Murray Bail has passed muster as an important Australian novelist for quite a while now.  His 1980 novel Homesickness, with its sustained parodic conceit of Australian tourists forever entering the prefab theme park, rather than its ‘real’ original, was an early national venture into what might have been postmodernism. Holden's Performance, a good time later, was as unyielding in its comedy, its surrealism, and its ungainly effortful lurch towards art. The ungainliness with Bail is part and parcel of whatever triumph there is (and it can be considerable). He is to fiction-writing something like what Buster Keaton was to the life of the body. There is a stoical sadness and solemnity to his fictions (which resemble even the more magical forms of realistic novel writing the way a slab hut resembles a townhouse) that comes it seems from the author’s incomprehension and incapacity in the face of anything like novelese. The husband of Helen Garner seems as incapable of telling an involving transparent story where the characters come off the page as he is of flying at the moon. On the contrary, he is a kind of homespun modernist, the sophistication of whose handling of his material is in inverse relation to his own narrative suavity.

The memoirs of any barrister still in harness are, by definition, advertising. The mystery of The Justice Game is what on earth Geoffrey Robertson needs to sell. He is much too busy already. A queue of life’s victims wanting his help in court would stretch twice round the Temple. But drumming up business is not what the book is about. Its real purpose, I suspect, is to show that, despite a certain radical reputation, Robertson is a sound man.

True he is from Australia, but he reached Oxford in the 1960s on a Rhodes Scholarship, found a toehold at the London Bar and fixed his vowels. Very early on, a chambers’ clerk advised him not to work for the National Council for Civil Liberties if he wanted ‘a career’ in the Law.

Take my Guv’nor’ ‘Lewis Hawser QC.’ ‘He is the best fucking silk there is. And why is he never going to be made a fucking High Court judge? Just answer me that. I will tell you why he is never going to be made a High Court judge. Because when he was a young barrister, he took calls from the National fucking Council for Civil fucking Liberties.

Marion Halligan’s new novel has as its centrepiece, shiny and assertive, flagged by its title, a dress made with loving care but, nonetheless, improvised just so that the fabric will go far enough. A dress that Molly Pellerin wears to a party at the laundry where she works, an event that becomes a defining moment in her life, the dress a legacy, offering an image of Molly as dazzling, beautiful, and loved. The photograph sustains her memory, potently, permanently.

I grew up with The Sydney Morning Herald. In spite of enforced years in Melbourne and Canberra and sojourns overseas, I still regard it as my paper. So my business being writing and Sydney my town, it’s a matter of identity that The Herald’s reviews are the primary ones for me. But my tribal instincts are faltering. The problem is The Herald’s book coverage. My quarrel isn’t with the choice of books nor the quality of the reviews. It’s the prior matter of quantity. Over the three Saturdays of the 11, 18, 25 April, The Herald ran a total of ten full-scale book reviews. The Australian over the same period ran seventeen, and they were generally longer.

My great-grandfather Robert had a beard, a pointed one, presumably grey. He stands in a sepia-coloured photograph, gazing steadily at the camera, leaning on a walking stick and wearing a grainy-looking overcoat. But these are only dimly recollected details: I have not looked at the relevant album for years. Much more vivid is the voice I never heard. It was transmitted by my mother, who is now also dead. Throughout my childhood my imagination was peopled by various characters, as she recalled their exact words, entertaining my sister and me as she herself had been entertained: by using remembered voices she recreated her past and created one for us.

Robert had the leisure in which to amuse his grandchildren. He had been so ill at the age of forty-three that he was superannuated from the post office; the restorative effect of early retirement was such that he lived another fifty years. He became a dedicated ventriloquist and had to be almost forcibly persuaded, in his old age, to refrain from hiring the local hall for the brilliant concert he was sure he could give. He practised for hours on end, often in the middle of the night, and was master of various monologues in which he played all characters. One such item was entitled ‘The English Railway Porter’, in which he would be both porter and female passenger, who would list the items of her luggage in the following order: ‘I’ve got three trunks, four bundles, an umbrella, a flat-iron, a grid-iron, a piece of string, and two children.’ He liked lists and had been born in the village of Ade, near Great Yarmouth, near Norwich in Norfolk in England. He was also a passionate believer in spiritualism and regularly used to announce that of course he would be in communication with his descendants from beyond the grave. Clearly none of us has been listening hard enough or at the right time.

The poet John Forbes died suddenly in January 1998. He was not glamorous, but his work was, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. Certainly, he was the most accomplished, along with the immensely learned Martin Johnston, of the young poets who swam into orbit in the 1970s. He was also the writer who most convincingly bridged the gap between a radical art and the relatively conservative, yet difficult, kinds of cultural theory which are expounded in the universities. Such newly collected poems as ‘post-colonial biscuit’, ‘Ode to Cultural Studies’ and ‘Queer Theory’ body forth, in their disembodied way, this concern to be a bridge-maker between academic talk and the melodious realms of poetry.

‘This is the most urgently needed book of our time’, says the back cover of this short, non-fiction work of advice to adolescent males, whose subject is how successfully to become a real man. (This boast contrasts strangely with the counsel given not to brag.) My son, the one aged twelve, described the book as being about ‘the need to grow up into little John Marsdens’.

Veronica Brady is a highly respected critic with long and distinguished experience in the academic and literary worlds. She understands as well as anyone, I am sure, the mysterious workings of the imagination – how a feeling, an image or an impression may strike a spark capable of igniting a flame that fuses often contradictory thoughts and experiences into the ‘little room’ of a memorable poem. So it must have been a deliberate, though to my mind regrettable, decision that made her concentrate on Judith Wright’s life as a conservationist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights almost to the exclusion of everything else – poetry included – in this ample and painstaking biography.

The title is not provocative: The Brisbane Line Controversy, but Paul Burns’s subtitle flags the partisanship that will mark his study. This is a case, he contends, of ‘Political Partisanship versus National Security 1942–45’. His conclusion is unobjectionable: ‘belief in a “Brisbane Line” was our barometer of fear about the vulnerability of our own continent which no Australian Army could negate’. In political demonology, the Brisbane Line signifies the intention of the Menzies–Fadden conservative governments of 1939–41 to abandon all but the south-east corner of Australia to the Japanese, should an invasion come. Burns is keen to absolve Menzies and his colleagues of blame and to find where, and with whom, the notion of the Line originated. In the process he indicts Labor front-bencher Eddie Ward, whose allegations about a Brisbane Line led to a Royal Commission in the election year of 1943.

Raimondo Cortese’s debut collection of stories, The Indestructible Corpse, contains ‘amazing stories’ in the true sense of the term, in that they produce amazement. The definitions of amazement in the Macquarie Dictionary include ‘overwhelming surprise or astonishment’; ‘stupefaction’; ‘perplexity’; and’ consternation’. Many of the stories are also maze-like, ‘a confusing network of intercommunicating paths or passages’; ‘a labyrinth’; ‘a state of bewilderment or confusion’.

The fascinating remembrance of the first two decades of the Communist Party of Australia is the first general history of Australian communism since Alastair Davidson’s The Communist Party of Australia: A short history appeared in 1969. Stuart Macintyre’s The Reds is both erudite and, as befits a former CPA member of Presbyterian background, is infused with moral vision.

The dreadful realities of Stalinist totalitarianism, and in particular the terror, hang like a spectre across the history of world communism. Here, as elsewhere, the Communist Party of Australia quickly succumbed to Stalinism. Hence the Australian communist project, which put down its deepest roots in the organised working class, was likewise fundamentally flawed and, despite its emancipist and egalitarian vision, deeply drawn to tyranny.

It is a tribute to Macintyre’s intellectual integrity that he does not shy away from the Stalinist tendencies of the local party but confronts them directly. As he points out in his introduction to The Reds, after eight to ten years of enthusiastic and largely ineffective activity, the CPA ‘became an utterly faithful follower of the policies and practices laid down by the Soviet leader’. This development is one of the primary concerns of Macintyre’s history. As he acknowledges, ‘an explanation of it presents some striking challenges’.

In my opinion, Macintyre is more than up to the task, which he confronts with a combination of courage, impeccable judgment and assiduous research. He also writes superbly well. Thus, while communists in Australia were primarily recruited from the working class, its adherents were gathered from particular segments of society – ‘the ardent, the outcast, the restless and dissatisfied’. Party membership, he rightly argues, ‘gave them companionship, hope, purpose, and demanded much in return’.

Those especially rank and file members of the CPA were, in the main, decent people who made many sacrifices, not least of all being more or less voluntarily enjoined to accept an iron discipline in relation to almost all areas of their lives. In this, they were quite different from the vehemently rebellious and distinctly anti-political Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) ‘who owed allegiance only to their principles (and) disdained all subterfuge’.

For CPA comrades, party and not personal loyalty had to be paramount. As local apparatchiks constantly enjoined, individualism, and in particular ‘petty-bourgeois individualism’, was a heinous sin. Lance Sharkey insisted at a party plenum, ‘A Communist has only one supreme loyalty and that is to the Communist Party and the Communist International.’ ‘If any comrade,’ Sharkey continued, ‘is doing something out of loyalty to other comrades, he wants to drop that point of view. We have no personal ties in the Communist Party.’

As Macintyre accepts, this sort of injunction, especially when coupled with the Marxist-Leninist theoretical underpinning of historical materialism, left almost no room for individual will and personal accountability. Yet such an approach involved a manifest contradiction in that, as a doctrine, communism was replete with images of moral redemption and of emancipation. In particular, it ‘employed a language that was saturated in judgements of capitalist evil and proletarian virtue.’

One manifestation of ‘iron discipline’ was that the Australian comrades, most of whom were men, had to follow the party through many intricate twists and turns of policy, almost entirely directed from the Soviet Union. Thus the notion of ‘Class Against Class’, a rejection of which could lead recalcitrants into supporting the ‘twin errors’ of ‘social fascism’ and the theory of the ‘lesser evil’, quickly, and to many inexplicably, gave way to the tactical idea of a ‘United Front’. This involved temporarily joining with other progressive forces for the defence of a people’s democracy. However, the Comintern made it quite clear that this was not a retreat from revolution, but ‘merely a manoeuvre in the proletarian struggle.’ Indeed, it was Lenin himself who coined the metaphor that communists would support reformists ‘as a rope supports a hanging man.’

Hence, as Macintrye aptly points out, much CPA energy

was spent in fierce polemics against the futility of reform, the perfidy of Labor politicians, the inadequacy of existing trade unions that only served to gild the chains of wage slavery, and above all, the errors of their socialist rivals.

In the 1920s and 1930s it was Queensland, of all places in Australia, which presented the most favourable climate for CPA success. This was because a long-serving, right wing, and largely Catholic and AWU dominated, Labor government had, by its reactionary policies, alienated most left-wing unionists and many members of the ordinary rank and file.

Thus in 1928 the executive committee of the Comintern accepted the so-called ‘Queensland Resolution’ which argued that there the working class was ready to overthrow a treacherous ALP state government.

In part, the Comintern was right in that it was especially in North Queensland that the communist party in Australia came closest ‘to constituting a genuine mass movement’. Thus in 1939 both Fred Paterson, later to be the CPA’s only representative in any Australian parliament, was elected as a communist to the Townsville city council. At the same time, his friend Jim Henderson, who is still alive, was elected as a CPA representative to the Wangaratta shire council, which encompassed the coal mining town of Collinsville.

Many Australian comrades in the north, including Fred Paterson, were regarded as rebels and irreverent renegades by autocratic members of the Sydney-based central committee. Indeed humourless CPA bureaucrats like Sharkey and Jean Devanny’s sometime lover, the authoritarian J. B. Miles, tried regularly and sometimes unsuccessfully to make recalcitrant Queenslanders publicly toe the often shifting party line.

Long standing CPA member and party official, my friend Claude Jones, who died last month in Brisbane, boasted that the Queensland communists were ‘bush larrikins’ with ‘a militant don’t give-a-bugger attitude.’ Claude, who joined the party in Toowoomba, delighted in recounting how Miles censured him by saying, ‘The trouble with you, Jones, you’re too much of a larrikin.’

As Macintyre relates in this first-class book, Jones replied. ‘A few more fucking larrikins and less theoreticians, and we might get somewhere.’

‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Amen!’ to that.

A man waits outside a schoolyard and watches a young girl who, it seems, is his daughter, though she doesn’t know him. What appears to be an internal dialogue between the man and the child’s mother commences, set apart from the main text. It is a self-conscious narrative manoeuvre. The narrator, Jules Pyatt, after all has a thesis in English literature behind him (abandoned). He knows what narrative is all about, and he knows he wants to tell the story of his ‘Tazyrik year’, which belongs to a period several years before, when he was in his late twenties.

Jane Austen’s aunt was once at risk of transportation to Botany Bay for shoplifting. It is piquant that Austen named two of her major male characters Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Captain Wentworth in Sense and Sensibility, because a leading inhabitant of New South Wales in those years was D’Arey Wentworth, disreputable but acknowledged kinsman of Lord Fitzwilliam. D’Arey Wentworth’s career smacks more of Georgette Heyer than Jane Austen, since he was a highwayman four times acquitted. Rather than push his luck further, he went, a free man, as assistant surgeon with the Second Fleet in 1790. As a young teenager Jane Austen may have read about him in the Times.

I remember a conversation a year or so ago with an Australian scholar who had recently returned after a stint in Europe and was astonished to hear colleagues refer to Henry Reynolds as a ‘populariser’ and not true historian. I’ve heard it myself. Now that Reynolds has become a full-time writer we can expect to hear it more often. All of which goes a long way toward explaining why academic history is in decline.

For the eighteen months or so that I taught novel writing a few years back, I was haunted by a remark of Somerset Maugham’s: ‘There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’ In his teasing way, Maugham is suggesting that while the novel has a recognisable form, it cannot – for a multitude of reasons – be reduced to a formula. What escapes definition is what makes the journey into the unknown worth the effort for both the writer and the reader. The danger is, of course, that such a remark can be used to mystify the whole process and imply that creative writing can’t be taught. You either have what it takes or you don’t.

In retrospect it’s not surprising that Andrew Riemer wrote so insightfully about Shakespeare’s comedies. Those green worlds of transformation are expressive of longing and nostalgia, of social order being restored through the acceptance and reconciliation of opposing forces. That the brute, material world is partly dealt with through nostalgia, fantasy and parody is an idée fixe of Riemer’s elegantly written autobiographical books.

I suspect that Bryce Courtenay’s novels about early Tasmania, The Potato Factory and Tommo & Hawk, have introduced countless general readers to aspects of Australian literature which might otherwise remain terra incognita. For this reason, I applaud his enterprise.

Murray Whelan – Labor Party fixer, spin doctor, branch-stacker, deal broker and, above all, true believer (his son’s middle name is Evatt) – returns for another tilt at the system in this entertaining and highly successful series. Presumably, our aptly named anti-hero was once good at his job, because these days everything he touches goes pear-shaped before you can say ‘travel rort’ or ‘credit card’. It isn’t necessarily his fault, but blame must attach somewhere in politics. Well-intentioned though he is, Murray is incurably prone to accidents and bad luck. If there is a banana skin within coo-ee, he will slip on it; if there is a dumpster in the vicinity, he will end up inside it. He is, in short, the bunny, a virtuous paragon of hapless endeavour. With Murray Whelan on the case, a policy initiative soon becomes an exercise in damage control.

This book, a tale of Stephen Scheding’s search for the artist of ‘a small unsigned painting’ he was unable to resist buying at an art auction, has already been warmly reviewed by others as an excellent read, a sleuth story that captures the frustrations and joys of research while holding its reader in a state of suspense worthy of the best whodunnit. I heartily agree and warmly recommend the book to anyone, amateur or art professional, looking to while away a pleasurable and interesting few hours.

It is the often hapless task of the reviewer to draw together observations on the aspirations and creations of up to six people into a seamless and riveting piece of critical prose. Sometimes it is just not possible, as is the case here, when all these three books have in common is that they are picture books, and will probably be found somewhere near each other in a bookshop or library.

Two autobiographical works, both by women historians, are presented in the elegant small format which often says ‘gift book’ and may suggest more surface charm than substance. In fact, there are at least as many contrasts as resemblances between the two, and although the mood is quietly reflective, there is no easy nostalgia.

Popular fiction is often character-driven. An immediate distinction between these heavily-populated novels would be that if I met the main protagonist of Scott’s book I’d want to have coffee with him whereas if I met Aitken’s I’d want to slap him.

Both books star a gay narcissist of mirror-ball proportions. The symptomatic difference is that Scott’s comic creations do more with less effort and fewer glitches, while Aitken’s clog up the narrative with a slurry of awkward Central Casting out-takes. The effect in Scott is of an acerbic one-man Greek chorus-line who comes onstage, stirs the plot, complicates the (sexual and otherwise) relationships, and performs a series of camp pratfalls that add to the subcultural comedy of manners while advancing the farcical detective-story. In Aitken, it is of being stuck next to a hyperactive garrulous prat on a transatlantic flight.

I am sitting at my home desk high up in the mountains overlooking the border ranges to New South Wales and then to the left, the strip of highrise, the Gold Coast, and the sea beyond. Hathorn and Lucashenko have both set their recent youth novels in an imaginary location not far from me. The sea and the hinterland is a territory I am beginning to know well and I have enjoyed exploring it a little further in my reading.

Libby Hathorn, well known for her award-winning but bleak children’s picture book Way Home has once again explored the darkness of humanity. I found it chilling.

If presence in literary journals, anthologies and at writers’ festivals may be taken as an indication of a poet’s importance, Anthony Lawrence has for some time been regarded as one of Australia’s foremost poets of the post­’68 generation. He has published five books of poetry, all of which to my knowledge have been well received, and he has also been the recipient of many prizes, most recently the inaugural Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize and one of the Newcastle Poetry Prizes for 1997. With the publication of his New and Selected, Lawrence seems to have been canonised.

From John Tranter

Dear Editor,

You may not be aware of it – indeed, the readers of ABR have hardly ever been made aware of it, for some reason – but over the last twenty years John Tranter has published the following books:

Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, Island Press, Sydney, 1979
Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982
Under Berlin, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988, winner of the NSW State Poetry Prize and the Grace Leven Prize.
The Floor of Heaven, Collins/Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992
At The Florida, UQP, St Lucia, 1993, winner of the Age book of the year award, poetry.

As well as the following anthologies, as editor:

The New Australian Poetry, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1979, reprinted 1980
The Tin Wash Dish – Poems from Today’s Australians, (selected by John Tranter from entries in the poetry section of the ABC/ABA Literary Awards competition held in 1988), ABC Enterprises, Crow’s Nest, 1989
The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead), Penguin Australia, Ringwood, 1992, (second printing Dec. 1995 also published as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry in the UK and the USA)

I’ve had twenty years to get used to being ignored by ABR and various other Melbourne magazines, and I thought I was inured to the process. But I now have to admit I was fooling myself. I have to admit I was disturbed to note in your twentieth-anniversary issue Quadrant reviewer Noel Macainsh’s unreadably dull piece on various conservative poets, including Les Murray, now the literary editor of that magazine. I was interested to note that Les got another review as well. Apparently one wasn’t enough to do justice to his importance on the literary scene. And Tranter? Not worth a paragraph.

That makes it ... let’s see ... Macainsh 1, Murray 2, Tranter 0
As Sam Goldwyn said, include me out.

John Tranter, Balmain, NSW

From Donald Horne

Dear Editor,

I assume you republished Andrew Riemer’s canning of The Coming Republic because it is such an historical curiosity – containing, as it does, what may have been the silliest sentence ever to have been printed in Australian Book Review, viz: ‘[George] Washington and his colleagues did not have to remake their society to the extent that Australia will have to be remade when the last, now illusory, link with Britain is severed’.

What he is referring to is the couple of decades in American history which marked the greatest, most concentrated, most comprehensive, and most influential period of institution-making in the whole record of the making of institutions, done in a manner that released the hopes and verve of ordinary people in a way that may never have previously happened, anywhere.

Donald Horne, Woollahra, NSW

From Miriel Lenore

Dear Editor,

It must be rare for a review of a poetry collection to focus on only one poem as Shirley Walker did in her review of Ken Bolton’s Untimely Meditations and Other Poems (ABR, April 1998), even when it is a long tide poem. I hope that readers are not deterred from a volume containing much to delight, much to challenge. By the way, Bolton doesn’t think wet feminists etc. rule the world – he suggests Les Murray and P.P. McGuiness think so.

Though not always agreeing, I do enjoy reading a poet who mocks the heroic, the pretentious and The Poetic, who counts Adrienne Rich among his influences (though lower no doubt than O’Hara, Schuyler. and Ted Berrigan!) and who, as poet and publisher, is generous to and supportive of contemporary women poets.

Miriel Lenore, Marden, SA

From Duncan Richardson

Dear Editor,

Your preference for writing that sets a context allows for readers who see reviews as information sources on subjects beyond the particular book, which is obviously valid and important. However, I have noticed that in ABR and elsewhere some reviewers often overdo this and launch into mini lectures on issues that are basically literary history on politics, background knowledge for the reviewer but irrelevant to the potential book buyer. Summaries of publishing history or factional feuds fit into this category.

Such padding is useful to the lazy reviewer who can disguise a lack of real engagement with the book in question by trotting out this waffle, often compounded by a verbal throwing up of hands and bemoaning the lack of available space.

In an interview in another publication, you mentioned using the ‘Shorts’ section to try out and introduce new reviewers. Looking back over the last year’s issues, I find the ‘Shorts’ writers have mostly been listed as ‘Melbourne reviewers’. While the rest of ABR’s content reflects the whole country to a fair extent, why not open the gates a bit more in this section for people beyond the Yarra.

Duncan Richardson

Ed’s reply: Reviewers in the Shorts section are encouraged to choose from a pile of books – a practice which is obviously unsuited to interstate reviewers. However, I take your point.