This is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages, and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies.

It is not a book for anybody who expects revelations, or even for more light to be shed on the events of 11 November 1975 when a single decision by the governor­-general split the nation in a way it has seldom been split politically before. The full story of that day has probably yet to be told, despite all the millions of words and hours of air time which have already been devoted to it.

The Whitlam government is also, in some ways, a curiously impersonal book. What is one to think of an account of the Loans Affair which does not even mention the name of Tirath Khemlani, or of a resume of the political rise and fall of Dr Jim Cairns, which omits any reference to Junie Morosi? Whitlam allows himself only a sidelong look at the ‘conversion’ of Cairns to the values of the alternative society when he says ‘... by now espousing “the economics of love”. He [Cairns] was hardly able to speak a common language with the hard­nosed men in his Department [Treasury] whose concern with human values was such that they were quite willing to use unemployment as a tool against inflation.’

On the other hand, Whitlam avoids personalities mainly where they lead him on to dangerous ground. Where he can, with safety, exercise the famous Whitlam wit, and the equally famous Whitlam malice, he does so with great style and verve, hiding his bons mots, like plums, in the dense body of the text, as treats for the persevering reader.

The book is largely what its title suggests, a detailed account of the Whitlam government (‘my government’, as the author invariably says) during its three tempestuous years in power. The theme is justification: Whitlam sets out to demonstrate – and does so very effectively – that whatever its weaknesses, and whatever criticisms have since been levelled against it, the first Labor government for twenty-three years left behind it a legacy of reform in both the domestic and the foreign fields for which it can never be forgotten.

A sub-theme, not unexpectedly is the betrayal of a great leader by fools and knaves. though to be fair this is hinted at rather than laboured. Whitlam seems to see the main villains as the conservative Establishment, the Canberra bureaucrats (especially the ‘hard­nosed’ men of Treasury) and the media. A quote from Machiavelli at the beginning summarises the text from which Gough is preaching:

And one has to reflect that there is nothing more difficult to handle nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself the leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces –·it has for enemies all those who do well out of the old order and has lukewarm supporters in all those who will do well out of the new order.

There are some small surprises in the book’s format. It is not, as might have been expected, a chronological account of the years 1972 to 1975, but instead Whitlam has chosen to examine his government’s achievements almost portfolio by portfolio. There are chapters on foreign affairs, the economy, national resources, industrial relations, education, health, social security, transport, housing, Aborigines, migrants, women, the environment, arts, the media, and law reform.

By far the longest section is on foreign affairs, the area in which Whitlam was most at home, and in which he can list with pride his government’s recognition of China, and the granting of independence to Papua New Guinea. ‘If history were to obliterate the whole of my public career save my contribution to the independence of a democratic PNG, I should rest content,’ he writes.

Whitlam takes a few hard swipes at the Hawke government for putting pragmatism ahead of idealism and for shying away from radical reforms. One senses that he may not care much personally for Bob Hawke, as he tells, apropos of nothing at all, a malicious story of Bob and Hazel disporting themselves on the carpet in the best bedroom of The Lodge, then coming downstairs to complain about the fleas.

Apart from Sir John Kerr, for whom his detestation has never weakened, the main villain for Whitlam, as far as Labor history is concerned, is Arthur Calwell, whose conservatism, racism, and sheer bloody mindedness he mercilessly exposes.

The Whitlam Government clearly reflects the paradox of Gough: a reforming idealist with a high view of the human condition, who is at the same time a bad hater with an almost feline maliciousness, and who has a view of his own greatness that sometimes comes close to monomania. We have not seen his like in politics since.

John Bryson has tried to solve one of Australia’s great mysteries – how Azaria Chamberlain died. The cover of Evil Angels gives the clue to his answer. A bruise-coloured sky glowers over a stark, orange-brown desert. There is the twisted relic of a tree in the foreground and in front of it, like a spreading puddle of blood, the shadow of a dingo, its eyes on an evil slant.

Bryson’s judgment that Azaria was taken by a dingo is never explicitly stated. But it is implicit in the way his meticulously gathered evidence is presented. In marked contrast to the quickies on the case that came out several years ago, Bryson has tracked down virtually all the relevant witnesses who were present in the carpark at Ayers Rock when the baby went missing. Many of these witnesses were not interviewed by the police. Some of them who were interviewed later were surprised to find that they were not called to give evidence in any of the trials. A number of them were adamant that the story told by Lindy Chamberlain, bizarre though it sounds, fitted in with what they saw and heard.

A colleague asked if I thought that Elizabeth Jolley’s Foxybaby might have gone ‘over the top’. I assume she meant that the book might be ‘too much’ because the function of its preoccupation with (say) crime and sex, including incest and homosexuality, was not immediately apparent. The question is a reasonable one, but for two reasons I don’t think that her latest novel does go over the top: there is no theme used or technique employed in Foxybaby which has not appeared in Jolley’s writing before; and, ad astra (perhaps per aspera or per ardua), the book represents a logical but highly imaginative development from her most recent work.

The thing that has distinguished the ‘inspired genius’ from the run of the mill ‘practitioner’ in all creativity is quality of mind. Michael Leunig, few Australians have to be told, has this. But astonishingly, quality of mind has not been a gradual, developing part of Leunig’s work, for it was evident as an integral part of his art, first widely seen in the pages of the fondly remembered National Review fifteen years ago. This is not to say he has not developed – he has in subtle directions and of course his graphic expression too has developed, as it should, with the discipline of creating for the Melbourne Age newspaper.

Arthur Phillips, who died last month at the age of eighty-five, was one of the major figures of the democratic nationalist tradition in modern Australian literary criticism; and his collection of essays, The Australian Tradition (1958; second edition 1966) epitomises the strength of this school. These essays are marked by the perception of the reading behind them, the clarity of the writing in them, and, the enthusiasm for his subject which shows throughout them.

But Phillips was no mere enthusiast for writing which happened to be Australian. He came from a family rooted in the tradition of English literature, and with an almost hereditary claim on the presidencies of the Melbourne Dickens and Shakespeare societies. In choosing not to follow in this succession, he demonstrated a catholic rather than any parochial interest, and indeed he successfully conveyed his interest in English literature to generations of schoolboys at Wesley College. His essay ‘Three Schoolmasters’ (Melbourne Studies in Education, 1976) is both a notable piece of autobiography, racing the origins of his own ideas about teaching and humanity, and a record of the wisdom he obtained from his own career as a teacher and which tempers the nostalgia with which he looks back at his youth.

One element of the schoolmaster which informed all Phillips’s discourse was his concern for accuracy in expression. This in turn gave him an eye for the niceties of style which he nowhere better demonstrated than in his essays on ‘The Craftsmanship of Lawson’ and ‘The Craftsmanship of Furphy’. These essays effectively destroyed the myth of naïve storytellers whose success was solely due to their reflection of bush people and their yarns. Phillips points out that other critics had earlier seen the fallacy of this view, but none had demonstrated it as effectively through close analysis of the text. In ‘The Democratic Theme’, Phillips links this artistry to the spirit of democracy, strongest in the bush but not found only there, which he saw as giving Australian writing its originality. He shows that at its best this theme went beyond class solidarity to show a ‘triumph of human sympathy over social prejudice’, and also examines the falling away from these standards and the loss of the earlier confidence. Later critics have modified these views, and in particular have questioned the degree of confidence and have analysed the complex relationships between the culture and its literary expression, but Phillips’s central perceptions of what was important about Australian writers retain their essential validity.

Phillips always worked on the periphery of professional literary activity in Australia, being published and broadcast as a freelance contributor and receiving academic recognition only after his retirement. Yet the freshness of his work may owe much to the perspective given by his position as outsider. Certainly, Australian literature owes him much, for his own writing and for the encouragement he gave to others. His friends will long remember how he would turn his head slightly on one side as he apologetically began one of those discourses in which wit and learning were the graces of a mind as keen as it was cultivated.

This book is a collection of papers from the first Aboriginal Writer’s Conference, held at Murdoch University in February 1983. Despite the long (unexplained) lapse between the conference and the appearance of this book, the papers raise a number of urgent and complex problems, for writers and commentators.

If there is one theme which emerges from the papers as a whole, it lies in the reiterated charge that black literature in Australia has been badly handled by the critical and academic communities. A number of speakers comment on the ‘narrow, ideologically loaded criteria of the currently dominant white literary establishment’ and its rejection of Aboriginal literature. This factor is given as the reason for the dismissal of much black literature as mere ‘protest’; it is coupled with the domination by whites of the means of publication as the most pressing problem confronting black authors.

Our newspapers participate in debate on public issues in their respective communities and have a role of importance. The News Corporation is a citizen of the global village, and such citizenship carries with it obligations and responsibilities as well as opportunities. We will continue to serve our communities, providing them with clear and unbiased reporting of matters of importance.

Thus wrote Mr Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the corporation, in its recent annual report.

The report, which resembles a glossy magazine, shows the chief before a mirrored tabletop. Behind him is a painting of what appears, in its lower half, to be a lot of lopped skulls, while above is a wolf, and a clown-like figure standing on a horse. He always was an agile balancer, this Murdoch. How else does an owner of newspaper and television stations also get licences from governments to run an airline and a state lottery? The conservative columnist William Safire was forthright in the New York Times when Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed Jimmy Carter for president following a Murdoch–Carter White House lunch which, in turn, paralleled a $US290 million loan from the Export-Import Bank in New York at an extraordinarily low rate of interest to Ansett for new aircraft. ‘The press cannot defend the First Amendment with its hand out,’ said Safire. ‘Journalism cannot shut its eyes to the danger of conglomeration, where one division scratches a government back that in turn scratches the back of another division.’ Safire advised Murdoch to learn the lesson that when journalism and government get too close, both suffer. The evidence seems to be that Murdoch applied an opposite, and equally American lesson: go for the main chance.

At a time when novels by women must run the gauntlet of feminist criticism it is surprising to find one which is prepared to discuss love and female dependence without any deference to feminism. Natalie Scott makes it clear that her heroine lives in ‘liberated’ times but she insists that the need for love remains a fundamental human weakness or strength. Furthermore, she is not afraid to link a woman’s desire for beauty with her need for love. The traditional feminine concern for beautiful things and personal beauty becomes in The Glasshouse part of a search for completeness, though the other interpretation – that it is evidence of feminine materialism and obsession with security – is also acknowledged. At the same time, Natalie Scott’s writing is careful, considered, occasionally witty, and always finely crafted. Her narrator, Alexandra Pawley, convincingly conveys the attitudes of an intelligent and well-groomed woman who desperately wants to form her life into a beautiful pattern.

Paul Radley’s novels are about loss and growth. The first, the prize-winning Jack Rivers and Me, showed how ‘Peanut’ was forced to shed his imaginary companion as a part of his joining the world of school. My Blue-Checker Corker and Me dealt with a twelve-year-old boy’s reaction to grief at the loss of his racing pigeon. Now, in his latest, he takes us through five years in the lives of two mates from just before they leave school until one of them dies in the mud of New Guinea. The setting of the novel is again his fictitious township of Boomeroo, but the time is now the late thirties and first years of the war.

A great part of the book is devoted to the boys’ discovery of sex. It is described joyously, extensively, specifically. Boomeroo is a small town, where everyone knows everyone else in most senses of the word, and the growing boys soon learn that it is large enough to offer every variety of physical sex. Yet the novel is not about sex – it is about people finding themselves in a world where their inner sensibilities are dominated by the external demands of family, work, war, and above all by their own veracious bodies.

This is a first novel from Alexander Buzo, the playwright of the 1960s and 1970s who gave vitriol a new status in the Australian vernacular and who, through characters like Coralie Landsdowne (Coralie Landsdowne Says No) and Edward Martello (Martello Towers), raised pretentious speech to new levels of social acceptability. In a published comment on audience reception to Martello Towers, Buzo describes Edward Martello as ‘an educated ‘rake’, who is, in keeping with the style of the play, articulate beyond the grounds of naturalism’ and concludes, ‘Still, as long as they’re enjoying themselves’. Defensive disclaimers from writers hint at a nervousness which must, eventually, find its way into the writing usually in the form of overkill. The worst recent example of this is the introduction to Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures in which a rather affected statement of pre-emptive failure is intended to head the critics off at the pass if they were to do anything as unkind as suggest that the work was any more frivolous than intended by its author, who, of course, intended it to be.

Prue Foster, the self-acclaimed, self-promoting virginal Tasmanian heroine of The Search for Harry Allway is, in my view, affected and silly beyond the demands of comic fiction. Still, as long as the readers are enjoying themselves then I suppose it doesn’t matter. And certainly the book is intended to be silly. In fact there is enough silliness to drown the main idea and leave readers floundering in a sea of disconnected one-liners (mostly very funny – ‘If that’s his face, imagine what his liver must be like’) and satirical descriptions according to Buzo’s catalogue of ‘types’.

Australian involvement in World War I has in recent years attained a high profile in books, film and television. The trend has been to demythologise the legends of heroism and courage associated with war, and the theme often adopted is the rapid and brutal transformation from naivety to understanding of how baseless the myth was. Although this might be considered well covered ground, Geoff Page in his first novel, Benton’s Conviction, has returned to the war setting. However, because he concentrates on an aspect which hitherto has not been fully explored, and sustains the work with deft prose, Page has succeeded in producing a novel of originality and consistent interest.

The eponymous protagonist of Benton’s Conviction is vicar of Geradgery, a New England country town whose few hundred inhabitants are mostly cockies and shopowners. It is 1916; the Gallipoli campaign is over, the AIF is plunged into fresh disasters in France, and Prime Minister Billy Hughes is trying to introduce conscription. The sons of Geradgery are fighting and losing their lives in the war, yet the townspeople willingly follow the official line and are in support of the war. David Benton, at some point before the opening of the novel, has preached against the war, but is promptly discouraged by his bishop from doing so again. God too, we learn, supports the fight against the Boche.

When Scholars wandered across our television screens recently, palettes in hand, many were offended by the anachronisms: busts taking artists off to Sydney, or feminist polemics leading out to a car-clogged St Kilda Road. One Summer Again was an impression of Australia’s impressionists, and had the honesty to make that plain; and the more one reads about Roberts, Streeton, and Conder, the more it becomes clear that, in addition to communicating the raw energy and exuberance, the miniseries got the essentials absolutely right. Tom Roberts was as Chris Hallam, himself a onetime Englishman and art student, depicted him: confident, given to making pronouncements, a touch humourless perhaps, but a man with a high sense of purpose who easily moved among all kinds of people at all social levels. A man of fierce intelligence, Roberts could discuss the problem of metaphor in poetry and painting with A.G. Stephens in a way that made that celebrated critic look to his laurels. And for a man who claimed he could not write, take his description of the scene of Shearing the Rams, where Roberts, standing amidst ‘piled up wool-bales’, was ‘hearing and seeing the troops come pattering into their pens’, noting ‘the subdued hum of hard, fast working and the click of the shears, the whole lit warm with the reflection of the Australian sunlight’. It is impressive enough even before he states the challenge: ‘a subject noble enough and worthy enough if I could express the meaning and spirit of strong masculine labour, the patience of the animals, and the strong human interest.’

Perth, like Sydney, is a city of water, but the water on display is safely enclosed in the reaches of the Swan. Here ferries and commuting speedboats plough their straight lines among flocks of red or blue sailed dinghies sailing and tacking in sudden turns like flocks of tropical fish. In Fremantle, sailors’ missions and clubs straggle around the side streets, and the mall on a Saturday afternoon is left to drunks and kids on BMX bikes. In the Book Market casual browsers can look through the latest publications from Australia and abroad, or climb upstairs to find a collection of raw socialist writings dedicated to Pat Troy, ‘one of Australia’s finest working class fighters’. In the harbour, the tug named after this militant waterside leader may be bringing in the Irene Greenwood, flagship of the state fleet and named after the pioneer feminist and pacifist. Down the street, the holiday makers soak up the sun on the terrace of Papa Luigi’s, the Asian food mart is crowded with families eating out cheaply on the riches of the orient, and next door, in the restored Freemasons’ Hotel, now known as the Sail and Anchor, a younger crowd listens to a group of ·energetic folksingers, ‘The Sad Fish’. Liquors on tap include, Swan, Guinness, and the pub’s own potent brew, which must rival Coopers as the only real beer still made in Australia.

Yet, although Fremantle is unmistakably a waterfront town, it is almost cut off from the sea. Certainly, you can drive down the mole and clamber over the piled rocks until you join the fishermen in their view across the grey waters to ‘Rottnest in the distance, or look south over container wharves, cranes, and the varied works of a port. But the very business of the harbour shuts out the ordinary person from its activity. This may be why Australians, clinging to the periphery of the continent, are nevertheless more fascinated with its harsh· inland than with demanding ocean surrounds.

Down by the Fremantle waterfront, at Cicirella’s you can still buy a packet of old-fashioned fish and chips and sit on a waterfront bench to eat them. Certainly, instead of six pence’s worth, the minimum order is for three dollars’ worth, and they come wrapped in butchers’ paper instead of newsprint, but they still taste as good as fish and chips used to do. And, to be fair, the packet is really a generous bob’s worth.

The benches are so placed that while you eat you look out across a grubby little harbour at a boatbuilding works where the luxury craft of the rich are being assembled. Very like Footscray, although Fremantle waters seem dirtier than those of the Maribyrnong. But the real excitement of eating there is the contest with the seagulls. They come from everywhere, raucous and persistent, like a crowd of extras from Hitchcock’s ‘Birds’. If you want to enjoy your purchase you need to keep it covered, and don’t hold a piece of fish too long in your hand to feast your eyes on its rich golden brown batter before you transfer it to your mouth.

A different vision of a seagull adorns the cover of the one hundredth issue of Overland. A Fred Williams icon soars in rich ochre above a list of names representing the whole span of Australian writers, young and old, left and right, poets, novelists, reviewers and essayists. There is no implicit claim of superiority, but a feeling of good company jostling together in a crowded gathering united only by a belief in the importance of words and people. Williams’s seagull represents them all. Its feet trail earthwards, its solid beak probes firmly ahead, but its wings lift it strongly upwards in the freedom of the air.

Perth, a city of seagulls, retains many of the contradictions of the society from which Overland emerged in 1954. It has torn down the past of its central city, replacing it with freeways and glass, but King’s Park still keeps the bush nearby. It kicks the poor out of their Fremantle lodging to make way for America’s Cup visitors, it is fearful of Aborigines, its press is good on news and poor on debate or anything concerning the mind. It prosecutes naughty eastern comedians and demands action against naughty words on the ABC. The WA Fellowship of Australian Writers meets in Tom Collins House and succeeds in bringing together writers, of quite diverse views, from Vic and Joan Williams, stalwarts of the old left, to Mary Durack, chronicler of the pioneers and unswervingly generous friend and supporter to fellow writers of every ilk. John and Rae Oldham, veterans of postwar reconstruction and socialist activities in the east, returned to Perth as pioneers of landscape architecture, and have both curbed the excesses of barbarism and clothed the freeways in beauty. Their book, Gardens in Time (Lansdowne, $30), a history of gardens in idea and practice from the earliest times, is a monument to humanism. While Sydney wallows in corruption, and Melbourne goes through moral agonies over the dismissal of a governor who has been caught freeloading, and the east as a whole enters a period of industrial and agricultural decline, the west continues to face the future while debating eternal verities.

Overland is like the winters of Perth in its mixture of tolerance and idealism, its belief in the importance of our past and its hopes for a better future. Stephen Murray-Smith, its founder and editor, is passionately interested in the sea and all its ways, but his journal turned inland for its name and inspiration. It came from a left which felt itself both embattled and pure in the face of the philistinism of Murray-Smith was to characterise as the ‘seemingly endless years of the Ming Dynasty’. Its first issue had a Noel Counihan drawing of mates ‘Off to the Diggings’ on the cover, above a list of contributors which included Nettie Palmer, John Morrison, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eric Lambert, David Martin, and A. D. Hope.

The exchange of poems between Hope and Martin was to lead to anguished discussion among realist writers about the propriety of allowing reactionary and élitist criticism of one of their own. The first poem in the issue, ‘Swans in Footscray’, by Nell Old, spoke of ‘chemicals tainting the water’ while untroubled black swans recalled ‘how close to industrial suburbs / Are spacious acres free to sun and moon.’ For thirty years now, Overland has kept these spacious acres free for its readers.

I first came across Overland when it advertised a year’s subscription in the long since and sadly defunct Voice as ‘Australia’s best five-bob’s worth’. Since then, like Cicirello’s fish’n’chips, its price has risen from a bob to three dollars, and now to four. It has in the last twenty-five years become a part of my life, I have shared in the task of editing, and the editor and his family are trusted friends, so I can in no way look at the journal dispassionately, let alone objectively. Yet I believe it still retains the qualities which first attracted me to it, and which it shared with the earlier Bulletin at its best – openness, a belief in Australia and in a socialism which remained democratic and free of sectarianism, interest in new writing and ideas, and, above all, a commitment to its readers, to whom it gave a voice in its columns and to whom it spoke in prose and verse without condescension. The century issue maintains these values, except that – sign of the age of professionalism – the readers are no longer present in print.

The issue opens with ‘The Brass Jardinière’, a chapter from David Malouf s autobiographical novel. This appears to be an exercise in nostalgia, as the narrator recalls in intricate detail the house of his Brisbane childhood, but as he moves his focus from his parents and the circumstances they made to the wireless, the piano with its world of potential waiting for the human agent to release, and finally to the contents of the jardinière, we realise that his concern is not with a lost past but with unrealised potentials, the things which could not happen because other things did, and above all with the twin, the person he did not become but which is always within him.

Other contributors vary this search for times and people lost. Barry Jones recalls the cruelties and excitements of a St Kilda past, and the isolated boy whom I remember as a polio victim – he does not mention that epidemic – and he as a spastic. Majorie Tipping recalls the Palmers – two of the contributors to the first Overland. Frank Dalby Davison appears from beyond the grave in a story about the dog which adopted his family, Michael Davies recalls Fred Williams, Judith Wright recalls Brisbane in wartime, with its opportunities and frustrations, her encounters with Meanjin and the Christensens, and her decision to stay in Brisbane when they went south: ‘I don’t know that I was ever quite forgiven for deciding to stay in Queensland’. No nostalgia in any of these, but a search for the origins of what has given value to the writers’ lives.

Poetry has always caused Overland problems. When it has been accessible, it has often been banal; locked in trite rhythms or expected images; when it has explored new ideas and experience, the readers have often found it intimidating or inscrutable. The present issue contains a poem by Patrick White which partly expresses this sentiment and then answers it. Other poems include Barbara Giles dancing a madrigal on the tightrope of age, Elizabeth Riddell talking of seminars and wordboxes, John Millett noticing a fisherman, Chris Wallace-Crabbe describing a fantastic Captain Melbourne. All are verbally alert, clear, amusing, insightful – bringing both delight and meaning. Eric Beach and Shelton Lea write in a different mode, remaking language to speak in a common tongue from the far edge of experience. Alan Gould has a long, reflective poem to Les Murray, and Barrett Reid, Overland’s poetry editor, has a similarly long poem on light and space, and the miracle of human creativity. John Croyston writes a footnote to a Sydney encounter. The poems not only provide for all tastes, they enlarge and unify our perceptions of the world.

As usual, the issue contains select reviews, and a long anti-review essay by Paul Carter. This essay, starting from a discussion of Xavier Pons’s book on Henry Lawson, which he finds important only as an example of the academic industry of literary criticism, raises the question of whether any review can escape being a part of the ‘mind-industry’, giving importance even to what it rejects by the mere fact of discussing it. Underlying the essay is Adorno’s notion of language as a seamless web entrapping our every use of it in the ideology and class structures of our time. Thus reviewing, criticism, and scholarship lock acts of creativity into safe boxes, subjecting them to the control of established techniques, putting them on display as a catalogue of human variety rather than allowing them to create possibilities for their readers. Yet the very urgency of Carter’s argument does, like the best reviewing, criticism, and teaching, lead us through its theories back to a point of liberation where we can again engage directly with Lawson, seeing his work more clearly not because it is placed, but because it is freed from some of the presuppositions he or we have brought to it.

This hundredth Overland combines the marauding urgency of the seagulls with their soaring spirit. Its writers look to the past to establish a foundation for the future. Like David Malouf’s narrator, they are concerned with what we are, how we came to be this way, and what we could be. The one hundred democratically quarrelsome and matey issues of the journal provide a sound foundation for more centuries of exploration of this territory. As Australia becomes more globally entangled, so this endeavour is likely to give more attention to what is happening overseas, and to problems of post-industrial society rather than to the industrial capitalism which Overland was founded to oppose. Yet, if the origins of contemporary Australian society and its problems lie overseas, our grubby and unyielding island continent gives us a particular perspective from which to view them. Like the seagull, Overland starts its seaward excursions from this landward base, but its true home is with the free surge of the winds above.

My first contact with Arthur Phillips was through a note signed A.A.P., attached to a short story that an editor couldn’t find space for. The note pointed out that the story lacked reality, e.g. a child was allowed to sit in a hotel bar. When I finally got to meet A.A. Phillips, it was over a drink. The pleasure at meeting was enhanced by a child at the next table. I ribbed Arthur about this, telling him that he had sinned against the commandments of social realism. He allowed me my small victory (the story is still unpublished) and then told a number of very funny stories against himself. I knew him only slightly, but that minimal acquaintanceship showed him to be as extraordinary and as delightful in his living as he was in his writing. 

Influence spotting is one of the major preoccupations of traditional art history. Important and necessary though the practice may be, I sometimes suspect that it is employed to keep art history the preserve of the specialist and to deny access to the general reader. How refreshing, then, to be confronted with a scholarly Australian art history book that explores the artists’ subject matter and its local context rather than the derivation of the artists’ styles.

In Images In Opposition, Tim Bonyhady chooses to interpret the history of colonial art from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the formation of the Heidelberg School in the 1880s in terms of a number of competing images of the landscape: an arcadian landscape peopled by the Aborigines; a pastoral arcadia which usually deliberately excludes the Aborigines; the untamed wilderness; the familiar countryside captured by Louis Buvelot; the melancholy landscape; and the contrasting brilliant sunlit landscapes and subdued twilight scenes portrayed by the Heidelberg artists. In the process, Bonyhady not only gives us the most perceptive treatment to date· of individual artists such as John Glover and W.C. Piguenit, but also raises for discussion major issues in colonial landscape painting.

This is a splendid book, by far the most important of the recent OUP contributions to the study of Australian literature. Everything that you ever wanted to know about Australian Literature. Comprehensive (amazingly), consistently lively, up to date, as far as I can judge, accurate.

I have played the usual reviewers’ game for a book like this – trying to find what has been left out. In my view: after three weeks (which is not nearly enough time) of living with the book, nothing important has been left out. If you want to sort out the Boyds, this is the book to do it for you. You can discover as much as you would want to know about shearers in Australian literature. It’s a delight to read. You can follow through from Cross, Zora (1890–1964), Crouch Gold Medal, Crow, of which there are several varieties, Croyston, John (1933), Crucible, see McKinney Jack, Cry in the Jungle Bar, Cultural Cringe, Cumpston, Ivy (1921–), Cunningham, Peter (1798–1864), Cunnington, Vivian (1921–). And it goes, on and on, relentlessly informative and interesting. Even on Bowyangs.

That Australia’s first national school of painters were ‘city bushmen’ is well documented. Tom Roberts began his career as a photographer in Collingwood, Frederick McCubbin in the family’s West Melbourne bakery and Arthur Streeton as an apprentice lithographer. Stories about their plein air painting excursions to Box Hill, Mentone, and Eaglemont are often told. The useful art historical label ‘The Heidelberg School’ first seems to have been used by a local journalist reviewing Streeton’s and Walter Withers’ work done chiefly in this attractive suburb where, with others of like inclination, they have established a summer congregation for out-of-door painting (The Australasian Critic,  l July 1891). Leigh Astbury, however, defines his use of the term Heidelberg School ‘in its current broader sense, that is, artists of a more ‘progressive tendency working in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1880s and 1890s’.

At a seminar on the arts and the economy held recently in Melbourne, Laurie Muller, general manager of the University of Queensland Press, attacked what he described as the myth of the Australian publishing industry. According to Muller, the market size for serious Australian books is so small (one to three thousand) that publishers can barely recoup their development costs, let alone make any profits to service capital and finance further books and expansion.

Marion Campbell’s first book is an ambitious work in which large themes are explored through the consciousness of a complex character, Rita Finnerty, a twenty-five-year-old Australian artist living in France. The writing is richly dense with images, symbolic clues, psychological insight poetic and painterly language, time layered with memory and even stories within the story.

Rita is caught in a constant passage between two poles: solitude, where she paints on her own terms but is in terror of the void; and society, where she is initially solaced by the ‘frames’ in which friends and lovers place her, but where she soon loses her personal and painting integrity. Psychologically sophisticated, Rita is aware of the connection between the death in her childhood of her father and her desire to please subsequent ‘daddylaps’. As an adult she sees herself as too easily becoming a ventriloquist’s doll, mouthing the meanings of others.

I have sat on these books longer than is reasonable for a review, yet have to confess that I am not satisfied with the readiness of what follows. I got the Porter first, but receiving the Johnston thought that they in some ways offered similar difficulties, perhaps similar rewards, to the reader, and that it might be neat to review them together.

It was probably not a rewarding notion, and not surprisingly, I suppose, comparison works to Johnston’s disadvantage. The grounds of comparison are simple: both are highly literate, ‘intellectual’ poets, both obscure and/or difficult; and both are modernists (I mean by this not much more than that both allow idiosyncratic movements of thought, of diction and above all of verse).

This fine first novel by a thirty-six-year-old Tasmanian woman was first published in 1984, but to the best of my knowledge has received only one review. Certainly, ABR missed it, and I would not have read it had it not been entered in the Vance and Nettie Palmer Victorian State Government awards for fiction. Had I been able to persuade my fellow judges of its merit, it would certainly have made the shortlist. Lohrey’s talent as a writer has finally been acknowledged in the latest issue of Scripsi, which prints an extract from the novel she is currently working on, as well as a substantial and thoughtful review by Anne Diamond.

The novel is based on a series of events that took place during the mid-1950s on the waterfront of Hobart involving the Hurseys, father and son. Although I was only about fourteen at the time, I can still remember the way the case dominated the newspaper headlines day after day and split my own family down the middle for a time, male against female, ALP-er against Grouper. For readers who wish to pursue it further, there is another superb fictional account in B.A. Santamaria’s autobiography.

Collections of a writer’s pieces of journalism are usually not well reviewed. The critic is often a journalist whose pieces have not been collected and there is something about the thought of a colleague’s being paid twice that rankles. If the pieces under review are travelogues and and adventures of an enjoyable kind, then the critical appetite for blood will be doubly whetted. The thought of a colleague’s being paid twice for doing what was enjoyable in the first place will sour the critic’s aspect to the extent that his review will be an example of someone’s being paid once for doing something they didn’t enjoy – an experience that some journalists will have you believe is a universal one. (Of course, when their turn comes and a book of their critical pieces is published they go around the place becoming abashedly like a pregnant ex-nun.)

Despite its faults, this book has the merit of being the first biography on the legendary Australian batsman, Victor Trumper (1877–1915). Young cricket lovers of today may well ask what feats of batsmanship Trumper performed to deserve this handsomely produced volume about him. After all, his test average was only 39.04, not to be spoken of in the same breath as Don Bradman’s 99.96.

Ashley Mallett, former test cricketer turned journalist, offers plenty of testimony from eyewitnesses that Trumper was the greatest batsman of his era (pre-World War I) and possibly of all time. But how do you measure ‘greatness’ if not in the number of runs scored?

If we are not what we eat, and we are not, nor what we read, as we are also not, nevertheless a plate of latkes and a page of Saroyan do something to limn the portrait, as the crashing waves delineate the shoreline rock.

Naah.

Skip that.

Who wants to nag about Saroyan, who needs latkes at this time of day?

Let’s get to the real stuff.

Let’s talk hair.

I have more hair at forty-seven then my father had at seventeen. Scads more. Masses. Waves and clumps. Wonderful, wonderful, hair. Oh grey, yes, certainly, sure, shot through with grey, grey aplenty, grey galore and the same again in spades, except for the beard, let me quickly mention the beard, which I should also say my father couldn’t grow one of even with the encouragement of manures and the addition of colourings to his face, two of the ploys he tried, no use, total failure, couldn’t get those bristles of his to form into anything of significance whatsoever on the round bubble of his visage; well. O.K., I admit it, this beard of mine, even though I’m only forty-seven, is basically beyond grey and into white.

The three books under review here promote no generalisation about the condition of poetry, the health of the beast, unless they call to mind the difference between poems which are interesting from line to line and those which somehow resonate as wholes. R.H. Morrison, the eldest of the three poets, is the one who most often produces whole poems, at least to my ear.

Morrison is someone who has been around for years, writing a good deal, and translating poetry from several tongues. As far as I know he has not had wide recognition or publicity, and his latest book, Poems for an Exhibition, is not at all flash in its production. It is a subtle collection, though, suggesting that Morrison may well have had less than his due.

Thomas Keneally’s A Family Madness attempts to get the reader in touch with life beyond the headline and the common enough family madness which irrupts the security we call home, sweet home. While each family may be unhappy in its own way, only some hit the screen or the front page, splattering their sorrow onto family breakfasts, lunches, dinners.

Keneally has exploited our voyeurism to capture attention. We witnessed some time ago, via the electronic eye, the death of a family. Keneally sets out to answer our question, ‘Why?’. The Author’s Note at the end of the novel states:

In a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in July 1984, a family of five willingly ended their lives. Their consent to their own destruction had its roots in events which occurred during World War Two, in voices heard and insupportable fears endured in that era.

Keneally’s novel gives us voices from history which provide much information on Belorussian nationalist fervour. This results in political intrigue, moral chaos, and finally the destruction of a family in Australia. This is an imaginative account. We are told that while ‘the chief figures of A Family Madness are not meant to resemble anyone alive now or in the past … some of the minor characters bear the names and traits of historical figures’. The author also acknowledges ‘the invaluable Belorussian information contained in The Belarus Secret by John Loftus’.

There is much in this novel that is admirable – Keneally’s moral intent, his compassion, his close study of human nature. There is also much which is troublesome – the structure, the perspectives, the presentation of history as fiction. Keneally, imaginative social and historical chronicler, has in his possession many memories given to him by those he interviewed for Schindler’s Ark. He exploited them well enough in that novel to receive The Booker Prize. His sympathetic treatment of Schindler, nevertheless, did not provide the answer to ‘Who was this man?’. And no more does A Family Madness answer the question posed at the end of chapter one, ‘Who are those people?’. Perhaps one never can. Keneally tries.

In a sense there are two novels here. One is psychological and centred on the consciousness of Terry Delaney and his pursuit of personal happiness. The other is socio-political and focussed on the lives of Australia’s DPs. Keneally attempts to explain the migrant experience by using a romantic connection between Terry Delaney, ordinary Australian, and Danielle, extraordinary daughter of the unbalanced Rudi Kabbel who wipes his world clean by obliterating his family.

The opening pages quickly shape the protagonist Delaney, his situation, and dramatic incident. And Keneally’s fascination with the violent and macabre still holds. There is a feel of being thrust into a detective novel. In a sense one has. The crisp presentation jars a little by its professional smoothness. Keneally’s giving us the dope; spare, bare, relevant. The metaphors are delightfully witty, slick: ‘the same tousled and bruised wives’, ‘a sort of fluff of ennui caught in the crevices of their faces’, ‘a skinny woman maybe, but with the fibre of the law in her’. We are on the scene with Terry at the slaughter. We are caught. ‘“Oh holy Jesus, Delaney!” Rummage cried, beginning to weep. “Who are those people?”’ We too want to know.

Part One of the novel works on a flashback technique. Terry Delaney’s association is etched between the vignettes revealing his Catholic background (treated with satirical lightness), his marriage to Gina (slightly but meaningfully romanticised), his passion for Rugby League, and his simple Australian values (tastefully ironized). Here Keneally catches the rhythm, the twang, the mental world of the bloke next door. ‘Mind my pew and look at Diamond Head, and I’ll get us one of those crook beers each.’ Keneally’s Rudi Kabbel is a bit of a problem. He talks too perfectly even when he’s being colloquial. He is a literary creation. Keneally is aware of the difficulty of getting this new Australian voice. He slides out of this dilemma by resorting to a reportage summary of a conversation.

All the Belorussian treasures had been destroyed by other people, by the Poles, the Litvaks, above all by the Russians. For example, the Belorussians had and treasured a race of buffalo, of bison, like the bison which Buffalo Bill had hunted. ‘Now you didn’t know that, did you, boys?’ he asked Stanton and Delaney …

Part Two sets out to give the reader insight into the history of some of its migrants, the complications of their political allegiances, the weight of personal guilts, and the sins committed consciously and unconsciously. For me, this trek into the labyrinths of European politics was as riveting as any suspense thriller. Other readers may find the form somewhat flat, contrived, too much of a school history, and lacking dramatic tension. Where others might recoil at seeing chapters headed, ‘Radislaw Kabbel’s History of the Kabbelski Family’ and ‘From the Journals of Stanislaw Kabbelski, Chief of Police, Staroviche’, my migrant background mind was stimulated. Was this truth; was this fiction. Not only does the socio-political novel run in and out of the psychological study of Terry Delaney, but so does Keneally’s parallelism between the besieged mentality of Rudi Kabbel and the besieged parochialism of Australian experience. The Belorussians fight for their nationhood by collaborating with the Nazis; the Penrith Rugby League team fights for the premiership and collaborates with Queenslanders and Poms. The Kabbelski family has destroyed during the war Jews, Partisans, intimate friends (Nazi), and some of its own family. Terry Delaney’s destruction is lower key – his marriage and the jaw of an opposition player. There are loyalties and loyalties and legality is often a matter of perception.

Throughout this section Keneally lays clues to the symbolic dimension within the work; Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum, Heller’s Catch 22, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; there’s Uncle Security, Golden Style, and apocalyptic wave. Keneally, however, does not cast stones. Through his protagonist, Terry Delaney, Keneally hopes to demonstrate that understanding is possible. Unfortunately, the very structure he chooses prevents him from achieving within the consciousness of his selected typical Australian the kind of insight Keneally claims for him at the beginning of the novel. It is the reader who is given the inside story. Terry Delaney remains on the peripheries of these peoples’ history. He will be given the opportunity to uncover the Heart of Darkness once he is able to read the story left behind. Part three schematically closes the novel but in its closure it shows the structural flaw – the reader and the central protagonist have not shared the same experience.

After nearly a lifetime of giving pleasure to those who read about cricket, Ray Robinson died in 1982. This collection of thirty-one articles which previously had appeared in various publications over a span of sixty years, has been admirably selected and introduced by Jack Pollard. Moreover, it is accompanied by a graceful and generous foreword by Sir Donald Bradman. Some pieces are better known than others. Certainly are those which first appeared in Robinson's hardbacked books. What we must particularly thank Pollard for is collecting some of that writing which was first published in not so durable magazines or newspapers. This commemorative volume therefore should delight many.