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The Facing Island: A Personal History by Jan Bassett

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October 2002, no. 245
Joy Hooton reviews ‘The Facing Island: A Personal History’ by Jan Bassett

The facing island in Jan Bassett’s memoir is Phillip Island, where her maternal grandparents had a dairy farm and where it seems she was most emotionally at home. Summer holidays there as a child in the 1960s, in the midst of her grandmother’s extended family and surrounded by familiar tokens of past decades reaching as far back as the early 1900s, undoubtedly sparked her lifelong commitment to Australian history. The title, taken from Peter Rose’s poem ‘Balnarring Beach’ (‘The facing island, a mortal blue, / beckons, intensifies, vanishes’), could hardly be more appropriate, compressing in a few words much of the emotional intensity of Bassett’s autobiographical last journey.

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Lexical Images: The story of the Australian national dictionary by Bill Ramson

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November 2002, no. 246
Nick Hudson reviews ‘Lexical Images: The story of the Australian national dictionary’ by Bill Ramson

Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.

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Death of a Notary: Conquest and change in colonial New York by Donna Merwick

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September 2002, no. 244
Peter McPhee reviews 'Death of a Notary: Conquest and change in colonial New York' by Donna Merwick

‘He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.’ Thus Donna Merwick invites us into this sad and instructive tale about the colonial Dutch world of North America.

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'September 11: A Symposium'

September 2002, no. 244

Never far from one’s mind these days, the events of September 11, 2001, and their direct aftermath in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had to be prominent in this month’s issue of ABR, such is their complex resonance and ubiquitous iconography. To complement Morag Fraser’s essay in this issue on the consequences of ‘September 11’ for civic ...

La Trobe University Essay | 'On September 11' by Morag Fraser

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September 2002, no. 244

Primo Levi, in two interviews given almost twenty years ago*, set a standard of critical sympathy that is not only exemplary, but peculiarly apt to the fraught debate about the post-September 11 world and the USA’s place and reputation within it.

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Eddie Gilbert by Mike Colman and Ken Edwards & Mark Waugh by James Knight

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September 2002, no. 244
Gideon Haigh reviews 'Eddie Gilbert: The true story of an Aboriginal cricketing legend' by Mike Colman and Ken Edwards, and 'Mark Waugh: The biography' by James Knight

This summer, browsers will probably find these chronicles of Eddie Gilbert and Mark Waugh snuggled close together in bookshops. Both, after all, are biographies of Australian cricketers, written by journalists, and published by firms with strong sporting backlists. But their proximity will be misleading. Cricket contains few less similar careers, and has generated few more different narrative styles. Indeed, reading them consecutively is to appreciate how stealthily our understanding of ‘biography’ has been elasticised.

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See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave by Julian Meyrick

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September 2002, no. 244
Helen Thomson reviews ‘See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave’ by Julian Meyrick

It is snatching some kind of victory out of defeat, I suppose, to write a Ph.D. thesis about the rise and fall of a theatre company, and Julian Meyrick has successfully transformed thesis into book. This has been achieved mainly through very good writing; lively, intelligent and uncluttered by jargon. The formal paraphernalia of the thesis – notes, appendices, statistics, bibliography and index – are not only useful in themselves, but crucial evidence for the argument.

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Letters - September 2002

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September 2002, no. 244

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Inga Clendinnen responds to John Hirst

Dear Editor,

I want to respond to John Hirst’s rather avuncular dismissal of Rosemary Neill’s White Out (ABR, August 2002). John is an old friend, and I have often relied on his goodwill and good sense, but I disagreed with just about every sentence of his evaluation of O’Neill’s excellent book. In fact, I think his review exemplifies the kind of predetermined politicised response that Neill and other engaged analysts of the Aboriginal condition are up against. Some Aborigines and whites have been ‘speaking the truth’ about the devastating disintegration of some Aboriginal communities for years. What is ‘new’ is that more of us are beginning to turn from our absorbing in-house squabbles to listen to what they are saying. We are being made to hear that the earnest diagnoses and recommendations we have been making over the last three decades appear to be mistaken. It is not only that Aborigines are dying earlier. Now they are suffering more before they die.

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Ideological Moments

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September 2002, no. 244

The history of emancipation.

Overtaken, riding uphill.

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Franca by Franca Arena & Speaking for Myself Again by Cheryl Kernot

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September 2002, no. 244
Craig Sherborne reviews ‘Franca: My story’ by Franca Arena and ‘Speaking for Myself Again: Four years with Labor and beyond’ by Cheryl Kernot

If Cheryl Kernot writes another book – and if Speaking for Myself Again is anything to go by, you had better hope she doesn’t – her publishers should at the very least make sure the punctuation police do their job. It appears they didn’t even show up to the scene of the accident this time. Exclamation marks are strewn throughout the work. Each time Kernot wants to bitterly labour a point, up pops an exclamation mark, as if she’s hitting the keyboard and cursing, ‘Take that you bastards’. Thus we get: ‘And some people can be so rude!’; ‘Women have sustained me!’; ‘I could write a whole book on my experiences with the media. Perhaps I will!’; and ‘Opinion rules!’ In a teen diary, that’s fine, but not in a book by a former senior federal parliamentarian.

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