Initial appearances notwithstanding, The Great World is not a grand, epic title. It is a phrase of the wide-eyed naïf, gaping at the wondrous, which is anything beyond his experience, especially any tawdry, flashy concoction. In fact, David Malouf’s primary ‘great world’ is an entertainment park of that name in Singapore where a contingent of prisoners of war are quartered early in 1942. The Great World is a fairground where disheartened men are temporarily housed as they go about various enterprises not of their choosing.

Less neatly of course, the great world is anything that may ever be encountered. Digger Keen, one of the novel’s two central characters, has a formulation that recalls Aristotle’s ‘the mind is as it were all things’. As a child, Digger glimpses ‘the sheer size of the world, and the infinite number of events and facts and objects it was filled with … no number of little paper bags would be enough to contain it, but your head could ... which was the same shape as the world, and really was the world, only on an infinitely small scale.’

Clearly, taking all this for its province, The Great World is an ambitious novel. It concerns the relationship and the careers of two men, Digger Keen and Vic Curran, from shortly before their births in the early 1920s to a popularly remembered mid-October day in 1987. They labour and suffer and play in a fair variety of great worlds.

It is a tall order for any novelist, and Malouf performs better in some worlds than others. His children and his childhood domestic scenes are unerring. There is no straining after significance, no attempt to unravel the meaning of the moment that adult scenes appear to demand. Digger has a sister who is slightly older but also simple:

‘Tellus somefing, Digger’, Jenny would whisper in the dark of their little room. ‘They’re asleep, they won’t hear’ ...
Beginning softly in the dark, he would tell her things. He would start in a whisper, but quite soon he would get excited, break into giggles, or his voice would crack in squeaky shouts.
‘Shuddup in there, get ta sleep’, their father would shout through the wall, ‘or I’ll bloody come in an’ make yer’.
Then, after a moment, their mother’s voice:
‘Go t’sleep now, Digger, you can tell that t’morrow. It’ll keep.’

The sure feel for the vernacular, the suggestive interaction of differentiated individuals, the completeness of the mini-scene in itself: this is inspiring writing. I am reminded of the early pages of Harland’s Half Acre, to my mind the finest part of that novel.

Yet such scenes are not really typical Malouf. The common technique and the major presence in Malouf’s fiction is the ruminating narrator, elucidating and mulling over action and inter­play. In spite of the scope of The Great World, it is not a novel of events or of colourful dramatic incidents (in the way that a Peter Carey novel, for example, is). For Malouf, incident is an intense confrontation between two people, or two aspects of the same person, and the moment is monitored in detail by the narrator. The understanding that results is often tremulous, undefined:

She was looking past his known face to one she had never seen. It was the one he wore when he was too deep in himself to be aware any longer of what he might have to conceal; the face he showed no one, and which even he had not seen.

It is hard to avoid the term psychological novel. Unlike everyone under fifty currently writing in Australia, Malouf has no whiff of either Raymond Carver or Roland Barthes about him. Malouf rolls his characters around in his own firm hand, as Henry James might. But in much of his narrative manner, and in sentences like ‘His body was hard­edged, separate, intent’, the strong suggestion is of a pedigree going back through Patrick White to D.H. Lawrence. The exploration is always acute, humane, and as a result a Malouf book, a Malouf narrator, is both admirable and likeable. He makes allowances, he is infinitely understanding: human evil is never a Malouf subject; he refuses to let it settle in any of his characters.

And yet, with all its lyrical moments, all its refusals to take any character at face value, The Great World leaves me uneasy. I wonder whether it isn’t ... stodgy. The problem is a combination of the narrator’s intensity and then the number and deployment of the characters.

Allowances made for the odd minor exception, novels usually have only one truly central character. Here, Digger and Vic are on a par. Their relationship is central to the book. But it is essentially one of dependence on the part of Vic-it is periodic, it is understated.

As perhaps with many Malouf relationships it is a matter of two people feeling out a stance towards one another. It is never anything so simple as love or friendship. To make a book out of such a delimited relationship, however, is very difficult. Hence both Vic and Digger must have other lives, other careers, other relationships. Malouf’s professional generosity needs to give all these the attention he gives to Doug and Vic in their scenes together. And so, for all its intensity, the novel tends to be centrifugal. Vic’s father, mother, foster-father, foster-mother, wife and son all have to have their scene. Ditto for Digger. Vic’s career as a mega-corporate speculator is important to his apotheosis, as was his career as a POW, but Malouf is stretching himself too thin: he’s unable to do more than gesture towards the reality of the great world of financial players. This is not the novel about big business Australian writers are occasionally asked to produce.

The outcome of this bringing the bit players in from the by-ways and setting them going on the highway is that the novelist can’t ignore them.

The action of the last third of the book is too much a mopping-up operation. In fifty pages, we have four major minor deaths – and they can’t just be mentioned either. These character’s prominence in the great world demands decent obituaries. But it means we are involved in resolutions of the narrative, not of the novel’s psychological or thematic problems.

All this is to confess that I could not confidently say what this novel is about. The great world really is too much with me, and rather overwhelms me. I prefer David Malouf in a miniaturist mood, the stories in Antipodes or Fly Away Peter, still my favourite among his books. But no writer wants to hear their best book was the one written eight years ago.

The blurb describes The Great World as David Malouf’s ‘finest novel yet’ and says that it is ‘destined to become a classic’. Maybe the blurb is right. But let’s have some discussion of the book that is not overawed by the publicity juggernaut which increasingly accompanies new books from our handful of major name writers. Here’s to its boosting sales, but not knee-jerk praise. Those of us who delight in David Malouf’s gifts and achievements are not going to be transformed into distraught ex­disciples by any problems his books might raise.

In this new book, Beverley Farmer quotes George Steiner: ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device.’ The blurb calls A Body of Water a montage. Well, it’s a difficult book to describe. It’s not a pasting together, there’s no smell of glue about it. Nor is it put together, plonk, thunk, like stones. It’s rather, in her own words, an interweaving.

It incorporates five finished stories, a notebook which at times is closely linked, even almost word for word, to some of the stories, quotations from Farmer’s favourite authors and from Buddhist sages, and her reflections on them. The notebook is sometimes concerned with events and ideas that later turn into stories, and at other times deals with Farmer’s friends and surroundings.

Philip Hodgins writes with assurance and he has a fine ear for the rhythms of spoken Australian. This enables him to recreate the ‘tall story’ in poetic form with great facility and yet this very facility is at the same time limiting, since it restricts the writer largely to what has already been said (typically, he devotes seventeen pages in this collection to a poem entitled ‘The Way Things Were’). He becomes a reporter of stories, of histories and jokes rather than an explorer of the literary unknown. At times this leads him to take on not only the form of colloquial bar-room speech but the whole masculine ethos of this language with its prejudices, clichés, and resounding misogyny. In this world, poetry issues spontaneously and quite naturally from the mouths of common men (and I mean men) and for all Hodgins’s tongue in cheek humour, he comes dangerously close to celebrating what could be mocked:

although the place to hear the greatest poetry
was where the old blokes gathered near the scoreboard.
They had a grasp of metaphor and simile
that would have done the Martian poets proud.

The persona of the no-nonsense country boy, itself a well-worn convention, is maintained throughout Animal Warmth, and this is reflected in the subject matter which derives almost totally from a familiar mundane/ mythological vision of Australian rural life. Rarely personal, one of the few moments of intimacy occurs in the morose philosophy of ‘The Emotions’:

I don’t think they’re worth it.
They get in the way.
Clear days can be clouded
just because of them.
Even the dinner I held last night
was nearly a flop
because the risotto went cold
and gluggy like baby-food

The warmth of Animal Warmth is generated by a nostalgia for a vision of country life more ideal than real, filled with the tangibly physical presences of cows, dogs, horses and sheep. The cover painting by Elioth Gruner depicts a man alone with his cattle bathed in an aura of light cast by the rising sun. Hodgins acknowledges the practical difficulties of the lot of the farmer, but this only intensifies his passion for it. In the long poem ‘Second Thoughts on The Georgics’, Hodgins reworks Virgil, maintaining the didactic content and verbal artistry while mustering his disillusionment:

You’d have to be out of you’re mind to want to run a farm these days.
I mean who on earth’s going to give you
a fair price for your produce?
What with the Russians, who can’t believe their luck,
and those pricks in the EEC subsidizing
mountains and lakes of everything under
the sun

What comes through most clearly in the ‘wealth of description and advice is a passion for life on the land, a passion that runs through other poems such as ‘Pregnant Cow’, ‘Milk’, ‘Standard Hay Bales’, ‘Superphosphate’, and ‘Until the Cows Come Home’. ‘The Cattle Show’, written in sestina form, is an excellent example of the disparity Hodgins is fond of creating between high-flown technique and down-to-earth subject matter:

The mood was tense at the annual cattle show.
Inside the pavilion a dozen well-groomed cows
were tied up along the rail while the judge
stood silently in the middle of the ring and the owners looked on nervously.
Each one had faith
that their particular cow was going to win.

Hodgins exploits this conflict between form and content to humorous effect although the tendency is to allow this humour to stifle the promptings of a more serious voice. In the presence of death, a situation full of speculative possibilities, it is the obstinately ordinary which captures his interest:

The graves spread out from each corner to keep
the four denominations apart, as if in death the concept of a separate group
could mean as much to some as it did in life,
and right there in the middle was a small shed
whose fibro walls and rusty galvo roof looked out of place.

This absence of critical depth in his work is responsible for moments of clumsiness in the collection. Lines such as: ‘To be déraciné for such a time would be worse than death itself, in a way’ and ‘I stood there thinking about it. It wasn’t much. But it was better than a slap in the guts with a dead fish’ do little more than fill out space. Elsewhere, Hodgins falls back into some surprising clichés about sex. In ‘Melbourne’ he writes:

Later that night
he advised me on sex. Old enough to bleed, he said,
old enough to butcher.
But I already knew about sex.
I’d seen the bull going for it heaps of times.

Hodgins reports this ‘witticism’ (more spontaneous wisdom from the common man) without irony and affirms the old cliché about a country boy’s knowledge of sex without acknowledging the obvious differences between animal cop­ulation and human sexuality. Of course, here the boy’s attitude could be interpreted as obviously naïve. Yet in ‘The Bull’, the misogyny of the adult narrator reveals itself quite openly as he equates the two forms of coupling in the following lines:

As soon as the bull was let in with them he shoved his
way round the yard
sniffing the loose wet cunts
and screwing up his nose in anticipation.

The most conspicuous and puzzling aspect of this collection is the absence of any feminine presence. Even the mandatory farmer’s wife merits little more than a mention tucked away amongst stanzas devoted to the footy team, Digga, and dad. Without speculating further on the writer’s attitude to women, this omission is clearly the strongest criticism of the very world (and ultimately the language which encapsulates it) that Hodgins evokes with such commitment.

‘Singing the Snake’, the poem that opens this collection, tells the story of tribes gathering at Uluru in a time of drought when ‘people drank sand’. If the singing of the people was strong and true, the Snake of Uluru would push water out from the ‘place where every river in the world begins and ends’, so that it spilled from the top of the rock.

Old Tjupurrula told this story to the poet, who asks, ‘You saw all this … water bubbling out of dry rock?’. The incredulous poet asks the same question that the white reader of Sally Morgan’s My Place must want to ask when she meets her ancestors in the bush.

Dear Editor,

Like many a white Australian, I have few opportunities to meet Aboriginal people and to come to terms with the issues of black–white relations. But I am well aware of how difficult these issues are and what a long way we have to go in resolving them. So it was with some trepidation that I opened the December issue of ABR dedicated to ‘Aboriginality’, expecting to be uncomfortably and justifiably challenged.

The first thing that struck me was that the photographs were predominantly of white faces, the second was that most the authors being reviewed were white, and the third, most disquieting, feature was the band of white reviewers. As far as the credits indicated, not one of the reviewers or interviewers was Aboriginal.

While we are given a fairly damning account of white treatment of black Australians, the picture we are given of Aboriginal arts is such a comfortable one: unlike the previous, misdirected, white adventurers into black society, these white writers have obtained for us the correct picture, sympathetic to Aboriginal culture. Furthermore, none of the bitterness against us that could be expected shows through in the Aboriginal work selected by these white writers. We may rest assured and go on to the next issue of ABR with an untrammelled conscience. Only the interview with Graeme Dixon is at all unsettling.

The picture may be correct, and the credentials of the writers and reviewers impeccable. But the issue of ABR would have had more credibility and surely a very different slant had it contained Aboriginal perspectives on writings about Aboriginality. Perhaps the fact that the editor either did not try to find, or was not successful in obtaining Aboriginal reviewers tells us more about black-white relations than the writings of dedicated initiates. But no editorial comment on the aims or problems of such a feature was forthcoming. Would this have spoiled the serene atmosphere of the ensuing articles.

Women have come a long way from the time when writing on women by men would be reviewed by an all-male team. Perhaps in the next ABR, blacks will be given the opportunity to adjudicate on writings about white Australia. The results would be much more enlightening.

Gabriel Crowley, Blackwood, Vic.

Dear Editor,

Those of us who are faithful readers of your Review but happen to live at the other end of the earth always are a bit behind the times in writing answering letters since a couple of months have usually gone by before we get a sighting. Only now have I got to read Dorothy Green’s good letter (ABR no.116) on environmental issues and population growth in Australia. One cannot but applaud and agree. Just as a detail though, may I take up a sentence at the end of the letter: ‘If the present rate of increase in world population continues, there will be standing room only on the planet in the not too distant future.’

I remember that a few years back one of our Spanish writers wrote something similar and received a reply in a letter to the press pointing out that, at a pinch, three people could sit on one square metre, and as a consequence the whole world population of the time could in fact fit on the island of Ibiza. If we are talking strictly about standing room, I dare say we could all be accommodated on one of the larger islands of Western Samoa.

Of course, this does not invalidate Dorothy Green’s general argument because we want to do more than just stand!

Professor Doireann MacDermott, University of Barcelona

Dear Editor,

A few words in defence of Mark O’Connor and the vitally important Writers for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (WESP) movement.

The movement has the support of several of Australia’s most respected men and women of letters, notably Judith Wright, Dorothy Green, and Professor Manning Clark. They bring many years’ research, thought, and profound concern to the subject. It is not another literary political debate. Sir Mark Oliphant stated last October, ‘We think too much about man’s wellbeing rather than the health of the planet as a whole’. Simple political tags are out of order.

In her letter in the November ABR, Dorothy Green alluded to the hidden agenda of Some of our literary-news columnists. They can have an immense and cumulative power, making some writers seem important and others, who may in fact be far more active and successful, seem invisible. The pseudonym Elizabeth Swanson being used, second-hand moreover, by a person whose literary affiliations would be immediately recognised and allowed for if she used her own name is as objectionable as her comments on WESP.

Let us at least have an open debate, and not covert attempts at character assassination as particularly in the case of Mark O’Connor. He has an impressive reputation nationally and internationally as a leading Australian environmental poet. Australian environmental poetry is not, as Elizabeth Swanson would suggest, a sideshow. To the relief of many readers, possibly a great majority, it has outsold most other kinds of poetry for a long time.

Brian Ridley, Bungendore, NSW

Dear Editor,

Whatever the critical assessment of a book reviewer may be, it is certainly not in order for him to recommend not to read the book under review.

The trite summation of Over the top with Jim by Hugh Lunn made by your reviewer Stephen Matchett is bad enough, and his comparison with 12 Edmonstone Street in odorous bad taste (why must the two works be competitively compared?). But his concluding rapier thrust – ‘on balance ... there is no overwhelming reason to read this book’ – is decidedly off balance.

I found the book a delight, unique, insightful, a psychological gem, a lucid, unpretentious, and logical minor masterpiece.

There. If I were reviewing the book, and had more space, I would give my reasons why. Right now, I can’t be bothered. But I do expect much better from a professional reviewer gracing your pages.

David Wood, Brisbane

Dear Editor,

Congratulations on your publication of a new type of book review, which will henceforth be known as the ‘Trivial Pursuit Review’. You know how it is with Trivial Pursuit: the first name that comes into your head is usually the answer. Now Stephen Matchett has brought this to the world of literature with his review of my latest book, Over the top with Jim (UQP).

Australian childhood biography: Clive James.
Set in Brisbane: David Malouf.
Queensland: Corruption.
New book: Unsold copies.

To protect my reputation and to put my motives for writing the book on record: I did not write the book because Clive James wrote one on his childhood in Sydney. I wrote it because my Vietnam: A reporter’s war had been successful and I saw the need for an Australian memoir set in the Cold War. I have not read the James book, but I doubt that sitting next to a Russian at school for ten years from 1950–59 is also his theme.

I agree with Matchett that I am no David Malouf. But then, Malouf wrote a novel with no Russians in sight. (A Brisbane reviewer, John Cokely, also made this comparison, but he wrote, ‘Lunn eclipses Malouf’s vision of Brisbane’.)

Matchett writes, ‘there are far too many “tales of being ordinary” breeding on bookshop shelves’. Well, his attempt to predict sales of my book was way off beam. It sold out in four weeks of frantic bookshop re-orders. While Matchett sees such writing as

‘bursting-its-culturally-insular-seams genre’, it appears there is a demand in Australia for books about ourselves – as well as the much more abundant books about New York and London.

Unlike Matchett, many of us are not content to take part in Australia’s day-to-day cancellation of memory.

Hugh Lunn, Author, Brisbane

Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience.

Neither a conventional biography nor an autobiography, Billy Snedden is a story told in two quite distinct and authentic voices. There is that of the late Sir Billy Snedden, Liberal Party leader from 1972 to 1975, and Dr Bernie Schedvin, lecturer in politics at La Trobe University.

The pairing of the honest ‘liberal Liberal’ whose working class Scots coal-mining father deserted the Snedden family at an early age and the middle-class, middle-aged psychoanalytically articulate and politically oriented scholar is an unlikely one, but it works remarkably well. Combining narrative, anecdote, political observations and (psycho)analysis, An Unlikely Liberal is a revealing tale of the origins of the vulnerable Billy Snedden’s movement into the political arena, his limited triumphs, and his many disappointments.

Bookseller Terri-ann White surveys the publishing scene in Perth and Fremantle, for several decades now torn by a battle for funds but recently showing encouraging signs of optimistic development.

Since 1975 and the establishment of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, the writing community of Perth has benefited enormously from the focus and support it has offered. Whether individual writers have been published by it or not, in the most isolated city in the world the possibilities have been opened up. The Press has clearly been responsible, as a developmental publisher, for encouraging and promoting creative writing, biography, and regional history writing in WA, and for opening up resources and opportunities for writers to work closely with good editors, good advice, and plenty of time to learn and hone work into a publishable form.

Set up with public money from local government as well as the state and federal arts funding bodies, the genesis of the Press has been well documented as an exemplary publishing venture. It has moved from being a regional press to a regional-based press, still only publishing works by Western Australian writers as policy, but that means much more than protectionism, fifteen years on. It is an investment in an identifiable community. Under the intelligent direction of its team (including Ian Templeman as founder, Clive Newman as administrator, Ray Coffey and Wendy Jenkins as editors, and Susan Eve Ellvey as designer) the Press has had big successes and many strong moves forward.

Louisa Lawson’s journal, The Dawn, probably wasn’t as politically influential as we would like to think, despite reliable evidence of a substantial subscription list and a fairly far-flung readership. Its championing of major issues of the day such as Female Suffrage and Marriage and Divorce law reform was relentless, unswervingly logical, and resounding, but the momentum which would bring victory in those and other campaigns for women's rights did not come centrally from The Dawn. And, when Louisa was saluted as Mother of the Suffrage, it was at least as much for her personal efforts – her speeches, public appearances, debates, and formidable public example – as for her ringing editorials and ideological feature articles. Indeed, Louisa’s very first image for the journal (‘phonograph to wind out audibly the whispers, pleadings and demands of the sisterhood’) with its haunting suggestion of Aeolian Harp mixed in with the latest amplification technology, was peculiarly apt in that The Dawn was less a shaper and leader of feminine political opinion than a fearless and unequivocal announcer of it. And, in the early stages at least, it was a more or less solitary voice – which greatly enhanced its importance.

In view of all that, it’s not surprising to find that The Dawn – even allowing for the vicissitudes of its erstwhile dynamism and its engaging, necessary brashness when the first heady wave of the women’s movement in the nineties began to falter at about the turn of the century. The Dawn also succumbed – understandably, given the provocations – to a certain amount of obsessiveness, of which the focus on the outrageous and long-running mail bag fastener scandal and a general and growing paranoia about male (especially GPO male) obstructiveness were the most obvious examples.

Perhaps considerations such as these stood in a general way behind Olive Lawson’s decision to establish a cut-off point at 1895 for her excellent selection from The Dawn. In a brief prefatory note on the principles governing the selection of the text (‘About This Book’), she says there were ‘two reasons’:

As a feasible publishing proposition, the quantity of material had to be limited; and it was in these years (1888–95) that the journal had its greatest impact, the contents of ‘The Dawn’ thus being of greater historic significance during that period than in later years.

This is slightly misleading, I think. Obviously it would be possible to select judiciously from the whole run of issues (1888–1905, excluding those lost) and still satisfy the requirements governing ‘feasible publishing’. And, while it is certainly arguable that by and large The Dawn made ‘its greatest impact’ and had ‘greater historic significance’ during that period, these two criteria are irrelevant to more than half the selection. The topics of ‘Miscellaneous Articles’ (on fashion, child-rearing, domesticity, education etc.), items ‘From the Correspondence Columns’ and ‘Household Hints’ stand apart from the great issues of the day being recorded and debated in the leading articles and are in general not very significantly influenced by them. They tend to roll on regardless. It was not in those areas – where the journal’s quirky distinctiveness was most visible – that The Dawn’s slight latter-day decline became evident.

But whatever the arguments that may be had about it, Olive Lawson’s selection still stands up very well. The long section of Leading Articles with which the book opens is especially good; the coolly trenchant house-style is nicely represented along with Louisa’s own brilliant capacity to identify the essence of an issue and to be uncannily ahead of her time:

There is a great deal of vague talk about the domestic woman and the home woman, the woman whose entire existence is comprehended in the meet-your-husband-with-a-smile platitude that is so old it deserves to be superannuated; but she who narrows her life down to a perpetual smile, while she is all right in theory, for some reason or other in practice is not a success.

A great deal is expected of the nineteenth-century woman, and a great deal more will be expected of her in the next decade. It would be worthwhile for these croakers and would-be philosophers and critics and fault-finders and the whole tribe of malcontents generally to turn their attention to the question: Where will she find a man worthy to be her consort? If, as all of these platitudes inform us, the chief end or aim of woman is to adorn a home, as a matter of primary interest, who is going to provide the home, and, of course, as the first count in this indictment, what sort of provider is it that is to be the mainspring of all this sweetness and light?

There is much more – sometimes acerbic and ironic; sometimes under a palpable restraint in the cause of sweet reason (as in ‘That Nonsensical Idea’); sometimes thundering and declamatory; always stimulating. Olive Lawson’s interesting selection from the miscellaneous articles emphasises marriage, child-rearing, and mother-daughter relationships, an emphasis which in fact catches The Dawn in relatively conservative mood while still allowing suggestion of its major and enduring contribution to women – the attempt to revolutionise their lives at every level. (This theme also emerges in ‘Household Hints’ with the recurrent advice on nutrition, self-sufficiency, natural remedies, exercise for women.)

The publisher’s blurb refers to Olive Lawson’s ‘well-researched annotations throughout’, but in this respect I found the book disappointing. No one wants to be flailing about in a sea of footnotes or (horror of contemporary horrors!) be confronted with something overtly academic, but I suppose there’s a happy medium between that and being too editorially shy.

The First Voice of Australian Feminism has roughly fifty-five footnotes (give or take a couple) in its 360-odd pages. About a quarter of these are explanations of Biblical references quite a few of which the ordinary reader might have been trusted to know. Many other footnotes are explanatory at a fairly simple level. A number of opportunities to widen and deepen the impact of selected texts have been missed.

Two random examples: the leading article for October 1890, ‘Women Warders’ would have been enhanced by a note explaining that Louisa’s championship of this issue led to the only trip she ever made outside of New South Wales in her life. She was invited to Brisbane to launch a petition there for the appointment of women warders to police cells where women were held pending court appearance. Her presence and her stirring address were considered a great coup by the organisers.

Again: the pronounced bitterness of her reply to ‘Poor Widow’, in the section ‘From the Correspondence Columns’, would be to some extent accounted for by a note detailing her efforts to get the youthful Henry into employment in Sydney and the battles with, among others, the GPO that resulted. (It would also have helped, incidentally, if the replies to correspondents, like the articles, were dated.) There are many other excerpts which would have been enriched by an enlarging note or two.

This is not a trivial point no matter how antipathetic we might routinely feel towards footnotes. The impact of an edition like this depends heavily on the quality and arrangement of the selection but partly on the degree to which the chosen material can be economically but illuminatingly set in a context. It is this kind of scholarship in textual editing and selection which helps the reader to appreciate the wholeness, the contemporary relevance, and impact of what otherwise might appear simply entertaining, discrete ‘pieces’.

Nevertheless, The First Voice of Australian Feminism is a delightful and entertaining selection which vigorously opens up to a new and expectant audience, the truculent, ironic, eccentric, revolutionary, idealistic world of Louisa Lawson’s Dawn.

Hero (Viking, 141 pp, $16.99 hb), Allan Baillie’s sixth novel for young readers, shows this seasoned storyteller at his best. Succinct yet incisive, it is a highly disciplined display of how tight technique can turn a single incident into an exciting story. Right from the first line, ‘A single drop of water exploded on Pamela Browning’s open exercise book’, we know we are on the precipice of an event towards which every mumble on the earth and rumble in the sky lead.

It’s a lovely idea – to go among the scientists in a pith helmet, learn their lingo, suss out what’s really going on behind the myths of cool objectivity. Like any other major human undertaking, science is a matter of interests, conscious or covert, set by policy and ideology alike. Such factors are all too easily accepted as inevitable and innocent; think of the male-dominated, reductive cast of traditional laboratory practice.

During the last decade, a kind of anthropology of urban subcultures has arisen, abandoning the highly romanticised jungles of the Third World to colonise the offices and labs of our own. Exchanges between participants are explicitly treated not as an ethnographic resource to be taken at face value, but as a topic for sceptical investigation.

There’s a lot to be said for plain writing for writing in such a way that the reader is nudged along through nuance and observation to perception. Plain writing tends to make the reader feel as if they too are watching impassively what the writer sees. It’s a little like standing in shallow water, not noticing the tide coming in. Plain writing involves the reader; any shocks, or passions, come from within the story not from the use of highly coloured words or manipulative tricks.

There used to be a saying: Penny plain; twopence coloured. It came from the sale of cardboard prints in a London toyshop. The uncoloured prints were considered inferior, less exciting. They left too much to the imagination.

Sophie Masson’s first novel deals with the probing of emotional wounds. It alternates from present to past as a journalist goes back to her village to write a story on a Family Court tragedy about people with whom her past is inexorably entangled. Set in northern New South Wales and Sydney, it examines the slow death of the rainforest areas and their rebirth as alternative lifestyle habitats for people fleeing the city.

If it is a truism that every person has a novel in them, then it is equally hackneyed to suggest that every doctor/lawyer/vicar has a fund of entertaining anecdotes waiting for retirement from public life to allow the leisure for setting them down on paper. Yet we can all recall with pleasure a few such collections of stories. They are not, perhaps, all that well written. They certainly have no place in the millstream of contemporary literature, busily recycling fashions in style and content, and establishing new paradigms for those who follow breathlessly to admire and adopt. Nevertheless, a small book of anecdotal, humorous tales can be just the ticket when you won’t a book that won’t, thank you very much, stretch your mind.

Twenty years ago there was a fashion in American political science of putting together collections of articles under a generic title such as ‘Political Parties in Developing Nations’. As with so many other American fashions, this spread to Australia and the edited collection is now common­place in the social sciences. The problem with all such collections, and it applies to this one, is the apples and pears syndrome – not all fruits are the same despite their common classification.

What Jennet and Stewart have done here is certainly worth doing and most of the contributions are worth reading. The question still remains as to whether movements in, for example, Australia, New Caledonia, the United States, Nicaragua and the Lebanon have much in common apart from their self-designation as movements. The title raises another query. Are movements examples of the politics of the future, or are they simply alternative and preceding forms of what eventually become institutionalised political parties?

Margaret Coombs’s second novel is an account of personal struggle against oppression and an analysis of the painful growth of awareness wryly viewed with humour and compassion. This is not a tranquil recollection; it is a confronting, buffeting novel, racy, witty, and uneven.

Helen Ayling (pun intended) is both protagonist and narrator. The narrator, perhaps occupying time present, views her younger Australian self living in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when she was overwhelmed by misery following the birth of her second daughter, Jemima. She is exhausted and depressed, but she knows that her problem is not biochemical. The combination of fear, exhaustion and isolation forces her, however, to accept the diagnosis of puerperal depression despite her sharp-eyed assessment of her own capacity to self-dramatize and the capacity of others for self-interest.

Fictions about academic life have always been about sex, but these days the sexiest thing to write about is theory. Fortunately for the writer who wants to write about both sex and theory, the equation between sexual and textual intercourses has excellent credentials in the poststructuralist canon. Followers of Barthes and Derrida have taken to the pleasures of the theoretical text with an eagerness aptly defined by the sexual metaphors they overindulge in. Others, less enamoured by theoretical discourses, have found that these provide an excellent target for parody and satire, and thus manage at once to partake in the playful intercourse and retain a critical, mocking distance. What tends to be forgotten, amidst all this textual cavorting, is that literary theory is a reasonably rigid intellectual discipline: playful though it may be, it is easy to get it all wrong!

At the centre of David Parker’s complex work (there, my theoretical innocence has been exposed - centre, work and author indeed!) are thirteen apparently autobiographical short fictions, held together by the name of  the main character, Roland Eye. But Roland, or Roly, is not the same person in each story. He is generally a writer or academic, more often than not he has a wife named Magda and two or three young children. The different Eyes are moreover connected by a common weakness – they suffer from some kind of delusion about themselves, about the world, or about their relationships to other characters.

Robyn Ferrell has written a novel as beguiling as champagne on a summer’ s evening – astringent, sparkling and more-ish. The fizz of dry wit comes bubbling up through layers of metaphor as Leo Wetherill (aptly named) embarks on a journey of self-discovery, alternately abetted and frustrated by the quixotic Weather Gods of the title.

Leo, ostensibly your average Australian bureaucrat, is the scientific mastermind behind Project Arable, a rain-making scheme designed to convert the Outback into green and productive pasture. But within Leo’s suit-clad breast paradoxes see the – empiricism vs poetry, utilitarianism vs aesthetics – making him prey to doubts about the wisdom of a venture which will impose a European ideal of useful domesticity on the vast red desert. Since his youth, he explains, he has been obsessed with the weather, with huge natural forces who ‘magic’ he has tried to understand through meteorology, while fearing to dispel their mystery.

Mr Jackson’s book narrates his experience and that of a friend as prisoners of the Japanese in Thailand during World War II. It is neither a good nor memorable book, but it does raise, however unintentionally, significant issues. In a nation still bereft of a civil religion, that amalgam of myths and tales of heroes which defines a country’s sense of self and values, the experiences described by Mr Jackson should be honoured.

As 25 April approaches, we face the alarming prospect (the electoral gods willing) of the prime minister weeping on an obscure Turkish beach. There is of course absolutely no reason why Mr Hawke should break the habit of a public lifetime. The anniversary of the Gallipoli landing is however hardly now the most relevant of symbols to anchor the gradually emerging Australian identity.

On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.

When she was four years old, she saw a newspaper picture of the child-god, the Dalai Lama who was then the same age. To meet him became the first of three wishes running like a leitmotif through her life. The other two were to sit under a palm tree in a tropical country, and to be found by a partner with whom she could live life the way she needed to live it.

In this second essay of the Telecom Australian Voices series, David Foster discusses how statistics are used by social science to produce a picture of what is normal. The figures and findings are not able to take into account the mystery of the individual, nor the chaotic principles which inform our actions.

T

he notion of what it means to be different, and the question of how we know we are different, invites us to consider statistical method and its implications for our society, for only in the context of what is normal can an individual be assessed as different. Mathematically, it would appear that the relationship between an individual and a society composed of individuals is by no means straightforward, a subtlety increasingly lost on those citizens who, armed with degrees in the social sciences, emerge from our tertiary institutions to study, rehabilitate, and edify us.

I well recall my own first encounter with statistical mechanics, which was part of the undergraduate training I received in the physical sciences. It marked the end of any real prospect I had of contributing to those sciences for, though I dragged on to postdoctoral level (without, I might add, much enthusiasm), never again could I feel intellectually at my ease. I could not see then, and still can’t, how an event such as atomic decay can be totally unpredictable at an individual level, yet somehow quite tractable when multiplied by. This is because, instinctively, I approached the situation from the wrong end, as an atom and not a scientist.

As every undergraduate knows, a single atom in a jar is a deeply mysterious entity. No one can say what it will do. It might decay or it might not. On the other hand, a lump of the same matter, containing billions of the same atoms, behaves in a predictable way. It puzzles me that the half-life for atomic decay (that is, the time it takes for half the atoms in a given sample to disappear) should be a measurable constant. I cannot see why this should be so. I know it is, but I can’t see why intuitively. I cannot convince myself it is necessarily so. If a particular atomic half-life were to change overnight, there is nothing, I believe, we could do about it except shrug our shoulders. The non-intuitive basis of modem physics thus left me firmly estranged.

In a vague way, I understood my dilemma had to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that law which gives, if you like, physical expression of the concept of evil as a force which must be resisted. This is the law that has to do with Entropy, and which states that the Entropy of the Universe is always on the increase. The First Law is the law of Buddhist quiescence; nothing really matters, all is in flux and the Energy of the Universe remains a constant.

Initially arrived at during attempts to make early steam engines more efficient, the concept of entropy has profound philosophical implications and is central both to information theory (cybernetics) and to all attempts at understanding the nature of Life itself. The physicist Boltzmann, who later committed suicide, was the first to formulate entropy in terms of probability. The less probable a state is, the lower its entropy. As the Second Law implies, entropy, generally speaking, is on the increase; castles disintegrate but do not spontaneously reform. Both life and knowledge, however, are characterised by low entropy. Both are improbable, and therefore an understanding of both has to do with statistics. Just as there is no such thing as the temperature of a single atom, so life is a colligative property of communities of individuals, whether those individuals be cells, animals, plants or ecosystems. Understanding the relationship of the individual with the greater community involves some coming to terms with the fact that the community, by sheer virtue of number, possesses properties or attributes the individual does not. All collectives of living beings show properties that cannot be predicted by a knowledge of any single one of them. This, I believe, seriously curtails the usefulness of introspection as a means of deciding what is and is not appropriate behaviour in the case of human beings. However.

Realising my own predilection lay in the study of individuals, I became a novelist. As a novelist, I work through induction, and my work could be seen as attempting to illuminate human behaviour by moving implicitly from the specific to the general by means of largely fictitious case histories. Guesswork, in fact. Such is the eternal nature of the tale. But because of the colligative nature of society, which exhibits (though I cannot understand why) properties I cannot hope to comprehend through examination of my own consciousness, what I put forward remains hypothetical, however passionately I myself believe what I say to be true.

But what is the alternative? Deduction, as employed in contemporary social science (that is, examining society as a population then attempting to extrapolate back to individuals), is equally inadmissible, as long as it relies on statistical method. Statistical method has, and claims, no knowledge or understanding of the individual events with which it deals. Such knowledge, I maintain, is never more than hearsay or literary guesswork. Yet no matter how often this is pointed out to us, as individuals we cannot seem to take it in. The problem, I believe, lies in the nature of language itself, and the fact that we always read as though what we read applied to ourselves and the lives of those around us.

Certainly, the social scientists are wrong if they suppose that their science provides them with an understanding of human behaviour superior to that traditionally accessible to the priest or the poet. The development of sociology in the nineteenth century was greeted by many of the eminent novelist of the day, including Dickens, Tolstoy, and Zola, with outrage and indignation. They could tell it would put us out of business eventually and it has, to all intents. But look how these social scientists, who provide the substance, the raw material for the magazine articles which, for most Australians, have replaced the Bible and the literary classic, are obliged to spice their how-to-live manuals with case histories. Narrative and characterisation are not to be dispensed with.

Much of so-called social science is not scientific anyway. Psychiatry has always had more in common with literary art than with physical science, which is not to denigrate it.

If societies of human beings are accepted as living entities, analogous to jellyfish or, at a higher level, Gaia Herself, it follows they will have interests, and hence laws, not always consistent with the interests of each of the individuals of which they are composed. About the nature of these laws, and about how they might be arrived at and implemented, I am not concerned here. I wish instead to explore the way in which, as individuals, we obtain information about our society, for information is the means by which democracies seek to govern. It is my contention that there is a surfeit of social studies, given that the information they provide is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to us all, as individuals.

Most of us carry some notion of Gauss’s Normal Distribution Curve. From it, we derive the notion of what is normal. So ubiquitous, that bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of any quantitative attribute within any sizeable population (and note the words ‘quantitative’ and ‘sizeable’). Height, weight, IQ – most of us are middle class, but out there on the edges of the bell, a couple of standard deviations from the mean, are the morons and the giants, the champions and the dwarves. Eliminate them, and they will reappear. Populations of people, as a whole, are taller now than formerly, but some are always shorter or taller than others. To locate such a group of people in our society would be a simple task. Typically, they could then be quizzed as to whether they had ever suffered any form of discrimination.

Regrettably, the scholarship on which we base our knowledge of society is increasingly of this nature. I say regrettably because I believe there is no way such data, whatever their intrinsic merits, can be given meaningful expression through language. Language, I believe, is intransigently non-statistical, cannot easily encode statistical data at all, and retains a tribal memory as a form of communication from a god to an individual. The presentation of a statistical datum, linguistically, is an invitation for us to make a choice. Generally, the choice has been made on our behalf. If not, we will look to the rhetoric of the text for clues.

Suppose I say to you, ‘Do you realise that twenty-five per cent of smokers contract lung cancer?’ It is my contention you will receive the same information from this statement, as you would if I were to say instead, ‘Do you realise that seventy-five per cent of smokers contract lung cancer?’ The actual percentage cited, provided it is not despicably low, is irrelevant.

Here are three quotes from ‘Women and AIDS’ in Connexions, the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Issues, May/June 1989:

These two texts reflect a current prevailing mythology – that there are different ‘Models’ of HIV transmission for the first and third worlds – and imply that heterosexual transmission is not a reality in western, industrialized countries. Statistics from America prove that this premise is false. According to the US Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from March this year, ten percent of new AIDS cases are attributable to heterosexual transmission and over half of these are women.

It is believed around ten per cent of the male population in Sydney is bisexual. If this is true then it has big implications for women.

In addition to being the traditional caregivers in the family, or in relationships, women also comprise about ninety percent of all healthcare workers – including nurses, social workers and home health aides.

To return to the two statements concerning smoking, I contend you will surmise from either of them that I am attempting to disparage the practice of smoking by impressing on you the datum that many smokers contract lung cancer. Because not all of them contract lung cancer, I cannot, no matter how tempted, state that smoking causes lung cancer. I can only state that more smokers than non-smokers contract the disease. As a responsible medical scientist, I may also conclude that, were the incidence of smoking in the general population to decline, the incidence of lung cancer may well decline too. But how may this be brought about? Knowing as I do that my data is pertinent to the general population but not to the individuals of which that population is composed, will I nonetheless try to persuade you to give up smoking? If so, on what authority?

It is not even proven from my studies that smoking and lung cancer are causally related. It is simply a reasonable hypothesis. It is not true that if you smoke your chances of contracting lung cancer increase. Your chance of contracting lung cancer is one hundred percent or zero. Chance doesn’t come into it. If you were to ask, ‘Will my chances of contracting lung cancer increase if I smoke or decline if I stop?’ I could not answer. All I can do is find a group of individuals who has given up smoking and a group who has not, and a group who has taken up smoking and a group who has not, and compare these. But as to you, I cannot say.

I know that some people who don’t smoke do contract lung cancer, and that some people who do smoke don’t contract lung cancer. My survey tells me nothing about you as an individual and, as an individual, you are debarred from obtaining any information from my study that may relate to your own individual behaviour. That a coin has a fifty percent probability of falling heads or tails is nonsense. The coin must fall heads or tails, and it may fall heads ten times in a row. Small, local violations of the Second Law are commonplace. Brownian motion and dissipative structures (flames, whirlpools) are but two instances.

Such, at least, is the situation in theory. As we all know, the reality is different. Strenuous efforts are constantly being made to influence individual behaviour on the basis of population studies. Advertising agencies, government departments, every kind of lobby group, are charged to get the message across, and what is the message? You’ve guessed it. Smoking causes lung cancer. Anyone who would choose to deny this is just a nit-picking no-goodnik.

 Smoking is a filthy habit, but do you know why young people continue to take it up? For the same reason they drink and drive too fast, because they are prepared to take their chances, which is as it should be, biologically. They understand, and I believe they are correct, that all these findings and surveys don’t apply to them. They intend to exercise their democratic freedom to be different and, what is more, there is a vestigial religious sense invoked in risk-taking. In our particularly godless culture, it is perhaps the only trace of the religious sense that remains. The mystery of the individual, unconstrained by population studies, is instinct with the mystery of God. By placing one’s life, or health, on the line, one retains a sense of this mystery. God does not play dice with the individual. I believe that the religious sense has to do with the Second Law, and in its raw, undogmatic state, expresses itself as a constant search for omen and coincidence or, loosely, the improbable. The voice of God manifests as pattern out of chaos. In general, social scientists are not in sympathy with the need to live dangerously, and would have all pedal cyclists wearing crash hats.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the issue of AIDS and HIV infection. A locus classicus, involving all the above mentioned ingredients, but here a torch with which to illuminate not so much human debauchery as the dark abuses of statistical method. I should like to consider these in some detail, but let’s get one thing straight from the outset: men are not being sufficiently supportive of their AIDS afflicted sons, as we learn from the following feminist gem from Aids in America by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross:

Between 1984 and 1986 about half of all mothers either physically or emotionally supported their sick sons, while only a third of the fathers were able or willing to do the same.

There are two kinds of research being done on the HIV virus. One is strictly medical and concerns itself with the structure and behaviour of the retrovirus itself. There are problems aplenty here, but outside the scope of this essay. Scientists know comparatively little about viruses ominously, they are probably former cell constituents who shrugged off their social responsibilities – but the AIDS epidemic has provided a source of funding and inspiration. It does not help when tentative findings, reported in medical journals as preliminary communications for the scrutiny of notoriously sceptical peers, are ripped from context and cited in the media (the only way the media knows how, through language) as breakthroughs, alarms and cures.

The study found AZT worked effectively to delay the onset of AIDS in people whose T4 cells had declined from normal levels … of 713 AIDS patients, half of whom were given AZT and the rest administered a placebo, only fourteen of the patients taking AZT developed AIDS, while over double this number (thirty-six) on the placebo had progressed to the last stage of the disease.

(From Studies released by the US Institutes of Health and quoted in ‘Connexions’, Sept/Oct 1989)

If I were still a research fellow with the US Institutes of Health, I would feel embarrassed about having this kind of preliminary finding made public, given the exorbitant cost of AZT. I would expect a canny lawyer to see I preferred to work with such low, virtually noise-level numbers so as to equip myself with a statistical ‘out’ in the event of being sued by some litigious AIDS sufferer denied the medication. No reputable scientist could agree that AZT here was being shown to work effectively, for the simple reason that fourteen out of half of 713 could be something else entirely next time round, and thirty-six likewise.

More importantly, AIDS is a question of definition. The onset point of full-blown AIDS is a matter for clinical judgement. The pattern of opportunistic infection that constitutes the syndrome differs with every patient. I make these comments only to illustrate the kind of misgivings scientists feel on having their work subjected to the scrutiny of a public so desperate for answers.

On the other hand, the epidemiological studies of AIDS are largely a matter of questionnaires. Notice how Haitians have disappeared as a category? There is good reason to suspect the virus is transmitted sexually, just as there is good reason to suspect smoking may facilitate the development of lung cancer, but to imagine that people will tell the truth about their drug habits and sex lives must strike any novelist as the height of sociological naivety. A recent article in Rolling Stone demonstrated that most, if not all, New Yorkers claiming to have contracted the HIV infection through ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse were in fact closet bisexuals who changed their stories under pressure. And it is cases such as these that are being used to justify the fear, with the attendant propaganda, that ‘normal’ heterosexuals are at serious risk.

The May /June editorial of Connexions stated:

AIDS is neither a gay disease nor an IV drug user’s disease. The fact that AIDS appeared first in Australia in the gay community is only an accident of epidemiological history.

Concerning this epidemiological history, it is not even known who has the infection. Fears that civil rights could be at risk, reluctance to subject healthy subjects to the stress of false positives, not to mention cost, debar what would seem the most obvious step. Then there is the long incubation period, and the possibility that the virus mutates faster than clinical tests can keep up. In the absence of any real data, bureaucrats are free to sound warnings that have no basis in fact.

And of course you only get the answers to the questions that you ask. As reported in Scientific American, a researcher in Florida found a high statistical correlation between the incidence of HIV infection in that state and the incidence of mosquito infestation. His work was rejected out of hand by public health authorities as irresponsible scaremongering. The Connexions editorial, once again:

The virus is spread by body fluids, specifically blood and semen. It has been detected in tears and saliva but in concentrations too small for transmissions to occur.

Who says? Infection, like fertilisation, is not a colligative property, and I see no reason why a single retrovirus would not be adequate for infection. A single spermatozoon is adequate to fertilise an egg. A single mutant epithelial cell can give rise to a tumour. The HN virus has never been isolated from vaginal fluid, but not for that reason are heterosexual men being urged to dispense with condoms during intercourse. On the contrary.

It may be argued no one ever caught the virus from a kiss or a mosquito, but rest assured no recently: diagnosed subject was asked if he recently kissed a junkie or dined in a restaurant where homosexuals worked in the kitchen.

Certain questions are taboo. Certain comments are unwelcome. Masters and Johnson were castigated for stating that, since the virus is known to survive up to four hours out of the body, they saw no reason why it could not be contracted through an open wound, from a toilet seat. How do we know no one ever caught it that way when we don’t ask? The point is that if we did, they wouldn’t remember it anyway. People are more inclined to remember, and lie about, sex acts and drug abuse. It makes sense to ask them questions they’re able to answer and lie about.

The taboo word ‘sin’, so rigorously avoided in the context of AIDS, is perhaps not inappropriate. Certainly, science is not the only victim of AIDS. Who can feel comfortable handing out needles to addicts and condoms to male prisoners? Most of us have sex lives and most of us use drugs, and I cannot see that to regard promiscuous homosexuals and N drug users as sinners is to be uncompassionate towards them. Attempts to vindicate their behaviour as normal simply perverts us all.

The AIDS education program is designed, in part, to protect AIDS sufferers against all forms of discrimination. So nebulous are the statistics, they could be used to prove anything. At present, they are being used to prove that we are all equally at risk, and that AIDS cannot be transmitted socially. To prove that we are all equally at risk, very small percentages are being emphasized out of all proportion. To prove the virus cannot be transmitted socially, similar percentages (and who can doubt they would exist, if only the appropriate questions were asked in the questionnaires) are not allowed to be compiled. Paradoxically, social workers, who study only populations, fiercely defend the moral outcast against the charge of abnormal behaviour. Certainly, no secular individual dares point the finger at another, but it is quite in order for societies to exert control over their members, surely. The reluctance of anyone to accept this responsibility suggests that AIDS cannot be brought under control in our society, and is perhaps best regarded as a mechanism by which Gaia may bring about a reduction in human numbers. Our society is already moribund, but as individuals we cannot see it.

Yesterday morning I had to put my thirteen-year-old son on a train. He was going to visit a friend in Bathurst, and the journey involved us getting up in the dark and travelling to Moss Vale station in time for him to catch the 5.15 am to Sydney. When we got there, they had no tickets in the ticket office and the train was running over half an hour late, which meant that he would miss his connection. A stem, grey-haired man with a briefcase overheard our plight and, after making a phone call, suggested we might accompany him in his car as far as Campbelltown. Because the train was late, he had to drive. Without much thought, I said, ‘I’m not going, but would you take him?’ indicating my younger son. The last I saw of my son that morning was his small, trusting figure, fishing rod projecting from overnight bag, following a total stranger. I had let my son go off in a car with a total stranger.

The man to whom I entrusted my son was a hard man in appearance, and he had strange eyes. They were blue, somewhat distant, and evasive even. But he also had a nice, wry tum of phrase I recognised and I decided, even before my son phoned through to say that he was all right, that I had done the right thing, and that I would continue to trust strangers, even if my son’s mutilated corpse were subsequently to be found by the side of the freeway. If he survived, my son would gain in confidence. Travel ought to be an adventure. But if we are afraid to die ourselves, we are even more afraid for our children.

There are men who take advantage of the trust of strangers, and there are men who rape and murder young boys. You can’t pick them in the street. I’ve been taken in by conmen myself, so I know my intuition is fallible. Between the time in which I grew afraid for my son’s welfare and his phone call, I prayed. I felt no inclination to call for the statistics and yet I have the feeling that, had I searched in the appropriate rack at the newsagency, I would have found a paperback entitled Men who Trust Strangers and the Strangers who Prey upon Them by some American PhD, or a magazine article in Cosmo or Cleo on ‘Why you should never accept a lift in a car from a strange guy’.

I would guess that if you don’t trust people, they become less trustworthy. It is, after all, meanspirited to decline a generous offer made on the spur of the moment. I would guess this, but I wouldn’t attempt to prove it through population studies. The test for me would lie in whether I could make of it a moving case history.

The truth is, of course, that most small boys are perfectly safe with total strangers. But if I were to read an article or paper citing just one instance to the contrary, that is very likely all I would take away. And so our fears multiply everywhere we turn. Because we have no religious faith, staying healthy and alive and fit is all we can imagine. We cannot imagine choosing to die or deliberately risking our health.

And yet certain traditional values – honour, courage, patriotism, and trust – require the individual to risk, or seek out, loss, death, and ill health. As our democracy degenerates to a rabble of self-seeking individuals unprepared to die for the greater good, the welfare of the individual becomes paramount. Unthinkingly, social science reflects this trend. Safety, comfort, equality, wealth-these are parameters easy to measure. And it is not the findings that matter – I hope I have shown that these are irrelevant – but the questions that are asked and answered. Little wonder the young reject the society social science underwrites. And what can social science have to say when the Death Wish erupts, as soon it must? Already, no one knows what to do with the junkies who don’t care if they get AIDS or spread it, just as no one knows what to do with the blacks who hang themselves in prison cells.

To summarise, our knowledge of society and ourselves would not deteriorate, I believe, were the practice of social science to cease. In trying to convey its findings in language, it distorts and, ultimately, falsifies them, both giving us a false picture of the world and circumscribing our options within it. We would be freer, and braver, without social science.

Omit statistical method and what is it anyway but what priests and novelists have always practised.

In his scientific foreword to Descent of Spirit, E. J. Steele, currently a Visiting Fellow at the John Curtin School of Medicine in Canberra, asks:

What is the connection between Science and Art? If there is a connecting link it surely must relate to our sixth intuitive, or integrative sense. It is this sense which the biological essays of E. L. Grant Watson directly address: he excites our sense of wonder.

I must acknowledge that in his second novel Rod Usher, author of the widely praised Man of Marbles, tells a good story. And he tells it competently, with some verve. The high points are nicely judged and well-spaced. The characters are drawn with firm lines. The setting – the countryside around the Conda­mine – is well integrated into a narrative which moves to a striking climax. The novel should enjoy some success and may well become quite popular.

Why not, then, be content with that? Popular literature occupies, and deserves to occupy, an honourable place within any culture worthy of the name. Fiction that aims to entertain is frequently able to render its readers alert to issues, possibilities, experiences and ways of looking at the world from which they may otherwise be excluded by prejudice and ignorance. Yet I cannot leave it merely at that because of several aspects of Florid States which contributed to my sense of dismay as I followed the strategies of this carefully contrived novel.