Archive

George Barrington was a fascinating man, and Nathan Garvey is his latest ‘victim’. Barrington’s life was a source of almost daily fascination to eighteenth-century contemporaries; some mystery still surrounds him. His birth date remains equivocal – was it 1755 or 1758? Church records don’t survive to help here, but it was probably the former. Were his parents artisans to the Irish gentry – a silversmith and mantua-maker – or less skilled workers? Even his name is a matter of antiquarian enquiry. The fact remains that George Barrington, the gentleman Prince of Pickpockets, well-known convict traveller to Botany Bay and putative author, appeared to the world in various celebrated guises and captured popular attention. He occupies an ambiguous place in the world of crime, history and fiction.

Anne Manne’s publisher invites us to include So This Is Life in the classical canon of autobiographies of Australian childhood – Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. In Australian letters there has been a long tradition of autobiographical writing of childhood; this produced some of the earliest critical writing on autobiography – by Richard Coe and Joy Hooton, for example. But I remain unconvinced by the MUP blurb, for Manne’s essays do not take us back to Porter or Gaita at all. Rather, they suggest the rich and dreamy vignettes of David Malouf’s autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street or the precisely observed rural domesticity that is captured in Olga Masters’s Cobargo stories. Daisy, Lily and Ivy, Manne’s great-aunts, all unmarried, who live together in the formerly grand but now decaying two-storey house where ‘absolutely nothing happened’, recall Masters’s ‘home girls’; Manne’s affective memory of her grandmother’s linen cupboard recalls the childhood perception and memory work that Malouf captures so powerfully.

This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).

Not surprisingly, publishers often claim that their latest offering takes the reader down a path never before trodden, to reveal new insights and understandings of well-worn topics and events. The Path of Infinite Sorrow is no exception, with the promise of a ‘whole new perspective’ on the Japanese side of the story of the Kokoda campaign in Papua during the early stages of World War II. In recent years, the status of Kokoda has challenged that of Gallipoli in the national consciousness, with a number of lengthy tomes, guidebooks, journal articles and newspaper articles, not to mention a feature movie, devoted to the campaign. But why another book, and does it offer anything new?

Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry is an astonishing book. Its surprise consists in its topic, style, passion, range of religious and philosophical scholarship, and its daring blend of human depth and philosophical originality. Johnston describes it as an essay that ‘gradually evolves into a sort of jeremiad’. There are plenty of complaints, and it is at times a tirade, especially in the final chapter, but the term ‘jeremiad’ does too little justice to the book’s subtlety and persuasive intelligence.

One view of the relationship between the word and the creative act is Goethe’s admonition: ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’ – ‘Create, [the German word actually places more emphasis on the idea of shaping and forming than on artistic imagination] artist, don’t talk’. Typically, of course, his own Conversations with Eckermann (1823–32) show him frequently ignoring this precept, when the occasion (or the questioner) demands. And the last forty years have seen a proliferation of books in which actors, directors and designers talk – sometimes revealingly, sometimes unproductively – about their approach to the creative or re-creative act.

[I]magine that a dictator had decreed that all publications in the future must be signed ‘Anon’, on pain of imprisonment. This would clear the ground of all but the most dedicated and necessary authors, allow trees to breathe more freely, and diminish the carbon imbalance. It is worth thinking about.

This is a celebration of Aboriginal survival on the Georges River, a river which snakes through the south-western suburbs of Sydney and disgorges into Botany Bay.

It is always a pleasure to sit down with a fat book by New Zealand historian James Belich. He writes with verve and takes a big-picture view of the past, giving you plenty to think about and, better still, much to argue with. Until lately he has been mainly known for his fine-grained histories of New Zealand and its Maori Wars. Now he ascends to the stratosphere for an Olympian survey of white folks pouring in astonishing numbers into the newly accessible regions of Australasia, Africa, Siberia and the Americas during the nineteenth century. From this exalted perspective they look like nothing so much as a great swarm of bees diverging into several different streams in search of new hives. There had been nothing like this concentrated great voluntary migration in the history of mankind.