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Absolutely Revolting

June 1989, no. 111

Welcome to the June 1989 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Peter Craven reviews Daddy We Hardly Knew You by Germaine Greer
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Contents Category: Biography
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There are few people on earth I would rather read than Germaine Greer, mad or sane. Whatever reservations I might want to express about Daddy We Hardly Knew You, it is some testament to its compelling power that I read most of it strung-out with fatigue from checking proofs some time towards dawn and I still found it difficult to stop reading.
Book 1 Title: Daddy We Hardly Knew You
Book Author: Germaine Greer
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $29.99 hb, 311 pp,
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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There are few people on earth I would rather read than Germaine Greer, mad or sane. Whatever reservations I might want to express about Daddy We Hardly Knew You, it is some testament to its compelling power that I read most of it strung-out with fatigue from checking proofs some time towards dawn and I still found it difficult to stop reading.

Oscar Wilde cannot have been the first human being to be so supremely interesting to himself that other people couldn’t take their eyes off him, but he does seem to have been the first to use this gift to enthrall the press and public to such an extent that the image of the personality he created necessarily outshone any art he produced.

Read more: Peter Craven reviews 'Daddy We Hardly Knew You' by Germaine Greer

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Doug McEachern reviews The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy by J.B. Hirst
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Contents Category: History
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In some ways, John Hirst presents his tale of colonial New South Wales as if it were a book for today. In the preface he comments: ‘But why should we care what it was like? – because in many fundamentals this is the political world we still inhabit.’ This theme is sketched and hinted at several times in the text but it is never argued in a systematic and rigorous manner. What are we to make of the claim?
Book 1 Title: The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy
Book Author: J.B. Hirst
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, 305 pp, $19.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In some ways, John Hirst presents his tale of colonial New South Wales as if it were a book for today. In the preface he comments: ‘But why should we care what it was like? – because in many fundamentals this is the political world we still inhabit.’ This theme is sketched and hinted at several times in the text but it is never argued in a systematic and rigorous manner. What are we to make of the claim?

Hirst’s book is about the decline of politics from some exalted position commanding community respect (assumed, not proven, and difficult to believe) to a messy and dishonest struggle for advantage. In the imagined golden age, power and authority had been decentralised, local, and respected. Now it is centralised, bungling, inefficient, and corrupt. For Hirst, such fundamentals are still with us. The need to make history ‘relevant’ to its present may serve a useful purpose, explaining social forces, tensions and lines of development and, undoubtedly, what happened in various colonies before Federation had an impact on subsequent social, economic and political developments. But this relevancy needs to be claimed, constructed, explained, and expounded.

Read more: Doug McEachern reviews 'The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy' by J.B. Hirst

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews Australian English edited by Peter Collins and David Blair
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Contents Category: Language
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Language like the weather, is something that everybody wants to talk about, itemise or complain about. All of us have our views about this or that departure from a supposed norm, this or that barbarous neologisms, this quaint local usage, that oddity of pronunciation. Many of us, too, can be as cranky about language as we are about our interpretations of the weather. For myself, I should like to see the apostrophe abolished, as being something which causes much confusion and error while doing virtually no good; but I am sufficiently conventional to use it, after all. In the upshot it’s not worth a cracker kicking against all the pricks. Let the apostrophe live out its natural life.
Book 1 Title: Australian English
Book 1 Subtitle: The language of a new society
Book Author: Peter Collins And David Blair
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, 358 pp, $39.95 pb, 0-7022-2110-4
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Language like the weather, is something that everybody wants to talk about, itemise or complain about. All of us have our views about this or that departure from a supposed norm, this or that barbarous neologisms, this quaint local usage, that oddity of pronunciation. Many of us, too, can be as cranky about language as we are about our interpretations of the weather. For myself, I should like to see the apostrophe abolished, as being something which causes much confusion and error while doing virtually no good; but I am sufficiently conventional to use it, after all. In the upshot it’s not worth a cracker kicking against all the pricks. Let the apostrophe live out its natural life.

Read more: Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Australian English' edited by Peter Collins and David Blair

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