Books flow steadily from the northern to the southern hemisphere through the traditional conduits of empire. To get them to flow back the other way is difficult but it can be done. The real task though, it seems to me, is to overhaul the plumbing so that writing and writers can flourish, and that’s a long haul.

The present debate about whether Australian books should be first published here or whether the British are better at what they now like to call global publishing – or whether it matters either way – is welcome but woolly, light on facts but strong on invective. One side labels the other naïve and ideological, or, alternatively, blasé and bland. Both sides are less than frank about their limitations and neither, beyond tossing the word ‘nurturing’ around a lot, has said enough about what being published really means and what kind of context we are working in.

I have a theory that every second Australian is a closet short story writer. And this is a conservative estimate. According to my theory, the so-called ‘booms’ in the history of the Australian short story in the 1890s and 1950s merely reflected fashions in the book and magazine publishing businesses, not the relentless scratching away in exercise books or thumping of battered typewriters which occupies the waking hours of the determined taleteller and which is, I am convinced, a more popular national pastime than dodging income tax. How else to explain the sheer volume of short stories being published? And these are but the tip of the iceberg – a mere fraction of those that have been and are being written.

The current boom is not simply reflected in the numbers of anthologies and collections currently available, although these are significantly high. There has been in recent times a notable increase in the numbers of literary magazines publishing short stories regularly. The numbers of literary and little magazines are themselves increasing and, if Tabloid Story is now defunct, other outlets which appear more frequently have sprung up to take its place. The Australian newspaper prints a quarterly Literary Supplement comprised mainly of short stories; In-print: the short story has been resurrected and now appears three times annually while Bruce Pascoe’s Australian Short Stories, appearing quarterly since No.1 at the end of 1982, continues to grow in popularity and prestige. Rumour has it that the much-lamented short story biennial, Coast to Coast is soon to be revived, extending even further the avenues open to previously unpublished material.

As artists get older, they are supposed to mature, and commentators begin to look for the demarcations of their three periods, a nice bequest from Beethoven. One vitiating side effect of this is to misplace freshness in their art. Judging the vital middle period works, and bowing before the sublimity of the late, the critic bestows a nostalgic glance over his shoulder to the early output – ah, what freshness, what morning glory there! It may be true of Beethoven, but the experience of most of us lesser creatures is more often the opposite. We start a bit grey and elderly: only later, after much experience, do we throw off ponderousness, embrace wit and light-spiritedness and appear verdant for the public gaze. I hope Chris Wallace-Crabbe will not object to my including him in this (to me) honourable company: those who write, after thirty years on the job, with twice the élan they had at the beginning.

In ‘Partying on Parquet’, the story from Vernacular Dreams chosen by Don Anderson for inclusion in Transgressions, the hapless Steve attempts to hold a party for his HSC tutor Penny. The party is split into two small groups: Penny and her ‘uni friends’ Jan and Greg, and Marina and Pavlos, ‘dumb ethnics like himself whom he had met at Greek dancing class’. Naturally everything goes wrong, from the loudness of heels on the parquet floor to the botched lunge at Penny in the kitchen. But this is not just a simple story of humiliation. Steve is depicted at the end standing under the shower moving from resolutions (‘As for Greg and Jan, the only way he would ever be able to get on top of smart arses like them was to beat them at their own game,’) to what might be called ‘shower dreams’: ‘The steam had got so thick, he could hardly see a thing. He stared up at the ceiling. It was hanging there like a mist, a fog, with the light shining through; and it as his for as long as he wanted.’

The jacket painting on Bruce Beaver’s highly wrought little book of prose poems is Lloyd Rees’ ‘The Coast near Klama’. It’s an elevated view of virgin green and dun coloured headland, the ochres rising through. Sea swirls into an oysterish bay. There is one distant figure looking down on another distant figure in a rock pool below. The sky, as with so many Rees skies, is egg-shelly yellow near the horizon, a glowing compliment to the taste we form and hold of earth.

Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.

For part of my life I lived for many years in a monastery. Singing, particularly of plain chant, was important, and the monastery was divided, with a monastic, unworldly sense of the implication of its metaphors, into ‘the choir’ and ‘the scrubbers’. I excelled. Whatever vocation I had, it certainly included being an eternal scrubber. For many years I spent fifteen minutes a day with a patient friend who attempted to teach me to sing the Gospel for the third Sunday before the Epiphany. Standing in the monastery basement and earnestly inhaling the smell of monks’ football boots and sandshoes and unwashed football jumpers, I could never get this simple piece of plain chant right.

I continue to sing off-key, much to the delight of the children my monastery never intended for me. This is my last Abbreviations column. Because of ill health, I have resigned from ABR. But apart from that, I believe that all columnists should retire after three years. Or sooner. Attention Philip Adams and Max Harris. In this last column I shall be more self-indulgent than usual. This column commenced as an information sheet. When it was handed to me, I dutifully typed out various badly written press releases until I could stand it no more and started giving my opinion. Now I find I am repeating myself. Boring for my mother and any other readers. So, I sing again off-key and start with some of things I have done off-key that relate to the joys and agonies of editing.

The Australian Stage represents an interesting intersection between the academic world and the creative arts, between the long perspective of the historian, and the ephemerality of theatre performances. Its methodology is academic; it proceeds from an examination of documents, of written records of an art form only one aspect of which we think of as being written, the actual texts of plays. However, these are not the documents in question (although some bibliographical information about the plays is also included); rather it is the responses to performances, particularly reviews, written reminiscences, playbills, newspaper reports, which provide, collectively, the material for a historical survey of theatre in Australia.

Thus the accompanying analysis is historical rather than literary; it is about the society which produces theatrical performances, rather than about the aesthetic judgments that might be made from an examination of what was performed. These documents have a cultural significance partly because from them we can read a sequential story, adding to our knowledge of a developing national consciousness. How a nation entertains itself is indeed revealing, even if you exclude sport, and it is hardly surprising to find charted here a classic tale of decolonialization. That an indigenous cultural identity has been successfully established can hardly be doubted now that governments subsidise both writers and performers. Useful as such a history as this is in understanding - the processes by which we reach today’s status quo, there are still a number of questions left in abeyance, some of them pot really elucidated by history; nor amenable to an academic approach.

In November 1984 when I left Queensland to come back to Victoria, Kathy de Bono, a friend from the Yoga school, followed me to Murwillumbah where I was catching the train. She told me that because my car was old she’d drive slowly behind me in case I broke down. Now my Lesley McGinley doesn’t look much, but it goes like the clappers. Out of mischief I flattened my foot when I’d crossed the Tweed, and Kathy soon became a speck in my rear vision mirror. When she reached Murwillumbah she said ‘I brought a packet of tissues in case you cried. Instead you’re all lit up and laughing.’

I must confess that it was not only the thought of coming home that’d lit me. The trip to Murwillumbah would light anyone. It’s one of my favourite slices of Australia. The cane fields were soft jade green, the mountain range blue. In the banana plantations bunches of ripening fruit, enclosed in plastic, had become giant flowers of a wilder blue. In Murwillumbah the jacarandas were in bloom – everywhere.

I caught the rail motor and travelled home with Lesley McGinley coming along the track behind so that I could look back on the bends and see it. On the trip I remembered my first visit to Melbourne. I was ten and on my way home to the Apple Isle from Adelaide where I’d been holidaying with my father. I was wearing the first pair of suede shoes I’d seen, dark brown ones, and Dad took me to a film called Wings of the Morning. It was set in Ireland and about a racehorse. Tyrone Power undressed a French actress called Annabelle beneath a tree. She’d been running around disguised as a boy and the foliage of the tree disguised the undressing scene as well. It was great stuff though. In the end Wings of the Morning won the right race and the two undressers got married. We should all be so lucky …

When the Writers’ Week organisers asked me to come and talk on a panel of literary agents, I naturally asked what they wanted me to talk about. (I knew that jokey anecdotes about publishers, writers, and agents would be just the thing; I also knew that my delivery would fall horribly flat, even if I could remember any.)

It was suggested that I might talk about pitfalls for writers – a subject on which literary agents can wax lyrical for hours – but that seemed slightly arrogant from where I sit, and I began to think of pitfalls for agents. And from there I started to think about what agents can and can’t do, how useful we are or aren’t, and by the time I’d thought all that through, I had the bones of what I wanted to talk about.

The hugest, most gaping pit into which the unwary agent can tumble is the pit of pride, of thinking they know it all and can fix it all and make everything come good for whichever lost lamb they’ve most recently taken into the fold. Unfortunately writers conspire to foster this dubious illusion. They like to imagine that once they’ve acquired the services of a literary agent, their careers will flourish like the green bay tree, their work will find instant acceptance, in Australia and everywhere else, film rights will be sold for bulk dollars, and fame and fortune will follow automatically.

It ain’t so, of course, and it’s the agent’s job to make sure that them and their author don’t plop into this pit, cosily hand in hand. There are things agents can do for writers and things we can’t, and it’s important to sort out the cans from the can’ts.

Dmytro Chub, in his introduction to On the Fence: Ukrainian Prose in Australia, observes that ‘Although there are some fine novels set in Ukraine’s historical past and under Soviet rule, the period spent in Displaced Persons camps in Germany and the emigré experience in Australia has given birth to no more than a few short stories. While older writers sentimentalise about a lost past, younger writers do not wish to stir up the sensitive issues in the community.’ This is the problem of the anthology. While it may be admirable to translate into English Ukrainian writing, the act of doing so exposes the weaknesses of translator and writer. As long as the prose or fiction remains within the language context of the group, it gains from the common memory of things past, shared pain, shared loyalty, shared guilt. To the printed word is added associated experience. Set it into a new language, a different social context, and the word has to work much harder in getting things right.

It seems to me that in this anthology words don’t work well enough in most of the writing to raise it above school essay standard. Perhaps this doesn’t matter because experiences are being set down and those members of the community who do not read Ukrainian are gaining knowledge of life outside their own. In telling his tales, my father can shape experience into a short story; my mother can’t. The event remains an incident, a fragment, a didactical stick or a dismembered thing unconnected to a body of ideas. However, good oral storytelling does not necessarily mean skill in writing . In the speaking, voice, tone, cadence, pauses, make cliches acceptable. Some of the stories here need to be heard, literally. They also need to be reworked. A more skilled translator. a more imaginative editor may have given them the kiss of life. But as they are on the page they remain waiting for the magic touch.

Kate Llewellyn’s poetry is immediately accessible and clear, but not simplistic. She is completely at ease, unlike most writers, with reading her work aloud; this may be a function of an eminently readable style of writing, or the reverse, where the style follows .the demands of reading aloud. Either way, it works.

Llewellyn is very good when retelling, in fact rewriting, mythological and folkloric tales. This is not new. Such poems can be tedious when simply argumentative, but Llewellyn’s versions of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Helen’, ‘Eve’, and others appear to have a personal edge and are written in a relaxed conversational way that makes for easy but interesting reading.

This book of elegant and gentle reminiscence covers the period ‘from the depths of the depression to the return of Bradman’. Bradman is used to present a focus of a boy’s perception of his world in the thirties and forties. There is a war, and no cricket, no Bradman. ‘Test cricket was in abeyance, only to return if we won. What would the Germans do to cricket? Ban it? Shoot all cricketers? The Japanese would be worse, Father said. Despite Teutonic arrogance, the Germans were European, while the Japanese were yellow and beyond prediction.’ The war touches life on the Riverina plain near Finley. Planes overhead, men going off to war, and finally, news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘A city had been destroyed. I’d been to Melbourne, I knew what a. city was, and a. city bad been destroyed ... The war, which would soon end, would be leaving us high and dry above the waters that had produced Hammond, Larwood, Voce, Maurice Leyland ... ’ Life will never be the same on the playing fields of Finley or in the paddocks of the Eagle farm. This is a book of sophisticated whimsy, of convincing recollection, of deep but deft seriousness. ‘Time passed. The Germans were defeated. The papers ran articles on the fitness of Bradman and the likelihood of his return.’

I read this book with a consistent delight of recognition. Part of this recognition is historical, in that I keep saying, yes, I remember, it was just like that. But more fundamentally, there is the recognition that Eagle has the rare gift of getting childhood right. I remember too, from my Albury childhood, the mythology that had already developed about the people of Albury answering a plane’s distress call and rushing in their cars to the showground (in my mythology it was the racecourse) to provide light for an emergency night-time landing. And the smell of chloroform that sickened hospital visitors. But Eagle’s strength is not simply history but humanity. The trauma of being discovered, through a brother’s passing-on of information, having stolen a packet of PK. The trauma of keeping hidden from parents the fact of a broken dinky toy or a punctured bike, only to find that these minor tragedies were of no importance to parents. Young Eagle stores treasures in ‘a biscuit tin from the stack in the wash-house’ – lovely to walk into a wash-house again, even with the recognition that wash-houses were a place of drudgery for a woman – and the treasures are almost forgotten: ‘I remember a coin or two, a badge, a newspaper clipping ... and then memory runs out.’ It is the time and world of Biggles (far superior to Worralls – ‘I consider girls unfortunate because their magazines are prissy’), Bonnington’s Irish Moss and Buckley’s Canadiol mixture, Reckett’s Blue that mysteriously makes clothes white. Eagle writes of his past with unsentimental lucidity. He uses a Wheat Board term, FAQ, Fair Average Quality, to describe the tenor of his family life. There are some pages where Mother and Father are presented in a sort of antiphonal form that I found rather tedious. But tedium is rare in this finely structured book. The countryside of the farm life is sharply realised. This is no unquestioning idyll. Eagle loves his windburnt country, with its storms (the mirrors are covered with blankets), threat of drought and bushfire. But he recognises the inherent cruelty of farming: ‘… the docility of a well-run farm disguised a brutality I found obscene.’ There is also a sharp portrait of the cruelty of small boys to a drunk wandering blaspheming down the main street of Finley.

These four books cover a broad, though certainly not complete, spectrum of the sporting literature available in this country; highlighting both the strengths and shortcomings of the genre. Sport is an important element for many people, and as such its place and significance in our lives deserves thoughtful consideration. That sport is a recreation does not mean that it should be indulged in unthinkingly or uncritically. As one anonymous Yorkshire cricketer (probably Wilfred Rhodes) pointed out, ‘We don’t play cricket for fun, you know’.

As the title suggests, Richie Benaud’s latest autobiography, On Reflection, is more than a mere life and times of the former New South Wales and Australian all-rounder and captain. For those who would wish to know more of how he took his 248 wickets and scored his 2,201 runs in 63 Tests, Spin Me a Spinner, published in 1963, remains one of the best examples of sporting autobiography around. In On Reflection Benaud musters his experience as a cricketer and journalist and more recently as a cricket consultant, to provide a refreshing insight into the game that he has seen change dramatically over the past thirty-five years, and to offer some interesting suggestions for its future direction. A most welcome aspect is Benaud’s appreciation that, while the game has changed greatly, some traditionalists have been too quick to berate the changes as being detrimental: ‘ … everything which seemed so marvellous years ago is often less so when you get down to the honest task of truthful recall.’ Some traditionalists might be alarmed to learn that from the moment cricket became a mass spectacle, which in Australia was in the 1850s, it has had to pay for its own upkeep and money has been an important consideration for both officials and players. Discussing a throwing controversy in Melbourne club cricket in 1870 one journalist, a former Cambridge blue, wrote that:

Resistance has three components – intelligence, sabotage, and aiding service personnel to evade capture. or to escape. Nancy Wake, in occupied France, was active in all three; and Jack Champ escaped. A member of the sixth division, he was captured in Greece, later taken to notorious Colditz.

There are seventy books about Colditz already. The Diggers of Colditz focusses on Australians imprisoned there. It was a very heavily guarded castle, just south of Leipzig, near the centre of Germany. Once out of the prison you still had to get out of Germany. Those sent there had already attempted escape from other prison camps. The Germans mistrusted the Australians; the Pommies saw the Aussies as tough, rough and admirable. Colin Burgess helps Jack Champ tell the latter’s own story. Included are satisfying sketches of other Australians and their escape bids. We are often on tenterhooks, always impressed by their determination, industry and courage. The chronicle starts with the original capture, describes camp life, details escape attempts and ends with liberation by the Americans.

Maria Lewitt is, if anything, a writer in the realistic mode, and she might be among the last to see her own work – and characters – in either symbolic or allegorical terms, For, their flesh­bone-and-blood individuality and tangibility aside, the major protagonists of her autobiographical novel No Snow in December – sequel to her earlier prize-winning Come Spring – could well be seen to constitute a spectrum. representing the migrant’s coming to terms with the land of his/her adoption.

At the one end of that spectrum stands Victor, a lively once-likeable acquaintance from narrator Irena’s Polish past, now a man embittered, sardonic and hating, a man obsessed and possessed by that past which has seen the wartime butchering of his first wife and child and which has, as a consequence, come to colour – or poison – with suspicion, cynicism and sheer malice every act of decency, courage or suffering he encounters in Australia.

It is eight years since Jean Martin’s book The Migrant Presence (1978) eloquently pointed out the extensive resecuring required in our mainstream institutions to redress an entrenched inequality. Problems experienced by migrants were pervasively dealt with in ways that blamed the victims. At worst, the different cultural backgrounds themselves were indicted as the problem. In the face of Australia’s accelerating demographic revolution, we conveniently avoided confronting the changes called for in our own cultural perspectives and social institutions. ‘Assimilation’ blanketed the field with its ill-explored assumption that the migrants were the misfits. Their differences were of little interest and were anyway temporary. Migrants would of course change rapidly to become like ourselves. This view was supported by a yawning silence. There was no book such as Ethnic Family Values.

In belated acceptance of our contemporary cultural and structural diversity, we now speak of ourselves officially as a multicultural society. If the phrase is to mean more than window dressing, the dimensions of our diversity need to be shared and under­stood. A primary aim of Ethnic Family Values is to discuss that diversity in a concrete manner so that professionals in the area of social work, police departments, health service workers, teachers and others whose jobs involve delivery of the services of our mainstream institutions may have some knowledge of their clients. Of these, ‘one-quarter were born overseas (approximately 55% of them non-English) and a further 20 per cent … have at least one parent born overseas’. The articles address ‘a vast ignorance and insensitivity to different value systems’, largely avoiding the danger of stereotyping inherent in an attempt to convey the elements of a different culture briefly. It is not on ‘culture’ in some abstract or romanticized sense that they focus. Their aim instead is to provide factual· informa­tion in the. areas of family life, family law, sex roles and the adaptation of these in Australia. A team of writers between them consider Italian, Yugoslav, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese and Aboriginal families. The information provided covers seventeen ethnic groups and seven major religions. It is sad that the article on Aboriginal families comes last. The history of our inhumanity and our trenchant refusal to understand their cultural precepts or to accord them any dignity represents in harsher form a legacy inherited by many immigrant groups. This stark fact would have been clearer if we had been confronted first with the Aboriginal experience.

Not since Altman has there been such an erudite book on the subject of homosexuality/lesbianism.

The reader of this critique might wonder at the choice of ‘homosexuality/lesbianism’ as a description of the subject. A reading of the book will demonstrate the necessity of the term. Thompson illustrates the fact that female homosexuality, as is female sexuality in general, appears to be a non­issue for the majority of authors, politicians, legislators and medical theorists. The book, however, is not a feminist treatise per se, it is an historical overview of the gay liberation movement in Australia and of the attitudes and theories on homosexuality. The refreshing feature of this book is that it is neither an apology for, nor a justification of, homosexuality. It is a factual and well-reasoned document on the topic.

I doubt if there has been a book like R. W. Connell’s Teacher’s Work. It aims at presenting to the lay reader the detail and nitty-gritty of life and work in schools from teachers’ day-to-day perspectives. The book successfully illuminates much of the routine of a teacher’s work and the way schools operate – at least in New South Wales in the late 1970s. However, this is one of the book’s problems. Because both time and place are so specific, there is a real problem about relevance. I felt many of the comments did not apply as clearly to Victorian state education as they obviously did to NSW. In particular, important initiatives in Victoria like the creation of post-primary schools (combining. High and Secondary schools) and the important Blackburn Report, inquiring into post-compulsory education in Victoria, limited the books usefulness. Furthermore Connell’s assertion that schools and teachers are essentially conservative (a statement with which I basically agree) partly ignores the fact that education is having to deal with quite massive changes.

Paul McLean was an uncommonly gifted Rugby Union player who represented Australia over the period 1974 to 1982. A long career by Australian Rugby standards, McLean’s period at the top coincided with the emergence of Australian Rugby from a period in the doldrums. He played his first Test at a time when the Australian Rugby team had an ordinary international record; talented and entertaining it was, but Australia was not quite one of the great Ruby nations. By the time McLean retired, Australian Rugby had been transformed. It had won series at home against Wales, France and New Zealand. And it had completed an impressive and successful tour of the UK, marred only by a poor record in the Tests.

Paralleling these great strides at the national level was an even more dramatic revolution in interstate rugby competition. A premier winter sport in Queensland and N.S.W. only, the annual clashes between the two States rival Test matches as the focal point of the season. For decades, McLean’s home state of Queensland had regularly been thrashed in these encounters. From the mid-seventies onwards this pattern was abruptly reversed, and Queensland has dominated the interstate competition ever since.

Hans Mol, who, though of Dutch birth, has many ties with Australia, is professor of Sociology of Religion at McMaster University in Canada. His Religion in Australia being out of print, he has now produced a new book on the same subject. The opening passages inform us that religion is on the periphery of Australian society and that it is ethnically based.

The historic mainline churches, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, demonstrate both theses amply, while the post-war influx of adherents of Orthodoxy and Islam are further instances of the latter. The first chapter provides a detailed demographic study of religious adherence, followed by a discussion of the sects. This highly charged term is used in a -non-pejorative sense to indicate a ‘particular religious body [which] tends to stress its marginality and separateness in a particular society and tends to attract individuals who are marginal.

As Professor Oskar Spate says in his Foreword, ‘Most Australians who have heard of Miclouho-Maclay at all have a vague idea that he was the first ethnographer to do serious work in New Guinea, a Russian with a warm human sympathy for native races’. In this sensitively written biography, Elsie Webster presents Maclay as a man of strong, complex and sometimes inconsistent character who packed a remarkable amount of work and adventure into his short life of forty-two years.

Nicolai Miclouho-Maclay was born in Russia in 1846. His father was a railway engineer who died when he was eleven years old and his mother’s grandfather had been physician to Prussian and Polish kings. He was a ‘hereditary nobleman’, a rank which did not carry a title. He was called ‘Baron’ by people outside Russia but he did not encourage its use and he can be acquitted of the charge of self-aggrandisement. In 1868 he adopted the additional surname of Maclay but, although he claimed a Scottish grand-mother, its origin is uncertain.

Sydney’s Nullarbor, that international wasteland fringed by car yards that masquerades as the Parramatta Road, has few peers in the communications business. Driving back to my airconditioned oasis at the cultural Broadway end of the tatty ribbon, I passed drought-stricken telegraph poles all festooned with a stark (Koo?) message, black on yellow: “Fergie and Andy its official”. That’s what instant communication is all about … and let us look forward to similar treatment for book promotion: “A Fortunate Life – a million sold”, “Keneally nabs Nobel Prize”, “Illywhacker joins space probe mission”. You can sense my optimism tinged with yearning.

I was wrong about ABC Television’s State of the Arts. It is adopting the Oscar Wilde approach to culture, seeing the artistic world as a witty florid pastiche. Here is lack of audience involvement. Once again it is for the converted, with no stops to pick up passengers on its road to Damascus.

There was much talk of radicalized spirituality and flamboyant extremes at the first meeting of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies in New York March 21 and 22. The tone was scholarly without being stuffy. Alexandra Cromwell from the University of Minnesota searched for (and found!) Byzantine themes in The Twyborn Affair and wryly commented that she was probably the first person to bother about such a connection. Norma Richey of the Louisiana State University talked about Stow’s narrative and Phyllis Fahrie Edelson gave a feminist interpretation of Hanrahan’s novels. Brian Matthews, currently in residence at the University of Oregon, was one of the few Australians at the conference. He gave a fine description of the Angry Penguins hoax which sparked a discussion of nationalism.