Grey’s Valley: The Legend by Hugh Atkinson (Penguin, 144 pp)
A Mavis Singing: The Story of an Australian Family by Cherry Cordner (New South Wales University Press, 262 pp)
Fortune by Robert Drewe (Picador, 256 pp)
The Song Circle of Jacky and Selected Poems by Colin Johnson (Hyland House, 112pp)
Lachlan Macquarie: A Biography by John Ritchie (Melbourne University Press, 318 pp)
The Nightmarkets by Alan Wearne (Penguin, 291 pp)

What these six extremely different books have noticeably in common is their preoccupation with the past, with making sense of origins – personal, political, historical, sometimes all three. Maybe it’s the influence of the Bicentenary or something on our collective national thinking, coming out in recent Australian writing; it seems extraordinary that six books so different in genre, scope and intention could have such a strongly evident common preoccupation.

Grey’s Valley by Hugh Atkinson is a strange and unexpectedly powerful novel – ‘unexpectedly’ because it’s fairly short and fairly simply told, where ‘power’ as a literary quality is something normally associated with books the size of house bricks. As an Australian novel, it more or less belongs in the ‘pioneering saga’ tradition of much longer works, the tradition of, say, Brian Penton’s Landtakers through Miles Franklin’s All That Swagger and Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia to Patrick White’s The Tree of Man – but it’s not really like any of them; it has a sort of fairy-tale feel, as though the story were unanchored in time.

In the ‘legend’, the original settler, Alec Grey, is a man with a mysterious past, an almost supernatural strength of body, mind and purpose, and a passion for ‘making’; the novel is largely about the relationship between the man and his land, the building of a solid house and thriving farm out of nothing but the potential of the fertile valley in which he settles. The family name becomes synonymous with the place and remains so long after the family has died out and the property fallen into ruin and neglect. The story is told entirely from the ‘outside’ – the book begins ‘If you are in those hills you will be taken to the valley and told this story’ – so the only information about the characters that’s given to the reader is of the ‘legendary’ kind available through hearsay to the people in the surrounding countryside and nearby towns. The Grey family remains a brooding, opaque, not entirely human presence, keeping strictly to itself, and the outside community is compelled to compose stories about it simply to keep mystery at bay. Grey’s Valley is a book about how and why legends are made; it’s also, by implication, a book about the nature of immigration and colonial settlement – about what drives or draws people to a new country, what they do when they get there, and what kinds of people they are.

Cherry Cordner’s A Mavis Singing is a fact-based family saga imaginatively transformed into something that reads like a novel, even though it is of necessity episodic and anecdotal, like all biographical writing. Cherry Cordner has stuck to what facts were available to her through her genealogical research. But this story of five generations of her family pulls and draws and entices you along through it the way that good fiction does, partly through Cordner’s brilliant shaping and structuring of her material and partly because of her use of the biographical methods of Lytton Strachey – the fiction-like, dialogue­studded dramatisations of scenes from the characters’ lives. If you try to imagine a kind of amalgam of Clara Morison, Martin Boyd’s Langton novels, and The Boy Adeodatus, with a touch of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony thrown in, it should give you some idea of what this book is like to read – although it’s perhaps less ‘literary’ and probably more widely accessible than any of them.

Which is not to say that it’s not beautifully written, because it is – both in its individual turns of phrase (‘She stood there, smile congealed, trying to look at ease, wondering what the passport was to the country of the accepted’) and in its overall structure. Each episode of the family history is begun with a scene involving Cordner as a child, being told family stories or given advice by her mother, and each of these conversations has some pertinence to the narrative which follows – as though Cordner were placing herself and her evolving values and ideas into the context of her family history.

She’s also very conscious of the public world, of the changing values and ideas of the society she writes about; this results in – for example – a revealing, quietly feminist perspective on a pre-feminist era, particularly in the tragic account of the bluestocking Aunt Gert. Not that this book is in any way a tract; the treatment of its male characters is equally sympathetic, and in a book full of tales of endearing gestures the most endearing of all is made by the author’s father.

Years later, my father told me of the tor­ment of drinking a whole bottle of lemonade, which I insisted must be left for poor old Santa, who must be tired and thirsty. As a matter of honour, he felt he must drink it all.

Robert Drewe’s novel Fortune is partly, like Grey’s Valley, about the making of legends, and about discovery and recovery. It’s the story of an energetic and increasingly obsessed adventurer called Don Spargo who finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast of Western Australia, loses it, finds it again, and subsequently becomes entangled in a wide net of financial and political confusion and intrigue exacerbated by his own personality and behaviour.

It’s a much more subtle piece of writing than this ‘adventure-story’ synopsis would suggest. For one thing it’s a book about narrative itself, about fiction and journalism and their similarities and differences, about recovering ‘the truth of what really happened’ from the more complex of life’s newsworthy events – especially when, as here, those events span twenty years. Drewe’s narrative method takes its structure from visual media like cartoons and film, and the reader is deliberately made to work hard in ordering, connecting and interpreting the short scenes, vignettes and scraps of fact from two hemispheres and twenty years.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe has written of an ‘absence of love’ in Australian writing, especially by male writers. One of the best things about Fortune is its moving, complex, underplayed treatment of the two love affairs which form part of the story; Drewe writes better here about romantic love and sexual passion better than man in the country.

Colin Johnson is one of the best known and most prolific of Australia’s Aboriginal writers, known chiefly for his three novels. This collection of his poems The Song Circle of Jacky is a hard book to write about for reasons to do with the simple inadequacy of my own training, reasons to do with language and language’s inbuilt politics. The way we have all been taught in an obsessively Anglophile tradition to write about literature becomes manifestly inadequate, if not a kind of insult, when applied to a book like this where personal and political passions which implicate the reader are expressed, often in rhythms unfamiliar to white ears – rhythms we can like instinctively but have no critical language to describe.

The thirty-five poems in the Song Circle use the character of the ubiquitously-named Jacky as the focus for Johnson’s wide-ranging and complex concerns about the history and the contemporary conditions or Aboriginal life in Australia: the remaining poems cover all kinds of subjects, including life in India where Johnson has spent considerable time. They are, as the blurb says, ‘accessible’ poems, but not simple ones; some of the Song Circle poems are passionate and disturbing. I remember being given Kath Walker’s poems to read when I was small, and the permanent impression made by them; Colin Johnson’s work is what this generation should be giving its kids to read.

John Ritchie’s Lachlan Macquarie is the historically intriguing tale of how a basically-nice-but-not-earthshattering personality came to find himself Governor of the Colony of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and of how the effects of that responsibility combined with the influence of his extraordinary second wife and the most admirable of his character traits shaped his conduct during that time and after.

John Ritchie has made extensive use of Macquarie’s journals and letters in this study, with the interesting result that the author’s own prose style frequently approximates his subject’s: Ritchie achieves this portrait of Macquarie’s personality not least by reflecting his use of language. Lachlan Macquarie is exhaustively researched; the bibliography and the amount of research work it indicates is nothing short of staggering.

But if this makes the book sound dense or dry or difficult, it’s misleading; Ritchie’s strong sense of narrative, skill in incorporating documentary source material into the shape of his story, and interest in Macquarie’s personality and motivation make this biography lively and frequently dramatic reading. Ritchie’s account of Macquarie’s work as Governor to transform a penal settlement – a site of negativity, a dumping ground, characterised by crime and punishment – into a colony with a positive sense of its own existence is obligatory reading for anyone interested in the origins of Australian society.

Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets, reviewed in this issue, is also in its own way a study of origins, this time more localised and precise: of how a particular generation in a particular time and place arrived at its social and political beliefs and practices, among other things. Wearne is a regional writer in the same kind of way that Helen Garner is; in The Nightmarkets as in her work, the landscapes of Melbourne are inextricable from the characters who move through them and from the events those characters generate. Wearne, however, is much more concerned with organised politics and the public sphere; to read these two writers in tandem is to get a pretty thorough education in contemporary Melbourne.

The best way to read The Nightmarkets is twice, once fast for the narrative and then slowly for the poetry; once you know who and what is going on then you can go back and savour the technical intricacies of the writing. Notable among these is the brilliant use of rhyme, often almost unnoticeable in the contemporary-colloquial flow of the ten dramatic monologues which make up the book – except in moments where it’s deliberately stretched to Ogden Nash-ish comic absurdity (as in the rhyming of ‘I thank her’ with ‘Casablanca’, or –my favourite – ‘virus’ with ‘Glen Iris’).

The Nightmarkets is full of things one wishes one had said oneself, as where one of the major characters, Sue Dobson, is talking about returning from Britain to Australia and must be speaking for thousands of us when she says ‘You know, out here we’ve so much / to guess with. Out there’s the horizon and / after that the horizon. Can’t live anywhere / that lacks the idea of one …’

There’s the shortlist, then, and a rich and strange assortment of summer reading it was. The winners will be announced in Melbourne on April 28^th. To help promote the National Book Council Awards for 1987 we have devised an ABR/NBC Awards Trivia Competition for your diversion; you can find out how to enter in this month’s ‘Abbreviations’. Prizes: copies of the two Award winners and twelve months’ free subscription to ABR, and all you have to do is read this issue from cover to cover …