Hardie Grant Books

Ninety years after the Great War, the bones of those who died are still rattling the consciences of succeeding generations. Two years ago, there were frantic diplomatic exchanges between Australia and Turkey as the possibility emerged that the remains of Anzacs may have been disturbed as a result of road widening – ironically, to enable contemporary pilgrims to ‘pay their respects’ to those very bones. A complex bureaucratic tug-of-war has also been simmering over the whereabouts of the bones of approximately 170 Australians who died behind German lines at the battle of Fromelles on 19–20 July 1916.

Readers of The Australian could not fail to have noticed the numerous articles written by Kevin Donnelly over the last few years complaining about the ‘parlous’ state of Australian education. With extraordinary repetition, Donnelly has called for a return to a syllabus approach, the books of the canon and teacher-directed literature classes, where students are presented with universal truths.

Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

Years before I had set foot in Italy, Masaccio’s frescoes, even in flat reproduction, opened a bright chink into a time and place not my own. There were the indelible faces, the bustle, colour, the human jousting – life so vivid, foreign and shockingly familiar. Vintage is the literary harvest of ten years of a writers’ festival in Mildura. If, like me, you have never been, this is your Masaccio ticket of entry into a decade of conversations, poems, stories, essays, recipes, letters, music and song. Vintage could be a ragbag, but it isn’t. It could be a self-congratulatory riff, but it isn’t, because the writing is of such quality and because the presiding figure of Stefano de Pieri gives the volume coherence and verve.

Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.