From August 1978 through January 1979 I read the complete fiction of Christina Stead, as well as those of her critical writings I could locate. A writing career of more than forty years consumed by a voracious reader in six months! I trust that I was as scrupulous and sympathetic a reader as Christina Stead is an ethically and technically scrupulous, sympathetic novelist.

I read this commanding body of work in two locations the British Museum and the New York Public Library. I’m not sure it occurred to me at the time, but am convinced in retrospect that there was a singular appropriateness in such a reading. It was, of course, instructive to read Letty Fox while apartment-hunting in Manhattan. More importantly, an international novelist of the standing of Christina Stead requires readers who are anything but provincial, parochial, chauvinist. Over dinner, the New York (and New Yorker) writer Donald Barthelme displayed great admiration for her work. It is difficult to imagine two more dissimilar writers, by background, or by the length and nature of their fiction.

Christina Stead can take comfort, if such were to give comfort and if comfort were what she needed, that the publication of a reader of extracts from her work must signify that she is established not only on the reading lists of our universities – a dubious honour she has had for some time – but also, I presume, in our high schools. I cannot imagine who else this sort of book can possibly be aimed at. Perhaps at people who want to appear to have read Christina Stead but do not relish the work of reading her admittedly lengthy novels. In which case they deserve all that they miss. Is the next step towards the heights of literary honour to be, like Dickens, condensed? Our school children, at any rate, deserve better. Christina Stead certainly does.

At a time when one is reading of Cabinet decisions to cut many of the remaining constitutional links with Britain (Premiers’ Conference, June), thus moving Australia closer to national sovereignty, it is timely to be reminded of events only just over the contemporary horizon which could be said to have matured this nation into quickening the pace towards that independence of British dominion – no matter how tenuous politically, yet still incipiently present in the Statute Books and by Privy Council.

As an American friend, now working professionally in the legal sphere in Western Australia, said percipiently on Australia Day: the problem for Australia is that it never has had its own War of Independence. Well, it has had its 1975 upheaval – and Sir John Kerr to boot. So reading Bruce Grant’s book Gods and Politicians has been absorbing, especially as we are now granted the wisdom of hindsight knowing that both nations survived to see another day.

A few Australian poems from J.J. Stable’s Anthology, A Bond of Poetry (‘The Man from Snowy River’, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, ‘My Country’), Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life are, to my shame, practically all the Australian literature I can remember reading in my school days. My interest in Australian writers was stirred, really, by two events while an undergraduate at Sydney University. The first was two lectures given by H.M. Green, Fisher Librarian, on Christopher Brennan (an interest reinforced by the first performance at the State Conservatorium of Music in November 1940 of Five Songs – poems of Brennan set to music by Horace Keats). The second was a passing reference by Ian Maxwell in a splendid set of lectures in 1939 on three modem satirists (Butler, Shaw, Huxley) to Christina Stead’s House of All Nations. Maxwell was certainly up to date in his reading, as Christina Stead’s fiction was not at that time widely known in Australia and House of All Nations had been published only the year before. These two events made me realize that Australian writers were part of that great world of English literature which were studied at universities.

ABR is very proud to present its readers with this special supplement in honour of the eightieth birthday of one of Australia's most significant writers, Christina Stead, whose birthday falls on July 17. I am particularly grateful for John McLaren for asking me to edit this supplement and for thus allowing me to be associated with this gesture of respect and esteem towards one whom I regard as a most valued friend.

With the reissue of The Beauties and Furies (1936) this month by the British feminist press Virago, virtually all of Christina Stead’s work is in print for the first time in the half century long career of this distinguished writer. That this is so is largely due to Virago Press itself, which has reprinted no fewer than eight of Stead’s books, five of them in their Modern Classics series. Apart from the early novel, the others are For Love Alone (1945), Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946), A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948), The People with the Dogs (1952), Miss Herbert (1976, also known as The Suburban Wife), Cotters’ England (1966, also known as Dark Places of the Heart in the United States), and a selection from almost all her work, A Christina Stead Reader. Next year they plan to publish her collection of novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl.

While not all of these novels live up to the highest quality of her best work, they help to set it in context and make clear what a substantial and formidable body of work hers is.

The Beauties and Furies, her third published book and probably the least known of any of Christina Stead’s novels, has been out of print virtually since its first publication until now. The few critical references to it tend to be casually dismissive and treat it as the conspicuous failure among her first five books. There is some truth to this. It is certainly a garrulous and overwritten novel, its characters possessed of that almost preternatural articulateness and volubility that distinguish so many of their creator’s protagonists. The novel also embodies much of the characteristic tension in the early work of Stead between extravagant flights of romantic fancy on the one hand and gritty, documentary-like observation of sordid demi-mondes on the other. But in its preoccupation with the workings of the female psyche and in its shrewd, hard-headed by largely dispassionate observation of the cafe world of Paris in which most of the characters circle aimlessly, it shares many of the same concerns as the other novels of its author.

At the opening of the novel, its thirty-year-old heroine is fleeing her doctor husband to join a young student in Paris who has declared himself passionately in love with her. Elvira is one of the first in a long line of Stead women: physically attractive, emotionally immature and vulnerable, susceptible to flattery, she has much in common with such women as Miss Herbert or even the apparently tough-minded Letty Fox, though she lacks the real inner strength of Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone. On the surface romantically inclined, she is at heart the essentially conformist, bourgeois-minded woman that Letty and Miss Herbert are. She has her affair in Paris, dithers delightedly between faithful husband and romantic, Adonis-lover, becomes pregnant and hesitates again before deciding not to have the child. Finally, predictably, she returns to the financial and emotional security of England.

Elvira is a challenging character, especially in the early stages of the novel. There is at times a certain salty shrewdness about her observation of men. Of her husband Paul, for instance, she notes, ‘A bachelor weekend. These men love to get each other off into stag huddles in the weekends: they get crushes on each other – his patients are in the City, and the City is a sort of stag-party.’ In response to Oliver’s sentimental idyll of ‘a woman’s hand wandering over the ivories ... a woman, a soft, reluctant voice, music, flowers’, similarly, she says with some asperity, ‘A woman is a human being, not an aesthetic gratification.’ She tries honestly to confront the issues of female freedom and equality. ‘The real thought of the middle-class woman,’ she complains, ‘is the problem of economic freedom and sexual freedom: they can’t be attained at the same time. We are not free. The slave of the kitchen and bedroom.’ It is a familiar plaint among Stead heroines but one to which there is no easy answer. In the course of the discussion with Oliver of which this is an extract, Elvira draws an analogy, also frequently to be met with in the novels, between the roles of housewife and prostitute. As the novel proceeds, however, she becomes steadily tamer. As her husband says of her, ‘Her self-respect is everything to her, and she likes to be on the right side of the law and of the proprieties.’

Early in the novel, the lace manufacturer Georges Fuseaux makes a speech in which he declares that ‘the only fine designs the Rothschilds are interested in are the arabesques on banknotes’. In Christina Stead’s fiction, there is always a tension between what this dichotomy suggests – the fantastic and extravagant versus the utilitarian and materialistic - but it is usually banknotes, especially in the later novels, that win out. In this novel the elements of the extravagant and exotic are certainly there. The presence of that Jacobean figure Marpurgo, forever hanging on the edge of the action and attempting to influence it with his mad speeches and devious plotting, is one example of this. Coromandel is an equally exaggerated figure, though good rather than evil. Elvira’s wild dream is followed by the superbly sensual scene in which this ‘strange sensuous water-animal’ as she is described lovingly inspects her own naked body while, unknown to her, Oliver is watching. Even ‘The Story of the Hamadryad’ reads like a leftover from The Salzburg Tales. One of the most puzzling elements in the novel – and the one that most completely exemplifies the ‘arabesque’ side of Stead’s talents – is the visit of Marpurgo and Oliver to the Somnambulists’ Club. In this scene, perhaps influenced by Ulysses to which there are several references in the novel, Marpurgo plays a sort of malign Bloom to Oliver’s Stephen. It is one of the strangest and most fantastic in the novel and it culminates in Marpurgo’s giving voice to his demonic philosophy: ‘the world is insubstantial and inane, a big-swollen nihility, air compressed by the devil into a borrowed and delusive form’.

But there are elements in the novel which are very substantial indeed. In the background to the swirling, tumultuous intrigues and amorous deceits of the main characters are the implacable mercantile realities of Parisian life. As she was to do later of banking in House of All Nations, Christina Stead reveals a formidably detailed and exhaustive knowledge of the Fuseaux brothers’ lacemaking business, from the actual process of manufacture to the economic basis and organisation of the firm.

Money is never far from any of the characters’ lives and consideration. Elvira returns to her husband not least because of the security he can provide. Oliver is allegedly a radical and admirer of revolutions but his studies in Paris are financed by his uncle and he cuts his scholarly cloth cautiously so as not to jeopardise his future chances of academic employment. He is quick to grab at any opportunity of employment in the business world. Marpurgo spends lavishly on his expense account but his position with the Furnaux bothers is increasingly uncertain and he becomes panic-stricken when he is eventually fired. But the clearest example of total subordination of one’s interests and mode of life to economic considerations is that of the actress Blanche d’Anizy, a not entirely unsympathetic character who lives virtually as a prostitute in order to support herself and her child. For all its flights of fancy. the strongest impression The Beauties and Furies leaves us with is the disreputable, avaricious nature of the Parisian urban world in which the characters’ dreams and fantasies are pursued.

I will pass over For Love Alone as having already been discussed in some detail by others as well as myself to move immediately to the so-called New York trilogy that Christina Stead wrote while resident in the United States. Letty Fox: Her Luck and A Little Tea, A Little Chat are in some ways companion pieces. Both have at their centre a character who is almost compulsively promiscuous but although overt judgments of characters are as rare in these novels as in any of Stead’s the presentation of their behaviour in the two novels is quite different.

Letty Fox is sometimes sentimentalised by feminist critics. Meaghan Morris, for instance, in her intelligent introduction to the Angus & Robertson edition of the novel, claims that ‘Free love is free only for men, who have the power to withhold emotional commitment which Letty can never do once an affair is underway.’ This is what Letty herself argues; I don’t think it’s how Stead would have it. Apart from the fact that it ignores both Letty’s unscrupulousness in her pursuit of what she wants (she tricks a woman out of her apartment, pursues unscrupulously even men who are already committed, attempts to blackmail a lover into marriage, deceives her husband-to-be with two men before he has even time to consummate her marriage, and betrays her sister twice) and her remarkable resilience in bouncing back from these affairs in which she was unable to withhold her love, the novel certainly does not argue that emotional commitment is the exclusive prerogative of one sex.

What is truly impressive about Letty, though, is her emotional honesty, her refusal to put a hypocritical gloss on even the least attractive aspects of her conduct. If this is a limited, perhaps even negative virtue it is nevertheless a real one. ‘Men,’ says Letty, ‘don’t like to think that we are just as they are. But we are much as they are; and therefore, I have omitted the more wretched details of that close connection, that profound, wordless, struggle that must go on in the relation between the sexes.’ Her claim is justified, and the great quality of the novel, one that places it years ahead of its time, is the immediacy, the fullness and the authenticity with which it chronicles the realities of a woman’s attempt to overcome sexual and economic harassment and inequality. It is a conclusive indictment of the double standard in sexual morality. The novel neither idealises nor pours contempt on Letty. It merely records with unjudging sympathy the extremes of behaviour to which social imperatives force her: in a witty parody of the Jesuit boast Mr McLaren observes, ‘let me have a child during the first seven dollars and I can guarantee its success afterwards’.

Christina Stead (photograph via Text Publishing/National Library of Australia)

Although some of her qualities spring uniquely out of the world of Stead’s novels – her extraordinary articulacy and garrulousness, for example, as well as her pretensions to writing – she is, justifiably seen as being to some extent a representative woman of her time. (In particular, she is a representative New Yorker: after asking herself why all her lovers abandon her, she gives the uniquely New Yorker answer – ‘because I had no apartment to which to take them’. Though she competes frantically against other women for any suitable men she associates herself also with ‘the tribe of women’. Like Elvira she points to the analogy between marriage and prostitution and twice turns angrily on the stuffiest of her lovers, denouncing prostitution as a social habit instituted by males. She tells Cornelis, ‘you don’t know the first thing about women, which is, that when you live with them, they begin to love you. This is because they are more earthy and also more honest than you are. When they give their body, they give their heart and soul, too. Isn’t that honest? It is men who whore!’

The portrait of Letty Fox, while less than flattering, is basically sympathetic. That of Robbie Grant in A Little Tea, A Little Chat on the other hand, is an appalling and appalled one, even though superficially his behaviour might seem to be similar to hers. Grant is, without doubt, the most odious character in all of Stead’s fiction, the one indisputably wicked man in all her work. I suspect that critics who rail against Samuel Pollit have not read this novel because, when placed against Robbie, Sam comes to appear almost angelic.

The world of this novel is the same dense, crowded, bustling metropolitan New York of Letty Fox, another of Stead’s brilliant portraits of cities, but what is hard-headed realism in Letty herself (told of Uncle Philip’s suicide she comments tersely ‘He died for love. But I don’t want to’ becomes unscrupulous and pusillanimous cynicism in Grant; and what is resilient energy in her case is a kind of febrile yet self-protective pursuit of hedonism in his.

Grant is rare among Stead’s central characters in being rich and never in want of money, yet he is, if anything; even more materialistic and obsessed with questions of profit than any of his predecessors among her fiction. The world of the novel is very much the aimless, amoral world of Letty Fox and Grant moves through it, spending the bulk of his time with women, sleeping with most of them but gaining little satisfaction from it. Stead, who is far more disposed to comment directly on him than she usually is, observes that ‘He had little pleasure out of his own real hobby, libertinage, and he gave none. Women fell away from him, but he did not know why; and he retained only the venal.’ He has a corny line as a seducer: ‘A woman like you could keep a man. I’m looking for an oasis in my desert, a rose on a blasted heath ... I’m looking for romance. My heart needs a home, a cradle, eh? I’ve used myself up, played too hard. Now I need a woman, a mother, a sister, a sweetheart, a friend.’ But the sheer indefatigable energy of his pursuit, backed up by the delusive promise of his riches, nets him a fair number of successes.

In the course of the novel, Grant not only seduces a large number of women (at one stage his son overhears him making telephone calls to seven women in succession, offering substantially the same patter) but drives one of them to suicide, engages in speculative profiteering despite his professed socialism, shows no love for his young son, steals a play which he had commissioned and refuses to pay for, sends anonymous letters to undermine two of the women with whom he had fallen out, refuses to pay his closest associate the money to which he is entitled, and drives several women to financial ruin by reneging on his promises of financial assistance.

Throughout all this, he is able to convince himself that none of it is his own responsibility. Robbie’s capacity for self-deception is on a par with that of Stead’s portraits of other great egotistical self-deceivers – Sam Pollit, Jonathan Crow, Henri Leon (in House of All Nations) and Nellie Cook in Cotters’ England. We see this trait especially in his repeated reconstructions of the suicide of Mrs Coppelius, for which he was responsible. The author tells us first that ‘Never once did he allow himself to think of the woman. It was a simple black-out in his mind’, but later, when he does begin to think about her, a remarkable process of sublimation takes place. In one version, Grant’s victim becomes a beautiful Italian woman Signora Maria Coppelius whom he meets only incidentally and who is driven to her death by a priest whose mistress she was! Numerous other versions that follow later are even more ingenious and further from the truth. Similarly, his method of coping with his own grievous faults and avoiding self-knowledge is to project them onto other people. Thus, a man whom he ruins by his false promises of financial collaboration becomes a case of ‘Megalo-mania’, and he advises his son to dismiss an employee on the grounds that he is a ‘libertine’!

Again, as with Letty Fox the background to this examination of sexual depravity is political and especially that of the war (both novels are set largely in wartime). At one point Stead tells us savagely, ‘Everyone scooped greedily in the great cream pot of war.’ Grant plays at being a ‘pinko’ partly because ‘leftist’ girls are assumed to be easier to get: despite her own professed socialism, Stead has presented us with a more scathing indictment of socialist and pseudo-socialist characters than most right-wing authors.

The depiction of both Grant and the New York he inhabits, then is a degrading one. In The People with the Dogs on the other hand, Stead seems to be attempting to redress the balance a little. This novel is in many ways the most attractive of the three New York ones, if only because its low-keyed mood and reflective, leisurely approach are something of a relief to come to after the hurtling pace of the previous two.

The novel opens. characteristically for Stead, with the sentence ‘In lower Manhattan, between 17th and 15th Streets, Second Avenue, running north and south, cuts through Stuyvesant Park; and at this point Second Avenue enters upon the old Lower East Side’. As so often, the author begins by locating us firmly in time or place or both: shortly afterwards we hear it is ‘just after the war’ as well.

Compare the openings of the following novels:

The express flew towards Paris over the flooded March swamps.

The Beauties and Furies

They were in the Hotel Lotti in the Rue de Castiglione, but not in Leon’s usual suite.

House of All Nations

All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit’s children were on the lookout for him as thev skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.

The Man Who Loved Children

One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.

Letty Fox: Her Luck

Peter Hoag, a Wall Street man, aged fifty-six in March. 1941 led a simple Manhattan life and had regular habits.

A Little Tea, A Little Chat

It was a Saturday, a fine March morning.

Cotters’ England

Dr. Linda Mack had brought the five girls down to her Devon cottage in the car: it was June and the weather was fair.

Miss Herbert

As with the great Russian novelists. we are immediately plunged into the narrative as well as given a context in which to place the characters. Frequently this becomes a moral topography as well, as in the New York novels or the Parisian underworld of The Beauties and Furies. In their dense materiality, their concentration on the factual and the material, their insistence on reaching towards the inner life by exhaustive presentation of the outer, Christina Stead’s novels stand at the extreme opposite pole to those of Australia’s other great contemporary novelist. Patrick White’s division between the riders in the chariot and those outside, between the handful of the chosen and the rest of us, in its way a kind of aesthetic Calvinism, is in total contrast to the all-inclusiveness, the omnivorousness and the secularity of Stead’s vision.

The central character of The People with the Dogs is Edward Massine, yet another would-be writer (someday an article will be written on Christina Stead’s unwritten books) and the only one of Stead’s protagonists apart from Grant who is financially well off: we are given a detailed inventory of his financial assets by Miss Waldmeyer in the opening pages of the novel though, predictably this does not stop the novel from being to a fair extent concerned with the financial affairs of Edward as well as the other main characters. In contrast to the earlier two New York books, this one is marked by an almost Chekhovian sense of aimlessness, of people leading lives of quiet futility. Edward dithers not only at his writing (his talent is suggested by the fact that he came first at writing at school!) but also over whether or not to marry his girl who, eventually, leaves him in despair. Despite the quietly comic tone and affectionate treatment of the characters, a sense of melancholy foreboding is never far away. The deaths of Big Jenny and Philip Christy, Nell’s near starvation of herself to death, the background figure of Les Chubin who hanged himself for love set the tone of the novel hardly more than the comic proposal of Edward to Lydia at the end or the endless conversations that run across one another without meeting, as in a Chekhov play, rumours, pun apocryphal stories, complaints or intrigues.

Central to our sense of the superfluous, aimless existence of most of the characters is the motif of the dogs in the title. Many of the characters, most notably of course Oneida, lavish on them the love they are unable to feel or express for each other. Edward’s girl Margot accuses him with some justification of being more responsive to canines than to humans: ‘Yes, you can’t bear a dog howling, but you can bear a soul howling’, she tells him. Oneida, without doubt the most obsessive and fanatical member of the family in regard to dogs, indicates just how much they provide a core of meaning to her life: ‘She had a stout confidence and self-conscious movement,’ Stead tells us, ‘all the freedom of her ungirdled unembraced body, which was almost rich grace. She was full of movement, unrestrained, and it was perhaps the plenitude of this one love, her dogs, which had given this life to her small thick-set frame, which had no noticeable dwindling and spindling like other women’. Victor-Alexander comments of her shortly afterwards that she ‘substituted dogs for a moral and spiritual life, even a life of sensuality, talent: dogs were a deep-rooted and dangerous vice’. At one stage the family hear about a cure for old age that is highly expensive. ‘How angry Oneida was that dogs of the rich could have this treatment, perhaps, and her poor dogs not. “And then there are poor old men and women,” said Oneida.’ This. accurately reflects her order of priorities.

Like so many of Stead’s novels, perhaps more than any except The Man Who Loved Children, this is also pre-eminently a novel about family life, and about ,how family love can easily become a cossetting, destructive thing: ‘Am I turning my back on life or looking at life?’, Edward asks himself anxiously. However, in keeping with the sympathetic tone of the novel, The People with the Dogs ends on an almost unexpected note of reconciliation. Edward emerges from his lethargy long enough to marry and Oneida is given a new dog by her long-suffering husband Lou. The plea that Edward bravely makes for the way of life of the people with the dogs is implicitly given some weight by the novelist’s stance: ‘What harm do we do?’, he asks. ‘We’re creative sloth: what life ought to give but it doesn’t. The right to be lazy.’ Despite the many criticisms Edward himself has made of family life the novel closes with a strikingly posed tableau of all the family members: ‘In this moment, as in all others, their long habit and innocent unquestioning and strong, binding, family love, the rule of their family, made all things natural and sociable with them.’

By the time The People with the Dogs appeared, Christina Stead had written nine novels in less than twenty years. Since then she has published three more plus a collection of novellas over a period of approximately thirty years. Although she herself vehemently denies the suggestion, claiming that she has always written purely and exclusively for personal satisfaction, it is difficult not to suspect that critical and commercial indifference has had something to do with the marked decrease in her output. At any rate, the publication of her next novel, Cotters’ England, coincided with the revival of interest in her work that began in the mid-sixties with the attention paid to Randall Jarrell’s introduction to The Man Who Loved Children, the reprints of some of her novels in Australia by Sun Books and Angus & Robertson, and the two critical works on her by R.G. Geering. This interest has been boosted enormously in the 1970s by the rise of the feminist movement, which has also led to radical and belated recognition of other female Australian writers such as Barbara Baynton, Eve Langley, Miles Franklin, and M. Barnard Eldershaw (whom Virago plans to reprint next year).

The cosmopolitan nature of Christina Stead’s work is confirmed by the settings of the later novels – two in England and one in Switzerland, to add to her previous treatments of Sydney, Paris, London, Salzberg, Washington and New York. It is not so much that Christina Stead seems to put down creative roots wherever she goes as that she remains an attentive yet disinterested observer of every variety and species of human behaviour wherever it occurs. The later novels, especially, are above all works of observation; though largely devoid of the intensity of moral commitment that characterises The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone, they remain vivid and profoundly original works of art.

Christina Stead deals, comprehensively and wisely and unsentimentally, with whole areas of experience which had hardly begun to be opened up by other writers until the early 1970s, however much they have since become commonplace as subject matter. The variety and abundance of her characters and settings is as astonishing as the encyclopaedic nature of the jobs and activities she shows them performing. Collectively, her novels form as rich and crowded a world as that of almost any writer since Balzac.

Whether they are all ‘Modern Classics’ as most of these Virago reprints are described, is a debatable question. What is certainly true is that Stead carved out, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, paths which other writers were to follow only years later. She is not only a pioneer but a pioneering giant. It is only now that, thanks to these handsome Virago volumes, that we can grasp the depth and voluminousness of her talent.

In the prologue to his history of Queensland, Ross Fitzgerald explains that:

All history is a story, told from the point of view of the present. This tale has one key theme: the effect of a particularly European idea of progress upon the land, the flora and fauna, the institutions, and the peoples of Queensland.

The major problem with this approach to history, as Fitzgerald treads it, is that he takes the preoccupations and perspectives of the twentieth century Sunshine State and implants them in a colonial Queensland context. This achieved, Fitzgerald can point to the continuities of Queensland history. I am reminded of my dog, who buries his bones and considers himself smart when he succeeds in digging them up.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one has chapters describing Aboriginal Queensland, European contact and the Moreton Bay settlement. Part two of the book includes an introduction and four chapters: one devoted to pastoralism, mining and agriculture; one to race relations; one to regionalism and one to what the author terms ‘the politics of progress’. Fitzgerald’s organisation of his material creates almost as many problems for the reader as does the material itself. Although the major themes of Queensland history (the development of primary industry, race relations and regionalism) have been correctly identified, Fitzgerald, in treating each as a separate issue, has failed to convey either the dialectics or the internal coherence of Queensland history, the course of which was determined by the population’s response to the challenges it faced. The choices which Queenslanders make in the Fitzgerald version are inevitable because if those choices were not made, we would not be what we are today.

Evans, Saunders and Cronin, in their study of race relations in colonial Queensland, have commented that:

contact situations … must be seen as much more than static set-pieces, fixed in time. For they represent human confrontations, incorporating the reasoning, the emotions, the endurance and suffering of men and women, either voluntarily involved or accidentally caught up in social happenings they could not fully understand. The easiest for us today is to condemn the exploiters and pity the exploited … yet it is hardest, though more important, that we endeavour principally to understand these people …

In these terms, Dr Fitzgerald has presented us Jess with a history than with a series of static set-pieces: contrived tableaux connected by moral commentaries.

By segregating the role of Aborigines, Melanesians, and Chinese into a single chapter, Dr Fitzgerald creates his own apartheid. He fails to integrate the experiences of racial minorities with the industries and ideologies which contributed to them. Moreover, although the chapter describes well the exploitation of non-whites by whites, it does not recognise, far less explore, the differing values, expectations and motives of participants on racial frontiers. Aboriginal resistance to European incursions is, creditably described. In dealing with all three groups within white dominated Queensland, however, Fitzgerald ignores, and thus denies, the initiatives which these minorities took in pursuing their own objectives. Why did some Aborigines cooperate with whites during and after initial frontier contact? Why did the Chinese flock to the gold fields and why did Melanesians often volunteer for service on° plantations? How did these groups react to the racist colonial environment in which they found themselves? Dr Fitzgerald’s failure to address these issues both ignores the discretion exercised by minorities in shaping the relationships which determined the nature of their existence in colonial Queensland and severely limits the validity of the author’s perspective.

Far more disappointing, however, is Dr Fitzgerald’s condemnation of those historians who have sought to distinguish between indentured and slave labour systems. In Queensland, he writes,

contrary to popular belief, it was not the first white settlement in the tropics to be ‘developed’ without the aid of slave labour. That until quite recently white historians should have wished to conceal the real nature of the Pacific Island labour trade in Queensland is entirely comprehensible, that they should have succeeded is astonishing. Regardless of ‘better conditions’ or ‘less frequent atrocities’, the Queensland kanaka trade was fundamentally similar to slave labour systems in other parts of the world.

Queensland historians have made valuable comparisons between the Queensland plantation system and the systems operating in other sugar producing areas, particularly Mauritius, where many of the white managers and overseers received their experience and training, and the southern states of the United States, and such comparisons are fundamental to any understanding· of the real nature of the indentured labour system. The hierarchical, caste-like organisation of plantations, ‘the methods of coercion and control of labour and the living and working conditions of the participants in’ slave and indenture systems were similar. Queensland’s Melanesians, however, sold their labour, however unequally, to planters, and were not the capitalised property of planters. On the one hand, this denied Melanesians a degree of protection and care usually accorded capitalised infrastructure; on the other, •it precluded the development, in Queensland, of the highly organised assault’ on the physical, psychological and emotional integrity of human beings that was intrinsic to, and undermined every human facet of, slave life. Fitzgerald cannot, or does not wish to, appreciate structural and ideological differences between the two systems, a disability which reflects more on himself than on the state of Queensland ‘historiography…’

In his concluding chapter, Dr Fitzgerald examines the nature of Queensland politics from separation to the Labor electoral victory of 1915. He explains that the colony enjoyed ‘strong social cohesion’ and he argues that a ‘corollary of cultural uniformity and anti-intellectualism was a latent authoritarianism uninhibited by a middle class liberal tradition.’ Although the chapter continues to describe the rise of working class radicalism, it maintains its general view that consensus and mediocrity fostered authoritarianism. In his concluding paragraph, Dr Fitzgerald writes that:

There can be little doubt that, given their optimistic faith in material ‘progress’, white Queenslanders – either owning or aspiring to own property, nurtured a deep seated concern for social and political stability. The stress on the struggle to ‘develop’ – at whatever cost – and the consequent neglect of moral issues, coupled with the high incidence of environmental and climatic hazards, especially in tropical Queensland, reinforced this concern with stability in the Sunshine State.

To some extent, this thesis is persuasive. It needs, however, to be carefully applied if the historical roots of our authoritarianism are to be understood.

Authoritarianism in Queensland during the period under review was a response to three conditions: social and political heterogeneity, the political requirements of economic dependence, and economic and psychological insecurity.

Far I from emerging in uniform and coherent societies, the trend towards authoritarianism has been most common in those polities where the authority of an élite to govern has been most challenged. Authoritarianism is only necessary to an elite under threat. Queensland’s social divisions, some of which Dr Fitzgerald has observed, divided black from white, Aboriginal from Melanesian, protestant from catholic, shopkeeper from squatter, squatter from selector, region from region and region from town, labourer from tradesman, tradesman from proprietor and non-Queensland capital from Queensland workers and resources. The major challenge for early Queensland governments was, therefore, the need to establish consensus among fractured and discordant communities, a consensus needed to mobilize a poorly integrated population. The solution found to this political problem was authoritarianism.

An important element of Queensland history not explored by Fitzgerald and relevant to the development of authoritarianism is the composition and role of the Queensland elite.

The divisions which split the Queensland population, in particular those of region, occupation and religion, coupled with the high proportion of foreign and southern capital in the Queensland economy, effectively prevented the growth of a coherent, stable and Queensland oriented elite. The graziers, lawyers and businessmen who, collectively, comprised Queensland’s upper class were little more than big fish in small provincial ponds. Queensland’s decentralisation precluded the mobilisation and unification of the upper classes which was a feature of Victorian and South Australian societies. Real economic power, in Queensland, moreover, rested in London and Melbourne and, since leadership functions are usually performed by those who control a community’s means of production, Queensland never produced an elite in which economic power was integrated with social status, it never produced an organic leadership. The regional and provincial families to whom status was attributed were less central to Queensland affairs than were absentee capitalists. In the absence of a unified and organic socio-economic elite, Queensland politics became progressively dominated by a class of managers and company representatives, and by those Queenslanders who collaborated in the exploitation of our resources. Queenslanders’ political leaders depended as much on support from Melbourne and London as they did on Queensland. Their interests, consequently, centred less on equitable and balanced economic and social development than on maximising the profitability of exporting Queensland’s raw materials, a profitability not to be diminished by dissent.

The rise of authoritarianism in Queensland was not the result, simply, of the machinations of capitalists and politicians. Life for most Europeans in early Queensland was often almost as unpleasant as it was for non-Europeans. Fortunes were uncertain and climates hostile. Despite the often brutal demonstrations of European monopolisation over the coercive arms of state and society, the intense physical, racial and cultural threats perceived by Queenslanders, particularly in the ‘north and west, fostered a deep-rooted insecurity which was, to some extent, assuaged by authoritarianism.

Queensland developmental ideology, therefore, was not the cause of our authoritarianism, but rather, the means through which our political leaders both mobilised otherwise fragmented electorates and legitimised the power they exercised on behalf of absent economic interests.

Dr Fitzgerald has joined the ranks of the historian in the grand manner. His book fails, not because he has tackled too broad a subject, but because he pursues his central theme at the expense of the nuances, ambiguities and contradictions, the exploration and resolution of which make history relevant. One is reminded of the words of Sir Steven Runciman: the supreme duty of the historian, he wrote in 1950,

is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. The writer rash enough to make the attempt should not be criticized for his ambition, however much he may deserve censure for the inadequacy of his equipment or the inanity of his results.

John Walker completed an honours degree in history and government at the University of Queensland in 1979.

The letters which form the body of this book are well edited and displayed, the biographical notes, although from necessity they are usually brief, are valuable – in these ways Decie Denholm has been a keen and careful editor. More about the letters later.

First though, increasingly I find it tiresome and misleading when historians like Decie Denholm use catchphrases like ‘the Victorian mould’ to label people. If the Victorian ‘mould’ or ‘stereotype’ means anything, it presumably means something different to every reader or student. At my age I recall ‘Victorians’; my children do not and what they understand by the word is likely to be very different from my interpretation. The ‘Victorians’ I knew in my childhood were mostly upper middle-class people – a person of my age from some other country, or different family milieu, would recollect something, or someone, else again.

The problems of children’s book publishing are not really different in kind from those which beset other types of publishing; they are the familiar problems exacerbated by the fact that these books are designed for a group of second-class citizens who, being young and dependent, have little influence on what is produced for them, and little financial clout.

Children’s Book Week is traditionally a time to take an overall view of the last year’s output of children’s books. Such an overall view is necessarily superficial but it can be interesting to note the appearance of new authors and illustrators, new themes, or different treatment of old themes. This article will look at the picture books and fiction of the last twelve months.

In a spirit of optimistic support for the APBA’s Book Design Awards, publishers entered 233 books for the 1981 competition, the thirtieth to be held. The judges made short work of their hopes. ‘Best book’ awards were made in only two of seven categories – children’s books and the section for best jacket or cover, won by The Frog and the Pelican (Methuen) and Homesickness (Penguin) respectively. Nineteen other books won commendations. The APBA Andrew Fabinyi prize for the book that best solved problems posed by content or production was awarded to Australia in Figures (Penguin). The judges withheld the $1000 Joyce Nicholson Prize for the Best Book of the Year, as a mark of their disappointment at the standard of entries.

The judges’ report (66 words long) notes the ‘perfectly competent’ nature of many submissions, but complains of a general conservatism of design and a lack of innovation. The tone of dissatisfaction extends to the one-line comments on some of the commended books. How must the recipient of a commendation feel to be told that her sympathetic design and production (Platypus Joe, Hyland House) is ‘let down by jacket/cover design’? How do you rate the pleasure of being commended for a book (Whistle up the Chimney, Collins) whose cover design was considered ‘too gloomy and unattractive’? If this is the year for rubbishing conservatism, why give a commendation at all to a book (A Short History of Australia, Mead and Beckett/Macmillan) of which the best you can say is that it is ‘clear if unimaginative’?