The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

Much of the impetus for the emergence of political advisers has come from the conviction of reforming governments (like Wilson’s Labour government in Britain or Whitlam’s in Australia) that the bureaucrats are unsympathetic and obstructive to their policy initiatives. The problem, Walter argues, is not so much one of particular bureaucrats’ conscious political commitment as the organisational interests of the bureaucracy itself: ‘Bureaucratic organisation and the methods appropriate to it inevitably entail limited responses to political demands.’

The autobiographer faces a real problem: the self. ‘Which self?’ may also be the reader’s question and it may also be the question of the autobiographer. Should one write about the known self, the self vaunted or scorned by others, the public one, parts of which can be found in archives, on record, in the books and conversations of friends and enemies? Or should it be the private self, the self-protected and defended by jokes, chiack and taciturnity, hinted at here or there, but never accepted as real when defined by others?

Donald Horne gives us the invented self, a fictive rather than fictional character, real up to a point, private up to a point, but guarded with irony, protected by the Colgate ring of smiling good humour. Not-so-young Donald is an obvious source of amusement to biographer Donald and we are fortunate to be able to share his joke.

Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’

The taste for aphorism is matched by a taste for formal verse. Steele is fond of the iambic pentameter (as I am), of the villanelle, of complex stanzas, and in this book he revives the ballade with distinction. At the same time, he writes a good many reflective poems in long unrhymed lines of alternately six and five stresses and running to two or three pages.

With Dryden out of favour and Rochester still only a cult enthusiasm, ‘Restoration literature’ is likely to evoke for most readers only stage comedy, yet likely to seem to a casual reader to promise only scholarly drudgery in justly neglected corners, crowned by an inadequate, hurried examination of a major work, Samson Agonistes, looking sadly astray in this company.

It is true, I think, that the chapter on Samson is inadequate to the work (and it is not quite clear why the even more formidable. Paradise Lost escapes attention); it is true, too, that it has little affinity with the rest of the literature Jose discusses. On the other hand, if his discussion of Samson is slight (and of course an adequate account would have utterly unbalanced the book), it is brisk, original and provocative – this chapter alone elicits in the author a critical intelligence to match the scholarly intelligence deployed elsewhere; and Jose is easily able to take Milton’s work as exemplary, revealing the nature of his contemporaries’ inadequacy.

Baldly, the Restoration of Charles was a measure taken in the absence of any other carrying conviction, but it answered to no deep conviction itself. A crucial passage of Dr Jose’s conclusion is worth quoting:

There was a degree of provisionality and uncertainty at the heart of the Restoration settlement. There was nothing that could be pointed to as ‘social reality’. Political exigencies were confused. There was no received version of the immediate past, and hence no established ways of seeing the present or anticipating the future; and the literary conventions to hand were in various ways anachronistic or inappropriate. In such a situation, in answer to a wide-spread and many faceted desire for reparation and restoration, the poets engaged in an art of fabrication. A naive craftsman like Sir William Davenant, for example, was concerned to work up a coherent and positive view of the king’s return. He made his job straightforward by the exclusion of complicating doubts and alternatives …

Milton, of course, stands utterly opposed to all this. Most interesting, though, is Marvell who, unlike Milton reconciled to the Restoration, nevertheless was able to be swingingly critical of government. I have long been mildly fascinated by his very uneven, at times scabrous satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, which reveals a poet very different from the lyricist who has monopolised attention for the last fifty years. It is satisfying to have this poem set in its historical context in Jose’s sixth chapter, ‘The Poetry of the Second Dutch War’.

After Samson Agonistes, Marvell’s poem is the work that most wins Jose’s respect; it is a pity that he does not devote more critical attention to it and it’s place in English poetry: that he thinks the latter as significant as I do is signalled clearly enough by a parenthetical reference to ‘Marvell’s successors – Swift, Gay, Pope and Johnson.’. Nevertheless, we may be grateful for the book we have, which is never less than informative and readable. Like many monographs that stem from doctoral theses, this carried in its Preface a burden of acknowledgement that, faintly comically, gives the sense of the completion of an exhaustive lifework. We can hope, on the contrary, that this is only a distinguished beginning.

From the enlightenment to post-modernity, there has been one common rallying cry: ‘This is the age of criticism.’ Religious authority, natural rights and philosophical dogmatism have all been under critique for so long that criticism has almost come to seem natural, authoritative and is in danger of hardening into dogma. Little surprise, then, that outside the academy the word ‘criticism’ is seldom linked with the venerable discourse of theology, politics and philosophy but rather with a comparatively recent and fluid phenomenon: Literature.

Like the essay, the ‘review goes back further than the academic article, dissertation or book. Wordsworth and Keats were reviewed long before their poems became the subject of academic debate, and the average competent article generally does little more than combine and refine several of these first responses. Questions of historical priority and belatedness aside, though, there are other mutations to consider. The reviewer’s right to comment upon contemporary high culture has largely been usurped by the literary critic; and the venue has changed from the newspaper and magazine to the journal and conference. The review pages of our newspapers are increasingly taken up with commentary upon popular and middlebrow culture. There are exceptions, but high culture tends to be noticed in the media only when it bears the mark of a spectacle: the melancholy face of ageing Patrick White, an opera costing thousand’s, or a modernist painting being bought or stolen.

In a paper entitled ‘Anthologies and Orthodoxies’ given recently at the Australian Literature Conference in Townsville, Jennifer Strauss, herself a poet as well as an academic, analysed the contents of six recent poetry anthologies, including this new Penguin collection. She came up with the same revealing statistics as editors Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn had discovered from a larger sample of fifteen collections: the average of female authors represented was only seventeen per cent. Obviously one of the orthodoxies enshrined in anthologies is in need of critical scrutiny if we are unwilling to accept the implication that there are either fewer or less talented women writing poetry than there are men.

The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets flings down the gauntlet, as it were, with a gender-specific survey, challenging categorisation based on genre or theme, such as The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse or Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems, two recent anthologies which distinguished themselves with a mere seven per cent and nine per cent (respectively) of women poets. Some anthologies have always been based on exterior factors such as place or time. ‘Australian’ has now to accommodate multiculturalism as well as expatriatism, ‘Modern’ has given way to ‘Contemporary’, but both have totally arbitrary boundaries.

Some years ago, when I was able for the first time to lecture on the position of women in Australian society within an Australian Studies undergraduate course (in a section headed ‘Minorities’), the available material on the topic, apart from occasional brief throwaway references in the standard works, was minimal. Recognition that this gap existed – in academic courses, in the knowledge structures of disciplines, in our minds – coincided with the publication of those first few books, like Damned Whores and God’s Police, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann and others, that allowed the subject of women to be spoken and the social structures and discourses that positioned them to be examined.

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Ken Goodwin must have found this a brute of a book to write. Not that difficulties are apparent in the writing. Far from it. It is simply that, in looking at it from a reviewer’s point of view, I am increasingly aware of the constraints under that the author must have suffered while managing to produce a book which the general reader and the interested undergraduate will find both interesting and useful.

There have been two major cycles in Australian political rhetoric since the war. The first occurred during the postwar reconstruction period, from 1943 until 1949, when contest over a new social order impelled an unusually clear articulation of philosophy and policies by the contenders for influence – represented in public debate by Curtin and Chifley on one hand, and Menzies on the other. The eventual ascendance of Menzies and the dominant ideas that emerged from that debate informed our political life for the next two decades. Not until the late 1960s, when the Liberal-Country Party coalition’s grasp of events slipped, and when the new problems of the modem world economic system and Australia’s precarious place within it dislodged the assumptions engendered in the 1940s, did the debate about the nature of our policy gain a new edge.

Dear Editor,

I was surprised, on reading the August Issue of ABR, to find no comment or tribute to the former editor, John McLaren. I understand too well the pressure of deadlines and have no doubt that ABR will, at some future date, provide a fitting tribute to its former editor.

In the meantime, I would be grateful if you would publish my own small and inadequate tribute.

Inner city residential areas of large Australian cities have, it is said, been transformed by a marauding band of the professional middle class. These people bought dwellings with ‘potential’, took up residence, and refurbished their houses back to their original state or into some dainty contemporary form. Such has been the demand placed upon this housing that a sharp escalation in house prices has resulted. Increasing costs associated with this rise have forced many old, long-term, working class residents – the traditional inner city occupants – out into distant suburbs. Thus, inner city residential areas are now dominated by the middle class.

Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.

As the child of survivors of a war-battered, sorely depleted driftwood generation, I have acquired reasons in plenty to call myself lucky. Perhaps more, far more, than merely lucky.

Born in Russia, the son of Polish, Jewish refugees, my life might have evolved in line with any number of scenarios, the final actual one being arguably among the least foreseeable.

We may, for instance, my parents and I, in the postwar years, have remained incarcerated in the Soviet Union, or have settled in any of the ports of transit along our journeyings – in Warsaw, my parental home, or Germany or Paris – while, had other papers become available ahead of the Australian visa, we might, at wanderings’ end, have found ourselves in Israel, the USA, South Africa, or Brazil, in each place to be potentially caught up variously in wars, confrontations or currents more dislocating, more life-menacing, terror-threatening, or officially oppressive and stifling than anything experienced in this our actual final destination, Australia – Australia, which, at the time of our arrival in 1951, was a place far from another bruited European war and known for its sheep and its fleece, though, regrettably, for little else.

Here, the relative freedom, the relative egalitarianism, and the relative mobility generally characteristic of Australian society - relative, because freedom, egalitarianism and mobility can never be either absolute or total – coupled with a sound work ethic and frugality brought as part of my parents’ otherwise very meagre baggage, permitted me within a decade-and-a-half of reaching these shores to attain to a profession – medicine – scarcely dreamed of by my forebears, subject as they were to the numerus clausus operating in educational institutions in Poland and seldom free from the poverty, crowding and limited opportunities that were their lot.

I have never flown first class on Qantas; I’d love to, but somehow I don’t think I ever will. But next time you fly first class on a Qantas 747, take a look at the inflight library and you might be surprised to find copies of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s Strong Man from Piraeus; Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino; Evan Green’s Alice to Nowhere; Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds; or Kate Grenville’s Lillian’s Story.

It must have seemed as natural to Penguin as money in the bank to ask Helen Gamer to provide a few enticing words for the cover of Jean Bedford’s new book, Love Child. Here, it would appear, is a book very much in the Garner backyard – short, domestic, ‘certainly not ‘loud’ or attention-seeking, but nicely crafted.

The two lots of new-look literary pages in the Age Saturday Extra and the National Times on Sunday are bidding fair to brighten up the weekends, especially for Victorians and for Other-Staters who also read the Age on Saturdays and will therefore get the benefit of both.

On the retirement of Stuart Sayers, Rod Usher has taken over the editorship of what is now the ‘Books’ part of ‘Arts and Books’ in the Age Saturday Extra, and is making a pretty classy fist of (and here I speak from experience and from the heart) an extremely demanding job. The few reservations I’ve heard around the traps have been to do with the number of Age staff reviewing books, and with the possibility that the ‘Books’ may get swamped by the ‘Arts’ now that they’re a double act. These odd mutterings are fair enough, but overall the whole section’s looking good.