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NonFiction

The dominant note of Professor Kramer’s long-awaited James McAuley is control. The volume will no doubt be gratefully received by lovers and adversaries of McAuley’s literary achievement, for many reasons: it brings before a wider reading audience guile a few new poems published only in the little-circulated volume Time Given (1976). These poems can now receive their due and wider admiration. (Unfortunately, only thirteen of the thirty-one poems from Time Given have been reprinted here, in two different sections.) This volume also gives wider accessibility to some of McAuley’s scattered journalism and literary criticism. Fifteen essays have been selected, but I 1hink it a great pity that some of the essays referred to and discussed at some length in Kramer’s introduction do not appear in the text, especially the seminal and highly ambivalent ‘The Magian Heresy’. In a similar way Kramer mentions the importance of the poem ‘A Letter to John Dryden, but summarily dismisses it as ‘the rather strident satire’, and does not include it in the volume.

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Making a Life edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee & Constructing a Culture edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee

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June 1988, no. 101

The title A People’s History of Australia is certainly a grand one. Its multi-volume predecessors have more modest titles, such as Clark’s disarmingly simple A History of Australia or the eleven-volume Australians: a historical library. The People’s History’s aspirations go beyond content to embrace audience. This is refreshing to see as many Australian scholars still regard their colleagues as the only audience that matters. The editors say in their introduction that:

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John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement – that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long post-war reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

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I would like to begin by talking about the work of the Committee to review Australian studies on tertiary education and try to bring out some of the implications of our work for publishing and for teaching. I will look particularly at the question of resources for Australian studies.

The brief of the Committee was to examine ways in which students in tertiary education institutions – in universities, colleges of advanced education, and TAFE – learn about Australia in their tertiary studies, and to recommend ways in which these studies can be developed. We were concerned not only with the humanities, with history, and with literature, but also with science and with professional and vocational studies across the curriculum. In fact one of our major tasks became to look at vocational areas to see in what ways students who took those studies were prepared for the world in which they would be used.

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The Australian Stage edited by Harold Love & Reverses by Marcus Clarke, edited by Dennis Davison

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May 1986, no. 80

The Australian Stage represents an interesting intersection between the academic world and the creative arts, between the long perspective of the historian, and the ephemerality of theatre performances. Its methodology is academic; it proceeds from an examination of documents, of written records of an art form only one aspect of which we think of as being written, the actual texts of plays. However, these are not the documents in question (although some bibliographical information about the plays is also included); rather it is the responses to performances, particularly reviews, written reminiscences, playbills, newspaper reports, which provide, collectively, the material for a historical survey of theatre in Australia.

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The World of Norman Lindsay edited by Lin Bloomfield & A Letter From Sydney edited by John Arnold

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October 1983, no. 55

The World of Norman Lindsay is compiled by Lin Bloomfield, proprietor of the Bloomfield Galleries in Paddington, NSW, and an authority on Lindsay’s work. It was first published more expensively in 1979. This elegant paperback will make it widely accessible, which is a matter for satisfaction. It contains comprehensive, short, expert articles about Lindsay’s life and achievements as an artist and the reminiscences of Lindsay’s children, grandchildren, models, friends, and colleagues. Good illustrations, some in colour, cover every era of his works in all their variety, and the book also includes photographs of people and places.

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In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Gordon S. Wood lamented the current dominance of ‘monographic history’, a dominance which he claimed has brought ‘chaos’ to the discipline of history. Most works, he argued are so specific and technical that they are comprehensible only to a few specialists in each field. The title of this book might suggest that here is yet another study designed only to appeal to that hardy little band of historians who spend their professional lives grubbing through the records of early America.

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Sir Samuel Griffith was chief justice of the High Court of Australia for sixteen years, from October 1903 to October 1919; but he had effectively retired in July 1919. Sir John Latham was chief justice for sixteen and a half years, from October 1935 to April 1952; but he had effectively retired in May 1951. Thus, Sir Garfield Barwick, who last month completed his sixteenth year as chief justice, has already established a record for active service in the position; if he remains in office until 24 October this year, he will have broken even Lathams formal record.

The holder of such a record term of office as chief justice would, on that ground alone, be assured of a unique place in Australian legal history; but in Barwick’s case, the years as chief justice are only a climax – perhaps even an anti-climax – to an extraordinary career.

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