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Absolutely Revolting

July 1988, no. 102

Welcome to the July 1988 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Don Anderson reviews The Rose Fancier by Olga Masters
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Contents Category: Short Stories
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Article Title: Fine brushwork on a small canvas
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I first made the acquaintance of Olga Masters’s writing some years back when a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for which her collection of stories The Home Girls had been submitted. I was immensely impressed by the control, passion, and implicit violence of the stories, and was of the impression that the book should win. But another judge, of considerable seniority, carried the day with the opinion that all the stories in the book were ‘at the same pitch’. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that her objection could equally be levelled at, say, Flannery O’Connor or Dubliners, but that’s water under the bridge.
Book 1 Title: The Rose Fancier
Book Author: Olga Masters
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $19.95 hb, 144 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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I first made the acquaintance of Olga Masters’s writing some years back when a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for which her collection of stories The Home Girls had been submitted. I was immensely impressed by the control, passion, and implicit violence of the stories, and was of the impression that the book should win. But another judge, of considerable seniority, carried the day with the opinion that all the stories in the book were ‘at the same pitch’. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that her objection could equally be levelled at, say, Flannery O’Connor or Dubliners, but that’s water under the bridge.

Read more: Don Anderson reviews 'The Rose Fancier' by Olga Masters

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Delys Bird reviews In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Not for the morally faint-hearted
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Place and the specifics of place are supremely significant in Tim Winton’s writing. It has established the South-west corner of Western Australia as its region, and the elements of that area, sea, sky, and forest, recur in his stories, images of an ultimate if unknowable meaning in the world. The people of Winton’s fiction live outside cities, immersed in their natural environment, from which the best of them learn as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Physical and metaphysical frontiers give Winton’s work its special flavour. Placed as they are, closer to nature than culture, his characters and the events of their stories develop beyond the boundaries of what we ordinarily know of ourselves and how we understand the world around us.
Book 1 Title: In the Winter Dark
Book Author: Tim Winton
Book 1 Biblio: McPhee Gribble, $24.95 hb, 132 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Place and the specifics of place are supremely significant in Tim Winton’s writing. It has established the South-west corner of Western Australia as its region, and the elements of that area, sea, sky, and forest, recur in his stories, images of an ultimate if unknowable meaning in the world. The people of Winton’s fiction live outside cities, immersed in their natural environment, from which the best of them learn as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Physical and metaphysical frontiers give Winton’s work its special flavour. Placed as they are, closer to nature than culture, his characters and the events of their stories develop beyond the boundaries of what we ordinarily know of ourselves and how we understand the world around us.

In The Winter Dark acknowledges that this knowing must include an apprehension of those things that lie beyond consciousness. Its epigraph comes from Victor Hugo: ‘There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness,’ and the dark dimension of human life with its inexplicable terrors presses upon the characters of this story. Set in a lonely valley, called locally ‘the Sink’, in the forests of the far south of Winton’s region, this narrative is told to Darkness by an old man, Maurice Stubbs. His telling of a series of weird happenings in the valley a year ago is an attempt to comprehend them, to ‘see the joins, the cells of it’, and to absolve his part in them, to relieve their pressure, to understand their history.

Read more: Delys Bird reviews 'In the Winter Dark' by Tim Winton

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Kate Ahearne reviews One Crowded Hour by Tim Bowden, We Have No Dreaming by Ronald McKie, Mermaid Singing by Chairman Clift, and Between the Flags and Other Stories by Jane Hyde
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: A paperback renaissance
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If your interest in Australian literature predates its current flavour-of-the-month status, no doubt there exists, somewhere in your dinner-party repertoire, a screechingly funny reminiscence from the long ago, that winds up with some pompous professor of literature, or some arrogant publishing mogul, delivering the punchline, ‘Australian literature? Guffaw guffaw. I didn’t know there was any’.
Book 1 Title: One Crowded Hour
Book 1 Subtitle: Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman, 1934-1985
Book Author: Tim Bowden
Book 1 Biblio: Imprint, $14.95 pb, 436 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: We Have No Dreaming
Book 2 Author: Ronald McKie
Book 2 Biblio: Imprint, $14.95 pb, 264 pp
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If your interest in Australian literature predates its current flavour-of-the-month status, no doubt there exists, somewhere in your dinner-party repertoire, a screechingly funny reminiscence from the long ago, that winds up with some pompous professor of literature, or some arrogant publishing mogul, delivering the punchline, ‘Australian literature? Guffaw guffaw. I didn’t know there was any’.

Perhaps you were among the few, way back in the early 1970s, who had discovered the exciting new work then beginning to appear from youngsters like Frank Moorhouse, Peter Carey, and Murray Bail. If you were reading widely enough, particularly among contemporary fiction writers, you would have twigged that here was a bunch of writers producing important work that was breaking new ground – and not just in local terms. If you were one of those who went about the place exhorting, cajoling, and bullying people into reading these new Australian writers, one thing’s for sure – you don’t look so silly now.

Read more: Kate Ahearne reviews 'One Crowded Hour' by Tim Bowden, 'We Have No Dreaming' by Ronald McKie,...

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Alan D. Gilbert reviews Australia: A cultural history by John Rickard
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: Searching for Australian culture
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It has a brave title, John Rickard’s Australia: A cultural history, for that adjective ‘cultural’ raises expectations difficult to meet. ‘Culture’, as Raymond Williams has explained, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ After reading the book I cannot help wondering whether the substitution of the word ‘social’ would have made for a more accurate subtitle. For what Rickard has given us is an impressive synopsis of recent research and inherited wisdom about the nature of Australian society. It will be a welcome addition to university and college reading lists on Australian history, but it is not, I believe, at the most fundamental level, ‘a cultural history’.
Book 1 Title: Australia
Book 1 Subtitle: A cultural history
Book Author: John Rickard
Book 1 Biblio: Longman Cheshire, $18.95 pb, 309 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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It has a brave title, John Rickard’s Australia: A cultural history, for that adjective ‘cultural’ raises expectations difficult to meet. ‘Culture’, as Raymond Williams has explained, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ After reading the book I cannot help wondering whether the substitution of the word ‘social’ would have made for a more accurate subtitle. For what Rickard has given us is an impressive synopsis of recent research and inherited wisdom about the nature of Australian society. It will be a welcome addition to university and college reading lists on Australian history, but it is not, I believe, at the most fundamental level, ‘a cultural history’.

Read more: Alan D. Gilbert reviews 'Australia: A cultural history' by John Rickard

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Contents Category: Commentary
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Article Title: Confessions of an unrepresented literary man
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I’m unrepresented but still resented. By the regular writers of the pulp I contribute to to keep me and mine from the pawnbrokers; by the witless screenwriters’ minders who know how to quote Lawson, but only in jest; by the rank & file plodders who hate the public, and most of all loathed by academics who have a sort of vision of blue collar, but mix it up with art.

Who could represent me, keep a sense of humour, and stay in the black? Writers’ representatives I’ve met ought to be carrying the hod. In case you’ve not heard of the hod, it is that uncomfortable article roof tilers require to haul their merchandise up onto the pinnacles of their perilous profession.

Read more: 'Confessions of an Unrepresented Literary Man' by Barry Dickins

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Contents Category: Commentary
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Article Title: On being a literary agent
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Have I talked on this topic before? Do I hear the echo of my own voice? ‘What we do’, I say so many times a week, ‘is read your manuscript. If we think there is a market for it, we’ll try to place it with the most appropriate publisher, negotiate the best possible terms for you, exploit such subsidiary rights as are applicable, and take 10 per cent of whatever we can get for you.’
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Have I talked on this topic before? Do I hear the echo of my own voice? ‘What we do’, I say so many times a week, ‘is read your manuscript. If we think there is a market for it, we’ll try to place it with the most appropriate publisher, negotiate the best possible terms for you, exploit such subsidiary rights as are applicable, and take 10 per cent of whatever we can get for you.’

That’s the bare bones of it. Of course it leaves out all the curly bits, but if we went into all that each time, there’d be no time left to actually get on with doing what agents do.

Read more: 'On Being a Literary Agent' by Caroline Lurie

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Contents Category: Commentary
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Article Title: Why have one?
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There is this battleground, see. On one side, shooting from the jungle, there are the literary agents. On the other, shooting from the swamps, are the publishers. And contrary to what you’re probably thinking the writer isn’t bleeding on the barbed wire, caught in the crossfire. Hell, no. The writer’s at home in silent safety, pencils sharpened, ruler straightened, papers just so, about to begin A New Work, for which the literary agent will extract from the publisher an advance twelve times bigger than the writer ever dared to hope for or believed possible.
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There is this battleground, see. On one side, shooting from the jungle, there are the literary agents. On the other, shooting from the swamps, are the publishers. And contrary to what you’re probably thinking the writer isn’t bleeding on the barbed wire, caught in the crossfire. Hell, no. The writer’s at home in silent safety, pencils sharpened, ruler straightened, papers just so, about to begin A New Work, for which the literary agent will extract from the publisher an advance twelve times bigger than the writer ever dared to hope for or believed possible.

Read more: 'Why have one?' by Mem Fox

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Katherine Brisbane reviews The Cherry Pickers by Kevin Gilbert
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Contents Category: Theatre
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Article Title: Black drama of white laws
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It seems a world away since 1968 when Kevin Gilbert and Brian Syron got together a group of untutored Aboriginal actors in the back garden of Judge Frank McGrath’s house in Centennial Park, Sydney, to read the first draft of The Cherry Pickers. Amy and Frank McGrath, dedicated theatre-lovers, had turned their stables into the Mews Playhouse and, in that time of extraordinary theatrical nationalism, were, for a short space, one of its most innovatory influences.
Book 1 Title: The Cherry Pickers
Book Author: Kevin Gilbert
Book 1 Biblio: Burrambinga Books, 80 pp, $12.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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It seems a world away since 1968 when Kevin Gilbert and Brian Syron got together a group of untutored Aboriginal actors in the back garden of Judge Frank McGrath’s house in Centennial Park, Sydney, to read the first draft of The Cherry Pickers. Amy and Frank McGrath, dedicated theatre-lovers, had turned their stables into the Mews Playhouse and, in that time of extraordinary theatrical nationalism, were, for a short space, one of its most innovatory influences.

The play was not complete, as I recall, but I remember with clarity the opening scene at the cherry pickers’ camp, in which an upturned tub on which a cheerful old woman sits, is discovered to contain her granddaughter, enduring a customary punishment for allegedly stealing damper and dripping. There was something so outrageous and authentic about the scene that I felt that for the first time I, as a European Australian, was being allowed to enter the private, domestic life of Black Australia.

Read more: Katherine Brisbane reviews 'The Cherry Pickers' by Kevin Gilbert

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Dear Writer by Carmel Bird
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Teaching writing with pleasure
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Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaimer and then, accordingly, confine themselves to technique. Somehow it’s as though people who take upon themselves the task of teaching other people to write feel compelled first to apologise for it and then to shy away from its less tangible demands.
Book 1 Title: Dear Writer
Book Author: Carmel Bird
Book 1 Biblio: McPhee Gribble,135 pp, $9.99 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.booktopia.com.au/dear-writer-revisited-carmel-bird/book/9780987447968.html
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Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaimer and then, accordingly, confine themselves to technique. Somehow it’s as though people who take upon themselves the task of teaching other people to write feel compelled first to apologise for it and then to shy away from its less tangible demands.

None of this applies to Carmel Bird's Dear Writer, which begins like this:

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Dear Writer' by Carmel Bird

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Margaret Harris reviews Outlaw and Lawmaker by Rosa Praed and Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Humanism plagues feminist criticism
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I first met Rosa Praed under the blue dome of the British Museum Reading Room some twenty years ago. She was introduced as Mrs Campbell Praed, an aspiring novelist advised by George Meredith – himself a novelist and poet, and the subject of my doctoral research – in his capacity as publisher’s reader for the well-known house of Chapman & Hall. The fact of her being an Australian writer seeking to break into the London publishing scene in the 1880s was notable; but she was marginal to my concerns at that time.
Book 1 Title: Outlaw and Lawmaker
Book Author: Rosa Praed
Book 1 Biblio: Pandora Press, 307 pp, $13.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Mothers of the Novel
Book 2 Subtitle: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen
Book 2 Author: Dale Spender
Book 2 Biblio: Pandora Press, 357 pp, $14.95 pb
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I first met Rosa Praed under the blue dome of the British Museum Reading Room some twenty years ago. She was introduced as Mrs Campbell Praed, an aspiring novelist advised by George Meredith – himself a novelist and poet, and the subject of my doctoral research – in his capacity as publisher’s reader for the well-known house of Chapman & Hall. The fact of her being an Australian writer seeking to break into the London publishing scene in the 1880s was notable; but she was marginal to my concerns at that time.

Read more: Margaret Harris reviews 'Outlaw and Lawmaker' by Rosa Praed and 'Mothers of the Novel' by Dale...

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Philip Salom reviews New and Selected Poems by Philip Martin, Labour Ward by Jennifer Strauss, and Selected Poems by Andrew Taylor
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Lyrical travelling
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Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.
Book 1 Title: Selected Poems
Book Author: Andrew Taylor
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, 205 pp, $14.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: New and Selected Poems
Book 2 Author: Philip Martin
Book 2 Biblio: Longman Cheshire, 76 pp, $6.95 pb
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Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.

Read more: Philip Salom reviews 'New and Selected Poems' by Philip Martin, 'Labour Ward' by Jennifer Strauss,...

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Stephen Knight reviews nine crime novels
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Article Title: Crime wave in Aussie publishing: Editors baffled
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Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.
Book 1 Title: Deep Gold
Book Author: Arthur Maher
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam, 298 pp, $8.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Seven Miles from Sydney
Book 2 Author: Lesley Thomson
Book 2 Biblio: Pandora, 205 pp, $9.95 pb
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Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.

Read more: Stephen Knight reviews nine crime novels

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