Archive

Ugh: today I realised Colleen McCullough’s latest book (her fifteenth), Angel Puss, which ABR sent to me several weeks ago, needs to be read, reviewed and dispatched by January 3. The dust jacket précis reveals that this novel is ‘exhilarating’ and ‘takes us back to 1960 and Sydney’s Kings Cross – and the story of a young woman determined to defy convention’ ...

Spirit Wrestlers takes its title from ‘Doukhobors’, the name adopted by a strict religious sect that originated in Russia and that was harshly repressed both by the tsarist state and the church. The Society of Friends, attracted by the Doukhobors’ pacifist beliefs and by their prayer meetings, which reject liturgy ...

What a phenomenon Bryce Courtenay is. In a world where we are constantly being told that books are on the way out, he sells them by the barrow-load. They’re big books, too. This one weighs 1.2 kilograms and is seven centimetres thick. It’s the kind of book that makes a reviewer wish she was paid ...

In 1954, Tom Inglis Moore established the first full-year university course in Australian literature at Canberra University College. English departments in Australian universities had until then resisted anything more than a token presence of Australian texts in their literature courses, many academics agreeing with Adelaide’s Professor J.I.M. Stewart that there wasn’t any Australian literature. Sadly, Inglis Moore’s pioneering initiative was to prove only a provisional victory in the continuing struggle for appropriate recognition of the national literature. When he retired in 1966, his Australian literature course was relegated to alternate years, and his parting plea that the Australian National University establish a chair in the national literature was ignored. In 1973, the ANU English department refused to appoint a specialist lecturer in Australian literature, prompting Dorothy Green to resign in protest. Fifty years after that first dedicated course, there are still only two established chairs in Australian literature in Australian universities – Sydney and James Cook.

On the back cover of Don Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, the entry for ‘absolute certainty’ is reproduced: ‘1. Beyond a doubt; scout’s honour; on impeccable authority, irrefutable evidence; watertight, ironclad; London to a brick; bet your arse (or ass) on it. 2. Not necessarily the case.’ The first definition offers the standard, transparent meanings; the second offers its ‘weasel-word’ meaning – what it means when it is minced through the minds of ‘the powerful, the treacherous and the unfaithful’, particularly bureaucrats and politicians. A citation from Vice President Dick Cheney on 2 September 2002 demonstrates weaseling or weasling in action (see Kate Burridge’s discussion of the process of haplology in her book Weeds in the Garden of Words for the likely transformation of ‘weaseling’ into ‘weasling’): the weaselly vice president says: ‘We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to build a nuclear weapon.

This book fulfils two objectives. Within popular culture’s contribution to concepts of national identity, it energises a gap left in cinema studies by taking the contemporary discussion from the 1990s through to Japanese Story (Brooks, 2003). Secondly, it attempts to place films produced in the last ten years within the context of what the authors clearly believe to be the single most important recent event in the positioning of a dialogue between white and Aboriginal populations about belonging. That event is the Mabo decision of 1992 by the High Court that native title did exist at the time of the British invasion in 1788. The authors contend that this decision marks a watershed in the political unconscious of the nation. The assumption of terra nullius, that the land was not occupied and therefore entailed no transaction of settlement rights, was overthrown. More contentiously, they argue that this decision has caused a deep trauma in the white community, symptoms of which may be seen in the movement for reconciliation. At the heart of their study is the idea that this trauma is entangled in the major themes of most, if not all, the films produced locally post-Mabo.

David McKnight made the first of many field trips to Mornington Island in 1966, when the old people could still remember how it was before the white men came. The Lardil largely escaped the violence that accompanied white intrusion, and had kept possession of their land, although in time they were made to share it with survivors from the region. A mission, established in 1914, had preserved them from further predation, but at a cost: hunter-gatherers were rounded up and made to live cheek-by-jowl in a ‘supercamp’ close by the mission, and their children were taken to be raised and educated by the missionaries, with only casual contact with their parents.

From his precocious youth in inner-city Sydney until his death – still in harness at the age of seventy-five – the Australian photographer Frank Hurley lived for ‘adventure and romance’. By any standards, his was an extraordinary career. Yet the individual delineations of its great landmarks have blurred in the factual catalogue of Hurley’s achievements in two Antarctic expeditions during the cradle period of exploration in that great southern continent; in his work as an official photographer during the two world wars; in his pioneering of filmed documentaries and as a cinematographer in the making of major Australian feature films in the 1930s. In the last twenty years of his career, Hurley travelled the length and breadth of his own country, celebrating its people and eulogising what he saw to be the heroic Australian landscape. Always restless, always yearning for the next challenge, Hurley was a citizen of the world. He was drawn to record the cultures of the ancient world and, closer to home, aspects of New Guinea and the Pacific.