Review

Behind the Exclusive Brethren is the story of a religious group that goes to extraordinary lengths to remain ‘apart from the world’ but whose very ‘unworldliness’ is maintained by very worldly means. Journalist Michael Bachelard’s readable and balanced account of the Exclusive Brethren in Australia is informed by a broad understanding of the church in its international context.

In the opening pages of an early manuscript, ‘A Feast of Life’, Elizabeth Jolley ponders the question of whether a novel should have a message. She has no answer, but will write out of her ‘experiences and feelings’. If her writing does help anyone, then ‘let a message be found’, so that she might ‘feel that I am at least doing something in a wider sphere than the domestic routine within the walls of the little house’. Jolley goes on to describe her method: ‘I shall start in the early years of my life and try to make things take some sort of order but order is not a strong point with me and I shall write with all my heart so that there will be the noise of my children in these pages …’

In 2006, a year after the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Inga Clendinnen published ‘The History Question’ as part of Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay series. ‘The History Question’ was, as its subtitle ‘Who Owns the Past?’ suggests, a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of historical understanding, and, more specifically, its uses and abuses. But at its heart lay an extended and surprisingly savage critique of The Secret River, the claims Clendinnen believed Grenville had made for it, and for fiction’s capacity to illuminate the past; and, more deeply, of the very idea of historical fiction.

Vertigo is to dizziness what a migraine is to a headache, or the flu to a cold in the head; you don’t really grasp the difference until you’ve had the nastier one. True vertigo pitches you into a chaotic blackness in which you lose your bearings utterly; no relief is to be had from sitting or lying down, because the chair, the bed, the floor all fall away from you as well. Disorientation on the flat is bad enough, but in three dimensions it is terrifying, like Satan’s journey through the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost where he meets ‘a vast vacuitie: all unawares / Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour / Down had been falling …’

One of the more successful ventures of Oxford University Press in the closing decades of the last century was a five-volume History of the British Empire. With more than a hundred contributors, this was a major undertaking, but its beginnings were not auspicious. Roger Louis, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, was appointed editor-in-chief. That drew a public complaint from Max Beloff, an Oxford professor and founding principal of the private University of Buckingham, who was raised to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher. Beloff wanted to know why OUP was allowing an American to rewrite ‘our colonial history’.

Who was hanged, disembowelled and quartered after printing ‘nawghtye papystycall Bookes’? William Carter. Where did English booksellers store and sell their books? For several centuries, mostly from tiny shops near St Paul’s. How tiny is tiny? Zachary and William Stewart had ten feet from their shopfront to the back of the yard. Who was the builder and owner of the Temple of the Muses, the biggest bookshop of its time? James Lackington. How did eighteenth-century booksellers use newspapers to promote their wares? Through the ‘puff’, a sensationalist pushing of a single book, and the ‘cloud’, a lengthy listing of many books. Who remaindered Jane Austen’s Emma? John Murray II. The questions, big and small, are endless, and this book provides the answers.

Literature is full of unexpected coincidences. After a long silence, two books appear within a matter of months that present both a detailed, personal and a deeply investigative account of those unique political partners, Joseph and Enid Lyons.

The Australian migrant experience is often regarded through the prism of the postwar experience and the waves of immigration and exodus, chiefly from Europe. Today, except among historians, the settlement of Australia is often the butt of colonial and convict humour, or the stuff of pop-cultural iconography and self-identification. This comes at the expense of a true appreciation and understanding of Australia’s rich cultural and demographic origins. In the light of recent cultural debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism, it is clear that our understanding of our society, and the varied backgrounds of its constituents, is wanting.

There has been no escaping Graeme Blundell lately. There was Catharine Lumby’s astute reappraisal of his image-making Alvin Purple for the Currency Australian Classics series; and, as I write, the advertisements for the new local documentary Not Quite Hollywood feature a bare-chested Blundell in a pair of unforgivable 1970s flares. Now, here is his own account of how he got to be that way – and a good deal more.

Blundell was branded for years by the Alvin persona, that of the improbable sex symbol, irresistibly attractive to women who are turned on by this short, faintly nerdish suburban lad with a curious magnetism invisible to the naked eye. And naked, of course, was the key word. There is a good more to Blundell than the Alvin image, but let’s get it out of the way first.