In 1868 John Heaps (alias Muley Moloch), a preacher, self-styled prophet, and trained bootmaker, left England with a group of eight women bound for Australia. Their intention was to set up a mission dedicated to the development of their own perfection and a preparation for the Second Coming of Christ.

They arrived in Melbourne but found it unsuitable as a New Jerusalem (too superficial and violent), so they moved to the south coast of New South Wales. At Yandilla, a seaside town dominated by Irish Catholics, they set up their protestant mission, but moved inland in 1870 to the preferred isolation of a property in the bush. Here, Catherine Byrne, the prophet’s wife, gave virgin birth to a son Immanuel. Or so it seemed. Along the way her husband had performed a number of miracles which included flying (or at least achieving briefly sustained levitation in a standing position – his shoes rose off the floor) and the bringing back to life of a drowned woman (with whom he then had a sort of immaculate affair to match Catherine’s immaculate conceiving.

One by one the women died of consumption at the mission property while the prophet’s megalomania waxed and his credibility waned. Eventually, the surviving women kicked him out, though not before he had accidentally shot and killed a hairy wild white man (an escaped convict).

The prophet opened a shoe business in town; the immaculate son, having turned out to be probably not immaculate at all, ran away to Ballarat and England; most of the women ended up dead in the mission graveyard; and Catherine Byrne told the whole story to the local policeman in 1898.

That’s it! All rather pointless, really. And that’s the point, I suppose.

Grand Days is volume one of Frank Moorhouse’s Palais des Nations novels, and is connected to the author’s previous works Forty-Seventeen and The Electrical Experience by the characters of Edith Campbell Berry and George McDowell. The principal narrative of Grand Days goes on for 500 or so pages, and is followed by some thirty pages of notes and explanations which form another narrative. The most interesting narrative of all, to me, however, is the story of where this book fits into the life and work of Frank Moorhouse.

One of the most irritating things a reviewer can do is say: well, here is this book, but I wish the author would write some other books on topics of the reviewer’s choice. But I must say that next, after all the Palais des Nations novels, I want to read the journals and the literary biography (autobiography?) of Frank Moorhouse. Tantalising pieces of these other desired books are to be found in the notes on the jacket of Grand Days and on the preliminary pages, and in the notes at the end.

I discovered Ruth Park’s Companion Guide to Sydney in a Sydney second-hand bookshop in 1980. Published in 1973, it was already out of print, probably because it evokes a Sydney that no longer existed. In the early 1970s, Park writes, ‘Sydney was beginning to pull itself to pieces, the air was full of fearful noise, the sky of dust … And the terrible sound of the rock pick tirelessly pecking away at Sydney’s sandstone foundations was over all.’

The same sense of a bygone era pervades Fishing in the Styx, the second volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography. It opens in 1942, the year Park emigrated to Sydney from New Zealand, arguably the worst year in Australia’s history. Sydney, with its dim-outs and riots, was suffering a terrible housing shortage. Surry Hills (in which Ruth Park was to set The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange) was ‘a queer, disreputable little village’ full of rats, criminals, and children who disposed of stray kittens by throwing them out of top windows. Kings Cross, on the other hand, was the artists’ quarter, crowded with long-haired and impoverished European refugees, who introduced real coffee to the dim little cafes.

For over a decade, Peter Singer has been one of those public intellectuals we are supposed by some not to have. In the past, however, the problem with him has been that his thinking has often been about matters not seen to concern the public at large, animal liberation, for example. But events have hurried us all forward. Even a few years ago it was possible for mottoes like ‘greed is good’ or pronouncements like Mrs Thatcher’s that ‘there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals’ to seem not only provocative but hard-headed. The good life, we were, many of us, persuaded, was synonymous with goods, our heroes were experts in money-making – having and spending, ethics seemed to be a matter of preserving the appearances, not getting caught.

‘Last time I saw you you didn’t look so good,’ he said.

Terry stopped, and turned. His face seemed genuinely puzzled: ‘Must have been a long time back, Scott.’

And he walked on, leaving Scott standing, flatfooted: but after a dozen paces he turned yet again, and this time shouted, his face purple with anger, as purple as it had been on the night of the Scene: ‘What do you want – a fucking medal?’

The words came in a shower of duck-spittle; then he turned on his heel and walked quickly away, and the two men would never speak again.

This is the finale to ‘The Death of Daffy Duck’, one of the stories in Peter Goldsworthy’s latest collection. ‘The Death of Daffy Duck’ outlines the end of a friendship between two bon vivant couples whose years of dining out together had come to an end in a restaurant, during dinner, when one of the men almost choked to death on a piece of food (the ‘Scene’ referred to), and the other saved his life. From that time on, the saved man will not speak to his rescuing friend.

A fine story, well told, but the real cleverness is that the reader is left woven into the puzzle of the relationship. What was at the bottom of the saved man’s rage? Humiliation at the public nature of the choking and the saving? A resentment at being the weaker of the two in the incident? Horror at being exposed as so clumsily, so trivially mortal? The tale was as real to me as if I had experienced it myself. And perhaps, in some sense, I have.

This power to call up echoes is a great strength of Goldsworthy’s writing. I put it down to this, that his observation is very acute, but better still is his instinct about what to leave out.

His current crop of ‘little deaths’ is, as in earlier volumes, set in a kind of all-round Australian inner-suburbia, peopled largely by the privileged. Goldsworthy stories don’t feature elaborate set-ups or vivid pictures of the locations. Unless it’s strictly germane to the theme of a story he offers no run­down on the politics or the history of a time or place. Yet the arena in which his characters play out their difficulties is strongly evoked, unmistakably modern Australia in every nuance.

His characters, too, arrive on the page fully evolved and, as a rule, already armed for destruction. Often lacking any of the usual privations of the human race – hunger, poverty, or lack of education, for example – they are at liberty to expend their creative furies in destruction, of themselves, or of each other.

The poverty of spirit is bearable, even amusing, as long as the characters are uniformly crippled. But when a character is chosen for the role of dupe or butt, as in ‘The Nice Surprise’, Goldsworthy transfers to another level. His moral purpose gains an outline.

In that story, a grandmother comes to town ready to love her son and his family, and finds, unexpectedly, a bitch of a daughter-in-law poised to strike on every conceivable occasion, and then on an inconceivable occasion, when the older woman is hauled off to hospital desperately ill. The son visits alone, ineffectually wriggles and lies and eventually explains to his mother that she can’t stay, or telephone, him and his family any more. His wife has told the children their grandmother died. The son apologises and leaves.

I once made a rather grand comparison of Goldsworthy to Chekhov; I began this book prepared to be embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm, but now I find myself thinking about Raymond Carver. What they all have in common is the fine etching of a small slice of the world that they know well. But Carver and Chekhov are both kinder, sadder observers of the human condition. Goldsworthy is an avenger. His stories are full of wit but he is not always sympathetic. Maybe there’s a touch of obsessiveness with sickness in his narratives. I think I’d be happier with a fuller, more wide-ranging view of the world. But the novella in this collection, ‘Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam’, delicately scarifying in its own way, shows that Goldsworthy can find a footing on yet another level, of deep sympathy, without relinquishing his talent for surprise.

Buy this book. You won’t regret it, even if sometimes your jaw clenches. In the economy of his telling and in the conviction of each story, Goldsworthy shines like a star. His jigsaws of events dovetail in witty imitations of life’s strange twists. Dialogue is exact, often cruel, stunningly mean. And I don’t want to be presumptuous but I’ll bet you’ve had some of the conversations you’ll read in this collection.

The faded but still brave word ‘grand’ in the title of Frank Moorhouse’s new novel gives a signal from another age, the 1920s, when after the war-to-end-all-wars there were grand ideals and grand hotels. It is also fitting that the League of Nations, the setting for the book, should in the 1920s have had its headquarters in Geneva in a former luxury hotel, while its own rather unfortunately named Palais was being built.

But this is no period or historical novel. Moorhouse has, with brilliant intuition, rummaged in what he calls ‘a trunk in the attic of history which has not been properly opened’, the archives of the League. Being Moorhouse, he also does not flinch at improprieties. His central character, Edith Campbell Berry as she determinedly calls herself, is twenty-six when she finds herself on the train from Paris to Geneva, fresh from Australia. She is an intelligent idealist, a hard worker but imaginative. She has also a great gift for startling not only the reader but herself.

We are introduced to the eponymous hero of Jacko by an Australian narrator who is writing a novel about China and teaching a writing class at New York University. The students in his class hero-worship Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver and compose pieces for submission to the New Yorker. In one of them:

… a woman betrayed by men of average fallibility meets a Persian-American in a Soho bar. He is a gentle soul, but he wants to suspend her in an apparatus designed for men who like to see women swinging powerless from the ceiling. He is embarrassed to ask, but would she consider it? More conventional males have adequately traduced her; she consents. In mid-suspension though, as she gyrates in her captive state, he’s overwhelmed by the shame of his perversion and goes off and reads American Track and Field. Suspended between his desire and self-loathing, she swings in an empty room. It’s a poisonously accurate image, a wonderful New York tale.

If such stories have a fault, it is that they do not carry a sense of the wider world, the world of China, the world of Africa, in which the apparatus of suspension is even more savage and the yearning of women even more radically thwarted.

It is a passage very much about the priorities behind Keneally’s own novel as well.

‘Tales tell a hidden truth as well as the things they seem to say.’
The Second Bridegroom

With the publication of Rodney Hall’s latest novel, The Grisly Wife, the author has brought to completion a trilogy that first began appearing in 1988. Since this last published novel is actually the middle work of the trilogy and what were formerly two separate novels are now bridged by this newcomer, we are finally given the opportunity to assess if and how the parts relate to the whole.

While each of these volumes can still be read as a separate work of power and effect, in their combined sequence the achievement is extraordinary. We are now made aware that for all the narrative diversity offered there are unsettling parallels and relationships between the stories; teasing them out is an enriching and engrossing task. At first reading each of the monologues (yes, monologues!) may reveal only a slight interrelatedness. Hall’s intense and poetic text is as dense as the primeval forest that is his setting. His stories are encircled and tangled with circumlocutions and asides, with sudden leaps of time and setting, with tantalising avenues of escape and revelation glimpsed through the thicket and rushed past us as we proceed further to the very heart of the matter.

Catherine Kenneally: The first thing that strikes me is that there are now two books in a row with Christian symbols on the cover.

Peter Goldsworthy: Yes, well I didn’t have much say in the cover of that one. They showed it to me. Interestingly there was the novel, Honk if You Are Jesus and then a novella called Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam – probably more interesting to me because that’s my own work. I’m not sure what that means. Maybe that’s the mythical 1960s generation getting into middle age and starting to worry about death and the afterlife and all that stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated by those almost banal adolescent questions, why is there something rather than nothing. I’ve never fully outgrown them, and maybe you shouldn’t outgrow them. It is the basic question, why are we here?, and all those whys that continue to fascinate me.

Despite the importance of her poetry and prose, Oodgeroo’s experiences were much more than a catalogue of achievements in European terms. Her life, often hard fought, was one of enjoyment as well as pain, of laughter as well as sorrow. Oodgeroo had a wonderful sense of humour; it was, like the title of Ruby Langford’s latest book, ‘real deadly’. She was always able to use this to advantage, to embarrass stuffy politicos, to get action, to explode stereotypes of Aboriginal people. At the same time, she related to young people better than anyone else I have ever met. She told stories, she entertained, she challenged and always threw down the gauntlet. I’ll never forget the day she was involved in a radio hook-up with children from all over Queensland and was coaching aspiring young poets over the phone: ‘That’s a great piece – now you keep writing! Never forget; you do what your teachers say, because knowledge is power. Now, go out and get some!’

Oodgeroo was also a canny, fearless, and highly effective politician. She represented her community, her Aboriginal constituency, better than any elected or appointed official has ever done. The title of her major retrospective book of poems, My People, says it all. She saw all Aboriginal people as members of her extended family and believed that her verse expressed their words. Her work was from them and for them.

What did she teach others? To respect the land as the basis of all life, as the spiritual matrix of existence. Not to give up, to believe in the future despite the horrors of deaths in custody and police harassment. Not to exclude the poor, the sick or the disabled from Australian life. To use the arts for a strong political end. Above all, to increase respect for, and awareness of, Aboriginal culture.

Oodgeroo stood out as being one of the most inclusive human beings I have ever encountered. She did not have to be this way; it was her choice and all of the 28,000 children who visited her at her home of Moongalba over the past thirty years were the beneficiaries. Like them, I consider myself lucky to have known her.

Commentators often use terms like ‘fire in the belly’ when they speak of Oodgeroo, and it is true that she did not suffer the presence of fools or hypocrites. It is hypocritical that the federal government granted her no more than a ‘peppercorn lease’ on her land, stating that it was hers only during her lifetime. Never before has there been a clearer case for land rights; Moongalba must be preserved for her family and for her Nunukul people as a ‘sitting down place’ forever.

Oodgeroo had many, many different careers. Ever since she began publishing, she has been in constant demand, as an adviser to Ministers of Aboriginal Affairs, as an educationalist, as an artist, an actor, an ambassador for her people and as an internationalist. As she often remarked, ‘Everyone wants a piece of me’ – and no wonder.

Oodgeroo had to fight against many things in her life, and she succeeded in surmounting them all. However, one advantage she did have was the fact that she was able to grow up with her Aboriginal family – unlike the thousands of Black Australian children who were forcibly removed from their parents by government order.

This shameful period of Australian history provokes the question, how many Aboriginal people were prevented from achieving their destinies because of this barbaric practice?

Sitting on her front porch on Minjerriba (North Stradbroke Island) and discussing politics with her, I found that racial issues often became wider human issues of injustice and intolerance. This was one of Oodgeroo’s special gifts; she showed by her life and personal example the potential for true equality in Australia if all people modelled their behaviour on hers.