Ken Stewart

The slightly odd title of this volume – not Marcus Clarke, but Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke – is reminiscent of a spate of movies in the 1990s, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Those weren’t the authentic products, but this book does present Hopkins’s Clarke, in that much of the volume is made up of his childhood memories of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and long extracts from Clarke’s letters to Hopkins.

No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.

Greg Chappell’s cricketing career from the mid-sixties until 1984 coincided with developments affecting players, administrators and audiences which reoriented attitudes and expectations, causing schisms and bitterness. McGregor’s biography stresses three related themes: the growth of professionalism, the effects of commercialism and especially colour television, and the difficulties in a cricketer’s life caused by conflicting allegiances, and personal and family considerations. A fourth theme, the ascendancy of speed bowling, gets due attention, but more incidentally. It is a conscientious book: Chappell’s early life and the arc of his superb career are followed carefully, comprehensively, informatively, but too often a false note of the ‘excitement’ of it all is journalistically struck.

‘Magazines and newspapers in Australian literature’ is a more troublesome subject than it may at first sight appear. Within its scope lurk issues and problems that preoccupy and sometimes bedevil much Australian literary criticism and cultural commentary. Indeed, the method and content of this book provide a helpful approach to those perennial issues.