Archive

Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.

Carphology, in case you have forgotten, is the ‘delirious fumbling with bedclothes’, as stated in the epigraph to David Musgrave’s poem of the same name, which is not about a pathology but, energetically though bleakly, about passion and sleep. The epigraph to the book as a whole is taken from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, fragment C1: ‘God be gracious to Musgrave, for he is a Merchant.’ Tongue in cheek, but Musgrave does indeed have wares and they are finely assembled configurations of words. The poems in Phantom Limb often suggest, rather than explicitly display, Musgrave’s erudition. There is a communicative ease about the enterprise, if this can be said about poems that continue to declare themselves after multiple readings. In them there are elusive depths combined with surface pleasures.

The settler art history of Australia is not a long one – not much more than two hundred years – so it is all the more surprising that the literature of its first century should remain so riddled with holes. It is a sad reflection on the priorities of the academic and curatorial professions that (certainly as far as concerns that conventional, fundamental professional resource, the monographic study) some very significant artists have been neglected or completely ignored. To give just a few examples, it is years since there was anything new or substantial on Augustus Earle, S.T. Gill, Nicholas Chevalier or Louis Buvelot, while there have never been focused, extended studies of first-generation early colonial artists such as the surveyor-explorer G.W. Evans and the natural history painter John Lewin, of Benjamin Duterrau, artist of The Conciliation (1840), Australia’s first history painting, or of the 1860s and 1870s landscapists J.H. Carse, Thomas Clark and Henry Gritten.

Prepare to be affronted, or perhaps just a bit miffed. Although it does not confine itself to works by British writers, you will look in vain for Australian authors in the new Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Among many titles from the United States, Little Women gets its due, as does Little House on the Prairie. Canada’s Anne of Green Gables is there, and so is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Scan the index and you will find works of European origin, such as The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. The latter two, of course, could be given honorary citizenship because of their immense popularity in English translation.

Set in the early 1970s, prolific children’s and Young Adult author Carole Wilkinson’s latest novel, Sugar Sugar, follows the adventures of Jackie, an Australian girl who dreams of being a fashion designer. After leaving her home in Semaphore to travel to London with her friend Colleen, Jackie finds herself working at the snooty fashion boutique Konundrum; waiting to be noticed by the fashion world. She soon realises that the ‘swinging London’ she’d been searching for ‘had pretty much swung’. After accidentally spilling hot tea over Julie Christie, and Konundrum’s most expensive evening dress, Jackie catches the hovercraft to Paris for the weekend hoping to impress French fashion designer André Courrèges with her design folio.

Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.

John Birmingham’s After America is the second book in what is clearly intended to be a trilogy of page-turners – a follow-up to his Axis of Time trilogy, the swashbuckling alternative history which saw a US carrier battle group transported back in time to the middle of World War II. After America, the sequel to Without Warning (2009), is set in a decidedly dystopian alternative present, the result of a mysterious energy wave that wipes out most of the human and animal life forms in North America in 2003. As one might expect, chaos ensues. A global ecological catastrophe has accompanied the human disappearance, a civil engineer from Seattle (the only big US city to survive the wave) has been elected president, Israel has launched nuclear strikes on its Middle East neighbours, and groups of well-organised pirates from Lagos have taken over New York City.