Longman Cheshire

Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.

It has a brave title, John Rickard’s Australia: A cultural history, for that adjective ‘cultural’ raises expectations difficult to meet. ‘Culture’, as Raymond Williams has explained, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ After reading the book I cannot help wondering whether the substitution of the word ‘social’ would have made for a more accurate subtitle. For what Rickard has given us is an impressive synopsis of recent research and inherited wisdom about the nature of Australian society. It will be a welcome addition to university and college reading lists on Australian history, but it is not, I believe, at the most fundamental level, ‘a cultural history’.

A Nation Apart is the title of this book of essays on contemporary Australia and it’s a good title because it summarises the fragmentation, the sense of disparateness, which characterizes this nation at the moment – and characterises the book itself.

In his foreword to Doc Evatt, Jim Hagan claims that this is the fourth full-length biography of Dr. H.V. Evatt and suggests that only one other Australian politician has scored as many. Leaving aside the fact that Allan Dalziel never pretended that his book, Evatt the Enigma, was anything more than a profile of the man he worked with for twenty years, these assertions create the misleading impression that a substantial body of literature on Evatt exists. Academics have long lamented the lack of a comprehensive and scholarly biography of one of Australia’s most important and complex judicial and political figures. The very recent appearance of Peter Crockett’s Evatt: A life, characterised by wide-ranging research but a crude psychoanalytical approach, chronic disorganisation, a weakness in the analysis of international affairs, and a lack of historical perspective, disappointed in many ways.

Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’

‘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.