Memoir

In 1983, Bill Dodd was nearly eighteen when he dived into a river and nearly lost his life. Dodd warns against diving carelessly into waterholes: ‘It can give you a lot of unnecessary hassles, take it from me.’ This laconic understatement is characteristic of Dodd’s account of his life. He is now a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair for life. Yet, without straining credibility, Dodd manages to convince you that he is a lucky man.

In the opening pages of Jewels and Ashes a man of eighty stands on a chair, his arms outstretched, describing the tree he remembers from his childhood. How beautiful and tall and wide it was, as it stood in the forest called Zwierziniec, on the outskirts of Bialystok, Poland. How strong his family was, how it branched and grew and prospered, in those years before 1939!

In the profusion of images in Gerard Windsor’s Family Lore one is particularly insistent. The surgical metaphor makes remembering an act of dismembering. It suggests control and precision, and ostensibly offers an antidote for messy feelings, which looks like a useful resource in the murky business of exhuming family ghosts. It also seems to satisfy an aspect of the narrator-personality that is reflected not only in the prose but also in little self-caricatures (such as his description of the fastidiousness with which knife and fork are used and put aside).

Mr Jackson’s book narrates his experience and that of a friend as prisoners of the Japanese in Thailand during World War II. It is neither a good nor memorable book, but it does raise, however unintentionally, significant issues. In a nation still bereft of a civil religion, that amalgam of myths and tales of heroes which defines a country’s sense of self and values, the experiences described by Mr Jackson should be honoured.

In this new book, Beverley Farmer quotes George Steiner: ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device.’ The blurb calls A Body of Water a montage. Well, it’s a difficult book to describe. It’s not a pasting together, there’s no smell of glue about it. Nor is it put together, plonk, thunk, like stones. It’s rather, in her own words, an interweaving.

The morning ABC radio program AM is not a book program. But occasionally we’re pleased to take the opportunity to broadcast the story of a new book, particularly when it comments on Australian public affairs. When John Pilger’s A Secret Country was published, AM ran an interview with the author which was unusually long for us, some five or six minutes. The response was remarkable. In my two years as presenter of the program, I can’t recall as much listener interest in any item, judging by the number of telephone enquiries about the book we received in subsequent days.

In September 1960, Jill Ker, aged twenty-six, left Australia for good. She was off to study history at Harvard and, as it turned out, to make a career as a high-flying academic administrator in the States. The ties she was breaking were those that bound her to her widowed mother and, above all, to Coorain, the thirty-thousand-acre property her father had acquired in 1929 as a soldier settler and where she had spent the first eleven years of her life. The Road from Coorain is her account – all the more moving for being carefully neutral in tone – of how those ties were formed as she grew up and how she reached her decision to break them.

Manning Clark will be remembered as a historian long after the last jot and tittle of the facts he amassed have been disputed and every revisionism has had its day, proving for those with the needful faith that he made it all up, that he was a waffler, that the diorama he presented as the history of Australia was nothing but an allegory of the inside of his head, and that it was all vanity and a striving after wind.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an affectionate look at Melbourne through the eyes of a drunken, literate, old member of its Establishment. There should, theoretically, be nothing wrong with the countless surreal situations which this takes us through in an effort to elucidate the soul of Australia’s most endearing city. There’s nothing wrong with a lost daughter sub-plot. There probably is something wrong with dragging in literati under such pseudonyms as F. Rank Morguehouse, Halloween Gurner, and Bob L. Arse – especially to those and of who believe Australian literature to be masturbatory enough already. But this element is merely a grain of sand against the reader’s neck. It is the whole uncomfortable yoke we must examine.