Apart from the theme of growth and adolescence (with which it often merges), perhaps the most common preoccupation of Australian novelists is the progress of a young man (usually) or woman towards artistic achievement and fulfilment. Frequently the field of art is pictorial. Patrick White’s The Vivisector, Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, Tony Morphett’s Thorskeld, and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus and Kewpie Doll, to name only those, all deal in some form or other with a painter of either actual or potential genius. It is, of course, one of the classic themes of twentieth-century fiction everywhere, but its pervasiveness among our writers suggests a self­conscious need to articulate the Australian experience and identity. Who better than the great artist to do it?

‘I wrote this book to show what dogs can do’, writes Archimedes the red setter in the preface to his book, and what follows are the experiences, observations, and reflections of a dog both ordinary and extraordinary.

Archimedes’ physical life is constrained by his ‘employment’ with the Guests, an average Sydney suburban family – father, mother, and three children. He is taken for walks – the dog laws make unaccompanied walks too dangerous, he leaves his ‘messages’ in appropriate places, he knows the electricity poles intimately, and the dogs in his territory, Lazy Bill, Princess, Old Sorrowful Eyes, and Victor the bulldog.

But Archimedes has a rich inner life. He understands human speech and has taught himself to read. At the back of his kennel in an old suitcase is a treasured possession, a Book of Knowledge found discarded in the street and carried home with great effort. Archimedes has a thirst for knowledge and experience. He sorrows because his family is so ordinary, and only fourteen-year-old Julie believes in his ability to communicate. He has great ambitions for dog people, and dreams of teaching them to read like himself.

I occasionally still deliver a lecture I first gave in 1966 though with appropriate variations. One version was published in Quadrant, March-April 1974. There I describe our long tradition of documentary writing or, as H. M. Green called it, “applied writing”.

One of my arguments that I expanded in a series of unpublished lectures was, and is, that from the earliest white settlement to now, writers in this country, and indeed in America and other new world colonies, devoted, and still devote, time and skills to describing matters that older cultures and places take more for granted. I think this tradition delayed the writing of good novels in Australia and also accounts for certain early Australian novels, and indeed novels as late as the 1930s, being over-weighted with descriptions and explanation. It takes time for the generality of authors to find voices to express inner scenery in an external fashion.

When I ask myself why I became a writer – something I do a lot lately, as I turn forty next week, and am still as dependent on Literature Board grants as I was when I began writing ten years ago – it seems to me the most important contributing factor was the time I spent as a child, flat on my back in Katoomba Base Hospital. I had polio, and at first, was not expected to survive. I was left crippled, and though eventually I recovered the full use of both legs, I think I acquired, during those years, a sense of my own importance. A cheerful, attractive lad, I was spoilt rotten, both by the hospital staff and my own mother. I have never since been able to believe I am not, in some way, different from other people, and this may even be true; I seem to have been left with a certain indifference to the feelings of others. I suppose it’s not surprising I became a scientist, when forced to choose a career for myself.

I was also made to rely a great deal on my own mental resources. I read a bit, comics mostly, but got my schoolwork done by ten a.m., which left me the rest of the day, and the night, for myself. God knows what I did with that time, but I dare say I used my imagination. It chills me to think of one of my own children in a similar situation today; TV and computer games would take care of free time.

In this short book Peter Charlton suggests that the final campaigns fought by Australian forces in the south-west Pacific were unnecessary, foisted upon our troops by an ambitious high command, notably General Sir Thomas Blarney. He argues that since Curtin had surrendered any Australian control over the use of its troops to MacArthur, it was left to Australia’s own generals to protect the country’s interests in circumstances where its political leaders had conspicuously failed. In so doing, these generals squandered Australian lives in a series of operations of dubious military value, using troops that were under-equipped and maintained, and ultimately seeking to win over public opinion by recommending a large number of decorations for valour in the field. The troops themselves were under no illusions about the value of their activities, and politicians had long ago abrogated their responsibility for setting out the political aims and limits of Australia’s military involvement. All in all, this was truly a “generals’ war”.

Anyone still worried about the military-industrial complex unveiled by Eisenhower at the end of his presidency can have their Angst updated with this disturbing book.

The present Republican commander-in-chief, with only the tinsel medals of Hollywood for his proud chest and a set role to play, is unlikely, even as a parting gesture, to use up prime time to let us in on how the robust infant of Eisenhower’s day has come of age and mutated with the times to become the fully-integrated military-industrial-academic-bureaucratic complex it is today.

Frank Barnaby, professor of peace studies at the Free University of Amsterdam and former head of the Swedish peace research centre, SIPRI, in the opening paper in this collection, ‘Will There Be A Nuclear War?, shows how powerful and well-entrenched this complex has become. Vast bureaucracies have grown up in the great powers to deal with military matters, and about 500,000 scientists, around 25 per cent of all scientists employed on research, work exclusively on military research.

These books have little in common though they are both concerned with men at war. Balfe’s book is chatty, idiosyncratic, episodic and without any academic intent. Often using the words of three pilots involved, he tells the story of the futile and costly air fighting which followed the highly successful Japanese attacks against Malaya, Sumatra and the Netherlands East Indies. Australian aircrew were forced to fight the Japanese with Hudsons and Buffaloes. Given that the enemy had overwhelming superiority in numbers; that the Buffalo was one of the worst fighters produced, and that the Hudson was no match for virtually any Japanese aircraft, the Australian squadrons after the initial contacts were almost completely destroyed. The causes of this disaster and the eventual outcome of it are well known.

“I wrote this book to show what dogs can do”, writes Archimedes the red setter in the preface to his book, and what follows are the experiences, observations and reflections of a dog both ordinary and extraordinary.

Archimedes’ physical life is constrained by his ‘employment’ with the Guests, an average Sydney suburban family – father, mother and three children. He is taken for walks – the dog laws make unaccompanied walks too dangerous, he leaves his “messages” in appropriate places, he knows the electricity poles intimately, and the dogs in his territory, Lazy Bill, Princess, Old Sorrowful Eyes and Victor the bulldog.

But Archimedes has a rich inner life. He understands human speech and has taught himself to read. At the back of his kennel in an old suitcase is a treasured possession, a Book of Knowledge found discarded in the street and carried home with great effort. Archimedes has a thirst for knowledge and experience. He sorrows because his family is so ordinary, and only fourteen-year-old Julie believes in his ability to communicate. He has great ambitions for dog people, and dreams of teaching them to read like himself.

The yellow peril has finally made it to Australia in John Hooker’s new novel The Bush Soldiers. The Japanese have invaded. The year is 1943. A trail of devastation in their wake, the Australian population, so it seems, has fled to the West, leaving a scattered but dedicated resistance force (the Volunteer Defence Corps) “to delay and deny” anything left of value to the enemy. An Australian veteran of the Great War, Geoffrey Sawtell, with his offsider, an Irish Catholic drifter, join forces at Bourke with two British veterans – a major and a padre – and a young Jackaroo from the outback. Their mission: to sabotage a mine at the Japanese held Broken Hill. Mission accomplished, they are forced to retreat into central Australia, into the desolate, uncompromising landscape, their trek re-creating the myth making trail of Burke and Wills. Pursued by an unseen enemy they move relentlessly forward until they too are destroyed – not by the enemy but by the country itself.

Apart from the theme of growth and adolescence (with which it merges) perhaps the most common preoccupation of Australian novelists is the progress of a young man (usually) or woman towards artistic achievement and fulfilment. Frequently the field of art is pictorial. Patrick White’s The Vivisector, Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, Tony Morphett’s Thorskeld and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus and Kewpie Doll, to name only those, all deal in some form or other with a painter of either actual or potential genius. It is, of course, one of the classic themes of twentieth-century fiction everywhere but its pervasiveness among our writers suggests a self-conscious need to articulate the Australian experience and identity. Who better than the great artist to do it?

In Malouf’s case this preoccupation is quite overt. His novels have become more and more consciously intent on expounding myths – archetypal myths of exile, or of imagination as a source of release and transcendence of reality, and in this novel of art as a means of repossessing one’s land and identity, the central theme of Harland’s Half Acre. The novel consciously enunciates the myth quite early on as the young and artistically precocious Frank Harland conceives his great scheme of winning back the land his feckless Irish forebears had lost repossessing it by means of his artistic genius:

The pattern involved a plan. It was quite simply, to win all this back some day and restore it, acre by acre, to its true possessors That was the gift he was preparing. It was for them. For his father and brothers.
It was, he knew, a large ambition, which is why he hoarded it up till all was done. He might easily look foolish if it were known. But he was not foolish. The power he had as he more and more felt it practical thing. His pictures were a reminder and inventory. They were also a first act of repossession, which made them charms of a sort and their creating an act of magic. The idea scared him a little but he was stubborn. He had chosen a course and would stick to it. For life – if that is what it came to.

Finally, Harland is successful. The half acre of the title refers to the legacy of the paintings he leaves behind him, all too neatly displayed in the ‘retrospective’ with which the novel closes, rather than to land.

As he did with the eponymous Johnno and the narrator Dante in his first novel, Malouf divides the novel between two characters. In this intricately structured narrative, two of the first four sections are devoted to the early years of the painter Harland and two to Phil Vernon, who becomes a lawyer and is sucked in to looking after Harland and his affairs in his later years. One section of only four pages is entitled ‘Harland’s Half Acre’ and is a daring attempt to recreate the actual process of developing and translating into art the vision Frank Harland possesses or that possesses him. What he says in his paintings is incommunicable in any other way and in a private meditation he apologises to his family:

Forgive me, I have not explained things well, not the way I would’ve wanted. The words in my head won’t do it, only the paintings could tell the whole of it and they are in a language you don’t read. What I leave you, my dear brothers – and you too father if you survive me – is only the smallest part of what I wanted to give you out of the great love I had for you, out of the –

In the final section, ‘The Island’, Harland retreats to a hermit-like existence reminiscent in some respects to the closing phases of Ian Fairweather’s life, and devotes himself solely to painting. The sections dealing with Harland’s life from before World War One up to the present (there are mentions of such events as the Poseidon scandal to keep us subtly formed) are intercut with the first person narratives of Phil Vernon who, like Dante, is a passive observer and recorder of the life of a man much greater than himself. Reinforcing the dualistic structure of the novel are antithetic images – Irish against English, the creative as against the artistically barren, feminine against masculine, warmth against cold.

And behind the preoccupation with art and the special kind of inarticulate kind of wisdom that belongs only to the artist is the myth of the land itself. Through a memorable character named Knack, whose genius is for music, Malouf tries to suggest that Europeans have some special access to experience that most Australians haven’t. Knack looks at Harland’s paintings and the following exchange takes place:

‘I like this country you have painted, Frank. This bit of it. It is splendid. A place, I think, for whole men and women, or so I see it – for the full man, even if there are no inhabitants as yet. Perhaps it is there I should have migrated.’
He gave a dark chuckle. It was one of his jests.
‘You think so?’
Knack looked.
‘No, Frank, I don’t think it is. Not yet, anyway. It has not been discovered, this place. The people for it have not yet come into existence, I think, or seen they could to there – that there is space and light enough – in themselves. And darkness. Only you have been there and you are the first.’

The section ends tragically with the mysterious shooting of his lover and himself by Knack, but the deaths are somehow connected with the emergence of Frank as an artist, as the tragic events of the novel almost always are. Looking at the blood splattered over one of his canvasses, Harland thinks:

The whole room shook which changes. His picture for instance – the one thing that was near enough to his own experience to offer him access. Changed! Extraordinary. Such reds! What painter would have dared? He was frighteningly dazzled by the possibilities, as if, without his knowing it, his own hand had broken through to something that was searingly alive, savage, triumphant, and stood witness at last to all terror and beauty.

Art and a sense of identity with the land are strangely, closely linked in Malouf’s imagination – all the more strangely for this largely expatriate writer – and the loving recreation yet again of the Queensland of his boyhood is Malouf’s own act of repossession, his own ‘half acre’.

Proponents of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons have often argued that the debate on these matters is best confined to those expert enough to comprehend the technical complexities involved. These two books are contributions to that debate based on an alternative view – that the nuclear issue is increasingly central to national and international politics and indeed to the question of human survival. As such it demands the widest possible debate and understanding.

Dr Camilleri’s The State and Nuclear Power is likely to become a landmark in this debate. This detailed exploration of the vital role of the state in developing and expanding the nuclear power industry is a significant contribution to an understanding of both the politics of nuclear power and the functioning of the modem capitalist state.

The central argument is that, right from the beginning the state has had to intervene to initiate and sustain all aspects of the nuclear power industry. This intervention has been increasingly necessary as the industry has had to confront major economic and political difficulties but increased intervention has brought with it serious conflicts and contradictions both within and between different states.

Secrecy in human affairs seems to me as useful in grappling with problems as flat-earth dogma is in navigation. I have the belief that the most dazzlingly effective stroke the U.S. Pentagon could make toward dissipating nuclear nightmare would be to throw open the whole spectrum of its weapons experimentation and innovation to anyone who wanted to walk in and look it over. My further belief is that the sheer weight, variety and thrust of all that would be revealed would be such a horizon-expander to, say, Soviet scientists that those scientists would be too caught up in the sheer challenges to the understanding of it all to constrict themselves into any scramble to winnow out immediate military advantage – and indeed that the very process of assimilation of and adaptation to the revealed data would very likely have so many sorts of extraordinary and mutually beneficial (that is, both to the U.S. and the non-U.S. world) effects that the very reasons for nuclear confrontation would vanish from sheer irrelevance and inanity.