On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.

One letter was of the ‘hope-this­finds-you-as-it-leaves-me’ variety, but it contained five words that stood out in the surrounding illiteracy: ‘War is a be bleed in bastid’. It was a statement that became an epitaph because a few days later the writer was blown to bleeding pieces during a dive-bombing attack.

The intention of this anthology is to sharpen our understanding of what was distinctive in the poetry of ‘the generation of ‘68’ (Tranter’s label).

Though he himself, as well as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, and Tim Thorne, were publishing before 1968, and the ‘senior’ figures (Bruce Beaver, Ken Taylor) were certainly fully formed, the tag is useful. It raises more questions, but they are potentially fruitful ones: ‘What really happened in the decade preceding 1968?’, or ‘How much of the new movement’s innovations were fully laid down in the first three years, say by Charles Buckmaster’s death in 1972?’

This volume of stories adds to the spate of books by or about Turgenev that have appeared recently yet it cannot be said to be redundant, as it provides an English version of five novellas not readily available in a collected form. Since the translator’s argument rests on the importance of the frequently neglected later part of Turgenev’s oeuvre (i.e. the shorter works appearing after the major novels) to a true understanding of Turgenev’s philosophical and spiritual history, then obviously the English-speaking world must have access to it, and they should be pleased to make the acquaintance of this accurate and easy translation.

In his introduction to The New Australian Poetry, reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Thomas Shapcott, John Tranter declares that this poetry has no allegiance except to itself. Some characteristics of works regarded as modernist are: ‘self-signature’ – the work validates its own technical innovations – and self-reference, where the ‘method’ is reflected consciously in the ‘medium’. He contrasts this modernism with such work as Vincent Buckley’s ‘Golden Builders’, which elicits a response of ‘quasi-religious rhetoric . . . a natural outgrowth of Australian university English departments’, and one sufficient to explain the ‘anti-academic bias’ evident in much of the work of the new poets.

Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today. He also works in the theatre. His play Glitter was performed at the Adelaide Arts Festival, and he has written the libretto for an opera with music by Helen Gifford. Black Light, his first published book of short stories, shows him to be a craftsman of the first order in yet another field.

The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

On page eleven of this book, Australians are called an engagingly innocent people ‘splendidly unthinking of anything but the simplicities of affluent living.’ On page twelve, they are called ‘lazy and uncreative’. On page 311, the author writes: ‘Yet in spite of a widespread belief (mainly self-generated) that we are a nation of yahoos, we have as much capacity for some unique kind of greatness as the people of any other race and nation.’

Maslyn Williams is a generous-spirited writer and an able observer of the Asian scene. I am not hunting for contradictions, and the thing is more subtle than I present it, but I cannot see how the lazy and uncreative, the splendidly unthinking materialists, can have a capacity for some unique kind of greatness. But I heartily agree that the concept of our yahoohood is a stupid and self-generated belief: having travelled perhaps no less widely than Mr Williams I have found no measurable difference between one people and another in this respect.

This book is about the early stages of the establishment and evolution of native local government councils in Papua New Guinea. The author, David Fenbury, was in charge of the first phase of this undertaking and the objective of his book was to record the early sequence of events. He begins with an overview of the local government system in 1975 in a state of decay even while it was being extended to the few remaining areas that it had not reached by the time of independence.

‘Go, little book,’ or the book as emissary, is not the simple matter that it once was.

Australian books and their authors now go to most European and Asian countries on diplomatic duties.

The purpose is neither to broaden the writers’ lives nor to sell books abroad, but to supplement the Government’s other diplomatic initiatives.

Anyone interested in quickly assessing the scope, direction and lacunae of urban history in Australia would be well advised to read this attractively priced and presented anthology. Although only two of the ten contributions have been specially commissioned, the rest are recent pieces, mostly from out-of-print, expensive or turgid larger works. These are two general essays, an article on each of the capitals (with the exception of Perth), and three specialised pieces on aspects of city growth (sub-division of Paddington 1875-90, essential services and Melbourne in the 1880s, and East Perth 1884-1904).

Undoubtedly the highlights are two seminal essays by John McCarty and David Merrett, the first a wide-ranging discussion of nineteenth-century commercial cities as products of the expansion of capitalism, the latter a resourceful and extremely revealing investigation of the course, conditioning and demographic sources of capital city growth in the twentieth century. The final section of McCarty’s original article, which examined the physical expansion and functional differentiation of the Melbourne metropolis, has unaccountably been omitted. As the thrust of the essay is an assault upon the myopic local history tradition, the original article possessed a balance lacing in the truncated version. Likewise, Merrett’s detailed tables setting out for intercensal periods the natural increase and migration components of population growth have been Mystery and Adventure abbreviated. Readers will now .have to chase up the original text which appeared in a small run in offset form. These are errors of editorial judgment, committed I suspect, in the mistaken pursuit of geographical balance.

Normally, Australia’s Writers could be expected to attract the special attention of critics. However, by sensible use of his preface and the quality of his book’s contents, Graeme Kinross Smith has minimised the possibility of adverse comment. Carefully, he sets out the guidelines adopted for the fifty­four essays that range from two to ten pages each, starting with Captain Arthur Phillip and closing with Rosemary Dobson. Stressing ‘the distinctive and fascinating’ tradition of Australian literature and the book’s purpose in giving an insight into that tradition, Graeme Kinross Smith writes:

As far as possible I have tried to allow Australia's writers to give their own accounts of what it is like to be artists in this southern continent. When their stories are put together they encompass virtually every part of Australian life – geography, history, politics and economics, social patterns and national characteristics. If one thing comes to the fore in almost all these profiles of writers, it is the places that meant a great deal to them, places that have been immortalised in our literature and which, with their particular atmosphere, are about us still if we know where to look...

The phenomenon of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Western Australia is one of the instructive publishing success stories of the past decade.

It is a frankly regional venture, and by concentrating on the local market and the immediate writing scene it has built up a secure base of interest – and sales. Out of a real or imagined (but widespread) sense of slight, or exclusion, has emerged the one thing most likely to resolve that carping insecurity: direct action aimed at self-sufficiency. It is important to recognise this motivating force. But it is important, also, to look at the consequences of that initial do-it-yourself bravado.

While the reading of a book has become a solitary matter, its interpretation remains a convivial task which must be performed anew for each new reader, new age, and new country. The business of criticism is to help us in this task, and from a multitude of judgements to further our understanding of an author’s words for our time. The critic is therefore involved not only with books, but through them with the cultural problems of his society. Critical debates thus become debates about major social issues.

The group of books presently being considered illustrate two different contemporary debates. The studies by Reid (Fiction and the Great Depression: Australia and New Zealand 1930- 1950, Studies in Australian culture, Edward Arnold (Australia), xiii, 166p., biblio, index, $10.00) and Heseltine (Acquainted with the Night: studies in classic Australian fiction, Monograph No 4, Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 83p) both consider the nature of our national culture, whereas the other two critics treat their authors in an ostensibly universal manner. On the other hand, Heseltine, Smith and Hassall have all produced studies in the conventional manner of literary criticism, examining language, structure and character to determine moral truths, while Reid attempts a new form of literary sociology, looking at authors and their works as emanations of particular times and places.

Reid’s book, both in its intent and its method, forms a part of that reconsideration of the nature of the Australian tradition which is currently being undertaken by newer scholars on the left in sociology, history and literature. While these writers differ in their particular ideological perspectives, they have in common a distrust of radical nationalist interpretations and a preference for structural rather than individual explanations. Instead of discussing individual books, therefore, Reid examines the whole perspective of serious fiction bearing on the depression, and, by discussing New Zealand as well as Australia, provides a comparative view of national peculiarities.

On one level, his work is a major success. He appears to have read everything relevant, and his study serves to dispel myths about the alleged rural and working class orientation of Australian writing as well as the cultural homogeneity of the two countries. He shows New Zealand fiction as both less class conscious and more rural in its setting, and relates these characteristics to the nature of the society on the one hand and to the preferred forms adopted by the authors on the other.

Yet doubts remain. Despite the acknowledged indebtedness to the French pioneer of literary sociology, Lucien Goldmann, Reid’s success is empirical rather than structural. He shows us the scope of the works, their locale, the range of their political sympathies and human concerns, and relates these to social conditions in the two countries, but he barely touches on the way in which these conditions might have generated this particular kind of literature. Nor does he ever seem to become engaged with any particular book. He skips, he collects, he displays, but he rarely grapples.

This avoidance is apparently deliberate. Although he expresses his opinions where relevant, he has explicitly chosen to provide objective social facts rather than literary judgements. Yet by avoiding extensive analysis of specific work he fails to demonstrate the kind of forces which are active in it. He thus avoids answering what is perhaps the most interesting question implicit in a book which raises sufficient questions to keep other scholars busy for years – what happens to the essentially bourgeois form of the novel, with its emphasis on individual character and action, when it is used for social purposes by writers committed to an ideology which takes the emphasis from the individual to society?

Reid’s comparison of Australia and New Zealand certainly adds to the interest of his study, but it is doubtful whether as a method it gives his work any authenticity beyond that already established by the range of his sources.

Heseltine’s study, by contrast, starts from questions about the individual text in order to raise questions about the nature of the Australian experience. The essays in his book, based on lectures originally given in Townsville, deal with The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Coonardoo, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and The Burnt Ones. In each case, he takes an aspect of the work which has not been given emphasis by earlier critics, and handles it to such effect that his reader’s view of these books is irrevocably changed.

The feature he discovers in common between these four works is the noctambulism of central characters, which in turn he relates to their capacity not only to suffer, but to accept suffering. This capacity, or experience, he finds lacking in Australia, and with its lack goes the inability of individuals to give of themselves. Our failure to establish right human relationships leads to our failure to establish our relationship with the land.

This summary does injustice to the complexity of Heseltine’s analysis of the tests, but it indicates the distance he stands from Reid. While both are concerned with the nature of our society, they approach it from opposite directions, the one starting from the moment of individual experience and moving out into the widest considerations, the other moving constantly over the whole social context in which the individual is only one item in the scenery.

The other two writers both stick firmly to the experience of the individuals in particular novels as a guide to the moral implications of the work. Smith’s study of Mansfield Park (Fanny Bertram, the structure of ‘Mansfield Park’, Monograph No 1, Department of English, James Cook University of North Queensland) is attentive to the keywords, and shows how from them Jane Austen constructs a universal moral fable of justice and propriety. In sticking so closely within the bounds of his text, however, we may feel that the critic has done more justice to his author than to his own readers.

Dr Hassall’s work (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sydney Studies in Literature, Sydney University Press , xv., 116p. , biblio. , index, $7.50) is a joy to read, reminding his readers of the vigour as well as of the moral structure of Fielding’s novel. An added virtue is his incidental use of Tony Richardson’s film to clarify his analysis. His book should both send old acquaintances back to Fielding’s novel and   prompt   new readers to discover it.

The secret of Dr Hassall’s work is that he takes the novel seriously as a guide to the principles of discerning moral truths in a social context, and thus as a serious, although never solemn study of good and evil as well as a form of education for both its central character and its readers. Yet, at the end of his study, we are left regretting that the author did not see fit to move out from his individual perceptions to a broader social context. After all, if good and evil are unchanging, the forms they assumed in 18th century England were not those we can find in 20th century Australia.