by Christopher Morgan

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Chris Boyd reviews When Books Die: 15 Essays edited by Finlay Lloyd
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'Ours is a time when monstrous book-merchandising conglomerates ... are into readers like humpbacks into plankton.’ So thunders James Grieve in the third of fifteen essays in the slim but satisfying When Books Die. All respond to the title, the ‘subordinate clause premising a prediction’. The consensus here is that the book is unkillable, but Grieve looks on the dark side. Swatting a mosquito will never eradicate the fever, he writes. ‘The lethal virus nourished in the putrid medium of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to flourish and kill ...’ If he could, Grieve would eradicate the works of Nostradamus, Gibran and David Irving. He mounts a powerful case for the crime of ‘perverting the course of truth’ to be entered into our statutes.
Book 1 Title: When Books Die
Book 1 Subtitle: 15 Essays
Book Author: Finlay Lloyd
Book 1 Biblio: Finlay Lloyd, $25 pb, 149 pp
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‘Ours is a time when monstrous book-merchandising conglomerates ... are into readers like humpbacks into plankton.’ So thunders James Grieve in the third of fifteen essays in the slim but satisfying When Books Die. All respond to the title, the ‘subordinate clause premising a prediction’. The consensus here is that the book is unkillable, but Grieve looks on the dark side. Swatting a mosquito will never eradicate the fever, he writes. ‘The lethal virus nourished in the putrid medium of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to flourish and kill ...’ If he could, Grieve would eradicate the works of Nostradamus, Gibran and David Irving. He mounts a powerful case for the crime of ‘perverting the course of truth’ to be entered into our statutes.

Read more: Chris Boyd reviews 'When Books Die: 15 Essays' edited by Finlay Lloyd

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Christina Hill reviews Luca Antara: Passages in search of Australia by Martin Edmond
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This novel by New Zealand-born Martin Edmond is difficult to pin down. As I read it, I wondered which genre it belongs to. The narrative moves among various genres, blurring memoir, travelogue, conventional history, reflections upon the internal journeys offered by personal reading, anthropological record, meta-textual fiction as postmodern mystery, even hoax. The unnamed narrator is a professional writer and researcher, thus suggesting an autobiographical element, and his considered reflection on the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax is perhaps the clue to the ‘fiction’ that ultimately engages him; that is, the mysterious document he receives that describes a Portuguese settlement near Darwin in the early seventeenth century.
Book 1 Title: Luca Antara
Book 1 Subtitle: Passages in search of Australia
Book Author: Martin Edmond
Book 1 Biblio: East Street Publications, $35 pb, 277 pp, 1741750547
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This novel by New Zealand-born Martin Edmond is difficult to pin down. As I read it, I wondered which genre it belongs to. The narrative moves among various genres, blurring memoir, travelogue, conventional history, reflections upon the internal journeys offered by personal reading, anthropological record, meta-textual fiction as postmodern mystery, even hoax. The unnamed narrator is a professional writer and researcher, thus suggesting an autobiographical element, and his considered reflection on the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax is perhaps the clue to the ‘fiction’ that ultimately engages him; that is, the mysterious document he receives that describes a Portuguese settlement near Darwin in the early seventeenth century.

The document comes from a Mr Henry Klang, of Melaka, a paranoid man of Portuguese descent who corresponds by e-mail with the narrator. Australia, or specifically the Kimberley, in the race memory of Portuguese colonists in Indonesia, was called ‘Luca Antara.’ What is the provenance of Klang’s story, the narrator wonders, as we ponder the status of the central story of this novel: truth or clever fiction? When the narrator finally meets Klang in Melaka, he promises to put Klang’s manuscript into his book. This is the book that we are now reading, presumably, but the narrator is now unsure of everything he has so far believed: ‘This encounter with the mercurial Mr Klang, or Carlo, or whoever he was, had a curious and unsettling effect on me. Everything started to look provisional, even, fictive.’

Read more: Christina Hill reviews 'Luca Antara: Passages in search of Australia' by Martin Edmond

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Kabita Dhara reviews Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland and The Cobblers Apprentice by Sandy McCutcheon
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Adrian Hyland spent many years living and working among indigenous people in the Northern Territory. His affection for and affinity with the people and the country are immediately evident. But whatever possessed him, in his first novel, to write in the voice of a young, half-Aboriginal woman? It is a testament to his skill and finely balanced writing that more has not been made of this fact, and that the reception to his novel has been mostly positive.
Book 1 Title: Diamond Dove
Book Author: Adrian Hyland
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $22.95 pb, 330 pp, 1921145307
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Book 2 Title: The Cobbler's Apprentice
Book 2 Author: Sandy McCutcheon
Book 2 Biblio: Scribe, $32.95 pb, 416 pp, 1921215003
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Adrian Hyland spent many years living and working among indigenous people in the Northern Territory. His affection for and affinity with the people and the country are immediately evident. But whatever possessed him, in his first novel, to write in the voice of a young, half-Aboriginal woman? It is a testament to his skill and finely balanced writing that more has not been made of this fact, and that the reception to his novel has been mostly positive.

Set in Central Australia, Diamond Dove is a beautifully paced novel that blends the best of the crime genre – mystery, gore, multiple suspects – with a gentle yet incisive narrative about black–white relations, with each other and to the land. Emily Tempest has tentatively returned to the Moonlight Downs community after years of starting and abandoning university degrees and travelling the world. Never quite sure of where she belongs, Emily’s homecoming is part of her search for self. As she renews acquaintances, it begins to feel like she never left. But within hours of her arrival, a murder takes place and Emily finds herself immersed in a hunt for the perpetrator.

Read more: Kabita Dhara reviews 'Diamond Dove' by Adrian Hyland and 'The Cobbler's Apprentice' by Sandy...

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Martin Ball reviews The Great War by Les Carlyon
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After the phenomenal success of his Gallipoli (2001), Les Carlyon has turned his attention to the experience of Australian soldiers on the western front in the years 1916–18. Carlyon’s purpose in The Great War is clear: he wants to expand the national gaze that is transfixed on the military exploits at Anzac Cove, to include the lesser-known stories of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in France and Flanders. Five times as many Australians perished in the war’s main European theatre as had died fighting at Anzac Cove, but those post-Gallipoli soldiers tend to be accorded a second-rung status in the nation’s memory of the war. As Carlyon says: ‘There were so many, and they were ours, and we never really saw them.’
Book 1 Title: The Great War
Book Author: Les Carlyon
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $55 hb, 863 pp, 140503761X
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After the phenomenal success of his Gallipoli (2001), Les Carlyon has turned his attention to the experience of Australian soldiers on the western front in the years 1916–18. Carlyon’s purpose in The Great War is clear: he wants to expand the national gaze that is transfixed on the military exploits at Anzac Cove, to include the lesser-known stories of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in France and Flanders. Five times as many Australians perished in the war’s main European theatre as had died fighting at Anzac Cove, but those post-Gallipoli soldiers tend to be accorded a second-rung status in the nation’s memory of the war. As Carlyon says: ‘There were so many, and they were ours, and we never really saw them.’

While there have been countless studies of Gallipoli, this is the first book since Charles Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921–42) to engage with the entire three-year campaign of the AIF on the western front. Clearly, there has been a need for such a book, and Carlyon is certainly well placed to write it. While his account of Gallipoli didn’t shed any new light on the campaign in terms of military history, it successfully told the story for a new generation. In its unique focus on the terrain of the country, it spoke directly to those thousands of latter-day pilgrims who tread the spurs and gullies of Anzac Cove, many surprised by a sense of patriotism they didn’t know they had.

Read more: Martin Ball reviews 'The Great War' by Les Carlyon

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Jonathan Pearlman reviews Australia and the Middle East: A front-line relationship edited by Fethi Mansouri
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Custom Article Title: The lessons of civilising imperialism
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In recent years, particularly since the Tampa and children overboard incidents and the 9/11 attacks, there has been a marked change in public and political perceptions of Middle Eastern migrants and the Arab–Australian community. In August 2001, for instance, the chair of a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s relations with the Middle East, David Jull, introduced the committee’s report with the ‘reassuring’ observation that ‘for the most part, the tensions and conflict in the Middle East have not affected the relations between the various community groups in Australia’.
Book 1 Title: Australia and the Middle East
Book 1 Subtitle: A front-line relationship
Book Author: Fethi Mansouri
Book 1 Biblio: I.B. Tauris, $49.95 hb, 259 pp, 1845112091
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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In recent years, particularly since the Tampa and children overboard incidents and the 9/11 attacks, there has been a marked change in public and political perceptions of Middle Eastern migrants and the Arab–Australian community. In August 2001, for instance, the chair of a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s relations with the Middle East, David Jull, introduced the committee’s report with the ‘reassuring’ observation that ‘for the most part, the tensions and conflict in the Middle East have not affected the relations between the various community groups in Australia’.

Read more: Jonathan Pearlman reviews 'Australia and the Middle East: A front-line relationship' edited by...

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Paul Brunton reviews Life After Death: The art of the obituary by Nigel Starck
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Nigel Starck has read a lot of obituaries. His doctoral thesis was on the obituary and newspaper practice, and he teaches obituary composition in South Australia. This book, though, rarely rises above the commonplace. I suspect it is written as a text for students; the final chapter is ‘How to Write Obituaries’. Even students would find the content fairly undemanding. A chapter telling us that those who have their obituaries published are the famous, those who did famous things, those who associated with the famous, national heroes, villains and eccentrics is not rocket science.
Book 1 Title: Life After Death
Book 1 Subtitle: The art of the obituary
Book Author: Nigel Starck
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $32.95 hb, 272 pp, 0522852564
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Nigel Starck has read a lot of obituaries. His doctoral thesis was on the obituary and newspaper practice, and he teaches obituary composition in South Australia. This book, though, rarely rises above the commonplace. I suspect it is written as a text for students; the final chapter is ‘How to Write Obituaries’. Even students would find the content fairly undemanding. A chapter telling us that those who have their obituaries published are the famous, those who did famous things, those who associated with the famous, national heroes, villains and eccentrics is not rocket science.

Read more: Paul Brunton reviews 'Life After Death: The art of the obituary' by Nigel Starck

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Braham Dabscheck reviews One Split Second: The death of David Hookes and the trial of Zdravko Micevic by Michelle Schwarz
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On 18 January 2004 the Victorian cricket team defeated South Australia in an ING Cup match. After the game, some of the cricketers and officials, including the Victorian coach David Hookes, and their girlfriends, assembled at the Beaconsfield Hotel, in St Kilda. Hookes had played twenty-three test matches for Australia between 1977 and 1986, at an average of 34.36 runs. After retiring as a player, Hookes, beside his coaching duties, had carved out a successful career as a broadcaster and media commentator. As closing time approached, security staff informed the group that it was time to leave. Approximately fifteen minutes later in the car park, Hookes received a punch from security guard Zdravko Micevic, and fell and hit his head on the ground. He died in the early hours of the next morning. Micevic was charged with the crime of manslaughter, but was subsequently acquitted by a jury on the grounds of self-defence.
Book 1 Title: One Split Second
Book 1 Subtitle: The death of David Hookes and the trial of Zdravko Micevic
Book Author: Michelle Schwarz
Book 1 Biblio: NewSouth, $34.95 pb, 234 pp, 0868409472
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On 18 January 2004 the Victorian cricket team defeated South Australia in an ING Cup match. After the game, some of the cricketers and officials, including the Victorian coach David Hookes, and their girlfriends, assembled at the Beaconsfield Hotel, in St Kilda. Hookes had played twenty-three test matches for Australia between 1977 and 1986, at an average of 34.36 runs. After retiring as a player, Hookes, beside his coaching duties, had carved out a successful career as a broadcaster and media commentator. As closing time approached, security staff informed the group that it was time to leave. Approximately fifteen minutes later in the car park, Hookes received a punch from security guard Zdravko Micevic, and fell and hit his head on the ground. He died in the early hours of the next morning. Micevic was charged with the crime of manslaughter, but was subsequently acquitted by a jury on the grounds of self-defence.

Read more: Braham Dabscheck reviews 'One Split Second: The death of David Hookes and the trial of Zdravko...

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Gregory Kratzmann reviews Other Summers by Stephen Edgar
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Commendations from celebrities and authorities have become a standard feature of cover designs for books of poetry: sometimes one wonders whether the writers have actually read what they puff so assiduously. How refreshing it is, then, to find Clive James and August Kleinzahler recommending Stephen Edgar’s latest volume so perceptively. Kleinzahler’s phrase ‘voluptuous elegance’ goes to the heart of Edgar’s way with words. James’s comment will strike a chord with anyone who takes the time (and time is needed – these are not poems to skim through) to engage with Other Summers:
Book 1 Title: Other Summers
Book Author: Stephen Edgar
Book 1 Biblio: Black Pepper, $23.95 pb, 108 pp, 1876044543
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Commendations from celebrities and authorities have become a standard feature of cover designs for books of poetry: sometimes one wonders whether the writers have actually read what they puff so assiduously. How refreshing it is, then, to find Clive James and August Kleinzahler recommending Stephen Edgar’s latest volume so perceptively. Kleinzahler’s phrase ‘voluptuous elegance’ goes to the heart of Edgar’s way with words. James’s comment will strike a chord with anyone who takes the time (and time is needed – these are not poems to skim through) to engage with Other Summers:

Read more: Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Other Summers' by Stephen Edgar

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Custom Article Title: Aspects of Holiness
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So much shown in a little space
All humbleness, all dignity,
Hand-work – the Knitted Nativity!
Seeing, one whistles on an arc of breath
Wonderful, oh wonderful!
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So much shown in a little space
All humbleness, all dignity,
Hand-work – the Knitted Nativity!
Seeing, one whistles on an arc of breath
Wonderful, oh wonderful!

Read more: Aspects of Holiness by Rosemary Dobson

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See,
how this slow tide
tugs
and sighs against
the flank of patient night –
the driving pulse that
aches towards the
fleck
of dawn then
shifts,
and curls around skin’s soft
warmth, that quiet space –
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See,
how this slow tide
tugs
and sighs against
the flank of patient night –
the driving pulse that
aches towards the
fleck
of dawn then
shifts,
and curls around skin’s soft
warmth, that quiet space –

See how all
things might be
refracted
here
in this small round,
in this brief
threading
of a needle’s eye,
how all the waiting world
might be
quilted
and unravelled here.

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Delia Falconer reviews The Best Australian Stories 2006 edited by Robert Drewe
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Story collections, especially ones that appear annually, hold out shimmering, Brigadoon-like hopes for their readers: that they will offer a snapshot of the times; capture the collective unconscious of a nation and its writers; and, if selected by a well-known writer, reveal something profound about that author’s tastes. Most editors will tell you that the reality is often different. Their wish-list of writers may have published little to select from that year, and have nothing in the bottom drawer when asked; well-known authors, approached on spec, may offer work that is sub-par but which the editor now feels obliged to take. Thus an anthology may end up as more of a compromise than an ideal selection. On the other hand, some anthologies, such as Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Australian Love Stories (1996), Drusilla Modjeska’s Sisters (1993) or the first two volumes of the long-defunct Picador New Writing (1993–94), have managed to pull off precisely this era-defining gathering of collective energy, showcasing our nation’s literature at a high-water mark. In such anthologies, there is a joyful sense of momentum and confidence: the pieces speak to one another with an almost predetermined charge.
Book 1 Title: The Best Australian Stories 2006
Book Author: Robert Drewe
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $27.95 pb, 391 pp, 1863952705
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Story collections, especially ones that appear annually, hold out shimmering, Brigadoon-like hopes for their readers: that they will offer a snapshot of the times; capture the collective unconscious of a nation and its writers; and, if selected by a well-known writer, reveal something profound about that author’s tastes. Most editors will tell you that the reality is often different. Their wish-list of writers may have published little to select from that year, and have nothing in the bottom drawer when asked; well-known authors, approached on spec, may offer work that is sub-par but which the editor now feels obliged to take. Thus an anthology may end up as more of a compromise than an ideal selection. On the other hand, some anthologies, such as Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Australian Love Stories (1996), Drusilla Modjeska’s Sisters (1993) or the first two volumes of the long-defunct Picador New Writing (1993–94), have managed to pull off precisely this era-defining gathering of collective energy, showcasing our nation’s literature at a high-water mark. In such anthologies, there is a joyful sense of momentum and confidence: the pieces speak to one another with an almost predetermined charge.

Read more: Delia Falconer reviews 'The Best Australian Stories 2006' edited by Robert Drewe

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Contents Category: Children's Fiction
Custom Article Title: Raising a smile
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Article Title: Raising a smile
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Humour sells, and it is no coincidence that the best-selling authors in children’s fiction know how to tell a funny story. It can be pure escapism of the silliest sort or the kind of humour that helps us to cope with life’s disappointments, hardships and embarrassments. Most childhoods contain plenty of all three and thus provide rich material for writers, and none has pushed the boundaries further than Morris Gleitzman. Walking a fine line between what is funny and what is painful, he has successfully employed humour to explore such subjects as euthanasia, homosexuality, cancer and birth control, and the result has been books that have made thousands of readers laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. But the proliferation of recent titles featuring worms, toads and nostrils as protagonists has left me unmoved, and I feel lukewarm at best about those children overboard, underground or hiding from Nazis. Often the humour has seemed forced and contrived.
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Humour sells, and it is no coincidence that the best-selling authors in children’s fiction know how to tell a funny story. It can be pure escapism of the silliest sort or the kind of humour that helps us to cope with life’s disappointments, hardships and embarrassments. Most childhoods contain plenty of all three and thus provide rich material for writers, and none has pushed the boundaries further than Morris Gleitzman. Walking a fine line between what is funny and what is painful, he has successfully employed humour to explore such subjects as euthanasia, homosexuality, cancer and birth control, and the result has been books that have made thousands of readers laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. But the proliferation of recent titles featuring worms, toads and nostrils as protagonists has left me unmoved, and I feel lukewarm at best about those children overboard, underground or hiding from Nazis. Often the humour has seemed forced and contrived.

Read more: Raising a Smile by Ruth Starke

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Gay Bilson reviews A Big Life by Jenny Kee (with Samantha Trenoweth)
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What a big book it is! And so many photographs: only a few without Jenny Kee. The dust jacket is drop-dead gorgeous: just Jenny’s face, with the Revlon red of her trademark glasses and lips lifted to the title. But heavens, this isn’t a dust jacket but a jacket. Take it off. The lining is Jenny’s Monet Opal print, and there are French folds and more photos. Open the book, and here is Jenny’s big life in twelve chapters.
Book 1 Title: A Big Life
Book Author: Jenny Kee (with Samantha Trenoweth)
Book 1 Biblio: Lantern, $59.95 hb, 423 pp, 192098934X
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What a big book it is! And so many photographs: only a few without Jenny Kee. The dust jacket is drop-dead gorgeous: just Jenny’s face, with the Revlon red of her trademark glasses and lips lifted to the title. But heavens, this isn’t a dust jacket but a jacket. Take it off. The lining is Jenny’s Monet Opal print, and there are French folds and more photos. Open the book, and here is Jenny’s big life in twelve chapters.

Jenny’s maternal grandmother Olive had twenty-four blouses ‘just for work’. Jenny’s mum was ‘a fashion plate’ and Mum’s sister Una would ‘sew mum into a dress’. Jenny, born to Enid and Billy Kee in 1945, was Enid’s ‘little China doll’. At thirteen, Enid bought Jenny Charles Jourdan shoes. They cost twelve guineas. Jenny left school after fourth form, a ‘Chinese Annette Funicello’.

Read more: Gay Bilson reviews 'A Big Life' by Jenny Kee (with Samantha Trenoweth)

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Graeme Turner reviews Jonestown: The power and the myth of Alan Jones by Chris Masters by Chris Masters
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This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something of a local icon; one of the most respected and fearless of Australian television journalists, whose professional integrity is widely acknowledged.
Book 1 Title: Jonestown
Book 1 Subtitle: The power and the myth of Alan Jones
Book Author: Chris Masters
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $49.95 hb, 527 pp, 174175156X
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This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something of a local icon; one of the most respected and fearless of Australian television journalists, whose professional integrity is widely acknowledged. There are, however, significant obstacles in the way of any independent public analysis of Jones’s political influence. Heavily constrained by corporate considerations, Masters’s 2001 Four Corners story on Jones was only able to scratch the surface of what is interesting about the broadcaster. The ABC’s eleventh-hour decision not to publish the book version was all the more depressing for its predictability and timidity. Nonetheless, it is also clear that, no matter how careful the author and his publisher, the likelihood of court challenges was always going to be high. No surprise, then, that the eventual publication of Jonestown: The Power and the Myth of Alan Jones produced headlines as well as comment.

Read more: Graeme Turner reviews 'Jonestown: The power and the myth of Alan Jones by Chris Masters' by Chris...

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