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Absolutely Revolting

September 1994, no. 164

Welcome to the September 1994 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Marie Maclean reviews The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Carey goes cybersurfing
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This is a dazzling book. A sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel, it drives its readers out of their everyday world and every comfortable preconception. It takes enormous risks, not least that of demanding our understanding for the monstrous.
Book 1 Title: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
Book Author: Peter Carey
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $34.95 hb
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/MXbbPK
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This is a dazzling book. A sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel, it drives its readers out of their everyday world and every comfortable preconception. It takes enormous risks, not least that of demanding our understanding for the monstrous.

The first striking achievement of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is in creating two wholly imaginary countries on some alternative Earth, countries with their customs, their governments, their literatures, their languages, their entangled histories. It is a feat I have rarely seen equalled, except perhaps in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Yet these lands, like hers, are based at the same time on a study of actual human history. In the case of Tristan Smith this history is particularly that of colonisation. These living pages say more about the colonial and the post-colonial, the way they shape minds for generations, than many an academic text.

Read more: Marie Maclean reviews 'The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith' by Peter Carey

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Nigel Krauth reviews The Riders by Tim Winton
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Article Title: Riding to hell on Tim’s back
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Okay I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s The Riders. I’ve scribbled notes on pages all the way through, but I don’t want to go back and consult them. Who wants to return to hell?
Book 1 Title: The Riders
Book Author: Tim Winton
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $35 hb
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/Gjggxk
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Okay I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s The Riders. I’ve scribbled notes on pages all the way through, but I don’t want to go back and consult them. Who wants to return to hell?

The Riders is a novel to read legless, brainless, and heartless. I recommend litres of Irish whisky, ouzo, cheap French wine, Dutch beer, or anything that stops you from feeling. The Riders is your wildest nightmare, the worst part of you, the world you wish you’d never constructed within you – provided, of course, that you are male.

Read more: Nigel Krauth reviews 'The Riders' by Tim Winton

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Geoffrey Dutton reviews Collected Poems by Judith Wright
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Why Wright will endure
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In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.
Book 1 Title: Collected Poems
Book Author: Judith Wright
Book 1 Biblio: A&R, $19.95 pb
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WDNNZM
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In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.

Reading them again today, in her Collected Poems, pleasure is not diminished by familiarity. The 426 pages of her work in this new edition confirm her position as the richest and most rewarding of living Australian poets.

Read more: Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'Collected Poems' by Judith Wright

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Andrew Peek reviews A Grain of Truth by Nicholas Hasluck
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As Nicholas Hasluck’s latest novel points out more than once, the adversarial system of judgement upon which this country’s law is based consists of the telling and re-telling of stories. The prosecution presents a version of events, the defence uses the same facts but tells a different story and, in summing up, the judge constructs a third one. Finally the jury is empowered by society to decide the ‘truth’. Counsel for the prosecution and for the defence are obliged to argue their respective points of view to the limit of their professional ability. The most effective way of doing this, as one of Hasluck’s characters points out, involves ‘subverting rational argument – constantly interrupting, confusing witnesses with nit-picking questions, blocking the presentation of crucial facts, shaping the truth to suit his client’s case’.
Book 1 Title: A Grain of Truth
Book Author: Nicholas Hasluck
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $14.95
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As Nicholas Hasluck’s latest novel points out more than once, the adversarial system of judgement upon which this country’s law is based consists of the telling and re-telling of stories. The prosecution presents a version of events, the defence uses the same facts but tells a different story and, in summing up, the judge constructs a third one. Finally the jury is empowered by society to decide the ‘truth’. Counsel for the prosecution and for the defence are obliged to argue their respective points of view to the limit of their professional ability. The most effective way of doing this, as one of Hasluck’s characters points out, involves ‘subverting rational argument – constantly interrupting, confusing witnesses with nit-picking questions, blocking the presentation of crucial facts, shaping the truth to suit his client’s case’.

Read more: Andrew Peek reviews 'A Grain of Truth' by Nicholas Hasluck

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Contents Category: Poetry
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A few years ago I found myself grouped with some other poets and given a label: ‘Generation of ‘68’. Like most tags it became after a while more a source of irritation than anything else. The description had been given by John Tranter to the inmates of his 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry, but before long had become a term of collective abuse as such labels tend to. One of the identified failings of this group of writers was their propensity for ‘game-playing’. So when Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray included poems by one of the ‘sixty-eighters’ in their anthology, The Younger Australian Poets, they prefaced Tranter’s pieces saying they had chosen things which, unlike most of his work, were not purely ‘language-game’ poems.
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A few years ago I found myself grouped with some other poets and given a label: ‘Generation of ‘68’. Like most tags it became after a while more a source of irritation than anything else. The description had been given by John Tranter to the inmates of his 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry, but before long had become a term of collective abuse as such labels tend to. One of the identified failings of this group of writers was their propensity for ‘game-playing’. So when Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray included poems by one of the ‘sixty-eighters’ in their anthology, The Younger Australian Poets, they prefaced Tranter’s pieces saying they had chosen things which, unlike most of his work, were not purely ‘language-game’ poems.

Read more: 'How to have fun with poems' by Laurie Duggan

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Contents Category: Interview
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Article Title: The anarchy at the core
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Are you a regional writer?

I suppose I am, if your definition of a regional writer is someone who evokes atmosphere and themes which have a particular relevance for a region. Firstly, to take the most obvious thing there has always been a particular buccaneering business style, dating from the days of the goldrush of the 1890s and in various eras since, and the whole 1980s materialistic era was written even larger on the West Coast than other places. Going even further back in historical terms when you think of the peculiarities of the exploration of this coast, both by the French and the Dutch, that is something which distinguishes the West Coast. Because of my particular enthusiasm for history and research and canvassing matters of the early exploration, it is a theme which has found its way into three or four of my books.
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In the fictional town of Blosseville, the dirty core of politics is being revealed, and lawyers are having to examine their consciences … for Perth writer, Nicholas Hasluck, the themes are intriguing, as he explains to Rosemary Sorensen.

Are you a regional writer?

I suppose I am, if your definition of a regional writer is someone who evokes atmosphere and themes which have a particular relevance for a region. Firstly, to take the most obvious thing there has always been a particular buccaneering business style, dating from the days of the goldrush of the 1890s and in various eras since, and the whole 1980s materialistic era was written even larger on the West Coast than other places. Going even further back in historical terms when you think of the peculiarities of the exploration of this coast, both by the French and the Dutch, that is something which distinguishes the West Coast. Because of my particular enthusiasm for history and research and canvassing matters of the early exploration, it is a theme which has found its way into three or four of my books.

Read more: An interview with Nicholas Hasluck

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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Vast spaces, quiet voices
Article Subtitle: Chinese connections in Australian poetry
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Without the support of a recognisably unified literary tradition, the Australian poet has had to come to terms with the diverse elements of an increasingly heterogeneous culture. Australia is, was, and ever shall be, someone else’s country, a homeland so fundamentally altered as a concept as to be no longer comfortably recognisable as ‘Home’. Paradoxically, if anything has drawn Australian poets together, it has been a strong attachment to the physical environment, the strange and often harsh beauty of an ancient land but one no longer a comfortingly European possession. As far as forms, genres, literary concepts are concerned, writers have had to draw on their own particular sense of a cultural past that has been, for the most part, European in origin. With the passing of time, a growing disharmony has arisen between the natural rhythms of the land and its hapless European inheritors. This alienation has announced itself often enough in poems of nostalgia, loss, and lovelessness.
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Without the support of a recognisably unified literary tradition, the Australian poet has had to come to terms with the diverse elements of an increasingly heterogeneous culture. Australia is, was, and ever shall be, someone else’s country, a homeland so fundamentally altered as a concept as to be no longer comfortably recognisable as ‘Home’. Paradoxically, if anything has drawn Australian poets together, it has been a strong attachment to the physical environment, the strange and often harsh beauty of an ancient land but one no longer a comfortingly European possession. As far as forms, genres, literary concepts are concerned, writers have had to draw on their own particular sense of a cultural past that has been, for the most part, European in origin. With the passing of time, a growing disharmony has arisen between the natural rhythms of the land and its hapless European inheritors. This alienation has announced itself often enough in poems of nostalgia, loss, and lovelessness.

Read more: National Library of Australia Essay | 'Vast spaces, quiet voices: Chinese connections in...

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Contents Category: Interview
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Article Title: Getting Judith Wright right
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Anyone who has had the experience of trying to translate a poem across even a fairly low-density language barrier (say German or French into English) will have tasted the near despair of finding oneself in danger of killing that in the creature that one most wanted to save. Sometimes it feels like cutting down the tree and whittling from the wood a mere mock replica of it  – the sap goes, the leaves in all their lively beauty disappear, and at best there’s an artifact which cleverly reproduces the mere outlines of what was once brimming with life.
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Co-translating the poems of Judith Wright into Japanese has been, writes Meredith McKinney, an intense experience, heightened by her very particular relationship with Australia’s most respected poet.

Anyone who has had the experience of trying to translate a poem across even a fairly low-density language barrier (say German or French into English) will have tasted the near despair of finding oneself in danger of killing that in the creature that one most wanted to save. Sometimes it feels like cutting down the tree and whittling from the wood a mere mock replica of it  – the sap goes, the leaves in all their lively beauty disappear, and at best there’s an artifact which cleverly reproduces the mere outlines of what was once brimming with life.

Read more: Interview with Meredith McKinney on translating Judith Wright

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Glyndwr Williams reviews Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite culture by John Gascoigne
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Contents Category: History
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Article Title: Banks shoring up the enlightenment
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In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the sciences, Cook’s sailing companion and ‘Father of Australia’ for some, the moving force behind the African Association and ‘Father of African Exploration’ for others.
Book 1 Title: Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment
Book 1 Subtitle: Useful knowledge and polite culture
Book Author: John Gascoigne
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $49.95 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the sciences, Cook’s sailing companion and ‘Father of Australia’ for some, the moving force behind the African Association and ‘Father of African Exploration’ for others.

Read more: Glyndwr Williams reviews 'Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite...

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Liam Davidson reviews The Orchard by Drusilla Modjeska
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Article Title: A pear of paradoxes
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Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.
Book 1 Title: The Orchard
Book Author: Drusilla Modjeska
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $24.95 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/a1GV7N
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Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.

Read more: Liam Davidson reviews 'The Orchard' by Drusilla Modjeska

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It has a relevance in one sense because it is a worry, since we live in a world which seems to have taxological problems. People like to be able to put things in one category or another. I seem at the moment to be writing in a way that sits on the line.
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Drusilla Modjeska has written a book of essays on women writers, Exiles at Home, and the award-winning semi-autobiography Poppy. And now, with The Orchard, the essay meets the autobiographical and both come out very differently indeed. Drusilla Modjeska begins by patiently explaining why the question, is this fiction or non-fiction?, is relevant to her writing.

It has a relevance in one sense because it is a worry, since we live in a world which seems to have taxological problems. People like to be able to put things in one category or another. I seem at the moment to be writing in a way that sits on the line.

Read more: An interview with Drusilla Modjeska by Rosemary Sorensen

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