Hale & Iremonger

One of the great merits of Phillip Deery’s presentation is the way in which he shows the immediacy of the coal strike: its great significance in changing the lives of the miners and in transforming the political situation in New South Wales. It was a time of great bitterness, in which those who expected the interests of the Labor movement and the Labor Party to converge, considered themselves betrayed. Nor did the swiftness of the Chifley government in moving to crush the miners’ strike garner them any favour in the public’s eyes. The public considered the hardships brought about by the coal strike to be merely the latest in a series of events that seem destined to threaten their comfort and standard of living. The communists were blamed for the strike, probably unjustly, for although there were communists among the miners, the vast majority were non-communists with legitimate grievances against the mining companies.

In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

For its double epigraph, Rock’n’Roll Heroes combines a couple of lines of Midnight Oil’s Hercules – ‘my life is a valuable thing / I want to keep it that way’ – with six wonderfully numinous sentences from Thomas Traherne:

By the time I was 35, I’d spent fifteen years as a student and teacher in universities. I was scornful of those who sneered at ‘Sheltered Workshops’ – a fashionable putdown in the early 70s; at the same time, I mocked Zelman Cowan’s observation – when playing stag at bay and asserting that he really was au fait with academia – that ‘I have spent all my adult life in universities’. But they are real places.

Illustrations are almost mandatory for certain types of books, technical manuals, travel books. Illustrated poetry is not unheard of, but neither is it a common phenomenon in Australia, the normal perception being that poetry is a discrete and competent medium. Nevertheless, there are times when pictorial complementation has been thought desirable. Such a book is O’Connor and Coleman’s Poetry in Pictures: The Great Barrier Reef, which collects some of O’Connor’s reef poems and matches them up with some superb photographs of the birds and marine forms described. The result is a handsome book of the sort you might buy at a reef resort for a Thinking Friend back home.

I have sat on these books longer than is reasonable for a review, yet have to confess that I am not satisfied with the readiness of what follows. I got the Porter first, but receiving the Johnston thought that they in some ways offered similar difficulties, perhaps similar rewards, to the reader, and that it might be neat to review them together.

Sometimes I’ve written reviews ‘because I was invited’, or felt I should. But this is a book I really want to review. And I wasn’t invited: I applied for the job. For close on thirty years I’ve been grateful to Rosemary Dobson, especially for her third book, Child with a Cockatoo (1955), the one through which I came to know her work. Her latest, despite obvious continuities, gives a rather different kind of pleasure, and new reasons for gratitude.