I have walked long and often with this writer man, travelled with him on trains, listened to him give exact references on the Melways map, noted him noting his whereabouts and those places about and abutting his whereabouts, and I am still uncertain why his work interests me so much, unless it be that the geography of the imagination is the first and the last landscape of grasslands to be explored and that the inland of an island such as ours will always be an ambiguous place which may display a real sea and a centre or mirages of either.

On one Saturday, which fell on the seventh day after I had recovered from the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of my supposed entry to this reality, I overheard a man describing the work of this first man with whom I have travelled so much assert that the work of this latter man is repetitive.

Had he made this remark on the very day of the celebration of my fiftieth anniversary, I could have introduced him to this man and he could have seen that this man is very like the man about whom he writes in his story, which this time, for this book, he has decided to call Velvet Waters, and that this man in the story ‘for twenty-seven years and six months ... had not been able to stop himself from drinking beer continually or from talking continually whenever he had been in a place where beer was being drunk’.

The man being introduced would have then, had he been a man of some insight, which he was not, understood that repetition, being a figment of time, cannot mean anything but that some sounds, which sound familiar, are very much, in their arrangement and their structure and in the order in which they are heard, like sounds which, in that same arrangement, structure and order, were heard in a different place, and that these sounds may or may not remind him of that different place, or of the similarity of his present place to that other place.

He might also have learned, had he been present at the anniversary of my first entrance, that the writer of this story, and many other stories, is therefore most interested in the question of place, and of how all places are connected to all others, because, if the pattern of all the connections between places can be mapped, then naturally (a word the writer of the stories would never use) one could be standing in one place and be also in quite another place at that same time.

Some people would have and have called this impossible. Some have referred to it as the problem of time and space. Others have simply noted that it is the normal use of the imagination.

The man who writes these stories, with whom I have travelled on so many journeys, can help those whose imagination is not normal. Those, for example, who will not understand that a teacher who has promised his students that he will post all their letters to New Zealand, and who has not posted them, will feel so guilty that he will not be able to burn them because, remembering what he has heard of a bush fire in the year he was born, he will also remember that the ashes were blown across the Tasman, and who can tell whether, just as he decides to burn the letters of his students to dispense with his guilt, a bush fire might not come and one or two of the fragments not be blown across the Tasman to New Zealand where they might be found by someone who would write back to the students to tell them that their letters had been burned, not posted. And if this were to occur, the man in the story, who loved his students, would know that the students would know that he had lied to them. Some would use, to describe the thoughts of such a man as the teacher, the new and commonly abused word paranoiac and would find in this collection of stories many other instances of thoughts which could be so termed. Particularly if they were to be readers who are not men and who wished to consider carefully the passages in the book where men reflect on those humans who are not men. Such readers would discover that the men in the stories are often thinking of those who are young and not men, and falling in love with them, but are afraid to ask them to the pictures on the following Thursday or Saturday because they fear that those who are not men will know that those asking such a thing have fallen in love with them, and have never been alone with a young woman before, and a knowing look will appear on their faces. If such readers were to follow one of the many paths in these stories, they would discover that such thinking, which the men in the stories spend so much time directing towards the women in the stories, is not to be called paranoiac but is the result of the society of the time seducing the men in the stories to a state of mind such that, as one of the young men in the stories confides to us, ‘most young men of the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne took care not to fall in love with young women and that most young women approved of the young men’s taking care’.

Even the most fervent of those readers who are not men and who do not like those writers who are men might, or perhaps will, feel sympathy with such young men who must take care not to fall in love and might see in the words of the mind of the young man, as set out in his words above, something that is not always proper for readers who are not men to see, which some would call humour.

Other readers, who might be men or not men, might also take note that the man in the story is from a particular place in the world and has not been to many other places in the world by train, or on foot, or by motor. But if they listen to the words of the man in the story they will travel with him to America, to Sweden, to Little River, Hepburn Springs, and to other places in the State of Victoria where there are grasslands and springs and small lakes, and it will not matter whether these journeys are in 1944, in 1957, in 1988, or notated on any other page of any calendar on which there are such numbers, because numbers on the pages of a calendar are not important if one is travelling on such journeys.

Readers of any human kind will see in the words of the men in this book, and in the many stories, that the pattern of paths, which connect places, can be travelled by anyone and that such travel will also connect the numbers on the pages of the calendar, so that the man on the train who is drinking beer with the soldier who has come back from the war in Malaysia and who helped other soldiers who were with him in Malaysia to shoot twenty young women, after staring into their faces, is the same young man who sits with his father on a train and watches the grasslands of that place North of Melbourne fade over his father’s shoulder into the last escarpment of the Great Divide many years before he is sitting on the train listening to the story of the soldier.

In the mind of the man who is telling us the story these journeys, and these people, and these calendar numbers, are all connected because his mind connects them, just as his mind, in that same story, finds a correspondence between a joke he had heard from the men who, on a Saturday night, used to sit with him and drink beer and play cards, a joke which tells of a part of a woman’s anatomy, a funnel-web spider and a finger, and which is not a proper joke to tell about a woman, and the small aperture in the garden of a monastery in those parts North of the Murray river where he had gone to visit his cousin to tell him that he would not himself become a monk but would marry ‘the young woman that he would have chosen for his girlfriend in the Catholic church in his country district’.

Some readers would not like the young man in this story because he drank beer and played cards and remembered the bad joke about the funnel-web spider, the woman and the finger. They would also not like the young man because he says only of the young women who were shot in the head by the soldiers who had first looked at them in the face that ‘the faces of the young women had looked as though the young women were too knowing’ and does not say anything further about the young women.

But those readers who, by this time, have learned to travel with this young man and with all the young men in these stories will understand the connections between these things which have been mentioned, and will agree that to mention any other things, or to express any of what are often called emotions about any of the facts which the young man in the story tells his readers, would be to disconnect those things which have carefully been connected and would destroy all the possibilities of other travels and other connections, which the writer of these stories allows his readers to make for themselves.

And if readers of the stories of the man who has written of the journeys in this book and of those in his other books, have made connections where there were no connections and which, prior to reading these stories, could be made, then they will enjoy travelling with this man and will wish to go with him to many more places, which is to say many more times, and they will understand how it can be that a very young man, staring at the photograph in the Argus in the year 1945, a photograph which his mother has told him is the photograph of a ship taking Australian war brides to seek their husbands in America, can turn his face away from his mother because he does not want his mother to know what is in his mind, and can tell us that he, as a boy, had then ‘knelt on the grass in his mind in front of the young woman in his mind’.

Such readers will find great pleasure in the freedom and the beauty of exploring, mapping and travelling with this writer. And this is why, perhaps, I have made so many journeys with him and would wish to make many more.

His minister described him as a permanent troubleshooter. And yet Charlie Perkins was surely the most trouble-prone and troublesome permanent head in Australian administrative history. Where other bureaucratics operated stealthily to preserve the outward appearance of responsible government, he engaged in calculated acts of public defiance and abuse of the governments he was meant to serve. They could no more dispense with his services, however, than he could operate without their largesse. And so for the best part of twenty year the volatile mediator orchestrated relations between the state and the modern Aboriginal movement.

Charles Perkins is both the subject of this biography and its principal informant. Peter Read declares frankly at the outset that he approached Perkins in 1986 and secured his cautious agreement to proceed; that he drew on Perkins’s extensive collection of personal papers as well as long conversations; and that he followed the final tumultuous conflict between Perkins and his minister from the vantage point of the former.

There’s something about country towns that makes them peculiarly well suited to being described in short stories. Or is it that short stories are particularly suited to describe life in country towns? Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor wrote about little else, and several Australian writers’ best books have been collections of stories set in country towns: Olga Masters’ A Long Time Dying, for example, and Frank Moorhouse’s The Electrical Experience. Gillian Mears’s Fineflour is a work which may be placed with absolute confidence beside any of those mentioned above.

This collection is an eclectic one. John A. Scott includes translations from Apollinaire, Ovid, John Clare (a translation from prose) and a little-known contemporary French poet by the name of Emmanuel Hocquard, together with a selection of his own work. This at first dauntingly disparate group appears to be united by the myth of Apollo’s son Orpheus in which creativity and the absence of the beloved are inextricably entwined (‘I come here for Eurydice, whose absence / filled my life – and more – could not contain’). Another aspect of this myth important to Scott is represented by Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell, in which spiritual suffering and occult experience are vital elements of artistic creation. Transposed to a more mundane level, this suffering is nothing more than frustrated sexual desire, a condition frequently evoked by the poet in this collection and one that finds eloquent expression in his translation of Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’:

You suffered from love at twenty and
                             thirty
I have lived like a madman and I
                             have wasted my time
You no longer dare look at your
                             hands at every
               moment I could weep
Over you over her whom I love over
                             everything
               which has frightened you

The campaign to save Nutcote, the home of children’s author, May Gibbs, has reminded Nadia Wheatley of her childhood reading. In this essay in the Australian Voices series sponsored by Telecom Australia, she looks at the role played by Australian authors in shaping the way we see ourselves and our environment. Robin redbreasts and muffins may be all very well, but that’s not the whole story if you’re growing up in the shadow of a gum.

We are having a Sunday picnic. It is not a cosmopolitan affair, with pâté and brie and champagne, nor even a dinky-di one, with sausages and sauce and tinnies. Simply an impromptu, let’s-get-out-of-the­house event: a jar of peanut butter, a jar of honey, a tub of marge, half a loaf of Friday’s bread and a packet of jubes.

We’re not even where we meant to be, for the plan was to drive to the end of the Glen Davis valley and explore the old shale oil factory. But it’s flood-time, and the road was cut off, so we headed down a side road named Glen Alice 8, and after quite a long time of the voices in the back seat saying ‘Are we nearly there?’, and the voices in the front seat saying ‘We don’t know where there is’, we arrived at a corner with an old hall, an old church, a weedy graveyard, a public lavatory and [the following is a message from this essay’s sponsors] a nice new telephone booth. This would have to do, we decided, though it looked boring and bleak. Cut our losses, just make the girls a quick sandwich, then head back to Capertee for a cupertee.

But you can’t drive for two hours and just eat a peanut butter sandwich and go to the toilet. (Yes, yes, we could have made a phone call; but you don’t drive two hours from a perfectly good phone at home to do that, either.) And so we made a quick reconnaissance of the little pressed-tin church (Anglican every second week, Uniting every fourth: or was it the other way round?); had a squiz at the graveyard (a family called Jamison seemed to have been the local nobs); and then we saw it. A classic river-valley river, with just-blooming wattle and newly tipped gums, and at the bend a little beach of pure white sand, where our footprints are the first marks upon its flood-cleanness as we arrive and start our picnic.

Now the billy has boiled and we’re having a cuppa in the post-sandwich stillness, and one of the three girls – they are aged eleven to thirteen, and go to different schools in the inner city – says, ‘I know this sounds stupid, but whenever I’m in the bush I think of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie’. She looks embarrassed at this double-revelation of childishness and bush-love, for she is tall for her age – far taller than I am – and wears all the brand-names, and has a different hairdo every hour, and is as interested as any of her peer group in fashion, romance, and Madonna. Indeed, all the way in the car, or at least till the last half-hour of hunger, the girls had read Dolly magazines, oblivious to the instructions from the front seat to ‘Look at the wattle! Oh, look at the kangaroo!’

Ignoring the embarrassment – what are kids for if not to provide a free source of market research? – I start the questions, for only a week ago I gave a talk to some Wollongong school librarians about how books such as Snugglepot and Cuddlepie had shaped my sense of cultural identity as I grew up in the fifties. I’d more or less assumed that my generation had been the last to be so influenced by the Australian classics; indeed, I’d argued that even though such stuff was now old hat, we had to honour its place in the development of our cultural history, and what better way than by donating money to preserve May Gibbs’s home Nutcote? etc. etc. But here, now, before my eyes, on this Sunday at Glen Alice, there is a live contemporary young person making, in a simple sentence, the equation that I’d laboured before the librarians: for many of us bush equals Gibbs and Gibbs equals bush, because Gibbs first made the bush known to us.

‘When did you stop reading Snugglepot and Cuddlepie?’ I ask.

More embarrassment. Small voice. ‘I, um, still sometimes read it.’

‘So do I …’ ‘Me too …’ The other two ease the situation, and suddenly it is like a coming-out session.

‘And Blinky Bill,’ someone volunteers.

‘And Dot and the Kangaroo …’

‘And The Magic Pudding …’

Probe I was taught when I used to walk the streets for McNair Anderson: ‘Why do you like Snugglepot and Cuddlepie?’ I ask.

‘I dunno. It’s just a good story.’

‘The drawings are so good.’

‘Yeah!’

Me: ‘In what way are they good?’

‘I dunno. They just somehow look like it really is.’ I look at the palette of the river’s murky flood-brown, and at the new gum leaves (that silver-green-grey on red shoots) and the wattle (yes, wattle-yellow) and I hear the girls’ voices (quite unaffected by all the American television that they watch) and I think about what I said last week to the Wollongong school librarians.

This paper is dedicated to May Gibbs, I began …

Like most writers, I’m always being asked how I write. (With a pencil? With a word processor? With your head? With your heart?) And, like most children’s book writers, I am always being asked whom I write for. (Two-to-five-year-olds? Five-to-eight-year­olds? Eight-to-twelve-year-olds? Post-primaries? For young people in general? Or even – radical notion – anyone?) Also like most writers, I answer these questions at different lengths and in different ways according to the audience and my mood.

But the short answer, and the always-true answer (and the answer I’ve never given before) is that willy-nilly, I write as an Australian and for Australians.

Of course, like any writer I’d like to publish overseas – besides the prestige and the money, a writer’s job is communication, and it is good to be able to communicate with as many different people as possible. At the bottom line, however, I do write from and for my own place.

In a sense, this is too obvious to be worth commenting on. The issue really is: how am I an Australian, and why am I?

The ongoing campaign to save Nutcote has made me think a lot lately about the role that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie played in the making of my cultural identity; this in turn has led me to realise the effect that Australian children’s books in general have upon the making of Australians.

(Quick! Some definitions, or you’ll sound like a mad jingoist.)

… When I speak of the making of Australians or cultural identity, I am not speaking in favour of a xenophobic chauvinism. I am not endorsing the line that this place is godzone, and I am certainly not throwing my cards in with those white Anglo-Celtic Protestants and Catholics who see themselves as copyright owners of the word ‘Australian’.

When I use the word Australia I mean the land that belongs today as always to the Aboriginal people. (Aside: a few weeks ago on TV a Koori writer read part of a story in which the narrator ran through the list of names that the early white settlers had given the place: New Holland, Terra Australis, The Great South Land. And so on. ‘What did you call the country before the white man came?’ a character asked. ‘Ours!’ the storyteller replied.)

And so, when I say Australians, I mean firstly these first Australians, but also all the people who add their own culture, through their being, to the place, all the time.

And when I speak of cultural identity I mean something that is not static, not tangible, that is not yet and never will be finished and ‘made’, for it is something that is continually in the process of making itself.

To explain my sense of the making of cultural identity I find I have to refer to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In his introduction, Thompson explains that he sees class as ‘something which happens in human relationships’. He adds that ‘class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs’.

Thus, for Thompson, the working class is something that continually makes itself and defines itself through friction – through rubbing up against that which is not the working class. While this has long been one of the clearest definitions of class that I’ve ever come across, it seems to me that Thompson’s model is equally applicable to the question of cultural identity. Thus, for me, the Australian identity is something that happens in human relationships, and which is embodied in real people and a real context. Most importantly, it is something that makes itself – defines itself – by rubbing up against things that are different.

At this stage I want to move out of the realm of theory and talk specifically about the way that Australian children’s books played a vital part in the making of my identity – in shaping how I looked at the world around me, and how I fitted into it. If the Nutcote campaign has been one trigger to this whole line of thinking, another has been the fact that recently my foster-mother moved from a big house to a unit, so that I was forced to go and collect all the bits and pieces of childhood that one leaves behind when one first flies the coop.

By bits and pieces I mean of course books. The sort of books that one doesn’t actually want when one is discovering other books by Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin and Chairman Mao and Malcolm X and Bobby Seale and Fidel Castro and Regis Debray (what a turncoat he turned out to be) and E.P. Thompson and (for recreational moments) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test man. In my own case, these left-behind books are still by and large the sort of books that one doesn’t actually want, given that the bulk of them bear titles like Wish for a Pony, Janet Must Ride, Pony Club Team, Jill’s Gymkhana, Great Horse Stories, Jacqueline Rides for a Fall (why did all the horsey heroines have names beginning with J? – the same was true of all the Abbey girls), It’s Fun to Have a Pony and (just in case the point isn’t already clear) She Wanted a Pony! But they’re hardbacks, first editions, still in their covers, so I can’t toss them at the tip; and as I haven’t the guts to take them into Gleebooks, I bundle the whole lot up blindly and bring them home. Late one night I unpack the box and find the two books I want to talk about now to demonstrate what I mean about cultural identity being shaped by fiction.

These are pre-pony; indeed, the first is virtually pre-anything, for it was one of the earliest books I had owned, heard, and loved. It is called Listen with Mother; you don’t have to be a deconstructionist to work out that the child is regarded as passive recipient of the text and that the implied audience is a middle-class WASP one. The cover indeed portrays the epitome of a mother WASP with her boy WASP and her girl WASP curled up together in their 1950s WASP armchair … But let’s take a look inside.

The first story, ‘Pansy’ (it is about a brown little girl with very curly hair whose ambition is to carry a basket of eggs on her head), begins: ‘Once upon a time there was a family of children who lived on an island far, far away …’

Away from where? Obviously, from the centre of the universe. And where is this centre of the universe? The second story tells us.

In story number two, Mother and John wave to the London Express!

In story number three, ‘Summer Friends’, we move into a more pastoral mode. Here Mother and Mary make friends with a ladybird, a robin, and a baby bunny.

By now it was clear to me as a child – though of course I didn’t question, let alone resent, the fact – that the book was speaking to me from a cultural framework that was not mine. OK, so Jamaica was far, far away from my home too, and I knew what trains were, and ladybirds. But the robin …

Oh yes, I knew what they looked like all right, for they were in all the books and on all the Christmas cards and I knew too that every time I told a lie a little robin redbreast died. Indeed, I dearly loved robins. But the birds I encountered in my daily life were not dear little robin redbreasts but great big noisy swooping kookaburras that my mother and I used to feed red gobbets of raw meat from our outstretched hands every afternoon at sunset. Those birds were not dear and not little, but I knew what they were.

And as for being friends with bunnies – I used to spend my holidays on my uncle’s farm, and I would go out with my big cousins and the dogs, and the dogs would dig the bunnies out of their burrows and we would club them (or try to) as they scattered squealing through our legs, for they were wretched pests that were undermining the very land we stood on. (Here I am reminded of something the leading British children’s writer, Jan Mark, wrote in the Times Educational Supplement after her visit to Australia last year. Among her ‘enduring memories’ she noted ‘Penguin’s success in flogging Peter Rabbit to a nation whose instinctive hero must be Mr McGregor’.)

But let’s proceed with Listen With Mother.

In the next story, ‘Janet and the Baby Fairy’, the robin redbreast acts as rescuer when Janet’s friend the little apple-blossom fairy (all pink and white and gold) gets lost. In ‘Pat’s Umbrella’, we meet the inhabitants of the British barnyard, who are about as like the animals on my uncle’s farm as my mother was like the mother on the book’s cover. (You’d have had to put an ashtray and a beer on the arm of the chair, for a start.) Finally, in ‘My Friend Robin’, we meet guess-who again, and Andrew and his mother feed their friend crumbs on a plate (so much nicer than steak on the hand) for it is snowing, in illustrations that used to make me drool with envy.

Here you must realise that I read – or listened to and looked at – this book at least three or four times a week, and that at the same time I listened to and looked at a dozen or more other books featuring robins and hollyhocks, primroses and oak trees, sweet baby bunnies and WASP-looking fairies – and snow. It is little wonder that I felt – though my vocabulary was limited – that they could stuff the sunburnt country; I wanted to live on that island far, far away where things looked like they were meant to look instead of (to quote the picnic girls) looking like it really is.

Back at Glen Alice now for a moment, we set off up the river bank, through the wattle and the gum, and the roaring of the flood water makes the drum­roll I need to introduce the second book I’d found as I wallowed through the things I’d left behind me …

Though the landscape of my early reading was one of primrose and oak, I was very lucky to be given, just as I was starting to read myself, something to rub up against the British cultural hegemony. This was (roar of flood water) Eve Pownall’s The Australia Book.

Once again, the book’s standpoint is implicit in the title; there are no apologies here, and no sitting still and just listening either. The book is dedicated (and I used to pore over this) ‘To Philippa and Gerald and the other young Australians who are part of the story’. Fancy, I would think, fancy me part of a story! And then, from the opening words onwards, the idiom, the tone, the voice of this book was not the prissy pom-speak that I was used to encountering in books, but the language of the people I heard around me.

Apart from all that, the book’s content was, of course, about a place that I knew, but equally important was the palette that the artist, Margaret Senior, had used. Suddenly I was seeing the green of the gum, not the green of the oak, the yellow of the wattle rather than the yellow of the primrose; above all I was seeing the Australian light.

Oddly enough – and this is the way in which childhood influences happen – though I now realise that The Australia Book led on to my love for history and for E.P. Thompson (and thus to my setting out one Sunday to explore a deserted shale oil factory), for a long time I forgot all about it. Indeed, I forgot about it so completely that when, a couple of years ago, a book of mine won a prize called the Eve Pownall Award, I went around asking who on earth this Eve Pownall was. I was told she’d been famous for a book called The Australia Book, but no bells rang. And it was a couple of hours before I was due at a function to pick up the prize from, I was told, Pownall’s children Philippa and Gerald that someone actually showed me what Pownall had written. ‘That Australia book!’ I yelled. ‘That Philippa and Gerald!’ And it all flooded back – the sound and the texture and the message of the first book I ever met that was written for and about me.

If The Australia Book affected me profoundly because I loved it, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie worked on me in quite the opposite way. I was in First Grade, and our plump motherly teacher, Miss Wilkinson, read us a chapter every day, and I would blubber so much in terror at the doings of the Big Bad Banksia Men and Mrs Snake that I would have to sit on Miss Wilkinson’s lap while she read. But, despite the lap, and despite the fact that my mother used to read a chapter ahead every night so that I would know that the gumnut babies would escape, I hated that book, for it filled me with nameless fears.

Now of course it is salutary to be so moved by a book that it terrifies you, but it was particularly salutary for me to be filled with terror by a book about the Australian bush. For terror makes something real. And when you fear something, you respect it.

Though I might still sometimes hanker for the cosy world of robins and the primrose fairy, I knew that the real world was one of gum and wattle and snakes and banksias. And I began to see that this world contained what Patricia Wrightson would call ‘an older kind of magic

Wrightson brings me to the next stage of my discovery of books – a stage at which yet again the Australian writers helped me to develop a sense of myself and of the place where I lived. Thus, while I was reading all the British pony books, I had Mary Grant Bruce to rub up against them. And, luckily, for I was a child in the 1950s, I was able to get in at the beginning of the careers of the writers who are for me the Big Four of Australian children’s literature of the post-war period – Patricia Wrightson, Eleanor Spence, Joan Phipson, and the extraordinary Nan Chauncy. And so, while I was reading and loving William Mayne and Rosemary Sutcliffe and C.S. Lewis and Kenneth Grahame and Arthur Ransome (and yes, Enid Blyton and the Abbey girls and so on), I was also able to read about Australian families and Australian landscapes and Australian adventures and Australian magic. And just as important as the content of these books was the fact that they were written not just in the English language, but in the Australian language.

Of course, Australia and Australians and the Australian language have changed since my 1950s childhood and, while Australian children’s books have reflected these changes, they have also helped shape them. Today, the Australian child character in the Australian children’s book will sometimes not have English as her first language; the Australian child reader of the Australian children’s book will often not have English as her first language. The very fact that I am referring to the platonic character and reader as ‘she’ reflects yet another change.

Most importantly, the Australian child reader can now encounter the magic of the Australian bush as it is written and illustrated by the traditional keepers of this magic. Thus there is the work of individuals such as Dick Roughsey and Raymond Meeks as well as the collaborative work coming out of the Aboriginal community, such as the Paakantji people’s The Story of the Falling Star.

I said at the beginning that I believe that a cultural identity is made by friction – that we can only discover and define our own place, our own magic, our own language, by rubbing up against that which is different. Thus, if we need books about the Giant Devil Dingo, we also need books about the little robin redbreast. And if we need the books of our Australian present, we also need the books of our past for, while a cultural identity is constantly making itself out of the materials – the people – of now, it is also always the sum total of everything that has gone before …

And talking of now, it is time to pack up, for the girls must catch a train back to the city. I gather an armful of wattle, and another of gum, and cram them in the billy, and I think of Jan Mark again and how she collected banksia men to take home as souvenirs, for she had never seen the like. And so, as we leave the river it is England I am thinking of, and English books, and inevitably of that ultimate in bunny-books, which shares its name with this place, and which I bought for myself last year in a lush new edition with illustrations by the surrealist Anthony Browne. And it is his picture of the Fall that is in my mind, or rather a tiny bit of it, for amongst the items on the shelves inside the well Browne has put a miniature blackboard on which there is a map of Australia – upside down. (‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think.’)

Yes, that was what it was like for me as a child, before I encountered writers such as Pownall and Gibbs: it wasn’t just the sense of deprivation (though I did feel that it simply wasn’t fair that I didn’t have snow and robins and red doubledeckers and primrose fairies) but it was the sense that my birthplace – my birthright – was utterly wrong, and comical to boot. And so I imagined all the Johns and Marys and Janets and Andrews – and Alice too, and that temperamental white fluffy creature – stomping around above my head laughing in perfect Oxford accents: ‘Nyer nyer, Nadia’s upside-down, Nadia’s upside-dow-wen!’ (Oh yes, it was the Antipathies, all right.)

So strong is the pain of childhood that I am still smarting at the injustice of it all as we drive into Lithgow, and then I see the sign on a board outside the Primary School:

HOT RABBIT PIES

I stop and buy one, and feel triumphant, as I indulge in Mr McGregor’s revenge.

My acid test of a good novel is how long the characters reverberate in the consciousness after the book has been put down. After I read both these books, I carried Grace Starr and Steven Messenger around in my head for weeks – both of them dangerous and mysterious persons, but in very different ways.

In Nights with Grace, Rosie Scott has once again demonstrated her ability to convey the subtle essence of femaleness, writing about women with the same honesty and understanding she showed in Glory Days. Grace Starr’s dreamily emerging seventeen-year-old sensuality is echoed by the voluptuous tropical vegetation of the island of Rarotonga and the spectacular, sex-and-sherry sodden decay of her mother Mara, whose beauty rots even as Grace’s blooms. The images of heat, wetness, secret underground processes, lush flowering and dank decomposition create a rich setting for Grace’s bitter-sweet progress in self-discovery:

... she was preoccupied with monitoring herself, listening for signs, she heard voices, her blood singing in her veins, the quiet formation of intricate tender structures going on inside her.

Scott has a gift for describing sensation and emotion in a way that captures all the intensity of the moment:

She kept thinking of him in images unbearably sweetened by loss, his warm body weighing on her, the salty smell of his skin, his eyes swollen with love as he lay sprawled beside her, punch-drunk with sex. She thought of the way they used to talk all through the night sometimes, lying in the dark with their eyes ahead like two schoolkids, speaking in soft voices of old painful things, ruminating, trying out their living history on each other in the safe dark.

This collection of poetry is similarly accommodating. It is shaped by four quite different tonal movements: ‘All Blues’ (eight lyrics closely observing the ‘still life’ within season, art-work, society and self), ‘Trans-Europe Express’ (a travelogue of past times and places where conscious reflection momentarily counters the movement and cross-currents of historical process), ‘Dogs’ (where Diogenes’ cynicism is invoked to ‘lower the tone’, reminding me of the blues singer’s injunction to ‘laugh just to keep from crying’) and ‘More Blues’ (where episodic vistas of ‘blue hills’ unfold from Tailem Bend to Mount Segur). The collection ends with a nine-part retrospective called ‘The Front’ which is partly about the art of making poetry or music in the face of ‘prevailing imagery’. Here a littoral between performance and reputation is reached as today’s determined play with a language is set against inherited ‘fixed ideas’. But poetry, that stuff sometimes beached but rarely buried, rises again to have its say in a different way:

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
submerge alliteration in a shallow tub
              of salt, weed, and jetsam,
and the new mob shine
with bastard smiles and kind hearts,
so that we are thrown back on these
       baleful; decorations, unable
to show us how to cross the road, ined-
       ible
finally a confused wrack
in which we sink or swim.

Alex Miller was recently awarded the Braille Book of the Year Award for his novel The Tivington Nott. When he accepted this award, he spoke of the archaeology of writing and how he sees his work as being like a buried city, waiting to be excavated. This is an edited extract from his speech.

Writers and readers, it seems to me, are often driven by a need to confess. Everything. Not just sins. But the lot. To confess in the original secular sense of this word; to utter, to declare (ourselves, that is), to disclose and uncover what lies hidden within us. If I’d not been a writer, I used to think I’d like to have been an archaeologist. It’s only recently I’ve located the connection between writing fiction and archaeology. Historians and biographers are probably just as confessional in their work as writers of declared fictions. But they are undoubtedly able to more easily disguise this because they are accountable to the objective – to outcrops of unrelocatable facts along the way, that is.

I met Patrick White first in 1965. Reduced to 1.9s.6d, he was lying, in an American edition of Riders in the Chariot, on a sale table at Finney Isles department store in Brisbane.

So much has changed. Today, we would talk of remainders; the shop has been taken over by David Jones which has in turn been taken over by Adelaide Steamship which later bought up Grace Bros; prices are now given in dollar and cents.

Being an intellectual at twenty-two is a risky undertaking. After completing my Honours year but still living in Brisbane, I was being very careful to read books that my friends had not. By this method I read Wolf Solent. Earlier this year, White remarked that he had tried to read it when a schoolboy but had been too shocked and put it aside until he was in his twenties when he better appreciated Powys’s darkening solecism.

The task of reading these three books together provided more than I was anticipating. Their perspectives of decades of Australian society and writing practices cover the past, the personal and the politics. The writers come from three different generations (born 1903, 1923, 1940), and represent particular writing intentions or schools, certainly different genres. The connecting thread, probably the only one, is that each of the books is written form such a particularised stance. Each is written in the first person, and flirts to varying degrees with the confessional mode. The tensions between restraint and letting it all hang out, what gets said and what comes out in the not-saying, interested me.

Charmian Clift’s essays, published in a weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age between 1964 and 1967, and now collected into three volumes, are fascinating examples of the way that cultural politics can work in the mass media, how subversion can be possible. It also shows just how sophisticated our tactics are now. These sixty-five essays, collected by Nadia Wheatley under the title Trouble in Lotus Land, are wonderfully vibrant. They are always written in a relaxed and conversational mode, the tone by which ‘women’s journalism’ has always been identified. Clift passionately grapples with issues of politics and the business of everyday life, educating about specifics through a process of sharing, and never speaking down to her audience. I wondered, while I was reading these, about equivalents today, and how they would be written and read. I could only come up with examples of pop psychology journalism.

Alex Miller was awarded the Braille Book of the Year Award for his novel The Tivington Nott. When he accepted this award, he spoke of the archaeology of writing and how he sees his work as being like a buried city, waiting to be excavated.

Writers and readers, it seems to me, are often driven by a need to confess. Everything. Not just sins. But the lot. To confess in the original secular sense of this word; to utter, to declare (ourselves, that is), to disclose and uncover what lies hidden within us. If I’d not been a writer, I used to think I’d like to have been an archaeologist. It’s only recently I’ve located the connection between writing fiction and archaeology. Historians and biographers are probably just as confessional in their work as writers of declared fictions. But they are undoubtedly able to more easily disguise this because they are accountable to the objective – to outcrops of unrelocatable facts along the way, that is.

The small magazine is the sign of postmodern diversity. How this diversity works itself out in literary production can be seen in the range of magazines available today.

One is tempted to view the proliferation of the small Australian literary magazine as a postmodern development. Few these days will turn a hair at the use of that term, previously confined to the domain of abstruse theories about culture and aesthetics. When the Australian Broadcasting Commission bandies about a word on the grounds that it has significance for programming strategies (according to the thrust of recent conferences, we may prepare ourselves for a new postmodern style ABC arts radio), then the word has acquired respectable currency. Postmodernism, according to the rule of thumb I shall engage here, simply emphasises the destabilisation of distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and the fragmentation of modernism’s homogeneous cultural narrative into a multiplicity of independent discourses. Cultural richness becomes evaluated in terms of diversity.