The title of David Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life, must be read three ways. Most obviously, the novel is an imaginative recreation of the last years of the life of the Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), who was exiled to a village on the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus in the last century BCE. The life is imaginary because it imagines – most successfully – the circumstances of this exile.

Yet the interest of the novel is not primarily in this imaginary recreation. Indeed, the reader interested mainly in classical civilisation is likely to be disappointed, not because Malouf is ever less than accurate and convincing, but because his main interest is not in verisimilitude. Rather, he is interested in searching, through the imagination, for the elements which give life significance. Ovid’s exile cuts him from everything he has known and valued, and he is therefore left with what he can imagine, both of his own past and of the utterly strange life of the people among whom he now finds himself. His real life has finished, so he has left only the imaginary life.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.

Ten chapters cover the areas that most interest him – the countryside, housing, national identity, suburbia, social protest, urban renewal, migrants, schools, and, strangely (given the man), very little about the arts.

Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Australian urban history. It took some time for historians here to take up Briggs’ challenge, but with the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Australian urban history has come of age.

Previous histories of Melbourne in this period (1880-95) have given us the superficial manifestations and sensational aspects of the boom decade. Davison explores its deeper meaning, its social, cultural, and economic significance. He goes beyond the now well-known public events (speculation, corruption, bankruptcies etc.) to discover how the experience of boom and depression touched the lives of Melburnians of all classes, at work and at home, and reshaped their society and their sense of urban identity. We have here a major theoretical and empirical study of the internal dynamics of capitalist urbanisation during that phase when the walking and talking city gave way to the rail and mail city. We have perhaps the most important contribution yet made by an historian toward an understanding of the patterns of class formation in the Australian city, the developing class conflict corresponding with the changing structure of capitalist industrialisation and the unexpected nature of the conflict between capital and labour in the depressed 1890s – and all this written with an elegance and clarity that puts most scholars of Australian society to shame.

This book in praise of the potato, the most versatile and delicious of vegetables, is one I thoroughly enjoyed. Having a penchant for the potato I am an easy mark for the creative use of this lovely vegetable.

Ms Souter shows us over and over again in this well defined book how very diversified one can be with the potato. She gives general information on the types of potato grown in Australia and those types usually available at the local markets, which type to use according to methods of cooking, and growing and storing potatoes.

Beverley Kingston’s review in this issue draws attention to the effect the Women’s Liberation Movement has had on our understanding of our past. By asking the questions insistently imposed by the present, the historians of women’s affairs have not only forced us to see a segment of our history which had been hidden, but have made us realise that this omission was just part of a total distortion of our view of history, and therefore of life. This distorted knowledge of the past affects the way we see ourselves, and thus diminishes our recognition of the possibilities open to us in the present. The unreasoning hostility which the Women’s Movement has aroused can be explained only in terms of our fear of the unknown. These new ideas do not threaten just the security which a male-dominated world offers to men and women alike. Rather, by taking away our comfortable structure, they take away our personal identity, and therefore threaten the existence of any kind of order.

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.

Jill Jolliffe ‘s East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism is the first clear account of Timorese history, cultural and political background, geography and ethnic mix and of the chain of events and the people bound up with them which led to the December 1975 bombing into capitulation of the country by Indonesian ships and aircraft.

Rodney Hall has always been a professional poet in the sense that he professes and declares – indeed, almost seems to make himself – in his poetry. The poetry seems to become a means of coping with experience; more, it becomes perhaps the central part of the experience. So it is in Black Bagatelles. But here, art and its expectations become less something for living than for dying by. Not that this book marks any great break with what has gone before, any rupture of identity. On the contrary, implicitly or explicitly, death has always been a major presence in his poetry. Its preoccupation with art and artifice represents, amongst other things, an attempt to give himself alms against oblivion. But in these poems the note of doomsday, sounded in the title of his first collection of verse, Penniless Till Doomsday; rings out, not portentously, but wittily, with immediacy and perception. Hall has always been concerned with masks, poses, the dance of experience. Now, the ‘masks compose themselves tableau-still’ and the source is revealed of the ‘desperate rustlings going on behind’. This source then is death, but not death majestical and metaphysical as Donne and the seventeenth century ‘knew him, not moralising and the servant of the mighty God as in the middle ages, but jester and joker, the one who calls the tune to life’s comedy, to

Dear Sir,

I liked Geoff Muirden’s review of The View from the Edge in the August issue, even though he got a bit confused here and there.

The first thing the general reader will need to know about this book is that it is not for the general reader. It too often and too closely approaches the clipped and densely allusive style of the average scientific paper, designed for initiates only and a small band of them at that. It uses too many words from the jargon of physics, chemistry and even geology with insufficient or no explanation. Even if Scientific American and New Scientist are your cup of tea, this book could exceed your powers of digestion.

Of these two unspectacular books from Second Back Row Press I found Tom Thompson’s Neonline the more rewarding.

It is a book that resists easy identification, being neither a novella nor a sequence of related short stories, and possessing neither a total scheme nor a clutch of subplots, no climax and no emergent theme. There is however a focusing eye, and this restively pursues a loose family of characters around a credible Sydney landscape, which in the closing pages moves via Singapore and Java to Bali.

Botanists of the Eucalypts is a compilation of short biographies of people who have contributed to the taxonomy of our most conspicuous tree genus. The author is a retired member of the former CSIRO Forestry and Timber Bureau, where he worked extensively on eucalypts. He has prepared approximately 400 entries which collectively reveal the tremendous diversity of the people involved – professional botanists, amateur naturalists, gardeners, graziers, foresters, geologists, surveyors, explorers, anthropologists, doctors, men of the cloth, a postmaster and a police-trooper – all people able to travel and spend time out of doors. As well, the compilation includes people whose names have been commemorated even though they may have had little to do with the processes of collecting and describing new species.

‘Women as clergy ... would be comparable to offering a meat pie on the altar of God.’  The Rev. Ian Herring, Victoria, 1971.

That is not the isolated view of a raving misogynist. The 1968 Lambeth Conference heard the now Anglican Primate of Australia, Marcus Loane, say that the admission of women into the priesthood would sound the ‘death knell’ of men’s interest in the Church. Just like a public bar.

And at Lambeth this year, 200 Anglican bishops were billeted 2 km away from their wives, so that they could more easily ‘wait upon God’.

The established Churches, like all our political institutions, have tenaciously guarded their rituals and hierarchies from female intrusion.

There’s a simple objection to the stories presented in this collection. They are all outdated. As a summary of Chinese culture prior to the death of Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung and the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’, they are acceptable, but they have not taken into account the transformation of Chinese society following the exposure of the ‘Gang’ and the repudiation of their ‘Line’. The introduction in fact makes it plain that the collection of stories, written by the Sydney University China Education Society (SUCES), is based on visits to China in 1972 and 1976.

One cannot but welcome the publication of a regional atlas which attempts to represent in detail a relatively small section of Australia. The editors of An Atlas of New England, and the University of New. England, which supported its publication financially, are to be commended upon their initiative. However, the success of such an innovation in the representation of regional resources and development issues would seem to depend closely upon the existence of a programme to develop and publish a series of such atlases for various regions of Australia. Although the contributors, drawn principally but not exclusively from geographers on the staffs of The University of New England and the Armidale College of Advanced Education, have put together an interesting and useful documentation of ‘their’ region, it would be comforting to know that this was part of an ongoing programme to refine the more general representations of Australia contained in publications such as the Atlas of Australia’s Resources.

I would like to think that the author hiding behind the pseudonym of Lake O’Charley is Don Chipp. Chipp would certainly be an enthusiastic supporter of the industrial relations policies advocated by the key characters in Anatomy of a Strike. And Lake O’Charley, like Chipp, clearly has a good working knowledge of the inner world of industrial relations. But I’ll play safe and settle for the assertion that Chipp and O’Charley are like-minded in much the same way as are the two main characters in this book – Richard Altman, QC , Counsel for the moderate Oil Superintendents and Operatives Union (OSO), and Robert Parrish, recently appointed Minister for Industrial Relations in the Australian Liberal Government.

The Hairy Man of South Eastern Australia
by Graham C Joyner
27pp., available from the author, PO Box 253, Kingston ACT 2604, $5.40

Loch Ness may have its monster and Tibet its Yeti, but Australia also has its legendary beasts. This booklet collects a number of references, mainly from local newspapers, to a hairy man, known as a yahoo or dulagal, which has been reported in various places between Gippsland and Sydney. Most of the accounts are credited ultimately to Aboriginal lore, but there are one or two sightings claimed by white men.

How to Study
by Kate Barnett
Sun Books, 2 + 87pp., $2.50

This is a most useful book directed to the needs of students approaching the final year of secondary school or the early years of tertiary education. It is essentially practical advice to the student on how s/he can organise himself/herself to have the best chance of success. Advice is given on such matters as listening to lectures, reading, writing essays, taking notes and preparing for examinations. The differences between secondary and tertiary education are explained succinctly, and a useful chapter is addressed to parents. Another good chapter is on the importance of sleep. A weakness of the book is the emphasis it places on hard work – a sample schedule allots fifty-four hours a week to study, with no time for the vital activities of talking and thinking. Such a schedule not only misplaces its emphasis, but may give students an unreal idea of what is expected of them.

Educating for Literacy and Numeracy in Australian Schools
by JP Keeves, Jennifer K Matthews and SF Bourke
(Australian Education Review, Number 11).
ACER, 70pp., $4.00

This booklet provides a clear and accessible summary of the main results of the Australian Study of School Performance, which was commissioned by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Learning Difficulties. The full report of the study has been published by the Australian Government Publishing Service.

The study enables us to conclude that, while Australian schools are in general doing well by their students, there is a substantial minority who leave school without the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic which are necessary for them to play a full part in our society. The authors suggest a number of implications from this fact. First, teacher training courses need to ensure that all teachers are prepared to teach basic skills. Second, schools must be organised to cater for individual differences. Third, we need as a community to support a variety of schemes which are outside the formal education system but which can give adults the opportunity to develop skills that they did not learn at school. This booklet gives both a clear indication of the school's basic tasks and an informed starting point for any educational debate.

The Unknown Drug
by Thea Stanley Hughes
Movement Publications, London and Sydney, 32pp.
An old-fashioned temperance tract in modern guise for the young.
John Seymour’s Gardening Book
Australian and New Zealand edition, Oxford University Press, 62pp., illus., $5.95

This book is very English in its style of gardening, with an insistence on the importance of compost, digging and hoeing, but it has been adapted to Australian seasons. The gardening is directed to the production of vegetables, and the writing and illustrations are simple enough to inspire the beginner, or alternatively to charm the arm-chair gardener.

Quarterly magazines have much in common with enjoyable small dinner parties whose hostesses serve fine food and wine in comfortable and attractive surroundings. Confident party-givers need no gimmicks to prompt their guests to lively and civilised conversation; they offer adventurous dishes and a few bottles from newer vineyards, but with respect for a balance with proven favourites [sic]; they invite new friends to their houses but value old ones too. They provide so many memorable occasions that their rare flops – and these fall far short of disaster – are forgiven and forgotten.

It would be remarkable indeed, if this collection of documents did not fulfil its broadly stated aim of interesting the general reader of Australian history and adding something more to the available literature for women’s studies courses. For the general reader it is a pleasantly presented book, utilising line drawings, cartoons, and advertisements as they appeared in the journals and newspapers of the late nineteenth century. The documents appear also as very extensive illustrations to the editor’s commentary, and although a querulous reader might complain that it is not always clear where the commentary ends and the documents begin, it is an easy book for browsing. As well, because documents of this kind have not been over-used in the conventional collections on Australian history, the general reader is bound to find something that is either new or stimulating.

Winners 1978

First prize –

$3000, including $500 to the publisher.

Monkey Grip,

by Helen Garner, McPhee Gribble.

Second prize –

$2000, including $250 to the publisher.

Living Black,

by Kein Gilbert, Penguin Australia.

Highly Commended:

Australian Primitive Painters,

by Geoffrey Lehmann,

paintings selected by Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press.

Ethnic Radio,

by Les A Murray, Angus and Robertson.

Flying Home,

by Morris Lurie, Outback Press.

Pieces for a Glass Piano,

by Gerard Lee, University of Queensland Press.

Swords and Crowns and Rings,

by Ruth Park, Nelson Australia.

Wacvie,

by Faith Bandler, Rigby.

Judges:

Joyce Nicholson, Editor, Australian Bookseller and Publisher.

Anne Summers, Literary Editor National Times.

John McLaren, Editor, Australian Book Review.

Like their predecessors, the judges of the 1978 Awards for Australian Literature have found their task a difficult one. This is not because of any disagreement among themselves, but because of the number and quality of the entries. This year 102 books were submitted by the publishers for consideration, and had the eight titles on our short list been omitted we would still have found difficulty in reducing the numbers of worthy contenders to those which could be included in the short list. Nevertheless, we are satisfied that each of the books included on the list is of high literary merit and has made an important contribution to Australian literature. Each of them would, indeed, have been a distinguished recipient of the award had its competitors not been published. The competition does therefore demonstrate that the level of productivity and creativity in Australian writing is high.

The major criteria that we have used are that the book be in every sense well-made, by writer and publisher, and that it in some way change the way in which we see ourselves. The first book to be considered meets both of these criteria. It is a visually handsome book in which text and art reproductions are so blended as to complement each other. the paintings which are reproduced offer a fresh view of Australia, and the text, based on interviews with the painters, offers a new understanding of art and the artist. Geoffrey Lehmann ‘s interviews with working artists not only tell us about the individual lives of the painters but also amount to a unique oral history of parts of Australian society often overlooked by other writers. The paintings have been well chosen by Charles Blackman, and the production of the book, Australian Primitive Painters, has been beautifully managed by the University of Queensland Press.

There was a particularly strong submission of poetry this year, including impressive first collections by three young poets as well as major new work by established poets. Of these, the one we chose for our final list is distinguished by the liveliness of the language, the control of the form, and the clear authorial voice. The reader can often disagree with the point of view which is expressed, but he cannot mistake it. Its idiosyncrasy arises not from oddity but from the author’s firm commitment to his chosen style of life and the values which arise from it and which are explored as well as declared in his verse. The book includes a major song sequence which has a delightful sense of place and time as well as offering a lengthy meditation on the familiar theme of city people and country ways. Ethnic Radio, by Les A. Murray, published by Angus and Robertson, is a book to delight and enlighten.

The next book on our list is also a work of delight. It is a fine novel about expatriation and the ghosts of past generations and represents what could be called Australian migrant literature. It combines pathos, wit and an appreciation of the binds of family, culture, race and country, with a narrative of a rather ordinary love-affair which attains significance by its implication in the narrator’s search for an authenticity which will reconcile the conflicting demands of family, race, country and nationality. Morris Lurie ‘s Flying Home, published by Outback Press, is both a very funny and a very serious novel. We have chosen the next book not just because it is original in its approach to style plot and characterisation, but because it originality arises from its author’s involvement with his subject matter. The life he describes in his collection of stories is contemporary - mechanical sex, poofter-bashing, hitchhiking, alcohol and other drugs - but the author’s attitude to it is u mixture of both wonder and cynicism. His narrator strives for an engagement of life which he cannot achieve, and yet adopts a stance of cool aloofness which protects him from possible danger. The result is. pathos, humour, a detailed picture of a recognisable world which is still as strange and new as sepia photographs or geometric projections. Some of the stories are as short as one paragraph, and we confess that the meaning of some of these eludes us, but the collection as a whole, Gerard Lee’s Pieces for a Glass Piano, published by the University of Queensland Press, is a witty and exciting contribution to our literature.

Our next book is another novel by a well-established Australian author. This book was, in the traditional sense, one of the best wrought books entered for the awards, with the craftsman’s virtues of strong plot and characterisation, accurate speech rhythms and eloquent prose. These virtues were brought to a story which explored the ways in which society regards moral and physical disabilities, deriding or fearing the one while tolerating the other. Through the exploration of this theme, therefore, the novel becomes also a study of the kind of room that society allows to the individuals of which it is composed, and the extent to which these individuals can shape their own room. Despite some gestures towards the tragic, and a deepening of the surface narrative by calling on the connotations and images of folk lore, the novel is finally resolved romantically, its central characters coming together to work out their own salvation while leaving the wider social problems stated but unresolved. For its exploration of courage alone, apart from its other qualities, Ruth Park’s Swords and Crowns and Rings, published by Nelson (Australia), earns high commendation.

Our next book is also a novel, but by a writer who is already well-known for her political activity in the cause of racial justice. Although a work of fiction, and one which succeeds as such, the book is also valuable for the light it sheds on Australia’s exploitation of Pacific Island labor [sic] in slave conditions on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. The book is neither a horror story nor an indictment, but a careful and loving recreation of the author’s past through the life of her grandfather, both on his island home and in Queensland. The novel is centred on his life, his aspirations and his friendships, thus providing a positive standard for its implicit moral evaluations. Although the book is uneven in style, we found that it was compelling reading and important for its pioneering of a new tradition of ‘slave literature’ in Australia. While all of us are familiar with the terrible history of the Atlantic slave trade: our own history, which is disturbingly similar, is almost unknown. Faith Bandler’s Wacvie, published by Rigby, helps to restore the balance.

We come now to the winner of the second prize in this year’s contest. This, you will remember, is for a book which, in the opinion of the judges, is of the highest literary merit in a category other than that of the book winning first prize. One of the strongest qualities of this particular book, however, is precisely the way in which it exploits its particular genre of reportage to shape people’s experience to bring out its underlying significance and make this accessible to a wider public. The book is both a work of art and an important social document which allows white Australians to hear, for the first time, the voices of Aboriginal Australians describing, on their own terms, the way in which they live in a white society. Blacks from the city, the country and the outback talk simply and starkly in a book which is both poignant and shocking in the way it lays out the hopelessness, courage, determination and fortitude of Blacks in Australia today. Its strength is its honesty, its refusal to pander to social niceties, to what white, and many black, Australians would prefer to hear. Through it comes constantly the demand for the right to assert their identity, based on the land and free from either paternalist control or legalistic restriction. Kevin Gilbert, the author and compiler, the people whose words he has collected and set down, and Penguin Australia, the publishers, have done us all a service with the book, Living Black.

Finally, then, we have the winner of the first prize in the 1978 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature. This book was neither an easy nor an early choice. Its subject matter – heroin addiction, inner-city communal living and obsessive love – has been criticised and even regarded as distasteful by some reviewers, and did arouse some resistance among the judges. Although the book deals with an area of Australian life which is important in its own right, and although it speaks for an Australian sub-culture whose voice is often ignored by the mainstream culture, there was some feeling that it merely represented a fashionable rejection of traditional standards and ways of living. The central character is superbly realised in her hesitances [sic] and enthusiasms, but perhaps the lack of definition in the other characters, their tendency to disappear into a shabby mass, offers too little resistance to the narrator’s attempt both to maintain her authenticity and to sustain a love affair which she knows is as doomed as it is imperative.

Yet the book itself destroys these doubts. It is in fact beautifully constructed, its theme enunciated on the first page, where the narrator falls in love with ‘our friend Javo, the bludger, just back from getting off the dope in Hobart ... burnt skin and scarred nose and violently blue eyes’. Plot and theme are contained in this sentence, yet their unfolding is as beautiful and hopeless as it is inevitable.

The positive qualities that the characters aspire to are clearly enunciated for all that they are rarely achieved, but for no-one in the book there is any turning back to an abandoned security ... ‘not one of us would ever have a life that simple, because we were already too far off the track to think about turning back’. The track they are off is not just tradition or respectability, but every kind of convention. They want to make the world again, but are too mixed up with drugs, feelings, human weakness and ideology. As the narrator remarks of one of her friends’ lovers, ‘His determined constancy in loving both Angela and Paddy, while living with neither, was no less painful for being ideologically impeccable’. Feelings and ideas do get mixed up, but these people are determined to live the solutions out for themselves.

The author is not illusioned, but utterly honest in facing the dilemmas of freedom, and particularly of social and sexual freedom for women trying to create for themselves a role which will recognise their full humanity. Helen Garner, the author, in choosing the title Monkey Grip for her novel, published by McPhee Gribble, focusses the power of the outside forces which clutch her people, but her novel also shows the strength with which they contend with these forces to build something for themselves.

During the last twenty-five years the National Gallery of Victoria has built up, under the guidance of Professor A.D. Trendall, a notable collection of Greek vases, not only from mainland Greece but also from the Greek colonies of southern Italy. The collection is now presented to the public in this handbook, which is based upon an earlier work by the same author, Greek Vases in the Feltoil Collection (Melbourne, 1968), but includes the many vases acquired in recent years.

Joan Phipson’s theme for her latest children’s book is acutely topical. Sydney is brought to a halt by a series of crippling strikes in protest against a proposed nuclear reactor for Botany Bay and, as power, water and all the essential utilities are withdrawn, the city becomes a wasteland.

Melbournians may be enchanted to learn that Conway regards Melbourne as the intellectual centre of Australia, even though he himself shows a nostalgia for the quieter backwaters of Hobart. More skilled at attack than defence, the writer shows the same capacity to come up with broadsides against the materialism and lack of general tenderness which he feels characterises the Australian character, and which also typified his earlier book, The Great Australian Stupor.

This is the first work of a series entitled ‘Ideas and Ideologies’. Other works now completed or in preparation are: Bureaucracy; Imperialism; and Human Rights. The general editor, Professor Kamenka, states that the series, which is one ‘of studies in the history if ideas, includes what might be called the history of contemporary ideas (sic). It aims to connect the past, the present and the future, the ‘material’ and the ‘intellectual’, the social and the personal.’

The problem with the five essays is that they are more involved with defending ideas from the past than with fully understanding recent developments. All the authors are professors and are steeped in the doctrines of ‘mainstream social science’. They vehemently attack new developments as a temporary state of dementia. They seek to retain the ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific method’ that they feel the new advocates have lost sight of.

Books on organic gardening are now, due to demand, appearing very frequently on booksellers’ shelves. One is therefore compelled to ask two questions of each new publication – Does it really have anything new to say? – or, does it cover the whole field very well? I think this book falls in the latter category, with succinct statements and clear layout; it is well-indexed and sufficiently illustrated, so that it is very useful to any gardener as a quick reference book. Whilst very little is new, the text is clear, the tables useful, and the weaknesses difficult indeed to find, so that the negative criticisms below are a minor feature of the whole work.

Australian Book Week

NBC $5000 Awards for Australian Literature

The Awards were presented at a Dinner on Thursday October 12 to mark the opening of Australian Book Week. This year the Awards Dinner was held in Melbourne at the Dorchester, Henley Gardens, Alexandra Avenue and the Awards will be presented by the Hon Mr Justice M D Kirby, Chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Book Week Poster

This year’s poster (see Page ? [sic]) was designed by Ann-Louise Gregory, a final year graphic design student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Thousands of these posters have been distributed to selected libraries, school libraries and booksellers in all States of Australia for “Our Favourite Australian Books” Display Competition, but some limited supplies of the poster are available from NBC Committees at 10 Bank Street, West End, Brisbane, 70 Glenmore Road, Paddington, 71 Collins Street, Melbourne, 136 Rundle Mall, Adelaide, 102 Beaufort Street, Perth, and 91 Murray Street, Hobart.

“Our Favourite Australian Books” Display Competition

A total of $4,650 of prizes has been donated by Australian publishers. This is a new record and NBC is pleased to welcome Associated Book Publishers, The Grolier Society, Pitman Publishing, Nelson, Oxford University Press, Penguin Books and L & S Publishing Company, all of which firms are participating in the Competition for the first time.

Details of other events to be held during Australian Book Week had not been finalised when this column was being written, but anyone wishing to participate in Australian Book Week can obtain a copy of a Special Edition of the NEWSLETTER, (which will be issued about the middle of September) from NBC 71 Collins Street, Melbourne, 3000.

Book Post

Once again the Australian Postal Commission has rejected the National Book Council’s submission for a book post.

NBC wrote to the Managing Director, Mr A. F. Spratt, expressing alarm that from July 1 1978 the cost of posting books will rise by up to 27%, but the cost of posting Christmas cards will remain at fifteen cents.

When the Commission in 1976 rejected our case for the re-establishment of a book post, Mr Spratt said in his letter: ‘It would not be reasonable to offer concession rates for books and have to charge more for other postal services as a result’. However, no one has ever said how much extra the Commission is charging for other postal services as a result of the special concession for Christmas cards.

Mr Spratt now says that ‘there is. . .a certain amount of revenue derived from the response mail generated by Christmas mail which offsets the revenue provided by the concession rate’.

Subsequently a deputation of three (Mr Michael G Zifcak, Chairman, Mr Barrett Reid, Deputy Chairman, and myself) waited on the Minister for Post and Telecommunications and were given an opportunity to present several facets of our case for the re-introduction of a book post for Australia. The Minister certainly gave the deputation a fair hearing and expressed the opinion that we had a case well worth considering.

One of the worst aspects of the very steep increases affecting the cost of posting books is that the added burden always falls on the very people who most need help, that is people living at substantial distances from the source of all kinds of books.

That, as Mr Spratt has demonstrated, is of no concern to Australia Post, but NBC is not giving up.

The technique known to social scientists as a ‘one-shot case study’ is not new in the field of Aboriginal studies. The pioneer work was Mahkarolla and Murngin Society, in the anthropological work, A Black Civilization, by W. Lloyd Warner, 1937. This appendix was a short life story of an Aboriginal man told in the first person. It is difficult to know whether such works should be classified as biographies, autobiographies, or simply as life stories. The next book in this field was Tell the Whiteman, by H.E. Thonemann. This was the life story of an Aboriginal Lubra, Buludja, and appeared in 1949. In 1962 appeared I, The Aboriginal, the story of Waipuldanya or, whitefella name, Phillip Roberts, put together from 100 hours of interviews by the well-known journalist, Douglas Lockwood. Lamilami Speaks, published in 1974, was touted as an autobiography, but it is the joint effort of many minds, though this does not detract from the interest of the story. Most of these books are about traditional Aboriginal people, but life stories have been made of Lionel Rose, Sir Douglas Nicholls and Reg Saunders, the first Aboriginal army officer.

This is an interesting first novel about a writer of Science Fiction stories, Juniper, who has a recurring nightmare about floating around the moon in a space unit. It begins and ends with one of those sequences, which alternate with sharply observed scenes of student life. Hector, Juniper’s oldest friend, is the eternal student, flitting from religion to religion and from ideology to ideology. His wife, Matty, gets fed up with him and goes to live with Juniper. The friendship between the men continues, the strain showing more in Juny’s recurring nightmare than in actual confrontations. Hector takes to drugs and violent films and in the last scene of the book thinks he’s watching a rather repetitious film while he sees Juny being beaten up and nearly kicked to death.

This is an account of a debate held at North Dakota State University between Erich von Daniken and Clifford Wilson, on the subject ‘Does the historical and archaeological evidence support the proposition that ancient human civilisation was influenced by astronauts from outer space?’ on Saturday 11 February 1978. Von Daniken is the author of several books advocating this proposition. These books have sold very well. Wilson has written several books attacking Von Daniken’s position. He is a senior lecturer in education at Monash University in Victoria; describes himself as an archaeologist, and as a ‘Bible-believing Christian.’