The Australian Year looks like the dreaded coffee table book, yet another gloss on the national ‘identity’, backed by Esso, and fit for export only. Certainly, the cover picture of parroty water gives that impression, as do many familiar ones inside, though the main photographer, Peter Solness, does turn in some good homely details as well. Generally, the photographs stand like an avenue of plane trees, their density and hues changing with the seasons of Les Murray’s fully ripened, free-ranging text – which meets the high expectations we might be forgiven for holding when a major Australian poet, a well-versed country boy and populist by persuasion, an erudite and vernacular singer of the old and new, writes a book on a phenomenon as democratically inclusive and resonant as the seasons.

This book can read at times as though it were Les Murray’s revenge on Australian poetry. Of course, no anthology will please all of the people all of the time, but this one does not so much seem to represent any consistent view of what significant poems have been written in this country as Murray’s own projections about the kinds of poetry which ought to have been written here. The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse is quirky and opinionated, very ambitious in the ground it wants to cover, and yet ultimately hamstrung in its assemblage. It amounts to a quixotic attempt to see Australian poetry as a massively unified body of work, and Murray has played fast and loose with the material that was before him in order to reveal this unity.

My own view is that he has tried to do too many things at once, by way of both inclusion and exclusion, for the book to remain coherent in its own terms and credible as an anthology of Australian poetry from its beginnings to the present day. There are in fact three books struggling to get out of this one, two of which should have been edited by Murray, the third by someone else. The first is an anthology of Aboriginal songs in translation, the second an anthology of vernacular poetry, ballads, folksongs, broadsides, and the like. Murray is deeply read in both these areas, and I think it is clear that he would have liked to include more material from either category had he not felt compelled to represent the work of contemporary and near contemporary poets.

The third anthology, and the one that has suffered most in the way Murray has ordered these pages, is an even-handed selection of major poems by the significant Australian poets, especially of this century. Murray has no doubt put the book together in the way he has in order to dissolve these distinctions, his resentment of which is well documented: but The New Oxford Book suffers from Murray’s synthetic and lateral approach, not because very different kinds of poems can’t sit reasonably side by side, but because he has seen fit to allow his taste for particular kinds of poetry to influence his selection of demonstrably different kinds.

The hazards of this approach are accentuated by the ground rules for inclusion Murray sets up in his introduction . ‘I have,’ he says, ‘imposed a working limit of three poems on everyone. This has made it possible to present an oblique view of the poetic landscape in which the peaks and larger hills do not obscure the smaller features.’ This might seem an admirably egalitarian way of putting an anthology together, especially one where well in excess of fifty per cent of the poets represented are still alive. And it might also seem a good way for an anthologist whose views on the art tend to the emphatic to guard against his own excesses.

In practice, it hasn’t always worked this way. The three-poem limit does work quite well in the first hundred or so pages as an efficient means of sifting nineteenth and very early twentieth-century work. Murray is completely at home with this material and has come up with a quota of poems which are for the most part lively and readable. There’s not too much fustian or fluted warbling here: Murray’s preference is for a down-to-earth brand of verse which spins yarns or makes jokes, and he has a particular affection for anything which cocks a snoot at the Old Country. Nonetheless Kendall’s ‘Bellbirds’ gets a guernsey, though Adam Lindsay Gordon is wiped off the map altogether. I did like the plain precision of these lines by Mary Fullerton though the sophistication of the tone is in fact atypical of the early pages of the book:

Ardent in love and cold in charity,
Loud in the market, timid in debate:
Scornful of foe unbuckled in the dust,
At whimper of a child compassionate,

A man’s a sliding mood from hour to hour,
Rage, and a singing forest of bright birds …

So far, so good. But as the ‘tradition’ starts to define itself in increasingly complex and self-conscious ways (it is worth noting at this point that Kenneth Slessor crops up just a little over a third of the way through the book), Murray’s ‘trade-union’ method makes for increasingly confusing reading. The wonder is not that Murray has tried to do it well but that he has done it at all. Three poems, unless they are of substantial length by a poet who customarily writes at substantial length, are hardly enough to give the reader a grip on any specific contributor. This book is much easier to skim than to read simply because the turnover of voices is so remarkably high.

And these problems are compounded by Murray’s declared avoidance of ‘anthology pieces’ and his very sparing treatment of the ‘established classics’. Having imposed on himself an arbitrary system he reacts with what looks like a wilful arbitrariness. It is apparent that the major figures from the generation roughly preceding Murray’s own have been given rather short shrift in this anthology. If you are interested in Slessor or Webb or Wright or Hope you will come away disappointed. With the exception of ‘Five Bells’ you will not find the poems which these poets have come to be known for and what is included is there in such small quantity that the impression left is negligible. The New Oxford Book has been so thoroughly constructed against a notional consensus of what might reasonably appear in an anthology of Australian poetry that it almost presupposes a knowledge of what has been omitted. It is highly probable that readers coming to this book without much knowledge of its subject (and anthologies work, by and large, as books of introduction) will wonder why poets like those named above are still read when others have long gone out of print.

The one area in which Murray’s steadfast principle of limitation breaks down is in his inclusion of English translations of Aboriginal song-texts. These punctuate the anthology at regular intervals. Almost all the songs are in literal translation and some do have a genuine luminousness and delicacy, though they tend to read in English like nothing so much as the drafts and fragments of poems. I cannot imagine that any of the mainstream poets represented in this book would allow their work to appear in this kind of translation. Murray’s refusal to rework the texts has left some of them inhabiting a deformed and shadowy no-man’s land between the original language and fully-fledged English poems.

There’s an element of projection about all of this: it is perhaps a measure of the distinctiveness of Murray’s own voice (and of his own raids on the treasure-house of Aboriginal song) that so many of these transcriptions read like gestures towards a Les Murray poem. And the fact that these are the only translations in the book tends to accentuate the air of special pleading their inclusion has about it. In this context, the omission of Dimitris Tsaloumas, the Greek-Australian poet – who in fact collaborates with his translator Philip Grundy – is nothing short of scandalous. Had Murray mixed things up a little by including a few translations which were unarguably finished Australian poems (J.M. Couper’s hilarious version of Horace’s Pyrrha ode, for instance), his selection of the Aboriginal verse would have seemed both richer and less chauvinist.

In his introduction, Murray argues that the latter portions of The New Oxford Book show less idiosyncrasy than the earlier sections because the number of mainstream poets who had to be included made it more difficult ‘to fit in material from what we have come to think of as the fringe domains of poetry’. The implication is not just that Murray would rather have been editing a different book but also that he sees the vast bulk of Australian poetry being written now as suffering from a kind of sameness. ‘A certain received “modern” sensibility becomes dominant’, he says at one point and while this is true in a banal sense (no sensibility can be entirely unreceived), it is unfair of Murray to blame the perceptible blandness of some of the more recent works he prints on the exigencies of his brief and on the cultural weather.

The latter section of the book is the one which will most rapidly date because Murray, rather surprisingly, has been content to play it safe and include as many ‘names’ as the anthology would tolerate. Through the course of the book, he in fact reverses his principles of selection and becomes inclusive of poets rather than exclusive of poems. The only qualification this statement requires is that the omission of Laurie Duggan, Alan Wearne and John A. Scott is a grave mistake, inexplicable given the number of respectable trundlers Murray does include. Anthologising poets who are still mid-career is no easy task, and I think there is an argument that anthologies which include contemporary work should declare their partisanship and then let the reader judge. As things stand, Murray seems tom between his duty to what he perceives as the field and his liking for poets such as Mark O’Connor or Robert Gray who do rather well given the premium on space in this book.

It is a strange anthology Murray has given us. Overtly programmatic in some ways and almost whimsical in others, The New Oxford Book begins in much better style than it ends. It is likely that he has made the earliest verse written here more accessible than any other anthologist before him: given his affection for certain kinds of descriptive and narrative poetry he selects with genuine flair where such material lies thickly on the ground, though ultimately this does become a function of Murray’s limitations as an editor. A whole range of voices from Judith Wright’s to John Tranter’s are not in any sense sufficiently characterised by Murray’s selection. The New Oxford Book is an anthology of taste more than judgment which paradoxically compromises its own catholicity just as surely as its structure seems to provide for a catholic approach. Murray, it would seem, has had his cake and eaten it.

Patrick White is a downy old bird. He has always shown remarkable ability to keep up with the game, even to keep ahead of it. Whether the game is currently being called Modernism, or Postmodernism, or some other ismatic title, he can handle it as a writer and still be himself. From The Aunt’s Story to The Twyborn Affair, he has displayed this ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to go in with the ferrets and also come out with the rabbits. In other words, of all Australian writers he most convincingly builds a bridge between what critics ask for and what readers want.

‘We assume, of course, that we are masters and not servants of facts,’ observes T.S. Eliot in an early essay, ‘and that we know that the discovery of Shakespeare’s laundry bills would not be of much use to us’. The sentence continues, still flickering between amusement and seriousness, futility of the research which has discovered them, in the possibility that some genius will appear who knows of a use to which to put them’. If he had lived a decade or so longer, Eliot may have smiled to hear of the furore which attended the publication of Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscripts, including his laundry bills. And while he may not have been entirely amused by Jacques Derrida’s essay, Éperons, partly prompted by this publication, Eliot would doubtless have agreed with one of the theoretical points that was made: it is impossible to tell for sure which of an author’s writings do not belong to his or her oeuvre.

The usual incumbent of this space is, as it were, being spelled. Meanwhile, the view from the other side of the bookshop counter is cheery. The debate about whether too much is being published and whether women writers are getting more of the discrimination than they are positively entitled to has flitted across the pages of the Bulletin and the National Times, with John Hanrahan, formerly an assistant editor and acting editor of this magazine, providing insight and balance.

Kylie Tennant hasn’t taken the task of telling the story of her life seriously – and that is one of the real pleasures of this rough and ready autobiography. Her ten novels and many short stories, as well as being piercingly accurate social documentaries, are carefully constructed to work as good yarns should. But Tennant’s autobiography is not well put together. It reads as if she is nattering with a friend and laughing at herself a lot. She rambles a bit, avoids any semblance of self-analysis, is engagingly matter-of-fact about her achievements and her failings.

Historians of the left have frequently adopted a highly sceptical, if not outright hostile, stance towards that pursuit of working-class interests through parliamentary politics which resulted in some form of ‘welfare state’ in most western industrial democracies. Historical interpretation has tended to polarise. On the one hand, liberal scholars have heralded the progress of governments towards active provision of an assured basic standard of living for those least advantaged in a capitalist society. On the other, a handful of socialist and Marxist scholars has discovered merely the minimal concessions of a bourgeois state to dampen the zeal of radicals, for fear of threatening disruptive social conflict; the reforms themselves were partial, inadequate, and a prop to the essentially conservative interests of the state, rather than a genuine modification of the body politic in the interests of the working-class.

Why do we like interviews so much? There must be a reason. Maybe it’s the lure – too often, alas, as in lurid – of confession: the ‘X Reveals All’ syndrome that deceives the mind into thinking it has always wanted to know what it is (finally) about to be told; or the more elevated sense of privilege and honour felt by those in whom such truths are confided.

This book is a useful and lucid account of Australian foreign policy since the very beginning. It does not purport to be an authoritative or a particularly analytical account of the evolution of external policy but is one which senior secondary school children could find helpful in achieving a sense of perspective. As its author concedes, to grasp the essentials of Australian foreign policy this book read in isolation would not be enough, and some general knowledge of world events is necessary.

I had sworn, in my editorial capacity, not to reinforce or allow to be reinforced, by word or deed, the old Sydney vs. Melbourne scenario in the pages of this magazine; but I realised very quickly that this was a case of one’s reach exceeding one’s grasp. The construction of this inter-city relationship as ‘St Petersburg or Tinsel Town?’, with its suggestion of two (and only two) opposing superpowers and its implication that one must make the choice, has – however you might feel about it – an imaginative force before which one can only bow. Several recent items in ABR have drawn on the two cities’ perceived differences in order to make points about the books or ideas under discussion (see, for instance, Rob Pascoe’s review of Frederic Eggleston and Intellectual Suppression in this issue); Jim Davidson has produced The Sydney Melbourne Book as heralded in last month’s ‘Starters & Writers’; the ‘opposition’ model seems to be a powerful figure in the national literary rhetoric.

Jenny Boult’s sixth book ‘I’ is a versatile character is also her first book of prose. It follows her play Can’t Help Dreaming which was performed by the All Out Ensemble in Adelaide, and four books of poetry, including The Hotel Anonymous, which won the 1981 Anne Elder Award.

The stories in this collection vary greatly in form and content, but they share a particular ‘poetic’ style which is rare among contemporary Australian prose writers. Although Boult is by no means the first Australian poet to publish fiction, she has been more successful than most in bringing to her prose many of the skills she has developed in writing poetry.

This dainty, delicate, savage book is lovely and rare because it is truthful, vicious, brimming with the blue eyes of memory, the red eyes of defeat, the open mouth and congo drum of childhood. When Barry Oakley writes of his childhood, it is you booting him the footy of laughter.

He writes, wonderfully, sweetly, dreamily of taking his sore-footed mum and soft-drink-eyed son for the satiric day to Taronga Zoo. Among the gorillas and orchids, you watch him scribble in the light. A journalist cobber to fellow mysteries, his friends.

He describes Patrick White as a retired Dairy Farmer; quite whitely so. I have only seen Monsieur White once. I was sipping drunken tea inside George’s Cafe in Oxford Street, and he gloomed by. I wanted to call out something, but couldn’t imagine him sharing lettuce á la defeat.

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.

That question is not the book’s subject, although one suspects it could well have been. One Man’s Way is an autobiography of sorts, collecting a body of Cecil Holmes’s writings, arranging them in chronological order, adding updates and postscripts where necessary and allowing them to speak for the man. It covers a period of over forty years, from 1939 to 1983, following Holmes’ career as film-maker, journalist, and notorious communist. The range of material and subjects is wide: the political problems of the Timorese, the recording of an Aboriginal ceremony, a chilling observation of Hiroshima after the bomb, an eye­witness account of Cyclone Tracy and its aftermath, and travellers’ tales of the Solomons, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, New York and the bush. All are marked with a particular perspective: the sense for the human and the idiosyncratic, as well as a sharp awareness of the importance of politics in the construction of our lives – no matter where we live. It is an account of a life that has been full of frustration and pitfalls, but a life that is also rich and vividly experienced.

This is a marvellous book. Bob Browning, an engineer who went to university after his retirement to study history, has produced an analysis of the 1975 constitutional crisis which has no peer in the now bulky literature written about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. Part detective story, part law treatise, part an essay in historical reconstruc­tion, the book is carefully crafted, sparely written and absorbing through­out. It is going to have a powerful effect on Australian political thinking, because the current generation of Australian politicians will have to come to terms with it, and because for the next ten years at least, university students will be told to work through it from beginning to end.

Back in the days of innocence, it was possible to choose ‘Imelda’ as one’s Confirmation name. I know. I did it. I was inspired by the touching tale of Saint Imelda’s life, not to mention her typically tragic and early death. At the time it seemed a good balance for ‘Dymphna’. If you were not aware that Saint Dymphna is the Patron Saint of the mentally ill (and latterly of at least one incest support group) you will be enlightened by Growing Up Catholic.

I suspect that the production of this cheery little book was motivated not only by the success of the similar volume in the United States last year but also by next year’s visit to Australia by the Holy Father. Catholics, lapsed and practising, will be searching their consciences on a scale not seen since the early days of the DLP. The bonds between the flock and the One True Faith will be rejuvenated.

The main objective of the Children’s Book Council of Australia is the encouragement of children’s reading, and the most widely known aspect of this is the support of quality literature through the Children’s Book of the Year Awards. The National Executive is responsible for administering the Awards, and appoints a Judge’s Secretary to carry this out.

Each state appoints one judge for a two year term. Half the judges retire each year, thus ensuring that the panel always includes some experienced judges. States appoint as judges people who have a wide knowledge of and interest in children’s literature. Whilst some of the judging procedures have varied over the years, the fundamental aim of selecting children’s books of high literary and artistic quality has remained the same.

Program for Change… Affirmative Action in Australia. I began to make my rash assumptions. Here was the book that was going to provide me with the blueprint for future affirmative action initiatives. I anticipated new perspectives and innovative strategies. I expected this collection of essays to be interesting, stimulating and provocative. I thought this would be the vehicle for the eleven contributors, well known and respected in the field of equal opportunity and social change, to present their original ideas on how the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce could be broken down. I was disappointed and I was bored. But was I fair?

Most biographies are about active people who do several things well but usually do them one at a time. As the publisher’s blurb says, Baldwin Spencer did many things and when Mulvaney came to describe his activities he found that the usual chronological approach used by most was not appropriate; four chapters of the book describe Spencer’s contribution from about 1895 to 1920 to biology, University administration, the Melbourne Museum and Australian art, and the reader must integrate these if he wishes to establish a chronology. Spencer’s anthropological work, including his stint as Special Commissioner for Aboriginals in Darwin in 1911, runs as a thread throughout the whole book. Biographers have to face up to controversies in the lives of their subjects and with Spencer these were the disintegration of his marriage, his lapse into alcoholism in the early twenties, and criticisms of his techniques as an anthropologist.

Marjorie Barnard, is, of course, a collaborator with Flora Eldershaw in the writing of five novels as well as several other books, under the collective name of M. Barnard Eldershaw. The stories in this collection, most of which were first published in various Australian magazines before they were brought together in 1943, represent her only attempt at solo fiction writing. All of them have some value and interest and among them are some classics, notably the title story which was reprinted in Coast to Coast and has been frequently anthologised since, most recently in Laurie Hergenhan’s The Australian Short Story.

A new catalog with a group of kangaroos posed gracefully on the cover has recently gone out to American libraries, academics and suppliers interested in Australian books. It contains the new Spring offerings of the University of Queensland Press, still the only Australian publisher with its own US offices. Unlike most university presses, UQP publishes fiction and poetry as well as the more typical scholarly monographs. Pearl Bowman who runs the New York-based operation is a rare combination of dynamism and intelligence and sensitivity. At the moment she is campaigning to get other Australian publishers to operate individual or cooperative ventures in the US and hopefully stem the flow of successful authors who depart to greener pastures of foreign publishing houses. (See what Mark Rubbo has to say about this in April ABR.)

Here are two books which illuminate aspects of intellectual life in Australia. The anthology edited by Brian Martin et al documents numerous instances of ‘intellectual suppression’, cases where individual scholars find their careers in jeopardy because their findings offend the powerful.

Some of the examples are famous. Cedric Pugh earned the wrath of the South Australian Institute of Technology when he questioned some of their staffing policies. Ann Moyal, a talented and enthusiastic academic in the field of science policy, was suspended from Griffith university on trivial grounds. Others are less spectacular but equally unjust. Richard Davis of the University of Tasmania specialises in Irish history but apparently has a stubborn enemy in another Australian university who can block his every application for external funding.

Roy Pascal was the major pioneer of the modem study of autobiography in the English language, in his book Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960). This was primarily a literary history, and was of particular value because of Pascal’s wide knowledge of continental European literature and criticism. Pascal’s volume was absorbed relatively slowly, and the critical study of autobiography in English only ‘took off’ in the 1970s and 1980s, with books like Karl Weintraub’s The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography ( 1978), and W. C. Spengemann’s The Forms of Autobiography (1980). James Olney’s selection of various papers in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) is a useful guide to the state of autobiography studies today.

Every autobiography reflects the conventions and contexts present at its conception. Literary and historical criticism is still at an early stage of recognition of this complex mix of individual and social elements in particular texts. Indeed, there is no agreement about the nature of the reading process itself – a structuralist, a semiotician, a sociologist or an historian will often read a discourse in radically different ways. Autobiographies can be particularly deceptive and difficult because they can create the illusion of direct contact between the self of the writer and the self of the reader. Any reader who wants to penetrate beneath these surface effects will benefit from two recent books, one edited by Doireann MacDermott, and the other written by Richard Coe, formerly Professor of French at the University of Melbourne, now at the University of California.