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A common theme unites the five books reviewed here: the effects on Aboriginals of European and Asian settlement in Australia, and the position of Aboriginals in the society that has developed from that settlement. The work of historians, a political scientist and anthropologists, the writings reflect changes in Australian historiography and anthropology. Reece (1979) recently made a plea on behalf of Australian historiography for more to be done by black and white historians to eradicate the tradition that Australian history was a white history beginning with Captain Cook. A parallel plea has been made to anthropologists in Langton’s (1981) criticism of anthropologists for concentrating their research efforts on remote communities. The work of Aboriginal historians is not represented here, but two of these books are indicative of the quantum leap in the quantity and quality of writing an Aboriginal history. Although anthropology is slow to change, a glance through recent bibliographies published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies reveals an increase in the proportion of social anthropological publications on Aboriginal society outside the more remote areas. That trend appears in the content of the volume edited by Howard.

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Beatrice and Sydney Webb are still alive, though failing. At least, that is the impression one gets from these five pamphlets, which mark the resurrection of the Victorian Fabian Society since 1980, after temporarily shaking off the mortal after coil.

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A grizzled, greying migrant, who was holidaying in Sicily after twenty years in Australia, attended a civic reception for participants in a seminar on Australian literature held in Piazza Armerina last January. His wife and three children were in Moonee Ponds. He was obviously pleased to speak with the Australians present as if they somehow confirmed his experience in a far-off land.

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One heady day in the mid I920s, sculptor and Lindsayite recruit Guy Lynch (brother of the elegaic subject of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’), held forth in a pub at Circular Quay on his plan for Sydney to become an Hellenic city. The Quay itself he saw as a magnificent ampitheatre for the incarnation of the Lindsay group’s Nietzschean dream of Dionysian joy, as revealed in the vital art affirmed as the salvation from the twin vices of bourgeois philistinism and modernistic decadence, the canon that ran from Shakespeare, Rubens and Beethoven, to Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. He-men would lean against pillars, girls would stroll about, and grand opera would be played amongst forests of statues.

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Albert Tucker by James Mollison and Nicholas Bonham

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August 1982, no. 43

Macmillan’s Albert Tucker is a pioneering venture. It is not just another well-arranged, well-printed collection of paintings by a notable painter, it is an endeavour to present the whole conspectus of a painter’s work and mind.

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Room for Manoeuvre: Writings on history, politics, ideas and play edited by Leonie Sandercock and Stephen Murray-Smith

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August 1982, no. 43

A joke told annually and publicly for fourteen years closes this collection of Ian Turner’s work. From 1965 to 1978, Turner delivered the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture and so created the site of an imagined overlap between the more formal rituals of the intellectual culture and the rowdy world of spectatordom, the VFL, the most visible and familiar self-presentation of the popular. He fabricated this site for speaking ‘our’ culture by romping around it in careful pastiche.

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Promoting a book north of Brisbane can be a wary business, especially if the author’s car carries a Canberra number plate.

In this most nationalistic of states, he must first establish his credentials as a Queenslander. In my own case, born at Boonah near Ipswich and with many years’ experience in the north, these were impeccable.

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A few Australian poems from J.J. Stable’s Anthology, A Bond of Poetry (‘The Man from Snowy River’, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, ‘My Country’), Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life are, to my shame, practically all the Australian literature I can remember reading in my school days. My interest in Australian writers was stirred, really, by two events while an undergraduate at Sydney University. The first was two lectures given by H.M. Green, Fisher Librarian, on Christopher Brennan (an interest reinforced by the first performance at the State Conservatorium of Music in November 1940 of Five Songs – poems of Brennan set to music by Horace Keats). The second was a passing reference by Ian Maxwell in a splendid set of lectures in 1939 on three modem satirists (Butler, Shaw, Huxley) to Christina Stead’s House of All Nations. Maxwell was certainly up to date in his reading, as Christina Stead’s fiction was not at that time widely known in Australia and House of All Nations had been published only the year before. These two events made me realize that Australian writers were part of that great world of English literature which were studied at universities.

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The letters which form the body of this book are well edited and displayed, the biographical notes, although from necessity they are usually brief, are valuable – in these ways Decie Denholm has been a keen and careful editor. More about the letters later.

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The major problem with this approach to history, as Fitzgerald treads it, is that he takes the preoccupations and perspectives of the twentieth century Sunshine State and implants them in a colonial Queensland context. This achieved, Fitzgerald can point to the continuities of Queensland history. I am reminded of my dog, who buries his bones and considers himself smart when he succeeds in digging them up.

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