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Australian Literature

Towards the end of the current issue of Antipodes, Bev Braune asks the questions, ‘Who is the reader? And how many of us are there?’ Braune is not referring to Antipodes and its audience. Nonetheless, the questions stand. Academic journals challenge our more romantic notions of readers and reading. As a general rule, they make poor bedtime companions; they deter greenhorns and lotus-eaters; they tend not to provide diversion, entertainment or consolation; and they serve a public and professional, not a private and recreational, function. One could hazard that they exist less for readers than for writers – that they are less read than written for.

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Mary Gilmore is one of the most acclaimed figures in Australian writing. A cultural icon, she appears in important paintings and sculptures and on postage stamps, not to mention the ten-dollar note. Her biography has been published, her letters collected, and now the first volume of her complete poems, edited by Jennifer Strauss, has appeared in the prestigious Academy Editions of Australian Literature. No other Australian poet except Henry Lawson has received quite the degree of attention that Gilmore has been accorded. Longevity certainly had something to do with her fame: she was a living link between the colonial Australia she was born into and the Australia of the 1960s that saw her passing. Like Lawson’s, her life and work are written into Australian history; and she too is inextricably associated with the legend of the 1890s. She never quite achieved Lawson’s popularity as a writer, but this edition makes it clear that her fame was truly earned, not merely accrued. No literary reputation is ever finally fixed, or immune to criticism, but this book will help us to understand why Gilmore, Australia’s foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century, came to be considered a national treasure.

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As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

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In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940), about the ethics of a Catholic priest in southern Mexico. Like Greene, Hardy was driven by a quasi-religious commitment, but for him it was a lifelong commitment to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) rather than to Catholicism.

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Moving house recently reacquainted me with my books as I handled each one, packing and unpacking, dismantling the shelves from under them, banging the shelves together in the new place and lining up the books in a jumbled vestige of the old order. Books carried round for half a lifetime, books read more than once, books that will never be read, gifts, enthusiasms, bearers of memory and desire. Arranging books is something we all must do, culling and keeping in mysterious ways that reflect ourselves and our circumstances.

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Alan Gould’s writing career began in the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Canberra Poets’. This substantial selection covers thirty years and clearly shows both the achievements and the limitations of his work: I think the former outweigh the latter. One of the strengths of his poetry is a consistent vision; thirty years gives the opportunity for that to be explored in all its ramifications. The centre of this vision is history or, in its unintellectualised form, the past. Almost all the poems relate to this in one way or another. Even the later poems of humour or love or the waiting for a child’s birth are framed by the overriding meditation on the past, so that, though they are expressions of an intimate personal life, it is one conducted on the surface of the immense, slowly changing patterns of history.

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Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane & Literati by James Phelan

by
October 2005, no. 275

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

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Nowadays, we want the truth. Suddenly, it seems, we are no longer content to be sceptical and laconic and sophisticated, or to take the line that there are many kinds of truth and that it all depends on how you look at it, and on who is doing the looking. Politicians and journalists, for example, long assumed by a knowing public to belong to professions that not only display but positively require a flexible approach to the facts, now find themselves being scrutinised and investigated to establish whether or not they have been telling lies. The Blairs – Jayson of The New York Times, and Tony of Her Majesty’s government – cannot, in their recent tribulations, have missed the irony of this dramatic shift. Where once we tolerated, even celebrated, shading and nuance and the need, sometimes, to elaborate and select and even invent in order to arrive at a truth of a kind that told us far more than the mere facts ever would, now we just want to get down to those plain unelaborated facts and to establish what really did happen, or is currently happening, or is about to happen.

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Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.

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Mention Colin Thiele’s name, and at least one listener will sigh and say The Sun on the Stubble in a wistful or regretful voice, depending on their schooldays memories. This biography takes us on ngrugie ngoppun: a ‘good walk’ with its subject. Largely chronological, it begins with a glimpse of the writer poised to tell his enduring story of the Coorong, Storm Boy (1963), and then retraces his long life and career (Thiele was born in 1920). His idyllic boyhood in the bosom of a loving farm community, his academic studies as a young adult, his RAAF service and his long distinguished teaching career are all laid out, leading to his subsequent fame as a part-time writer.

Thiele has been a prolific and versatile writer for over sixty years. He has written poetry, short stories, plays, biography, textbooks and novels, while working full-time as a teacher and then principal of Wattle Park Teachers’ College. He is best known for his novels about his beloved South Australia, in particular those set in fictitious settlements in the Barossa Valley: The Sun on the Stubble (1961), Uncle Gustav’s Ghosts  (1974) and Labourers in the Vineyard (1970), among others. Storm Boy is widely acknowledged to be his best-loved story for children. Some of his short stories for young readers are small gems: Danny’s Egg (1989) could easily fit into the ‘Aussie Nibbles’ series. He has published a biography of Hans Heysen (Heysen of Hahndorf, 1968), and his own memoir of childhood, With Dew on My Boots (1997). He published poetry in the notorious Ern Malley issue of Angry Penguins, and had radio plays broadcast while still a young teacher. His work has been adapted for cinema and television. Considering his long life, too few photographs are included, but a note directs the reader to a website for more. There are more than thirty pages of notes and bibliography, and an extensive index.

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