At seventy-one Judah Waten is not just another old soldier who refuses to fade away. Nor is he a man who keeps writing books out of habit. He is a born storyteller who writes when he has something to tell us. And the more he writes, the more powerful and persuasive his fictions become.

Scenes of Revolutionary Life is a brilliant achievement; the work of a man at the peak of his power. Subtle, richly panoramic, and at the same time a splendid character study, this book tells the story of Torn Graves from youth to retirement age, his dedication to the Communist movement and his yearning to be a great writer, his love affair with Maggie Carlton, a brilliant student at Melbourne and later an Oxford don, and his unconsummated passion for Nadine Rose, Secretary for the Bloomsbury Branch of the Communist Party.

If any volume of Selected Poems must be in part the autobiography of an imagination, it is subject to the vicissitudes and ironies which attend all autobiography. One gazes at it and finds familiar lineaments, but one also finds mobilities and stands made more evident than a more partial acquaintance can show. The very title is a warning that the whole story –whatever that might be – is not to be found here: a ‘Selected Poems’ is the outcome of recurrent options.

            Often, in the face of this, reviewers lodge their complaint that something has, inappropriately as they take it, been left out, or something unhappily been left in. I shall not do that here. After all, if ever there is a place for the de gustibus dictum, this must be it. Rather, I should like to remind the potential reader what kind of thing he may expect to find in either R.A. Simpson’s or in Vincent Buckley’s Selected Poems.

The title of The Half-Open Door implies questions relating to the lives of modern professional women in Australia, and bears on the current attention, political and academic, being given to women’s matters. These questions are made explicit in the book’s Preface, which asks why women enter the demanding areas of the professions and the arts, and why so few achieve positions of high status in these fields. Contemporary evidence, formal and informal, of the ambiguity of opportunity for women in Australia is commonplace. For instance, the typical composition of academic humanities departments is like that in which the reviewers work: sixty-four per cent of the student body yet only twenty per cent of the full-time academic staff are female. Why the door – which was opened relatively early for women in Australia by university admittance, emancipation and equal job-opportunity –remains half-closed is a question that needs to be asked. Regrettably, this volume goes only half-way to suggesting an answer.

Poor John Monash has waited a long time. Before he died in 1931, he clearly hoped for a friendly posthumous biography. He destroyed his collection of erotica and some extramarital love letters. This was characteristically called ‘Emergency Action’. Less characteristically, he instructed his son-in-law and executor, Gershon Bennett, not to ‘preserve indefinitely’ the enormous collection of letters, diaries, cuttings, etc.

Fortunately, the Bennett family withheld the papers for longer than an ‘indefinite’ period. In 1975 they granted Geoffrey Serle exclusive access to produce the first comprehensive, thoroughly grounded Life. Equally fortunate is the deposition of the papers in the National Library in Canberra.

Serle speculates in his preface that Monash himself ‘would take exception to little that I have written’. This biography by invitation rather than commission, written by a senior post-World War II historian rather than a writer of Monash’s generation, still draws heavily on the conventions of the traditional, authorised Life.

My Blue-Checker Corker and Me probably has enough strengths to make one forget, eventually, most of its irritating features. Paul Radley’s story of ‘a small mellow world’ is unashamedly emotional. and Radley is clearly fascinated with the possibilities of language. This is the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his relationship with his grandfather, his mates and his pigeons.

Not surprisingly there is lots of small boy talk. ‘Bullshit. I got friends. Lots of them. Right here in fucking Boomeroo. More friends than you could whack your dick at.’ This passage can illustrate three elements that I found very irritating about the novel. Little boys saying ‘fuck’ become very boring. So do novelists. Radley is also relentlessly and unironically Australian. The place names become a parody. Worse than these two qualities is the naive and aggressive masculinity of the novel.

Times are changing within the Labor party. As L.F. Crisp points out in his essay on the branches, the new membership is often educated middle class and keen to discuss the International Situation where once the thing was to have a few beers and raffle a chook. Even Bill Hayden, despite his cop background, reflects some of the new flavour of the party with his too often carping manner, redolent of the classroom pedant. That Labor Essays – ‘designed to stimulate creative thought within and without the party’ – should have begun to appear in 1980 seems not unrelated to the growing desire within the party for intellectual as well as emotional satisfaction.

In Labor Essays 1982, a mixture of academics and politicians address themselves to the problems of bringing change to a deeply conservative society. The enormous discrepancy between the rationalistic and egalitarian values of the writers and the realities of Australia make for a reading experience which is both irritating and interesting.

Russel Ward’s new book is a revision of History, which he published in 1965, mainly for an American audience. In fact, it was read more in Australia and now he has extended the work, put in more detail, and, presumably in response to recent developments, included some cursory glances at the doings of Aborigines, explorers, and the female half of the Australian people.

The author also announces that, though all good historians strive to write ‘fair’ and ‘objective’ history, none can really succeed. This is scarcely world-shattering news and not all historians would agree with these splendidly liberal criteria, except with very substantial qualifications and amendments. The historian should seek to understand how we came to be what we are; ‘fair’ treatment should not be permitted to collapse into the bland, valueless, and safe conventional historical wisdom that there are two sides to every question. Ward goes on to say that good history, indeed, springs from a continuous dialectical tension between the writer’s will and the intractable nature of his material.

Sir Alexander Downer (1910–81) was a man of great courtesy, absolute integrity, honesty in reporting the things be observed. I think that these attributes are all self-evident in the book he has written about six Australian prime ministers. Also apparent was, I believe, a too subservient attitude to a Britain which was disappearing and changing throughout his life. After all, the concept of the Queen as the Queen of Australia – instead of the Queen of Britain or the Commonwealth – received acceptance only after World War II, which incidentally was a war that Alec Downer saw out living in the hell of Changi Prison Camp. But he deals with his six prime ministers in a book of three hundred and seventeen pages, which is clearly not within cooee of being enough to deal with any one of them. The reader should be warned, therefore, not to expect a rounded man to appear from these pages, nor a description of what vicissitudes that man went through to achieve his position. It is a book which presents the prime ministers dealing with problems as they arise. No man is able to chronicle this completely, but Sir Alexander is unique in having been in Cabinet under Menzies and in having been high commissioner in London under Harold Holt and myself. Moreover, he was a high commissioner who had many friends amongst the politicians of both parties in London and who was able to report objectively and fully on attitudes which changed – as for instance the attitude to Britain’s entry into the EEC – with the changing moves of prime ministers.

The Shearers by Patsy Adam-Smith is worth a place in the best of libraries if only for its superb collection of photographs and reproductions – 291 of them! She is to be commended for including reproductions of an 1891 ‘Loyalty’ certificate, an 1890 Queensland Shearers’ Union ticket and three ‘shearing ticket’ versions of the Amalgamated Workers’ Union. I wish I could claim possession of an original of these. I do, however, have a complete collection of every membership certificate issued in what is now called The Australian Workers’ Union right from its very beginning in 1886, when it was called the Australasian Shearers’ Union.

Ms Adam-Smith makes the mistake so often made, even by W.G. Spence, of describing the Australasian Shearers’ Union as the ‘Amalgamated Shearers’ Union’. It was not until after the amalgamation of the various shearers’ unions that the Creswick based union changed its name to Amalgamated Shearers’ Union of Australasia. And, in 1894, when that union extended its constitution to embrace general labourers, it became The Australian Workers’ Union.

For the previous Commonwealth Writers’ Week associated with the Commonwealth Games at Edmonton, a large if not necessarily lively anthology of writing from all countries of the Commonwealth was produced. Brisbane produced a twelve page ‘Guide to Participants’ which showed that only eighteen of the sixty-three listed participants were not Australian or Australian born. Not all of the eighteen visitors turned up, the most conspicuous absentee being Edward Brathwaite of Jamaica. This imbalance was reflected in the sessions themselves, nearly half of which were exclusively Australian in content. ‘Directions in Australian Drama’, and ‘Australia – a Dependent Culture’ were designed to leave the overseas visitors sitting politely in back seats. By midweek there were distinct groups of Us and Them forming. A more communicative balance, though, was achieved because of the venue for half the sessions and all the visiting participants – the Banyo Seminary, a large echoing boarding school of a place overlooking Brisbane’s industrial estuary and sited to attract all the prevailing sea breezes. An informal messing in at mealtimes and in the communal bathrooms did more for human and social contact than any of the formal sessions. As with the Writers’ Retreat at the last Adelaide Festival (available only to selected participants), this informal living together was to produce genuinely stimulating contacts and conversations. For this alone, the Brisbane Writers’ Week was a refreshing change from previous literary occasions.

Who, we wondered, gets the largest Public Lending Right cheque each year – Manning Clark or Geoffrey Blainey? Probably still Manning, and he’ll still be ahead in the royalties stakes too, but the younger colt must be closing fast, and he shows no signs of tiring. Even if he did, his publishers, like Manning’s for that matter, can always do, as they have here, a recycling and packaging job.

On the basis of what Macmillans admit is ‘limited alterations of syntax and style’, together with ‘one fresh note on p.58 ff.’, Triumph of the Nomads is presented as a revised edition. The Tyranny of Distance is also a revised edition. It’s ‘only a small new paragraph’ on page 11, and a six page Chapter 15 which ‘looks at the developments in all areas of life in the last 15–20 years that have lessened the distance between us and the world’ (a marvel of compression one might think) that have been added but sufficient unto the day … A Land Half Won is called on the verso of the title page a revised edition, but the publishers comment gnomically that ‘a blind man would be pleased to see any changes here’. What can they mean?

This is a very fine first novel by Jean Bedford. Her first publication was the collection of short stories, Country Girl Again, published by Sisters Press in 1978. Sister Kate justly deserves to be one of the two bestsellers in Melbourne.

The novel traces the life of Kate Kelly, sister of the famous Ned, and opens when Kate is twelve and Edward just returned from a three-year stint in Pentridge. He is shocked and outraged to learn that his brother, Jim, a mere sixteen-year-old, has been arrested for horse stealing and sent to Pentridge also. Ned is nineteen. Kate remarks:         

This collection of stories put me off from the first page. In the opening paragraph there is ‘an exuberant kelpie bounding’. The second paragraph outdoes that, presenting seagulls as ‘wheeling and screaming’, in search of ‘a reeking fish head’. We already know that ‘the life was lonely, but it was peaceful’. Clichés enlivened by irony or just some simple surprise of context proves useful tools in the hands of a good writer. But Julie Lewis, on the evidence of Double Exposure, is not a good writer and clichés are offered up to us without any apology. Much of the problem seems to be that she overdoes adjectives and adverbs:

She felt for a pulse. Feeble. She gingerly touched the stubbly cheek It was bruised and there was a gash on the forehead. His clothes, seaman’s wear, were soaked. She studied the unconscious form. He was fairly young, about thirty, she thought. Looked a battler. She smiled ruefully and gently lifted the lock of hair that had fallen across his brow. It was matted with blood. (‘Flotsam’, p 2)

Despite the upsurge in the publication of books about Aboriginal life in recent years and the increased interest in traditional or ‘primitive’ art around the world, very few attempts have been made in this country to either reproduce substantial collections of photographs of Aboriginal art, or to provide serious, but readable. discussions of its relationship to the broader aspects of Australian society. This offering from the Berndts goes some way towards filling the gap between the coffee table glossies and the specialist publications of bodies such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

The Berndts have been producing good. thoughtful books about Aboriginals, aimed at a general readership, for more than thirty years. This volume carries on the tradition that they have established in works such as The World of the First Australians. The Australian Aboriginal Heritage and Pioneers and Settlers. The book is beautifully presented. It contains 153 plates, almost all in excellent colour, all relevant to the text at the point of insertion (descriptive annotations at the end of the book provide further information for those seeking it). On this score alone it can certainly hold up its end of the coffee table in the terraces of Carlton or Paddington.