Letters turn talking to yourself and to someone else into the same thing. The recipient can’t interrupt, and can’t answer back, at least not yet. Self-obsession is almost a virtue in letters since correspondents who won’t talk about themselves are boring. But letters also make for unreliable autobiography because they’re written out of an understanding not just of what the sender wants to say but also what the recipient needs to hear – and every recipient is different. This is why reading letters not addressed to you is taboo: you invade the privacy of two parties.

A striking black-and-white photograph on the front cover of Oodgeroo implacable and wise. And then the publisher’s blurb on the back cover:

Oodgeroo – poet, human rights activist, conservationist, educator, artist – proudly saluted her people’s heritage, whose ‘long making’ was ‘so much of the past’, and gladly beckoned a brighter future. A great and passionate voice of Aboriginal Australia, she left the world a legacy of hope.

All this fills the reviewer with some trepidation when approaching Kathie Cochrane’s biography of Oodgeroo/Kath Walker.

Contemporary Aboriginal writing, like Aboriginal art, is now so diverse that is impossible to talk about any one particular style. John Muk Muk Burke, whose first novel, Bridge of Triangles, has just been published, recently told a Sydney seminar for Aboriginal writers that they were no longer writing from the viewpoint of victims. He said they were survivors rising from the ashes of the invasion like the phoenix. Burke’s own novel is multi-layered, poetic and visually strong, with a structure informed by his study of world literature.

On the day of the last Federal election, I became engaged in an unlikely conversation with a helper for the ‘Call-to-Australia’ cause at my local polling booth. When I revealed that I had recently completed a research project on Dr H.V. Evatt, my elderly companion asserted that Evatt should not be hailed as the hero of the labour movement. Australia’s greatest politician, this former member of the Australian Labor Party informed me, was ‘Edward Granville Theodore’.

The ‘place in the city’ of Fr Edmund Campion’s latest pilgrimage into Australian Catholic life and history is St Mary’s cathedral, Sydney. Campion spent six years here as a young-priest working in the shadow of both the cathedral and the august Normal Cardinal Gilroy.

Campion sets himself to become the Victor Hugo of Australia’s Notre Dame and he keeps returning to the cathedral as a focus of his reflections and his anecdotes from Catholic history and from his personal experience.

This is a fascinating publication. The first book by Wiradjuri author John Muk Muk Burke, Bridge of Triangles, is really free-form short fiction than a novel proper. Novella length, it is episodic, impressionistic, often poetic and open­ended. And, while it has many strengths, this 1993 winner of the David Unaipon Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors is ultimately a disquieting piece of work.

When most of literary publishing is in the doldrums, literary biographies are seen to be the one bright line in the publisher’s balance sheet. Such is the enthusiasm for biographies that a bevy of scribblers are at this moment casting about for a writer who hasn’t already been ‘done’. I find something unset­tling about this voyeuristic fascination where the life of a writer has come to possess an inherent interest, quite apart from the work for which the writer became famous. On this, if not much else, I agree with the caustic Gore Vidal:

Although the writer as an actor in his time is nothing new … for the first time the self now threatens to become the sole artifact – to be written about by others who tend to erase, in the process, whatever writing the writer may have written ... Today the writer need not write his life. Others will do it for him. But he must provide them with the material; and a gaudy descent into drink, drugs, sex and terminal name dropping.

If, unlike Patrick White or Christina Stead or Hal Porter, a famous writer has failed to provide the eager biographer with the material for a prurient exposé of personal vulnerability and culpability, the life recovered could well be a dud. Still, considering that thousands of people buy handsome and expensive biographies of writers whose work they have never read, it could be reasoned that the biography of a writer who had been read and loved by countless thousands of children over several generations would be money in the bank. I can only presume this to be the reasoning behind Viking’s decision to produce a handsome and expensive biography of Ethel Turner, written by retired academic Sandy Yarwood.

There is certainly nothing for the prurient in the life Yarwood has reconstructed. His reticence about the intimate is extraordinarily anachronistic. Early on we notice that Ethel’s stepfather was something of a brute who had terrible rows both with her mother and herself. The impact this may have had on Ethel, weighing up her choices between marriage and career, is never explored. Mr Cope’s furious and violent reaction to a joke proposal for Ethel’s hand ‘was not a happy augury for the real time when a real suitor would declare himself’ Yarwood helpfully tells us. Already a successful author of Seven Little Australians, Ethel responded hesitantly to the ardent courtship of lawyer Herbert Curlewis, whom she eventually married. Her diary records the very first meal she cooked for her husband and in-laws which Herbert refused to touch because ‘a carrot lurked within’. Says the biographer: ‘One can only wonder at the composure with which the diary entry was made. It seems likely that with the termination of their secret engagement and the beginning of Herbert’s more secure and complete role as husband the balance of influence had moved significantly in his favour’. Well, yes. Other diary entries for that first year of marriage suggest to Yarwood: ‘Quite rapidly, it seems, Ethel had got over the feelings that made her feel so repelled during the courtship by any approach to sexual familiarity’.

It is this marriage which lasted for forty-six years, which dominates the life of Ethel Turner, who chose to be wife and mother rather than follow the uncertain path of her friend Louise Mack into professional journalism. She always honoured the role of wife and mother over a professional career, nevertheless she was often capable of earning more in royalties than her successful husband earned as a judge. We don’t know what Herbert felt about his wife’s considerable professional success or whether he learnt to eat her meals without insult. In fact we don’t learn much at all of what might be found beneath the superficial surface of a conventional marriage, on the surface like countless others. From accounts of family events and outings we might gather that Herbert and Ethel had a companionable partnership. Yarwood is happy to accept Ethel’s summation of the relationship ‘never apart for more than a few weeks, never more than the human inevitable friction’; and to conclude that part of Ethel’s life with her record of Herbert’s last words ‘Not half an hour before he died, his hand in mine, he said, “My son” ...’ Mmmm. I have to ask what is the point of reconstructing a life if that is all one has to say about it?

But my concern with From a Chair in the Sun is not just that the narrative is pedestrian and the narrator obtuse. The book is very poorly written. On almost every page I find clumsy sentences and silly, anachronistic phrases. Like this taken at random from p. 356: ‘Life was drawing to a close for the youngest of the three maids who had accompanied Sarah Turner from England seventy years earlier’. Poor Ethel Turner. I still don’t know much about her, but I am sure she deserved a better account than this.

It’s a clever and provocative title that Patsy Adam-Smith has chosen for her autobiography. She is a woman who has said many ‘goodbyes’ in her rich and adventurous life; and she is of an age and disposition where ‘girlie’ is heard as an endearment, not a put-down. Patsy Adam­Smith is one of Australia’s greatest writers, although you will rarely hear the literati or the academics say so in public. As an historian she has been more widely read than Manning Clark (it would be interesting to know how many of the purchasers of Clark have been able to finish each volume); and she and Wendy Lowenstein have listened to the histories of more Australians than probably the rest of us put together. But she remains insignificant in the eyes of the theorists of oral memory and historical consciousness.

When I started publishing my poems back in the early 1970s, I did so amidst a concern that Australian poetry was being Americanised: Coca-Cola, the pizza parlour, and the rock and rollers’ preoccupation with that thing called ‘lurve’ had swept all that was pure and true into the trashcan of history, and we with our Olsons, O’Haras, and Berrigans were unwitting accomplices to this annulling of our own birthright. My defence at the time would have been, ‘well, we’re taking aboard all that’s repulsive in American culture: their military and economic theses, their particular variety of consumerism, and no-one is protesting much about this – so why do they get so upset when we pick up on something of value from that culture?’ American artists themselves had absorbed things from other cultures without anyone there worrying about it. A great deal of the motivation behind the ‘New York School’ came from the French surrealists, though in translation surrealism had its more harebrained ideological aspects removed painlessly. In fact this ‘translation’ was a model of cultural appropriation, showing what a sea-change (and a change of tongue) can do to some seemingly immutable items.

In recent times, we hear, stars of TV serials such as Neighbours and Home and Away have been mobbed on arrival at Heathrow Airport, and recognized even in Finland – Australian production houses appear to have a talent for capturing on screen alluring fantasies and traumas for purveying to mass audiences, both home and away. The foundations for this sorely-needed export industry were doubtless laid in the 1940s and 50s, when Australian radio serials and drama were heard around the globe, at least in English-speaking countries (subtitles are difficult on radio). At home, hundreds of hours of drama were pumped out every year on ABC and commercial stations, and Richard Lane is surely right in saying that from about 1935 to 1955 radio drama was far and away the nation’s top-ranking form of entertainment. Vaudeville and circus were gradually declining, and theatre meant mainly imported stars and plays in a dwindling number of houses. The nation was glued to ‘the wireless’ on mantel sets and giant coachwood boxes for its daily fixes of comedy and adventure, weepies, and thrillers – as well as new Australian writing and the classics. Between 1936 and 1938 ABC Radio broadcasted all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays on Sunday afternoons in winter – live to air, naturally, there being no other way – an achievement unthinkable in the present day.

Is Robert Adamson Waving to Hart Crane, or drowning? He is certainly calling for help. In 1930, Hart Crane turned his back on Eliot’s The Waste Land and built The Bridge, a poem ‘to launch into praise’, to span across despair towards some brighter shore. But Adamson does not like what he finds on the other side, ‘No sonnet will survive / the fax on fire’, he warns.

The Clean Dark, the 1990 volume that won several national awards, was Adamson at his most meditative, gliding through his riverscapes like a boat at high tide. This time, Adamson is having an argument; with poetry, with other poets, and even with himself. His verse is peppered with questions, with question marks, and exclamation points. He is a shape changer, who breaks down his lines into new forms from poem to poem, and erases his own syntax as he goes along.

Dear Editor,

In a generous review of my recently published novel, A Grain of Truth (Penguin), Andrew Peek mentioned an article I wrote for ABR two years ago, in which I suggested that the hostility of critics and reviewers in this country to novels dealing with current social issues threatens to suppress political fiction in general and the contemporary novel of ideas in particular.

Dear Editor,

It has always been my understanding that the National Book Council’s principal function is the promotion of Australian books.

Therefore I cannot understand why the Council has allowed the publication of a review in its Australian Book Review journal which calls for the public destruction of a book. To quote from Meredith Sorensen’s review (ABR, October 1994, p.67):

take one Big Bad Bruce and tear it to shreds – preferably in front of as many small children of both sexes as you can gather about.

The males of the party, having consumed enormous amounts of something smelly and bubbly, must then piss on the remains.

There are many ways in which a reviewer can express dislike of a particular publication, bµt Sorensen has totally overstepped the mark in her incitement to violence.

I am outraged that the National Book Council deigned to publish such an unprofessional, grossly offensive review.

Patricia Bernard, Paddington