Australia in the imagination of its first European mapmakers was a curious place where odd creatures dwelt. Now that a metropolitan culture emanates from cities to encircle the continent with farms, roads, towns, and nature reserves, the spaces marked ‘exotic’ have shifted. But they’re still here. I know, because I’ve recently moved from Melbourne to Tasmania. Why are you doing this? Asked West Australian colleagues when we talked at a conference in south India. Tasmania’s a great place for a holiday, but how could you live there? It’s so far from everywhere, and you’ll have no one to talk to.

Little do they know, I thought as I smiled and said nothing and remembered my Yankee cousins who came down South to visit us when I was growing up in the mountains of Tennessee. Snooty kids they were, looking at us as backward, blind to the pleasures and freedoms we enjoyed in our difference, our resistant space on the periphery.

The Australian literary scene has always been more depressing that it is lively, especially when critics and writers are quick to display their battle scars in public places where oftentimes the debate hardly rises above fawning or fighting. The walking wounded are encouraged to endure. This is about the only encouragement extant. I remember the Simpson episode, not O.J. but Bart, who arrived in Australia for a kick up the bum. Perhaps the emulation of Britain has reached such an unconscious proportion that no ground can be explored beyond the grid bounded by Grub Street and Fleet Street, where youngsters need to be caned for reasons more prurient than wise, and where small ponds become the breeding pools for goldfish pretending to be piranhas dishing up more of the same stew. Thus, British writing, apart from its internationalists, hath come to this sad pass. Or where, given the brashness of being itself a young nation unused to finesse, Australia’s grand ideals end up as populist opinion – a talkback republic of letters irrelevant to its real enemies.

But now is the time for millennial pronouncements, while the chattering classes chatter on as blithe barbarity turns upon Babylon. Henry James was of course very good at pointing this out, but more than a hundred years after him, a rather poor copy of an aspiring creative nation struggles towards bedlam. It may be unfair to place this weight upon the shoulders of writers and critics, but in times of crisis they should be nothing if not critical. The ruins of history loom large fore and aft. In order not to prostitute a diminishing future, writers and critics have to be more than themselves, more than their minute brief of petty bickering, for there are politicians enough for that.

Just what is the difference between a reviewer and a critic? It seems a question of status, based in turn on the frequency and quality of the reviewing. On the other hand, the critic is suggestive of reflective articles and/or books, whereas the reviewer is offering a first reading, a virginal reading so to speak, without the opportunity for prolonged reflection. Nor properly should there be such aftermath reflection, because the review presents itself, by definition, as a first response.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when it was still fashionable to speak of the Great Australian Emptiness, we took this image of the geographical dead heart of Australia as implying a cultural emptiness as well, a suggestion that too little had happened or been made here to give the mind, the civilised mind, anything to hang on to, identify with or make its own.

Well, the idea of geographical emptiness has gone. Geologically, and as the home of a rich flora and fauna, Australia now looms in our head as a crowded space, made alive to us, in a living way, partly through our own discovery of it as a place we are deeply at home in, partly through our understanding, if only in a beginning way, of that great earlier network of meanings that was laid over it by the Aborigines; crowded too, now that scholars and publishers over these last years have made the whole story known to us, with the products of more than two hundred years of dense and daily living, with country houses, bark huts, regional forms of domestic architecture, furniture, silverware, paintings – artefacts of every sort that mark and define our presence and are, as much as anything can be, the evidence of a unique identity.

Snake Cradle: Autobiography of a black woman is the first published volume of a three-part life story from Australia’s renowned black rights activist Dr Roberta Sykes. In Snake Cradle, Sykes chronicles the first seventeen years of her life in Queensland and gives us a generously open story in her legendary powerful and thought-provoking style.

After thirty years of activism, Sykes has become something of an icon of black rights in this country. Her reputation as an articulate and powerful woman grew in the 1960s and 1970s as Australia’s Aboriginal leadership broke barriers of entrenched racism to change the backward policies of containment of Aboriginal people in this country.

Secrets swarm through Sykes’ childhood in 1950s Townsville, then a rural north Queensland seaside town. Here in the ‘Snakes Cradle’ of colonial racism, Sykes and two younger sisters grew up with their white mother, Rachel Patterson, in a nest constructed of secrets and lies. Yet Sykes speaks fondly of her mother who was ‘the minder and nurturer whom we suspected of having eyes in the back of her head, and who was the central and most powerful influence in our early lives. But did we know her? The answer is no.’

Sykes also draws upon the Carpet Snake totem, which was revealed to her by an old Aboriginal man who, recognising family resemblances, placed her in an Aboriginal ancestry. Throughout Australia, the knowledge of Aboriginal elders on such matters is uncanny and respected.

Can you keep a secret
I don’t suppose you can
you mustn’t laugh, you mustn’t cry
but do the best you can.

That old rhyme sits unpondered in the memory of every woman or man who grew up to speak English or chant it in the many incantatory rituals of childhood. It is locked in there, partnered with the rhythmic thud of a skipping rope and spirals drawn on your palm to test endurance, in the exquisite torture test that was part primitive ordeal, part initiation into a social community that had its mysteries and its taboos and its transgressions. Children move naturally in this world of internalised rhythms, of things unexplained, of enigma and excitement.

Lionel Murphy was a prominent and colourful figure in the ALP renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, and a significant legal intellectual. The extraordinary saga of his final years, when he was hounded by political foes and the press, created a farrago of misunderstanding and innuendo that clouded his reputation. Jenny Hocking has set out to recover Murphy’s public life and to correct the record. Curiously, her emphasis on philosophy and consistency works against the interest of this story: the larrikin edge and the complexity of the man are smoothed away.

A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.

The photo is opposite page eighty. I suspect from the faint fluff in the hair that it’s late 1972. It was taken in the office by a photographer from the Australian News and Information Bureau, a group who were not your art-portrait photographers. The sitting would have been over in a minute; the subject didn’t spend time posing. The caption reads:

Many pictures of Gough Whitlam recall Eric Fromm’s observation that in the expression of narcissists we often find a kind of glow or smile, which gives the impression of smugness to some, of beatific trusting childishness to others.

Clever Gough playing the beatific, trusting childlike card all these years. If only Eric Fromm had been around to tell us.

This eccentric, laborious book is designed to correct what most of us think about the 1967 Referendum. The popular belief – the authors call it a myth – is that the Australian people then voted to acknowledge citizenship by giving Aborigines the vote, and that this was a Commonwealth thrust towards, crucial, deeper involvement in Aboriginal affairs.

‘Surely 27 May should be Australia’s national day,’ The Age opined last year, ‘On that date in 1967 by referendum, all Australian citizens, indigenous or otherwise, became equal under the Constitution with the same rights and responsibilities. True nationhood was born on the day.’ The sentiment is shared by Aboriginal leaders, including Patrick Dobson and Roberta Sykes.

But it is wrong, according to these four authors (two white historians and the two Aboriginal and Islander people who helped them with the all too sketchy oral testimonies dealing with ‘indigenous memories and perspectives’). It is wrong, or at least overstated for several reasons.

John Kinsella, who has made a name for himself in Australia and abroad as poet and critic/commentator, has published an extended prose sequence which his publishers describe as a novel, called Genre. It’s dedicated to Derrida, as well as Kinsella’s partner, Tracy Ryan; and it begins with quotes from Defoe (on the plague) and Dennis Hopper (on drugs). Genre reads like a kind of journal/essay with meditations on ideas of seeing, on poetry, and addiction, intercut with several narratives. ‘In the Theatre of the Imagination, all but one of the eight stages are occupied ... The Renaissance Man is writing an essay on an exhibition and thinking about his latest books on aesthetics.’ The narrator’s essay is called ‘A Public Viewing of Private Spaces’. The writing, shifting sometimes abruptly in mid-sentence, sometimes seamlessly from the journal or essay to other narratives, slides along in a smoke of speed (both kinds). Upstairs in Genre apartments, it’s a display of drugs, sex, and intellect. The student is reading Descartes, and writing a science fiction novel; the ‘girls’ are snorting speed – or is it ecstasy, acid, or strychnine; ‘the addict’ is reading a cult drug novella, too stoned to fill out his dole form, and his girlfriend has had her child taken away by the Department, and painted the walls vermilion.

‘Ken Wark,’ says Linda Jaivin on this jacket, ‘makes postmodernism sexy.’ First cabbages, now postmodernism! Where can she take us from here? The trouble is I don’t believe her. Now that’s too easy a write-off. I’m not instinctually warm to The Virtual Republic, and I think Linda Jaivin’s line is a more than normally meretricious blurb, but Wark’s enterprise is essentially a request for conversation and why not accede to that. Still I want to protest even as I converse. The book is an olive branch masquerading as a polemic. Or, like Lindsay’s parrot who was a swagman, is it the other way round?

There are two parts, ‘Roots’ and ‘Aerials’. The first is an account of Wark’s intellectual progress and program, the second a critique of recent cultural controversies —Demidenko/ Darville, Manning Clark, The First Stone, Christopher Koch and David Williamson on postmodernism, political correctness, Pauline Hanson. This second part I find often stimulating and sometimes even persuasive. Koch’s Miles Franklin acceptance speech, for example, does not stand up at all well, and Wark’s discussion of Clark’s Meeting Soviet Man manages to be sympathetic yet not a ridiculous spectacle of bending over backwards.

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.

Samuel Johnson

 

Sometimes the situation in Australia, with respect to writers, resembles that in early eighteenth-century England.

The Dog-star rages! nay ‘tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

Thus Pope, in ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’. The scene he describes was undoubtedly more fevered than ours. There were virtually no constraints with regard to defamation or copyright, or ‘professional’ competence. As books came off the printing press they engendered more books and pamphlets in turn, continuations, disputations, commentaries, squibs, and parodies. Writers were essentially public creatures in ways that might seem strange, or attractive, to us now, depending on the point of view. They were, to adapt the title of a pamphlet by Richard Savage, the unfortunate hack immortalised by Dr Johnson, ‘authors to be let’, employed in the combat between political factions, active in religious controversies, quick to turn their hands to vilification, and adulation. ‘He lived in those days,’ Pope wrote of himself in the introduction to The Dunciad:

John Docker

Mark Davis’ Voltairean Gangland is one of those rare books that prise open a space for revaluation of the direction of a culture. Like The Dunciad’s evocation of the Grub Street hacks of its time, Gangland exposes tentacular networks of chummy patronage, mutual puffery, and cultural power. Gangland is especially enjoyable on the clown-like behaviour of the ex-Scripsi diaspora – in a curious sexual division of labour, a B-team of male critics, captained by the felicitously named P. Craven, has successfully promoted a coterie of writers like Jolley, Garner, and Modjeska. Compared to those I analyse in Australian Cultural Elites (1974) and In A Critical Condition (1984), this new élite is the most intellectually thin in Australian cultural history. Assisted by a passive, grovelling middle-class readership, it both creates such writers as canonical and then tries desperately to shield their texts from critique and challenge.

Playwright and professional poéte maudit, Barry Dickins launched this collection as part of La Mama’s thirtieth anniversary festivities. Dickins, it is reported, was not in a festive mood. In an unusually begrudging and self-absorbed frame of mind, he allegedly failed to extol the selected plays and went so far as to hint that one of his own tautly sprung specimens should have been included.

With most of my plays (even Dimboola) going out of print, it is tempting, but only for a split second, to echo the Noel Coward of Reservoir. I would have been ineligible: The La Mama Collection (‘six plays for the 1990s’) is most rigorously centred on the new and young. As such it is a model of the neophilia which drives and dominates our theatre culture, a neophilia emanating from indigenous theatre companies but also whipped up and cemented by an inanely modish media.

Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone in a decade.

The same goes for literature that attempts to define or interpret the music. Sure, that Guns ’N’ Roses, Culture Club or Spandau Ballet picture/text book might have seemed pretty impressive when it first appeared and you, dear reader, thought the artists in question were the greatest thing since the invention of the toaster – but in most cases those books are clogging up bookshelves or went out for fifty cents at a garage sale five years ago.

Some days ago
I sat and watched a struggling world,
yours.
Misty rain fell
and humming birds hovered
Who said ‘Insanity
is heightened sensitivity’?
                       ‘Psychiatric Clinic and Humming Birds’

The introduction to this collection(Horns of Dilemma, Papyrus Publishing, $14.95 pb, 108 pp), and the poems themselves, make it clear that Helene Brophy is a woman of much compassion and experience in the humane realms of feminism, teaching and social work, as well as in the more personal spheres of serious injury, illness and death.

Broken Land is a collection of twelve poetic sequences which record five days spent in the small outback New South Wales town of Brewarrina (the Bre of the title). It’s a drama, almost operatic in complexity and intensity, in which the central players are Dad, a Bre man who lives in solitary retirement and ‘doesn’t own much, but he likes it that way, he likes to make do, doesn’t want a new heater or a mattress, just wants to listen to the radio, roll a smoke and check on lotto …’, and Coral, the stranger in town:

‘Gordon Jacobs …’ Glass’s voice echoed around the columns of City Hall’s marble foyer as they climbed the stairs to Tuesday Reed’s office. He was as bitter, as irascible and stirred as she had ever seen him. ‘Was your Al, teflon-hearted scumbag.’

‘I heard something about it on the radio – ’

‘Blown away in a Safeway parking lot. Now isn’t that some epitaph?’

At the top of the stairs, they turned and headed down the corridor.

‘They said nothing about the leads. About suspects.’

‘This vermin’s been done once already for felonious assault – against some piece he was shacked up with – ’

‘Mr Jacobs’ former de facto, I take it you mean?’

With a title like Metre, you know that this magazine is not attracting readers by its chic and sexy appeal. Our own home-grown mags, such as Otis Rush, Salt, and HEAT, at least offer their poetry with a bit more adventure and promise. Furthermore, by combining poetry with a range of fiction, cultural criticism, essays or reviews, such local efforts release poetry from solitary confinement and bring new energies into it. In contrast, Metre seems nostalgic for older times, for days when poetry demanded respectful homage. As the staid European cousin, its conservative title is buoyed only by the overarching gaze of ambition.

How do you define despair? You might choose to describe it as ‘a chemical imbalance of the brain, resulting in fragmented perceptions, often associated with grief and pessimism’. That is the definition Gary Kelp comes across in the course of his working day. It seems to fit. ‘I imagined a picture of myself to go with the text,’ he says, ‘sitting there at the bar, staring into my drink.’

Gary works for an organisation called Information Digest, a company which produces condensed books. He cuts, pastes, rewrites, clarifies: his current assignment is to update a book called The Illustrated Family Doctor, a lay person’s medical guide. The task distresses him, particularly the images of the body he confronts on his computer screen.

It all depends. If living in an old, run-down Queenslander peopled with ten eccentric, loveable losers on government benefits is your idea of heaven, then John Birmingham’s new book, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, (the sequel to his 1994 bestseller He Died with a Falafel in His Hand), could be the realisation of your most fervent desires. For the rest of us, the lives of the characters in Birmingham’s latest offering roughly approximate hell on earth.

Remarkably to some, this cultural history of the drafting of the Australian constitution is an exciting and triumphant book. Helen Irving manages to fill in adroitly the blank pages of our constitution as a cultural artefact and to celebrate the complicated processes whereby Australia became a nation on the first day of the new century.

To actually write the framework for a nation by agreement indeed represents a concentrated act of the imagination. Moreover, it demonstrated, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a profound optimism in this country’s future. As Irving rightly argues, the nation of Australia itself was the product not of external pressure or crisis, nor due to any religious or ethnic imperatives, but was created in a time of peace. This achievement, and the codification of our national powers and institutions, despite their obvious limitations, rightly deserves celebration.

Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.

Every so often you come across a book of poetry which is just plain friendly, a book without tensions or terrors or angst to seize you – but which is consistently good poetry throughout. Seeing Things is such a book. It is so accessible in its straightforward diction and low-key tone that reading it is to feel very much spoken to, acknowledged. This is not a poetry foregrounding language or form so much as a series of poems which almost coalesce during reading into an intimate reportage of the quotidian. Intimate in the sense of almost being there, sharing the observations. It is language as transparency. From ‘Painting Session’ referring to the poet’s two-year-old daughter:

She can’t paint without taking her clothes off
and painting her body.
Beginning with her hands and finally covering
all she can reach ...

And yet, by the end of this delightful, quiet poem, there is just enough shift:

I have a blue demon, blue-eyed, rolled in blue,
tonguing the blue air here in the yard.
I hose her back to something like my child.
I am calm, distant, middle-aged,
the colour barely showing in my face.

This is subtle writing. Without such shifts, the poems would suffer, I feel, from flatness, but the shifts are doing more than merely ‘saving’ the poem, they are the poetry itself, that which informs the writing beyond its prose.

The collection is frequently structured around the list, as much of the seeing is compressed out of narrative and into a gathering. In a witty and affectionate poem a fellow poet is implied and actually characterised by the items he has left behind in a house (‘Grant on Edward’), a cafe and locale are placed in a series of images (‘Kaleidoscope Kafe Sydney Road Brunswick’) or, with use of a parallel, an Irish ancestor is portrayed by separate events in his life alongside the poet’s account of things noted while touring in Ireland. As he says: ‘and this Brophy watched with eyes / that remembered everything’. And there does seem to my ear a distinctly Irish phrasing to Brophy’s fluent and effortless humour, something I’d discerned before these poems of his set in Ireland, and reminding me of poets such as Heaney but especially Paul Durcan – who is much funnier than the good, staid Heaney – in phrases like this: ‘In fact last year I confess I changed Dean / Street to Death Street without drawing attention to myself.’

Two poems which do use narrative are among the best in the collection. The longer ‘A Small Mistake’ again uses the parallel, this time contrasting the reaching for calm and detachment through yoga with a minor but growing problem of having to kill a half-drowned guinea pig left behind by the school’s half-mad problem student. The poem becomes a sustained meditation on action and non-action (‘My yoga teacher says that we find life difficult / because there are too many fires burning inside us.’), on the everyday perceptions of order and, then, through a gently modulating momentum, on death, and finally resolves itself in the desire for having children. Given its twenty-six sections, this is a more complex and amusing poem, not because of inaccessibility but through it gathering stronger thematic variables and its more unexpected but witty shifts of register. It is a strong double then with ‘What Men and Women Do’ which looks back through a child’s naive perception of the things adults (exemplified through parents) do that seem so strange and unknowable, and how the son wishes to have this knowledge revealed so he in turn can do and know those things when they are gone. Parallel with this is the accident of the two brothers hit by a car after leaving a newsagent:

We were carried back to the newsagency and placed on the
floor together
my brother screaming and me still holding the comic
and the newsagent bent down to me and tugged at the comic
and I
tugged back
holding tight to what I had paid for (knowing the value of
money).
You can’t just take it, the newsagent said and the crowd
watched him
try to pull it from my hands and my brother screaming.

Brophy’s poetry never leaves you in a strange territory; it is a world plainly recognisable but rarely plain. There are among the many poetries those poems which, by registering a seeing, show us and have us feel again the world as we know it – the poem as a re-making, a construction of moments or sequences. Closely related to these are the poems which begin from this ‘reality’ then seem to inscribe within it another world we know much less well – and which is perhaps only to be found in the poem. It is more a language of intuitions. Brophy’s work is pretty nearly always the former, so it is less strange and more familiar and if that is a loss then it is also its charm.

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading:

When I was a kid … I thought that one day I would live the kind of life that was described in the books I had read, a life filled with meaningful and thought-provoking conversations and dramatic revelations about my own nature and the nature of others ... When I got older I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the realities of the adult world. The world I discovered seemed like an inane parody of the world I had read about.

Merarra is the local name for the land near Walcott Inlet in the far north-west region of Western Australia where saltwater meets freshwater, coastland meets inland. And the ‘man from Merarra’ was the last ‘full’ speaker of the local, Unggumi language, a senior lawman and famous Kimberley stockman called Billy Munro, or, in his native tongue, Morndi.

It’s a saltwater name in Unggumi and Wororra. I’m just about saltwater myself. I’m Morndi, the saltwater mirage. I came to my father as a vision. He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye. I was a little human in the saltwater mirage walking towards him, calling out, ‘I’m Morngingali ... ’

Here’s the first in a new series from the indefatigable pen of Jennifer Rowe. Verity Birdwood is still going strong, at last check: it wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Lamb to the Slaughter in these pages. And, of course, as Emily Rodda, Rowe has turned out a couple of dozen Teen Power books, attracting several Children’s Book Awards. She is every inch a professional writer.

And professional is what you’d have to call Deadline. It opens what can be relied upon to be a long series, linked to the TV series Murder Call, which Rowe has co-written with Hal McElroy (in her spare time), featuring Detective Tessa Vance, who makes her print debut in this book. Rowe’s approach to crime writing is as organised as all the other facets of her life. 

Deadline, while breaking no new generic ground, is highly readable and competently executed in every way. It turns on a central puzzle of curious enough invention to sustain interest, bolstered by an engaging and suitably (if predictably) flawed focal Detective/Detectress duo in the lovely (naturally) Tessa and taciturn-but-goodhearted (of course) Steve Hayden. The whole is spiced with the complex currents running between these two, on their first case together.

Special credit, as ever, to Rowe for vivid settings: here, initially, the overtly theatrical fun park scenario, but equally the subsequent pubs, apartments, period houses, offices, and beachside outdoors. Perhaps as a gesture to a visual medium, the story opens inside ye olde Ghost Train, almost too stagey a setting for a murder, except that the reader’s attention is drawn right away into the less than edifying musings of a rather unprepossessing attendant in a skeleton costume, whose final minutes these are.

In line with the now firmly established convention regarding TV women detectives, Tessa Vance must be shown to have a soft underbelly. We meet her at the moment the Ghost Train Murder Call comes through, the ringing phone sounding the death knell of more than the intimate birthday dinner it interrupts. Young Ms Vance arrives at the tacky scene late, distracted, wrong-footed, and still dressed to kill.

Uh, oh. Will newly-promoted Senior Detective Vance be tough and professional enough to cope with the uncertain, mistrustful reception of her new colleagues, male and female? Will the new partners find a modus vivandi? How wrong will the case go if they don’t? Predictably, but nonetheless enjoyably, the tensions, misconceptions, half-explanations, and general pride and prejudice on both sides rapidly erect communication barriers, dismantled, finally, just in time.

As the murders proliferate, and the reader’s attention is directed to the psychology of the murderer, interpersonal push­and-pull between Vance and Hayden is a satisfyingly tense backdrop to the progressive unveiling of a killer’s motivation and the accomplishment of a few more killings. The necessary counterpoint, with sparks of the necessary attraction, is established for a long partnership.

Rowe’s language seems, with each book, to become more terse and straight forward, not a word wasted. The pace in this one is unflagging. Perhaps a little too much so. The number of victims killed or targeted, according to an obscure agenda which we are let in on about half way through, is possibly excessive, limiting the emotional engagement the reader is willing to dedicate. Although the requisite ingenuity in the matter of plot construction is certainly present in Deadline, along with the twist at the end, there is a certain mechanical feel to the dénouement. The victims are lined up like shells on a coconut shy, and in the end one’s interest is limited to how many of them will be knocked down.

This feature only becomes pronounced in the latter half of the book. The first few victims are speedily but deftly sketched, with sufficient context to bring them decisively to life. After Detective Vance makes a few inspired guesses that lead to the (apparent) explanation of apparently unconnected murders, the vignettes become more cursory, the wrap-up, back in the slightly de trop fun park, a bit perfunctory.

Keeping the major plot warm, as it were, is the sub-plot of personal danger faced by Tessa. Here, she is the intended target of an ex-con with a grudge. As in so many of these fictions, a mix of unhelpful emotions and circumstances conspire to prevent her from explaining the situation to her new colleagues, Hayden in particular, with suspenseful results, resolved only just in time for the final metaphorical shootout.

In the end, the reader will find him/herself quite satisfactorily involved with Tessa Vance and Steve Hayden, perhaps a little less engaged by the plot and its resolution. But Steve and Tessa are the main thing: they have the makings of a long­running, well-nuanced partnership.

In 1992, Fang Xiangshu collaborated with Trevor Hay, a mandarin-speaking Melbourne academic, on a non-fiction book, East Wind, West Wind, an account of Fang’s escape from China to begin a new life in Australia.

Fang, who had met Trevor Hay in Nanjing, first came to Australia as an exchange scholar in 1984, was recalled for reasons which remained mysterious but clearly threatening, and spent a nightmare period being slowly enmeshed in the coils of Chinese bureaucracy. He had left his young wife in Melbourne, and this, as well as obvious signs that his own future did not look promising, gave him enough ingenuity to find a risky way out of the country. After a good deal of tangling with the Australian bureaucracy, he became an Australian citizen, and now lectures in Chinese language and culture at Deakin University.

In a course on Australian popular culture, I routinely ask students a pair of questions: is Australian culture increasingly Americanised; is Australian culture increasingly distinctive and original? They routinely answer yes to both. Australian National Cinema suggests why there might be more than poor logic behind their response. Its contradictoriness tells us something fundamental about how Australian cinema exists in the cinema world and the social world.

Tom O’Regan’s book is the most important study of the subject since Dermody and Jacka’s The Screening of Australia (1987–88). Such statements are always faintly absurd but this gives a perspective on the book and announces my sense of its achievement. O’Regan positions his argument in relation to Dermody and Jacka’s which considered Australian film as a ‘film industry’ and as a ‘national cinema’. He continues this double perspective but complicates and extends it. The book isn’t quite a history of Australian cinema or the film industry. Nor is it a study of the dominant themes and styles of Australian movies, an attempt to define what Australian cinema is, or a critical demolition of the myths and stereotypes it circulates. It’s all these things and something else again.

Tony Austin and Rosalind Kidd are non­indigenous Australian scholars whose special contribution to the history of black-white relations in this country is to have researched the policy detail, culture, and interpersonal intricacies of the white bureaucracy that dealt with Aboriginal affairs in a large part of northern Australia. As each of them documents over and over again, the white males who exercised government power over indigenous Australians went to great lengths to avoid consulting those they governed or to include them in the decision-making process. The present books therefore do not claim to represent an Aboriginal point of view; their object of study is white policy and malpractice. Never Trust a Government Man and The Way We Civilise are each the outcome of archival research using government departmental documents, beginning at roughly the same period – from the time early this century – that a newly created Australian Federal Government first began to face its responsibilities towards indigenous people.

Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.

Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone in a decade.

The same goes for literature that attempts to define or interpret the music. Sure, that Guns ’N’ Roses, Culture Club or Spandau Ballet picture/text book might have seemed pretty impressive when it first appeared and you, dear reader, thought the artists in question were the greatest thing since the invention of the toaster – but in most cases those books are clogging up bookshelves or went out for fifty cents at a garage sale five years ago.

From Gerard Hayes

Dear Editor,
If Mark Davis had wanted to concoct a parody of babyboomer fogeyism, he could hardly have done better than Peter Craven’s review of Gangland. Opening with a quotation from Anthony Powell and doing his best to parrot the Powellian tone of bored hauteur, Craven details the shortcomings of Davis’s age: not young – in fact a ‘late bloomer’ – but still not old enough to know better, indeed ‘rather earnest and plodding’.

Craven goes on to declare his astonishment at Davis’s bland statement that ‘neither he nor anyone in his circle would voluntarily read a book by Garner or Jolley’. This astonishment, rather than accusing Davis, illustrates precisely what he is talking about in Gangland. Ozlit as a cosy coterie in which someone like Craven can work for years as an editor and reviewer without ever meeting or, more importantly, reading anyone whose literary mindset differs significantly from his own.

And although Craven’s looking-glass logic in pursuit of predetermined conclusions is well documented in Gangland, can I just ask for verification that he is seriously arguing, in his review, that The First Stone should be held less accountable to a standard of historical veracity than The Hand That Signed The Paper? Seriously?

Gerard Hayes
South Yarra, Vic.

From Sophie Masson

Dear Editor,

One of the most lamentable things, for me, about Gangland (reviewed in last month’s ABR) is a sense of missed opportunity. Instead of a genuinely thoughtful and heartfelt exploration of the Australian cultural map, we just get an attempt to replace one supposed gang with another. There are errors of fact and interpretation in the book (for example, The Death of Marat by David was indeed a political painting, but not in the way Davis thinks it is – for David painted it to curry favour with one Jacobin faction, (only to have to do a hasty turn around), as well as some bad timing (see the beginning of Chapter Ten for a rather unfortunate example).

But that sense of missed opportunity is the most gnawing one, for me. I am exactly Davis’s age and fit his stereotypical image of the so-called neglected , not only as an inbetweener, but as a woman and a ‘nesbie’ of totally tangled ethnicity, yet found his book unbearably patronising. A dusty boring dualism – a dualism, moreover, based on that most ridiculous and arbitrary of ‘differences’, that of birthdate – infests his book, making the few interesting bits and pieces just too easy to miss. One of the truly exciting – and sometimes disconcerting – things about our times is the opportunity to engage not only in dialogue but in multifaceted conversation, free of the vicious and tedious ideologies that made the greater part of our century such a river of blood. I feel excited to be writing at such a time, when all kinds of things are possible, when things I was brought up with which seemed at the time impossibly offbeat and out of field, are now at least illuminated to some degree, and know that I have had opportunities in this time that I might perhaps have been denied in a less pluralistic age (I say perhaps because the past is never monolithic either). And I have found my fellow writers, including many of the ones Davis demonises in his book, to be both generous and collegial, and that the culture does indeed make way for people if they have something interesting to say. What’s wrong with an older, more experienced writer offering advice and encouragement to a younger, less experienced one who seeks it? Besides, it can cut both ways, as I know from personal experience. Unfortunately, Davis seems to be stuck in precisely the same groove that he accuses his targets of. He persists in using outmoded ideas and symbols, much more outmoded than those of many of the people he attacks so gratuitously.

For heaven’s sake, in France today few people are interested in the cultural theorists he’s so assiduous in defending; their legacy is seen as precisely the ancient strangler fig which has succeeded in arresting French literary life. Davis pins cliched label s such as ‘cold warrior’ on people like Robert Manne, without seeming to undersand the surely simple notion that Manne’s reactions to Demidenko (as indeed, his previous and subsequent analysis of Communism and its hideous history) stems from his horror at the intellectual abstraction of real people’s real suffering – a reaction of flesh and blood, not of ideology at all. Davis correctly points out that one of the most interesting comments on the Demidenko debacle came from a letter writer to The Australian who said that ‘To become a Demidenko, you first have to be a Darville’, but doesn’t follow the reasoning far enough. Not to the furphy that ‘Anglo-Celts’ are limited in their understanding of other people’s suffering, or that non-Anglos have it hard, but that to become a media event – not just a novelist – based on plunging your hands into other people’s wounds, it is best to be not only callow and shallow, but a fake. It does not mean that we should never touch such subjects – and Manne’s idea that the book would not have been published in Europe does not stem from any cringing sense of European superiority, but rather that the memory of those things lives on there in a way that precludes lime-lighting and showing-off: for a truly devastating look at Nazi collaboration, see Marcel Ophuls’s documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, and Louis Malle’s heartbreaking film, Lacombe Lucien. To put everything in the context of parochial pugilistic politics is both naive and unworthy, for much of the world’s people lives in the world not of Davis’s privileged cultural theory students, but Lucien Lacombe’s world, a world which Shakespeare would recognise. By the way, I have seen performances of Shakespeare, the supposedly ‘paradigmatic monocultural Englishman’ of Davis’ dismissal, in countries as far apart as Zimbabwe and France, Indonesia and Ireland, and no-one appeared to have any trouble understanding his world view (in any case, anyone who imagines that England, with its mosaic of regional traditions, dialects, and historical mix of cultural influences, is a monoculture, simply does not understand what the term means!).

And in a book supposedly all about the young, why has Davis left out the entire literary and other culture produced for children and young adults? No doubt it’s because in his scheme of things those under university age don’t count – but if he talked to a few of those young people, he might get a few surprises.

Sophie Masson
Invergowrie, NSW

From Ken Gelder

Dear Editor,
In October’s ABR, young Peter Craven informs us of ‘the fact that people do not simply act in their friends’ interests’. Is the world still turning? Pinch me, someone, I must be dreaming.

Ken Gelder
Brunswick, Vic.

From Nathan Hollier

Dear Editor,

On reading Mark Davis’s work, Gangland, I felt, to paraphrase Helen Garner, somewhat out of context, like coming up for air after spending, well, a few years of newspaper reading at least, underwater. That’s what education can do for you. For someone who had only a vague sense of the ways that our literary figures and cultural commentators fitted together, Davis’s work has performed a valuable service. It is all very well for literary insiders to complain that they are placed in a bad light by having their intrapersonal relations scrutinised, but with whom should Davis’s loyalties lie, with them, or with his (and their) readers?

There is nothing too complex about the analysis employed, nor the conclusions drawn. He merely states a basically enlightened opposition to a broad range of narratives operating within the public sphere, and argues that these narratives share something in common: ‘babyboomer’ values. The book demonstrates to the reader that, although occupying the central positions of speech within the media and ‘culture industry’, these individuals are in no way representative of the broad, or normative opinion to which many of them, though not all, lay claim. Firstly, this places pressure on these figures to engage with, as opposed to simply ignore or dismiss, the sorts of criticism thrown up by universities and new cultural formations. Secondly, it reveals how this general unwillingness to acknowledge a culturally privileged position of speech dovetails into intellectual flaws and regressive political ramifications.

It may be overstating it to suggest that anyone could have written this work, but it is certainly true that its real strength stems from the phenomenal effort involved in tracing the intellectual and political permutations of this culture of intolerance. It is precisely this middlebrow approach, this pitching of his argument at the level of the ‘ordinary person’, or literary outsider, which makes Gangland such an effective intervention within public debate.

Nathan Hollier
Carlton, Vic.

From Jan McGuinness

Dear Editor,
Is Don Anderson suffering from too-many-hats-dysfunction? I recall him as a delightful and coherent lunching companion in the days when I was one of the many literary editors he claims to have served under. How alarming then to note the confusion that distinguishes his most recent rolling column (ABR, October), where he is moved to both lament and defend the status of book reviewing.

On the one hand, he rails against literary editors who mismatch reviewers and writers with the journalistic intent of creating a stir. The unhappy and ill-served writers cannot object, especially by letter, for fear of fuelling and prolonging the controversy. It happened to Don the writer, still smarting it seems from having one of his books handed to a ‘shallow’ and ‘scatterbrained’ reviewer.

On to the next column item which is written by a different Don – Don the reviewer. In August, ABC TV’s Between the Lines canvassed the standard of reviewing in Australia and didn’t like what it found.

Despite his own adjacent misgivings, Don embarks on an exercise in kill the messenger. BTL is accused of ‘scare mongering’ and ‘gossip’ without the benefit of ‘substantiation, evidence or documentation’.

For one who has been around journalism for so long, can I respectfully suggest that Don has gleaned very little about how it works. BTL covered all the bases, presenting first-hand accounts – as distinct from gossip – from a respected publisher (Jane Palfreyman, Random House), a respected reviewer (Imre Salusinszky), a respected writer (Tom Keneally) and a respected literary editor (Susan Wyndham, SMH). Furthermore, he accuses BTL of censoring Imre Salusinszky. What a strange choice of word. BTL removed the potential defamation on legal advice.

Strangest of all is this: Don takes great objection to an ‘intellectually disreputable’ voice-over (which he quotes accurately and at length despite asserting that he merely surfs BTL), yet selectively chooses to ignore Jane Palfreyman’s endorsement of it in reply to a direct question. Yes, BTL’s criticisms are well-founded, she says, and yes, there is danger in her talking about reviewers who might then look upon Random House less favourably in future. Tom Keneally says also that he won’t name names for fear of jeopardising future reviews.

Given his earlier column item, Don should be able to relate to such unrelieved frustration. In the event, his overwrought response to BTL’s story underscores its basic assertion that many of those affected are afraid to criticise book reviewing standards for fear of an arrack à la Anderson.

Jan McGuinness
Executive Producer
Between the Lines
Elsternwick, Vic.

From Damien Broderick

Dear Editor,
It’s scary, as the writer of a book (The Spike) on the likely impact of drastic scientific innovation, to find your work damned by a reviewer who candidly admits up front: ‘Certain statements, I, a pre-internet mortal, cannot assess’. This proud declaration of ignorance does not prevent Don Miller (ABR, October 1997) from denouncing my case as ‘scientific mumbo-jumbo’.

It’s even scarier to find your words twisted to mean the opposite; things you’ve never said, or even thought, put into your mouth. Take the suggestion that I was ‘swayed by the mad and bad proposal’ to manipulate children’s brains. In fact, I called this proposal ‘most disturbing’ and ‘horrific’.

Miller claims I hold ‘an innocent, positivist view of science and knowledge’. (As the last positivist retired in 1951, I wonder that he didn’t accuse me of championing Physiocracy or Bimetallism.) A glance inside my The Architecture of Babel (1994) proves the contrary. I wrote:

It is increasingly accepted that theories of literary textuality, like all theories (including those of the practices of science and technology), are not freestanding: they are deeply implicated in ideological and other non-literary contexts … Increasingly, both literary and scientific meta-theorists are coming to view their objects of study as principally textual, as constructed ‘narratives’ which operate within social formations via processes of canonisation and negotiation. What is needed, though, to anchor constructivism’s scientific perspective (as the body anchors the arts) . is something we might call ‘the insistence of the empirical’ (p. ix-x).

It gets worse. If we now knew a mere two percent of the brain’s workings, I quoted, then it will be understood fully in just half a century, given the current rate at which knowledge in neuroscience doubles. Miller detects a fatal, hubristic flaw – surely no such estimate can be made in advance? Well, slash that absurdly low estimate to one hundredth part of one percent. We can hardly know less than that. Apply the doubling rule. We’re back up to a complete mapping in less than 150 years. On a cosmic or even historical scale, that is instantaneous.

By the way, I do not boast, let alone ‘reiterate’, that Melbourne University is ‘the finest … in the southern hemisphere’. And Marc Andreessen’s opinion of the likely impact of nanotechnology is not quoted indiscriminately as that of some random ‘24 year old computer science graduate’ – Andreessen, more saliently, is co-founder of Netscape. But as ‘pre-internet’ Dr Miller irritably puts it, how can he be expected ‘to judge the worth’ of that kind of thing?

Damien Broderick
Brunswick, Vic.

Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone ma decade. The same goes for literature that attempts to define or interpret the music. Sure, that Guns ‘N’ Roses, Culture Club or Spandau Ballet picture/text book might have seemed pretty impressive when it first appeared and you, dear reader, thought the artists in question were the greatest thing since the invention of the toaster – but in most cases those books are clogging up bookshelves or went out for fifty cents at a garage sale five years ago.

In his introduction, Queensland academic Denis Cryle writes, ‘Journalism history is bound up, not only with literary history in its contemporary sense, but with cultural history’. So true, yet so little appreciated or acknowledged in this country until very recently; unlike , say, the United States where the interplay of journalism and literature is basic to an understanding of writers ranging from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain last century to Hemingway and John Dos Passos in our own . As it was, it seems to have taken the very different works of the two Helens, Garner and Demidenko/Darville, to bring such issues into public consideration in this country.