NonFiction

When the Picador Nature Reader was published several years ago, it included only one contribution by an Australian: an excerpt from David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but it is not set in Australia. It struck me at the time that for a culture so deeply embedded in, and concerned with, the land we have little in the way of nature writing.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language. In the preface, he laments the chaotic state of the language: ‘When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules; wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated.’ He despaired at the scope and futility of his task:

This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.

During a career that lasted almost sixty years, Frank Hurley (1895–1962) produced thousands of negatives and more than sixty films. He also wrote some twenty books and was an avid diarist. A number of biographies have been written on Hurley, and Helen Ennis, in Man with a Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas, makes no attempt to revisit territory covered in these earlier publications, choosing to focus on a particular aspect of Hurley’s oeuvre: the photographs he took outside Australia. She draws on the extraordinary holdings of Hurley photographs in the National Library of Australia. The book comprises more than seventy full-page images illustrating the range of Hurley’s international work. It also complements John Thompson’s Hurley’s Australia: Myth, Dream, Reality, published by the NLA in 1999.

In his opening sentence, Andrew Ford explains that, ‘The seventy-something pieces in this volume were written over fifteen years for a range of publications and occasions’. Indeed, in the sixty-eight titles that constitute Undue Noise, forty-four of which began life in the ABC organ 24 Hours, Ford confronts us as critical theorist, copious reviewer of music, text and film, diarist, sleeve note writer, radio commentator and university lecturer.

We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next eighteen months. Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons. Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners …’ reads a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Does it sound familiar? However, the date is 18 November 1948, a time when aggrieved readers were bombarding the papers, protesting against the influx of postwar refugees.

A major work in the history of Australian architecture is a rare thing, and it is the more remarkable when the author is an amateur – in the true sense, that is – an enthusiast and connoisseur rather than a professional or academic hack. For Brian Andrews, though he has developed his expertise during a full-time career in telecommunications, is certainly not an amateur in terms of expertise.