Archive

In Glenice Whitting’s début novel, a dying man, Frederick, recalls his childhood in Footscray from before World War I to the end of his life at the close of the twentieth century. The theme is the split identity of an Australian-born man who has strong connections to his German heritage. His formative influence is his charismatic grandmother who raises him when he is rejected by his mother. This remains the centre of his personality even when, as he grows older, he craves acceptance as an Australian. Frederick is more like a first-generation immigrant than a second, especially as the grandmother names him Frederick Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg, a name destined to become a burden in his childhood as Australia succumbs to rabid anti-German propaganda during World War I. A similar predicament impels the family to change their name to Fraser.

'I had fully expected to find Karoline and her family living in difficult circumstances but in their home I am confronted and embarrassed by the extent of their poverty.’ In his stand-out piece of reportage, Peter Mares relates how Karoline and Jone came to Australia from Fiji to pick fruit, pluck chickens and make their families’ lives back home more bearable. They stay illegally, ‘enmeshed in a complex web of opportunity and obligation’. This refugee story details the global reasons for, and effects of, such journeys, as well as the daily hardship of poverty. The shock of reality, the yearning to make a positive difference, the allure of an ‘authentic’ experience, the realisation of its impossibility, and the weary cynicism of disappointment: these themes persist as Australians write about their Asian neighbourhood.

Christopher Heathcote’s scholarly study of the abstract artist Roger Kemp (1908–87) took more than a decade to complete. Heathcote’s examination of this Melbourne-based painter provides a refreshingly different view of Melbourne’s art scene from the 1930s to the 1980s and opens up new vistas beyond the much-studied Angry Penguin circle.

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.’

Media discussion of the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, tends to focus on his political persecution at the hands of the Turkish state. Pamuk concedes that history has forced him to don a ‘political persona’, one that journalists and literary festival audiences are keen to encounter. Yet Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colours: Essays and a Story, reveals where politics (or political commentary) and the writer of imaginative thinking part company.

Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.

My first emotions in a seagoing submarine were a mixture of fear and exaltation. I was a seventeen-year-old cadet-midshipman ‘sea riding’ in HMAS Oxley as it prepared to fire the first Mark 48 guided torpedo acquired by the Royal Australian Navy from the United States near thirty years ago. When the boat submerged off Sydney heads and we proceeded beyond a depth of six hundred feet, I assumed the strange noises I could hear and the weird sensations I felt were a familiar part of submarine life. While I had complete faith in the very experienced commanding officer, I realised that any catastrophic accident would probably result in the deaths of all seventy-two souls on board.

Sometimes books date quickly. This is the fate of To Firmer Ground, which was published in October 2007, one month before the change of government in Canberra. Had it appeared one year earlier, or had Kevin Rudd not triumphed at the ballot box, then this book might have provided a timely critique of the policy failings of the Howard government. Six months later, with Kyoto ratified and the new parliament having apologised to the ‘stolen generations’ and amended WorkChoices in its first sitting week, this volume seems bogged in the past.

Narrative, historical narrative in particular, figures strongly in these recent books from Judy Johnson – one a new collection of poems, the other a welcome reissue of her verse novel. Jack was first published in 2006 by Pandanus, shortly before that imprint’s demise. It won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and is republished now by Picador. With its lonely, embittered, one-eyed captain, its miscellany of onboard characters and Coral Sea setting, it is not without potentially cliched romantic elements – which the Picador cover, with its Blue Lagoon-like scene and blockbuster typeface, is happy to trade on. But Jack compels.