‘This has been a difficult book to write ... It has become more than the Women’s Studies text it was intended to be: it is my statement on the oppression of women and our passionate resistance to it. It is a contribution to feminist revolutionary change, written in the hope that it will bring women closer to our Selves and to other women, the personal and the political embracing, empowering us to create a world where women’s oppression can be taught as history, not lived daily in bone and flesh.’

I am sure it was a difficult book to write: the issues are extremely complex, the transdisciplinary range of the areas covered extensive and detailed, and the finished product extremely succinct and presented with an admirable clarity. Yet throughout, the passionate commitment to the task of making women’s oppression visible, readable, audible, indeed refusing to let it not be seen, read and heard modulates, in a specifically feminine voice, the social science genre of expository prose and factual representation which Rowland, as writing subject, adopts from her particular institutionalised position as both woman and writer of a Women’s Studies text. And her text is in other ways too, a realisation of her feminist and feminine commitment to this cause. The materials she uses to support her expository arguments, her evidence/facts/data, are for the most part Australian and her reference list and footnotes, those academic appendages of the genres of originally masculine knowledge­construction, refer mainly to women writers, many of them Australian. Thus are the structures of patriarchal ways of knowing subverted in and through this feminist re-making of the generic structures and knowledges of the social sciences themselves.

A crucial clue is given right at the beginning in the form of a lavender plant punningly sent to Claudia Valentine, our detective heroine. Like just about everything else in the novel, it turns out to have been put there by the novel’s Mr Big, Harry Lavender. And finding out the extent of his influence is what keeps us going through the back alleys and one way streets, more often than the smoothly flowing highways, of a clever detective narrative.

The novel not only describes but structurally relies on recognisable features of its particular geographical and historical setting: big, unpredictable Sydney in the corrupt 1980s. Claudia says that once:in a movie, I heard California described as a beautiful dancing lady, high on heroin, enchanting like the drug, who doesn’t know she’s dying till you show her the marks. Sydney was like that: not so high, not so dying, only sick sometimes ... She’d been a very sickly child, poxy and plague-ridden. But she’s grown strong, like a mushroom on a dung heap. Like an exotic mushroom I’d seen once at Gary’s. A beautiful crimson fungus had sprung out of the ground like a spider flower. But in its centre was a dark foetid substance that smelled exactly like human excrement.

Narrative history, the sort that tells a story starting at one point in time and ending at a later point, is now out of favour. Some write sociological history focused on class, gender, race, or the family. Others prefer the slice approach concentrating in depth on specific years, or the semiotic spatial history of Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay. Before all else there must be a Theory.

This presents a dilemma for those of us with a bent for writing narrative history. Some resolutely ignore theory and, ignoring the pity of younger colleagues, stick to good old empiricism. For one of our finest practitioners of narrative history, Geoffrey Blainey, this has hardly been possible. Growing up in the postwar University of Melbourne at a time of lively debate between Marxists and Catholics; Blainey has pursued his entire career in Mel­bourne; perhaps the most theory-­conscious of all intellectual milieu. Being neither Marxist nor Catholic, Blainey has only one defence against the charge of practising history with­out theory. He invents his own.

Barry Hill, who is among a few Australians who write from the head as well as from the emotions, sets his latest novel in a Buddhist Teaching Centre in a Queensland forest. Not so deep in the forest that the glorious coast itself cannot be seen, a fact that causes young Mark, who has just learned that his girlfriend Robin is pregnant, to remind himself that (as he gazes at the breakers hurling themselves into spray one hundred kilometres away) he may never surf again: paternal responsibility implying no more surfing. The reader may feel that as Robin is only thirteen years old the partnership, even if she has the baby, may be over in plenty of time for Mark to have a few good surfs before his muscles collapse.

This Centre is run by an amiable elderly Tibetan mystagogue named Geshe-la. Run is not exactly the word; he simply appears from time to time, answers questions through a translator, lives rather remotely from the rest of the settlement but goes on a picnic to the fair at the nearest township just like everybody else.

Australian attitudes to strong leaders, big bosses and tall poppies are said to be simply disrespectful, but are in fact ambiguous. Our high culture constructs a version of low culture which is defined as wittily cock-snooking, and rejoices in, its ironic one-liners. G.A. Wilkes quotes as slightly canonical an account of a Gallipoli digger giving a vulgar, impromptu brush-off to General Birdwood. Again, we could reflect on how literary culture in Australia despises the monarchy, whereas the popular imagination still rejoices in Royal visits.

Graham Little in his canny new book, Strong Leadership, can move rapidly from Plato’s conceptions of timocracy and oligarchy to the telling observation that: ‘As always, the theories of the ancients have a contemporary ring. Since Malcolm Fraser was defeated in 1983 there has been a boom in ‘entrepreneurialism’ and the businessman has become a culture hero.’

It seems strange to describe Diamond Jim McClelland as, really, rather an old-fashioned man. Few septuagenarians have anything like his energy, his forthrightness, his optimism, or, most of all, his receptivity to new ideas. But if there is a continuous thread in his extraordinarily full and complex life, it can probably be best summed up as a very untrendy, passionate commitment to morality. The catch is that his ideas of what constitutes morality – or at least what is the best way of achieving it – have gone from here to there and back again.

McClelland started as a devout and guilt-ridden Roman Catholic. Like many such, he developed doubts, and embraced communism in its most radical (and unachievable) form: Trotskyism. The doubts resurfaced; he became a dedicated fellow traveller of the Catholic based Movement, committed to breaking the power of the communists within the unions. This in turn became unsatisfactory (or perhaps just boring) and the Camelot held out by the Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam beckoned. 1975 disposed of that magnificent obsession, which was followed by a term in the Land and Environment Court, in which McClelland became greener than many of the greenies appearing before him. This obsession lasted with him into the Maralinga Royal Commission on British Atomic Tests, and about the same time he became converted to feminism.

Staining the Wattle is the fourth volume of a series edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee collectively entitled A People’s History of Australia since 1788. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, is not popular history, that is to say history written to be of interest to the general reader. This book actually makes very dull reading. Nor is it exactly, at least to judge by this volume, social history, that is to say history dealing with the lives of ordinary people. This book is about politics. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, seems, rather, to be ideologically useful history; history as a weapon of social change, as a means for the unmasking of the forces of oppression which have shapes, and for the glorification of the forces of progress which have struggled to reshape, Australian history.

Three sections at the beginning of Marion Campbell’s second novel, Not Being Miriam, initiate its preoccupations and problems. They relate incidents from the childhood of Bess Valentine, its major character. In the first and shortest, Bess creates a transforming ritual, a childish game with significant narrative implications. Bess strips herself and Sean, paints their bodies with clay, the children enter the water which washes away the clay; then she dresses in Sean’s boxer shorts and clothes him in her bubble bathers. Now, she tells him, he’s the bride and she’s the groom; and the section ends with an incantation:

This is the wedding
This is the wedding
I take you for my wife
I take you for my husband
This is the ring
This is the ring
This is the kiss
This is the kiss
This is the cave we’ll live in
This is the cave

indicating the innocent surety of this stage of Bess’s life. She controls the pattern that anticipates her future.

Older, in the second section, Bess can no longer create her world, but seeks to know it. She’s sceptical of the Sunday school ritual that acknowledges Peter as the rock of the church, and of the games played by her younger sister Cassandra and Peter Petra. Searching out their secret, she finds a cubby Peter has built and can’t resist going into it despite its misspelt warning notice: ‘PETER’S LABRINTH ENTER AT YOUR RISK’. Unlike the purity of the first game and Bess’ autonomy in it, this one has been established without her and is overlaid by social prohibition. As Bess shoots out of the seductive, dangerous darkness of the labyrinth, she’s propelled both by Peter’s mother’s indignant disgust as this ‘thing’ of Peter’s, as well as by her need to understand the word, ‘lab[y]rinth’, thus the meaning of the other’s game. Her myth book is her source for the knowledge she seeks; now, she thinks, she can be Ariadne ‘who learnt the plan, drugged the guards and gave the thread. Who knew.’

Peter and Cass are unwilling participants in Bess’s game in the third section. Bess and Cass, behind the hessian Bess has stretched over the workbench in the backyard, are radio presenters. Peter is the listener, with the power to choose his station. Around them is the world Bess has made – ‘all theatres, inside, outside, up trees, underground, behind the shed, down near the jetty.’ Abandoned by Cass and Peter, Bess becomes the game, she enters the News, and it’s violent and retributive. Game and reality merge, a snake is killed, and Cassandra labels Bess ‘Murderer’.

The language – from the exquisite simplicity of the first to the density of the third and increasing length of these introductory sections reproduces the growing complexity and restrictions of the maturing child’s life. As the narrative moves into Bess’s adult life as a high school drama teacher, caught in the conventions of discipline and examination, in the constrictions of life as a single, middle-aged woman in an Australian suburb, and in the irony of her past promise and reduced present, loss and compromise seem inescapable. So does the impossibility of retaining the early charm and freedom of being a scallywag, as Bess’s mother labels her at the beginning, of controlling her own destiny by presenting life as a performance, But Bess keeps trying to plan its drama.

As readers, we must learn the narrative plan by following its threads through the labyrinthine stories. Threaded through the conjunctions of Bess’s childhood and adulthood are the lives of other women (and men). Chief of these are Lydia, the German-born wife of Bess’s colleague and one-time lover, Harry Grogan, and illiterate Elsie, victim of incest and domestic abuse and Bess’s neighbour. Each of them has another woman as a point of reference, as Bess has Ariadne. For Elsie it’s the second Mrs de Winter, the mousy, nameless heroine of Rebecca; for Lydia, it’s Katerina Kepler, the doomed witch mother of Johannes Kepler. These counterparts provide an imaginative expansion and sharing (Bess, for instance, is called a witch) of the women’s lives through the roles they suggest. They allow, too, for both reinforcement and comedy – playing charades at Christmas to the well-meaning but patronising audience of Lydia and Billie, Elsie ‘done my Mrs de Winter ... (first Mrs sounds like kisses and then I puffed and blew and shivered for winter)’ – as well as intimating failure and tragedy.

There are more. Cassandra waits in the wings to take over Bess’s part, to move into her everyday life, having achieved the success Bess had been promised; there’s the sisters’ aunt, Mamie, who taught them her sophisticated role playing, gender bending games; there’s Billie, Lydia’s friend who has the beach house where she and Lydia play Scrabble with Harry as an impotent audience. And Miriam is the ultimate Other, the absent type of them all, that indefensible, sacred other woman of male fantasy who is eternally young, flawless and beautiful because she’s dead.

Behind them are the male figures, presences that seduce, threaten, promise and brutalise. Some of them are kind, but although they have few of the answers or talents they hold all of the overt power. Triangular relationships structure the stories; presaged in the Bess, Peter, Cass figure at the start, and repeated conventionally through Bess, Harry and Lydia and less so through Elsie, Roger and Bess. In them, however, the women are less rivals than allies, drawn together emotionally and finally physically in the bizarre climax of Bess’s story.

While the women’s lives are marked by loss and failure, repeating in their ‘crazy sacrifices’ that ‘founding loss’ that was Ariadne’s, they have their own power and their triumphantly subversive mechanisms. Wonderfully memorable comic moments celebrate that female rebellion against the masculine authority which, like the promises of the ambiguous gods of mythology, attempts to keep women in their place. Caught and treated with contempt by her boss as she feeds her baby in the Kalgoorlie cafe where she’s been the drudge, Elsie imagines ‘squirt[ing] them all, using her breast like a fire hydrant.’ The comedy, and pathos, explode as Elsie leaves, blinded by tears and aban­doned by her own special magic that enables her to ignore the taunts of those around her, and slams the pram with the squalling baby into a wedding party in the wide, hot main street.

This is a demanding novel to read, and a daunting one to review; any attempt to describe it risks reducing its wit and audacity, its narrative power and complexity. Sometimes, the narrative games take over and meanings expand until they become unintelligible. Often, the referential detail and language play is sheer, punning delight. In the section called ‘From Ariadne’s Yarn’, Ariadne’s story, her career through history where she’s always off stage – her only ‘entry’ in the dictionary is under ‘A for Abandonment’ – is developed in a dazzling series of often savage puns, female weapons against males who despise language games because they ‘upset their curricula vitae’. Here, Theseus’s monster is Ariadne’s ‘minotaur’; she’s ‘not going to be mythtaken’ and will ‘underpun’ their purpose.

Allusions, classical and literary, es­pecially theatrical, criss-cross the narrative, and it generates its own referential motifs, like Mamie’s wishing well lamp, a haunting reminder of the possibilities and hollowness of female desire, or the unattainable male-generated Miriam of the title, against whom the ordinary women of the story are, ambiguously, perhaps positively, perhaps negatively, ‘not being’. Not Being Miriam is important, too, in its social as well as its narrative concerns. While the impulse of the narrative is a feminist one, there is no sentimental recreation of an ideal sisterhood; no heroic realisation of Bess’s talents and beauty; no pathetic rendering of Elsie’s disadvantages. The women’s stories are presented honestly and their differences are part of the meanings as the female lives, contemporary, historical and mythological, touch and overlap.

As the weaving metaphors of the last section, ‘Ariadne’s Option’, fan out beyond the end of the novel and reach back to the beginning, the composite woman Ariadne/Bess/narrator becomes the sea, the beach, the mother. The blindness assigned by the gods to the feminine gaze is made knowing, ‘new, tactile, intimate’. Finally, ‘She is ready’; a readiness (for her entrance, to play her role, to become the darkness?) reinforced by the image immediately preceding ‘Ariadne’s Option’ of Mamie and Elsie, armed linked, swaying on the beach at night, throwing a shadow case by the lighthouse beam that ‘four-legged ... danced for miles along the beach.’ This narrative is just such a dance, celebrating and justifying the women’s stories it tells.

Donald Horne, pleasantly surprised that he is now a university professor, looks back at the journalist and aspiring novelist that he was in the 1950s. This is to be the third (and final) instalment in the saga of the education of Donald.

Shortly after the book opens, Donald sets off from Australia on a voyage to England, with his English-born wife, Ethel. On the ship he is a party-goer and maker of trivial fun, at once witty and deeply pessimistic.

About ten years ago, I was asked to give a talk to a Sydney group of Australian writers. (Actually, they asked Leonie Kramer, but she was busy.) I decided to talk on ‘Some unknown Australian women writers of the nineteenth century’ in ‘the hope of interesting some of them in researching the lives and careers of their predecessors.

Among the stories by seven women writers in the recent collections, Canberra Tales, there is a haunting story by Dorothy Johnston, in which, in the improbable setting of contemporary Canberra, she conjures up the figure of a mythical boatman rowing across the waters of Lake Burley Griffin. The image lingers, shimmering and numinous.

‘Dissatisfied’ summarises in a single word how I felt after reading Backstage at the Revolution. Dissatisfied not by John Bryson’s undoubtedly eloquent prose but by the publishing and marketing concept of the book.

As a politics and current affairs publisher, collections of essays arrive on my desk many times each year and are inevitably rejected. The authors are often well known, with an established literary or political reputation, and one or more books to their credit.

What would you like to know? Doc Evatt’s on-the­-spot explanation of why he wrote to Molotov? Archbishop Mannix’s response to Cardinal Spellman’s claim on the papacy? The particular pleasure derived from small boys by the headmaster of Geelong Grammar Junior School? How a knowledge of Urdu maintained the Hands off Indonesia blockade? What Malcolm Ellis said to Charles Currey when the lift opened? All those delights and more tumble out of Russel Ward’s autobiography.

Several of Ward’s anecdotes deserve to become what E.H. Carr called ‘historical facts’ – not just events that happened but items selected by scholars as typifying a process. For example, the examiners’ report on his completely unfootnoted 1948 MA on Eliot’s poetry pointed out that ‘it is possible to dislike what one may call the idea of the Jew without being anti-Semitic.’ The wisdom of literary criticism far surpasseth that of Solomon.

First up, best dressed is a warning for flatmates where the laggard must take comfort from the prospect that ‘An overcoat covers a multitude of sins’.

 Like the overcoat, research can include a richness of distractions. Asked by her professor what she was doing, one graduate student answered ‘Research’. ‘That’s good’, returned the professor. ‘These days most people seem to be photocopying.’

Far from the resources that Canberra provides, I have been doing research in the form of wider reading. The alleged focus of this bed of pleasure is M. Bernard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow which has been on my mind since 1971 when I first read the mutilated 1947 edition. Until Virago issued the uncut version in 1983, one of my delights had been to track down second-hand copies for students and friends, pressing Tomorrow and Tomorrow (as the earlier version was called,) on them as a lost masterwork.

A slightly unconventional 1950s upbringing – I was nourished on Russia’s virtues as well as Weeties – may be responsible for my inability to believe in that pandemic, the tall poppy syndrome; instead I’ve always seen the naming of it as just one more jaunt down that jingoistic path which supposedly leads to the discovery of a definition of Australian identity – surely one of the dreariest literary pursuits known to person. But having popped my head up over the parapet a few times in the last few weeks, and having attracted an absolute fusillade of complaint, I was thinking seriously about changing my tune.

At a recent international conference at Victoria Falls, Mr Rupert Murdoch spoke passionately of the role of a free press. His national masthead, The Australian, reported the essence.

Mr Murdoch said too many journalists made life easy for governments because they lacked the energy and mental attitude to ... find out what is going on for themselves.

Dear Editor

Thank you for publishing Susan Ryan’s provocative and concisely argued lecture, ‘Freedom to Write’ (ABR, October 1988). However, there is one assertion that I would seriously dispute, namely that ‘we have in Australia a healthy publishing industry ... which allows the genuine, talented and committed writer to appear in print’. This is nonsense.

Take this genuine, talented, and committed writer, for example. For more than thirty-two years my books have been rejected by every publisher in Australia (including on at least two occasions – one of them quite recently – Susan Ryan’s former firm, Penguin Books). No publisher doubted my abilities, but the excuses were always the same: ‘Too unusual’ and/or ‘Too Australian’.

Finally, despairing of ever finding a healthy publisher, I decided to take the drastic step of publishing myself.

Everyone’s confidence in my genuine talent was immediately justified. My books were acclaimed with choruses of enthusiastic, full­throated hosannas from the critics of every major newspaper in the land (except significantly The Australian, which has never so much as mentioned a single one of my efforts).

I then discovered what the publishers meant by ‘too unusual’. I had unwittingly mastered a style and genre not currently in favour within the sycophantic groves of Academe. As a result, my books were rejected by the buyers of all the trendy and so-called independent bookshops. I don’t blame them, for their readers are the darlings of the hollow automaton set, programmed to imbibe only the faddish and fashionable.

The general bookshops and the chains are of course a hopeless barrier because of their commitments to the overseas blockbusters and their insistence upon terms guaranteed to impoverish the most hopeful publisher.

Wake up, Susan! Unless a book is ideologically and generically acceptable to the academic establishment, its commercial prospects are limited. Tom Howard survives because of the enthusiasm and unstinting support of library buyers and suppliers. But not all novels are naturals for the public library system. Very few, in fact. What of all these other books – potential and published – that have the bad luck to fall between the two idols of academic approval and mass-market acceptance?

A healthy publishing industry, Susan? I could do no worse with a sick one.

Dear Editor,

I write to congratulate you on publishing Carole Ferrier’s review ‘Problems in feminist criticism’ (ABR, September 1988). It is a relief to hear a voice informed by both history and personal experience amid the born-again excitement current about Australian women’s writing.

Carole Ferrier has, for well over a decade, been an influential pioneering figure in Australian feminist literary criticism, tirelessly, and in the face of patriarchal rudeness and silence, promoting the publication of material both by and about women. Perhaps only another editor could appreciate the extent of the task that Carole undertook when she founded the biennial journal, Hecate: an inter­disciplinary journal of women’s liberation in 1975. Through Hecate, which she continues to produce, she, and Hecate’s assistant-editor Bronwen Levy, have fostered both creative and critical writing by women, and about women writers. Moreover, Carole has produced other collec­tions of women’s writing as well, the more recent including her collection of critical essays Gender, Politics and Fiction (University of Queensland Press, 1985) and her edition of Jean Devanny’s autobiography Point of Departure (University of Queensland Press 1986).

She has, then, good grounds for objecting to Dale Spender’s ‘claims ... to pioneering ingenuity and originality’ (ABR, 104, p 24), particularly when those claims ignore all of Carole Ferrier’s work, and that of others too.

To say this is not, and I repeat not, to object to the appearance of a new range of reprints of Australian women writers by Pandora Press and by Penguin. Nor is it to object to the appearance of critical essays on Aus­tralian women writers by Australian women. On the contrary. It can be nothing but a source of pleasure to see so many women, including younger scholars, engaged in reshaping the critical orthodoxies of Australian literature. Similarly, and I’m sure Carole would agree, there is good reason to be excited about the republication of works by Australian women writers that have, for decades now, been available only in rare book collections in libraries. Perhaps at least some of these works will, at last, appear on reading lists in schools, colleges of advanced education and universities.

But if they do, it will not be because Dale Spender as pioneering discoverer has stormed previously impenetrable barricades. Rather, it will be because those barricades have been being white-anted for well over a decade by Australian feminist scholars and writers, among them Carole Ferrier and Delys Bird, Lucy Frost, Susan Gardner, Sneja Gunew, Susan Hampton, Bronwen Levy, Jill Llewellyn, Drusilla Modjeska, Susan Sheridan, Shirley Walker and Eliza­beth Wehby – to name only those who spring immediately to (my) mind.

If Dale Spender could acknowledge that she is building stilts upon other feminists’ shoulders, then those feminists would be far less inclined to shrug their shoulders at her claims.

Dear Editor,

I would like to reply to the two responses to Beyond the Echo contained in this edition of ABR. first, I’m very glad that Amirah Inglis found pleasure in many of the writers included in Beyond the Echo though sorry that she also found our introduction ‘ugly and excluding’. It is worth remembering that the same team who wrote this document also selected the anthology, a difficult task whose working assumptions we felt we had to explain. Let me try to clarify further.

No, these writers haven’t ‘been excluded from mainstream anthologies because the editors judged them not good enough’. Rather it is because the existence and work of many were simply not known, or, were judged by the wrong criteria. By wrong criteria is meant the common move that anything emanating from people with explicitly non Anglo/Celtic names is often read as confession – the simple story of my life. It is, in other words, not accorded the status of writing, that is, knowledge of linguistic and literary conventions and the conscious man­ipulation of both. Such writing has been enthusiastically quarried by historians looking for the authenticity that is supposedly offered by first-person accounts or by sociologists seeking telling details concerning the ‘migrant problem’. In other words, these writers are not perceived as having an automatic place in the nation’s literature. Even this review expressed the concern that much of this writing did not ‘offer a tangible, realistic migrant world’.

Finally, the reviewer describes herself as an ‘old-fashioned modernist’ but rejects Ania Walwicz’s pieces as being unreadable because they do not abide by the usual conventions of punctuation. James Joyce and Gertrude Stein both played notorious games with punc­tuation but this did not prevent them from being generally regarded as foundation members of the Mod­enu.st movement. Once again the point here is that some of these writers are committed to experimental writing, to changing the relationship between readers and texts. Fortunately not everyone dismisses Walwicz’s work on these grounds and some would consider her to be one of the most exciting new poets in contemporary Australian writing precisely because she challenges many of our reading habits including the distinctions we make between writing and speech. Similarly we hope that this anthology will challenge many people’s perceptions of what is currently both Australian Literature and Australian women’s writing and, indeed, what kinds of writing are labelled literature in general.

My second rejoinder concerns Serge Liberman’s article. I agree with the position shared by him and Manfred Jurgensen that ultimately multiculturalism will engage the whole spectrum of Australian literature. Our differences lie in the strategies we are employing to get to this utopian state. As Dr Liberman states himself towards the end of his article, ‘ethnic writing’ should be an ‘integral part’ of any curriculum concerned with Australian literature. In other words, he himself is making a distinction between these two categories as most people still do at the moment. To put it another way, how do we recognise ‘ethnic writing’ and are we in fact saying that currently traditional Australian writing is not ethnic? The element of culture or ethnicity is a factor in all writing just as class and gender are factors.

Literature is constructed according to a rhetoric of merit, that which is ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ according to personal and institutional bias. We all have idiosyncratic tastes and problems only arise when this is elevated to some form of absolute judgment. What I consider to be good is so without my having to explain my criteria for selection because once I begin to give my reasons then the whole process is revealed for what it is – a relative one governed by many elements: the historical period in which it occurs, age, class, race and gender. If then we agree that literary value is to some extent a matter of fashion then it becomes possible to reverse the procedure and, instead of pretending that these choices occur in a vacuum, to actually try to analyse, consciously, the elements involved in that enterprise. Both the presences as well as the absences of certain writers are not ever accidental ones and I am merely suggesting that we become more fully and responsibly conscious of our reasons for particular inclusions and exclusions.

All anthologies are concerned with exclusions but most are rather more covert about their criteria than we were: Before what is currently termed ‘ethnic writing’, by Dr Liberman and others, becomes an integral part of Australian writing the wider public must be given some idea of what is included in this terrain. Dr Liberman must surely recall that it was only a few years ago that one was met with blank stares when the term came up. His own bibliographic work on Jewish writing in Australia has been a milestone in making this tradition a visible absence in our literature and others have laboured similarly. All of us are engaged in a strategy of making an absence visible. Even so, we have only uncovered the tip and much historical and archival work remains to be done. Yes, some ethnic groups have received this attention – those whose cultural and linguistic traditions lie in England and Ireland.

My own position is that we need to keep exploring the matter of cultural differences within the rather limited opportunities afforded by Australian publishing and that we still need the occasional anthologies which concentrate on particular and hitherto underrepresented groups. Redressing the historical imbalance is going to take a long time. Even getting this category to be recognised within our libraries and centres of research continues to be an uphill battle.

Of course, ultimately, not only will the names which make up Australian literature be different but the ways in which we read this field will also change, including the ways in which we re-read the old canon. If cultural difference becomes a recognisable category in literary interpretation (as class and gender have long been so) then we will truly have Dr Liberman’s omni-culturalism. But simply wishing it will not make it so. Only visibility (just who are these writers) and recognition of the issues involved in cultural politics will achieve this state.

Dear Editor,

I refer to the recent Starters and Writers column in the Australian Book Review about Australian university presses. You certainly deserve full marks for parochialism: two and a half columns without mentioning the lively and active presses at the universities of New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. The only two presses outside Melbourne to rate a reference were the two Clayton presses – ANU and Sydney.

I get increasingly exasperated by journalists making pontifical statements without bothering to check the facts. You say, for instance, that ‘Of all Australia’s university presses, the most viable is without doubt (my emphasis) the Melbourne University Press’. How the hell do you know?

If you mean economically viable then your readers are entitled to assume that you have examined the financial statements of all Australian university presses. Have you seen our latest balance sheet or profit and loss statement? Did you know that we have made profits every year for the past fifteen years? As I wrote to one of your colleagues in response to the Bulletin article on Ryan’s replacement: ‘I dispute that Melbourne is unique in being solvent, stable and self-supporting. The New South Wales university Press also enjoys that happy condition – in fact we can go one better than Melbourne because we have actually returned almost $150,000 of our profits to our parent, the University of New South Wales.’

Further, while acknowledging Melbourne’s pre-eminence in the field of scholarly publishing, we too have a thriving and growing scholarly list, and one which we feel is less establishment oriented and more adventurous and risk-taking than Melbourne’s. Certainly our books in the Modem History and Colonial Text series are invaluable contributions towards scholarship in Australia. The enclosed brochure illustrates the depth and range of our list – we will publish about thirty-five books in the coming year. Of course, only a minority will be classified as scholarly but even then we will be publishing many more scholarly books than La Trobe University Press.

On that question, Ian Patterson must be incredibly naïve if he thinks his press can survive on scholarly publishing – believe me, it is just, not possible in Australia. If he doesn’t ensure that he has a steady source of income outside scholarly publishing, then he is doomed. Haven’t the universities learnt the lessons from ANU and Sydney?

I will close on that cheerful note.

Douglas S Howie, Managing Director, NSW University Press

As the year comes to a close I feel some clichéd compulsion to review ABR’s progress. Our place in the literary magazine market is assured due to the fine editors who have preceded me. There seems to be an increased awareness of ABR out there among the general reading public and this is verified by our increased sales. Of course, our position has been enhanced by a general push to bring the book out of the study and into the world. ABR’s circulation increase has certainly been assisted by the hard work of Dinny O’Hearn’s Book Show (SBS, Wednesdays at 8pm) and the continuing and comprehensive Books and Writing program produced by Robert Dessaix (Radio National, Sundays at 7.25 pm and Mondays at 3.05).

Browsing through the last ten issues I thought perhaps some figures might be of interest to our readers of all the material published in the March to December period:

38% of what we published came from NSW
37% came from Victoria
12% came from ACT
5% came from WA
4 % came from Queensland
2% came from SA
2% came from Tasmania

And for the ‘women-oriented-women’ or the ‘men-in-search-of-a-coven’: 57% of our reviewers were male and 43% of our reviewers were female.

What these figures suggest is that we have made inroads into the creation of a national magazine. We do still have some work to do down south and to the west and invite suggestions from all interested parties.

In the meantime we thank you for your support and encouragement and wish you a satisfactory secular holiday.

Next to the couch this month:

1.         Brendan Hennessy’s Australian Literary Calendar 1989

2.         Morris Lurie’s My Life as a Movie

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 

Ian Hicks, the assistant editor of the Herald, took over the literary editorship after the brief reign of Chris Henning, who went back to work on page one, and the very lengthy incumbency of Margaret Jones. He remains assistant editor, and sees his books job as a short-term ‘appointment. His policy over embargoes on imported books is controversial. Like Valerie Lawson in her heyday at the Times On Sunday, he ignores them, especially if the book can be seen as having ‘some news interest’. Disregard of embargoes quite often drives overseas publishers to airfreight in the entire Australian run of a book and drive up its cost unconscionably. Hicks says he attempts to publish a new poem each week. But Australian fiction and poetry get more lip service than serious attention in the Herald. Often they’re dealt with in job-lot reviews of four books. Recent victims include Robert Gray and Gerard Windsor.

Hicks has employed a number of European expert reviewers, which is a healthy sign, but he relies too much on the old Herald standby of giving an inordinate number of books to ex-editors Pringle and Kepert. Reportedly, he has not changed another of the Herald’s legendary policies – demanding return of reviewers’ copies.

Christopher Pearson

THE AUSTRALIAN

There was a time when nobody of my acquaintance felt any compulsion to read The Australian’s book pages. They seemed hastily cobbled during the time the over-worked editor took a breather from pressing assignments. Then Geoffrey Dutton, that committed and energetic promoter of Aust Lit, got the job; and what for some was a xenophobic emphasis on the local product in the pages was, for others, an admirable way of getting the news across to the great unwashed that a home-grown literature exists.

A few weeks ago, Barry Oakley took over, introduced a couple of new columns, and expanded the book pages from two to three or four. Reviews, as we all know, contain opinions written to a deadline that expires almost as soon as the book arrives; and book pages resemble a form guide that shows which books and reviewers are currently under the floodlights. They can’t pretend to be comprehensive or authoritative. They are interesting and/or irritating because they’re not. So, the new columns, particularly ‘Writer’s Block’, are welcome. In this column writers are invited to have their own say amidst the week’s delivery of brickbats and bouquets. It’s good to get some fresh angle directly from the shop floor – and this might even remind the magisterial reviewer who’s really in charge.

And what’s being reviewed lately? The full range of literary forms, bias Australian. Yes, poetry too. I’ve particularly enjoyed recent reviews by Kerryn Goldsworthy (biting), Greg Flynn (hilarious), and Beverley Farmer (felicitous). Thankfully, Sydney’s provincialism is not especially manifested in the catholic choice of reviewers, but this can’t be said of the pseudonymous Elizabeth Swanson’s ‘Foreword’ column of literary news and gossip. In recent weeks she has tended to abandon her spies and satellites. The beat of the ‘Literary London’ column is clearly defined. So when are we going to have ‘Literary New York’ or, for that matter, ‘Literary Wagga Wagga’?

Andrew Sant

THE COURIER MAIL

‘Books with Peter Charlton’ is inserted so unobtrusively into The Courier Mail’s Saturday supplement, ‘The Great Weekend’, as to seem almost an afterthought. Jostling for page space with miscellaneous advertisements, the book reviews offer only the most cursory of glimpses into recent publishing in Australia and overseas.

Perhaps as a result of lack of space, the main weakness of ‘Books with Peter Charlton is the apparent haphazardness of the selection of titles, and the absence of any periodic survey of recent literary and publishing trends. Books tend to be discussed in isolation from each other and from any intellectual context. Pressure of space may also account for the mysterious omission of reviews of some major works, and the considerable delays with which other works are reviewed. In the case of books published in Australia, such delays are inexplicable and reinforce the impression of a lack of commitment to intellectual concerns.

The selection bias in favour of fiction and biography leads to important works in fields such as politics, social inquiry, the history of science and philosophy being ignored. A more consistent attempt to survey publishing in these fields might also provide ‘Books with Peter Charlton’ with a more coherent intellectual framework for reviewing literary works. At present, with the notable exception of Ken Goodwin, Henry Bartlett, and Peter Charlton, contributors tend to concentrate on the description of plot and character.

Given the emphasis on fiction reviewing, it is a curious and regrettable fact that well-known Australian writers are not represented among the reviewers. The rationale of ‘Books with Peter Chatlton’ seems to be based on the belief that its readers are simply seeking tips on undemanding reading with which to while away a weekend. If this is the case, a worthwhile contribution to Brisbane’s weekend reading might be the provision of more entertaining book review.

Belinda Mackay

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

Two papers thud onto my lawn each Saturday: The West Australian and The Weekend Australian. I don’t usually bother with the West – which is a shame.

The West books editor, John Weyland, is also the features editor. He is not really a literary specialist (although as a humble staffer he was interested in books, particularly WA books), and there are huge, conflicting demands on his time.

Unfortunately for Weyland, his arrival at the features desk coincided with ownership changes at the West, and the editorial policy seems to be one of lowest common denominator. So we have lots of overseas blockbusters and pictorial reproductions from illustrated books (easy on the Saturday hang­over). Until recent weeks, there had been virtually no Australian poetry or fiction, and very few literary features, although I have detected some improvement there of late. Perhaps the books edi­tor has been freed a little from the editorial chains – or perhaps he’s simply becoming more confident?

However, most of the material is either syndicated or written by staff journalists, and Weyland does a lot himself. Almost no use is made of local writing talent, and the few freelancers he does commission reviews from are paid less than their counterparts on other papers (although Weyland has tried to do something about this). But is money really the problem?

Meanwhile, Perth’s literary community reads the Weekend Australian, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. (Oh, and ABR, of course.) But this side of the country we don’t see Saturday’s Age or SMH till Monday afternoon. Sigh.

THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

For at least ninety per cent of South Australians, what The Advertiser publishes is gospel truth. It is universally referred to as The Paper.

            Its Saturday Book Section therefore has captive readers, and is likely to bring many of them their only news from the wider world of literature. What they can get in the limited space provided is necessarily very limited indeed – usually there is room for at most four shortish reviews plus a short, regular Popular Fiction column.

            There is no evidence of any editorial policy beyond an attempt to provide over the weeks an unspecified range of reviews of books of general interest. One pictures a great big bin of review copies, and the reviewers coming in each week and saying ‘I’ll take that one’.

The result is a kind of fruit salad – one week it’s W. McMahon Ball’s Diaries plus a lavish book of photographs, plus a sociological study, plus two new Australian autobiographical works; another week it’s Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows letters to his son plus Princess Di plus Australian Jazzman plus assorted overseas fiction in brief.

            The literary editor is obviously battling with a serious shortage of space, and probably with a very small budget as well. But is there a real shortage of reviewers? In the four weeks of September, the book section contained about twenty pieces of which seven were written by Katherine England, four by David Harris and two by Brian Dickey. These are, in fact, good reviewers, especially Katherine England, but their constant reappear­ances do give a grey sameness to one’s Saturday diet of book pages.

            In short, you don’t expect to find in the Advertiser book pages revelations of new talent or great literary insights. Instead, you can be sure of good, safe reviews of good, safe books unlikely to offend anyone.

            You can also be sure that you won’t be roused by these reviews to wild frenzies of desire that will cause you to stampede your library or bookshop.

            Rosemary Wighton

THE AGE

Poor old Aggie Age. She’s never been the same since she was Fairf-ked. (Or unfairly F---ed, if you take a high Melbourne line.) She just seems to get greyer and greyer with the years. And putting on weight is no substitute: newsagents are turned into bunkers by piles of unclaimed Saturday Extras.

            ‘Twas not always so. Camberwell once swore by The Age Literary Supplement; never at it. Now it would scarcely bother to do either.

            Once you scale the trivial tale that invariably leads off the Extra (which, by the way, is dis­honestly named, since you pay extra), what do you find? Well, no Michael Barnard, for one thing. This makes for a change – even if that change is called Peter Ryan. Sweeping on – by courtesy of ads for flying Persian carpets – you come across four pages or so headed Arts & Books. Here Frothers can be found telling us how we ought to have The Mastersingers of Nuremberg in Melbourne, we really ought, since this is the Bicentennial Year and the opera celebrates ‘national’ art. (Just who then does he think won World War II?) Somewhere in there are books.

            The layout of the two, and occasionally three, book pages is about as helpful as that of the recent Spoleto brochure. Indeed they could give you the impression that the books chosen were an entirely random lot. A wicked thought I know, but now that the last general has finally been laid to rest, a new organising principle has had to emerge. And it has. These days, when like likes like, it’s no surprise that Aggie should decide that whenever possible books should be reviewed by her very own boys and girls. Journalists feature Saturday after Saturday. To be fair, a bit less than they used, since lately there have been more new reviewers. But the problem remains, as a double-barrelled one: the books need to be chosen more carefully, and reviewers, whether new or otherwise, paired with them more tellingly. In short, the pages need to project a view of the world, and of Australian culture, which they don’t really do at the moment.

            Jim Davidson

Now is the season of good will towards all specimens to which your correspondent replies ‘Bah humbug’. He does not like Christmas and has always considered Ebenezer Scrooge to be far more sinned against than sinning. Naturally this hack receives no yule time gifts; after all what do you give a youngish fogey whose only wish is to command a Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Shiloh? Yet if reality was suspended (and given the Australian book community’s tenuous grasp of it, this is not altogether unlikely), there are two presents which the wise, the good and the rich amongst Australia’s publishers and writers could confer upon this hack.

These books in the Touch the Sun series are very good. But as all reviewers have to do, I will compare. I had three favourites which were, Top-Enders (McPhee Gribble 114 pp, $6.95) by Jennifer Dabbs, Captain Johnno (McPhee Gribble, 122 pp, $6.95 pb) by Rob George, and Peter and Pompey (McPhee Gribble, 114 pp, $6.95 pb) by John Misto. These three books compelled me to read, they were interesting as far as I think it is possible to be when writing for this age group.