‘Curiosity is a muscle,’ Helen Garner declares in the first essay of this selection, displaying again the metaphorical spark that marks her out and keeps her readers plundering her pages. She is writing about writing, and her revelations couple a disarming intimacy – Garner the wry, lifelong apprentice, confiding trade secrets – with shrewd and reflexive moral admonition. Here, in a brief paragraph, is laid out the disciplinary ground of fiction and reportage, plus a private view of Garner’s workshop and tools: ‘Patience is a muscle,’ she continues. ‘What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open out in front of you.’ It’s a beguiling act, this ability of hers to be forever the journeywoman but in the assured allegorical diction of a latter-day Bunyan.

True Stories, a selection of her non-fiction works, is the yield of a quarter century of Garner’s habitual, patient, writerly curiosity. And of something else as well. Call it tenacity maybe, a stroppiness that is part anarchist perversity, part determination to winkle out the truth in complex human affairs. And always there is the mark of the scourge that she wields against narcissism, her own and others.

Until I reviewed Marion Halligans novel Lovers’ Knots, I didn’t really know much about what a lover’s knot was. And now I know more than I used to know about the word ‘cockle’.

Quite simply, the cockles on cockle shells are the distinct ribs, and since the ventricles of the human heart resemble in some ways the shape and ribbing of the shells of scallops, we have the expression ‘cockles of the heart’. Certain furnaces are called ‘cockle stoves’ because of their shape, and something that appeals to your deepest feelings is said to ‘warm the cockles of your heart’. Christian pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela, the legendary burial place of St James the Great in northern Spain, have always worn the cockle shell because it is one of the attributes of St James.

Once the scourge of the conservatives, some practitioners of cultural studies are starting to make the stuffed shirts of English Departments look like mad-eyed anarchists.

Asian and Pacific Inscriptions, a special book issue of Meridian edited by the La Trobe University academic Suvendrini Perera, is a collection of theoretical considerations of cultural constructions of ethnic, national, and sexual identities in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on the insidiously colonising Australian cultural strategy of rapprochement with Asia. These are voices ‘situated’ on the margins (plural), probing, undermining, deconstructing the centre (single, more-or-less), tracking the way colonialism has traversed the geographies of ‘subjectivity, collectivity and place’. Yet to this reader, at least, the book reads like the collective work of an Otherhood of Right Thinkers, all speaking the same language, all waving approved ideological banners, all determined to be on the side of the angels.

The French literary world was agog last year with the news of the awarding of two prestigious prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, to a novel called Le Testament Français, by a writer called André Makine. The unusual nature of the novel is that it was written in the most beautiful, yet freshly distinctive French by a man whose maternal tongue is not French at all, but Russian.

Makine has only lived in France for eight years, although he has known French for much longer; yet his novel appears to epitomise France in a way which is quite extraordinary. At least, so say the critics, but to me it is much more extraordinary than that, for more than any other novel, in French or English, that I can remember reading, it expresses perfectly that ‘langue d’étonnement’, that ‘tongue of wonders’, which is created by the bilingual writer who is at home as much in two languages as it is possible to be. For Makine, French is as much a part of his soul as Russian; being of both, of neither, all at the same time, gives him a life in that gap between cultures, between languages, which is what he calls the ‘langue d’étonnement’. Something composed of gaps, of silences, as much as of difference: in its very nature, something which seems to speak the universe both more clearly, more truthfully, yet also less comprehensibly, than is found within the work of someone steeped in only one language from birth.

‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.

Dorothy Porter’s Crete would be a natural home for such ironies, in that it constantly turns the givens of the literary past to new purposes – usually in the twinkling of a tongue, often at the tilting of a heart. Her Byron, or Tsvetaeva, or Mandelstam is nobody else’s, but here they all are, attended by Porterian flourish.

What is she up to in Crete? Readers of her earlier work will not be surprised to learn that the enterprise negotiates (at least) two zones of being. One is that of physical intimacy – not only that between one embodied self and another, but the jumpy electric charge between the I who knows and the known I. The other is that of blazoned imaginations – in this case, for instance, Arthur Evans’ rendition of archaic Crete, or George Seferis’s psychic hinterland, or George Steiner’s.

Something a little like this happens in all poetry. Unless something called to be fleshed out, nothing would be written; at the same time, we all borrowed the alphabet and its sleeping messages from other people. In Porter’s case, though, the transaction is intensified. It is as if she is being romanced, night and day, by word as by world.

The resulting thrill often takes the form of a question, with which many of the dozens of poems here begin. ‘What do the Minoans teach us – / exuberance with bloody hands?’: ‘Is the gaily painted trussed bull / still alive / as its slashed neck bleeds / into the sacred vessel?’: ‘Is poetry a strange leftover / of Minoan bull-leaping?’: ‘Am I the Arthur Evans / of my own lost city?’: ‘Is my blood too thin / to serve the gods of ecstasy?’ Such interrogations face outwards towards the palpable with all its vivid names, and inwards towards the revolved, customarily impassioned, self.

The easiest thing to say about still romantic poetry is that it resumes the argument between love and death, but that does not make it the less true, and it is certainly apropos in Crete. ‘The Labyrinth of Intimacy ‘, after an epigraph from Steiner referring to the ‘absolutely alien which we come up against in the labyrinth of intimacy’, goes,

How far did the Minoan thread go
in the labyrinth of intimacy?

Was there less tear and tangle
when they loved their dead
more than each other?

The world of gorgeous hallucination
is a sweeter place to visit
than the mucky lair of another’s heart.

The Minotaur helpless
the Minotaur bleating
blind in the brutal sun

is this the truth of love
none of us could bear?

If the poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth, such accumulated questioning will still lead us to go one way or the other: a yes or a no germinates in the mind, and possibly in the heart. But part of Dorothy Porter’s success as these poems unfold is in her appropriating that immensely durable imaginative resource, the labyrinth, which by design goes on giving and taking, leading out and leading in, and making play both with pattern and with chaos. Many of the poems in the long ‘Crete’ sequence – like others in other sections of the book – are homages to passion, as suggested by titles like ‘Wild Honey’, ‘The Law of Volcanoes’, ‘Why I Love Your Body’, ‘My at-last-lover’: many of the same poems are also investigations – deployed probes, testings of the angles and surfaces of experience’s labyrinthine ways.

Improbably, as some will think, but not in vain, the book includes a sequence which is in effect a celebration of the cigarette, that sixth finger in so many millions of hands. The first part goes,

The dove of peace
no Longer brings
an olive branch

the dove of peace
offers the halo
of the shared cigarette

that glow
between your lover’s fingers is the red-tipped palm
on your oasis

it smoke-signals
your shared
alert drowse

you have never heard
the war so hushed.

If still-life were a vital artistic genre today, the cigarette would have a good claim to a place in it: it is not surprising after all that it can also belong in a book so exercised by love’s subjection to, and defiance of, mortality.

Since the fire never says,’ Enough’ and desire is in principle infinite in pitch, the open-mouthed voracity of question can always claim a place where love is at issue – another reason for its prominence in this book. But question’s near relation, fancy, is also accommodated generously. One of the most attractive and illuminating, poems here is ‘Liberties’, with its Wildean epigraph, ‘The secret of life is Art’:

The Minoans took greater liberties
           with nature
than squinting Arthur ever took
           with them

blue birds, flowering ivy,
           wild roses with an impossible
                      number of petals

a reckless geyser
           blooming over polished agate

they painted what they fancied           
           not what they saw.

Myth is a way of taking liberties with history, history a way of taking liberties with myth; Wilde’s aestheticism may be shaky when taken to extremes, but at least it can alert us to paradoxes innate in most ways of registering experience. Dorothy Porter’s ‘they painted what they fancied / not what they saw’ seems to me to catch much more than a central element in her own poetry. The very old argument about whether we are moved principally by knowledge or principally by desire is not likely to be decided in any one generation, which means that the ways of ‘fancy’ are likely to remain the paths of poetry. In ‘Vanished’, Porter writes of ‘An extravagant boy / deified by extravagant art / deaf to personal questions.’ Her own art manages to make the extravagant and the personal neighbours.

‘But beside me I had a new laptop computer …’

The publisher’s promotional material which was included with the review copy of Philip Salom’s new poetry collection, The Rome Air Naked, indicated the book would be launched ‘with an innovative exhibition which will use computer technology to extend the written work into an aural, visual and multimedia presentation’. After reading the author’s introduction and then dipping into the poems for the first time, I only wished I could be there, to listen to, and participate in, the promised performance which will combine visual image and sound, animating the poetry, allowing it to breathe off the printed page, to dance freely in space.

I approached this collection of essays with some sense of anticipation, thinking ‘Do David Williamson, Beatrice Faust, Jamie Grant, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, and Christopher Pearson have something in common? If so, what?’

When I read Peter Coleman’s introduction with its language of battle lines and militarist imagery, I was certainly aware of an Us vs Them program, with the demon as Political Correctness. ‘There have been many victims of this bazooka conformism’, Coleman the strategist asserts, though he does have the good sense to concede that ‘The political correctors could never have the field entirely to themselves in a country with democratic traditions. Inevitably there were voices from the Resistance, even if they were confined to magazines with a small circulation.’

Economics

The fanzine is not a magazine. It bypasses and subverts the economics of commercial publishing and it reasserts the creative link between writing and production. Zines can also, because of the ‘terrorism’ of their production and distribution, bypass the convoluted legalistic boundaries of copyright. Graphics, slabs of text, photos, and images are photocopied, scanned, and pasted into fanzine, then cut-up, reassembled, and often made to assume an oppositional symbolic meaning to that of the original image.

Fanzines do circulate in a market but their chain of distribution does not depend on the bloated edifice of commercial publishing. They are distributed through post-office boxes, independent music, and book shops, through nightclubs and through pubs. The individual or individuals who create the fanzine sell their publication directly to friends, peers, and to local shops. No barcodes, no ISBN numbers, no editors or lawyers. The minimal costs of production – all you need is a photocopier and a typewriter or computer (not necessarily even these; some zines are handwritten) – allow for a freedom of expression that is localised and specific. Most fanzines speak from particular sites of subculture or identity. Punk, hip-hop, thrash metal. Feminist, anarchist, skinhead. But this circulation, though limited in terms of quantity of production, can be expansive in terms of geography. A friend of mine who produces a fanzine receives feedback from Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Athens. Fanzines are often concerned with questions of music, pop culture, and radical aesthetics and their circulation across territories and locations speaks to the globalisation of culture/fashion. Fanzines are literally part of a ‘black market’. This is not to say that they are outside the control of the commercial and legal bureaucracies of capitalism, but rather they circulate ‘beneath’ and ‘tangental’ to the capital Market. (In 1995 an anarchist bookshop in Melbourne, Barricade Books, was raided by the police and the workers arrested for displaying a pamphlet on homosexuality and anarchy. They were charged with displaying obscene material in a public place. Battles against censorship remain a priority for many individuals involved in fanzine production.)

Punk

The first fanzine I ever saw was a rough ten pages of typewritten text devoted to thoughts about the punk band Buzzcocks. It ranged from badly reproduced photos of the band to sexual imaginings about the (ungendered) writer and his/her obsession to get the band into bed. The emergence of a punk aesthetic which argued that you needn’t be a singer to sing or a musician to play an instrument acted as an impetus to fans of punk music to produce their own publications devoted to individual thoughts and musings. You don’t need to be a writer to write, a publisher to publish. The aesthetics of punk were cheap, confrontational, and, most particularly, anti-professional. The producers of fanzines don’t necessarily have to concern themselves with questions of readability, accessibility, and quality which are of paramount concern to commercial publishers and to commercial writers.

Punk imploded and gave rise to the New Wave and to an increasing demarcation of musical genre and subculture. This splintering had the effect of destabilising the dichotomy of mainstream/alternative on which punk music depended for its identity. Quickly the punk style became assimilated into a fashion conscious youth culture, epitomised by the success of magazines such as The Face and ID. The confrontational graphics of punk, symbolised best by the poster for the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ single (Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose), found their way into commercial popular culture but competed for space with the increasingly classical lines, typography, and imagery of the New Wave. Rap and hip-hop also began to have an increasing global audience and its initially confrontational statement of black-American frustration clearly revealed the racist underpinning of western popular music. The pale-faced punk culture could not compete with the urgency and power of rap and the punk slogan ‘Death to Disco’ took on uncomfortably subtle racist connotations when hip-hop was revealing the rich history of funk.

The fanzine did not die. They continued and continue to be produced but its association with the specific locations and aesthetics of punk undermined its relevance to the new identifications with hip-hop, reggae, industrial, goth, house, new wave, call it what you like.

Pre-Punk

The fanzine may be identified with punk but its history can be traced further back to the experimentations of the Dadaists and the Situationists. The Constructivist graphics of the early Bolsheviks also continue to supply inspiration to current fanzines. Pamphlets and newsletters of the left and of the right can also be understood as predecessors to the fanzine, both in terms of economy of production and in that they were communicating an urgency to, again, a specific and localised audience. The excursions into cut-ups and assemblage art also act as a reference point to a hesitant history of the fanzine. The effect of punk was to assert the primacy of music culture as the direct reference point around which fanzines circulated. This is not to argue that fanzines do not often have a direct political and/or intellectual intent but rather that the mutating forms of western popular culture became the focal points around which identification was inscribed. I want to resist an easy equation of fanzine culture with anarchist or left-radical politics. Fanzines can be a call to revolution, a critique of capitalism, but more often they are a send-up of Barbie, an attack on Madonna, or a celebration of a local garage band.

One precursor to the fanzine I came across in a second-hand bookshop years ago was a six-page photocopied collection of homosexual pornographic writing from the late 1960s. These small pamphlets circulated through the urban American homosexual communities before the rise of Gay Liberation. Though their production is confrontational and necessarily political in that it is a response to the censorship and repression of the period, the pamphlets’ uncritical celebration of pornography and violence (a couple of stories are about the pleasures of bashing) cannot be adequately made sense of within our dominant political paradigm of left-wing/right-wing. Porno fanzines still circulate but even more covertly than music fanzines. This is still an area where the State will not look the other way when it comes to the black market economy of the Zine.

Sampling

Cut-up, assemblage, juxtaposition are terms widely understood to refer to practices within the visual arts. Rap music popularised the use of the cut-up in music by relying on the technology of the computer to remix, reassemble, and distort recorded music into new configurations and sounds. Sampling quickly became embroiled in legal questions of copyright but its influence has been vast across the genres of what constitutes popular music in our contemporary world. This is not a digression from a discussion of fanzines. The technical experimentations of rap and hip-hop accelerated the breaking down of divisions which had segregated music into black/white, rock/funk, art/pop. In the late 1980s with the ascendancy of acid-house this cross fertilisation of musical genres allowed for the hard beats of house music to be matched to the thunderous chords of bass guitars. In late 1977 punks maintained a clear-cut separation between themselves and other musical subcultures. Nearly twenty years on this segregation no longer seems viable or necessary. The mainstream may still exist – the play list of the Top 40 – but even there the explosion of musical genre is visible. A rap record is number one. At number five is a song that is reminiscent of the Beatles. Grunge at number thirteen and funk at twenty-three. Within a particular youth subculture an understanding of a tribal ‘us’ may still be at play, a rigid definition of style and attitude, but the ‘them’ it is in opposition to is no longer clear-cut for the cultural landscape is now too diffuse. In 1996 the fanzine can no longer be simply identified with punk.

Riot Grrls/Homo Core

In 1995 Anne Summers published an article in The Good Weekend, the yuppie supplement of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, in which she decried the lack of commitment to feminism from contemporary young women. What struck me as absurd about the article was that around me I had visible signs of a passionate engagement with feminist politics by women as young as twelve. The Riot Grrl scene developed in the early nineties, loose collectivities of women who shared a passion for loud music and a commitment to breaking down the gendered divisions of popular culture. Girls with guitars or with samplers were on stage and on CD, but they were also producing fanzines, writing on the Internet, and sending out vitriolic posters and pamphlets arguing for the necessity and imperative of feminist politics. Much of the musical influences of Riot Grrls could be traced to punk but in their engagement with politics of race and identity, the influence of other musical forms was self-evident. Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem I Will Survive may be as much of an influence as X-Ray Specs’ punk anthem Bondage, Up Yours! While the daily tabloids moaned about political correctness, fanzines were being produced that cared not a toss about the acidity of their observations or the partisan nature of their proclamations.

My reintroduction to the validity of the fanzine came with a growing awareness of the Homocore movement, a burgeoning subculture of gay and lesbian punks who were sick of the homogenising lifestyle politics and aesthetics of the urban commercial gay culture. My awareness of homocore came from reading cheaply produced fanzines from the US and the UK which ranted against the body-fascism of gay culture and which incorporated porn, politics, and music reviews in one grand, incoherent, and vibrant mess. In Melbourne a homocore fanzine, The Burning Times is being produced which allows for debate, dialogue, and passion not visible in the slick ‘official’ gay magazine, Outrage. The Burning Times is part of a media intervention which refuses to be dictated by the economic concerns of mainstream gay publishing and refuses to concede to notions of sexual identity as coherent or uncontradictory. And by not prefacing homosexual identity as consumption oriented it does not depend on the market forces of publishing to allow its contributors and artists to have a voice. This is not to say that The Burning Times will not alienate some people but in the cut and paste world of the fanzine the response is simple. Create your own fanzine and give yourself a voice.

Apologia

The above is not an attempt to explain or justify the fanzine. The existence of fanzines is proof enough of their necessity and impact. The economic ‘black market’ of the fanzine finds its symbolic correlation with the ‘underground media’ of art terrorism. By art terrorism I mean symbolic, creative activity that attempts to subvert and confront the meanings and disseminations of popular media (everything from billboard graffiti to the zaps of ACT-UP and the Guerrilla Girls Art movement). In a world increasingly dominated by the proliferation of the image the fanzine, by prioritising creativity and localised production, enables a countering of the passivity demanded by the television and the computer terminal. Whether handwritten on paper or transmitted through the Internet the fanzine refuses to acquiesce to a reduction of human subjectivity to the level of consumption. I’m not celebrating the fanzine because it is necessarily radical or alternative or transgressive. It can also be conservative or banal or infantile. But by delineating a space within which any individual or collectivity can labour to create, to experiment, to get a view across into public discourse, the fanzine allows for a media practice which is ultimately egalitarian and which will not be silenced by the dominance of the media moguls. Imagine a fanzine devoted to cruel ways of assassinating Ray Martin and Jana Wendt, or a fanzine juxtaposing the golden arches of McDonald’s over the blood-filled floor of an abattoir.

The fanzine can be about anything and by anyone. This is what is worth celebrating.

Some years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan style Murray willed himself to transgress and that there was an inverted dandiness, if not a pedantry, in all that Boeotian ballyhoo. It does not seem to me a remotely fair remark but it is a good epigram notwithstanding and it takes on a range of meanings depending on what light you look at it in. Presumably Forbes thought, or feigned to think, that Murray’s poetic demotic was a variation on that Colonial Strut which is, in fact, a version of the Cultural Cringe. In any case his words came into my head the other day when I was reading Simon During’s new Oxford monograph about Patrick White.

Richard Hall, in ‘Debasing Debate: The Language of the Bland’, had neither the grace nor the courtesy to contact me when preparing his essay on ‘the language, methods and findings’ of The Mackay Report. Had he done so, I might have been able to caution him against publishing such false and misleading material. I could certainly have asked him to correct several errors of fact but, more importantly, I could have alerted him to the many misconceptions, misrepresentations, and untruths in his article which would inevitably destroy any value it might otherwise have.

The Sunken Road is an ambitious novel which sets the crisscrossing lives of families in the northern highlands of South Australia against a temporal panorama of a century and a half and forces that extend far beyond state and continent. It is a compassionate but never sentimental account of a collective experience full of hope, pain, exploitation and double standards. At its centre is a strongly rendered character called Anna Antonia Ison Tolley.

Were it not for the timing, it would be easy to speculate that this richly evocative collection of pieces about music was the inspiration for Jane Campion’s glorious film, The Piano. So many elements of the film – the dominant image of the beached piano, the powerful undertow of sexual passion, even the unexpected violence-are present in this book in the most uncanny similitude. I should not be surprised since Carmel Bird has already displayed her uneasy fascination with the film in her dazzling essay ‘Freedom of Speech’ (in Columbus’ Blindness and Other Essays) and in her introduction to Red Hot Notes she admits that the film was a catalyst for the idea of various writers exploring ‘the complex feelings that surround, and embed themselves in, the human response to music’.

Near the end of a candid 1966 documentary portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in 1966 (and shown last year on SBS), the French critic Jean-André Fieschi casually asks the Italian director whether art is for his a ‘matter of life and death’. Pasolini – who up to this point has been discoursing urbanely on class, culture, cinema and language like a true public intellectual – is floored by the question. ‘This changes the whole basis of our discussion,’ he declares, and goes on to confess that everything he has previously said is a mere mask hiding his actual, primal, angst-ridden feelings about life, death and survival. Unmasked as a trembling existentialist, Pasolini announces that the interview is over. And there Fieschi’s film abruptly ends.

These six poetry titles represent the third series of New Poets to be published by Five Islands Press. Each title runs to exactly thirty two pages – no more, no less. It is, in a sense, a mini-collection, or a semi-collection, midway between a reading and a book. The series as a whole is therefore like a showcase of new talent – you applaud some of the poems, and get impatient with others, much as you do with the poets themselves. This is a good thing – it presents poetry as the provisional affair it really is, most of the time, for poet and reader alike.

This provisional air should not be allowed to detract from the fact that there are real and sophisticated talents to be found in these series. The poets are ‘new’ only in the sense that they haven’t had a collection before: it’s not as if they all started writing last week. Peter Boyle’s Coming Home from the World, published in the second series, shared the NBC Banjo Award for poetry, and won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award. There are assured and experienced voices in this series too; and to give the idea of ‘new poets’ its due, there are also poems so full of energy and intensity, that they threaten to burst off the page.

Garry Disher: The Sunken Road is a so-called literary novel. I find that I’m a bit typecast, Garry Disher the crime writer or Garry Disher the children’s writer. A lot of the fiction I’ve written is so-called more literary in nature. This is my big book, up to date, if you like. It’s a novel set in the wheat and wool country in the mid-north of South Australia where I grew up. It’s a story of the region and of a family and of a main character called Anna Tolley. I tell this story in a series of biographical fragments around a theme like Christmas, or love, or hate, or birthdays. And each fragment takes a character from childhood to old age. And I repeat this pattern right through the book and certain secrets are revealed or come to the surface through this repetition. So at that level I suppose it’s a linear story, but the structure’s not all that linear. In terms of structure it’s an advance for me, or an experiment.

In this issue, Hugh Mackay replies to Richard Hall’s essay in last month’s issue and his reply is printed here in full, unedited, at his insistence – which was communicated to me by his lawyers. As a matter of principle, of course, ABR offers right of reply, which is indeed a regular feature of the magazine, most commonly through the letters to the editor. On this occasion, given Hugh Mackay’s insistence, ABR includes his 3,300-word reply as a special feature.

In his reply, which he calls a ‘rebuttal’, Hugh Mackay points out that The Mackay Reports are not ‘books’ and therefore wonders ‘why they got a run in ABR’. I am interested that Hugh Mackay appears puzzled that matters not in ‘book’ form should come into the domain of ABR.

Katherine Brisbane’s Currency Press is the major play-publishing house in the country and no stranger to the snap-freeze process of producing program play texts by women as well as men. The women have a fair representation in Currency’s general range, but they proliferate in the Current Theatre Series, those pre-first production texts so impossible to follow up with the writer’s post-natal reconsiderations.

It is always a pleasure to read Glenda Adams, a most accomplished and stylish writer. At its best her work displays a natural and unassuming flow, masking artistry of a high order. Admirers of her earlier books will find many familiar concerns in The Tempest of Clemenza; they will also discover her striking out in new directions in a bold and adventurous undertaking.

Edward Colless is the ‘don’ of the art world – in fact, he is Juan, Quixote, and Giovanni all woven together. The Error of My Ways is his ‘mille e tre’ of theoretical affairs – essays and articles that have infected an otherwise sterile art scene with a flame of desire.

The catalogue essay is a sadly neglected craft. Every week, art galleries commission hundreds of short essays to accompany images in their exhibition catalogues. The quality of these essays range from testimonies by an artist’s mate, theoretical exegesis, and creative musing. Regardless of quality, their destiny appears as ephemeral as the shows they illuminate. That such a mass of writing should be consigned to oblivion is disheartening for those in the trade, which is reason to welcome the decision by Brisbane’s IMA to publish a collection of essays by the best catalogue essay writer in the country. The enigmatic style of Colless emerged in the early 1980s, along with art theory publications such as On the Beach and Paul Taylor’s Art and Text. While many of his colleagues have since moved to fresh pastures in Cultural Studies, Colless migrated to Hobart. Judging from the sample of forty-six essays included in The Error of My Ways, Hobart has insulated this writer from the cults of contemporaneity that flourish on the mainland.

Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure offers all the ingredients that have made Justine Ettler’s name to date: sex, drugs, tough women, bad men, and rough prose. Thankfully it does leave behind some, though not all, of the relentless violence of The River Ophelia. Marilyn is not as hell-bent on the same masochistic path as Ettler’s earlier heroine, Justine, and the novel admits a light­ness of tone which is initially refreshing.

‘This story about Marilyn’, the narrator informs us,

doesn’t start with her moderately immaculate conception or with her depraved adolescence ... or with that summer she spent clinging to a bobbing beyond-the-breakers surf­board off Australia’s most famous beach and squeezed orgasm after orgasm from between her tanned teenager’s thighs. 

Dear Editor,

I am flabbergasted at the savage, totally unjustified hatchet job that Richard Hall has done on Hugh Mackay in the National Library Voices Essay (ABR, Feb/March 1996). Is the National Library now paying for character assassination?

I know both Hugh Mackay and Richard Hall. I think that the Pot should always think carefully before calling the Pan sooty-arse. If Mr Mackay looks like ‘a possum thinking about an apple’, the curmudgeonly Mr Hall looks a bit like the possum’s bum.

The first virtue of this study is to remind us of the dramatic, potentially cataclysmic, quality of the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes to California in the late 1840s and to south-east Australia soon afterwards. That was prime among the several characteristics the two experiences had in common. At few other points is there so close affinity in the histories of Australia and the USA. The subject is altogether appropriate for one, like David Goodman, who has engaged in research in both countries, and who teaches their comparative history. The result is a most satisfying monograph. While the heavier incidence is on the Australian side, this is one of the few examples in the Australian repertoire of effective comparative work. One of few others in that list – Andrew Markus’s Fear and Hatred – also probes the goldfield, experience, describing how the British master-race treated the Chinese in either case. Goodman’ s aim is much more ambitious – to reveal basic socio-political responses to the cataclysm of gold.

The central contention of this provocative, well-written, and extensively researched study is that Australia underwent a process of decolonisation during the 1940s, and that only by understanding this can we make sense of the subsequent relationships between Australia, Britain and the United States.

The wartime reorientation of Australian affairs away from Britain and towards the United States was viewed as a purely wartime expedient, and even before the war’s end the Australian government (a Labor government, let it be remembered), was looking to renewing the military and diplomatic ties with Britain which the Pacific war had weakened. The election of Attlee’ s government in Britain in 1945 brought with it expectations that a grouping of Labour governments in the Dominions would prove a positive force in remaking Commonwealth relations in the postwar era. The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, jokingly referred to a meeting of the Commonwealth prime ministers in 1946 as the ‘Imperial Labour Executive’.

It was not to be, and in the field of foreign relations in particular the Australian and British governments found it increasingly difficult to reach agreement or act to a common purpose across a range of issues in the second half of the 1940s. The two overriding issues of postwar history – decolonisation of the European empires and the East-West tensions which rapidly developed into a state of Cold War – emerged early, and agreement between Australia and Britain on either proved impossible, at least until 1949.

The good old days (bad old days?) of young adult fiction are gone. A couple of decades back it was impossible to imagine a reputable mainstream publisher producing a book for older children which has been supported by the Literature Board of the Australia Council and whose plot revolves around drug-taking (casual and accepted), violence, murder, abduction and rape. This is what The Enemy You Killed is about. The question is, does it more accurately depict real life than, say, an old-fashioned genteel novel like Swallows and Amazons? Perhaps it depends where you live. I’m not convinced that teenage gunplay with live ammunition is necessarily more ‘real’ than messing about with boats. At least in Australia. There is more than a whiff of the tabloids around the melodrama of The Enemy You Killed. It tells of a fifteen­year-old girl, Jules (Julia), who lives in an unspecified country town which lies close to a state forest dissected by a steep gorge. In this forest, mostly at weekends, many of the local young people have for many years been playing wargames dressed in combat gear and using not only air rifles and home-made explosives, but sometimes real combat weapons. The Tunnel Rats stalk The Rebels and vice versa, and a successful ambush is the ultimate thrill.

Jules has an oppressive past. When she learned some time back that she was adopted, she freaked, and hid out in the local hotel as a groupie with a heavy metal band before finally returning home. Then she formed a relationship with cold-eyed, unruffled bad boy Wade,

before finally getting her act together and finding happiness in dumping him for sexy Jammo, boxing champion and hunk. Jammo is the most successful leader the Tunnel Rats have had; Wade’s speciality is to act as the lone sniper.

It was during the writers’ week of the Adelaide Festival in 1992 that I first heard the so-called Australian sense of humour described as ‘Slavic’. This intrigued me at the time; now it troubles me. That week in March 1992 turned out to be the one during which sharp lines were finally drawn in Sarajevo and the attack on Bosanski Brod signalled the outbreak of war in Bosnia. Although it is difficult to weigh the significance of such events to take much notice, the least you can say is that it was a bad week for the whole idea of nationalism.

On two separate occasions, both the parents of Slobodan Milosevic committed  suicide. It is impossible to gauge of course the extent to which his drive to create and control a Serbian empire has been making up for fundamental deficiencies in his personal life. Psychological explanations of history are notoriously slippery. But it is curious that the only will able to resist Milosevic in six years has been that of Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Karadzic is not a professional soldier. He is a psychologist. A bleak view of history can see national identities being shanghaied into the working out of personal agendas.

‘Nothing odd will do long’, said Johnson (that great friend of reviewers). If we begin by positing Aland Gould as an odd poet (that is, more than merely eccentric or self-conscious), then whether Johnson is correct about oddness depends on the second half of his observation: ‘Tristram Shandy did not last’. No doubt ABR readers smile at such a sentiment; but if so, then the question becomes whether or not Gould is odd enough.

By some reckonings, Gould has moved away from the port of oddity towards accessibility (the blurb implies this). Gould’s seven collections of verse, four works of fiction, and unknown number of model ships certainly show his interest in making (he is, after all, a poet), and his continued use of stanzaic verse, rhyme and so on is handled with increasing skill and flexibility. It is, of course, not this that makes Mermaid odd or even a little difficult. Any inaccessibility emanates from an almost ‘Jamesian’ manner (another oddity which did not last) in which the poems rigorously fail to give up what it is they hint at offering. ‘Sea Ballad’ suggests this:

‘Stories of Young Adult Sexuality’ and ‘Stories about being Young and Gay/Lesbian’ are the respective subtitles of these two bumper anthologies, coming out together in a joint marketing venture. ‘Not rivals but conspirators.’ writes Mark Macleod in the press release.

In an interview in December 1995, author Christobel Mattingley said that ‘from the beginning’ she felt ‘that writing was my way of giving something back, helping other people to grow and expand and make the world a better place’. Her first book, No Gun for Asmir, about Bosnian refugee child Asmir and his family, had a remarkable effect world­wide, both emotionally and practically. The book was used by many people to exert pressure on various bureaucracies to allow Muris, Asmir’s father, to leave Bosnia. Now we have the story of Muris himself, in Escape from Sarajevo – a book Christobel Mattingley has dedicated in part ‘to all who teach children to make peace’.

Is it only reviewers who read literary magazines through as if they were books while most people dip into them? In the hope that a theme for each issue would hold the attention of readers RePublica this time has centred on Gang.

Last year, two memoirs were published in Melbourne. Abraham Biderman’s The World of my Past and Mark Verstandig’s I rest my case should be read together and alongside Roman Visniac’s photographic record, A Vanished World. As intricate depictions of Polish Jewish life before the Holocaust and as intimate memorials to family and friends, they are monuments to the persistence of memory. But they also have an importance beyond that of individual recollections because of the contrasting insights they offer into the paths to, and resistance against, genocide in rural and urban Poland. Birdman, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto in a city once home to some 250,000 Jews, was incarcerated in a series of concentration camps before his ultimate release from Bergen-Belsen. Verstandig is one of the few thousand Jews who survived in hiding in the Polish countryside, which makes his account a relatively rare and important historic record.

Fact or fiction, cookbook or novel, the recipe is a unique discourse, embedded within other discourses, with its own narrative relationships with those discourses. The giving of a recipe is important, as is the sharing or, indeed, the unauthorised acquisition. The author of the recipe is equally important, as is the response elicited by the author for that which is desired. It is a social exchange, above all; some would say one that is exclusively feminine, but not necessarily so for Julie Capaldo in her first novel, Love Takes You Home.

David Clunies-Ross came under notice last year with Springboard, a darkly intriguing thriller about power, corruption and murder in Hong Kong at a nervous time in the colony’s history, with the Chinese takeover looming. In White Guard he seems to have used the same ingredients to assemble a similar scenario about Australia on the brink of becoming a republic as the year 2000 approaches. Domestically, the country’s politics are in disarray, bringing to mind the constitutional crisis of 1975. Couldn’t happen again, could it? Simultaneously, superpowers are competing in a deadly game of brinkmanship that shows up the threat to this country’s very existence in the form of US communications bases at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and the North West Cape – But Skinner’s position is clearly untenable: he has put the US offside by threatening not to renew leases for its tracking bases, right on the eve of a major joint military exercise in the outback; the Opposition is hugely popular with voters and Skinner has a sex scandal hanging over his head which will destroy him if it gets in the papers. Something’s got to give, but Skinner’s determined to hold on to power no matter what, as politicians invariably are for some reason.

Fiona Capp’s accomplished first novel is pungent with sea-salt and urgent with the relentless momentum of the waves. It opens with the image of tsunami, a freak wave that grows from a shudder in the seabed to a wall of ocean which engulfs the landscape of the novel, an image which is recalled most effectively through the book to echo in metaphor the emotional upheavals of its characters.

These characters are strongly but sparely drawn: we meet them over a summer holiday season and learn little more of them than is necessary to give each motivation and convincing life. Hannah is a year into Melbourne University; commended all her life for having her feet firmly on the ground, she ‘dreams of walking on water’ and has come down the Mornington Peninsula with a secondhand surfboard to try to make the dream into one kind of reality. Marcus and his son Jake fled to the Peninsula from the Liverpool docks, putting distance between themselves and the pain of Jake’s mother’s death from cancer. Jake surfs under the jealous mentorship of a polio-stunted science teacher and Marcus collects the detritus and the distinctive treasures that the sea spews up along the tideline.

The first national guide and only major reference work on gay, lesbian, queer and transgender writing has a tall order to fill. Thanks to Hurley’s practical and sophisticated direction the guide is geared to perform to a demanding audience of both specialist and general interest.

The dead-end problems of producing such a historically destined resource – to include or not to include – are skilfully manoeuvred. Hurley’s introduction acknowledges the limits of such a publication while ushering us into the creative research possibilities of a guide which balances the importance of its inaugural mission with a healthy open-ended approach to the history it is making.

Plays read in books can be nearly perfect works of creativity. The acting is superb, the sets and lighting are imaginative and breathtaking and the direction somehow manages to extract every subtlety from the text without ever becoming overbearing (and I haven’t even mentioned the costumes). In fact, some plays read so well on the page that that is where they deserve to remain without ever being made to endure the harsh reality of an actual theatrical production.

Composing Venus by Elaine Acworth revolves around three generations of women living in an Outback Queensland town and the forces of time and emotion that shape and change their lives. Set at the rear of one of those big stilt-raised Queensland houses, the play opens on a night in 1957 with a radio broadcast announcing that the Russian satellite Sputnik is set to pass through the night sky over Charters Towers.

Sparrow’s Fall

By Terry Lane

Pan, $12.95 pb, 52l pp

‘What I wanted to do was to write a story that would confront me with a number of incidents requiring moral, philosophical or theological reflection,’ Terry Lane writes in the postscript to this novel. There’s something a little unfashionable about such an aim: most contemporary fiction markets itself in more secular terms. But Lane was once a religious minister, prior to his career in broadcasting, and this book testifies to that history. It is a novel that returns obsessively to questions of spiritual crisis and dissent. From the perspective of the dissenter, it targets public morality, and doctrinaire religious observance. From that of a sceptic, it asks how senseless disasters can be squared with a divine plan.

Describing Sparrow’s Fall in such a way, though, risks misrepresenting what is more apparently a wartime adventure story and romance. The protagonist, Gerry Goodman, tells how he came to enlist to fight the Hun, and of his impassioned pursuit of Helga, his German love. The prose is plain but effective, the perspective masculine and middle-aged. The story’s moral reflections emerge from the adventures it describes. In this way Sparrow’s Fall offers both secular entertainment and spiritual dilemmas to its readers.

Great Australian Urban Myths

By Graham Seal

Harper Collins, $14.95 pb 175 pp

Urban myths are defined in part by their familiarity. Hence, I found myself nodding in recognition as I leafed through this selection. I had heard more than once of The Hairy Hitchhiker aka The Lady with Hairy Arms. The stories of kid(ney )napping reminded me that, when overseas, one’s internal organs must be guarded constantly. Less familiar were accounts of ‘skinrunners,’ of whom the author writes:

These are usually naked humans who are seen running beside automobiles at far greater speeds than we are normally capable of. Intriguing mention is made of the Nullarbor Nymph.

For the most part, such legends are neither urban nor Australian. As they circulate they are adapted to local conditions. They deal with communal anxieties in everyday settings: contamination, bodily invasion, embarrassing disclosures and alien dangers. The compiler of the collection, a folklorist, provides details of alternate versions, interpretation and historical background. The effect is somewhat demystifying – perhaps it’s more fun to hear urban myths recounted singly, in an atmosphere of breathless authenticity. There is no doubt, however, that certain of these stories, concerning fingers in meat-pies or nesting spiders, will evoke a pleasurable shiver wherever they are encountered.

Unnatural Order

By Liz Porter

Mandarin, $15.95 pb, 457 pp

Unnatural Order is a Story of Obsession, its cover announces. Combining thriller and romance, it promises to be a page-turner of the first order. The narrative follows Caroline, an Australian journalist attached to her independence. One summer she finds herself courted by Karl, whose insistent, charming attentions lead her to take up his invitation to live with him in Germany. Karl can be very persuasive, as typified here:

Sleepily Caroline abandoned herself to his attentions, breathing deeply as the stirrings of desire flared slowly under Karl’ s persistent fingers.

Once installed in Karl’ s apartment, however, everything changes. Karl wants a hausfrau, and Caroline finds his rule­bound approach increasingly oppressive. Counterpointing this relationship drama is Caroline’s developing obsession with Germany’s Nazi past. Her journalistic inquiries lead her on the track of war criminals, and Germany’s uneasy relationship with its history is exposed to her inquisitive gaze.

As the story unfolds, Karl’s character remains strictly cardboard, just as the ‘exploration’ of Germany merely reproduces cliches. If these cliches were compelling, though, all would be forgiven. Alas, no – rather than beings wept up by this narrative of obsession, my experience was of being inexorably dragged into someone else’s tediously dysfunctional relationship. Unnatural Order lacks the ingredients which turn pages: passion and intrigue.

Resilience: Stories of A Family Therapist

By Moshe & Tesse Lang

Mandarin, $14.95 pb, 258 pp

‘Story telling is healing,’ Moshe Lang suggests at the beginning of this collection, because stories give shape and coherence to experience. Along with their therapeutic benefits, stories have an aesthetic advantage:

The story is a form which captures the uniqueness of the encounter. To describe it as a ‘case presentation’ is to lose that uniqueness. As a story it is engaging and memorable.

The collection is as good as its word: its stories of ‘people and problems’ from Lang’s work as a therapist are indeed often engaging and memorable. Families are described vividly: a child’s refusal to attend school, for example, shows up larger issues of family interaction. Focusing these tangled networks, family therapy finds its justification.

Perhaps, though, the story format also risks removing the rough edges – the work and the agony – from the situations it depicts, and turning them into neat parcels. Some stories verge on the anodyne. But others, like those concerning Holocaust survivors, powerfully resist this possibility. Such stories evoke the particular experience, without imposing the finished form of a ‘case’. They show how silences live on, and what is at stake in telling of the past. The unfinished, haunting quality of these stories makes the collection memorable.

Otis Rush #11

Little Esther Books and SA Pub. Ventures & Futures. PO 2l, North Adelaide 5006, $40 for four Issues, ISSN: 0819 7288

One reward for editing, publishing and keeping afloat a small magazine must be that you can pay homage to your heroes and can even claim a good chunk of magazine for yourself. Editor/publisher Ken Bolton and poet John Jenkins are obviously having fun with ‘Gwendolyn Windswept’, their ongoing verse novella, of which thirty pages appear in issue 11. Bolton follows this with forty pages of his art commentary, covering a year’s viewing of exhibitions in Adelaide.

Otis Rush cultivates an image of being for ‘the independent, the hip, the wigged-out & true’. It has been going since 1987 and has a loyal following. Apart from the presence of Bolton, the new writing in this magazine, mainly poetry, is experimental in form. Contributions from far afield include the writing of Dada-inspired Nakahara Chuya, who died in 1937, and an extract from Soh Sakon’ s ‘Mother Burning’ published in 1967 (both translated from Japanese by Leith Morton).

Despite the pale print, issue 11 looks terrific. Drawings by Micky Allan are featured, and the poetry throughout is given plenty of room to breathe.

The UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing

Volume 1. No. 2, Nov. 1995, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, UTS, PO 123 Broadway, NSW 2007, Biannual, $15 per issue ISSN: 1323 1677

According to the editors, much cultural studies writing published today is written for an international (British and American) readership. The UTS Review came into being partly to help offset this and to provide a space for writing on culture that will attract critical discussion in Australia. This journal is regional, with an emphasis on communities within Australia and around the Pacific and Indian oceans.

The opening article by Denis Byrne is seductive. The famous Return of MacArthur is interwoven with the history of Intramuros, a 16th century Spanish colonial enclave in Manilla. There are resonances between Byrne’s piece and the next, by Brian Massumi, who also examines media representation of war.

Writing styles range from lyrical to academic, and topics such as globalization, multiculturalism and postcolonialism weigh in equally with writing on aspects of popular culture, as in Jean Duruz’s analysis of fashion scenarios told to her by women.

The book reviews section covers relevant new titles and broadens to include The First Stone. One notable aspect of this new journal is the linking of literary and theoretical genres by the inclusion of a piece of creative writing. Another is that dialogue is encouraged through a Responses section, where enough space is given for ideas and arguments to be developed.

Viewpoint: On Books for Young Adults

Vol 3, No. 4, Summer 1995, Faculty of Education, Uni. of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, $36 for four issues, ISSN: l039 2858

Two recurring questions in Viewpoint are what constitutes Young Adult Literature and how old are the readers of these books. In the current issue the age range is stretched, at one end by a picture book, The Story of Rosy Dock, and at the other by Darren Williams’ 1994 Vogel winner Swimming in Silk.

Viewpoint is a well-organized magazine for teachers of literature in secondary schools, and for librarians. It is serious-looking and substantial compared to the more commercial Magpies, which probably hooks in a few parents and even the occasional young adult as well.

In place of the usual forum, the summer issue runs three consecutive interviews with YA authors. A series of book reviews follow, with two perspectives offered on The Third Day. The Frost by John Marsden and on Sleeping Dogs by Sonia Hartnett. A comprehensive section of shorter reviews appears towards the back. Regular features include a reconsideration of a book published in previous years, and examine the reading habits of young people.

Contributors are mostly teachers or authors but one insightful article on crime fiction for younger readers is by Olivia Craze, a Year 12 student.

Aurealis: Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction: #15

Chimaera Publications, PO 2164, Mt Waverley 3149, $24.00 for four issues, ISSN: l035 1205

Aurealis is geared to mass-market sales (it has US and UK distributors) and has a preoccupation with finding the right mix – content mix, that is. This issue dispenses with the long article, increases the reviews section and adds the Australian SF Writers’ News. An Input questionnaire on the back page ensures that the mix will be fiddled with for some time yet.

This slim magazine is now perfect – bound and ready for bookshop shelves. The cover illustration is effective; it shows a spaceman riding a large flightless bird through the jungle. Inside the magazine are five conventional science fiction and fantasy short stories.

The news section is of more interest. It lists local and overseas markets for SF and fantasy and gives a step-by-step account of submitting a manuscript on the Net. Before you reach the Input page, a taste for sifting through statistical information is revealed in Market Response Times, a table showing how many weeks various publications take to respond to submissions from authors.

Browsing through some of the late 1995 offerings from small poetry presses was a case of moving between the dark and light in both themes and styles.

Decidedly on the dark side were two chapbooks from Shoestring Press in Nottingham, giving English publication to the work of two oddly matched Australian poets, Dimitris Tsaloumas and Tim Thorne.

Tsaloumas’ poetry is characterised by gravitas and a grand universality of theme and has sometimes seemed exotic or anachronistic in the less formal, more colloquial context of Australian poetry. Interesting that his English publisher felt it necessary to provide a brief Foreword to Six Improvisations on the River (Shoestring Press, $7.25 pb, 20 pp), offering a cautionary note:

[Tsalomas’] mode of writing may fret British readers conditioned to expect a less composed, a rawer poetry, one attempting to recreate the force of immediate experience.