Archive

An author who calls his book Wonderful is asking for trouble. He is either very confident or unusually foolhardy. Andrew Humphreys’ second novel has some ‘wonderful’ things in it, but it is ultimately too much of a good thing: it is too long, and tries to cover too much ground. I know nothing of his first novel (The Weight of the Sun, 2001), but one thing that strikes this reader is that few Australian novels betray as little of their author’s country of origin as this does. Wonderful could as easily have been written in California or Hungary, to choose two of the novel’s locations. This seems to me to be a matter for praise; there is no reason why Australian novelists should be doggedly bent on explaining their country to their readers. In a grown-up country, authors, like filmmakers and artists, should locate their work and their themes wherever inclination leads them. Nationalism is one of art’s corsets.

The new edition of Henry Reynolds’s acclaimed The Law of The Land is described on its front cover as ‘the ground-breaking book about land rights in Australia’, but ‘the heart-breaking book’ would be more apt. Reynolds has updated his classic text by documenting the progress (or otherwise) of native title since the 1992 Mabo High Court decision. It is not a happy story.

In the book’s first edition, published in 1987, Reynolds advanced the argument that native title rights were recognised – but not properly protected –under British common law in the early nineteenth century. On the frontier, where violence ruled, those legal rights were generally disregarded, but, as Reynolds argued, not necessarily explicitly extinguished. The thesis outlined in The Law of the Land is popularly believed to have been influential in the 1992 Mabo judgement, a perception fuelled in part by Reynolds himself. In the postscript to the book’s second edition, published in 1992, soon after the Mabo decision was handed down, he wrote:

[T]he court had clearly absorbed the lessons about Australian history embodied in the new historiography of European-Aboriginal relations that had been written over the previous twenty years. Law and history now coincided in the view that the Aborigines were not dispossessed in an apocalyptic moment in 1788 but in piecemeal fashion over a long period of time.

There is a wonderful sense of liberation in the title of this short novel: a sense of being able to gaze at a distant blue horizon and sniff salty sea air. It provides an exhilarating contrast with the atmosphere of claustrophobia suggested in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s work of similar length and loosely comparable themes. But whereas the Underground Man rarely ventures into the street and never strays far from St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the nameless protagonist of lgor Gelbach’s tale moves constantly between Leningrad, Moscow and Sukhumi. Sukhumi is a Georgian resort town on the Black Sea, where Rubin, a theatre director and friend of the dilettante narrator, owns a little-used apartment. Rubin prods our narrator to stay in it and enjoy the sun, the palm trees, the esplanade and the coffee, but also to write a novel about a certain theoretical physicist called Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest was one of the circle surrounding Albert Einstein in the early years of the twentieth century when Einstein spent five years in St Petersburg. The narrator is not averse to the project, but even when he occupies the Sukhumi apartment, the muse remains elusive.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans have been asking why the world hates them. Now it’s Australia’s tum. Why do Asians applaud when Dr Mahathir mocks us? Why docs the Indonesian prime minister snub Australian leaders? Why, despite progress with bilateral trade agreements, do we seem to be permanently locked out of organisations such as ASEAN and ASEM?

At one point in A War for Gentlemen, a school-teacher is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to her class in rural New South Wales in 1872. Seven-year-old Annie Fitzhenry excitedly announces that her father had fought for the North during the US Civil War. When the teacher subsequently visits Annie’s home, both she and the child are abruptly undeceived. Charles Fitzhenry is indeed a veteran of that war, but had served in the Confederate army.

Harriet Beecher Slowe forcefully argued that the disintegration of the families of slaves was perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slavery. In French’s novel, it is racial prejudice that separates parents, children and siblings – tragically, because entirely unnecessarily.

It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.

Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

Lawrence Bourke’s A Cold Touch begins with a poem called ‘Advice to a Failure’. Expressed with such force as to render grammar a secondary consideration, its argument is hard to grasp al first, but the poem is only technically meaningless: it contains, I think, an important truth:

The committee can stick
their mate with medals until the man’s all brass
but his brilliant chest will never help him frame
a line to shine like those of poets who came
to nothing but writing well writing for themselves
and us the simple truths some call fiction.

The line that shines, in other words, is a prize that outshines the brass and medals. Few, I suspect, would disagree with Bourke on this specific point. But why is something so uncontroversial expressed with such conspicuous force? Is Bourke, I wonder, as baffled as I am as to why certain books get medals at all?