Archive

If Antonella Gambotto hadn’t been sued by Cliff Richard early on in her career, would she have later described Kylie Minogue as ‘a charmlessly robotic dwarf’ under the impression of being an ‘incandescent, gifted and alluring siren’? Perhaps not. It seems it was Cliff, the 50,000 pounds and the resulting barrow-loads of letters that convinced Gambotto of the value of opinion pieces: people react.

Family is surely the house of all feeling. Yet when we are in our early twenties, if not before, part of our dream of being grown up is to imagine the day when we will leave this house. Years later, many of us realise that we never did, that the building may be prison or comfort, but it is also us. How one adapts to this sage correction by time and maturity largely determines the emo­tional comfort of middle life and beyond.

Both Dennis Haskell and Andrew Sant are primarily domestic poets. Family and friends comprise the milieu of many of their poems, which attempt to transform quotidiana into something of enduring interest. The chief danger of this type of poetry is that the prevalence of so many poems about family members and friends results in a poetic environment that can resemble a vast, monotonous suburb. If most domestic poets seem indistinguishable from each other in their subject matter alone, then the situation of contemporary poetry becomes further muddled when this homogeneity is bolstered by a general complacency with language.

Autobiographical tales, at least in Australian culture, tend to come in three kinds: the kind that was written as a self-consciously literary product; the kind that has a unique or sensational angle, or focus, or moment; and the kind that was written by the famous to tell the story of their fame, usually with content well to the fore over style.

I appreciate the irony. I deliberately used the title Personal Best for anthologies I once edited (1989, 1991) as a way of saying that there are personal achievements outside the world of sport, and now I am being asked to review an anthology titled Personal Best which is a collection of stories about sport (for young adult readers).

This is a tale of good guys and bad guys. The bad guys (mostly called Whitlam, Hawke, or Keating) are zealous lackeys of two ogres called Centralised Wage Fixing and Political correctness. They are often helped by other guys (frequently called Peacock, Elliott, and Bjelke-Petersen) who pretend to be good but aren’t.

As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says: