My point was neatly underlined a few weeks after Andrew Peek’s review appeared when my novel, together with a recent book by Michael Wilding, This Is For You, was reviewed in The Weekend Australian by ABR’s aptly eponymous in-house critic, Michael Sharkey. This critic, who lectures in English at the University of New England apparently, savaged both books on the grounds that ‘politics is a stone attached to the neck of literature’.

Need I say more? In a time of rapid social change giving rise to drama and intriguing stories in every comer of Australia, a reviewer such as Sharkey, safe in his academic playpen, makes faces at those who talk about what is going on in the grown-up world and screams at what he doesn’t understand. We’d better find yet another post-modernistic toy for him to play with. Try not to break it, Michael dear, it comes all the way from France and is made of the finest plastic.

Nicholas Hasluck, Claremont, Western Australia

Dear Editor,

In your July issue, you generously reviewed my book, Te Wai Pounamu the Greenstone Island, in connection with the 1994 New Zealand Book Awards in which it won the non-fiction section. Following the review you run a piece by Dr Maarire Goodall of Aoraki Press, who published my book on behalf of the Ngai Tahu Maori Trust Board. After describing his self-sacrificial role as publisher, a trade renowned for its altruism, Dr Goodall says of my book that ‘several large commercial publishers declined to publish it unless it was substantially shortened’. He claims that my reference notes were incomplete until he got me to ‘expand them considerably’.

Unfortunately I have to object to these statements, as they are both vexatious and untrue. Firstly, my book was not declined by anybody. The final typescript, complete with reference notes, was submitted to only one publishing house. They were assessing it when the Ngai Tahu Maori Trust Board offered it instead to Dr Goodall. This I accepted as the Board’s prerogative because they had invited me to write the book. Secondly, as to my reference notes, Te Wai Pounamu has more than 2,000 of them. Among these the only items initiated by Dr Goodall are those in which he is acknowledged. They are nine in number.

Harry C. Evison, Christchurch, New Zealand

Dear Editor,

I can’t resist responding to Winifred Belmont’s comment in her review of my book (ABR No. 165) that ‘Not that I think writers should be uneducated, but academic qualifications in “creative writing” are still a bit suss … I don’t like the thought that I’m reading someone’s term paper … ‘.

The remark is similar to some others on the same subject – short and unreasoned, ill-informed and snide. This letter, then, is a challenge to those who feel uncomfortable with creative writing in universities to respond with an argument.

Writers who have done undergraduate and graduate writing courses and have published in recent years include Beth Yahp, Fiona Place, Bernard Cohen, Carol Mara, Fotini Epanomitis, Christopher Cyril, and, I’m told, Kate Grenville, a graduate from an American Masters program. Readers would be hard pressed to show that these writers have been ‘schooled’ or that their published work reads like a thesis. Some published writers are joining postgraduate writing courses to work on second or later books: John Dale is a crime fiction writer, with his University of Technology Sydney ‘term paper’ being published by Serpent’s Tail; Heather Falkner, also a crime writer, wrote a subsequent novel there; Pamela Freeman, shortlisted in the 1994 NSW Premier’s Awards for her first children’s book, is writing the sequel as part of her MA in writing.

Which brings me to the publishers of these books. No one need fear reading a thesis from a writing program because publishers won’t publish such a work. The manuscript handed in for examination at the end of a writing course is not the same manuscript that is published by Allen and Unwin, Picador, McPhee Gribble, or Serpent’s Tail. And when a manuscript is submitted for publication, especially so for new writers, it has to have what publishers and readers want: story and individual voice, a sense of excitement, and promise around it; publishers are often looking for a new writer who won’t just do this one book, but more good books.

It should be obvious that the publishing economy is quite different to the one around the creative writing program. Publishers’ editorial processes have some parallels to the writing workshop and the supervision given by the writing teachers, but their final aims are different.

Then there are the teachers of writing. They are not people interested particularly in producing prose that is institutionalised: Helen Gamer, Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, and Glenda Adams have taught writing in the States and some also here. Like the published students, the teachers are disparate in their writing and teaching styles: Amanda Lohrey, Drusilla Modjeska, Gerald Murnane, Barbara Brooks, Stephen Muecke, Dorothy Porter, to name a few more. Elizabeth Jolley remarks in the ‘Acknowledgements’ in her books that she is glad to have worked within Curtin University’s community of writers. She thanks the institution for the ‘continuing privilege of being with students and colleagues … and for the provision of a room … ‘. A room, no doubt, in which she meets with writing students.

Jane Messer, Strawberry Hills, NSW

Dear Editor,

Winifred Belmont doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Jane Messer’s Night by Night is a masterpiece.

Stephen Muecke, Newtown, NSW

Dear Editor,

Astute ABR readers may have puzzled a little over the oddness of last month’s cover illustration, an image of a woman wrapped in red satin and reclining on a bed of roses. While Penguin Books evidently found this vulgar image suitable for Nicholas Jose’s new novel, The Rose Crossing, your readers may have wondered at its relevance to an issue featuring an essay on The New Woman.

I, too, wondered.

The cover image I sent to the printers on the day of my retirement as editor of ABR was rather different from the Red Reclining Sheila who appeared, without my knowledge, on the issue as printed. How could this happen? I ask, wonderingly (much wonderment is present in the world, is it not?).

The image I sent off was of Rodney Hall, famous writer and former Chair of the Australia Council, transmogrified: the well-known bearded head and confident gaze were there, but his body had become svelte and curvaceous, a vamp swathed not in red satin but in a lacy corsetty number. Lovely, the image suggested, is a many-gendered thing.

Astute ABR readers would have had the chance to ask themselves, who goes there? Why is man-as-woman amusing (or shocking and ‘poor taste’ as has been suggested)? And there were more of these question-prompters inside the magazine. Tim Winton, Tom Keneally, Peter Carey – all helping out with what I believe is a basic and important issue, the impositions of gender-stereotypes.

They, too, mysteriously disappeared, spirited away like unmarried mothers in the 1950s. I think it’s a pity that our, now your, readers were not able to judge for themselves whether these images had any power. But I would like to let people know that the R.R.S. who did appear on the cover is no friend of mine, and would, if I had my way, have been told to get up from her bed of roses and get on with her life.

Rosemary Sorensen, North Fitzroy, Vic.

Dear Editor,

I realise the nature of reviewing leads to generalisations, so I won’t lament that. But when a reviewer, as in the case of Amanda Wilson’s review of my book, Burning Swans, uses generalisations in defiance of their superficiality and contradictions, it is necessary for some remarks to be made.

Her apologetic dismissal of the book is the culmination of several distortions. She states that my book ‘raises questions about experimentation and the communicative purpose of poetry’. It may be that, to her, those questions are raised. A more focused reading would reveal that my ‘question of experimentation’ has less to do with communication in poetry than with representation in general. The iconoclastic title, the blurb and the poem, ‘The Iconoclast’s Image’, indicate this most clearly. All the way through the book the difficulty of saying is placed in relation to the difficulty of seeing and thinking. This may not be interesting to poets but it is significant to the book.

Writing that my work focuses on ‘postmodern concerns’, your reviewer succeeds in avoiding a consideration of the poems she implies she would like. The poems about the politically dramatised South Africa are the clearest of the book and contradict most, if not all, of her criticism. Her use of post-modernism deflects attention away from particularities and results in a cartoon. As a pale South-African-Australian, I oppose the transnational, transcultural pretensions of those issues that Wilson has as ‘postmodern concerns’. The ‘dialectic between memory and forgetting, presence and absence, speech and silence’, if it is to be found in the work, it is not merely that. That would be like saying there’s no difference between the work of Breyten Breytenbach and Milan Kundera just because the publishers’ blurbs use similar phrases. Forgetting for a South African in Australia is profoundly different from that same process were it affecting an Aboriginal person. Her reiteration of these ‘postmodern concerns’, by saying that I write ‘with a personal knowledge of cultural disjuncture, (my) separation from South Africa realised through writing in absentia’ (which means?), and by adding later, ‘the aporia (is) too much a private space where the writing remains locked in its own suspended obscurity’, enables her conclusion to seem inevitable. However, not once does it occur to her that the descriptions and the atmospheres in the book are real for some people. What to her is merely ‘suspended obscurity’ might be, to a less judgmental person, a space wherein an image might be formulated. By making this space difficult and inconsequential, the ‘poet’ may have been hoping to avoid the declarations that lead to irreversible decisions.

Your reviewer’s remark that ‘Mateer often writes … without having anything to say that I can hear’, unlike most of her comments, makes her superficial reading of the work even more obvious, though at least honestly so. The prevalence of imagery in the book should have suggested that what I had to say might not be audible: it might be visual.

Supposing one hears meaning implies there are meanings one can’t hear, for no one speaks all languages. In coming from a country where an uprising was caused by the enforced teaching of a language, I am conscious that it is often what I can’t hear that is most important.