Each person’s death diminishes us all, but the death last year of Olga Masters has removed from us, and our literature, a talent that had too little time to flourish.

To speak of too little time seems idiotic unless we understand that this mother of seven, who also had to work part-time as a journalist, was, like so many women of her era, simply not free to sit and write that most solitary of occupations until she was in her fifties. Not for me to judge what she would have considered her most important work, the rearing of a large family or the writing of fiction, though the dedication of this novel is simply: ‘for my children’. I am glad, however, that, in time, she managed both.

In a response to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli published in Quadrant in 1982, Gerard Henderson observed that ‘recounting the story of the Anzacs has become something of a growth industry’. Five years on, the Gallipoli industry shows no sign of a downturn. The salvaging and publication of war diaries, letters and manuscripts that had long mouldered in museums, libraries and attics, the spate of ‘epic’ teledramas and ersatz war fiction (like Jack Bennett’s spin-off from the aforesaid movie), new historical studies and the resurrection of old ones such as C. E. W. Bean’s Official History and, at the other end of the scale, John Laffin’s Digger: The story of the Australian soldier (its subtitle magically changed to ‘The legend of the Australian soldier’), all attest to the enduring appeal of Australia’s military exploits to writers and filmmakers and to the subject’s ability to tap a popular audience.

Ida Mann’s autobiography reminded me a little of the kind of speech that well-known elderly women tend to give to girls’ speech nights – full of zest, homely admonition, and assurances to the rows of upturned young faces that they’ll get out of life what they put in.

Serge Liberman is that unfashionable thing, a committed writer. Not committed to a party-line, of course, but to a literature of engagement with humanity. A parable that seems to illustrate his view of the artist’s role is provided by a story entitled ‘The Poet Walks Along High Street’. The poet, Gabriel Singer, walks along a street pointed towards ‘Erehwon Creek’, peopled by allegorically named figures. In this imaginary place the inhabitants are offered a ritual cleansing, announced in the manner of an evangelist’s message. But there is violence in the streets. The slogan over the hospital echoes the viciously ironic slogan that welcomed victims of the holocaust to the concentration camps: ‘Cleansing Makes Free’. The poet watches friends and acquaintances being sent into the ovens:

He was a poet, an artist, not a man of action. His brief was to create order from disorder, beauty from discord, truth from confusion. Not for him was it to compound violence with violence or confound common sense with derring-do. Nor was it in his power – let others do it! – through ill-judged action to alter events. What had been – if, indeed, it had truly been – had had to be. For this was the way of the world. And if others had been cleansed, purified, purged and, in that way, redeemed, it was because they had shown reason for it ...

To have or not to have children: a dilemma made possible by technological advances and the consequent loosening of social roles. Once, having children was both an almost inevitable result of adult sexual activity and, generally, a desired one. For most people, being an adult member of a society implied having and taking responsibility for children. And for many people it still does. But it is now possible for people to choose when to have children, or to choose not to have them at all. No Children by Choice is a collection of interviews with men and women who have chosen not to have children; Mature Age Mothers is a collection of interviews with women who have not had children until they are over thirty (except for Junie Morosi who had three children in her teens and another child at forty-five).

The jacket blurb describes Beyond Redemption as ‘a novel about falling rapturously in love in the dark ages of the nineteen fifties.’

It’s before my time, but I had always thought of the 50s as the very opposite to dark: white sugar, white flour, clean lines on cars and furniture, the white lines in the sky from passing jets. An era of expansion – the baby boom, the great push for home ownership. In Australia, a time with a great concern for the marking out of territories and boundaries, definitions: the carefully fenced lawns planted with English shrubs marking out one’s private space, the nuclear family. And on a national level, the White Australia Policy.

The last decade or so has seen a spate of books and films about the days of British colonialism. While much of this outpouring has been critical of aspects of those days, it is hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that underneath it all lurks a fair amount of nostalgia. And here lies the danger in much of this material: it is one thing for colonial survivors to feel nostalgic (as it is hard for people to discredit important actions in their own lives); it is another for them to lure readers into sharing that feeling.

For British imperialism was not a pretty era. At best, it was paternalistic and authoritarian. At worst, it was degradingly exploitative and violent. How, for example, could the Chinese forget that, less than 150 years ago, the British waged war to force them to allow imports of opium and thus make addicts of countless thousands? And, more immediately, why should Aborigines join in the 1988 celebration of a white migration which led to their oppression and, for many, death?

Ida Mann’s autobiography reminded me a little of the kind of speech that well-known elderly women tend to give to girls’ speech nights – full of zest, homely admonition, and assurances to the rows of upturned young faces that they’ll get out of life what they put in.

Like so many autobiographies, The Chase has a curiously undigested quality about it. Only if you stand well back and listen carefully is it possible to pick up the moments when self-awareness breaks through the public presentation – when the voice changes for a moment or two before briskly carrying on with the account of people and places and professional milestones.

Don’t let the silly title put you off; this is a marvellous read, stylish, splendidly crafted, the kind of autobiography that is all too rare in the Australian experience. Who to compare with MacCallum (beware: the elder Mungo, not the one still being rude from Canberra) in recent years? Hasluck perhaps. Whitlam maybe, overlooking the egoism. Donald Horne, again discounting the ego. The genre, if the word must be employed, is restricted.

MacCallum, journalist, broadcaster, novelist, poet – original in every sense – bears a formidable name and inheritance, although of more significance to Sydney than elsewhere, except in the confined, raffish field of Australian journalism. There was the grandfather, awesomely distinguished, Professor Mungo MacCallum, destined to be knighted and become Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and – rather more justifiably than for some to whom the phrase has been applied – a legend in his lifetime. There was the father, yet another Mungo, scholar, indeed Rhodes Scholar, who could have occupied a chair in law at Oxford, but chose instead a career in Sydney as a barrister, failed and ineffective, toper of frightening enthusiasm, and journalist of renown in the trade, but, as leader writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, not widely recognised.

Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory opens with a riddle:

‘Would you tell me please, which way
I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where
you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where – ‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘ – so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you ‘re sure to do that, ‘ said the Cat, ‘if only you walk long enough.’

To start with a different biography: R.M. Kessing’s Elota’s Story: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islands Big Man (UQP, 1978) will tell you the following tale.

In the Kwaio settlement on the Solomon Islands lived a man called ‘Elota. Through careful cumulative earning, and an expanding set of enterprises (breeding pigs, growing taro, making bracelets and anklets), as well as cutting costs in feasting, ‘Elota managed to attain the status of Big Man. Though ‘Elota presented himself as a humble character, he used his wealth to provide huge feasts, which established his popularity in Kwaio. The feasts were usually held after a burial ceremony. What made ‘Elota different from other Big Men in Kwaio was the way he combined a strong commitment to old customs with a belief in the Christian god. One of the remembered sayings of ‘Elota is, ‘A house with pigs is a house into which money flows.’

The sad fact about this worthy collection of interviews is that it has already dated, and it was dated on the day it was published. A bright, interesting, and useful journalistic account of the marketing of Australian movies to the Americans, it is redolent with the euphoria which followed the surprising arthouse success of Breaker Morant in the USA in 1981. Most of the interviews were recorded in 1982-3, and the book’s authorial conclusions are essentially those which seemed appropriate in 1983. What may have been quite a subtle interest in Australian film then has since been swamped by far more obvious and unequivocal successes – the Mad Max trilogy of genre movies and, of course, Crocodile Dundee. So, there is a degree of hesitation in this book – the careful positing of possibilities, the modest isolation of a trend – that would not be there if it were to be assembled now. It is a book of its moment, and that moment was four years ago. The authors, or their publishers, implicitly admit this by adding a 1986 afterword, but it only underlines the fact that this book has taken two years longer than it should have taken to reach our bookshelves.

That said, it is an interesting read for anyone who has followed the fortunes of the Australian film industry, and who cares about its survival. The book collects interviews with film industry people from both sides of the Pacific in order to trace the nature of the interest Americans suddenly found in Australian movies. We meet American critics, publicists, marketing people, and Australian directors, producers, marketers, and ‘talent’ (a curious category, usually used for front-of-camera workers rather than for writers Bob Ellis, David Williamson and unionist Uri Wendt). Many of the comments are illuminating. A fine interview with an opinionated Robert Altman, a revealing discussion with a representative of Home Box Office (the cable television network), a charming expression of commitment from a New York publicist, offer fresh points of view on Australian film production alongside the more predictable (because more familiar) perspectives of Philip Adams, Gill Armstrong, Fred Schepisi, George Miller and others. Some of this latter material is disappointing. Parts are either very similar to, or borrowed from, Sue Mathew’s earlier 35MM Dreams; the repetition of material and approach does not enliven these interviews.

In a response to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli published in Quadrant in 1982, Gerard Henderson observed that ‘recounting the story of the Anzacs has become something of a growth industry’. Five years on, the Gallipoli industry shows no sign of a downturn. The salvaging and publication of war diaries, letters and manuscripts that had long mouldered in museums, libraries and attics, the spate of ‘epic’ teledramas and ersatz war fiction (like Jack Bennett’s spin-off from the aforesaid movie), new historical studies and the resurrection of old ones such as C. E. W. Bean’s Official History and, at the other end of the scale, John Laffin’s Digger: The Story of the Australian Soldier (its subtitle magically changed to ‘The Legend of the Australian Soldier’), all attest to the enduring appeal of Australia’s military exploits to writers and film­makers and to the subject’s ability to tap a popular audience.

And now - predictably, perhaps - ‘Australians at War’, a fifteen-volume attack on the Australian market by Time-Life Books in conjunction with the Sydney publisher John Ferguson. Apparently we should all feel grateful to Time-Life for its vision and enterprise. The series, intended as ‘a tribute to our nation as a whole’ (did Bob Hawke write the blurb?), is the first produced by the American firm for what its public relations people call an ‘indigenous’ market, and will embrace several as­pects of the Australian participation in the two world wars, plus Korea and Vietnam. Time-Life has kindly paid us the compliment of allowing Australians to tell their own war story - according to Bonita Boezeman, the American managing director of the company’s South Pacific division, exhaustive research had uncovered the startling fact that ‘no one was writing war books from an Australian point of view’. (She was interviewed for the Australian.) Time­Life should sack its researchers: parochialism, often of the most unpleasantly blinkered kind, is one of the more obvious traits of what has always been a robust local war literature.

Some autobiographies are like novels some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

In this book everything seems brisk, lively and casual. From the beginning of chapter one, which tells us that ‘My parents were railway people and we lived beside the tracks all our life’, to the point where seventeen-year-old Patricia Jean is about to leave as a VAD on a troop train we are taken through the plain events of a working-class girl’s growing up. It all sounds perfectly fair dinkum. As the author writes in her prologue, ‘Hear the Train Blow is a true story.’ And country railways made up a world remarkably rich in stories.

Some autobiographies are like novels, some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

In this book everything seems brisk, lively and casual. From the beginning of chapter one, which tells us that ‘My parents were railway people and we lived beside the tracks all our life’, to the point where seventeen-year-old Patricia Jean is about to leave as a VAD on a troop train we are taken through the plain events of a working-class girl’s growing up. It all sounds perfectly fair dinkum. As the author writes in her prologue, ‘Hear the Train Blow is a true story.’ And country railways made up a world remarkably rich in stories.

Of course there is always a paradox in our saying that something is true and that it is a story. Stories resemble other stories. The plain, brute facts of life begin to take the traditional shapes of stories as soon as somebody makes them into stories. Life keeps on imitating some kind of art or other.

The winners of the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature, judged by Margaret Whitlam, John Bryson and D. J. O’Hearn, are Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets and Robert Drewe’s Fortune. Here is the Judges’ Report.

It is customary to begin Judges’ Reports by discussing the difficulty with which the judges reached their final decision. In the case of the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature these difficulties are best illustrated by the fact that the judges’ final decisions could not be described as unanimous. While the final choices were made without heat or acrimony, it is quite true that the judges experienced the gravest difficulty in achieving their shortlist of six from the 84 titles submitted.

Even then four books, each of which was worthy of a place on the shortlist, were highly commended by the judges. These were Chester Eagle’s Play Together Dark Blue Twenty (McPhee Gribble), Rod Jones’ Julia Paradise (McPhee Gribble), Patrick O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia (NSW University Press) and Fay Zwicky’s The Lyre in the Pawnshop (University of WA Press).

There were other books reluctantly eliminated for various reasons from the judges’ final consideration for the shortlist. It would be invidious to name them. Some comments on highly commended books were:

Dorothy Johnston’s first novel Tunnel Vision told a story of the lives of women on the job in a rundown Melbourne brothel. For her second book she moves to another scene of female oppression and exploitation, the domestic home. Ruth passes up the surrealist comedy of the earlier novel in favour of a closely-observed realism, which combines social satire with human pathos by setting the life of its heroine against the social and political developments of the mid 1970s. A novel with a strong sense of time and place, it moves from the township of Port Lonsdale, drenched in the sight and sound and smell of the sea, to the urban environment of 1975 Melbourne, in ferment over the precarious social reforms of the Labor government, the fall of Saigon, and that other fall, the dismissal of the Whitlam government. That Ruth herself seems unable or unwilling to make a successful transition from nature to culture establishes her as a symbol of the female predicament which Johnston explores with such care and subtlety.

It’s a favour to no-one to call him (certainly never her) ‘a modern Henry Lawson’ – as the back cover of Bruce Pascoe’s collection proclaims – because of the large and difficult questions that are raised. What does the name ‘Henry Lawson’ mean? ‘The Loaded Dog’, or ‘Water Them Geraniums’? The writer of humorous stories about the bush where life is animated by a huge and comic spirit, or of ones about living in the bush that leave you feeling dismayed and chilled to the bone? And who is this epithet aimed at? For some Lawson is the face on the ten-dollar note; for others he’s the successful Australian writer who went to England and failed to make any impression, returned, and then lived long enough to mourn his own decline as a writer, ending his life as a miserable drunk; for still others he’s one of the first writers you read at school.

The point here is that Australian culture is not so homogeneous that the name Lawson can be taken for granted. And what does it mean to call a writer a ‘modern’ Henry Lawson? The idea seems to include some notion of resurrecting the past; perhaps the kind of rewriting of the popular mythology of men and the bush and country life. The trap here is a kind of complacent nostalgia. Murray Bail’s story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, which is as much about Russell Drysdale’s painting as it is about Lawson’s story, is instructive here. Bail’s story is a reading of the painting, and its power comes from the way it unlocks the story hidden in the details of the painting while at the same time telling another side of Lawson’s story. This is a story that deals with disappointment and loss, the soured marriage of the speaker and his wife, the bush and the way it means, to each of the characters. But its carefully sustained and ruthless economy wipes out even the possibility of nostalgia and sentimentality. Some of Pascoe’s stories are set in the bush; most are about men’s lives; some of them tell those lives as heroic struggles; others deal in a kind of pathos that reaches for Frederick McCubbin’s The Bush Burial but, inevitably, leaves the reader short changed because that particular kind of pathos doesn’t really work for anyone anymore.