The decisive influence on Australian politics and culture has been the fact that our society has always included a large minority who, even if they considered themselves British, were definitely Irish and not English. The fact that this minority has been Catholic and, as a result, has felt itself discriminated against, has shaped the church into an Irish rather than a European mode, so that, as Campion points out, not only was to be Irish to be Catholic, but to be Catholic was to be Irish.

The first paragraph in Campion’s book describes his first university lecture, where he sees ‘a girl named Myfany ... a strange name I had never heard before, so different from the Eileens and Irenes and Kathleens of my boyhood. Its strangeness seemed to tell me that I was that day taking my first step outside the Irish-Australian Catholic world in which, up until then, I had lived, moved and had my being.’ Many of us felt the same way when we had our first encounter with black-garbed priests or nuns and found that they, too, were after all human.

A sympathetic reader might feel that Tim Winton, winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, is a victim of one of the unkindest tricks Fate can play on a writer, with the publication of his first novel, An Open Swimmer, at the age of twenty-one. A first novel from a writer of this age is typically seen as, a ‘young man’s book’, full of the gaucheries and immaturities of the precocious, and even if a success, it is an albatross around his neck for the rest of his career. The best one can hope for is a moderate success, substantial enough to start a career, but not either brilliant enough or bad enough to determine its direction from then on. Fortunately, Tim Winton’s first novel does not neatly fit this stereotype.

An Open Swimmer is set in the south of Western Australia. its action revolving around the sea, fishing, and the bush – and it is rich with its sense of region. It is, in some respects, about being young: it charts the quest for meaning undertaken by its main character, Jerra, as he approaches adulthood; Jerra spends much of the novel testing the waters of experience as if he has a choice about entering them; often the view of reality we receive has the clarity and simplicity of innocence. However, Winton distances himself from his character’s immaturity, viewing his introspections with detached respect, while placing the self-destructive anxieties which haunt Jerra as stages through which he must find a passage. Jerra is no Holden Caulfield, and the romanticism of the quest motif in the narrative is qualified by a realist’s sense of acceptance. Always, too, Winton is in control of his language, deftly manipulating the emotional registers without distortion or insistence.

It is the surface of Winton’s writing that is, initially, the most impressive feature of the novel. Apparently unambitious and naturalistic, the prose nevertheless provides access to a wide range of association and meaning; Winton’s close affinity with his natural context provides him with an inexhaustible facility for finding the right location for the idea, mood or reflection he wishes to release. Stylistically, his continual checking of personal experience against the indifference of nature is a distinctive feature; the sense of balance and poise in his writing derives from the continual movement from self to surrounding, from the inner to the external world. The process is tentative and suggestive, but not informal; rather, the patterns and symbols which organise the book’s thematic substance are carefully woven into a dense fabric of meaning and suggestion which is both technically impressive and rewardingly rich in implication.

The dialectic structure reflects a thematic position which explores the acceptance of limitations, of contingency, while remaining open to possibility. An argument about kinds of ‘freedom’ is ‘implied in the structuring of Jerra’s dilemmas. The novel tends to fence Jerra in, not physically but psychically, as his apparent freedom in the bush is limited by the guilt he feels for his ambiguous relationship with his Aunt Jewel, his confusion about the incompleteness of his participation in his own past, and even the sense of claustrophobia and mortality which can suddenly envelop him when he is at his most free, in the ocean. Jerra has to learn to deal with these problems without resorting to escape, denial or the fearful panic which results in his grotesque mutilation of a groper. The ‘open swimmer’ of the title is Jerra’s mandala, the antithesis of the ‘cave-fish’, and the paradigm of the novel’s recommended negotiation between freedom and limitation, withdrawal and acceptance.

An Open Swimmer allows these thematic implications to emerge, rather than imposes them on the material, and its form always seems to suggest the virtue of scepticism as it balances human pretension against the variety and scale of nature; it is impressive to see a young writer sufficiently mature in his craft to use formal strategies as a means of sophisticating and disciplining the articulation of his vision, and this ability alone would make An Open Swimmer a most interesting and promising début for Tim Winton.

The prolific David Malouf, another of our poets turned novelist, just had two short prose works published within a few months of one another. Although Child’s Play (which also includes two short stories) is set in Italy, where Malouf now resides, and Fly Away Peter in Brisbane where he grew up, the two books are thematically related, not only to each other but to the author’s earlier work.

In his previous novel An Imaginary Life (1978), Malouf had posed the situation of the poet Ovid, banished for life from the Rome he loved but coming to terms with the wilderness around him and discovering that true freedom is internal, lying within the imagination. The protagonist of Child’s Play lives on the other side of Ovid; he has in a sense dispensed with the imagination, as being a source of potential vulnerability:

‘To open to others all that lies beyond the hard surface, the doubts, fears, hesitations, anxieties of the lonely individual, all the soft dark life within ... would be to introduce an element that might entirely destroy us,’ he says of himself and the other members of the cabal.

If nowadays felicity and tranquillity were not the states induced by visions of the Australian frontier, this memoir of an Australian frontierman might be unsettling:

I thought him the personification of everything noble and loveable and this opinion was shared by all at Livingstone Gully. He used to take me on his horse and gallop past the house cracking his stock whip. He played leapfrog, marbles, cricket and handball. He was tall and slight and had the most lovely head of auburn hair, the equal of which I never saw since … remember he could speak the Aboriginal language like a native and there being a blacks’ camp at Livingstone Gully, James Bourke used to call old blackfellows round him and the picaninnies and talk to them and generally would get on his horse and chase them cracking his whip and finish by giving the old men tobacco.

This is not Mary Grant Bruce. It is not a squatter’s widow speaking. Nor a maiden aunt of good descent. It is an old man of the pastoral age.

This book is concerned essentially with the impact of the environment upon Europeans in Australia. It sets out to test C.E.W. Bean’s thesis that during the Great War the most effective Australian soldiers came from the bush. It does this in relation to men from Western Australia, arguing that the West was one of the most predominantly bush areas of Australia, and therefore that there, if anywhere, the influence of the bush should show up in the achievements of soldiers.

The Monash University team at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne has achieved great success in its endeavours to relieve infertility by the production of ‘test-tube babies’. This collection explains what goes on, discusses moral and legal problems relating to the programme, and gives a preview of what might lie ahead. The contributors include members of the medical team, their clients, and moral philosophers and theologians.

Gerard Henderson takes as the subject of this important book the relations between the bishops of the Catholic Church and its lay organisation, the Catholic Social Studies Movement during the period from 1940 to the 1960s. The study is particularly welcome as neither Church nor Movement were given to public self-exposure. Henderson, by using the files of the National Civic Council and the minutes of relevant episcopal committees, has given us an insight into the conflicts within the church over its role in political activity in this period.

The key figure in the study is Mr B.A. Santamaria. As the driving force behind the CSSM and behind the postwar willingness of the church to speak out on social and political issues, Santamaria occupied a position of great influence within the church, especially in the period 1947 to 1954. Henderson characterises him as a ‘kind of quasi-bishop who ran a political machine and reported directly to the bishops’. He also says of Santamaria that he was engaged in no less than a crusade to ‘permeate’ Australian social and political organisations with the aim of imposing a Catholic social order.

‘Even when there’s simultaneity,’ as one of Michael Wilding’s characters says, there’s still linearity that needs to be found, and linearity is difficult to find in this group of books. So, it is better, as Wilding’s book also suggests, to let the books perform and then see the pattern they make.

Pacific Highway, in fact, is a kind of haiku novel, which coheres into a single expressive emblem, the emblem of the dance its narrator offers us at the end. It begins and ends on a beach, stretching clean and clear and its casual rhythms express the lives of the people who live carelessly and easily nearby. But it also a metaphor as well as a beach, and its people need to defend themselves from all the other competing fantasies that seek to invade and pollute it, work and wars; money and propriety, and in this sense it climaxes in the fantasy of the flying-saucer landing which leads to the CIA-Real Estate Development invasion of the beach. The beach wins, though, and the story concludes with the lighthouse standing white and beautiful with an osprey circling above it and a whale spraying ‘a peacock’s feather gauze of soft spray across the sea’. So, the plot is the pattern and the pattern the plot. Unusually for Wilding, who often seems to me to labour these things, these is an air of spontaneity about all this, as if for once he’s prepared to trust his lyrical sense, to delight in language and in the shapes it makes, to be more intent on this shaping process than on his audience.

These three books on Aboriginal European relations are a reminder that the process of rewriting the history of contact of Australian Aboriginals (or should one say Aboriginal Australians?) has come a long way since C.D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, the work which started it all twelve years ago. Each is important in its own way. Lyndall Ryan’s book (The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 315 p., $22.50) demolishes once and for all what the author calls ‘the myth of the last Tasmanian’: the still widely held belief that Tasmanian Aboriginals perished in 1876 when Truganini died in Hobart. Judith Wright’s work (The Cry For The Dead, OUP, 301 p., $19.95 hb), although essentially a story of the tragic struggle or the author’s squatter forbears, is one of the few attempts ever made to incorporate Aboriginal perspective into the history of pastoral expansion, to run the white and black ‘versions’ of events side by side. Henry Reynolds’s epoch-making book (The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, 255 p., $6.95 pb, first published in hardback by History Department, James Cook University, 216 p., $7.50 plus postage) documents and interprets’ some of the Aboriginal responses to European invasion and settlement during the nineteenth century. All three are well written, although The Cry for the Dead is at times a bit irritating and difficult to follow, largely because of the lack of appropriate maps. All attack traditional wisdom and are therefore inescapably political, dealing as they do with highly emotional issues which have aroused a great deal of passion ever since 1788.

I’m a speedy reader, a rapid degutter of poems, yet it took me days to read John Tranter’s Selected Poems. This poetry is so packed with meaning, with metaphor, so inventive, intelligent, and funny it’s impossible to hurry. It left me, though I’d read most of it before, wishing for a Complete Poems to fill the gaps.

A common theme unites the five books reviewed here: the effects on Aboriginals of European and Asian settlement in Australia, and the position of Aboriginals in the society that has developed from that settlement. The work of historians, a political scientist and anthropologists, the writings reflect changes in Australian historiography and anthropology. Reece (1979) recently made a plea on behalf of Australian historiography for more to be done by black and white historians to eradicate the tradition that Australian history was a white history beginning with Captain Cook. A parallel plea has been made to anthropologists in Langton’s (1981) criticism of anthropologists for concentrating their research efforts on remote communities. The work of Aboriginal historians is not represented here, but two of these books are indicative of the quantum leap in the quantity and quality of writing an Aboriginal history. Although anthropology is slow to change, a glance through recent bibliographies published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies reveals an increase in the proportion of social anthropological publications on Aboriginal society outside the more remote areas. That trend appears in the content of the volume edited by Howard. Several of the books reviewed here also show evidence of changed perspectives on contact history and the nature of Aboriginal society: Aboriginals are depicted as having resisted European invasion rather than being passively massacred; the settlement of Australia is shown to have been a process of ruthless and bloody conquest. Furthermore the structure of Aboriginal society is no longer seen as apolitical and uniformly egalitarian.

Beatrice and Sydney Webb are still alive, though failing. At least, that is the impression one gets from these five pamphlets, which mark the resurrection of the Victorian Fabian Society since 1980, after temporarily shaking off the mortal after coil.

Fabian socialism has not been without mockers in its home land and it has exported somewhat less vigorously than the blackberry and rabbit. The image problem it has patiently endured this past three-quarter century has largely concerned a certain smug quasi-religious righteousness and unwillingness to examine appealing socialist notions very stringently.

The dustjacket of this novel gives the author grounds for action against his publishers. Bald, bold, equi-width, football scoreboard capitals, half sump oil black and half baby stool brown occupy the left upper corner, announcing author, title and the fact that this is ‘a novel by’. From the lower right corner rises a green, broken ended frond, or wave perhaps, flecked with the same insistent brown, as though the artist, an early morning surfer, had woken with the intermittent sewage-crowded state of Bondi Beach troubling his mind. Granted the visual contradiction manifest here, the quoted words of Geoffrey Dutton, further crowding the surface in the bottom left hand corner, throw their weight behind the bold explicit capitals rather than the vague, Triffid-like thing.