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Absolutely Revolting

May 1994, no. 160

Welcome to the May 1994 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Beverley Kingston reviews Weary: The Life of Sir Edward Dunlop by Sue Ebury
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Contents Category: Biography
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Over 35,000 copies of the hardback edition of Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s war diaries had been sold before they were reissued in paperback. Now Sue Ebury, who edited those diaries for publication, has written an accompanying ‘Life’. An impish picture of the older Weary in a sportscoat looking rather smaller than he really was grins beneath his name written in gold on a red silk background. In the paper edition it will surely be embossed.
Book 1 Title: Weary
Book 1 Subtitle: The Life of Sir Edward Dunlop
Book Author: Sue Ebury
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $45 hb
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Over 35,000 copies of the hardback edition of Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s war diaries had been sold before they were reissued in paperback. Now Sue Ebury, who edited those diaries for publication, has written an accompanying ‘Life’. An impish picture of the older Weary in a sportscoat looking rather smaller than he really was grins beneath his name written in gold on a red silk background. In the paper edition it will surely be embossed.

This book is very long, as is often the way with modern biographies, and it needs a strong pair of wrists, but unlike many modem books the typeface is a decent size for the older reader. Much of it was written before Dunlop’ s death in 1993 and with his assistance, so it has some of the qualities of an autobiography. Sue Ebury had access to Dunlop’s papers and other correspondence which is still in private collections and she was able to interview many of his friends and associates.

Read more: Beverley Kingston reviews 'Weary: The Life of Sir Edward Dunlop' by Sue Ebury

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Contents Category: Commentary
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Article Title: Flesh and blood imagination
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On a weekend when the Melbourne Age and the Australian could muster barely three book pages between them and only one review of a work of fiction, I went to an exhibition of Juan Davila’s recent work. The paintings were visceral, fierce, transgressive, shocking. Here was art disdainful of demands for beauty, art that took the notion of aesthetics into the dungeons of the mind. And it set me on edge.
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On a weekend when the Melbourne Age and the Australian could muster barely three book pages between them and only one review of a work of fiction, I went to an exhibition of Juan Davila’s recent work. The paintings were visceral, fierce, transgressive, shocking. Here was art disdainful of demands for beauty, art that took the notion of aesthetics into the dungeons of the mind. And it set me on edge.

I was aware of the same response when I first saw the paintings of Francis Bacon, when I heard Xenakis’s frenetic piece, Eonta, when I read Ginsberg’s Howl, and later Proust, when as a child I found The Waves on my mother’s bookshelf and wondered how, with this gem in her possession, she could lead such an ordinary life. Art with its rude and hungry clutch on the imagination could change lives I believed. Literature in particular. In fact, after I found the Russians (one often speaks of finding books, not that they were ever lost but more that one was searching) I decided literature could do anything. But is it delusion? Has it always been delusion? What in fact is the point of imaginative writing? After all, those things, those events, that demand to be perused and understood, to be engraved but replicated no.

Read more: National Library Australia Voices Essay | 'Flesh and blood imagination' by Andrea Goldsmith

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Cath Kenneally reviews Lullaby: A novel by Janine Burke
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: You hiding from me, Pa?
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Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.
Book 1 Title: Lullaby
Book 1 Subtitle: A novel
Book Author: Janine Burke
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $16.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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‘You have your own place now; your own magic.’
‘How to make it last, that’s the question.’
‘You mean, what spell should you invent – what’s in your power?’
Bea smiled. ‘Words, I suppose. Stories.’

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.

Read more: Cath Kenneally reviews 'Lullaby: A novel' by Janine Burke

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Thomas Shapcott reviews Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of l’Oiseau-­Lyre, 1884–1962 by Jim Davidson
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: Virtuoso display
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One of the defining features of recent years in Australian ‘literature’ (as I suppose we must call it), in tandem with a perceived growth in the quantity of fiction and poetry by women, titles reflecting the ethnic diversity of origin in more and more writers, and a growth industry in Aboriginal studies, has been the remarkable increase in sophistication of approach to biography. Perhaps more specifically, cultural biography.
Book 1 Title: Lyrebird Rising
Book 1 Subtitle: Louise Hanson-Dyer of l’Oiseau-­Lyre, 1884–1962
Book Author: Jim Davidson
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Publishing, $49.95 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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One of the defining features of recent years in Australian ‘literature’ (as I suppose we must call it), in tandem with a perceived growth in the quantity of fiction and poetry by women, titles reflecting the ethnic diversity of origin in more and more writers, and a growth industry in Aboriginal studies, has been the remarkable increase in sophistication of approach to biography. Perhaps more specifically, cultural biography.

Read more: Thomas Shapcott reviews 'Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of l’Oiseau-­Lyre, 1884–1962' by Jim...

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Helen Daniel reviews Mad Meg by Sally Morrison
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Furore and disarray
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Midway through Sally Morrison’s new novel, Mad Meg, I began to develop the scissor twitch, an almost overwhelming urge to cut it up and reassemble it into a new structure. Not quite the vandalism it suggests – I read Mad Meg in galley pages, which encourages scissorly desires. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic novel, which opens with a wonderful mischievous energy, full of surprises and pleasures, and laconic wit. Yet it begins to teeter midway and, in my view, ends in unnecessary disarray. Hence the twitch.
Book 1 Title: Mad Meg
Book Author: Sally Morrison
Book 1 Biblio: WHA, $24.95 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Midway through Sally Morrison’s new novel, Mad Meg, I began to develop the scissor twitch, an almost overwhelming urge to cut it up and reassemble it into a new structure. Not quite the vandalism it suggests – I read Mad Meg in galley pages, which encourages scissorly desires. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic novel, which opens with a wonderful mischievous energy, full of surprises and pleasures, and laconic wit. Yet it begins to teeter midway and, in my view, ends in unnecessary disarray. Hence the twitch.

Read more: Helen Daniel reviews 'Mad Meg' by Sally Morrison

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Helen Elliott reviews Searching for Charmian by Suzanne Chick
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Article Title: The charm of a daughter’s desire
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I came to Suzanne Chick’s book full of prejudice and cynicism. Certainly Chick was the illegitimate daughter Charmian Clift had when she was nineteen, but Chick was relinquished at two weeks to her adoptive family and Clift took her own life before Chick began to make enquiries about her natural mother. What could Chick have to say about Clift that those who knew her couldn’t? Wouldn’t this just be crass cashing-in on a famous and alluring name? A ‘Mommie Dearest’ genre from a different angle?
Book 1 Title: Searching for Charmian
Book Author: Suzanne Chick
Book 1 Biblio: MacMillan, $39.95 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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I came to Suzanne Chick’s book full of prejudice and cynicism. Certainly Chick was the illegitimate daughter Charmian Clift had when she was nineteen, but Chick was relinquished at two weeks to her adoptive family and Clift took her own life before Chick began to make enquiries about her natural mother. What could Chick have to say about Clift that those who knew her couldn’t? Wouldn’t this just be crass cashing-in on a famous and alluring name? A ‘Mommie Dearest’ genre from a different angle?

Read more: Helen Elliott reviews 'Searching for Charmian' by Suzanne Chick

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Contents Category: Interview
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Article Title: Writing with a whoop
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I’ve left formal art criticism behind to a certain extent and I’m glad to do that.’ I found the area of art criticism very inhibiting and when I was waiting the book on Joy Hester in tandem with my first novel, crossing the t’s and dotting the I’s, and getting everything absolutely correct, suddenly seemed enormously constraining. But writing about Joy Hester, who is difficult (because so many of her works deal with states of feeling), I think I helped push my writing further and further away from the correctness of art history and towards a much more lyrical and imaginative way of writing.
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Janine Burke built her reputation as an art critic specialising in the work of women painters, but she has been steadily supplanting that reputation with another, that of fiction writer. Since Speaking was published in 1984, she has written Second Sight, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award, and Company of Images, a novel about the Melbourne art world.

With her fourth novel, which she says has taken her four years to write, she heads in a new direction, although the locale is still close to her Melbourne home. She explains here firstly how the change from art historian to novelist was achieved, and then how the themes in her writing both continue and have shifted in her new novel, Lullaby.

I’ve left formal art criticism behind to a certain extent and I’m glad to do that.’ I found the area of art criticism very inhibiting and when I was waiting the book on Joy Hester in tandem with my first novel, crossing the t’s and dotting the I’s, and getting everything absolutely correct, suddenly seemed enormously constraining. But writing about Joy Hester, who is difficult (because so many of her works deal with states of feeling), I think I helped push my writing further and further away from the correctness of art history and towards a much more lyrical and imaginative way of writing.

Read more: An interview with Janine Burke

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