Calibre Prize
Hold your nerve
I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
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We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take ...
January 5
We have lost our Hermia, so Sally-Anne Russell comes round to sing for me. She has fished out Benjamin Britten’s Charm of Lullabies and her score of The Rape of Lucretia. We work on both, but particularly on the aria in which poor Lucretia threads together gorgeous lilies into a funeral wreath, her response to what the boastful, ghastly Tarquinius has done to her. Sally-Anne has not sung the opera for twenty-five years, but it sounds as though she’s fresh from recording it, so inside the role is she, so beautiful and rich her voice. I phone Neil Armfield. We have found our Hermia.
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The World of Charmian Clift is a selection of the weekly columns she wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald’s women’s pages. They date from 1964, the year that she, George Johnston, and their children returned from Greece, up to her tragic suicide in 1969. Clift herself selected most of the essays for the book, which was first published posthumously in 1970, not long before George Johnston’s death from tuberculosis.
The Australian colonies were much more of an ethnic mix in the middle of the last century than is nowadays imagined. In 1861 one Victorian in ten was Chinese. Germans were everywhere, not just in the Barossa: 10,000 also lived in Victoria. The folk memory of such groups was not continuous enough to preserve a sense of their collective heritage. Few material traces remain: overgrown tombstones, fading foreign surnames atop country stores, an exotic farmhouse looking quite unlike its neighbours.
The vast majority of these itinerant aliens left no mark at all. They lived in a goldfields tent, rented a room in the inner city, or built a shanty amid tall timber. Within a few years they moved on, perhaps to New Zealand or the Americas, and returned home in old age. Of Italians, for instance, probably 120,000 had come to this country by the time of the Great War, but the 1921 census counted only 8,000 of them.
Shane Warne is one of the greatest bowlers of all time, if not the greatest. Highly competitive and aggressive, he is one of the main factors in Australia’s prolonged dominance in world cricket. He has been involved in a series of controversies, on and off the field. He has been fined for sledging and over-aggressive appealing; and for providing, along with Mark Waugh, information to a bookie (something they both readily admitted, which the Australian Cricket Board tried to cover up). In 2003 he received a one-year ban for taking a banned substance, diuretic tablets, intended, he claimed (and this is not disputed by Barry), to help him lose weight. Off the field, like many leading sporting personalities, he is a serial womaniser