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These two quite different historical novels, both by first-time novelists, reveal once again the many difficulties of that genre, no matter how much information the author has gathered. The publisher of Temple of the Grail has provided ample publicity material. Along with the usual media release, there is a two-page puff piece couched in the first person about how Adriana Koulias came to write and publish the book. Koulias is Brazilian by birth, from a Catholic family that moved to Australia when she was nine: ‘By the time I was eighteen I had come into contact with a cornucopia of religion and philosophy.’ Much of this lore has been fed into Temple of the Grail, which sets out, she says, ‘to show how religious zeal, carried to extremes, eventually leads to error’. In addition to this promotional material, the book itself contains a foreword by David Wansbrough praising the book to the skies:

The Bunburyists is a reminiscence of the author’s five years’ escape from the ‘dependent worlds of politics and journalism’.

I had fled with my family to the bush … where we sought to escape the present by returning to the past and setting ourselves up in business as dealers in antiques. Or at any rate, a superior kind of junk.

Today, as the novel opens, he finds himself again perched in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – ‘I have come back to work, to all I had sought to escape. The admission of defeat is self-evident. One more among many failings.’

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.

Rodney Hall has always been a professional poet in the sense that he professes and declares – indeed, almost seems to make himself – in his poetry. The poetry seems to become a means of coping with experience; more, it becomes perhaps the central part of the experience. So it is in Black Bagatelles. But here, art and its expectations become less something for living than for dying by. Not that this book marks any great break with what has gone before, any rupture of identity. On the contrary, implicitly or explicitly, death has always been a major presence in his poetry. Its preoccupation with art and artifice represents, amongst other things, an attempt to give himself alms against oblivion. But in these poems the note of doomsday, sounded in the title of his first collection of verse, Penniless Till Doomsday; rings out, not portentously, but wittily, with immediacy and perception. Hall has always been concerned with masks, poses, the dance of experience. Now, the ‘masks compose themselves tableau-still’ and the source is revealed of the ‘desperate rustlings going on behind’. This source then is death, but not death majestical and metaphysical as Donne and the seventeenth century ‘knew him, not moralising and the servant of the mighty God as in the middle ages, but jester and joker, the one who calls the tune to life’s comedy, to

 … the hold of

heart

on heart the band

of gristle the bloodtie

just

waiting to be

bled to death by a clever cut

For a man who has as much claim as anyone to the title of ‘greatest Australian’, John Monash has remained a somewhat distant figure in the national imagination. Certainly, he is far less well known than that other pretender to the title, Donald Bradman. But the publication of a new biography by Roland Perry should put some balance back in Monash’s ledger.

According to the conventional wisdom, Australians are not overly fond of official orations. Russel Ward’s so-called ‘typical Australian’ was ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, and John La Nauze, biographer of Alfred Deakin, noted that Australians were ‘inclined to associate sophisticated speaking with condescension or insincerity’. Alfred Deakin’s eloquence, he added, was ‘surpassingly rare’ in Australia. For Robin Boyd, it was probably just as well, for when Australians deigned to open pursed lips it revealed not only bad teeth, but ‘worse words’. The appearance of these two collections of Australian speeches – and another is due for release shortly, from Melbourne University Press – flies in the face of this orthodoxy. And it buries the myth that public cynicism towards political speechmaking – for politicians dominate both collections – has reached such stratospheric heights that we would all prefer a quiet doze than be subject even to an exuberant flight of rhetoric. Clearly, no matter how often speeches are spurned as chronic windbaggery, they retain the capacity to give meaning to the life of the nation and the affairs of state.

Luther’s Pine is a beautiful account of an old man’s encounter with his younger self. John Molony’s life has an iconic quality. His father fought on the Western Front during World War I, sustaining injury from mustard gas, before returning to marriage and settlement in the Mallee area of Western Victoria, close to Sea Lake. Sea Lake was also the home of John Shaw Neilsen. Young Molony, born in 1927, shared some of Neilsen’s ability to find beauty in an arid landscape: ‘in that poor country, no pauper was I.’

Frank Welsh is ill-served by his publicists. His history of Australia, we are told, is the first to be written by a non-Australian. It is not: the American Hartley Grattan wrote probably the best of a number of earlier such works. Great Southern Land is trumpeted as drawing on sources from Britain, the US, South Africa and Canada to place Australia fully in a world context: in fact, it incorporates some material from British archives and fragments from elsewhere to illustrate Australia’s more obvious international links.