Early on in her long and billowing narrative, Eureka Jones makes a promise to us:

Listen, I will make the clouds rain stories for you ... I will try to revive for you this time of liquid possibility when the valleys were brimful with our love of elsewhere, a love stronger than any atmospheric process, a love which turned the mountains sapphire blue.

This novel, Delia Falconer’s first, takes the form of a love lament: all about breath in bodies; textures and surfaces; clouds; mountains; photography; colour; gardens; illness. Much more, too, of course, and it is a work that certainly does not warrant such a glib cataloguing of elements and attributes. It is ambitious, and successful.

The clouds stand in for much: they are there, so close, our reading heads surrounded by them, lodged there in that pillowy space. We are high up, in the midst of mountains. Cumulus. Cirrus. Stratus. The clouds in service, attending to the forms of desire; providing more, too, a more physical effect, like this: ‘We marvelled at the beneficence of clouds. They would encourage us to eat and sleep ... soak into the pores of our skin, improving its texture and the quality of our blood.’ From the Blue Mountains setting, the village of Katoomba, Eureka Jones offers, for a whole range of listeners, retrospective tellings of the fate of love and the establishment and changes in a community. The period of her reminiscence is 1907 to 1926: starting with the closure of the hydropathic institute in the Hydro Majestic Hotel and ending with a ship’s journey. But it is to diminish the novel to try and pin down any chronology, any trajectory of action or development. It is more accurate to speak of its movement forward as holding and capturing recoveries - recuperations from consumption, from physical ailments and from broken hearts. The heart and lungs are intimately connected.

Like much else about this novel, its title The Chosen is not the relatively straightforward affair it may, at first, appear to be. One assumes for the first hundred pages or so that the ‘chosen’ are those citizens of the small NSW Southern Tablelands town of Lost River who have been chosen by a randomising computer program to have their lives represented in the commemorative tapestry being woven as a civic project along with two other pet Town Council proposals, a new jail and a high-temperature incinerator. It’s a mode that critic Ken Gelder has called ‘dark pastoral’.

This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.

Australia is exceptionally rich in parrots. Why? Many Australian plants have hard, woody seed capsules because of adaptation to seasonal aridity, low nutrient soils and wildfire. Parrots can be seen as flying nutcrackers. Australia does not, however, have any woodpeckers. Why? Well, read the essay.

George Seddon is well-known as an environmentalist and academic. Western Australian readers will remember in particular his Sense of Place (1972). He is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne.

Seddon’s approach to landscape combines pluralism with empiricism. As a literary interpreter, he is always prepared to concede that there is another meaning to be got out of an object, as a scientist he is replete with observational detail. The combination of these approaches, which bring together the interests of his professional academic life, results in generously humanistic ethic based on the hard-work of observation and analysis.

Ours is not a visually literate culture – architects and designers are not the household names they are in countries such as Spain, nor is design understood or appreciated to any discernible degree – so it is always a particular pleasure when a publication appears that celebrates design. However, it is therefore also doubly important that such a publication should enliven or enlighten a public already so impervious to what design has to offer.

Ken Cato, one of Australia’s best-known graphic designers, has edited a compendium of over 100 of ‘the world’s top designers’, First Choice. His idea in making this book is very simple. Each designer has been asked to select seven favourite projects, and these are displayed across a two-page spread. Designers appear in alphabetical order. No one is given prominence. The book is a catalogue, a register of items – in this case designers – that hints at universality and completeness.

Much of the evidence and source material used in Depraved and Disorderly, particularly in Part One, will be familiar to the scholar of female convict history. But Joy Damousi provides some additional material which is both original and evocative. For example, her discussion of lesbianism and tattooing as both challenging to contemporary concerns about sexuality and social order, and as another means by which these women could express their own identities, provides evidence of the diversity of characters among convict women, as well as broadening our understanding of colonial society. More importantly, however, Damousi adds a further theoretical dimension to the already complex and contradictory historiography which surrounds the female convict.

In Tracy Ryan’s poems there are no safe houses, the walls of domesticity keep falling in and she is the clear-eyed tightrope walker negotiating a perilous foothold. Her lines zigzag across the page:

When a poet reviews a poetry magazine, it can be like walking out over a virtual minefield. I have a few more books to write before they take me out, so let me say straight away, I come in peace. These are cynical times, so maybe nobody will be taken in by this tone. After all, Salt is published and edited by John Kinsella, a highly successful poet who has established himself in record time. Let’s face it, this is poetry as strategy. As Hilary McPhee pointed out, the literary community in this country can be particularly vicious, and if anyone tries to hose that down they are having themselves on – the response McPhee got in relation to what she actually said proves the point really. It doesn’t have to be bland and polite though. There has been a lot of talk about the careerist approach to poetry lately. Ramona Koval noted at the first National Poetry Festival in Melbourne recently that some American poets have taken on this ‘professionalisation’ of poetry even down to their ‘Brooks Brothers suits and leather satchels’. Fay Zwicky replied, ‘I think careerism in poetry is contrary to how a poem comes into existence in the first place.’

‘The historical aspects of The Rocks should not be oversold’, declared a recent Sydney Cove Authority strategic plan, ‘it should be used as a background’. In this sanitised heritage precinct, tourists might thrill to the hint of a raffish past, but should be shielded from more intimate and disturbing glimpses. This is always easy in the absence of systematic research.

Part guru, part factoid, Gough Whitlam shows every sign of enjoying his retirement from politics. Thanks primarily to Sir John Kerr, Sir Garfield Barwick, and Sir Anthony Mason. And of course, Malcolm Fraser.

This is Caroline Caddy’s sixth collection of poetry. It comes to us after her well-received Antarctica, which the publicists mention in terms of her interest in ‘hinterlands and extreme land­scapes’. Working Temple is not so much about that, it seems to me, as the sensual encounter one might have with exotic puzzles and puzzlement. It is a collection that almost advances a notion of experience as a temple within which the signs of that experience are worked and worked again.

As Tim Bowden would well remember, the ties of Hobart to the Antarctic have been visible long before the transfer of the Antarctic Division from Melbourne to Kingston, south of Hobart, in 1982, and the establishment of the Institute of Antarctic and Oceanic Studies at the University of Tasmania six years later. From the 1950s, the chartered Scandinavian vessels that carried members of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, Nella, Kista, Magga and other Dans, set out from Hobart early each summer. To look south down the Derwent was to know that one was truly at the end of the inhabited world. Yet if no permanent settlement has ever been created in Antarctica, thousands of Australians have worked and wintered there. The Silence Calling is Tim Bowden’s exemplary record of their achievements in this, the golden jubilee year of the ANARE.

Continent of Mystery, subtitled ‘A thematic history of Australian crime fiction’ is, in the most simplistic terms, a daunting and inspiring book. My Australian crime fiction, mystery and detective fiction magazine, Mean Streets, was launched by Knight towards the end of 1990, not long before his move to the United Kingdom. For better or worse upon Knight’s departure I assumed, or at least so I was told, the mantle of Australia’s expert on crime fiction. I always perceived that observation as a compliment but having read Continent of Mystery with a sense of awe I can only say that I’m not sure I’m even fit to sit at Knight’s feet when it comes to local fiction with criminality at its core.

Sure, I possibly know more than he does about American hard-boiled writing, which is my passion, but Continent of Mystery is so breathtaking in its grasp of the localised genre, so full of insight, connections and understanding that I read most pages feeling like a pretender to the crown.

It takes a book like Robin Klein’s The Listmaker to remind adults that a children’s book which succeeds in conveying a child’s point of view may well not immediately engage more mature readers. In this instance, Klein so precisely articulates the self-absorbed voice of twelve-­year-old Sarah, the eponymous listmaker, that it takes an effort of will for an adult reader to persist past the first few pages of what seem like overstated emotions and overdetermined plot. Children will have no trouble accepting Sarah’s voice and understanding that it’s like it is because it’s been distorted by her circumstances. Adults too, however, would do well to persevere with The Listmaker, for it turns out to be a heartfelt indictment of how our greedy me-first society can damage children.

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’

Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t.

From Aldi Wimmer

Dear Editor,

This is the first time I am responding to something I read in ABR, and the reason is Ivor Indyk’s outrageous review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 (July ABR). Actually, it isn’t so much a review as a piece of character assassination. How Indyk, whose reviews are usually excellent, can fall into a ranting mode in which he totally loses sight of the texts that he should be evaluating, is beyond me. What can have possessed him? Envy that a younger man is an accomplished writer? As if Rilke, Keats, or Thomas Chatterton had only started crafting excellent work in middle age. As ‘proof’ for Kinsella’s ‘belief in himself as an important poet’, he points at the repetition of some poems in the collection, but fails to see the obvious: both ‘Night Parrots’ and ‘The Frozen Sea’ are items that represent sequential units and thus cannot be mangled by removing individual poems. But most insulting of all is Indyk’s allegation that European academics have somehow been hoodwinked into praising Kinsella’s work merely because of his skilled self-promotion. We can think and read for ourselves thank you, and if we invite Kinsella to our universities and conferences, it is most definitely not because he has conned us.

Adi Wimmer
General Secretary, European Assoc. for Studies on Australia
Department of English
University of Klagenfurt, Austria

From Heather Cam

Dear Editor,

Well, it was wholly to be expected.

It was with a sigh of relief that I read Ivor Indyk’s piece on John Kinsella. At last, here was a respected critic reiterating similar literary reservations to those I had voiced two years earlier (on 15 July 1995 in a Sydney Morning Herald review of Kinsella’s prize-winning The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony). I had commented then on organisational sloppiness; stretches of dull, anecdotal accounts of rural life; the poet/persona’s embarrassing self-indulgence and tiresome tendency to self-mythologise, and concluded that overall The Silo was a flawed composition.

I seemed to be alone in holding these views at the time. Alone and soon to be taken to task by one of Kinsella’s academic supporters who wrote of being touched by the ‘anguish’ my criticisms had caused Kinsella. I was accused of giving Kinsella ‘short shrift’ and concern was raised ‘about the ethics of reviewing’. I was amazed to find myself having to write a long letter explaining the basis for my literary opinion and defending the critic’s right to express a considered viewpoint based on a careful reading of the text.

Two years later, reading Indyk’s brave and informative review which revealed the considerable international acclaim of this energetic poet, I felt certain that Indyk would soon be reprimanded, no doubt more publicly and vehemently than had I, for daring to express doubts or even mere reservations about the quality of Kinsella’s poetry. This suspicion was spectacularly borne out by the letters from Kinsella, Keil, Tranter, and Coffey in last month’s issue.

My chief concern is with the issue of the reviewer’s freedom to express an informed opinion without fear of retribution. Critics of Kinsella are being told none too subtly, if you can’t say something in praise, back off or suffer the consequences.

Any poet who gets review space these straitened days is being treated seriously, and most poets are able to take words of criticism as words of advice to act on or ignore. In my experience, most poets have the maturity to read and pass on, without self-indulgence or needing to draw others to their defence.

It would be a grave misfortune if only upbeat reviews could safely be published, and fortunately Australian Book Review has had the courage to run Indyk’s informative and cautionary piece.

Heather Cam, Camperdown, NSW

From Zan Ross

Dear Editor,

I’m rarely moved to write to any magazine unless an essay, review, or piece of work has achieved such a standard of excellence that I simply can’t resist the impulse. Unfortunately, in this instance that isn’t the case. I, too, read Ivor Indyk’s review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994, was annoyed to find so little actual reviewing, and surprised by the literary gossip, not to mention Indyk using the so-called review as a forum for his views on the literary scene. Much of what he wrote would have been better addressed in an essay.

Having said that, I’d like to state that the piece was, if nothing else, entertaining and about as far from top-heavy, convoluted, academic writing as it is possible to get. I definitely don’t think it or Indyk deserved to be called ‘erroneous, libellous, and rancorous’ nor ‘a treachery’. The so-called review never quarrelled with the perception of Kinsella as an important, influential, or experimental writer. It did claim that not everything any writer produces, whether or not previous collections have gone out of print, is worthy of appearing in an assumed Selected, which is after all just that – selections of the best material written over a certain period of time.

Kinsella’s reaction to the review and his rallying of big-name support on his behalf smacks of a certain amount of paranoia, not a little of immaturity and quite a lot of what used to be called ‘preciousness’. He has never, as far as I have been able to determine, had a ‘bad’ review and has, in fact, received unconditional support from any number of people in the arts world over the past few years. Strangely, it seems no one is willing or dares do at this point what a good critic or editor can do for any writer (or her/his readers): knowledgeably inform her/him (and her/his audience) of where and how work falls short of the writer’s potential; where s/he is exceeding anyone’s expectations.

This is the site, in my opinion, of Kinsella’s legitimate complaint: his work has not been given appropriate consideration. In this respect Indyk was, perhaps, not the best choice as reviewer, considering that his general preference in poetry is for the immediately accessible with a strong narrative – a peculiarly modernist position for an academic in these times. As most readers of Kinsella have found, he often leaps far outside the aforesaid narrow band into little wandered territories of postmodernity. That he frequently does so with extreme verve and skill does not mean, however, that he succeeds in every instance. This is what should have been addressed in the review.

Despite my own arguments with the review, Indyk did voice concerns I personally have, not the least of which are any one person representing Australian writing, being seen to decide what is good Australian writing or being so influential that no one dares write anything critical about their work. While neither I nor anyone else can state with certainty that these points apply to Kinsella, these are certainly issues that must be faced head-on should anyone encounter them. And for this, I admit to a grudging respect for Indyk: he positioned himself and was willing to take the considerable flack that ensued.

Finally, I find it curious that no one has responded to the supposed essay by Kinsella and Ryan in the July issue of ABR. If it was ficto-criticism, it was poorly done. In fact, I can’t see a justification at this point for its taking up the six pages that it did. No one amongst my sophisticated reader-friends was able to get past the first column. I made it through the second before moving on to something less self-indulgent and congratulatory. It seemed like very, very bright children showing off. Considering how few opportunities there are for writers to have their work reviewed in Australia, I think the space could have been better utilised.

Zan Ross, Palmyra, WA

From Ian McFarlane

Dear Editor,

Apropos your August editorial, some writers will always be noticed before others for reasons that have little or nothing to do with writing. I suspect it flows from the increasing number of people writing just for the sake of writing. Churning out books that lack beauty, originality, or ideas. In a rolling column last year (ABR 181) I suggested that a significant difference between the have­to-be writer (driven by psychological rather than fame-and-fortune motives) and the wannabe writer (usually seduced by the size of Bryce Courtenay’s royalty cheques, or prospects of gaining cult status at literary festivals) was the sensitivity of the former to know when NOT to write a book.

A literary system that encourages battery hen production and bases success on personality and self-confidence before text, disadvantages the writer most likely to advance cultural landscapes. Good writing is more about self-doubt than self-confidence. Of course, you must manage self-doubt or you would never write anything, but the process of turning it into a creative dialogue with yourself is, I suggest, the fragile essence of literature.

Ian McFarlane, Beauty Point, (via Narooma) NSW

From Janet Hay

Dear Editor,

John McLaren’s review of Letters and Liars by Joanna Mendelssohn (ABR April 1997) states that the author’s research ‘leads her to a new interpretation of the [Lindsay] family’s alliances’ and notices in the last paragraph of this generally favourable review, ‘there are judgments in the book which the reader might question’. After struggling through this book I rather agree with your reviewer – but for different reasons.

Being a granddaughter of Hugh McCrae (and authorised to speak for the holders of his copyright), I bothered to chase up the letter which Ms Mendelssohn attributes to Hugh McCrae (p.86, Letters and Liars) – and found, as I suspected, that the letter in question was not in fact written by Hugh McCrae. The reference given for this letter (p.278) is also incorrect.

No wonder Ms Mendelssohn has been led to some ‘new interpretation’!

Hugh McCrae is peripheral to Ms Mendelssohn’s theme and, but for her mistaken attribution of this letter to Hugh, he probably wouldn’t have rated a mention, let alone have been subjected to a couple of unsubstantiated assumptions by Ms Mendelssohn (pp.86, 87).

If this can happen on the periphery, what of the core research?

Ms Mendelssohn’s mistake is puzzling because any scholar with an ear for prose would recognise Hugh McCrae’s style and know this letter was not his. Besides, the McCrae letters are invariably written in his distinctive handwriting, which is easily recognised and for which he is in fact justly renowned.

Yet Ms Mendelssohn claims extensive reading of his letters (pp. 86, 87).

It is a pity that the author did not seek copyright permission to reproduce the letter she believed was written by Hugh McCrae. If she had done so her mistake would have been rectified before publication.

Catherine Jinks’ new novel reminds us that humans are great pigeonholers: we like to know where everything (everyone) fits, to be able to pop them in the right slot, slap the right label on the front and relax, secure in the knowledge that our future reactions are safely prescribed by the parameters of the pigeonhole to which we have consigned them.

Mortal Divide is an anti-oedipal odyssey, Joycean roman à clef, migrant memoir, and Orphic mini-epic. Nemerov’s self-reflexive Journal of a Fictive Life is one of its inspirations. George (Yiorgos) is a first-generation Greek translator working at the Multicultural Broadcasting Service. Victim of the media machine, he begins to hear and see things that aren’t ‘real’, including his spectral double Yiorgos Alexandroglou, and plunges videoleptically into dreams whenever he closes his eyes.

This is a serious tale of crime and punishment from Jean Bedford, who had been working up to it. Her Anna Southwood novels have been consistently good, their light touch obscuring not at all the author’s passion for justice, an old-fashioned sentiment which always informs the best crime novels, often most palpably present in crime fiction by women.

I found Don Anderson’s essay ‘Leisure’ (ABR, August 1997) interesting, but was intrigued by his photo that covers almost one third of a page. There is a lengthy biographical note which tells us that Don is ‘a member of the English Department at the University of Sydney. His monthly column, ‘Between the Lines’, appears in the Sydney Morning Herald.’ The note also informs us that he contributes a quarterly essay to 24 Hours and has been appointed to the Board of the Sydney Writer’s Festival. I also find out from the note about his most recent book.

The Australian film industry got going in the 1970s perhaps just a little before the resurgence of Australian publishing and perhaps for that reason there has been less interplay between Australian film and Australian writing than there might have been. Patrick White raged and roared about the prospect of Joseph Losey and Max Von Sydow making a film of Voss, but that was the tormenting hope of a more colonial dispensation. There have been bearable films of modern Australian classics like Stead’s For Love Alone and more or less shocking films of such nearly contemporary classics as Monkey Grip (a real monster despite Noni Hazelhurst and Alice Garner as child star doing their best) and, more recently, Lilian’s Story with Ruth Cracknell badly miscast. Cases like Fred Schepisi’s lean, pungent version of Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith are rarer than they should be though it is encouraging to hear that Mel Gibson owns the rights to My Brother Jack and intends making a film of it one of these days. Of course there was My Brilliant Career and Gillian Armstrong is in the throes of making Oscar and Lucinda. Still, there is no automatic translation between the two forms and in fact rather less than you would expect. All of which is simply background to the fact that Samantha Lang has made a film of Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well and it is very good indeed.

Gallienus is hardly the best known Roman Emperor. The records of his reign from 235 to 268 are so fragmentary that even the date of his assassination can only be approximated as taking place during a six-month period.