At various times in its history, the Australian short story has been predictable, as editorial and public appetites have limited experimentation. I am glad to be reading now, when approval can be conferred on collections as different and as variously excellent as Julie Lewis’s The Walls of Jericho and Peter Skrzynecki’s The Wild Dogs. Lewis’s work is more formally experimental than Skrzynecki’s, but both collections offer insight into the social and the literary.

Julie Lewis is part of the vigorous Western Australian literary community. She is, or has been, a teacher, writer, broadcaster, and editor. The sureness of her style and the extent to which she is prepared to take risks exhibit a confidence which comes from long familiarity with the evaluation and encouragement of writing. Her stories blend the recognisable with fantasy and fable. They are told in a spare style which invites consideration, rather than consumption and disposal. The title, The Walls of Jericho, suggests the unexpected – and imperative – collapse of defences and the stories investigate the substantial and the vulnerable, textually and socially. The use of irony and the exposure of delusion are central to this investigation.

Writing is what I love doing. There is almost nothing like it. Even playing two or three close sets of tennis will not quite compete with having a good poetic theme discover you, and then managing to nut it out, to make it chime like a bell. No wonder the French critics are so fond of talking about the jouissance of a text. When a poetic shape-and-theme I’ve been struggling with comes good, it comes like an express train. And, whether painful or pleasing, writing has become an absolute necessity, so that I grow fretful, grumpy, zany, if I haven’t written anything decent for several days.

This ailment first caught up with me when I was in the Air Force. I did six months’ National Service at Laverton in 1952–53. When I went in, I was still the potential scientist I had been since discovering Mendeleef’s periodic classification of the elements (surely the greatest of all taxonomies?) at the age of twelve; when I came out, it was as a poet in the making. Six months of dozing in the uniformed public service gave one all that time for reading the European monsters: Flaubert and Kafka, Woolf and Yeats, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. I was hooked. Sadly, typically, I did not read any Australian writing at all, until I discovered Judith Wright, and Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’.

Reading My Place by Sally Morgan reminds one of how powerful a book can be when there is an urgent story to be told. This book, let me say at the outset, is wonderful.

Sally Morgan and her four brothers and sisters grew up in Perth in the 1950s and 1960s. They are part Aboriginal, but didn’t know it then. They knew they were darker, different, perhaps they were Greek; their mother and grandmother told them they were Indian and this answer satisfied the kids at school, and them for a time. When she was about fifteen Sally suddenly woke up, though her more worldly younger sister, Jill, had known for a while. Her grandmother, Nan, who lived with them, was black; they were Boongs, Abos, Aborigines. ‘“You know Jill,” I said after a while, “if we are Boongs, and I don’t know if we are or not, there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well just accept it.’’’

About a year ago, when The Woodpecker Toy Fact and Other Stories was just a gleam in its author’s eye, I chanced to hear this very fancifully dressed woman read a story about childhood perception, semantic confusion, and small-town gossip. It was one of those welcome breaks at an academic conference, when we turned our attention from the analysis of art to the thing itself. And it was perhaps the context, along with the exceptional performance of the reader, which made this particular story stand out so vividly. For while it satisfied, they (by then quite desperate) desire to be enthralled by something fictive, it also played up cleverly to the critic in us all.

The reader in question was Carmel Bird and the story was the title track from her new collection. The principal characters of the narrative are ‘maggers’, country matrons in sensible shoes and chiffon scarves who gossip all day over the back fence while washing flutters on the rotary clothesline.

‘The settlement of returned soldiers on cultivable land,’ wrote Ernest Scott in Volume XI of the Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918 (1936), ‘is one of the most ancient policies of governments after wars.’ Soldier settlement in Australia after World War I is a major instance of a practice dating back as far as Assyria in the thirteenth-century BC. In early twentieth-century Australia, the need to raise an army entirely from volunteers, and the insatiable demands of modern war, made soldier settlement as much an inducement of recruitment as a means of calming things down afterwards, its traditional function. Half the male population between ages eighteen and forty-five – some 330,000 men – enlisted. Of these 270,000 returned. By 1929, 35,700 had been settled on farms in the six States (and more by the 1930s). This may seem a small proportion, but the incapacitated were many, and it represented over 100,000 men, women, and children. In keeping with the most liberal repatriation scheme in the world, public expenditure was considerable, amounting in Victoria alone to forty-six million pounds by 1938, though the financial cost was minor compared with expenditure by the Commonwealth Repatriation Commission set up in 1920 as the soldiers’ welfare state. However, by 1938 about half the settlers had left their blocks, many with nothing to show for years of unremitting labour. All that has ever been written about ‘homes fit for heroes’ promised to British soldiers after World War I applies to the Australian experience of soldier settlement, and more. It is a subject fit for Thucydides.

If, as Dr Johnson opined, a lexicographer is a harmless drudge, what does that make a lexicographical reviewer? A potentially harmful drudge perhaps. Who else feels the need to consume a dictionary whole in one indigestible sequence?

Drudgery indeed, and potentially harmful if as with the malign convention in this kind, the reviewer summarises the preface, reports a few humorous entries, takes ex cathedra issue with some others, and so comes to imply how much better it might all have been done. But there is another course open to reviewers these days, or another discourse. Recent theory has confided much about the construction of a subject, human and academic, shown how manifold and intermittent can be the modes through which a position, an ideology, might be created. Dictionaries and guides to usage, those dense repertoires of a culture and its authorising rules, may be some of the most insidiously effective means of sustaining and reproducing cultural and social ideologies.

Many of our strongest writers are also numbered among our most commanding critics; and in some cases – Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, and Eliot – it is not easy to tell whether their greater contribution is to literature or literary criticism. Part of the problem, of course, is that at this high level the distinction tends to break down: criticism becomes literature in its own right and often on its own terms.

The same could be said of certain critics who are not practising writers or whose writing is of marginal importance. After acknowledging the eccentric brilliance of a William Empson or the forensic talents of a Paul de Man, one must surely also recognise a claim for the scholarly essay to be read as literature. This is not simply a matter of paying tribute to the ‘well-written article’; it is, rather, to admit that critics use the same rhetorical manoeuvres as other writers, and that in their essays one can find, albeit displaced, a certain ‘will to literature’ which is generally only looked for in poems, novels and plays.

Living with Stress and Anxiety is the title of one of those self-help guides put out by Manchester University Press in its ‘Living With …’ series; Living with Breast Cancer and Mastectomy is another. Living with Literary Theory is not a scheduled volume, I imagine, although some people who work in the lit. crit. business seem to regard literary theory as a prime source of anxiety for which the only remedy is theorectomy. In the decade since Terence Hawkes first taught us how to live with Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Methuen has succeeded admirably through its expository ‘New Accents’ series (edited by Hawkes) in making it easier for everybody to cope with such anxiety-provoking processes as Lacanian psychoanalysis or Derridean deconstruction; too easy, in the opinion of those who them-selves feel uneasy at the politics of marketing criticism’s nouvelle cuisine as fast-food takeaways, with Methuen playing the role of the big M.

On Bertrand Russell’s ninetieth birthday, the Daily Express published a congratulatory leader, which described him as ‘an intellectual gadfly on the rump of British society’. Moreover, to demonstrate that this most conservative of British newspapers intended no insult, the leader went on to describe Russell as ‘the second greatest living Englishman’ after Winston Churchill. Australia’s record of producing, much less recognising the achievements of, intellectual gadflies is if anything worse than Britain’s. The only figure of real stature who might qualify for that title is Hugh Stretton, an academic with an unerring talent for tearing the veils of pretension from the ideas and practices we most take for granted. Since this epoch, as much as any other, needs to take a mirror to its real rather than its pretended self, this too is intended to be anything but insulting.

The perennial and increasingly tiresome question of Australian ‘national identity’ will probably diminish rapidly after the point where the design of a new and truly Australian flag is determined.

That it is a question at all, after just on two hundred years of settlement here, is curious. Part of the condition was diagnosed by the late Arthur Phillips in his studies of our colonial culture, The Australian Tradition, where he perceived in this country what he termed ‘the cultural cringe’. Phillips’ book, together with Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties and Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, were emancipating surely.

Editorial boards of magazines are seldom noticed, except when a magazine is in trouble. For the past three years ABR’s board chairman was Brian Johns. Last May Brian resigned. It was a resignation he had been signalling for some time; he believed that it was time for him to go.

As a member of the board, I was saddened to see Brian go. ABR had been very important to him, and its success and survival, in both cultural and economic terms, had been an overriding concern. Brian was a demanding, at times overbearing, at times charming, but always inspiring and exciting chairman.

Brian is always interested in what people think, and in them. One of his great talents is that he inspires people to articulate and implement their ideas. With ABR his overriding ambition has been to establish it as a journal of influence in promoting Australian writing, that was successful on all fronts; and with the help of some wonderful editors – John McLaren, John Hanrahan and, most recently, Kerryn Goldsworthy – that has been achieved.

I don’t usually reply to Letters to the Editor, but … Since this lot (see opposite) is particularly atrabilious, a lovely word I have just learned from Don Anderson, I feel moved to make a few mild replies. Ken Gelder and Gerard Windsor are big boys now and can look after themselves, but I will say that John Carroll’s is the only negative response I have seen or heard to Windsor’s June Self Portrait (there were lots of positive ones, although Gerard did get a tad upstaged by his small son). I should also like to point out to John Carroll that Norman Mailer was reduced to his correct proportions years ago (‘brought down’, if you will – funny how Mailer’s name irresistibly suggests these metaphors of detumescence) by an assortment of immortal feminists who most certainly do not need any help from me, and as far as I am concerned the basic difference between Norman Mailer and John Hooker is that John Hooker is a serious human being. If I did indeed take a tone of unbecoming admonition, it seems to me that John Carroll has caught it; there’s a lurking sub-text to his letter best expressed as ‘Naughty girl, silly girl, stop it now or Daddy will smack.’

The last paragraph of Caroline Lurie’s letter made me hang my head and kick the floor a bit, 1 must say. But it has been my bitter experience (a general observation, this) that the indiscriminate exercise of tolerance and generosity – towards, for example, the ungenerous and intolerant – in the name of enlightened female-hood usually results in having one’s head shoved firmly back down under the surface of that primordial slime (posh stuff this posh stuff go it molesworth) from which so many of us have so recently emerged, dazed and blinking, into the light.

Michael Sariban has provided us with a new and memorable collection of poetry. In 1984, the Queensland Community Press produced At the Institute for Total Recall, which met with an enthusiastic response.

A Formula for Glass is a poetry sequence that forms a loose narrative thread. It traces the poet’s journey back through his childhood, both through memory and physical visit to Berlin. The middle section is a series of meditations on themes ranging from ‘your reasons for leaving’ to ‘Justice and Sex’, to unfulfilled women who wait at home for their soldiers at war: ‘Girls growing into widows / while hanging out the washing’. The closing sequences record his grief over his wife’s early death.

Disraeli considered that biography – in contrast to history – is life without theory, though the result of such a policy can be arid. It needs, as well, to be portrayal without betrayal, but it more often errs in the opposite direction: who is likely to write about someone for whom she or he feels an antipathy or an indifference? Yet I am inclined to think that there is a case to be made for ‘arranged biography’, analogous to the ‘arranged marriages’ of other times and cultures.

Ally is fifty-four when her husband leaves her. Her best friend and her daughter – neither of whom she has ever really talked to before – are each thousands of miles away. She descends rapidly into an undignified breakdown. Retreating from everyone and everything, she grows increasingly fat and fearful. Ally has never been terribly confident in her own identity (‘People tend to look past her, rather than at her. Shop assistants tend to give her bored glazed looks and a sharp “What?”’) and now, unloved and unneeded, she is threatened with disintegration. The woman in the mirror is a stranger, she imagines herself as a white grub that she can make vanish by closing her eyes.

Q: What is the most outdated, boring genre in children’s literature?
A: The boys’ boarding school story, a fossil left over from the last century.

Q: Would it be possible to revive it?
A: Out of the question. And anyway, who would want to?

Miracles can still happen. Robin Klein and Max Dann, two of the most popular and successful contemporary children’s authors, have combined forces to write a comedy with a boarding school setting which might, just possibly, start a whole new trend in Australian children’s literature.

It’s finally happened. I’m not funny.

All my life I’ve been told I’m a ratbag. I’m a maniac. I need help. I see life different. Hint of lunacy in the blood. Touch of madness in the haircut. Dickins, he’s crazy. Dickins, he thinks like the turn-off to Shepparton.

And generally I have to say I’ve agreed with the general view; the consensus is, always has been, that Barry Dickins is as silly as a wheel. Mind you, mostly I find people who run me down about as grim as Ryan’s rope. Grimmer. (Is there a grimmer? There must be.)

Rita Erlich states that Good Enough to Eat is ‘a guide to some of the best foods in Melbourne’. It is that indeed and a very good one – and fun to read as well. But it has much more than a provincial value. Since Australian Book Review is a national journal, it is worth stressing that this book gives invaluable advice that is applicable anywhere – how to shop, what to look for, how to judge this or that purveyor, above all what questions shoppers should ask not only of the sellers but of themselves.

I thought of concealing myself behind the androgyny of my initials and writing a mean little piece about apple-pie and motherhood and pregnancy in particular. But honesty prevails and I confess to being a woman, and a pregnant one, too.

Or is it honesty? Let me search my soul here momentarily. Is it not rather the concentration on self to which pregnant women are prone, an animal survival mechanism that makes eceinte one think of herself with her little passenger as the only being on earth, and of her pregnancy as the only thing worth thinking about, the thing that people want to know?

Dear Madam,

I don’t usually believe in responding to reviews, but Kenneth Gelder’s review (ABR June 87) of The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Stories, which I edited, raises a few points which are worth a reply.

Gelder may have his fantasies of Adelaide as a city of ‘beautiful spaces’, greys and pinks, colour-coordinated, but I wish he would leave me out of them. I never lived in Adelaide, and left South Australia for Sydney nearly four years ago.

For some reason, he also feels compelled to review my The Australian Collection, published in 1985. His review is as much an attack on Richard Walsh and the Angus & Robertson designer of the Collection, and on Nelson and Barbara Beckett, publisher and designer of the Treasury, as it is on myself. The main reason for this attack is what Gelder calls ‘beautifying populism’. The aim of both publishers was to reach as wide an audience as possible, an audience composed not of deconstructionists but of ordinary (not ‘leisured, “cultured” middle class’) people made somewhat nervous of literature by people like Kenneth Gelder.

Yours etc., Geoffrey Dutton.

Dear Editor,

I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to counter in such earnest detail the views on writing expressed by John Hooker in ‘Shelf Life’. All right, a quick bucketing if you really must, but a thousand of your best-chosen words? Bit twitchy, aren’t you? Why respond to bull-necked ignorance with the full flag-flying treatment, and in such smug tones that one would have thought you’d at least brought down Norman Mailer? Your sententiousness aside, it’s quite possible that ABR readers don’t need to be preached at, Kerryn. Tedious, and dull. Still, not as bad as the good Gerard Windsor taking a whole page to tell us how to pronounce his name. And who cares about Hooker’s list of ‘best’ authors, or yours? I suggest that you invite guest columnists for ‘Abbreviations’ if you can’t think of anything to say. Put me down as a volunteer.

Your faithfully, John Carroll.

Dear Kerryn,

Hey, come on, why are you taking out your carpet beater to smash an ant? There’s poor old John Hooker, struggling not-so-young novelist in a faraway coastal resort, filling up an aptly titled column in a daily paper with a few words of a kind, just letting out a few irritations which circle round the head there in the country, just wishing littery critics wouldn’t puff themselves up so with pontifications about post-modernist radical feminist deconstructionist texts, when boom! Poor bloke gets swatted! So perhaps his grammar slips a bit. Doesn’t yours? Doesn’t mine? Don’t we all put our commas in eccentric places now and then? (You did, several times.)

Hooker wasn’t being anti-intellectual, you know, just anti-pseudo-intellectual. What this place lacks is a Pseud’s Corner. (I’m not suggesting you’d be there – anyone who could even contemplate shelling out fifty bucks for a Mills & Boon rather than spend a few hours without hir print-fix can’t qualify as a genuine Pseud.)

The man was just tossing off a few ideas, right? Maybe they weren’t ideologically correct. Maybe I don’t necessarily agree with them. Certainly, Hooker is not my friend or my sex or my nationality or my soul brother in any sense. But he isn’t devoted to floating on grey sludge either: he was just using a column to say a few things, same as you. And if you deign to notice them at all, why not treat them with respect rather than scoring points about whether he got his quotes right, or getting miffed because all his favourite writers are men, or stooping to the patronising line of ‘Poor thing, he can’t help it’?

What Hooker was saying was neither stupid nor reactionary, as you imply. The plea for simplicity has an honourable lineage, from the Bible through Strunk & White and Orwell, and a host of others I can’t even remember. Of course big, peculiar words may sometimes be useful, and there’s a certain satisfaction to be had from wielding them. But it’s a specialised activity, like carpentry or studying the habits of the lesser spotted dung beetle: and some of us really hope that literature won’t become an esoteric branch of philosophy.

There’s a conflict of perspective here, and that’s healthy, so long as it’s recognised as such. Fat chance there is of the cut and thrust of intellectual debate which Australia is alleged to need – and actually does need – if the moment anyone dares say what they’re thinking they get hacked to pieces and parcelled up into last year’s rubbish bag. Current orthodoxy is always tiresome and exclusive, and I don’t like to see it peddled by otherwise intelligent people.

OK, I’ll come totally clean and admit that I once used to hope that if women ran the show, they would extend, to all those people whose views they didn’t share, a tolerance and generosity hitherto unknown. And we will, and you must, Kerryn, otherwise the whole painful business of Getting There has been an appalling waste of time.

Sincerely, Caroline Lurie.

About twenty years ago, we were offered a house on Stradbroke Island for a winter holiday. Cheshire, the publishing company I had recently left teaching to work for, was also a bookseller; so not only was there a fortnight, kids willing, to catch up on all those books we had meant to read, but they were available at staff discount.

Before we left, I went through Cheshire’s paperback section like Mrs Marcos through a shoe shop. Lots of novels we had heard about, a couple of unknowns with rather promising covers and, while I was about it – to assuage the guilt of the promising covers – The Tyranny of Distance. I had heard it was good and had meant to read it one day.