After being reduced to servile domesticity and painting for an advertising agency, Rita struggles free. She returns to Australia with a child and achieves success on her own terms, having determined to ‘Give it back to them, give the ventriloquist’s doll on the daddylap her own voice at last.’

Lines of Flight is the tale of Rita’s quest for integrity. Along the way, big issues are met: being Australian and an artist, the nature of creativity, the relationships between artist, critic and public, between women and men. Only in retrospect and with an effort of imagination does the description ‘quest’ come to mind. This word papers some cracks that I perceive: Lines of Flight seems composed of fragments that cannot be accounted for satisfactorily; sometimes, too, the energy of the writing is sapped by the burden of words. The opening, for instance:

That orange Chiaroscuro of the pitted skin. Oblique shadow and then a fainter reflection in the desk. Could be any time.

Of course you could do something with it, find some conjunction to situate it by. Pluck a line from the sleeve of some surrealist conjuror like: Le ciel est bleu comme une orange and frame after frame, juggle the alternatives. Seriously though. You could eliminate the perfectly satisfactory sphere of the orange on the desk, its attendant smudge and vertical ghost, and just present that suave link: blue like an orange, equating the blue sphere with the orange one, the colour with its complement, the yin with the yang or whatever. Pirouette out of contingency, kilojoules and francs per kilo. That’s abstraction for you.

I found it difficult to lose sight of the writer, at a desk somewhere, pen facing, getting it all down, in fits and starts.

Marion Campbell has great imagination, with language and daring to match. I’ll be looking out for her next book, hoping to read the same intensely vital writing under more control.

Helen Garner’s collection Postcards from Surfers is a pleasure to read for a number of reasons, not the least because the hand holding the pen is so sure that the reader can forget the efforts of the writer and join the characters. There is quite a range to join – the women (woman?) besotted with the ubiquitous Philip, a knee-high child, a temporarily bisexual homosexual young man, an adult daughter, mothers, and a group character with a composite voice.

Sentence by sentence, the prose is simple, yet it creates images and allusions greater than the sum of its parts. The title story resonates with echoes: of a lifetime’s uneasy father–daughter relationship (‘Going to help Mum with the dishes, are you, Miss? ... My shoulders stiffen. I am, I do’), of the implications of the mother’s reined-in intellectualism, of the narrator’s life spent elsewhere in another time as Philip’s lover. Resonant too is a sense of the comfortably estranged family’s exile from the cool south: memories are handed back and forth like old photographs, and there are transplanted southern rituals – knitting (who needs woollies in Queensland?), watching the Victorian football on TV, reading The Age.

‘All Those Bloody Young Catholics’ is a story cast as a monologue and composed of references to people and events outside the story’s frame. The gilded recollections of an ageing barfly obliquely recreate the history of the silent ‘Watto’ as well as the oblivious, sad character of the narrator.

Confident with the medium, Helen Garner experiments with it. These are mostly very short short stories. The monologue story is less novel than ‘The Dark, the Light’, which is the commentary of a group, a town-full, of people, on the return in glory of one of its members. The piece builds a sense of fervid curiosity and anticipation, and climaxes into sad. sated humility, all in the space of two and a bit pages.

Evidence of technical range is there in ‘Did He Pay?’, written in a tone both intimate in knowledge and distant in sympathy, reminiscent of New Journalism, and in the accumulation of ironic vignettes that compose ‘The Life of Art’.

Characteristic of Helen Garner’s writing is small-scale wisdom that enlightens without overwhelming. It is wisdom revealed in irony – postcards to Philip are dropped into the slot of a rubbish bin next to the letterbox; the young man making bisexual love for old times’ sake switches back in mid-act when a Peeping Tom hovers into view; the dislocated mother of ‘A Happy Story’ driving regretfully away from a rock concert is pitched into joy by a cassette choir singing a Strauss song, the chorus of which is ‘Habe Danke!’

Love in all its variety is celebrated throughout this collection. Its bonds are acknowledged, but it is always life-enhancing. Its absence in the make-up of the musician of ‘Did He Pay’ makes his life a baffling nightmare. Even failed love, as in ‘A Thousand Miles From the Ocean’ and ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, brings joy to its sufferers.

For some time, it has seemed to me that Helen Garner is an acute observer, in depth, of her own generation in its time and place. She has chronicled its youth (Monkey Grip), its early maturity (Honour and Other People’s Children), and its midlife crises (The Children’s Bach). Postcards From Surfers is welcome because it confirms the vitality of the short story in current Australian writing, and especially because it shows Helen Garner ranging widely. For what she has given us and for what we have come to expect from her, Habe Danke! ■

Sandra Moore is a Melbourne short story writer.