The only woman in The First UQP Story Book is the naked one on the front cover. She is sitting in a kind of beanbag chair with her legs crossed and a floppy straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She is reading a book called The Possession of Amber which is by Nicholas Jose. Nicholas Jose is a man and so he was allowed to be actually in The First UQP Story Book.

During its twenty-two years Melbourne Studies in Education (MSE) has served many masters: the publication of public lectures, staff and visitors’ papers at the Faculty of Education, Melbourne University, thesis work and so on. But the annual has remained loyal to the study of history of education, especially on Australian and South Pacific topics. This has not been accidental as all four editors since 1957-58 have been historians of education.

‘Crank back on roller, belt left front ...’ So begins the sequence. Stuart’s novel, the fifth in a series of six called The Conjuror’s Years, depicts Colin of Drought Foal and Wedgetail View following the instructions for preparing his Vickers gun to fire against the Vichy French in the 1941 AIF invasion of Syria.

Three things are specially striking about this deftly written book which shows, once again, Stuart’s knowledge that the art is to hide the art.

The memoirs of Australian war leaders have not enjoyed the commercial success gained by American and British commanders. Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 is possibly the only book of its sort which has ever had any real success. In the last few years the Australian Trenchard, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, could not attract a commercial publisher for his autobiography, though it covered the entire creation of the RAAF. Public interest apart, the fact is that Australian generals, admirals and air marshals do not tend to be literary. We just cannot imagine an Australian Slim. The only classic works produced by any Australian connected with the armed forces and aviation in general have been P.G. (Sir Gordon) Taylor’s finely wrought books.

That it is possible, however, for talent to be concealed has been demonstrated by the appearance, at the author’s expense, of Air Vice-Marshal J.E. Hewitt’s Adversity in Success. Hewitt is not only a man of very great intelligence: he is well-read beyond his profession and has some feeling for style. Between 1939 and 1948 he kept diaries, extracts from which form the basis for this 324-page book. Many people would agree it might have been better had he used the diaries as a quarry for a completely new book. In default of that, this is a work of significance to the war historian if only for the lack of anything else like it. (If only Blarney had kept diaries!)

Following the enterprising publication of Michael Leunig’s drawings and of Arthur Horner’s ‘Colonel Pewter’ and ‘Uriel’ cartoons Penguin’s latest offering in illustrated publishing in a wonderful book of evocations – a selection of many hundred Australia ‘trademark’ symbols created to identify local products ranging across the one hundred years from 1860.

Symbols of Australia is essentially a picture book. It has no conventional text apart from the introductions and preliminary notes, but there are captions which attempt to date the examples and sometimes explain their history significance.

Symbols and devices as means of identification, both in peace and war, have been part of European civilisation for many centuries. From the time of the early Christians, Apothecaries, Sorcerers, soldiers, printers, tradesman and craftsmen adopted symbols designed in abstract forms – some in monogram – as owner’s marks on tools, for identifying elements and chemicals, as badges of rank, or as personal trademarks on stone work among other uses. In fact the first true ‘trade’ marks were in those carved by European stonemasons into a stone of a building during the Middle Ages.

Dust jacket blurbs are usually misleading, but at least one point made by the back cover of Blanche d’Alpuget’s new novel, Turtle Beach, is authentic. It refers to the ‘Graham Greene sense of inevitability’ of the events of the work. As an admirer of Greene, especially in his Third World novels, I can confidently recommend Turtle Beach as a worthy successor to such socially important novels as The Quiet American and The Comedians. D’Alpuget has the same keen sense of the inadequacies, irrelevance and wrongheadedness of Western involvement in the East, the same wryly ironic depiction of the frailty of human nature regardless of class, colour, creed or sex.     

Turtle Beach takes its title from the famous Malaysian beach where each year giant turtles come to breed, watched by European, American and Australian tourists, and are plundered of their eggs by the local villagers. It is here that the French-Indonesian Minou, second wife of Sir Adrian Hobday, the Australian Ambassador, commits her final act of social indiscretion – suicide – for her own and her people’s integrity. She is accompanied to the beach by Judith Wilkes, an Australian journalist, and Kanan, Hindu academic and impassive observer of the universe and its teeming, troubled people.

Australia in the thirties – tough, innocent, conservative and patriarchal to the ninth degree. In A House with Verandahs Nene Gare writes about men dispossessed by the Depression and who become working class casualties, unable to grasp the world outside and clinging tenaciously to the world of domesticity and the comfort of women. And, in tum, the women struggle to maintain their world and to support each other through the petty obstinacy of their men. Nene Gare’s novel is drawn from her own childhood – its form is close to the autobiographical fiction of the Canadian writer Alice Munro. It also has similarities to Glen Tomasetti’s Thoroughly Decent People, and to a much earlier Australian classic, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. All depict the culture of women and the linked culture of children. Like much of the fiction written by women, A House with Verandahs is episodic as it meanders through the intricacies of human relationships. The world outside makes very few impingements even the man’s work as a tradesman is spent in the backyard workshop. The Hounslow family are poor. They recycle everything in their battle to survive. Women’s skills are endlessly on call to save the day-old cast-off adult wear clothes are cut and made into children’s Fruit is bottled and preserved and served up as jams and chutneys. House­hold repairs are done by the family members usually again by the women or left to languish. The men are so debilitated that all their energy is spent keeping face. Anything extra is a threat to their identity and to their position. Molly Hounslow must continually remind her more rebellious and impatient daughters to be careful of Dad. She says after any crisis: ‘Don’t say anything to your father ... it might worry him. We all knew about not worrying Dad. It made him nervy . . . newspapers also upset him. He said people would get the idea from newspapers that the world was full of criminals.’

Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance.

What are we to make, for example, of Carroll’s clever essay ‘Automobile Culture and Citizenship’, where he argues, perhaps ironically, that the motor-car is ‘the most vital element in the modern consumer struggle to keep his liberty intact’. For all his denunciation of Rousseau’s poisonous intellectual influence, Carroll’s motor-car essay readers like a modern version of Rousseau: Reveries of a Solitary at the Steering Wheel.

This book of a dozen essays, with a foreword by Sir Kenneth Weare (his last substantial piece of writing before he died), concentrates on various aspects of the changing Anglo-Australian relationship.

It is an enlightening collection, for most of the essays test and in some cases challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ which pervades recent analyses of Australian life. This is especially useful to this reviewer who, as an immigrant of two years’ standing, discovered on arrival a veritable industry of writers in various disciplines all concerned with the search for an Australian identity. Two essays, for a start, provide the leaven in reassessment of George Johnston’s literary quest for ‘the way home’, as well as Donald Horne’s ‘Lucky Country’ theme and Alan Renouf’s ‘Frightened Country’ analysis. The first is interestingly dealt with by Alan Lawson in his ‘Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition’, which challenges several half-truths which have become maxims. Horne and Renouf immediately spring to mind in J.D.B. Miller’s ‘An Empire That Don’t Care What You Do’. This essay is a ‘must’ for those people who view most past (and some present) Australian leaders as supine in their dealings with British counterparts.

Playlab Press is an offshoot of the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory which has the aim of assisting playwrights in the development of their craft through workshopping, production and possible publication of playscripts. It seems to be, with one exception, very much a regional enterprise and all the more admirable for it. The quality and number of these scripts culled, one assumes, from a much larger number of scripts submitted for selection, suggests a wealth of unpublished and unperformed theatrical material in the rest of Australia waiting for local groups as enterprising as the Queensland Playrights Laboratory.

This is the story of one woman’s crusade to achieve social justice for a handicapped child. It is one person’s elevation of the ineptitude, the hypocrisy and the dishonesty that became associated with a particular group of handicapped children. It concerns an institution that attempted to tum a pretext into reality rather than declare that a terrible mistake had occurred. Rosemary Crossley found Annie in St Nicholas Hospital in 1976. The hospital was originally a children’s hospital built in the 1890s. In 1964 The Mental Health Authority took possession of the buildings and after demolishing some and refurbishing others opened again in order to cater for the needs of severely and profoundly handicapped children, those whose purported I.Q.s were believed to be below thirty. Although it was originally designed to cater for individuals on a temporary basis most of those who came never left. It is perhaps Indicative of our attitudes towards the handicapped that the ‘high brick walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass’ were left untouched. One wonders whether the author of the slogan ‘Break Down the Barriers’ had this in mind when he took up his pen.

Finding the answers is often not half as important as asking the right questions. Desmond Ball has written an important book even though he raises more fundamental questions than he answers.

The central question in A Suitable Piece of Real Estate is simply ‘What are the rights and responsibilities of a host country which allows installations of a foreign, albeit, friendly state, to be sited on its territory?’ The author has dedicated the book For a Sovereign Australia. Australia is the host country in question, with American defence, scientific, and intelligence installations on its territory; but the situation he describes in great detail could, and probably does, apply elsewhere.

As soon as I read the title, I welcomed Mr Gough Whitlam’s pamphlet following perhaps an instinctual and rather biased interest in all that concerns both Italian and English literatures, and even more so whenever I come across an analysis of cross-currents between the two. My enthusiasm, however, was but short-lived. What the booklet offers, in fact, is only an enormous and indigestible amount of information, collated in a hopscotch fashion, with hardly any attempt to classify it in any way or to illustrate the purpose of such a mammoth task; it eventually fails to offer the reader a satisfactory overall picture, however superficial, of what the author means by ‘Italian Inspiration in English Literature’.

Although, in the concluding section, Mr Whitlam does apologise for the compilatory nature of his ‘opus’ (as he calls it himself in the very first line of the script) and justified it as merely a modest attempt to create a dynamic enough stimulus to trigger off further and more specialized research with the subject, why go to such lengths to achieve this dull and uninspiring result, when there have already been other and more authoritative voices on the matter, who are not perhaps so encyclopedic but who nevertheless are much more rewarding and challenging?

The title of this book accurately represents Jane Adamson’s approach to Othello, her view of the play, and her critical achievement. Rejecting from the outset the ‘conventionalist’ approach, which would have us discount our own responses and treat the play as ‘artificial’, a ‘purely dramatic phenomenon’ (ars gratia artis: the old lie), she bases her critical judgment on a systematic consideration of the feelings it arouses. This leads her to the view that. the connection (or disconnection) between the characters’ feelings and their judgments is at the heart of the play, and at the heart of the tragedy.

The foundation of her argument lies in her strong sense of the sheer painfulness of the drama, and the vulnerability of the characters. Because she has the capacity to write with power and precision, she makes us feel these things with a peculiar immediacy, while at the same time showing how each character in his anguish, or in efforts to avoid anguish, deceives himself, or others, or both. All the main characters feel obliged to repress, or oversimplify, or otherwise distort their feelings. She shows this process to be most surprisingly and comprehensively at work in the case of Iago, who (she says) ‘never loses his conviction that his will can protect him from any and every human susceptibility’. His apparent control of feelings, and his contempt of other characters who cannot ‘control’ theirs, is not the sign of superiority he takes it for, but of his need for emotional self-protection: he will not wear his heart upon his sleeve, ‘for daws to peck at’. Iago prefers not to take the risks of feeling, not to expose himself to the possibility of pain or disappointment or treachery by submitting himself to the direction of his emotional instincts above all, by opening himself for the gift and receipt of love. Thus, he ensures that his emotional life, by being repressed, must become deformed, furtive, lurid and corrupt. As a result, ‘in Iago’s accent, relish is so hotly mated with scorn and revulsion that the product is obscene as well as grotesque’.

The poet John Ashbery, now a considerable force in American poetry, has said: ‘I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time…’ Like John Ashbery – and Frank O’Hara (who was involved with the Abstract Expressionism scene in New York before being killed by a dune buggy in 1966) – John Forbes and Gig Ryan are, in Australia, poets who must be linked to the broad automatic writing phenomenon which gained strength with so-called Action Painting (or, to use its other name, Tachisme). The foundation of that art movement was surrealist painting, sculpture, and writing; and these were made familiar to young American artists when writers and painters such as Max Ernst and André Breton escaped from Europe before Hitler took over.

I am sure A.B. Facey intended no irony in calling his remarkable autobiography A Fortunate Life. He is at once too unassuming and, too serious for smart games with words though he does find humour sometimes among the grim and frightful events of his earlier years and, after his perfect marriage, there were times of fulfilment and true happiness. He has chosen to emphasise triumphs as well as struggles, and, while such brave qualities determine his title, they are also what make this chronicler a great man and his book a classic to equal Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Beyond all Pity. It surpasses anything else I know of to which it might be compared; even Shaw Neilson’s autobiography must yield before Facey.

To borrow from Jones and Bassett: ‘Not another Kelly book!’ Well, yes; in fact two more can be added to last year’s bumper crop. One of them comes from Kelly Country itself, written by two local residents. And the two books provide a perfect example of the extremes in the Kelly publishing game.

Ned Kelly: A Pictorial History was obviously compiled for the centenary market. Profusely illustrated, it uses Boxall’s text, written over seventy years ago, to tell the Kelly story. The book is slipshod in its preparation and presentation, shows no signs of editorial planning or basic research, and takes no account of the Kelly literature published since Boxall wrote his book. Boxall’s text is riddled with errors. The publishers have made no attempt to amend it. Even Lonigan’s name is misspelt (Lonergan).

Wrecks and the relics of wrecks have always fascinated. Their search and finding brings the excitement of the chase, their identification involves detective sleuthing, their background entails historical research; the very sight of them evokes the adventure of their days of sailing, and the drama of their night of death. Australian writing is rich in books about them, with earlier emphasis more on the adventure and the drama, less on the historical research and the archaeological interpretations. But with the coming of modern underwater techniques and sophisticated instruments, the haphazard sampling of maritime ruins has changed into the modern science of marine archaeology. The enlightened Maritime Archaeology Act (W.A.) and Historic Shipwrecks Act (Commonwealth) have made these relics a part of our national heritage, the Marine Archaeology course at the Western Australian Institute of Technology has formalized the new science, and the Western Australian Museum has built up a compendious catalogue of all the wrecks ever recorded on the Western Australian coast, together with all facts known about them.

Graeme Henderson is in charge of this work at the Western Australian Museum, and his Unfinished Voyages decks out this catalogue, elaborating where necessary, expanding the historical background, adding maps and sketches, providing footnotes and references, and transmuting the formal catalogue into discursive reading. Nevertheless, he eschews the sensational, and perhaps underplays the drama. When there is quotation from contemporary newspapers (as with Lancier), or better still a rare eye-witness account (as with Governor Endicott) the change of style is evident.

In the closing years of the Napoleonic War, Edward Primrose Tregurtha saw active service in the navy for three years, and at the end of the war was honourably discharged – at the age of twelve years, after which he went back to school! He resumed his adventurous career as an officer in the East India Company, and saw further action in the Opium War in China, and in the troubles at Rangoon. Then followed five years of sea-faring and whaling until he finally settled at Launceston in 1836. His journal, which is reproduced in this book, covers first these early adventures and then a further sixteen years in Van Diemen’s Land and on the mainland.

Tregurtha never made the main pages of history, though he was often close to the places where history was being made. If he had arrived in Launceston a few years earlier, he might have shared in the exploits and in the fame of Batman and the others who pioneered the settlements across the strait . A few months too late, he had to be content with the less glamorous (though important) work of ferrying sheep, goods and passengers from Launceston to the infant townships of Melbourne and Geelong.

Dear Sir,

It is extraordinary how touchy and nasty an academic can become when confronted with the romantic. A prime example of this is Prof. Patrick McCaughey’s review of Charles Blackman – The Lost Domains in your March issue. It seems he just cannot stand a romantic writer writing romantically about a romantic painter, and sets out, not merely to debunk her writing, but, in effect, to destroy the delight one can experience from what is, by his own admission, a magnificently produced book.

It is no mistake that the first major book on Clifton Pugh since Noel Macainsh’s in 1962 is a biography rather than a critical appraisal. Pugh’s persona has always been of greater interest to the public than his art. He fits the bohemian image of what the public think an artist should look like and do – live in a mud brick house, have a succession of wives and mistresses, and support causes with passionate energy – in Pugh’s case, the Labor Party, wombats and everything natural in the bush.

Pugh’s personal history is no secret, and he has always appeared to relish the publicity which set him up as the eccentric conservationist who could paint magpies with the same enthusiasm applied to portraits of Labor politicians. His third wife, Judith, is explicit on how to make yourself a famous and rich artist, a task which she set herself for the benefit of dear Clif:

The more publicity you get for a show, the more likely you are to sell the paintings and that provides your income…That ‘s one reason why if somebody rings up and says can I do a story of the house…we can say yes instead of no, because we don ‘t play this ridiculous game of, Oh I am a private person.

Traudi Allen writes as an admirer but with enough caution to make her account plausible. Pugh the man comes first, and the art serves as a handle into everything you wanted to know about Australian bush bohemia. Significantly, her interest was first kindled not by the pictures, but by an interview Pugh did for This Day Tonight about his retros­pective exhibition at the Adelaide Fes­tival of Arts in 1976.

Despite the sympathetic treatment, Pugh comes across as a self-centred and absorbed man, especially in relation to his women and children, a publicist, and an opportunist whose political inconsistencies enabled him to form friendships with Holt and Whitlam, and to paint Prince Phillip and Sir John Kerr alongside Dunstan, Wran and Lionel Murphy. Phillip Adams mercilessly lampooned Pugh the politico, describing ‘Clayton Puff as a ludicrously contrived poseur, a business tycoon with a mud brick house fully equipped with electric typewriters, telex facilities and Yves St Laurent handkerchiefs with which he wipes the paint from his hands. Politicians wait their tum to be painted and Pugh ‘s wife pronounces, ‘When the Government isn’t sitting in Canberra, you’ll find it sitting for Clifton’.

What criticism the author does make of Pugh is second hand, and she cautiously assembles pastiches of newspaper criticism which condemn Pugh for his sentimental message making. To redress the balance, she immediately juxtaposes the negative criticism of the 1970s to the earlier positive remarks which made Pugh’s ‘rocks, dingoes, stumps and crows the most promising one man show seen here for many a long day’. The author takes no real position on any critical issues and opts out, along with Pugh himself, by sweeping aside critics as ‘failed painters who make poor writers’. It is a case of the misunderstood artist. Ironically, Pugh’s subject matter and manner of painting have made him more than accessible to a wide audience.

Allen’s major problem as Pugh’s biographer is that she has not yet come to terms with basic questions of art and the public: the conflict between popular and critical opinion, the notion of what avant-garde art might be, or the possibility of seeming Pugh’s art in a context wider than Australia. Avoiding these problems leads the author instead into bush territory – and she begins to sound like Pugh’s mouthpiece on the stomach contents of feral cats and dingoes and the pleasures of raising wombats. it is a strange combination of anecdotes of Pugh’s personal life, panegyrics on the Australian bush, and escapades into Pugh’s marital and sex life. The author allows Pugh to write his own epitaph when she quotes him as saying:

No woman should live with a genius longer than two years because after that time she ceases to appreciate him fully.

There is one aspect of this otherwise rather predictable book which does illuminate many of Pugh’s attitudes. These are Pugh’s war diaries, written from New Guinea where the artist fought with the 2/2 Battalion. Disillusioned with army life, Pugh’s entries into his diary provide the most riveting passages of the entire book:

The track was treacherous, slippery, steep, the heat stifling…As we push forward more and more do we see signs of cannibalism – one Jap killed has a pack containing 10 lbs. flesh, ‘boong’, and lying nearby was a dead Jap waiting to be cut up, his calves were already cut out…Wrapped in a blanket were the remains of two arms they had been nibbling raw. You could see the toothmarks where they had bitten off bits of finger to chew.

That wartime writing may in fact be more significant than has ever been acknowledged. His jottings have the brutal directness of a man who apparently enjoyed killing, and who later in his personal life steeled himself against intimacy with wives and children. Traudi Allen has recorded well the popular mythology which Pugh has perpetuated about himself – how much he cares for the bush and its inhabitants. Unwittingly she has also portrayed a man whose self-importance is measured by his tendency to name-drop. In the same breath that he espouses one of his causes, he can utter, ‘I think they’re a bloody awful mess, people’. With a more critical ear and a few stiff whiskies, Traudi Allen might have come to the same conclusion about her subject.

The two local histories in this group are about utterly different places and are quite unalike in technique and form, yet they do share a common motivation. Both emanate from the researches and pens of local inhabitants, determined that the outside world should appreciate the qualities and problems of ‘our town’. However beyond this, they are linked only by ironies. One is the story of an environment and community being destroyed by an excess of wealth; the other is of a working-class suburb’s character and difficulties that spring from quite the reverse. The first is Nancy Cato’s very angry The NoosaStory: a Study in Unplanned Development; the second, In Those Days: Collingwood Remembered, is the fruits of the Collingwood History Committee.

Fine Wines from the Desert
Mildara, the first 90 years
by Syd Wells
Quartet Books, 134 p., illus., $15.00

The idea of publishing a history of one of our major wine companies is a very pleasant one. Written by one of Mildara’s long time staffers, this book is not perhaps a model of what such a history could be. It is dominated by statistics, documented details and managerial reports, and commercial decisions. What is missing for the wine lover is the wine itself, those wonderful sherries, for instance, or the white label Coonawarra reds with their justifiably high reputation. Inevitably, there is a certain ‘house’ history feel about it, but the story of the company’s expansion despite many vicissitudes is still a fascinating one.

The Mills Brothers of Port Fairy
by Alan Broughton
Published by the author, 59 Martin St., Thornbury, 45p., $3.50

The Mills Brothers of Port Fairy by Alan Broughton is a highly readable pamphlet history of a pioneering family of southwestern Victoria. John and Charles Mills came first as seal hunters, returned as whalers then settled in Port Fairy, John as a captain of trading ships and harbourmaster, Charles as a farmer. As their historian says, ‘they were well-known and respected in Western Victoria, but they were not famous’. We follow the Mills brothers through the perils of the sea and the struggles of early settlement, but Alan Broughton does not allow us to forget the Aboriginal people whom white settlement dispossessed and the convicts it degraded. This little history would be first-class for secondary school students, as well as for the local history enthusiast.

Berwick, Some Aspects
by John C. Wells
Shillington, illus., 63 p., $4.80

Berwick, Some Aspects is a guide to the historical buildings of the Victorian town of Berwick, with a splendid text by John Wells and charming illustrations by Maggie Mackie. For those who know and love this strangely ‘English’ part of the world, this book will provide much pleasure. For others, it may tempt them to visit Berwick before it is swallowed up entirely by the Melbourne sprawl.

Coastal Towns of New South Wales and Norfolk Island
by Cedric Emanuel
Cassell, illus., 90p., $10.95

In Coastal Towns of New South Wales and Norfolk Island the popular artist Cedric Emanuel pays his homage to some of the most beautiful places in Australia. His black and white drawings capture details and aspects of historical buildings and relics that the camera often fails to record, which will be much appreciated by future students of architecture and history. Moreover, the historical relic is preserved in these delightful drawings with a quiet timelessness. For any fan of things east of the Great Divide and of architectural drawing, this would make an excellent present.

Trees
by Eleanor Stodart
Angus & Robertson, illus., 30p., $4.95

Rain
by Dorothy Rogers
Angus & Robertson, illus., 30p., $4.95

These two books belong to the Young Nature Series and are intended for the very young. They contain black and white and colour photographs. The informative texts genuinely seek to impart knowledge in a simple and direct manner without being condescending or resorting to baby talk. Useful additions to any primary school library.

Growing Orchids Cymbidiums and Slippers
by J.N. Rentoul
Lothian, index, illus., 170p., $14.95

This is a full and comprehensive treatise on the art of growing Cymbidium and Slipper orchids. A later book will cover other orchid families. Every aspect of the subject is included from hot house construction to countries of origin. There are plenty of black and white photographs and more important (and essential in a book of this sort), a generous collection of excellent colour photographs. The whole study of orchids takes on a rather nightmarish quality when one comes to the question of hybrids – over 100,000 altogether, many of them no longer in cultivation. As the author points out in his introduction, it’s enough to ‘drive the botanists mad’!

Grow Natives: Creating an Australian Bush Garden
by Bill Molyneux
Anne O’Donovan, index, illus., 154 p., $6.95

The popularity of bush gardens seems to increase at the same pace as our national consciousness. It’s all a part of our own cultural (or should it be horticultural?) revolution. This again is a very comprehensive publication with a good collection of diagrams and black and white and colour photographs. Unfortunately the constant use of botanical names in preference to common names makes it a little heavy going. For instance we read of ‘Stands of Acacia prominens’ rather than Golden Rain Wattle. This apart, the book would seem to be an invaluable aid to anyone wishing to establish his own Australian Bush Garden.

Trees and Shrubs for Australian Gardens
by Timothy and Elizabeth Hall
Pan, 203 p

The botanical names of flowers and trees (as opposed to their common names) seem to speak a language of their own. It somehow comes across in the pronunciation. Consider for instance the plaintive, childlike murmur of Prunus mume; the swaggering braggadocio of Betula pendula; or the rasping command of Backhousia citriodora! George Orwell once complained of the disappearance of the common names of plants, preferring the English snapdragon to the Greek Antirrhinum. No need to worry about botanical names in this catalogue: all the main entries are given under the common names of the plants.

Dingo Boy
by Michael Dugan
Puffin, 66p., $2.50

On its first appearance, Margaret Dunkle (ABR, no. 26) [link to article] called this book for young people ‘a fine, sensitive story, told with a taut economy that compels belief’.

A Log of Great Australian Ships
by Graeme Andrews
Reed, index, biblio., illus., 160 p., $18.95

An encyclopaedia of over one hundred and fifty famous Australian ships, set out in alphabetical order for easy reference, and each page carrying one ship, so to speak, for convenience. Although based entirely upon the author’s selection the ‘log’ still manages to cover a large array of craft. A handsomely bound book from one ship lover to other ship lovers.

Redgums & Paddlewheels: Australia’s Inland River Trade
by Peter J. Phillips
Greenhouse, biblio., illus., 165 p.

An impressively presented book on the history of Australia’s inland river trade, related as a long story rather than as an historical chronicle. Prolifically illustrated with some ancient and many rare photographs, and well stored with readable information researched to great detail, this book is of the kind to suitably grace any coffee table or armchair. Of great value to those who are already interested in the subject.

The Monopoly Book
by Maxine Brady
Pan, 153 p., $, First published 1978.

Designed as much for the ‘Once-a-blue-mooner’ as for the ‘aficionado’, this illustrated book outlines the history and development of the game, the different possible roles of players, strategies and tactics, fine and broad rules and even gives an indispensible epilogue on ‘How To Deal With Tantrums’. Certainly a book that can not only help finish the game, (yes, it can be done) and not only help win it, but add well deserved interest to it as well. Effectively dispenses with all allegations of kinship between the words ‘monotony’ and ‘monopoly’.

The Vanguard Sleeps in (A War Novel)
by Les Wicks
Glandular Press., illus., 37 p., $

Only as thick as the magazine you’re reading now, this book’s main concern is for people on the periphery of society. Snatches at and glimpses of people run all through the book in poetry, poetic prose and story form. Very few of the stories or ‘portraits’ go for more than a page, yet within their particular spaces can cover substantial human experience and provide alluring reading. Quick to read but long to ponder.

Science Fiction Trilogy
by Martin Reece
Darling Downs Institute Press., illus., 45 p.

Science Fiction Trilogy belongs to a project for publishing ‘Books for kids by kids’. Its dates reveal that Martin Reece was twelve or less when he wrote these three stories.

The first is a ‘space war’, which would certainly not be recommended ‘for kids’ if an adult wrote it; the characters may be only humanoid, but they die too often and too suddenly. They splatter or char or get split in two, and ‘stain the metallic floor a sickening red’. Meanwhile, 81st century technology mingles oddly with devices already being superseded now; for example, a lock which falls with a clang when blasted off the door.

Nevertheless, Martin Reece plots coherently and displays both wit and imaginative technique. Thus, in a story combining a post-holocaust world and a time-travel paradox, he switches to a computer’s record during the narrator’s fist-fights. And his robot’s ‘auto­biography’ quotes once from ‘a 53rd century poet by the name of Quell’.

It is a pity that, either through editorial inefficiency or unstated policy, the book’s spelling is sometimes ‘catoclismic’ - a ‘catastrophy’.

RE-ISSUES

[missing contributors]

Tiburon
by Kylie Tennant
Angus & Robertson, Sirius, 413 p., $7.95 pb

The first reprinting since 1972 of Kylie Tennant’s first novel. First published in The Bulletin in 1935 when it won the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize, this vivid account of the life of the poor and unemployed fringe-dwellers of an Australian country town is one of our most important novels of the Depression.

Foveaux
by Kylie Tennant
Angus & Robertson, Sirius, 425 p., $7.95 pb

One of Tennant’s most widely praised novels, not least because of its array of memorable characters. Set in an inner-city suburb of Sydney before World War II and first published in 1939, this novel’s charm has, if anything, increased with the passage of time.

Tell Morning This
by Kylie Tennant
Angus & Robertson, Sirius, 446 p., $7.95 pb

First published in 1967 and set in Sydney. A funny and bitter novel which ironically contrasts the prostitutes of Woolloomooloo and the snobs of Bellevue Hill.

Wake in Fright
by Kenneth Cook
Angus & Robertson, Australian Classics, 143 p., $8.95 pb

A savage and sour view of the ugly side of the Australian outback. Kenneth Cook’s now famous novel of the ultimate frustration of one man’s attempt to control his own destiny was first published in 1961 and has now achieved the classic status it obviously deserves.

Dig: The Burke & Wills Saga
by Frank Clune
Angus & Robertson, Australian Classics, 182 p., $8.95 pb

Dig enjoyed wide popularity when it was first published in 1937 but has been out of print for many years. Clune adopted the mixed stance of amateur historian, novelist and schoolmaster to produce one of the first full-length accounts of Victoria’s most famous explorers and their ill-fated expedition.

The Red Chief
by Ion L. Idriess
Angus & Robertson, Australian Classics, 226 p., $8.95 pb

A story handed down from generation to generation by an aboriginal tribe of the Gunnedah district of New South Wales of a legendary young warrior, Red Kangaroo, who by his mental and physical prowess became chief of his tribe. Told with apparent reluctance in a fictionalised manner by Idriess who includes a number of photographic illustrations to lend extra authenticity to his tale.

The last few weeks have seen the re-issues in paperback of some outstanding Australian fiction. Among recent paperbacks are the following:

I Can Jump Puddles
by Alan Marshall
Longman Cheshire, 243 p., $3.95

A new ABC television series has apparently prompted the re-publication of this famous Australian classic. Alan Marshall’s story of his childhood and his overcoming a crippling disease is deservedly one of the most popular books ever published in Australia.

Homesickness
by Murray Bail
Penguin, 317 p., $4.95

Murray Bail’s brilliant novel, winner of the 1980 National Book Council Award and Co-winner of the 1980 Age Book of the Year award, is now out in paperback. Bail’s two books so far reveal him as possibly the most original and inventive fiction writer in Australia. Reviewed, ABR, October 1980 [LINK to article].

Owls Do Cry
by Janet Frame
Sun Books, 173 p., $3.95

Janet Frame is not an Australian, of course, but a New Zealander, but let’s stretch a point and acknowledge this fine, if grim, novel. Since its first publication in paperback in 1967 it has now run into six editions.

The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin, 337 p., $4.95

Like many expatriate writers, Shirley Hazzard has suffered from undeserved neglect and only belated recognition in her country of birth. However, this original and compelling novel should send readers back to her earlier four works of fiction.

Australian Literature to 1900 by Barry Andrews and William Wilde is Volume 22 in the series American Literature, English Literature, and World literatures in English. The aim of each volume in the series is to act as a guide to information sources in its particular area and there is a basic format governing the general shape and organisation of the material.

I often think that the worst fate which can befall a writer is to have his works prescribed for use in schools – a sure kiss of death if it is not attended by a close first hand knowledge and genuine enthusiastic response on the part of the teachers, who, for good or ill, act as literary brokers. Teachers who are ignorant of the real nature of the books to which they sentence the captives in their charge should not be surprised if the children receive them coolly, or with resistance, if not outright hostility, and shun those writers for ever more. I believe the greatest potential impetus for reading in our schools – and for the making of the readers for life – is the ubiquitous presence of enthusiastic teachers who know books well. These teachers like the books they have chosen to prescribe and they feel they are appropriate choices for the children they teach. Above all they want to share their enthusiasm for these books with their students.

David Burke, former journalist and author of books about railways, has written Darknight (Methuen pb.), a mystery story about a cadet reporter sent to an isolated, closed community to cover a story about some lost bush walkers. Come Midnight Monday (Methuen) is an equally exciting read.

Nan Chauncy, more than anyone else, provided the incentive and precedent for the boom in high-quality contemporary Australian children’s literature. Her books are as readable as ever. The particular Tasmanian settings and convincing characterisation  make the stories Devil’s Hill and Tiger in the Bush all the more rewarding. Tangara is a key book in our history. It success­fully blends fantasy and reality in its idea of a modern girl making contact with a Tasmanian Aboriginal girl. Mathinna’s People , a poetic and sensitive account of the tragic fate of the Tasmanians is her most impressive achievement. (All books by Oxford.) Mavis Thorpe Clark’s The Min Min (Lions) remains her best book. Set on the Nullarbor plain, it is an account of a young girl’s yearning for different hori­zons or directions. An-early book Pony from Tarella (Knight) is as good as anything in its class – a horse story but with a boy as hero.

Margaret Balderson’s When Jays Fly to Barbmo (Oxford): There has never been a worthier Book of the Year winner than this, and it was runner up for the Carnegie Medal in Britain too. It is an outstanding novel which, if taken up by the adult market at the time, would have been a best seller-and elevated its author to a position she deserves. This first novel is set in Norway during World War II and concerns a girl’s insistence on discovering the truth about her origins.

Keats and Chapman attended the world’s first and so far, only performance of Karl­Heinz Stochasm’s massive composition for several large orchestras, chorus and regimental artillery, the Cantata for the Victims of Eureka. Afterwards, Keats asked Chapman what he thought of the work, and Chapman admitted that he had quite enjoyed some of the choral themes in the last movement. ‘You mean melodies,’ said Keats, who hadn’t liked any of it. ‘Themes’, Chapman insisted. ‘But themes aren’t what they sing!’ cried Keats. ‘They so rarely are’, said Chapman. In all fairness I think it must be said that Macmillan’s have not been treating me at all well lately. Here it is nearly April and I have not yet received a review copy of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which makes me think I have been quite overlooked. Further, though I have no doubt I would make good use of the New Grove at any time, I had most desperate need of it just after Christmas.

Picture me, if you will, sitting quietly at the Foysters’ place on the evening of the 28th, meditating upon peace, good will and the future of man under Reagan, taking care the while not to smoke too many cigarettes at once because it does terrible things to my friends’ wallpaper - a cosy yuletide scene indeed, and a memory to be treasured. Suddenly the mood was shattered and my ash went everywhere when John started asking me, all in a rush, a lot of silly questions about music. Who wrote Mozart’s 39th? How many horns in a horn trio? What do the following have in common: Fidel Castro, Yehudi Menuhin, Tommy Flynn? In which opera does the heroine say ‘Gak!’ and die? What instrument handles water music? Well, that sort of interrogation might unsettle a lesser man, but I just fired answers back at him as fast as I could make them up. Danzi Finzi Mackenzie. Four including shoehorn. Characters in an unperformed opera by Karl-Keinz Stochasm. None. Bath tuba. It was the bath tuba, I think, that unnerved him. ‘You’d better have this’, he said, handing me the National Times, ‘You seem to know more about this stuff than I do.’  And that’s how I became involved in the National Times Music Quiz Competition, ruining my holiday (Sally was m Tasmania, building snowmen on the beach at Cremorne), driving myself and everyone around me mad for the next week. There were 100 questions, twenty each on Opera, Mozart, Orchestral Music, Chamber Music and Twentieth Century Music, but because many of the questions had several parts or required multiple answers, I finished up looking for 190 answers. And look for them I did. My more creative answers might have satisfied John Foyster, but I had the feeling that they wouldn’t fool the judges.

            By the time I got to Mervyn Binns’s New Year’s Eve party I had about seventy answers. ‘Happy new year yourself,’ I said to Mervyn, who operates a retail space-opera establishment in Swanston Street, ‘Who wrote Mozart’s 39thl’ ‘Damned if I know,’ said Mervyn, genially, ‘Isaac Asimov? Why don’t you ask George Turner?’ An excellent suggestion. I cornered George, who knows even more about opera than he knows about science fiction, which is an awful lot, and extracted a dozen answers from him, all but one (it turned out) correct. He did not know who sang Figaro at the first performance, claiming not to have been around at the time. I didn’t believe that for one moment, but I let him have his Carlton Light back and went off to pester someone else. Myf and Tony Thomas said some of my answers were pretty unlikely, and said also that I was welcome to look them up in their paperback Grove. That was very decent of them, but at the time I thought it would be almost cheating to do that. Besides, they live way out in the bush, somewhere beyond Wantirna, and it seemed a long way to go to read an encyclopaedia. Noel Kerr said it was a pity none of the questions were about Dave Brubeck, because he knows a lot about Dave Brubeck, and I said ‘Who?’ and there was a bit of a friendly argument, and just then Damien Broderick jogged past, muttering something about ‘Drunken loon!’ and then we all joined hands with Lee Harding and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and then we went home.

The party continued next day at Damien and Dianne’s place. Christine Ashby asked me what I was writing for the Age’s funny-writing competition, and I asked her which modern composer died after tripping over a dog, and we all had a good time again. There was a lady at the party who looked remarkably like Valma Brown. Valma lives in Canberra and usually spends Christmas skiing in Brisbane, or whatever they do in Brisbane at Christmas. This lady had come to the party not knowing what Damien and Dianne’s friends might be like, and was quite charmed, in an embarrassed sort of way, at the number of people who cuddled her without being properly introduced. I knew she wasn’t Valma, because she couldn’t tell me who had written a concerto for Ondes Martenot. Also, she was smoking. I think Valma only moved to Canberra because she couldn’t stand all the smoking that goes on in Melbourne.

The rest of my answers (I ended up with 154 correct by my reckoning, 146 by the judges’) came mainly from the

Gramophone magazine, of which I seem to have accumulated several hundred issues over the years, and Jennifer Bryce’s books on modern music. I knew that Jennifer played a musical instrument - indeed I have seen a photograph of her playing it in London - so I thought she might have a few books on musical subjects, and I was not wrong. By the time I borrowed them I was becoming very dejected about the competition. All the libraries I usually go to had closed down for the snow season, or whatever they close down for at Christmas. In desperation, prepared if need be to buy Einstein’s Mozart and Kobbe’s Complete Opera Book if I came across them, I scoured the bookshops of Melbourne, to absolutely no avail. And I must say, for all that I believe books to be the most reasonably priced luxury available to the average Australian, that I was appalled at the prices of books about music. The $1700 that Macmillan’s are asking for the New Grove would not buy you more than a few feet of other standard references and monographs on individual composers. For that matter, it wouldn’t buy you very many nights at the opera, would it? What a splendid bargain it is! What wonderful, big-hearted publishers Macmillan’s are! (Should I drop in at your office or will you post it to me?)

The competition closed on 7 January, and I posted off rrty entry on the 5th. The National Times for 11 January announced a review deadline, the 14th, and I went around fuming for a day or two because I’d wasted a week and the libraries were open again. The official results took up two pages of the issue for 18 January. The three prize-winners were the secretary of a philharmonic society, a doctor who composes in his spare time and a music teacher. The judges’ comments made it clear to me that I had run fourth or fifth. Some of their answers were ambiguous, and some just plain wrong, but what the hell, it was all good clean fun and it stopped me watching television for a week. But I must admit that I have been thinking a bit about why I went in for the thing. Was it to impress John Foyster, who knows I’m not as clever as I think but thinks I don’t know that? Was it to prove that a competent book editor can find out anything about any subjects if he sets his mind to it? Was it simply to win first prize?

I can answer the last one. First prize was two season tickets to Musica Viva, and I haven’t been to a musical concert since they barred me from the Uni2_n Theatre for snoring through the entire second act of Monteverdi’s L’in­coronet_ione di Poppea. (or possibly II ritornol d’ Uisse in patria: l always get those two confused), which was many years/ago, when I was still constitutionally capable of listening to music and not smoking for an hour or more. I was once able to sit through an entire Bruckner symphony at the Melbourne Town Hall without too-much discomfort. For a committed smoker such a thing is more of an endurance test even than going to church. No, I just wouldn’t last out a concert these days.

Am I really as far gone as that? Surely not? If someone gave me a free ticket to something I liked, I’m sure I would make an effort. It might even be the first step towards rehabilitation and return to a normal, full and productive life. I could go for long rides on trams and trains. I might eventually become a librarian. It’s something to think about. Oddly enough, while I was thinking about that, the Age decided to give’ away fifty (50) pairs of season tickets to Musica Viva. All you had to do ‘was match up the portraits and autographs of twelve composers, which was a darrin sight easier than answering questions like

Which composers supplemented their in­comes by (a) working as assistant to the architect Le Corbusier, {b) winning the jackpot on an Italian TV program, (c) teaching Greek at Harvard? Then you had to be one of the first fifty correct entries opened.

Have you ever wondered why so many classical music concerts are absolutely ruined by people coughing? I am now in a position to tell you why this is so. These people are smokers with free tickets. trying to redeem themselves and regain their place in normal society. Be gentle with them, kind reader. They have to start somewhere. Me? No, I believe I came fifty-first.

This is Emery Barcs’ autobiographical account of his early years in Australia. The bulk of the book deals with the time from his arrival in August 1939 until his discharge from the Australian Army in (according to my reckoning) October 1944. The book is divided into three sections - corresponding to the three distinct episodes Barcs experienced during this period. The first, entitled ‘No­body Owes You a Living’, deals with Emery Barcs’ attempt to make a living in Australia in the phoney-war period.

Here are reports from an Australian agent in London, sent directly to the head of government and for his eyes only. I use the word ‘agent’ because in many respects R.G. Casey was that, rather than a more orthodox public servant or member of a diplomatic mission though his stated primary function was to improve the flow of information on international affairs to Australia.

Consider the position. In 1924, Major Richard Gardiner Casey, D.S.O., M.C., M.A. (Cantab.), Chief Intelligence Officer (Citizen Forces) at Army Headquarters in Melbourne, a wealthy bachelor with a distinguished war record, joined the Commonwealth Public Service as a Third Division clerk in the External Affairs Branch of the Prime Minister’s Department. What on earth was such a man doing in the Public Service on £15.9.3 a week?

Her previous work, A Patch of Blue, became a Hollywood film with Sidney Poitier, and another, Child of the Holocaust, was recently serialized by the ABC. Neither was short on social awareness, which makes her latest novel all the more inexplicable. All the characters of The Death of Ruth are stereotypical. The twists and nuances come in the plot, not in the characterization.

Dr Hudson, who is now editor of historical documents in the Department of Foreign Affairs, has written a very useful study of Australia’s involvement in the League of Nations. A sometime journalist, Hudson has an enviable flair for writing about complex international issues in a manner comprehensive to an undergraduate or to that gentleman beloved of publishers’ blurbs, the intelligent layman. This book is further evidence that a scholarly work can be both brief and readable.

Some aircraft seem to be designed to achieve worldwide publicity, like the Spitfire, while others just do not make the headlines because they are not engaged in the more historical clashes. The Bristol Beaufighter was one of the combat aircraft without which the Second World War could not have been won, but it has never caught the public eye. This book tells the story of the decision to manufacture the Beaufighter. under licence in Australia- and the combat achievements of ‘both British-made and Australian-made Beaufighters during the Japanese War in. the Southwest Pacific Area, as it was then known.

The epigraph to The Dreaming Dragons suggests that melodrama can accomplish ‘the articulation of the unsayable’.

Accordingly, this book evokes transpersonal consciousness through the medium of a gripping plot, whose effect of conveying ‘the unsayable’ is only heightened by the fact that the writer and his words sometimes seem at odds with one another. Thus, ‘the midday sun took barrenness into its fists and shook it’ is like Roger Zelazny impossibly faltering; and ‘wholly in the dimensions of tactual  and haptic space’ involves adjectival tautology. Overall, the writing seems designed to make readers stand back (melodramatically), rather than to lead them into enlightenment.