Archive

Henry Lawson epitomised the weather-beaten laconic when he said: ‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.’ A century later, Bill Bryson, in Down Under (2000), picked up where Lawson left off: he defined the ‘real Australia’ as places where ‘no sane per­son would choose to live’. Somewhere in between, Patrick White created one of those dubious entities, a sweat-stained eccentric in an undaubed slab hut who told the explorer Voss that the country ahead of him was all stones and thorns, a place where anyone crazy enough to go out there might celebrate a ‘high old Mass ... with the skull of a black­feller and his own blood’.

The award of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics to William Henry Bragg, sometime Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide, and his Australian-born son William Lawrence Bragg is one of the icons of Australian science. Their ‘services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays’ is mentioned in the guide for new Australians, Becoming an Australian Citizen (2007), so we can put them up there with Don Bradman and Captain Cook.

For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is that the author does not approach his work as historical fiction, but as literary fiction.

This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.

In 2005 Simon Cleary was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for the best manuscript of an emerging Queensland author, and here it is, every bit as fresh and lyrical as the report promised. It is one of those novels that works by close-up focus on substantiating detail, leaving the main contours of the plot to emerge as they will; like a bridge, perhaps, calling attention to its line and form and even its usefulness. It takes a more careful eye to appreciate the development and assembly and the structural stresses – its very strength.

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

The title is presumably meant to be ambiguous. Not only did the protagonist, Howard Hughes, hurtle round the world in aeroplanes of his own devising, and not only did he ingest amphetamines at a rate that would finish most of us, but there is also a sense of his crashing non-stop through life itself. And 'speed', he tells us in Luke Davies' remarkable new novel, 'shouldered some of the weight for me ... helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since, control, ultimately, is all there is.'

In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'