Martin Harrison’s attentive poetry must be read attentively: the snaking semi narratives move through the landscape as rivers finding their way. The tonal shifts and mixed modes are fundamental to this collection’s many middle-sized poems that are often (even more than in his previous book, The Distribution of Voice) both verse essay and lyric, as Kevin Hart has noted. Not that all this in itself makes for good poetry; there are times when the verbal constructions are a little too odd, a little too free with metaphorical bravura. Why is it that ‘The gift of tongues and sight is platypus’? Other poems play with their referents like a fisher with a fish. Even syntactically straightforward similes such as ‘Mirrored clouds spike themselves with sharp, green shoots / in paddies marked out like holding tanks or Versailles’ lakes’ take a bit of thinking over.

            But Harrison’s verbal landscape is mostly an exhilarating place to be; not least of all because it so often comes out of the Australian landscape. Part of the delight of this is that Harrison isn’t afraid to write it up rich. Australia is not a land of negativity and absences: it is a place that generates metaphor with abandon, or rather, disciplined prodigality. His Australia contains the desert, for sure, but more often than not the poems migrate to watery landscapes where the ever-changing, changeless clouds, colours and birds are caught in their immense complexity (reminiscent of Judith Beveridge’s intense observational powers).

In his third novel, Steven Carroll continues to work on those questions, obsessions, scenes and images that preoccupy him as a writer – the characters and personalities of women, and in particular that figure of a sexually charged and sophisticated young woman so disturbing to Helen Garner in The First Stone; the language of infatuation; the placement of characters in their particular city; mismatched lovers as the centre of a love story; and a certain trick Carroll has of overlaying the inner lives of characters with the narrative of events in the story being told. It is as though his characters swim, groggily, up out of their fantasies into the harsh, ironic events that have been provoked by their inner dreams. Life in his novels operates as a merciless commentary on the evasions and hubris of each character's consciousness.

Carroll’s interest in mythic figures of the Jungian kind, with a keen wit keeping the work from being ponderous, his control of his prose, the fun he has with long sentences and even a tendency to adopt a fruity sort of alliteration are nicely displayed in one of his images of a young woman near the beginning of the novel:

When she walked, the whole school stopped. Whether they despised her, admired her, loathed her or loved her, the legs of Helena Applegate would stop the school. In the February heatwaves or the cool months of June, the eyes of the school would lift, be still, and become arrested by the spectacle of Helena Applegate walking. If there was a crowd out there, she never noticed. A pity she was so stupid and had nothing to say, they muttered. What a pity she was almost mute with stupid­ity. Of course, Lucy knew she wasn't. But with perfect legs, and a walk that had the power to stop the whole school she had to be stupid.

Since its initial publication in 1906, Who’s Who in Australia has dominated the market for contemporary biographical information in Australia. Founded by Fred Johns, an Adelaide journalist and Hansard reporter, it began as Johns’s Notable Australians, changed to Fred Johns’s Annual, became the Who’s Who in the Commonwealth of Australia for the sixth edition in 1922 and settled on its current name in 1927. After Johns died in 1932, the publication was taken over by the Herald and Weekly Times, and Who’s Who was issued every three years from 1935 to 1991.

Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines.

Peter Carey’s 1988 novel is also the book a lot of people would turn to if they wanted to show how Australian writing could take it up to the Marquezes and Rushdies, the fabulist tradition where you get realism and fancy with the lot. Oscar and Lucinda has, after all, its glass church on water, its central conceits of gambling, its Plymouth Brethren and megalomaniac clerks and parish hypocrites and Chinese gaming dens, its random happenstance and its dea ex machina.

Last month’s editorial on reviewing and its ailments in Australia seems to have touched a few raw nerves. Various reviewers have enquired nervously about whether I was referring to them, for instance. On the other hand, as a result of the editorial, I have held a number of valuable conversations about the state of reviewing in Australia. Alas this is not reflected in the Letters pages of this issue. It seems with such a long break between the December/January issue and the February/March issue, the letter writers think of other things. Letters in this issue are few, fewer than any issue for several years.

Gideon Haigh is turning into something of a one-man industry on cricket in Australia. Following highly successful books on the Packer revolution, Allan Border’s reign, and a recent defence of the Ashes, he has now turned his attention to the crucial years 1949 to 1971 when Australia went from being undisputed world champions to a side being overtaken, not merely by England but for the first time by South Africa, which would shortly be expelled because of its practice of apartheid, with the so-called Third World countries showing that they would not remain beaten for much longer. It opens, in other words, with Donald Bradman about to depart and ends with the ruthless sacking of Bill Lawry and the arrival of Ian Chappell as new captain.

Both Dennis Haskell and Andrew Sant are primarily domestic poets. Family and friends comprise the milieu of many of their poems, which attempt to transform quotidiana into something of enduring interest. The chief danger of this type of poetry is that the prevalence of so many poems about family members and friends results in a poetic environment that can resemble a vast, monotonous suburb. If most domestic poets seem indistinguishable from each other in their subject matter alone, then the situation of contemporary poetry becomes further muddled when this homogeneity is bolstered by a general complacency with language.

I opened up my last issue of ABR to see my photograph. It’s there because I was mentioned at a conference at La Trobe as evidence of an ascendant anti­intellectualism. I suspect my new reputation as a villain on the black hat side of the Culture Wars has a lot to do with my play, Dead White Males, or, more accurately, the fact that the play proved popular with audiences. Dead White Males satirised the dominant theology of the humanities, variously called postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, social constructionism or what you will. The theories are complex and prolix and, one suspects, on occasions, deliberately obscure, but the central proposition seems to be that there is no ‘reality’ in the world other than one constructed by words. Categories are ‘constructed’ according to the power interests of groups advantaged by such ‘construction’, and the main ‘intellectual labor’ confronting the humanities is to ‘deconstruct’ these false categories and show them to be based not on objective reality or knowledge, but on ideology generated by a group wishing to attain or maintain a power advantage. The corollary of this belief is that these ideologies or discourses are taken to be the ‘truth’ by those generating them and more often than not by those who are being exploited. Thus the only way that justice will be served is by analysing the modes and techniques of verbal deceit used in the construction of these ideologies to expose their fallacies and implausibilities.

Family is surely the house of all feeling. Yet when we are in our early twenties, if not before, part of our dream of being grown up is to imagine the day when we will leave this house. Years later, many of us realise that we never did, that the building may be prison or comfort, but it is also us. How one adapts to this sage correction by time and maturity largely determines the emo­tional comfort of middle life and beyond.

A player of the calibre of John McEnroe constantly thrills his audience with strokes so perfectly timed that they appear effortless and lethal – and it is this combination which regularly amazes spectators. They may at times sense that what contributes so effectively to this timing is an early preparation of his strokes. He seems always already ready. It is, I suspect, only on fewer occasions that an admiring audience can see, and appreciate, what lies behind that: an ability, seemingly an uncanny one, to anticipate the play of the opponent. So uncanny sometimes that spectators come close to laughing, embarrassingly, at the supposed ‘luck’ of the player – to manage even to ‘get the racket at’ some extremely difficult or unexpected shot by the opponent, but then perchance to hit it for a winner. But the wise audience ‘knows’ that only the exceptional player has such ‘luck’ and has it so often. It is uncanny.

If Antonella Gambotto hadn’t been sued by Cliff Richard early on in her career, would she have later described Kylie Minogue as ‘a charmlessly robotic dwarf’ under the impression of being an ‘incandescent, gifted and alluring siren’? Perhaps not. It seems it was Cliff, the 50,000 pounds and the resulting barrow-loads of letters that convinced Gambotto of the value of opinion pieces: people react.

Hack: A common drudge; especially a literary drudge; hence a poor writer, a mere scribbler.
Hack: A half-breed horse with more bone and substance than a thoroughbred.
Hack (as a verb): To make rough cuts, to deal cutting blows.

Phillip Knightley prefaces his book with these definitions, so which does he want to identify himself with? Surely not the first. A mere scribbler he may have been early in his career, especially when he was recycling other journalists’ stories (hacking them about, perhaps?) at the London officer of the Australian Daily Mirror. But no-one, now, could call him a poor writer.

Still fondly remembered as one of the Doug Anthony Allstars, although most recently known for biding his time in the depths of Channel Nine between those twin peaks of high culture, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Little Aussie Battlers, Tim Ferguson has obviously not been idle, instead indulging in everyone’s favourite pastime – Canberra-watching. Inspired (or possibly horrified, if Left, Right and Centre is anything to go by) by what he has seen, Ferguson has created a monster – Luther Langbene.

The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

In a selection of eight essays introduced and edited by Geoff Levitus (artist, writer and founding editor of Periphery), we are presented with a range of ways of dealing with the myth of the landscape in a contemporary context and of ‘new’ approaches to the assessment of the role of the landscape in the formulation of an/the Australian identity. These essays are variously challenging, informative, aggressive, and stimulating.

LEON CADOGAN 1899–1973. One of the foremost ethnographic experts in Paraguay. He was noted for his research on the origins, languages and customs of the Forest Indians of Eastern Paraguay. The son of an Australian immigrant belonging to the New Australia Co-Operative Society ... he was one of the first people to denounce the mistreatment of the Ache (one of the tribes) at the hands of the Mezito population. (Historical Dictionary of Paraguay, 1993)

It was perhaps a fair return because in 1893, when the first 200 Australian settlers took up the land given to them by the Paraguayan Government to establish their Utopian paradise, they found one thousand Guarani Indians living on the land. They were ‘expelled’.

When I mentioned to one of my exceptionally brainy friends that I was reviewing Jocelynne Scutt’s recent collection of speeches and papers – most of which were written during the late 1980s and 1990s and which have now been edited for a two volume work entitled The Incredible Woman – I was, strange as it may seem, not surprised to hear her say that the very thought of reading anything by Scutt made her anxious. For while those of us who are familiar with Scutt’s work will be aware of how wonderfully accessible it is, those who are familiar instead with Scutt’s formidable reputation might well presume that her writing will be heavy­going. It’s not. And because Incredible is both accessible and an important contribution to feminist politics, it would be a pity if people shied away from it.

Why are we still hooked on the 1960s? As English art historian David Mellor said they were the Utopian Years. Perhaps our dreams and aspirations were anchored there. It is a rather difficult period to review with historical accuracy precisely because it was so rich in ideas and ideals; there was so much happening.

Unless we understand the immediate past, we can have no cultural continuity, nor can we fully comprehend the present. The next generation is left to take for granted the benefits of past struggles without understanding. Whether they like to acknowledge it or not, they are the inheritors of this legacy.

This is a tale of good guys and bad guys. The bad guys (mostly called Whitlam, Hawke, or Keating) are zealous lackeys of two ogres called Centralised Wage Fixing and Political correctness. They are often helped by other guys (frequently called Peacock, Elliott, and Bjelke-Petersen) who pretend to be good but aren’t.

Well placed for their task, the authors avowedly enjoyed ‘immediate access’ to the head good guy as he struggled against overwhelming odds to become Prime Minister. Pru Goward, who wrote the first chapter, dealing with Howard’s life before entering parliament, had helped make a Liberal Party television history and is Executive Director of John Howard’s Office of the Status of Women. David Barnett has worked at Parliament House, Canberra, for the past quarter century and has known Howard since 1974.

Paying little attention to his private life, their book emphasises Howard’s main political preoccupation, namely economics, and particularly his development as an economic rationalist progressively striving for the adoption of financial deregulation in Australia.

Coherently (and chronologically) organised, it is packed with pertinent information about everything from Liberal Party political infighting to bottom-of-the-harbour tax scams. But most of it is already on the public record and the interpretation is not particularly insightful. Of the plethora of recent biographic of living Australian politicians, this is surely the most one-sided. One need not know much to distrust its contents; a reasonably intelligent Martian would regard such hagiography as implausible. John Howard’s few acknowledged mistakes are presented as errors of tactics rather than substance or blamed on someone else. When in 1988 he foolishly called for a reduction in Asian immigration, it was because the interviewer ‘had led him into making a comment which could be branded as “racist”’. His party’s economic failures are imputed to (for example) the overthrow of the Iranian Shah or bad advice from the tax office. His enemies are depicted as almost universally incompetent. What little credit is accorded to Labor is grudging. Paul Keating’s 1983 dollar float was ‘a bold stroke even if one made inevitable by … events’, while his reputation for economic sagacity ‘was built on the reforms he had adopted from Howard’.

Gleeson is an award-winning novelist for young readers, winning the 1991 Australian Children’s Literature Peace Prize for Dodger and the 1997 Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for Younger Readers with Hannah Plus One. Her other novels include I am Susannah and Skating on Sand, and her picture books include The Princess and the Perfect Dish and Where’s Mum. She is an accomplished writer, which is reflected in her latest novel for older readers, Refuge.

‘Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, I’m sick of wearing yellow!’ declares the pomposity of puffed-up Mr Toad, intends staying in bed until he gets what he wants – a new blue suit, like those worn by the Moon. Meanwhile, the roosters haven’t crowed, the cows need milking ... saplings want their dew and it’s bitterly cold, and so Mother Nature, Father Time, King Neptune and the Moon set out to solve the problem, with help from the Celestial Tailor. The results are ridiculous and enjoyably rude.

Rise & Shine is an inherently silly – and largely successful – book. Character dominates plot, and the images, with their immediate impact a wealth of comic, apposite detail to discover, outshine the text. (Shown covers of the three books here reviewed, children reached for Rise & Shine.) King Neptune has a fishtail moustache, crab epaulettes and a golden bath plug dangling from his chain of office; Mother Nature is a bandy-legged charwoman, followed by and feeding animals throughout the book; Father Time’s necktie hangs askew like the hands of a clock; and so on.

As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says:

From time to time I’m invited to talk on ‘mystery’ fiction or review a ‘detective’ novel. I wish those terms could be abolished. All fiction is mystery fiction, and these days few detective walk the mean streets of the genre. I prefer the term crime fiction, for it is fiction dealing with the perpetration, investigation, reasons for or effect of a crime, and my taste is for contemporary crime novels, which work in three main levels – as mysteries, critiques of society and accounts of character.

I have to admit that I’m a magazine junkie. With the possible exceptions of golfing and bridal magazines I’ll read any magazine – from the trashy tabloid to high-brow literary – anywhere; anytime; dentists’ waiting rooms, doctors’ waiting rooms, hairdressers’ salons and, most of all, public transport. In fact, magazines are made for public transport. Unlike reading novels you can finish an article, story, or review in the space of a P.T. trip without the narrative being interrupted by annoying practical details like getting off. Buying a magazine and making it last over a week of P.T. transport is an art, as is choosing the right magazine for the right journey. It’s not an exact science but there are compelling reasons for giving this matter serious consideration.

Sydney writers are notoriously slack during any hot summer. Sydney audiences are equally lackadaisical. Except, it seems, when it comes to fronting authors on their working-holidays, if we can judge by the numbers who turned up to this year’s Writers sessions at the Sydney Festival. For each of the eight sessions of ‘The View from Tinsel Town’, held in the grandeur of the Sydney Town Hall (January 16 to 19), was enjoyed by capacity audiences. As Margaret Jones commented in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It would have been a sell-out if it hadn’t been free.’

From Denis Altman

Dear Editor,

I suspect I’m the ‘(male) baby boomer academic who should have known better’ referred to by Delia Falconer in her piece in the Gangland symposium (ABR, November 1997). I have an unfortunately hazy memory of the event, but I certainly don’t assume a common age and education makes for ‘the same ideological viewpoint’: if it did I would have far more in common with some of the current government than I do. As I recall I was struck by a common language – fairly academic – which all three writers deployed, despite some very clear differences in their positions.

Oedipal politics is a useful device which each generation reinvents to attack those both older and younger. (I have memories of Coral Bell et al. dismissing the student movements of the 1960s in these terms.) The more serious point made by Mark Davis – that there are relatively few gatekeepers of those seen as important intellectual figures – should not get lost in an orgy of blaming people for belonging to the ‘wrong’ generation (that is, any except that of the writer’s own).

Dennis Altman, La Trobe University, Bundoora

From Jill Mather

Dear Editor,

No doubt the article, ‘The Role of the Critic’ by Brian Castro (ABR, November 1997), will cause itching in uncomfortable places.

The implied hospitalisation of the ‘walking wounded’ will doubtless continue in epidemic proportions as long as we, the Australian writing public, fester in silence, brooding darkly on the unfairnesss of the so-called democratic tongue-lashings served up by the literati cognoscenti!

The word ‘critique’ implies an invited criticism, does it not? The word ‘review’ invites a ‘survey or inspection’ and discussion may follow as a result of this. The burden of responsibility (so aptly written by Mr Castro) is the quality of leadership. The reputation of the reviewer and critic hangs tenaciously off the coat-tails of leadership. Too often blemished by blatant evasion, social, political, or commercial implications. (After all, who is going to give a well-known writer a rotten review?) Yet writers in the past have suffered dreadfully – why not now?

Yes, reviewers and critics (in the main) huddle together. It seems fashionable to do so, ladling on the schmaltz and actively encouraging poor writing. Some even praise it – tainted by modernism and grunge. Dare I say it – they seek public endorsement by veneration at the shrine of the favoured few and are polluted by it.

The ego of these writers is sustained by adulation and it would seem that the primary function of the reviewer/critic is the chatter about often second-rate works. I am sure there are armies of new writers out there who are steadfastly ignored. They have a hard time of it. Australia is not known to encourage new talent – much better to foster the known. It’s more commercially viable. Ask any publisher!

While this situation remains unchecked nothing will change. Reviewers and critics will continue to plump their pillows and write exactly what leaders want them to.

While the media encourages and employs these people they will continue to be fearful of their own position both socially and commercially. Professional bias is a contagious disease. Therefore one must ask should they indeed be employed to do such work?

Yes, Mr Castro, there is definitely a desperate need for an honest critic. This person would need to be all the things you state and not financially dependent on the media. No doubt there have been brave souls who tried to do the right thing and became strangled in the process. Such is the fate of the martyr.

Jill Mather, Wyong, NSW

From Maurilia Meehan

Dear Editor,

I notice with interest the discussion in your pages recently of the role of the reviewer. May I suggest, in the spirit of the new year, a light-hearted competition?

As you will know, the English Literary Review runs an annual competition called the Bad Sex Award, where readers nominate the worst purple passage pf the year. How about two awards for reviewers, voted for each year by ABR readers?

The first would be ‘The Pearls Before Swine Award’, for the reviewer who wrote the most insensitive review of a commendable book – on of those bull-in-a-china-shop reviews which totally miss the point. (Last year there were at least two like this about Delia Falconer’s novel, The Service of Clouds.)

The second would be ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes Award’ for the reviewer who most sycophantically and lickspittingly attempts to defend a tired old/keen-to-please young writer’s latest underwritten fragment as a major and revolutionary work which will change culture as we know it forever. (Too many exampled around to select just one.)

I hope this amusing and democratic competition takes your fancy.

Maurilia Meehan, Fairfield, Vic.

I appreciate the irony. I deliberately used the title Personal Best for anthologies I once edited (1989, 1991) as a way of saying that there are personal achievements outside the world of sport, and now I am being asked to review an anthology titled Personal Best which is a collection of stories about sport (for young adult readers).

The book under review is a theme anthology and it’s worth examining how anthologies have evolved in Australia. There was a time when few were published. Most were overview collections of classic stories by famous writers – as determined by the editor – and saw themselves as being representative of short story writing here. In the 1960s and 1970s various factors emerged to challenge this – a vigorous little-magazine culture; the influence of critics and teachers like Don Anderson; the publication of landmark collections by innovative writers; Literature Board encouragement; the liberalisation of censorship laws – so that, by the 1980s, anthologies were less inclined to restate the canon and more inclined to publish contemporary writers, new stories, and new forms of writing.

Now, in the 1990s, we have the theme anthology, a collection of stories suggested by anything from a painting to a place, a season, an emotion, a condition, or an activity. There has also been a significant editing shift: where editors once scoured various publications for published stories, they now commission new stories, offering fees that are much higher than those offered by the little magazines, the traditional home of short stories. In an atmosphere where little magazines are declining, few firms are publishing collections by individuals, there are no popular outlets for short stories, and no outlets for the long story, and established authors can’t afford to write short stories on spec but only if commissioned, the theme anthology has taken on a central if skewed role in Australian short story writing.

There are obvious pitfalls for an editor. A theme is self-limiting by nature (though writers’ imaginations may not be); lazy writers are inclined to submit slightly reworked versions of their bottom-drawer stories, and some nerve is required to reject a story once it’s been commissioned.

In all other respects, a theme anthology is like any anthology. It will offer good writing mixed with the bad, introduce us to writers whose other work we may wish to read, while away time in a classroom or on a train, and establish new canons or sub-canons.

Anthologies are also common in children’s books, but in one important respect they are breaking new ground: they take it for granted that Australia and New Zealand are neighbours. Like Crossing (Agnes Nieuwenhuizen and Tessa Duder, 1995), Personal Best is a collection of stories by Australian and New Zealand writers. One might suggest that marketing decisions drove the make-up of these books, if it were not for the many other instances of Australia/New Zealand co-operation in the field of writing for children. There is often a strong contingent of New Zealand children’s writers at our writers’ festivals, for example, and Viewpoint magazine always gives equal consideration to Australian and New Zealand children’s books.

According to the introduction in Personal Best, the editors asked for ‘stories about kids involved in some sporting activity’, suggesting ‘some element’ of the main characters learning … something about themselves … Maybe, in the process, growing up a little’.

It’s not surprising, then, that there is a certain likeness to the stories, a sense of self-deprecating loner or misfit teenagers finding a measure of courage or achievement. In other words, the editors could just as easily have asked for stories about ‘leaving home’ if empowerment and the getting of wisdom – the common and predictable themes in children’s fiction-are the point of them. This is disappointing when we consider the significance of sport in contemporary life. So many of sport’s negative aspects – bullying, hero-worship, the lure of big bucks, the hype – affect teenagers more than anyone else. Indeed, the editors allude to these wider implications in their introduction. I realise that I’m asking for a different book when I should be reviewing the one to hand, but I did wonder: Why sport?

That said, there are some very fine stories in Personal Best (the New Zealand contributions generally better than the Australian). Although several strain for a comic effect, end too conveniently or miss opportunities, the best among them, like Martin Baynton’s ‘Leap of Faith’, Tessa Duder’s ‘Freddie Bone’, and Janice Marriott’s ‘Good Hands’, offer the density and complexity that we demand of good short fiction. Baynton’s story is also beautifully written, and Duder’s funny and moving. Christine Harris’ story, about a spina bifida athlete and his unwilling community-service-order assistant, is finely judged. Diana Noonan’s ‘Somewhere Dangerous’, with its appealing main character, natural dialogue, and vivid scene-setting, is the most satisfying story in this (mostly) satisfying book.

Autobiographical tales, at least in Australian culture, tend to come in three kinds: the kind that was written as a self-consciously literary product; the kind that has a unique or sensational angle, or focus, or moment; and the kind that was written by the famous to tell the story of their fame, usually with content well to the fore over style.

But the Wherrett brothers’ Desirelines is a different kind of book again. It is autobiographical but it was written by two people. The sensational angle is something they share. They are both famous, but it is not, or only incidentally is, a book about their fame. Both of them 'can write’, but it was not written as a high-literary book. Desirelines belongs to what has almost become a sub-genre of autobiography, at least in Australia – the harrowing-story-of-the-father book – and recalls books otherwise as widely different from each other as Merv Lilley’s Gatton Man, Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, and even to some extent Sally Morgan’s My Place, as a chronicle of family secrecies and horrors engendered by paternal violence, failure, or silence.

For the figure at the heart of Desirelines is neither of the Wherrett brothers nor even, quite, their long-suffering and much-loved mother. Arthur Eric Wherrett, father of Peter and Richard, schoolboy athletics champion, disappointed suburban pharmacist, epileptic, alcoholic, wife-beating cross-dresser, is the focus of this book, and many of those episodes and reflections which do not involve him directly are presented, or must be read, as having their genesis in his tormented and tormenting self.

This is what the term 'post-feminist really means: it describes an era in which a good explanatory framework has been provided for hitherto inexplicable or, sometimes literally, unspeakable behaviour; an era in which it is possible to acknowledge and speak about constructions of gender and the horrors those constructions could bring on real, ordinary people, setting rigid standards and agendas for sexual and social behaviour at a time when gender difference was regarded as a matter of nature and essence, and ignorance was bliss.

Questions of gender and sexuality have determined the patterns of both Wherrett brothers' private lives, and each examines these in the course of their more or less alternating contributions to the book and as a kind of counterpoint to the stories about the development of their work in public life. Richard, musing on his appointment in 1979 as Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, remarks, ‘I’d entered the 1960s buoyed by the clarification of my sexual identity. I’d entered the 1970s buoyed by the clarification of my national identity. I was now entering the 1980s buoyed by my professional identity.’

It's Richard, also, who, in discussing his production of The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, provides the clearest brief summary of his father’s and his brother’s practice as cross-dressers: I began to understand that cross-dressing was not essentially a sexual activity, and was most frequently a heterosexual practice of a very complex and sophisticated nature. That this is so is borne out by Peter’s account of the genesis of his own cross-dressing, which he remembers as intricately bound up with childhood fear and rejection of his father:

I am in bed and I am wakened by a noise which turns out to be my father screaming abuse at my mother. The sound is harsh, angry and frightening and I am very much afraid … I get out of bed and pad along the hallway to my parents’ bedroom and open one of my mother's drawers and take out a soft, silky item of her underwear. I carry it back to my bed and I cuddle it … With my security blanket I can survive. The security blanket is my mother and I hold onto her tightly.

I wanted to grow up to be like my mother. I loathed my father. I was in mortal fear of him, and of what he represented, seeing him as the archetypal male … I still have very few male friends and I am still fearful of the male pack mentality.

Disappointingly, this memory doesn’t lead to any speculation about Eric Wherrett's own childhood or where his cross-dressing might have come from, although one of the book's most intriguing images is of Peter, by then well into adolescence discovering his father's frocks and wigs. ‘In this, at least, I was my father’s son. It disturbed me because I didn't want to be like him. And then it occurred to me that he didn’t want to be like him either.’

The Wherrett brothers have between them contributed a great deal over a long time to a broad spectrum of Australian culture: theatre, television, movies, and the sprawling subcultures of car worship. Desirelines is worth reading for its account of that; and for its intriguing account of the psychosexual of a violent father’s sons; and for its vivid picture of a 1950s Australian suburban childhood. But what should really stand out is the skill of Peter Wherrett, who after all spent many hours carefully learning his craft as a journalist, whose writing is in consequence forceful and direct, and whose fishing-with-Father tale at the beginning of the book is one of the best parent stories I’ve read for a long time.

Imants Tiller is one of the most distinguished of Australia’s postmodern generation of artists. Just about every trendsetting exhibition within Australia throughout the 1980s had a Tillers piece on centrestage, and his inclusion in internationally touring shows then and in the 1990s has been a matter of course. His commercial success has matched his fame and his prodigious output. But Tillers’s high profile and fashionable appeal are contradictory phenomena. For an artist whose work is declaratively derivative – brashly quoting, awkwardly imitating or strategically appropriating other artists’ imagery – Tillers has nonetheless managed to develop a signature effect in his working method which is inimitable.

Frank Wilmot has aways existed in my mind under his nom-de­-poetical-plume: that is to say, as Furnley Maurice. This, even though his proper name was given in my first collection of Australian verse, that of H.M. Green forty-five years or so ago. For several decades, from the mid-1950s on, modernism was seen as a Good Thing and our stuffy Australian forebears were upbraided for not taking it on more quickly. Over those years we strove to find the modernist traces which had gone ahead of us: in Kenneth Slessor or Chester Cobb, in Margaret Preston and Adrian Lawlor, in Walter Burley Griffin. Some of us had turned against aspects of this imprecise movement in the 1950s, I admit, because of its associations with fascism, but who could really resist for long the world of Picasso, Stravinsky, Woolf, Joyce, and Auden? What incomparable riches were there, I felt, and still do.

In the 1980s, a rubber wheel had turned, mainly in the sheltered workshops of universities and art colleges. Students were now brought up firmly to believe that modernism was a Bad Thing. Nobody in the outside world noticed, but a post-structural demolition of artist heroes rolled ahead and is far from over yet. Moreover, there were considerable gains along the way, ‘minor’ artists like Lesbia Harford and Clarice Beckett getting the attention they deserved, and ethnic writers rapidly attracting the notice they would have got anyway – in time.