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Absolutely Revolting

October 1980, no. 25

Alan Gould reviews Homesickness by Murray Bail and Monkeys in the Dark by Blanche d’Alpuget
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Desolation of modern life
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I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.
Book 1 Title: Homesickness
Book Author: Murray Bail
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, 317 pp
Book 2 Title: Monkeys in the Dark
Book 2 Author: Blanche d’Alpuget
Book 2 Biblio: Aurora Press, 76 pp, $12. 95
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I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

The story describes the adventures of thirteen Australian tourists, following them from Africa to London, to Quito, to New York, to London again, thence to Moscow, and finally to an unidentified place at the book’s close that might be hell, and is certainly limbo. The Australians spend most of the book sightseeing, progressing through a variety of bizarre museums, a museum for domestic goods in Africa where tubes of toothpaste, lawnmowers and syphons are displayed, a corrugated-iron museum in England, a leg museum in Quito where their guide is a one-legged Italian, a museum dedicated to the institution of marriage in New York, and one dedicated to gravity in Moscow. Apart from their museum experiences, the Australians are voyeurs at a gang-rape in New York where they have joined a safari-like enterprise that caters for this grotesque titillation, spectators at an English home where one, Fred Russell, whose outsized nose resembles Ayers Rock, causes his monstrosity to change colours like the Australian monolith. Despite so much time being spent in museums, there is a strong sense of locality evoked as the Australians fly from continent to continent. The atmosphere of London, Ecuador, New York is faithfully recreated; the events take place in this world and at this time.

Read more: Alan Gould reviews 'Homesickness' by Murray Bail and 'Monkeys in the Dark' by Blanche d’Alpuget

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Nancy Keesing reviews Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Article Title: Little boy lost
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Douglas Stewart has pointed out that James Joyce and Henry Lawson, opposites in art, and living at opposite ends of the earth, once wrote the same story and, each in his own way, made a masterpiece of it. The funeral of Dignam in Ulysses is the same story as Lawson’s ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In ‘Dublin and the Bush’ (The Flesh and the Spirit) he persuasively developed this argument.
Book 1 Title: Unreliable Memoirs
Book Author: Clive James
Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, 171 pp, $14.95 pb
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/DVREgy
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Douglas Stewart has pointed out that James Joyce and Henry Lawson, opposites in art, and living at opposite ends of the earth, once wrote the same story and, each in his own way, made a masterpiece of it. The funeral of Dignam in Ulysses is the same story as Lawson’s ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In ‘Dublin and the Bush’ (The Flesh and the Spirit) he persuasively developed this argument.

Read more: Nancy Keesing reviews 'Unreliable Memoirs' by Clive James

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Stuart Macintyre reviews Occasional Writings and Speeches by Manning Clark
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Contents Category: Selected Writing
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Article Title: The years of unleavened bread
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In one of the pieces that make up this collection, Manning Clark recalls how he first encountered Barry Humphries in the late 1950s and recalls the shock of recognition that he was in the presence of a man of genius. Clark wants to defend that judgement against those of us who find today’s Edna Everidge tedious and offensive. He identifies the great gifts of the satirist, the timing, the ear for a phrase, the emotional extravagance, the ability to conceive and execute a range of outrageous characters. This technical virtuosity is important, Clark maintains, because it enables Humphries to hold up a mirror to Australian society and show us what we are. No matter that we are offended by the mounting vulgarity of Edna or the wilful misrepresentation of Whitlamism: Humphries is merely showing us ourselves in an age of ruins. His is the madness of a man possessed by a love-hate relationship with the people, a man impelled to confront us with our inner emptiness.
Book 1 Title: Occasional Writings and Speeches
Book Author: Manning Clark
Book 1 Biblio: Fontana/Collins, 269 pp, $4.95 pb
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In one of the pieces that make up this collection, Manning Clark recalls how he first encountered Barry Humphries in the late 1950s and recalls the shock of recognition that he was in the presence of a man of genius. Clark wants to defend that judgement against those of us who find today’s Edna Everage tedious and offensive. He identifies the great gifts of the satirist, the timing, the ear for a phrase, the emotional extravagance, the ability to conceive and execute a range of outrageous characters. This technical virtuosity is important, Clark maintains, because it enables Humphries to hold up a mirror to Australian society and show us what we are. No matter that we are offended by the mounting vulgarity of Edna or the wilful misrepresentation of Whitlamism: Humphries is merely showing us ourselves in an age of ruins. His is the madness of a man possessed by a love-hate relationship with the people, a man impelled to confront us with our inner emptiness.

Read more: Stuart Macintyre reviews 'Occasional Writings and Speeches' by Manning Clark

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Judith Armstrong reviews Turgenev: The Quest for Faith by Robert Dessaix
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While there are several biographies of Ivan Turgenev, and one or two specialised studies of his works available in English, there is only one comprehensive attempt at interpretation and criticism –Richard Freeborn’s Turgenev: The novelist’s novelist. The A.N.U. Press’s publication of Robert Dessaix’s doctoral dissertation is a valuable addition to a scanty field, especially as there is very little overlap between the two critical works. This is all the more surprising when one realizes that both are more heavily weighted in the pan of philosophical exegesis than in that of strictly defined literary criticism. Freeborn’s book contains a chapter on style, which Dessaix’s does not, but both authors are mainly concerned to study the major novels in the light of differing but related perceptions of Turgenev’s spiritual development.
Book 1 Title: Turgenev
Book 1 Subtitle: The Quest for Faith
Book Author: Robert Dessaix
Book 1 Biblio: ANU Press, 222 pp, $6.50 pb
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While there are several biographies of Ivan Turgenev, and one or two specialised studies of his works available in English, there is only one comprehensive attempt at interpretation and criticism –Richard Freeborn’s Turgenev: The novelist’s novelist. The A.N.U. Press’s publication of Robert Dessaix’s doctoral dissertation is a valuable addition to a scanty field, especially as there is very little overlap between the two critical works. This is all the more surprising when one realizes that both are more heavily weighted in the pan of philosophical exegesis than in that of strictly defined literary criticism. Freeborn’s book contains a chapter on style, which Dessaix’s does not, but both authors are mainly concerned to study the major novels in the light of differing but related perceptions of Turgenev’s spiritual development.

Read more: Judith Armstrong reviews 'Turgenev: The Quest for Faith' by Robert Dessaix

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David Martin reviews Visions of Mowanjum: Aboriginal writings from the Kimberley
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Contents Category: Anthology
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Article Title: Visions in the desert
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How, not being an anthropologist, do you set about reviewing tales and fragments of experience from Aboriginals of the Kimberleys? You might begin by stating your difficulties.

People like me can usually establish some kind of empathetic link with the arts and traditions of many cultures. If we cannot feel our way into them, at least we can derive intellectual pleasure from contemplating them: as a rule there is some point of contact, although to us, of the western heritage, nothing can ever be as real as what belongs to the family of Hellenism. I can ‘make something’ of Hindu sculpture, Inca masks, Negro jazz; perhaps even of shamanic spells.
Book 1 Title: Visions of Mowanjum
Book 1 Subtitle: Aboriginal Writings from the Kimberley
Book Author: Daisy Utemomorrah et al; Maisie McKenzie
Book 1 Biblio: Rigby, $9.95 pb, 100 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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How, not being an anthropologist, do you set about reviewing tales and fragments of experience from Aboriginals of the Kimberleys? You might begin by stating your difficulties.

People like me can usually establish some kind of empathetic link with the arts and traditions of many cultures. If we cannot feel our way into them, at least we can derive intellectual pleasure from contemplating them: as a rule there is some point of contact, although to us, of the western heritage, nothing can ever be as real as what belongs to the family of Hellenism. I can ‘make something’ of Hindu sculpture, Inca masks, Negro jazz; perhaps even of shamanic spells.

Read more: David Martin reviews 'Visions of Mowanjum: Aboriginal writings from the Kimberley'

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John Hooker reviews Patterns of Australia by Geoffrey Dutton
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Article Title: Intellectually enriched cream
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As I write this, the Aboriginals have been forced to capitulate at Noonkanbah. The Western Australian Government is hell-bent that Amax should drill on the Blacks’ sacred site, and the National Aboriginal Conference is in Geneva to state its case at the United Nations. Patterns of Australia, funded to the tune of $120,000 by Mobil, one of the most powerful trans-nationals the world has ever known, could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Although author Geoffrey Dutton deals dutifully with the Aboriginals in the course of this book, Noonkanbah or what it stands for – energy resources, land rights and the exploitative activities of trans-nationals – is not one of the ‘patterns’ (along with many others) discussed in this smooth coffee table creation.
Book 1 Title: Patterns of Australia
Book Author: Geoffrey Dutton
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan Australia, $19.95 hb, 172 pp
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  ... no mention of the Western Suburbs, life in Blacktown, Mt Druitt … no mention of Sunshine, Altona, Lalor … Has Geoffrey Dutton ever had a beer in a pub at the top end of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy on a Saturday night?

As I write this, the Aboriginals have been forced to capitulate at Noonkanbah. The Western Australian Government is hell-bent that Amax should drill on the Blacks’ sacred site, and the National Aboriginal Conference is in Geneva to state its case at the United Nations. Patterns of Australia, funded to the tune of $120,000 by Mobil, one of the most powerful trans-nationals the world has ever known, could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Although author Geoffrey Dutton deals dutifully with the Aboriginals in the course of this book, Noonkanbah or what it stands for – energy resources, land rights and the exploitative activities of trans-nationals – is not one of the ‘patterns’ (along with many others) discussed in this smooth coffee table creation.

Read more: John Hooker reviews 'Patterns of Australia' by Geoffrey Dutton

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Don Grant reviews Bob Hawke: A portrait by Robert Pullan and Hawke: The definitive biography by John Hurst
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: Leader with harm and aggression
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Success may not always have come easy to Robert James Lee Hawke, but it has come often. In 1969 he became President of the ACTU without ever having been a shop steward or a union organiser or secretary; he had never taken part in or led a strike. His experience at grass roots or branch level in the ALP had not been extensive when he was elected Federal President of the party in 1973. Now, untested in parliament and government, his jaw is firmly pointed towards achieving what has always been his ultimate ambition – the prime ministership.
Book 1 Title: Bob Hawke
Book 1 Subtitle: A portrait
Book Author: Robert Pullan
Book 1 Biblio: Methuen, index, illus., 224p., $12.95
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Hawke
Book 2 Subtitle: The definitive biography
Book 2 Author: John Hurst
Book 2 Biblio: Angus & Robertson, illus., index, $12.95
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Success may not always have come easy to Robert James Lee Hawke, but it has come often. In 1969 he became President of the ACTU without ever having been a shop steward or a union organiser or secretary; he had never taken part in or led a strike. His experience at grass roots or branch level in the ALP had not been extensive when he was elected Federal President of the party in 1973. Now, untested in parliament and government, his jaw is firmly pointed towards achieving what has always been his ultimate ambition – the prime ministership.

Read more: Don Grant reviews 'Bob Hawke: A portrait' by Robert Pullan and 'Hawke: The definitive biography'...

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Mary Lord reviews Ballades of Old Bohemia: An anthology of Louis Esson, edited by Hugh Anderson
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Article Title: Elegance in bohemia
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This volume will come as a surprise to those who think of Esson simply as the father of Australian drama, the man who set out with the avowed aim of building up a national school of Australian drama, the author of the ironically titled classic, The Time Is Not Yet Ripe. Esson was not merely a talented playwright, but a prolific freelance writer and journalist as well as a dedicated nationalist and socialist. This is the first representative selection of his work to be published: it is a compendium of his verse, stories, short plays, and articles, political, literary, and humorous.
Book 1 Title: Ballades of Old Bohemia
Book 1 Subtitle: An anthology of Louis Esson
Book Author: Hugh Anderson
Book 1 Biblio: Red Rooster Press, 316 pp, $10.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This volume will come as a surprise to those who think of Esson simply as the father of Australian drama, the man who set out with the avowed aim of building up a national school of Australian drama, the author of the ironically titled classic, The Time Is Not Yet Ripe. Esson was not merely a talented playwright, but a prolific freelance writer and journalist as well as a dedicated nationalist and socialist. This is the first representative selection of his work to be published: it is a compendium of his verse, stories, short plays, and articles, political, literary, and humorous.

Read more: Mary Lord reviews 'Ballades of Old Bohemia: An anthology of Louis Esson', edited by Hugh Anderson

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David English reviews Christopher Brennan: A critical biography by Axel Clark
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Article Title: Sydney Bohemian eludes biographer
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Axel Clark’s is the first full-length biography of Christopher Brennan, and its publication has drawn attention to what was a lamentable deficiency in Australian literary studies.
Book 1 Title: Christopher Brennan
Book 1 Subtitle: A critical biography
Book Author: Axel Clark
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, 341 pp, $25.00 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Axel Clark’s is the first full-length biography of Christopher Brennan, and its publication has drawn attention to what was a lamentable deficiency in Australian literary studies.

Clark has assembled a veritable goldmine of interesting material, and I found the details of Brennan’s life made compelling reading. In particular, what Clark’s book does for me and other readers of the book I’ve spoken to recently is to demystify the shadowy, aloof figure of Brennan – one which might have been constructed as an extension of the obscure, symbolist, incantatory poetry.

Read more: David English reviews 'Christopher Brennan: A critical biography' by Axel Clark

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Geoffrey Williams reviews Diplomatic Witness: Australian foreign affairs 1941-1947 by Paul Hasluck
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Article Title: Innocents barracking abroad
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Sir Paul Hasluck has written a most interesting account of Australia’s foreign policy during the war and the period 1945 to 1947. His impressionistic narrative which seeks to illuminate a period of history through one pair of eyes, as a central witness, giving evidence of how it was, works quite well despite the difficulties and unintentional distortions of the historical record that such an approach can often involve. I suspect that in the fullness of time his account of this period will be substantially upheld by future professional historians.
Book 1 Title: Diplomatic Witness
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian foreign affairs 1941-1947
Book Author: Paul Hasluck
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, 306 pp, $25.00 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Sir Paul Hasluck has written a most interesting account of Australia’s foreign policy during the war and the period 1945 to 1947. His impressionistic narrative which seeks to illuminate a period of history through one pair of eyes, as a central witness, giving evidence of how it was, works quite well despite the difficulties and unintentional distortions of the historical record that such an approach can often involve. I suspect that in the fullness of time his account of this period will be substantially upheld by future professional historians.

Read more: Geoffrey Williams reviews 'Diplomatic Witness: Australian foreign affairs 1941-1947' by Paul Hasluck

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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: Hayden and the changing middle class
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Writing a biography of any practising politician is a difficult task: you are more or less beholden to your subject, and the book can end up an exercise in diplomacy instead of perception. Writing a book about Bill Hayden, who has been called an enigma, a Hamlet, and a Cassandra, is double difficult. Writing about Hayden without Hayden’s help (he ‘was able to squeeze in only limited interviews’) is almost impossible.
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Writing a biography of any practising politician is a difficult task: you are more or less beholden to your subject, and the book can end up an exercise in diplomacy instead of perception. Writing a book about Bill Hayden, who has been called an enigma, a Hamlet, and a Cassandra, is double difficult. Writing about Hayden without Hayden’s help (he ‘was able to squeeze in only limited interviews’) is almost impossible.

So, Denis Murphy’s Hayden – a political biography is a useful, dull, and finally unrevealing book. Useful, because it does give a straightforward account of Hayden’s life and political career from 1933, when he was born into a poor working-class Catholic family in Brisbane, to his current election campaign for the Prime Ministership. Dull, because it isn’t more than that (much of the book relies on Hayden’s past speeches). And unrevealing because Murphy, who is a Reader in History at the University of Queensland, an accomplished academic historian, never seems to get close to Hayden’s character or understanding what the real wellsprings of his political actions are.

Read more: Craig McGregor on writing about Bill Hayden

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters to the editor
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Custom Highlight Text: While I make no question of Mr Davies’ sincerity in taking action, I am firmly of the opinion that nothing in either play could damage him (even if, as I strongly question, it could be taken to refer to him) in the eyes of any reasonable person. At the same time, the law concerning literary defamation is so unsatisfactory in its application to creative fiction (as opposed to purported factual reporting) that there was strong sympathetic support for the idea of a test case.
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Sir,

Further to Michele Field’s discussion of the defamation problem for the publisher in your last issue, may I amplify, and correct one or two points, her account of Currency’s brush with Mr Lloyd Davies, the former husband of Dorothy Hewett, over our publication of The Chapel Perilous and The Tatry Hollow Story.

While I make no question of Mr Davies’ sincerity in taking action, I am firmly of the opinion that nothing in either play could damage him (even if, as I strongly question, it could be taken to refer to him) in the eyes of any reasonable person. At the same time, the law concerning literary defamation is so unsatisfactory in its application to creative fiction (as opposed to purported factual reporting) that there was strong sympathetic support for the idea of a test case.

Read more: Letters to the Editor - October 1980

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Jack Clancy reviews The New Australian Cinema edited by Murray Scott
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Contents Category: Film
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Article Title: A chronicle of colonial powerlessness
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The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’
Book 1 Title: The New Australian Cinema
Book Author: Murray Scott
Book 1 Biblio: Nelson, 207 pp, $14.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’

Read more: Jack Clancy reviews 'The New Australian Cinema' edited by Murray Scott

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Article Title: The prize
Article Subtitle: Soundings by Michele Field
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American authors and publishers like to choose sides. The adversaries are seldom strictly Authors v Publishers – some best-selling novelists often join the publishers’ team, and publishers of new fiction like Farrar, Straus & Giroux line up on the authors’ side. Last May the battleground was drawn again in the national Book Awards (that’s not the old capital-N National Book Awards, or the NEA, but the new capital-T The American Book Awards, or TABA). 
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American authors and publishers like to choose sides. The adversaries are seldom strictly Authors v Publishers – some best-selling novelists often join the publishers’ team, and publishers of new fiction like Farrar, Straus & Giroux line up on the authors’ side. Last May the battleground was drawn again in the national Book Awards (that’s not the old capital-N National Book Awards, or the NEA, but the new capital-T The American Book Awards, or TABA).

In the New York Times, novelist John Irving (The World According to Garp) wondered whether the advantages of book prizes ever compensate for the ill will they generate. I imagine that the ill will exists anyway, but it is made more obvious by the ostentation of the awards.

Read more: Soundings column | Michele Field on the literary prize

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Article Title: Turn up the light
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The most imaginative, although in all probability the least politically effective, of the campaign badges produced for the current Australian elections is the ALP Badge, ‘the light on the hill’. The badge, a simple cloisonne in blue and red with gold wire, symbolises the hopes of that great Australian, J.B. Chifley. 
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The most imaginative, although in all probability the least politically effective, of the campaign badges produced for the current Australian elections is the ALP Badge, ‘the light on the hill’. The badge, a simple cloisonne in blue and red with gold wire, symbolises the hopes of that great Australian, J.B. Chifley. It is accompanied by a card with his words:

We do say that it is the duty and responsibility of the community and particularly those more fortunately placed to see that our less fortunate fellow citizens are protected from those shafts of fate which leave them helpless and without hope; this is the objective for which we are striving. It is as I have said before, the beacon, the light on the hill to which our eyes are always turned and to which our efforts are always directed.

Read more: John McLaren on the 1980 federal election

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Gordon Kidd reviews Whirlwinds in the Plain by Elsie Webster and The Mystery of Ludwig Leichhardt by Gordon Connell
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Contents Category: History
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Article Title: Tales That Would Bridge a Gulf
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Inland explorers and their discoveries form a vital part of Australia’s historical consciousness and the tracks they made on maps of exploration and settlement are part of the learning process of every Australian schoolchild. All too often, though, the image of the explorer is two-dimensional and the men and their motives seem less interesting than the patterns of dotted lines in the huge expanse of the Australian continent in schoolbook maps.

One notable exception has been the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Ludwig Leichhardt, who came to Sydney in 1842 to study the land and to collect geological and botanical specimens, and who became the leader of expeditions in Northern Australia, to explore the inland rivers for new lands and routes across the vast territory to the north and west of the settled eastern coast.
Book 1 Title: Whirlwinds in the Plain
Book 1 Subtitle: Ludwig Leichhardt – friends, foes and history
Book Author: Elsie M. Webster
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $28.60 hb, 462 pp
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Book 2 Title: The Mystery of Ludwig Leichhardt
Book 2 Author: Gordon Connell
Book 2 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $12.20 pb, 96 pp
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Inland explorers and their discoveries form a vital part of Australia’s historical consciousness and the tracks they made on maps of exploration and settlement are part of the learning process of every Australian schoolchild. All too often, though, the image of the explorer is two-dimensional and the men and their motives seem less interesting than the patterns of dotted lines in the huge expanse of the Australian continent in schoolbook maps.

One notable exception has been the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Ludwig Leichhardt, who came to Sydney in 1842 to study the land and to collect geological and botanical specimens, and who became the leader of expeditions in Northern Australia, to explore the inland rivers for new lands and routes across the vast territory to the north and west of the settled eastern coast.

Read more: Gordon Kidd reviews 'Whirlwinds in the Plain' by Elsie Webster and 'The Mystery of Ludwig...

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Geoffrey Williams reviews Agenda for the Eighties: Contexts of Australian choices in foreign defence policy edited by Coral Bell
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This book is a useful acquisition for those anxious about Australia’s prospects in the 1980s and while it does not exude optimism it contains a generally hopeful outlook which, given the way things are going, could be a rare commodity in 1990. The topics covered are those thought the most complex and difficult which the policymakers are likely to confront this decade. The essays are of a variable quality and somewhat less than uniform in style but Professor Coral Bell gives this volume a focus and an overall perspective in her preface. Her excellent opening chapter and final remarks (arising from the debates at the ANU Seminar) make up for some of the deficiencies of her distinguished colleagues. As she observes, there is no great optimism to be found in these pages, but at least the prophets of doom have been held at bay. She writes that ‘anyone writing in 1979, and reasonably in touch with international opinion on matters like the possibility of a major depression, or an energy crisis, or Soviet­Chinese or Soviet-American confrontations in the early 1980’s must be bound to take a rather sober view of the prospect for mankind, including Australians’. She asserts that the issues confronting Australia in the 1980s are likely to be those that were evident in the 1970s and that there remain almost immutably the same preoccupations, namely the search for security and prosperity. She must be right.
Book 1 Title: Agenda for the Eighties
Book 1 Subtitle: Contexts of Australian choices in foreign defence policy
Book Author: Coral Bell
Book 1 Biblio: ANU Press, $12.95, 256 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This book is a useful acquisition for those anxious about Australia’s prospects in the 1980s and while it does not exude optimism it contains a generally hopeful outlook which, given the way things are going, could be a rare commodity in 1990. The topics covered are those thought the most complex and difficult which the policymakers are likely to confront this decade. The essays are of a variable quality and somewhat less than uniform in style but Professor Coral Bell gives this volume a focus and an overall perspective in her preface. Her excellent opening chapter and final remarks (arising from the debates at the ANU Seminar) make up for some of the deficiencies of her distinguished colleagues. As she observes, there is no great optimism to be found in these pages, but at least the prophets of doom have been held at bay. She writes that ‘anyone writing in 1979, and reasonably in touch with international opinion on matters like the possibility of a major depression, or an energy crisis, or Soviet­Chinese or Soviet-American confrontations in the early 1980’s must be bound to take a rather sober view of the prospect for mankind, including Australians’. She asserts that the issues confronting Australia in the 1980s are likely to be those that were evident in the 1970s and that there remain almost immutably the same preoccupations, namely the search for security and prosperity. She must be right.

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George Munster reviews Drug Traffic, narcotics and organized crime in Australia by Alfred W. McCoy
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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: Radical sensationalism without economics
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A gap of eight years is a big slice in a writer’s life: at the end, a changed man speaks in a different context. Al McCoy’s Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and his Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (1980) have the same publisher and the same villain, but they are very different books.
Book 1 Title: Drug Traffic, narcotics and organized crime in Australia
Book Author: Alfred W. McCoy
Book 1 Biblio: Harper and Row, $9.85, 455 pp
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A gap of eight years is a big slice in a writer’s life: at the end, a changed man speaks in a different context. Al McCoy’s Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and his Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (1980) have the same publisher and the same villain, but they are very different books.

With Politics, an anti-war graduate student dealt a body blow to the CIA for its involvement in the dirty heroin traffic. He took to the trail in person, travelled from Marseille to Vientiane, played out one intelligence agency against another, and painted a startling novel picture. McCoy has since acquired a PhD, a job as a history lecturer, and a research assistant. He now pays terminological homage to some brand of sociology, does the right thing by historians in taking the present back to its origins, compiles a large apparatus of footnotes -and seldom goes out to see for himself.

Read more: George Munster reviews 'Drug Traffic, narcotics and organized crime in Australia' by Alfred W. McCoy

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Betty Feith reviews Suharto’s Indonesia by Hamish McDonald
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: President on an empty stage
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Hamish McDonald has provided us with the first biography of President Suharto since O.G. Roeder’s authorized work which appeared in 1969. It is not only much more critical, but more comprehensive, and, as much of this second book deals with the events of the last few years, it can be said to be about a different Indonesia and a different President Suharto.
Book 1 Title: Suharto’s Indonesia
Book Author: Hamish McDonald
Book 1 Biblio: Fontana/Collins, $5.95. 277 pp
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Hamish McDonald has provided us with the first biography of President Suharto since O.G. Roeder’s authorized work which appeared in 1969. It is not only much more critical, but more comprehensive, and, as much of this second book deals with the events of the last few years, it can be said to be about a different Indonesia and a different President Suharto.

The author has written eleven tightly knit chapters. His first one - Java – is very important in that it attempts to provide some introductory understanding of that mysticism – the sophisticated form of the ‘Javanese religion’ expounded in some depth by Clifford Geertz - which is perhaps the key to so much that baffles the outside observer of Indonesian life, and to Suharto himself. This first chapter also gives us a short account of the President’s early life. We meet someone whose boyhood is undistinguished - a small­town Javanese childhood and somewhat interrupted schooling, with a family background of financial and personal insecurity. We learn that Suharto’s first job as clerk in a village bank only lasted a short time, as a bike mishap tore the rider’s only suit of clothes; that he was unemployed at the time of the Japanese occupation and volunteered for security organization work under the Japanese, thus acquiring military training under PETA (Volunteer Army of Defenders of the Homeland). We learn that like so many other young men he rose through the ranks and was Head of a regiment by 1949, that he distinguished himself by holding Jogja City for half a day on I March 1949, thus embarrassing the Dutch, for whom it was important to be able to claim effective control of the city at that time. By the end of the Revolution we see a man still young, but with a closed approach to politics, unlike the eloquent Soekamo, for whom politics throughout all his life meant debate and display – subtle yes- but always open to onlookers. We see a commander with a reputation for caution as well as courage, seeing guidance from the traditional mystical Javanese wisdom, a man who had never had much contact with the West.

Read more: Betty Feith reviews 'Suharto’s Indonesia' by Hamish McDonald

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Bernard Smith reviews A Dream of Islands: Voyages of self-discovery in the south seas: John Williams, Herman Melville, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gaugin by Gavan Daws
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Article Title: Europe’s mirror of islands
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What effect did life, does life still, exert upon Europeans in the Pacific? Does it weaken cultural bonds with Europe or does it sustain them? Does it set up alternative cultural standards by means of which European culture may be more critically assessed’) And individuals may more critically assess their own motivations? Are their lives fulfilled in the Pacific or does it destroy them’? These are among the questions which Gavan Daws has set himself, in this highly readable and elegantly written series of linked biographies of five men, Williams, Melville, Gibson, Stevenson, and Gauguin, whose fame and destiny were determined in whole or in part by their lives in the Pacific. Each of them found in the islands ‘the other side of his own civilised humanity’. The book, therefore, though it contains a great deal of factual information about the movements and lives of these men in the Pacific, is really about the romantic voyage, the voyage ‘into the self’.
Book 1 Title: A Dream of Islands: Voyages of self-discovery in the south seas
Book 1 Subtitle: John Williams, Herman Melville, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gaugin
Book Author: Gavan Daws
Book 1 Biblio: Jacaranda Press, $12.95, 289 pp
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What effect did life, does life still, exert upon Europeans in the Pacific? Does it weaken cultural bonds with Europe or does it sustain them? Does it set up alternative cultural standards by means of which European culture may be more critically assessed’) And individuals may more critically assess their own motivations? Are their lives fulfilled in the Pacific or does it destroy them’? These are among the questions which Gavan Daws has set himself, in this highly readable and elegantly written series of linked biographies of five men, Williams, Melville, Gibson, Stevenson, and Gauguin, whose fame and destiny were determined in whole or in part by their lives in the Pacific. Each of them found in the islands ‘the other side of his own civilised humanity’. The book, therefore, though it contains a great deal of factual information about the movements and lives of these men in the Pacific, is really about the romantic voyage, the voyage ‘into the self’.

Almost half a century before Williams, the first of these voyagers into self, set sail for the Pacific, the French Encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot, in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (written in 1772 but not published until 1796) had asked the central question, ‘Was not Tahitian life, with its sexual and marital freedom, its gay and easeful life (as Diderot had chosen to extract it from Bougainville) a standing criticism of European civilisation?’ That question, though constantly rebutted by the self-confident and more often than not, self-righteous, upholders of European values, continued to nag at the European mind, tempting it to test its restless drives and confirmed beliefs, in the islands of the Pacific.

Read more: Bernard Smith reviews 'A Dream of Islands: Voyages of self-discovery in the south seas: John...

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