Of Elizabeth Jolley’s first novel, Palomino (1980), Nancy Keesing said it ‘establishes Elizabeth Jolley as absolutely one of the best writers of fiction in this country’ (ABR, March 1981). Of The Newspaper of Claremont Street, Tom Shapcott said its ‘capacity to touch the very nerve centre of human fragility, of exposing the tragedy in human needs within the small comedy of existence, is something I have not seen done with such delicate balance and precision since the ‘Pnin’ stories of Vladimir Nabakov’ (Fremantle Arts Centre Broadsheet, January-February, 1982). Sally McInerney’s judgement of The Newspaper is that ‘this slight and disturbing novel sways between socio­political allegory (about work and non­human relations) and conventional storytelling, and the two elements work against each other’ (National Times, 17–23 January, 1982). I agree with Keesing and Shapcott, but can understand why McInerney might have come to her conclusion.

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new creative phase in the post-Menzies and the Whitlam years.

In 1972 he became an adviser to Whitlam, a role he oddly describes as ‘outside the system’. Beside Whitlam, Coombs stood as a symbol of continuity. Friends had long regarded him as the kindler of ‘the light on the hill’, while his enemies had never ceased to see him as a dissembling bureaucratic espionage agent for Labor.

This novel raises more interesting questions about its author than about its characters and action.

The story, set in Chicago in 1913–14, is told by a well-to-do businessman, called Mr Cavarley, who sympathises with feminism and females, and sharply criticises men whose sexual and social life is corrupted by ‘the toy idea of WOMAN’. He falls in love with an independent-spirited secretary-editor, Sybyl Penelo (a name clearly suggesting some link with Sybylla Melvyn in My Brilliant Career, and with Miles Franklin herself, to whom in many ways Sybyl bears a close resemblance). Sybyl has radical doubts about whether she should ever get married, and though she likes Cavarley, she is also attracted to the younger, sillier, richer, but quite charming Bobby Hoyne. After Bobby’s convenient death in a car race, she draws closer to Cavarley and becomes engaged to him, though right to the end of the story it is not certain that she will actually marry him.

Exiles at Home is a fascinating work by a feminist of the 1970s about a group of anti-fascist feminists of the 1920s and 1930s. From it we learn as much about the world view of the author as we do about the politics of its subjects. A serious book, about serious writers, it examines novels for their historical rather than for their literary interest. It offers no real criticism of writing styles, and no comparison with modem feminist authors. Nor is it a book to be read in the hope of rediscovering almost forgotten characters from our literary past.

Drusilla Modjeska tells us that her reasons for jogging our memories about Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Jean Devanny, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others are political. Insisting on ‘the importance of ... ideological readings of all the texts’, she seeks to unearth a tradition of women’s fiction, ‘and to insist that it is taken seriously’, in order that Australia’s cultural history can be freed from ‘the bonds of masculine tradition’. In this she bears a striking resemblance to her subjects, who were evangelists in the cause of Australian literature fifty years ago. Just as Palmer and Franklin believed that a public fed on comics and moving pictures conspired with Anglophile academics to deny native authors the readership they deserved, so Modjeska believes that male critics and conservative academics have spread the myth that women’s fiction is ‘dull, tame, domestic’.

Xavier Herbert is probably the most enigmatic of Australian writers, but there is nothing enigmatic about Laurie Clancy’s treatment of the man and his works in Twayne’s World Authors Series. This is the best assessment of Herbert since Vincent Buckley’s article ‘Capricornia’ (Meanjin, 19, 1960) forced critics to take Herbert seriously as a writer of stature and an experimentalist with the form of the novel, and since Harry Heseltine’s Xavier Herbert (OUP, 1973) drew attention to what Heseltine saw as the ‘deep motive’ of Herbert’s writing in the works that preceded Poor Fellow My Country.

Clancy’s book will be valuable to the student of Herbert and also to the newcomer to his works; it may be used mainly by Australian readers, but it should also help to change that situation which Clancy rightly refers to as ‘Herbert’s relative obscurity overseas’. The book is well written; Clancy’s critical judgements are unequivocal and, I believe, basically sound. That last statement will provoke dissent.

Following her husband’s excellent autobiography of his early years, Mucking About (1977), Alexandra Hasluck’s own life story has been eagerly awaited. And it has been worth the wait. Portrait in a Mirror is one of only a handful of good autobiographies by Australian public figures. Its 322 pages are full of colour, with some excellent passages of prose, particularly her warm, evocative descriptions of the Australian countryside. Hers is essentially a feminine, empathetic view of the world.

It is mostly a superb piece of autobiographical writing. Alexandra gives a good deal of herself. The book begins with an interesting description of her forebears – her father’s family, the Darkers of Brisbane and her mother’s, the Hills of Perth. Then follow chapters on her girlhood trip to England, her schooldays in Perth, her years of study for a BA at the newly opened Perth University, her marriage to Paul Hasluck, a young journalist on the West Australian, their honeymoon in Europe, and her early married life, including several years in wartime Canberra.

In this, her fourth autobiographical volume, Naomi Mitchison takes on a difficult task – that of making travellers’ tales interesting. Her first three autobiographies dealt with childhood, youth, the between-war years. She demonstrated great literary skills in selective recall and in creating the wholly misleading impression that this was an artless narrative. In fact she gave us a brilliant account of the lives of a section of the British upper bourgeoisie, and the moving and honest story of her own growth into political radicalism.

Now this sister of J.B.S. Haldane changes course, and talks of her many foreign excursions: pre-war eastern Europe, several visits on peace missions and the like to the Soviet Union, her times in India before and after her brother’s death there, and much on the politics of Black Africa, where she has played a distinguished part as a political and cultural emissary, being declared a ‘Prohibited Immigrant’ in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.

We also get a brilliant vignette of Australia: a wombat trying to break into Clif Pugh’s house at Cottle’s Bridge in Victoria ‘like an elderly inefficient burglar’, and a trip to the North with Pugh, writing articles, looking and thinking. What Naomi Mitchison learnt is put down with plenty of words in the right places but with the overall economy of a master craftsman.

Born in 1897, Naomi Mitchison has been a writer and activist all her life. An English reviewer has remarked of her that she is one of the finest products of an imperial tradition which she has helped to dismantle. Her books point to one great truth: that the true radical sees theories in terms of people, and not the other way round.

What a delight it is to read a collection of contemporary poetry which is not only good but entertaining and capable of arousing emotions – and the delight is intensified because the experience is so rare. Most Australian poets that I have read recently seem to think that the exercise of writing, for example ‘happy days / lost in lust’ justifies them in putting ‘poet’ instead of ‘esq.’ after their names. Geoffrey Lehmann is not one of these. On the strength of his recent book, Nero’s Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero, published by Angus and Robertson, it can be seen that Mr Lehmann justly deserves the title ‘poet’, even though, for the duration of the book, we are asked to suspend our belief and attribute the poems to the Emperor Nero himself.

Lehmann’s Nero is not the Nero portrayed by Peter Ustinov – a shambling despotic pretentious fool of little wit and less self-command. This Nero is an artisan, a musician, a lover of architecture, and a man of the people. He is a street poet, one who loves to recite his works in public, particularly when he is happily indulging in one of his favourite pastimes, imbibing the fermented juice of the grape.

Verna Coleman’s biography of Miles Franklin is extremely valuable but somewhat flawed. Those parts of Franklin’s life that are germane to the mateship tradition and the development of a nationalist Australian literature have been widely canvassed – although they take in only her precocious youth and mellow old age. The crucial decades between 1906 and 1927 are an almost total blank, even though they include the writing of her most important journalism and all but one of the novels on which her reputation rests. (Marjorie Barnard scarcely even tried to fill that blank with her 1967 biography.) Ms Coleman has restored those lost years and we must all thank her.

The sources for the period are a bit limited, but Ms Coleman deploys them with great skill to achieve maximum value, exploring substantial American manuscript holdings as well as the archives of Life and Labor, the magazine that Franklin edited with fellow Australian Alice Henry. Ms Coleman fills in the details of Franklin’s career with the National Women’s Trade Union League but her most curious discoveries are from neglected pocket diaries of 1909–16.

In a way, two words suffice for Plumb. Read it. It would be fair to add, ‘Make yourself read it.’ The inexorable, old man’s voice of its narrator George Plumb may irritate you, but before long you will respect his unrelenting and unsparing honesty with himself and his memories, and you will realise that everything he says has its place in this splendidly fashioned novel. At the end, he writes: ‘I thought, I’m ready to die, or live, or understand, or love, or whatever it is. I’m glad of the good I’ve done, and sorry about the bad.’

Plumb’s recollections span a few weeks in about 1946 during which he journeys from his home near Auckland to Wellington, in what he perceives, probably rightly, as a farewell visit to those of his New Zealand children whom he has not seen for a long time. His memories are of a full and spiritually adventurous life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is a man of strong beliefs that changed from time to time, not from any Vicar of Bray expediency, but from inner conviction. During World War I, as a socialist and pacifist, he went to jail for the mildest of seditious utterance: he opposed pro-war rituals in primary schools.

The best things about this book are the paintings, the photographs, and the paper. The worst thing is the prose. But does this matter, you may well ask, in a book obviously designed to travel rapidly from the coffee table to the wall – with its large size format and convenient disintegration at first read? It’s the pictures we want, not the prose.

Well, back in the 1920s and 1930s when Arthur Streeton was our grandest and oldest gold-and-gum-school-boy this might have been okay. Then everyone was clamouring for those gold and blue landscapes whose open spaces and dreamlike distances were seen as the nationalist ideal, the quintessential Australia.

This book is the best thing that’s happened to me since J.D. Salinger covered his typewriter, or went to Mars or whatever it was that happened to him. It’s a book to put in your satchel and take everywhere, so that in times of stress, you can take it out, read a chapter and feel your heart lift. In fact, it’s really too good for me to write about, but I don’t suppose the editor would be amused by a silent tribute.

Barry Dickins has given us thirty-odd chapters, snapshots is probably a better word, from his life. They are so funny, so sad, so ENLIGHTENED, they make you believe again in some of the things you’d become afraid to believe in.

There is a Melbourne school in the study of politics, a group of scholars whose work in biography, and in public opinion and public administration studies has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, and stresses the importance of unconscious motivation. The Melbourne school is a loose grouping; some of its members would deny that it has a leader, but it owes its existence, and much of its success, to Professor A.F. Davies of Melbourne University’s Political Science Department.

In Skills, Outlooks and Passions: A psychoanalytical contribution to the study of politics, Professor Davies has brought together and extended his previous work in three areas, the study of administrative styles and roles, the classification of political outlooks, and the study of the emotions as they are expressed in political life. The book, the author explains, is ‘actually three slim volumes bound as one’, but it is the product of a single version of the political animal. Despite the relative paucity of psychoanalytic literature which deals directly with political topics, this book is, in all senses, substantial.

Kathryn Cole’s book sets out by means of thirteen contributions to evaluate ‘two assertions about trade unions (which) are pervasive’. These are that they are very or too powerful, and that they are usually the aggressors in industrial disputes. Its conclusion is that unions are more sinned against than sinning, or, to paraphrase the words of Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited describing Lady Marchmain, ‘they are saintly without being saints’.

This conclusion results from an argument that runs like this. The media is inevitably against trade unions, and unions do not know how to use the media (‘few unions have the funds to communicate regularly with their own members, let alone the public at large’). Secondly, ‘conflict is intrinsic to capitalist industrial societies’, because ‘the primary objective of employers is to harvest the maximum possible return’. So unions could not possibly be the aggressors. (What are they after?)

Australia’s need for a definitive history about its national trade union centre has been handsomely filled by Jim Hagan. His exhaustively detailed study must become the base for future researchers who will seek to assess what happened in our times.

As a viable union summit, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) struck root in 1927. Its promoters were bound by a wish to bring such a body into being. They were diverse however in their views about what its basic functions should be. Mass disillusionment among unionists over the World War I roles of a Federal Labor Government and three State Labor governments and adverse attitudes to their trade union base created a climate for new ideas. Most influential was the One Big Union (OBU) concept. It aimed to eliminate craft divisions and coalesce workers into a single union. The OBU would then be the springboard to replace capitalism by a socialist regime.

The four books reviewed here may be divided into two categories: the first, consisting of The Gosses: An Anglo-Australian Family, by Fayette Gosse, and Dinkum Mishpochah*, by Eric Silbert, is family biography, while the second, into which fall The Tanner Letters, edited by Pamela Statham, and Don Charlwood’s The Long Farewell, is the reconstruction, by means of such primary sources as letters and diaries, of the Australian past. Though these are very broad classifications, they serve to highlight the differences as well as the similarities between the members of each group.