‘To paint’, Ian Fairweather once observed, ‘one must be alone.’ True enough, you think, though hardly deserving of quotation. Down the years all kinds of artists have made the same observation, yet not many of them have been as consistently forthright when essaying the value and aesthetic nature of their lonely activity. Fairweather was an exception. ‘I paint for myself,’ he went on to add, ‘nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’

 I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.

David Martin arrived in Australia in the wake of World War II, having already been involved in quests ranging from the Spanish Civil War to a kibbutz in Judea. He experimented with the pen as a weapon as an anti-Nazi journalist in London during the War. His career in Australia, as journalist, poet, and novelist, has been, as he would himself perhaps say, not without honour.

Although the policy of the Australian Book Review is to review only Australian books, every now and then a publisher sends us a book which is so important or so relevant to issues of current concern that it cannot be ignored. Recent debate in Australian newspapers makes The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, by Yehuda Bauer (published in Australia by ANU Press), such a book.

The book consists of four lectures originally delivered in Seattle, and concerned with the question of why the Holocaust is the central experience of our civilisation, and of how it was allowed to occur.

Every book of poems is to some degree a selection, unless it’s a record of work and gets down among discarded drafts. Anthony Turner’s unpromisingly-titled first book (Musings: A collection of poems, 1965-1977, Hawthorn Press, $4.50 pb, 74 pp) needs so much more editing that it was an unwise venture into covers.

Noting against poems ‘oldie’, ‘exercise’, and worse, I found interest in maybe five or six. ‘The Cloning Machine’ is neat, and there’s decent feeling in ‘News-vendor’. But a poet is accountable in 1978 for what he publishes in 1978, and ‘Hasten the Day’, for instance, is a damning inclusion. Turner might be worth reading if the brief ‘Detour’ had been on, not off, his customary route.

It has been suggested that ‘picas’ should again be awarded to books discussed in this column, on the scale of excellence of nought to three established by my predecessor, Peter Pica. Well, I will try; but I point out that what I am looking at is the success or otherwise of books in their own field; I am not trying to relate different kinds of books to one immutable standard of design and production, even if it were possible to do so. I am conscious of the fallibility of judgements like these.

Portable Australian Authors Series. Rolf Boldrewood. Edited by Alan Brissenden. University of Queensland Press. Printed and bound in Hong Kong.

It is portable, but is it legible? This book consists mainly of Robbery Under Arms, photographed from an 1893 printing of Macmillan’s hideous one-volume edition of 1889, which with its packed setting – 50 8½-point lines to the page – was a typical Victorian test of the reader’s eyesight. (The three-volume Remington edition of 1888, which ran to more pages, was by contrast a model of well-leaded readability.) This facsimile is unevenly printed and there is a lot of show-through. Much as I admire UQP, this production rates, I think, no picas.

Menzies Observed, by Cameron Hazlehurst. George Allen & Unwin Australia. Set by Asco Trade Typesetting, Hong Kong; printed by Griffin Press.

We used to set them in Australia and send the repro away to the uncomprehending North to be printed. The tide has turned, and here is skilful Asian typesetting printed without a blush in Australia. It is a mystery to me how this happens, when there are so many typesetters about that you almost expect to find a type shop in the back corner of the local supermarket. The interesting thing about Menzies Observed, however, has nothing to do with Asco but with the publishers, who specified 11 on 12 point Times for the text and 10 on 12 Plan tin to a narrower measure for the quoted matter, which is extensive. There is a disconcerting difference in the colour of the pages, the Plantin appearing much lighter and greyer than the Times. But all things are possible and may come to be accepted in time. Griffin Press with their usual professionalism have produced a well-made book. The simple photographic jacket is effective. 1 ½ picas.

Sir Harry Chauvel, one of the founding fathers of the Australian Armed Forces, died in 1945. His involvement in the military and political history of Australia stretches back to the Boer War, through Gallipoli and Beersheba to the Volunteer Defence Corps of World War II. A.J. Hill’s affectionate and painstaking biography of Chauvel also implies concern for the present and future defence of the nation. At a time in popular repute when military sympathies of any kind are regarded as sabre-rattling, Hill’s book is welcome in both tone and content.

The exploits of legendary heroes, so deeply rooted in particular cultures, very often suffer diminution by being retold in another language. Heroic deeds need no justification or explanation for the original audience, who share with the teller the same aspirations, the same fears, and the same codes of behaviour. The explanatory footnote and the authorial aside to mitigate strangeness in a new version are just as fatal to authenticity as those turn-of-the-century illustrations showing Jason and Perseus looking like upper-class British Empire builders, exemplars of the Baden-Powell ethos.

The approach taken by the South Australian Royal Commission into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs is to be highly commended. This commission was appointed in January 1977, under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Sackville, Professor of Law in the University of New South Wales, nearly nine months ahead of the Federal Commission chaired by Mr. Justice Williams and the New South Wales Commission, chaired by Mr Justice Woodward. The South Australian Commission includes Earle Hackett, Deputy Director of Adelaide’s Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, and Richard Nies, Head of the School of Social Studies at the South Australian Institute of Technology.

This biography was commissioned by the late Sidney Myer’s trustees shortly after his death in 1934 and completed within a year or so. The author, Ambrose Pratt, was a personal friend of Sidney Myer as well as being a prominent man of letters and the biographer of David Syme.

However, the book was not published during the author’s lifetime. Ambrose Pratt died in 1944.

One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.

The author does not let us down in his eighth and most recent contribution to cricket literature: The Immortal Victor Trumper. Ostensibly the work is concerned with tracing the career, character, nature, and playing style of one of the most generous and gifted batsmen who ever trod the Australian, English, New Zealand, and South African cricket fields. How well Fingleton performs his self-allotted labor of obvious love! His research into his subject is exhaustive, thorough, and well-documented and brings to light hitherto little-known facets of the life and character of undoubtedly Australia’s best-loved cricketer.

Probably not too many would quarrel with Evan Jones’ light-hearted description of himself as ‘one of our twenty best-known poets under forty in some views…’ Though closer now to fifty than forty, Jones in his three books so far has shown himself to be one of those academic poets of great fluency in traditional forms, capable of whipping up a cigar-and-port entertainment at a moment’s notice – but also capable of genuinely moving poems.

In these more serious moments, Jones has a manner reminiscent in some degree of Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin – a confessional use of detail allied to a certain flatness of surface. A typical concern of these poems is the need, in the midst of so much dullness and transience, to focus and hang on to the small moments of transcendence and human contact allowed to us.

In his second book, Understandings, this emphasis often led to poems of some real lyrical force, as for instance in ‘A Line from Keats’ (in Jones’ formal vein) and ‘Generations’ (in a more colloquial style). Less lyrical but equally powerful, mainly for their acuteness of social observation, were poems such as ‘The Divorcees’, ‘Hostel’ and ‘At the Airport’.

Now after eleven years Evan Jones has published a third book, Recognitions, which only rarely reaches the level of the best poems in his second. Admittedly in that earlier book there were quite a number of very light pieces – but to some extent this was offset by the seriousness and ambition of his long political narrative poem, ‘A Dream of Barricades’ which took up the last nineteen pages of the book. In Recognitions the lightness runs on for pages at a time – incidental jottings to friends, whimsical communications with the ageing self, etc. – and there’s not very much to balance it. More ambitious pieces such as ‘Elegy for a City’ and ‘Death of a House’ tend to slump disconcertingly in mid-flight.

He had enough foresight to buy a lot of land
round about here. He sold it:
too soon to make a killing, late enough
to make early retirement feasible, while
his second son as junior partner worked
harder than he ever had at their real estate
                                              business . . .
                                        (‘Death of a House’)

That minefield between verse and prose which a poet like Robert Lowell could dance on with ease has been rather stumbled across here.

There are some marital and domestic poems, (e.g. ‘To Catherine, aged 5 months’ and ‘Eight Weeks Old’) which have an affecting sincerity but in this third book Jones is probably at his best in a poem such as ‘Elegy for Kate Mackenzie’ which reads like an excellent Saturday page interview / article with the added grace of verse. Certainly, it’s a fine evocation of a particular moment and person.

Kenneth Mackenzie, incidentally (Kate’s husband), would seem to be an important figure for Jones. Dying prematurely, back in 1955, Mackenzie was a vital, if unfulfilled, poet whose intensity Evan Jones celebrates in one of the book’s most substantial and delicate poems – an intensity which rather contrasts with the increasingly grey manner of Jones' own more recent poetry.

In general, the poems of Peter Skrzynecki give one the uncomfortable impression that they ought to be better than they are. Their raw material sounds promising (experiences as a migrant child, years as a teacher in remote country schools); their seriousness of intent is obvious. Yet somehow, probably for technical rather than conceptual reasons, they frequently fail to satisfy.

In a review of Skrzynecki’s third book, Immigrant Chronicle, Thomas Shapcott observed: ‘Everywhere there is a brooding sense of darkness and unease, and of the need for celebration in the face – in defiance of – the dark forces. This has always been a quality of Skrzynecki’s verse, but it is now attaining the wholeness of a vision.’

This is a fair comment as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the poems expressing this vision often do so less than forcefully because of their weakness as poems.

One problem is that, despite their frequently generous use of imagery, Skrzynecki’s poems quite often have a disconcertingly prose-like feel about them. There may be several reasons for this. One is Skrzynecki’s peculiar concept of line; another is his tendency to write at times almost arhythmically. Take this stanza from ‘My Father’s Birthday’, for instance:

Or simply
That I’ve grown up
Unprepared
To face a future
That will not include
His physical presence
Permanently.

Or this one from ‘Sailing to Australia’:

Leaving from
A Displaced Person’s Camp
In Germany,
We travelled south
By train into Italy.

It’s difficult to escape the feeling that the function of the short line here is to disguise the prose underneath. There is rhythm of a kind but it’s not one which particularly reinforces the bleakness of the statement. James McAuley’s ‘On the Western Line’ poems have something of the same plainness of tone but there’s no mistaking whether they’re poetry or prose.

My father and my mother never quarrelled.
They were united in a kind of love
As daily as the Sydney Morning Herald,
Rather than like the eagle or the dove.

In Peter Skrzynecki’s more telling poems (e.g. ‘Parents’, ‘Stan Kostka’, ‘The Hired Lady’s Son’), there is some concreteness, some eye for the significant detail.

They stand at the gate
like a part of the garden itself –
Waving through shadows
Already between us:
The last words spoken
Five minutes ago
In the silence of an empty garage.
                                                            (‘Parents’)

In a poem like ‘Elegy for Kate’ things don’t go so well. Abstract nouns, vagueness and cliches win the day.

…How time and circumstance.
Fused into moments
Of absolute joy.
The incomprehensible logic
Of heart to heart
Speaking
In stolen glances.

In general The Aviary is a disappointing book. There is enough in it to make one realise how much better it might have been.

‘From the day you were born all you ever heard about was how you came from the “Blacks” Camp! You weren’t a person; you were just a thing that had to live out there to keep you away from decent people. It’s not too different today, either.’

Ella Simon is described on her Aborigines Protection Act Certificate of ‘Exemption from provisions of the Act and Regulations’, under the heading ‘Caste’, as ‘light’. She could have passed, but as her colored grandmother had done, she chose always not to pass. White, and sometimes black, were against her; tragedy walked with her and her people all their days; for most of her life poverty and deprivation were her constant companions; her work was menial and unrewarding, and almost always she was denigrated and belittled. Always, in every circumstance, she kept her head high, holding fast to what her Grandmother had taught her of Christ’s loving-kindness, and the splendid ancient tribal heritage of the Aborigines. She knows that the two can combine, to make a beacon to guide white, black, and all shades between to a lifestyle worthy of human beings.

Now, at seventy-seven, she is wise, and vastly experienced in the ways of the callously indifferent community that has ‘roughed the people around’ for so long. Through her eyes, and her heart, she has seen and known it all, and her answer to all the problems is still the love of all living things.

Ella Simon is a Justice of the Peace. If I ‘go up for something’ in her district, I hope she is on the Bench. J.P.s need her kind of compassion and understanding, as do we all.

I must close these too-brief lines with her last few lines. ‘Even at my age, I’ve had to change my ways and not live in the past. But, you know, I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering what I might have been…’ What she is, is a great Australian. (The dust wrapper photo of her is superb.)

Bert Kelly has had three careers and one idea. He was a farmer by inheritance and turned himself into an agricultural whiz who could pick flaws in subsidised projects from the Ord River to Kathmandu. He was a federal politician for eighteen years, holding the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wakefield and scraping a couple of ministries under John Gorton. And he has become widely known as a folksy columnist, writing as ‘The Modest Member’ and since his departure from Canberra in 1977 as ‘The Modest Farmer’, amongst other pseudonyms.

Pursued through his three careers, Kelly’s idea was that tariffs on manufactured goods should be lower. This would make life easier for farmers, even if it throws other people out of jobs. It has lately had a powerful pull among other people, too: those who have tenured jobs financed out of the general revenue; and there have been visionaries who see the ultimate abolition of tariffs as a way of gelling rid of manufacturing altogether.

In One More Nail, the plea for low tariffs appears between hard covers, along with a diary of the author's days in Nepal and a collection of political anecdotes.

But Kelly was more than a man with one, fixed idea. He was a close student of the Tariff Board and its successor, the Industries Commission, and he was a party to many of the moves surrounding trade policy. I turned to his book for an account of these manoeuvres, hoping that a man who has left professional politics might feel free to paint an unvarnished picture, but I closed it in disappointment. Something had been missing from his understanding of the situation all along. Coming from South Australia where the choice is Liberal or Labor he hasn’t managed to appreciate the precarious existence of the Country Party, and the ruses its leaders have had to indulge in for survival.

The conflict of interest between farmers and manufacturers has wide, and often hidden, political ramifications. It was noted, way back, by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. British manufacturers wanted cheap, imported cereals to keep down wages, and under the banner of free trade, they won the battle against the domestic farmers. The rise of Britain as a manufacturing nation gave free trade a high reputation. In countries which industrialised later, such as Germany and Italy, a political compromise was struck over tariffs. By the late nineteenth century, the demands of rising socialist movements preoccupied landlords and industrialists, and they got together under a variety of formulae expressing the trade-offs on which they had agreed.

The conflict between Australian agrarian and manufacturing interests was a mirror image of the British situation. The parties were similar, but their bread was buttered on opposite sides. Our farmers, who did most of the country’s exporting, wanted cheap industrial goods and adopted the ready-made free trade doctrine. Our manufacturers relied on the domestic market, and wanted tariff barriers. They may have glanced at German or American protectionism, but Britain was the fount of economic wisdom, and by the Australians looked across the Pacific in awe, Coca-Cola had begun to permeate the globe and the flag of free trade was flown at American universities from Boston to Chicago.

As in so many matters, consistent doctrine on international trade counted little with politicians. The important thing was to gel the issue well out of the way, to institutionalise public controversy. The device used was the Tariff Board. In the decade after World War I, when the Country Party began to represent ‘the man on the land’ and the predecessors of the Liberal Party counted the new, large manufacturers among their mainstays, tariff policy was a hinge round which coalitions swung. The swing could not go too much this way, too far the other. The Tariff Board was useful in absorbing untimely pressures. What if a manufacturer in a swinging electorate mounted an intense campaign for protection? The general level of prices was not likely to be affected, so the matter was refer­ red to the Board in the hope of its ultimate support. But what when a strong lobby, with an output used in many branches of industry, mounted a concerted drive? It was shunted off into a complex inquiry lasting till the next election was over. The coalition held together; its backers were encouraged to hold their dogfights in a well-regulated backyard.

This cosy arrangement started to come to pieces when the Menzies government, having scrapped import quotas, met its balance of payment problem by sharply reducing demand. To pick up the pieces after the recession poll of 1961, John McEwen, as Minister for Trade, pressed for higher protection. The chairman of the Tariff Board, Sir Leslie Melville, relinquished his post in dismay and McEwen filled the Board with senior officers from his Department. By the mid-1960s, he was so well regarded by the beneficiaries of his policies that Sir James Kirby, a Sydney manufacturer, headed an appeal for funds to build McEwen House, the Canberra headquarters of the Country Party.

Bert Kelly welcomed the abolition of import quotas and in 1960 called for a recession nine months before the Treasury recommended it and the Government followed its advice. The new McEwenism, which emerged in the wake of this disaster, spurred him to great efforts: in one adjournment debate, he spoke four times against protection. He kept a diary of his doings, but One More Nail reveals next to nothing about them. The reader is rationed to one incident. Kelly took to Menzies a newspaper cutting of a protectionist speech by McEwen. Menzies pondered it for three weeks and then called the member for Wakefield back into the presence: ‘He handed the cutting back and said: “Use it when and how you like, my boy, I am sick of the sod”.’

Dropped from the Gorton Ministry, Kelly began to write for the Australian Financial Review. For his weekly column invented Eccles, a character whose opinions closely resembled those of Richard Boyer, the woolgrower and Tariff Board member who had converted Alf Rattigan, his chairman, to free trade. When Whitlam made the Tariff Board over into the sumptuous Industries Assistance Commission, Peter Robinson, Kelly’s editor, joined it. The Commission began to play a new role. Where crude politicians attacked strikers, it played a long game. It flooded the market with imported goods, thus cutting the unions down to size before they could mount their claims.

Encouraged by their success, some members of the Commission have begun to lecture the country on performing arts and on the wastefulness of subsidies to publishing. These run to a small fraction of the Commission’s lavish budget.

On all these events, Kelly is silent. The low-tariff mafia has its own code of honour, and for the real effect which the ‘Modest Member’ had on our lives, we’ll have to await the posthumous release of his diary.

This is a book that is unashamedly intended for the Aunty market, not the arty market. It will flourish in circulating libraries and must have solved many a Christmas dilemma (the publishers, I’m sure, budgeted on that). It is happily and old-fashionedly enthusiastic in tone, and tells the story – as authorised – with admiration and lots of incident. As a Helpmann compendium, it is sufficiently detailed to warrant a subtitle such as ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Robert Helpmann That He Wanted You To Ask’. And Elizabeth Salter did. The things Elizabeth Salter might have been afraid to ask, we can safely surmise the Aunties, also, would not really be interested in anyway. We meet, here Helpmann the Institution, the Public Performer (performer in public and private) whose surprisingly long career is, let’s face it, quite engrossing enough. Perhaps, even, the man IS the performance.

I found this a book of uncertain trajectory. On the one hand its target seems to be a broad readership, for these forty-three short stories were first written for the periodical, Tabloid Story, whose method of distribution has been the effective one of being hosted by student and national journals of wide circulation. On the other hand, the collection includes a long self-conscious explanation of itself whose apparent interest in a secure perch on a tertiary syllabus would exclude the popular audience. In it the editor outlines why these stories represent a revolution in Australian short fiction, anatomises the causes and course of this upheaval, locates its European and Latin American antecedents, names its genres – in short tells why his authors should attract serious study rather than serious enjoyment. The ruse, of course, is to hallow an episode in Australian literature, a manoeuvre that I found as transparent as it is indicative of shaky confidence. A revolution with genuine roots will hallow itself.

Science-fiction short stories traditionally made their first appearance in American and British pulp magazines. The best stories then appeared in anthologies. In recent years more stories have been published for the first time in all-new anthologies, skipping the preliminary magazine stage. This in turn has led to the growth of science fiction publication in those countries, such as Australia, which do not have sufficient population to support specialist science fiction magazines of their own. Other Worlds and Rooms of Paradise are each all-new anthologies of science fiction. Rooms of Paradise is the more polished collection. Six of its twelve stories are by established overseas writers – including stars like Brian Aldiss and R.A. Lafferty – and the other six are by Australians. The local product is not overshadowed in this company; I think that in general the Australian stories are as well written and more original.

‘What is a leader?’ asks the rather breath­less blurb on the back of W. J. Byrt’s Leaders and Leadership. ‘Is he the product of the situation in which he finds himself? Is he the possessor of definite character traits? Does he have an inherent charisma which elevates him above his fellows? Are the determining factors social, political, personal or intellectual or some mystical combination of them all?’ These are interesting questions: the answers to them would be still more interesting. However, the best the author is able to come up with, after 175 pages of fairly repetitious theorising and examplifying, is the following: ‘Leadership is a process whereby the behaviour of the led is influenced by a leader of leaders. The process depends on the leader being able, or being perceived to be able, to assist the led in achieving the satisfaction of certain needs within certain situations.’

In the world of theatre and concert economics, the inelegant but expressive term, ‘bums on seats’ seems to be here to stay.

The books we buy or borrow (for borrowing patterns affect library sales) are the equivalent of theatre tickets. Books which keep an optimum number of bums on desk or living room chairs are just as good news to publishers and booksellers as prosperous box office returns to entrepreneurs. Most books take at least twice as long to read as a performance does to sit through so it is not inappropriate that they usually cost more. The writing, production, and intelligent selling of books is highly ‘labour intensive’. Books remain the cheapest form of entertainment, inspiration and instruction if one takes into account the permanence of printed paper and its portability, and allows for the numbers of people who often read one copy of a work, even from private shelves. Unlike cassettes, print’s chief competitor, the enjoyment of printed books requires no more equipment than the human eye.

Frank Kellaway writes of the things which threaten the equilibrium of man, woman and people kind: napalm, gas chambers, pollution, lovers who go away, lovers who stay, motorcars and cruelty in general.

He can also write of things which have great beauty, but usually as a means of a contrast with the lesser works of the ape that stood up.

There is a poem to the Muse which seems to be obligatory in any collection. It is a rather incestuous habit of poets but one which Kellaway does not indulge to any serious degree. In fact a poem called ‘Moon Madness’ talks of the poet and his craft and is a rather beautiful poem full of some lavish images.

This account of the life and dancing times of the ballerina from Newcastle coincides, or almost, with her appointment as Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet. She follows Dame Peggy van Praagh, Sir Robert Helpmann and Ann Woolliams in that position and will no doubt find herself (as they did) adapting, confronting, persuading and opposing the administration and the board.

I have to admit that after reading these 127 well-designed pages and looking at the pictures – an index is missing, but a repertoire is appended – I know what Marilyn Jones has done but not why she did it, nor what she is likely to do in the company of Peter Bahen et al.

The functions of literature in a society are many and varied and often there is a good correlation between what a people’s literature says about them and what they say about themselves. This is certainly true of the traditional literature of the Aborigines of Australia as exemplified in their myths and legends and of the traditional pattern of life which, laid down in The Dreaming, was followed so well until the European settlement and the resultant culture clash.

Among the most fashionable complaints today is a complaint about your doctor, one which has spread even to the profession itself. In fact, for a really scarifying complaint about doctors, you should hear some doctors; not that one is very likely to unless you are his receptionist catching a scrap or two at morning tea, or his spouse later in the day.

Everyone in and around the profession knows that there is something terribly wrong with the quality, and the delivery, of applied medicine. Anthony Moore, whose book looks into the matter, certainly knows it.

‘Memory as slippery as a melon seed.’

So wrote Frank Dalby Davison in a letter to his mother in 1945. And memory in its trickiest forms is before the reader’s mind throughout Owen Webster’s semi-, demi­biography of Davison -·’semi’ because, though Webster described this book as a ‘non-fiction novel’ it relies so heavily on Davison’s fiction for ‘facts’ that one might better call it ‘fictional biography’: ‘demi’ because it deals only with the first thirty years of Davison’s life (and with his forbears). Webster, a most assiduous collector of material, had planned a second volume (predictably with the provisional title of The Inward Journey), but died in 1975 before completing his work.