As she did so vividly in Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson uses a returning expatriate woman to cast fresh eyes on the social and urban landscape of Australia. Here, it is Sylvia Foley who has spent some twenty years in Europe eschewing the comforts and constraints of suburban life, teaching Italian and conducting tours of the British Isles and the Continent. On a whim, she abandons her peripatetic life to return to Sydney for a few months prior to her plan to settle in Rome. Unbeknown to her, her autocratic father, Jack Cornock, is dying and she is immediately suspected by other members of her dislocated family of returning to benefit from the will – which she ultimately does as the recipient of her father’s vindictive gesture to spite his wife. And Sylvia’s ‘family’ is considerable. There is her illiterate mother Molly, now married to Ken, her brother Stewart, and her stepsiblings: Harry, Rosamond, Hermione, and Guy, the children of her father’s second wife, Greta.

This book must win the prize for the most lavish and the most amateurish book on an Australian artist. Not one of the 200 odd colour plates is dated; not even in the portentously titled Opus Index (a list of plates without page numbers!) do we get a single date or indication of present ownership. Where dates are given in the text, they are often vague and careless ‘... in the 1950s...’etc.

Earlier commentators and critics swim in and out of the text without reference and there is no bibliography or biographical outline. Proper names are misspelt e.g. Barrett Reed (instead of Reid), Al Alvares (instead of Alvarez) as though the author had taken dictation faultily from the Master. The text is frequently unconsciously comic:

In 1907, the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable (later Sir) Thomas Bent, purchased for 120 pounds from the artist in England Victoria The Golden, scenes, sketches and jottings from nature, by William Strutt, Melbourne, Victoria, 1850-1862, described by the Hon. F.S. Grimwade in his preface as the greatest treasure in the Library of the Parliament of Victoria. The Library Committee of 1909, on accepting the gift, minuted the note that ‘The Librarian was to acquire a suitable safe in which to keep the volume’.

P

atrick McCaughey’s Fred Williams is a rare event in Australian publishing, a substantial and scholarly monograph on a living Australian artist. Fred Williams, born in 1927, belongs to the so-called ‘heroic years’ of modern Australian painting (1940-65), yet his reputation as ‘Australia’s leading painter’ was made during the decade that followed. Unlike his contemporaries – among them Charles Blackman – who made their reputations before going overseas, Williams spent most of his formative years (1951-56) in England. The works from this period are mainly figurative and shaped by his experience of London life – music hall and other genre subjects.

When he returned to Melbourne in 1956, the Contemporary Art Society had re-formed and the conflict between figurative and non-figurative artists was on the boil. It culminated in the Antipodean’s call-to-arms against abstraction. Although Williams knew all seven members and had shared studios with two of them, he was not asked to join the group until after the Antipodean Exhibition in August 1959. According to McCaughey, he ‘was hurt by his exclusion and it precipitated the crisis in his art’ and pushed him towards the enemy camp of formalism. Now back in the Australian environment, he experienced the proverbial ‘shock of recognition’ and began his long-term exploration of the Australian landscape. From then onwards the figurative works were kept in the background.

Williams, as McCaughey is eager to point out, ‘is exceptional to his age not typical of it’, an age, it seems, that is really confined to Melbourne figurative artists of the 1940s and 1950s. He is a ‘thoroughly modernist’ painter whose ‘art mediates the major shift in sensibility from the “heroic image” to the more impersonal and abstract ways of Australian painting after 1965’.

This desire to present Williams as a dinky-di formalist comes unstuck when you examine his largely unknown stream of figurative works, particularly those from the London years. The artist is living a double life.

As the hero of Australian formalism, Williams must be provided with ancestors of the highest order, preferably the giants of European modernism such as Courbet, Manet and Matisse. He is not one to let himself ‘be overwhelmed by relatively minor or ephemeral figures’. He must challenge the masters (Tom Roberts, too?) like some brush-wielding Don Quixote. In reality, Williams’s landscapes have always shown some vestiges of the ‘heroic image’ painters – Nolan, Tucker, Blackman and others.

In its attention to detail and wealth of illustrations (many works seen for the first time) Fred Williams compares favourably with Andrew Causey’s new book on English artist Paul Nash. Nash, like Williams, is noted for his landscape paintings, but that is as far as the similarity goes. In his book Causey aims ‘to gain access to the man by a close analysis of his work’, but McCaughey on the other hand, is ‘overridingly concerned with an analysis of the formal, “abstract” qualities and properties’ of William’s art and only incidentally interested in what makes him tick. He is suspicious of finding the key to artistic production in the life of an artist, but then, Williams isn’t exactly Picasso, or Nash, if it comes to that!

In keeping with the world of ‘professional’ art, the paintings have been fastidiously assembled in chronological order, sampled, and classified (in the manner of an annotated wine list) into vintage years of ‘crisis’ or ‘quality’. One can imagine that more than ‘just the right balance of carrots’ mentioned in the preface was consumed by the artist, his critic, and dealer during the five years it took to write the book.

Don’t get me wrong – McCaughey’s text is never boring, even when endlessly analysing paintings, but he is best when writing about Williams’s early years and the Antipodean affair However, I get the distinct impression from the book that Williams is just two eyes and an arm that is permanently attached to a brush. Surely, there is more to him than that.

This volume is subtitled ‘A Novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)

Virtually every book examining the whole or part of Australia’s postwar foreign policy has taken the American connection as its focal point. Camilleri, a prolific scholar and well-known commentator on international politics, however, shifts the emphasis and integrates some new dimensions. Instead of centring his study on the isolated aims of Australian policy-makers, he assesses the relationship within the framework of the major partner’s global strategy. The first critical factors to isolate are the changing needs and capabilities of the world’s leading capitalist nation; how have the Americans perceived their interests and responded in a dynamic global environment?

Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940 is a memento of the exhibition of women’s art initiated by the Ewing Gallery for 1975, International Women’s Year. An extraordinarily rich exhibition, it convinced me and many others who saw it on its tour of the eastern states, that Australian women painters, for at least the first 30 years of this century, must share the laurels equally with men.

I remember walking into the Ewing and being bowled over by the contrasting reds and greens, and unexpected, spidery pattern of Grace Cossington Smith’s painting of a smart Art Deco cafe in Sydney. I loved the dark, solid geometry of Margaret Preston’s Banksia, and the considered cubist rhythms of Grace Crowley’s Girl with Goats and Alison Rehfisch’s Still Life with Gardenia.

The slump, it seems, has hit at last, the slump occasioned by the competition of television, films and the theatre have felt it for some time, but here it is being registered in literature. In its own way each of these three books represents an attempt to capture the popular imagination.

An Extravagant Talent can be compared to the blockbuster film using the novelistic equivalent of the wide screen and stereophonic sound to out-Hollywood Hollywood. It boasts an all-star cast of clichés: a handsome and youthful hero who is discovered to be an artistic genius at the age of seventeen, and an American millionaire who adopts him, a lovely and lonely French girl in the clutches of a brutal guardian wandering ripe for the rescuing on a deserted beach, art dealers, South African mining executives, smoothly sophisticated, eternally faithful black servants, seductive whores and the poor but proud, beautiful but faithful girl who is our hero’s reward in the end. If you happen to like this kind of thing and can take bland acceptance of apartheid, sexism, a brutal and mindless hedonism that seems little more than a series of hangovers, and big business making and breaking people as well as fortunes, then this is your book and you can even have a token tribute to more decent values at the end – at no extra cost. Like the blockbuster film it is all skilfully done but, personally, I would like to think that there is more to fiction than thrills and titivation.

In Papua New Guinea, no one dies from natural causes except, perhaps, some foreigners. At least, that is what every islander believes. Even a lifelong active Christian such as Mr Justice Narakobi’s mother, on her deathbed, attributed her fatal asthma to sorcery.

Shakespeare’s Dogberry, moving as usual beyond conventional platitude, roundly condemned all comparisons as odorous. Although this book consists entirely of essays in comparison, one need approach it with no Dogberrian apprehensions. Indeed it is one more manifestation of a recent and surely healthy tendency in the academic study of politics, namely, the willingness to take seriously political theories and ideas rather than merely engage in the ‘scientific’ study of political behaviour, itself often the excuse for an arid pursuit of near-meaningless statistics.

The best of a newspaper should be, or used to be, news. But in the electronic age, when sheer questions of the very survival of print media are raised often enough, mere news is not enough. The press has those functions of interpretation, comment and backgrounding which electronic news gathering rarely has time for or interest in, and one of the qualities which marks a quality paper is its activities in these areas. And the quality of those activities.

Whatever would we do without Geoffrey Blainey? If he did not exist it would certainly be desirable to invent him. Of all our historians perhaps only Manning Clark reaches such a wide audience: but while Clark's epic history is pitched at a prophetic level, Blainey’s various works are, literally, much more down-to-earth affairs. Yet they are full of ideas, new insights and questionings of old orthodoxies.

Fifty years ago the sagas of maritime discovery were the monopoly of the historians; but today they have been taken over by the geographers, and especially by the practical geographers who themselves go down to the sea in ships. Australia is fortunate that its two major interpreters of the voyage of Torres – first Captain Francis Bayldon and now Captain Brett Hilder – are, or were, both blue-water navigators, with special experience of the waters that Torres crossed. Captain Hilder’s The Voyage of Torres is strictly the account of a voyage, and that voyage is analysed with consummate professional skill. The documents of Torres and Prado sufficiently supply the materials, but they are not materials which could be interpreted by an armchair theorist equipped with a school atlas. The guess-work distances sailed, the errors in the primitive observation of latitude, the absence of longitude, the crudeness of early cartography, the loss of some of the records – all of these produce conundrums which only an expert can solve. Earlier analysts, working over the same material, have come to different conclusions; but Captain Hilder’s comprehensive, scientific and authoritative analysis renders obsolete the conjectures of his predecessors, and settles for all time the details of the course sailed.

It is a shame that animals have recently become infamous in books and film. For some reason, predators of man possess a morbid fascination, whether they are calculating killers or mindless machines of instinct. Culpable or not, the giant saltwater crocodile Numunwari is an enemy of the people in precisely the same fashion as the giant shark in Benchley’s Jaws.

Ralph Wiltgen’s history of the founding of the Roman Catholic church in Oceania stands within a definite tradition: the recording by members of the various Christian denominations of the activities and personalities involved in their proselytisation of the heathen inhabitants of the Pacific islands. Works of the earlier century sought to eulogise the missionaries and encourage the faithful back home to continued support. Wiltgen’s approach shows the influence of far more sophisticated attitudes and scholarship. He has consulted dispersed and complex archival sources written in several languages, he has pieced together his intricate and detailed narrative in painstaking fashion, to describe the growth of Roman Catholic missionary activity in the Pacific from its commencement in Hawaii in 1825, to the existence of an arch-diocese, eight dioceses and eight vicariates apostolic in 1850. Pride in this achievement underlies his writing but does not lead into rationalisation or polemic.

Welfare in Australia has never been studied as comprehensively as one might have expected, given its political and economic importance. This book is the first major overall study of the welfare system since the work of T.H. Kewley.

Its coverage of issues is extensive, beginning with a brief history of welfare in Australia, with reference also to the international context, and a look at attitudes of social science to welfare. A later chapter looks briefly at inequality in Australia, though this is rather skimpy on data and does not look at recent research on the distribution of wealth.

Old fashioned dinki di Australians will view this book with mixed reactions indeed. For those of us conditioned in the popular culture of May Gibbs whose Mr and Mrs Koala featured in her ‘Bib and Bub’ drawings, Dorothy Wall’s koala ‘Blinky Bill’, and of course Norman Lindsay’s delightfully comic bear ‘Bill Bluegum’, will be decidedly startled by this latest anthropomorphic koala. For ‘Bear Dinkum’ is a nasty bear, the written and illustrated creation of Neil Curtis, a Londoner from West Ham.

No mainstream humor this. The book has been conceived as a ‘comedy’ but of a sort that ‘black’ does not quite define. Because of the author/artist’s preoccupation with cruelty, violence and destruction, some would agree ‘sick’ could well be the elusive definition.

The daughter of a prosperous-enough middle-class farming family in Devon, Elizabeth Veale received an upbringing and an education that stood her in good stead during her long existence in New South Wales as Mrs. John Macarthur.

The absorption of traditional, female and Christian virtues in her youth enabled Elizabeth Veale, first, to raise her numerous family and maintain their endeavour in the colony during the periods when her husband’s impetuous involvement in public affairs led to his having to absent himself in England; and later, to contribute to the maintenance and extension of their prosperity.

Nathan Spielvogel, a highly regarded Ballarat historian and schoolmaster, in 1928 presented the Annals of the Ballarat Hebrew Congregation to the executive committee. He told how he had discovered, in a corner of the schoolroom adjacent to the synagogue, an old iron box full of letters and papers, tied and labelled. They were dated from 1855 to 1877 and covered the first twenty-two years of Jewish communal life in Ballarat. Papers from 1878 to 1892 were destroyed great number) were prevented from remaining on the missions, where in most cases, they had spent their whole life. The Act set in motion a general breakdown in the family structures, which, for so long, had created a rich and culturally satisfying life for Aborigines on the missions. by fire at the secretary’s residence, but from then on records were preserved, unfortunately without the correspondence that made Spielvogel's annals so human and vivid. Newman Rosenthal, from these sources, has written a history of considerable importance. It increases the small literature on the history of Jewish communities in Australia and reveals that Ballarat owes a great debt of gratitude to civic minded Jews from Eastern Europe and the British Isles for their forthright support in founding institutions and building civic pride.

Sir Paul Hasluck writes this book, so he says, as a witness, seeking no higher appreciation than Montaigne’s remark that it reflects the ‘author’s sincerity “free from vanity when speaking of himself and from partiality and envy when speaking of others” ’. However, Hasluck is not so much witness as judge, and hanging judge at that. If the book is free from envy, the absence seems due to his certainty about his own opinions and place. If there is no partiality, there is at least a tendency to make assessments of attitudes and strategies on the unstated criterion of whether they conform to Hasluckian models.

As for sincerity, consider his observation concerning H.V. Evatt, the chief sufferer of his sometimes heavy hand, humor and prose: ‘… we resumed something like our old relationship of mutual respect’. Respect? At this stage in the book Hasluck has already chronicled Evatt’s jealousy, nastiness, ‘inability to trust others or even to respect their separate identity’, his expectation of ‘personal attachment to his own interests without having the qualities that attract and hold personal loyalty’, and his distortion of the record ‘both by what he reported and what he did not report’. He has noted that Evatt’s ‘most natural and unaffected shows of emotion were for little children’ but ‘once anyone passed the age of four he started to become suspicious of them …

Hasluck goes on to mention Evatt as being ‘authoritarian so long as he could be the authority’ and ‘in many matters not considerate of other people or sensitive to their distress’. Even when he takes off the black cap, he shows little mercy. He credits Evatt with ‘a deep and genuine Australianism – a football barracker’s type of patriotism –  which made him insist at all times that his country had to get a fair go’. And he sums up Evatt’s time on the world stage: ‘If one conceives of Australia’s role in world affairs as a stinging fly Evatt was a good foreign minister’. All this is not to say that Hasluck does not provide evidence of Evatt’s ministerial deviousness and paranoia, pay tribute to his energy and idealism, and detail those personal idiosyncrasies which indicated the tragedy to come. But he does not stick to his high-proclaimed brief as witness, even if witness for the prosecution.

Nor does he seem to concede the possibility that other world views – and views of the decolonisation process or the relationship between public servants and politicians – might be valid. Quoting his own report on the 1942 Mont Tremblant conference on post-war objectives, he refers to some non-official Americans’ ‘strong obsession that the forms of self- government and political liberty are the be-all and end-all of life for native people in colonial regions’. It is a back-of-the- hand remark which reflects Hasluck’s later policy of gradualism when, as Minister for External Territories, he had charge of Papua New Guinea. He resisted setting a time-table for self- government and independence. Undoubtedly there were virtues in the evolutionary approach, but such an approach did not take into account the beneficial and catalytic effects of a target date or the international realities in a world where nationalism was a growing force and the sun was setting fast on the old imperialism. Yet during the setting-up of the United Nations, Hasluck was persistently critical of Evatt for ‘losing sight of the rocks of power politics under the full flood of internationalism’, for ‘never reflecting on the world situation’, for seeming ‘unaware of many of the realities of international relations’.

Hasluck also seems to lose sight of a few rocks when he discusses the minor theme of his book, the relationship between the public service and politicians. On the concluding page he says: ‘The ideal in my view is to have a strong and independent and non-political public service and a vigilant and effective parliament to give checks and balances to the executive. Alongside that ideal we need ministers who are both intelligent and strong enough and so clearly answerable to parliament that they give checks and balances to any trend towards rule by a bureaucracy’.

The present public service is a source of grave disappointment to Hasluck. He finds that public servants who are restrained by the conventions of public service anonymity and of ministerial responsibility and their own respect for the superiority of ministers and parliament in a constitutional democracy’ are in a steadily decreasing minority. And he writes of the ‘egregious vanity of the gnomes of the democracy’. The fault, he says, is due to the weakness of ministers. Indeed, during 30 years or so ‘the major weakness in constitutional democratic government in Australia ... is in the quality and capacity of ministers’.

He thinks that the principles of the public service, damaged by wartime Labor administration and restored by Menzies, only to be eroded on Menzies’ retirement, have now been permanently changed. Hasluck’s own statement of these principles is contained in his speech after his resignation as a public servant in 1947: ‘(the public service) continues unchanged no matter what ministry takes office and, in discharging its duties, does  not distinguish between one ministry and another but serves all faithfully. It has continuity while ministries come and go. It is not limited in its loyalty to any particular ministry but seeks to service the government of Australia in the highest and most comprehensive sense of that term. It should know no party other than Australia’.

Hasluck also says that ‘in our system of government it is proper that public servants should try to shape policy and to take part in decision making. It only becomes improper when they use methods appropriate to the politician but inappropriate to the public servant’. But were those Menzian public service days really so golden? Did philosopher kings-who-knew-their-place walk the corridors? Would not those public servants who properly ‘should try to shape policy' themselves be shaped by upbringing and by the social and political environment? Perhaps it was not totally unreasonable for Labor to suspect that 23 years of conservative rule might have shaped part of the top echelon of the public service in a conservative mould. Perhaps Hasluck does the public service a disservice by setting an impossible ideal.

However, if this book contains some annoying elements of trial by Hasluck, it nevertheless gives a fascinating insider’s account of foreign-policy making and the problems practitioners faced in wartime. Present practitioners will find in it useful pointers towards a case for the defence of a department which is battling to maintain primacy in foreign policy advice and formulation.

Barbara Hanrahan is arguably the best woman writer to have emerged in Australia in the last decade, and that automatically puts her streaks ahead of most of her male colleagues. The Frangipani Gardens is her sixth novel and with the possible exception of the earlier The Albatross Muff, her best in terms of control, artistry, and characterisation, Perhaps more importantly for her growing number of admirers, Hanrahan is a masterly raconteur, handling her bizarre characters and intricate plots with ease and verve.

She is an obsessive novelist, returning in this novel to the now familiar Hanrahan territory of Adelaide and Fern Gully in the Adelaide Hills, and to the constant themes of sexual exploitation, social injustice, the ludicrousness of middle class Anglo-Saxon mores and conventions, such as royalty, within an Australian context. The most outstanding obsession in all her works and especially evident in The Frangipani Gardens is her knowledge of palpable evil within the heart of each individual and percolating throughout society. Like other Catholic writers, and I only suspect that she is one on the evidence of her fiction, Hanrahan is very attuned to the sense of good and evil in the world: one is constantly reminded of Thomas Keneally, and more pertinently, Graham Greene when reading Hanrahan’s dissection of middle class Australian society and her revelation of the evil, and good, at its core. There is in The Frangipani Gardens a sense of magic and mystery, a snubbing the nose at conventions, especially if they are English, an understanding and sympathy for the underdog and outcast, a healthy disrespect for the clergy and church in all its forms. Like Keneally and other Irish Catholic writers in Australia, there is constant sexual titillation, a plethora of perversions, which serves only to mask an abhorrence for sexuality in most of its forms, especially when hypocrisy and exploitation of the young are involved.

This is an interesting and important book dealing with Western Australian politics in general but it also manages in depth treatment of various aspects of the political process. The book is divided into two parts: the first part deals with government, which includes the federal-state relationship, the parliamentary system. electoral politics, public administration, the role of the executive and the place of local government in Western Australia. The second part of this well-conceived book deals with party politics and the role, nature, organization and ideologies of the three major political parties. The occasion for publication was the 150th anniversary of the founding of Western Australia and this constitutes a scholarly contribution to mark the occasion. It is easy to agree with Sir Charles Court, the Western Australian Premier, when he writes in his foreword that ‘the collection is seen as a worthwhile contribution to the scholarly heritage of the State’.

This book is a bird of most curious kidney. For the life of me I can’t see any raison d'etre for it. Not that James McAuley, with his wardrobe of fascinating hats, doesn’t cry out for a book, and not that Peter Coleman doesn’t have so many of the qualifications to write that book. But this work is not it. It’s thin, to the point of emaciation. It appears exactly four years after McAuley’s death, which, as literary biographies go, is but a day. Which puts me in mind of an Entebbe Raid or Teheran Hostages book, hitting the market while the event is still fresh. But McAuley’s career, for all its interest, lacks that brand of newsworthiness. And a book with so comprehensive a title as The Heart of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian Poet presumably aims to be more than a piece of ephemera.

John Baxter’s Australian Cinema was the first of a number of works on the history of film production in Australia – all, in varying degrees, superficial, selective and inaccurate, in such a new field, where to arouse interest in the subject was perhaps as important as to supply information, these early books could be forgiven for such inadequacies. But Pike and Cooper have at last taken the next step. Using material gathered over a ten- year period from many sources (archives, contemporary journals, personal reminiscences, and the films themselves), they have compiled a comprehensive encyclopaedia-style coverage of the feature films produced in Australia from 1900 to 1977.

Although Howard Florey spent most of his life abroad, he was a great Australian and according to his biographer probably the most effective medical scientist since Joseph Lister.

Professor R.G. MacFarlane has written an account of Florey’s life which is deserving of a wide readership in Australia. He concentrates on Florey’s career from its beginnings in Adelaide through to Oxford where he was leader of a team which developed penicillin. A useful ‘Epilogue’ completes the picture by reminding us that after Florey’s emergence as one of the world’s great scientists at the age of 44, he went on to be knighted, elected president of the Royal Society, become Provost of Queens College, Oxford, and enter the House of Lords as Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston.

The men of the 2/30th Battalion laughingly enlisted. They didn't laugh on 16 February 1942 when, as part of the 8^th Division and the Singapore garrison, they reluctantly surrendered to the Japanese. Happiness being relative, some of these Australians laughed all the way from Changi to a new camp near the wharves. Struggling to load bagged salt, they had no laughter, just helpless sickness in the stomach, as Sergeant Stan Arneil was savagely beaten by guards. Scenes change, states of mind go up and down, until the survivors are about to disembark in Sydney late in 1945: ‘and everybody on the ship is laughing all the time’.

You Are What You Make Yourself To Be is the documented personal history of one Victorian Aboriginal family. The author’s story is interspersed with researched documented facts intended to authenticate and support the narrative but at times these lengthy italicized notes work against the continuity of the story.

More serious works have been written on the life and times of W.M. Hughes than on any other Australian prime minister and, probably, any Australian at all. The little man got off to a flying start with his own books about himself and his amazing adventures, then Farmer Whyte among others came along and, to cap it off, there has emerged the very lengthy two-volume study of Hughes by L.F. Fitzhardinge, among the best and certainly the most elegant of our political biographies.

Reading Michele Nayman’s collection of short stories is like a dip into the bitter/sweet river of life. People try for the unattainable and discover they are ordinary after all – the moments of sharing and understanding fade in the light of day and leave the protagonists even more alone.

Palomino establishes Elizabeth Jolley as absolutely one of the best writers of fiction in this country, although it is a book that in some ways does not, I think, entirely resolve the problems it poses for itself. As I interpret Palomino one of the things Elizabeth Jolley intended to explore in her first novel, is the contrast between a person whose genes, hormones or whatever dictate that they shall for ever and irreversibly be homosexual; and a person whose sexual nature is capable of change and influence. She also pursues themes like this in some of her excellent short stories. The lovers in Palomino are Laura and Andrea, and it is Andrea’s excessive background that confuses the basic issues, a point I will return to.

The Jesuits are, whatever else you might say about them, formidable. Dr Bygott quotes Francis Bacon, who believed that the Jesuits as teachers ‘are so good that I wish they were on our side’.

I myself am, in part, a product of their education system. Several of the personalities in Dr Bygott’s study have been known to me personally, and I can honestly say that I never knew a Jesuit whom I did not, in one way or another, admire.

But why would anyone want to do it? This seems a reasonable question to ask about Robyn Davidson’s self-imposed ordeal: Davidson taught herself from scratch to tame and train camels, then travelled with four of them and one dog across 1700 miles of desert from Alice Springs to the coast of Western Australia. Tracks is the book she wrote about it.

It is ironic and, perhaps, happy for him that the most vainglorious of Australian Labor Party leaders has so quickly become the subject of more books than any Australian Prime Minister. Your ‘1975’ library now contains many instant histories, polemics, laments, critical academic studies, eulogies, and edited highlights, but not yet a comprehensive biography of Gough Whitlam.

One of the remarkable things about Melbourne is that until recently it had virtually no definable literature of its own at all. There are a few exceptions, of course. Henry Handel Richardson wrote about us, notably in The Getting of Wisdom; Henry Lawson described our appalling working conditions at the turn of the century in the Arvie Aspenall stories, and more recently Alan Marshall, Judah Waten and Frank Hardy, to name only those, have centred novels and stories in Melbourne. But I think it is fair to say that the Melbourne they wrote about would be largely unrecognizable to most of its citizens today, certainly to most of its younger citizens.

‘Australia's Animals Discovered’ is a title which to some extent might mislead. Grisly little books about discovering our furred and feathered friends, about the quaint oddities of marsupial creatures and about being kind to koalas may be conjured up. But this one is nothing of the kind. It is written by the Director and the ornithologist of that magnificent fossil, the Macleay Museum of the University of Sydney, and is to my knowledge a book altogether original in conception.

The most glorious moment in a lifetime of eating – three times a day, seven days a week, going on for forty-two years – was one night at the famed Two Faces restaurant, in trendy South Yarra. It was my first and so far only visit to that august chophouse. I was filled with trepidation and awe. Actually, I was practically quaking. The Two Faces, you understand, costs an arm and a leg, but never mind that, this was a wedding anniversary, or my wife's birthday, or some similarly daunting occasion, and I was going for broke.

O.K.

So there we sat, the good wife and I, in that svelte subterranean chamber, praying that the shoddiness of our clothes not be noticed in the general hubbub of great food – I had painted both ankles black to simulate matching socks – and not just great food but all around us such elegant gentlemen and their diamonded ladies as to make Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh look positively cheap and trashy.

Unaccustomed though we are to knives and forks, the good wife and I managed to slog our way through the delectable meal, and then suddenly the waiter presented us with the bill, and the glorious moment was at hand.

No, no, not that.

Not that at all.

Nothing like that.

The glorious moment was when the waiter similarly presented the bill to the elegant gentleman to our right, and then to the elegant gentleman to our left, both gentlemen of that ilk born with silver cufflinks in their mouths and caviar sandwiches for school lunch, and it was my delight and triumph to watch them nonchalantly flip over their bills and then with a cry of ‘Hot fuck!' topple senseless to the floor.

I have dined out on that glorious moment ever since.

Actually, it was my mother who had the right idea about eating out. She never did it. ‘Feh!’ she would cry, at the mere thought. ‘Who needs that filth? I’ve got my own kitchen!’

Imagine!

Never once a watery spaghetti at Pellegrini's.

A raw-in-the-middle John Dory at El Calamaro.

A bowel-cleansing curry at Jamaica House.

Or such a stuffing yourself with barbecued meats at Vlado’s Charcoal Grill that it is a delight to find that your car has been stolen when you stagger out into the Richmond night and the seven- hour walk home is the only thing that saves you from cardiac arrest.

But wait a minute.

I almost forgot.

There were occasions in which my mother laid aside her hygienic scruples and treated us to an angelic blow-out, moments of gastronomic madness supreme, and these occasions, I now recall, followed the fitting out of her offspring with footwear for the coming year – at Ezywalkin’s lush premises with its cancer-inducing X-ray machine to reassure you that there was plenty of room for growth in the black leather tubs you had just had inflicted upon you yet again – and then off we clomped to Coles, in Bourke Street, upstairs, on the first floor.

Ah!

Coles push-your-tray-along cafeteria!

Was there ever such a haven of bliss?

All those little windows Filled with such great goodies, jellies and cakes and things of orgasmic cream and psychedelic hue, which the second you popped one on your tray, your mother grabbed it and put it straight back, substituting for it something drear and wholesome like a chunky cheese sandwich or a cloggy date slice, each one of these parental grabs accompanied by a fierce cry of ‘Feh!’ – not that it mattered, because when you got to the end there was never a vacant table to be seen and in less than a second the entire contents of your tray slipped from your shaking hands and crashed in full finery to the hard floor.

Wow, that mother.

Denied the arse-breaking chairs at the Faraday Cafe.

The handfuls of salt flung upon your chips in the gloom at La Chaumiere.

The occasional rare sighting of Barry Humphries in the clothes of a man at the Society.

The barely-suppressed sneer of the waiter at Baxter Provender when you can’t quite finish your second pig.

And at Kuni’s.

At Maxim’s.

At Mietta’s.

At the Oriental Gourmet.

At the flash, brash Deli in Toorak Road.

At all those places where I occasionally break public bread, in this great city of a thousand grand restaurants and food halls and eating places galore, where none need go hungry so long as someone else is paying –

I hear the cry of my long-ago stay-at-home mother –

And I order another dish.