The debut of the ‘Books’ pages in the National Times on Sunday was impressive, with a wide range of reviewers, reviewees, articles and columns. Graham Little, who has produced some of the most distinguished and enlightened writing in recent years on Australian politics and politicians, was an appropriate choice to review Malcolm Fraser on Australia as Barry Oakley was to write on the current issue of Meanjin (‘A funny Meanjin? Is this, like The Spirit of Queensland … and Christian Real Estate … an oxymoron?’) (And for more on a funny Meanjin, see below.) D.J. O’Hearn takes a padded sideswipe at the title of Kevin Childs’s Men on Women (but far be it from me …) and Sara Dowse’s review of Jean Bedford’s Love Child is accompanied by a general article on Bedford by Michele Nayman. Jack Hibberd is amusing and knowing on Thérèse Radic on Nellie Melba, and editor Jan McGuinness’s own column ‘Under the Covers’ promises to be a fruitful source of Australian literary gossip – like, for instance, the fact that the amazing Richard Walsh is leaving Angus and Robertson to take up the position of Editor-in-Chief at Australian Consolidated Press. Speculation about the possible identity of his replacement, or replacements, is rife. Richard will, we are glad to report, be staying on as a member of the ABR Editorial Board.

And while we’re on the subject (more or less) of Angus and Robertson, they have published two extremely beautiful books, companion volumes jointly described in the press release as ‘Pioneering Life Revisited’. These editions, The Letters of Rachel Henning and Mary Gilmore’s Old Days, Old Ways, are, like the recent Paterson and Lawson collections, classic high-quality Aust. Lit. lavishly and lovingly reproduced for a general market; with the growing general interest in Australian social history and in writing by women, these publications are extremely timely. They are also big, solid, gorgeous books of the kind you loved being given when you were a kid and hope people will still be giving you when you’re looking for ways to kill time in the nursing home.

Maybe it’s the biggish print that makes me think of youth and age as two likely places for these books to find a home. And they are both plentifully and beautifully illustrated; some of Robert Avitabile’s watercolours in the Gilmore volume are astonishing.

Henning’s letters and Gilmore’s discursive recollections are both characterised by a kind of warm writing, radiant and personal. If there’s a special kid (well, eleven or twelve and up) or an old person or anybody in the middle ground whom you love and adore and who’s just about due for a present, you couldn’t do much better than to give him or her one or both of these.

Editing this magazine is a job with a steady stream of surprises, and one of the nicer ones is the way the many and varied reviews that land on one’s desk through the month tend to pull themselves together into unexpected groups and sequences while one’s back is turned. Going through the list of books reviewed in this issue in search of phrases and titles for cover designer Keith Robertson to attach his witty and sometimes wicked pictures to – Helen Garner, writing of Elizabeth Jolley’s work, once used the phrase ‘batty sideways slip’ and it’s one that comes to mind often when Keith delivers the cover and I see what new visual dimensions of meaning he has added to my usually innocuous verbals – I found I had jotted down ‘photographs, film, rock ‘n’ roll, First Love First Sex, Hot Copy.’ Well well, I thought, here’s a whole new image … These conjunctions were not deliberately planned but I did think they’d make a rather arresting cover and that Keith would have fun finding pictures for them. ‘Ah,’ he said as I finished reading him the list, ‘I see a theme emerging here.’

The current special issue of Meanjin, edited by Judith Brett and Don Watson, and devoted to the slippery concept of ‘humour’, is special: it’s an overview of the state of the art of humour in Australia, and to do this as successfully as they have done it must have been a fiendishly difficult task. The analysis of humour is a notoriously unfunny activity; and the production of it is very difficult in a context in which one is expected to be funny. In Meanjin 2/1986 there’s a nice balance between analysis and comedy; the comedy is indeed funny, almost despite the fact that the reader was expecting it to be, and the problem of analysing humour has been cleverly got round by getting the performers and writers to do it themselves. So there are witty and riveting interviews with Barry Humphries and Max Gillies, admirably conducted by Jim Davidson and Helen Thomson respectively; a piece on the perils of performing as a (female) stand-up comic by comedian Wendy Harmer; and a brilliant essay on the death of Australian rural humour by Gillies Report scriptwriter ‘the ruminative and bucolic Don Watson’, as Max Gillies puts.

Other highlights include Judith Brett’s lovely deadpan dissertation on ‘The Chook in the Australian Unconscious’, Frank Moorhouse’s story ‘Disobedience’, and Thea Astley’s ‘Why I wrote a short story called “Diesel Epiphany”’ (‘Somewhere between Calgary and Regina our Greyhound bus hit a moose.’)

And there’s a new Scripsi out too, with the massive and eclectic assortment of writing and graphics we have come to expect: the gem is a wonderful interview with Harold Bloom, conducted with flair and, I should think, forbearance by Imre Salusinszky, who is addressed throughout by Bloom as ‘my dear’ in a manner reminiscent of W.H. Auden, Hal Porter, Noël Coward, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s mother. There’s also a companion piece by Bloom on Falstaff (and other pieces Shakespearean), an article on being a Visiting Writer in Russia by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, a review of Christina Stead’s Ocean of Story by Helen Garner, poems by Johns Tranter, A. Scott, and Ashbery, and lots more from both sides of the International Date Line.

Of particular interest to ABR – at the risk of rather deceptively appearing a quaintly passé nationalist, but there you go – is Stephanie Trigg’s excellent, extensive and charming interview with Elizabeth Jolley. Jolley discusses her own life, her methods of working and her ideas about the world with an unusual and irresistible combination of frankness and modesty, and Trigg’s well-researched and finely focused questions elicit a quantity of enlightening information about Jolley and her work. As companion pieces there’s a detailed review of Foxybaby, also by Stephanie Trigg, and an extract from a Jolley work-in-progress whose opening sentences will leave Jolley fans breathless with laughter and recognition: ‘“A peptic ulcer is an ulcer which occurs anywhere in the alimentary canal, sing that to la,” Trent says. We are all trying to revise for our exams.’

Watch carefully for Jolley’s new novel, The Well, and when you see it, get it.