It is, of course, impossible to separate this book from the debate partly initiated by Professor Blainey’s comments at a Rotary conference in March of this year, nor is it feasible to judge the book’s merits without considering its likely impact on the continued controversy about the size and composition of Australia’s immigration programme. In many ways, this slim volume will contain few surprises for those who have followed the debate with any degree of interest.

The Blainey view of immigration is based on a few simple assertions: during the present period of high unemployment our migration intake should be drastically reduced; Australia, like other rich nations, has a humanitarian responsibility to accept its fair share of refugees, given our population size and resource base, and the choice of refugees has not been based on genuine need; unlike the situation in the 1960s and early 1970s, government policy has gone far ahead of public opinion; the migration intake, in both family reunion and refugee categories, unfairly discriminates in favour of applicants from Asia, and from Vietnam in particular; government policy is formulated and administered in a secretive manner designed to deceive the population about the true situation; ‘old’ Australians in particular feel alienated in their own land, and are especially worried about the ‘Asianisation’ of their country; the concentration of Asian migrants in a few suburbs will cause tensions and perhaps lead to racial violence in some areas; the acceptance of migrants from Asia will not improve our trade and defence relations in the region, and in any case the majority of the population is not in favour of Australia becoming more identifiably part of Asia. These views were already familiar, and the book presents little or no supporting evidence to back up these claims.

I don’t know why a book – and one that has been ‘completely revised’ for its second edition – about one of the world’s more interesting (dare we say exciting) recent cultural developments – the progress of Australian drama from the nineteen fifties to the present –should be so standardised as to read like a school text-book. But I suppose that’s where the answer lies: it’s like a text book because that’s the market.

Playwrights arc ‘mainstreamed’ along conventional lines with chapters earmarked and a neat intro to show where they fit into the picture. It’s a reference book – a kind of encyclopedia of 15 Australian playwrights – chronologically arranged so that essay and exam topics can be conveniently sought and answered.

I recently attended a seminar where the speaker’s main purpose seemed to be to denigrate the reputation of a well-known contemporary sociologist by suggesting that his virtues were those of synthesis and compilation rather than ones of originality. As if to clinch the point, the speaker let it be known that it was rumoured the sociologist in question was currently engaged inwriting a text-book – and, as if to make matters worse, for a major American publisher.

I was as surprised that the point should have been made as I was by the largely disapproving reactions it prompted. One member of the audience observed, as if the activity were in some way suspect, that the production of text books by leading sociologists constituted one of the chief means through which the discipline of sociology reproduced itself. Quite so, but I was at a loss, then as now, to see why a noted scholar should be hauled over the coals for thinking the conditions of his discipline sufficiently important to dedicate his efforts to sustaining them.

Myths of oz taps into the current obsession with Australian popular culture. Its success is guaranteed by its appearance at the start of Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations in which we have been invited to wallow in our national identity. As the celebrations shape up as a joke at our expense in both senses of the word, the unfolding non-event echoes a theme developed in Myths of Oz that:

Culture ... has to work to construct any unity that it has, rather than simply celebrate an achieved or natural harmony. (p.X)

Forty thousand is the square of two hundred years, but such dark socio-mathematics are not commensurate with Paul Carter’s idealistic account of spatial history in Australia. His exploration of exploration stresses the imaginative, or perhaps delusory, processes through which the explorers named, described and fantasised into being narratives about Australia, systems of geo-vital meaning that have conditioned much in white Australians today.

Through that sense of productive mental formation this book creates its most powerful impact, generates its own repositioning originality. But to liberate itself from the pragmatics and materialism of conventional history Carter’s text also must, or feels it must, eschew the brute politics of land-taking.

I took the sub-title of Tom Shapcott’s book to be mildly ironic. His ‘brief history’ is not brief, nor is it a history in the conventional sense. It is a hefty compilation of lists– lists of writers assisted by the Literature Board, lists of projects, lists of payments and awards to authors, lists of publications –together with long extracts from official reports, board minutes and documents of various kinds, all impressively tabulated and cross-referenced, with codes and file numbers in abundance. And at first sight it looks pretty dull. Surely a prose narrative would have brought the story more vividly to life? Surely Tom Shapcott, the Board’s respected director since 1983, could have presented this laborious aggregation of data in more digestible form, enlivening his history with the occasional sharp anecdote, dwelling here on a notorious personality, here on a clash of wills, here perhaps on the tiny scandal or neglected cause celebre?

Yet the more one examines this absorbing publication – a better sub-title might have been ‘Selected Papers’ – the more useful and in­structive it appears. One is gratified to discover, for example, among the list of Literature Board fellowship­ holders, the names of Max Harris and Barry Humphries – writers renowned for their public hostility to ‘subsidised culture’ and arts funding of any kind. Shapcott has taken the view that the best way to present the history of the Board is simply to record what it has done – everything it has done – if necessary in copious and unvarnished detail. Thus one notes the discreet annotation (‘aban­doned’) against Lady Frances McNicoll’s biography of Menzies; one wonders what became of Tina Jorgensen’s stage musical Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, assisted in 1977, or Peter Jones’ Historic Motor Cycling. As­siduous readers, of course, will be able to calculate at leisure which writers have received most in subsidy and produced least in return, which universities have had most writers-in-residence, which poets have won most prizes. The possibilities are enticing.

Awards seem to proliferate and grow fat within themselves. The National Book Council's rejigged and revitalised Banjo awards are announced next month. Sponsorship from Qantas has enabled the creation of new prize within the NBC awards for young writers.

In a more adventurous vein the ANZ Bank is sponsoring a prize within the Victorian Premier's Award for the best new writing – writing which breaks new ground. The $7,500 prize will certainly be the most valuable prize in Australia, and possibly the world, for this kind of writing. The Victorian Premier's Awards have been dogged by controversy (not necessarily a bad thing) and the new writing award will be a difficult one to administer and to judge. One judge’s new writing might another's old meat.

Over the next few issues ABR will continue the debate that we began in our March issue on issues in Australian cultural life. In this month’s ABR Veronica Brady responds to David Solomon’s review of The Law of the Land. Humphrey McQueen’s article prepares the ground for a major discussion piece in our one hundredth issue (May) on writing history in 1988. Wendy Bacon will take on the media monopoly and its effect on the publishing of books and responses to her article will appear in later issues in the year.

What this means of course is that you will have to subscribe if you want to find out who replied to whom on what question of cultural importance next month!

By now most of us already know, whether we’ve read it or not, that Peter Carey’s new novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is about God, glass and gambling, and that in the last few pages a glass church floats up the Bellinger river. We know because the book has been reviewed in just about every major newspaper and magazine in the country. There have been speeches and public appearances, extracts, profiles and interviews. This is the sort of literary event that publishers dream of. Carey’s last book, Illywhacker, was short­listed for the Booker Prize and sold sixty thousand copies of the paperback edition in Australia alone– astonishing when you consider that the average new novel by an unknown writer appears in a print run of three thousand. It’s not bad going for a writer who has only five published books to his credit. What’s more, Carey is now in this mid forties, which is mere chickenhood for a writer, so we can reasonably expect him to build a most illus­trious career indeed.

But one of the extraordinary things about Peter Carey is that while the public clearly loves him, reviewers have tended to be more cautious, in some cases downright scathing. When Illywhacker appeared, it was criticised quite vehemently for being incoherent. That sort of claim is potentially very damaging to both the writer and the book. In the case of Oscar and Lucinda, you might even have been unlucky enough to read a review that ruined the book for you by telling the story, particularly the fate of the two lovers – a mortal sin as far as reviewing novels is concerned.

Oh dear, I really wanted to like The Baltic Business and ‘Beverly Hills’ Browning, the latest productions from the Peter Cortis word factory. Like thousands of other Australians, I’ve become addicted to Cliff Hardy, and summer means my annual fix of an evening breeze through sex and sin and nasty pollies under the sunny skies of Sydney. Cliff may have been an undisguised Philip Marlowe lookalike, but then, I’ve always had a yen for Chandler’s view of the world. And anyway, at least Cliff Hardy was ours, spoke Oz with style in recognisable locales, and reorganised the moral order of Sydney with an appropriately Australian sense of the limits of possibility.