Archive

The Australian migrant experience is often regarded through the prism of the postwar experience and the waves of immigration and exodus, chiefly from Europe. Today, except among historians, the settlement of Australia is often the butt of colonial and convict humour, or the stuff of pop-cultural iconography and self-identification. This comes at the expense of a true appreciation and understanding of Australia’s rich cultural and demographic origins. In the light of recent cultural debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism, it is clear that our understanding of our society, and the varied backgrounds of its constituents, is wanting.

There has been no escaping Graeme Blundell lately. There was Catharine Lumby’s astute reappraisal of his image-making Alvin Purple for the Currency Australian Classics series; and, as I write, the advertisements for the new local documentary Not Quite Hollywood feature a bare-chested Blundell in a pair of unforgivable 1970s flares. Now, here is his own account of how he got to be that way – and a good deal more.

Blundell was branded for years by the Alvin persona, that of the improbable sex symbol, irresistibly attractive to women who are turned on by this short, faintly nerdish suburban lad with a curious magnetism invisible to the naked eye. And naked, of course, was the key word. There is a good more to Blundell than the Alvin image, but let’s get it out of the way first.

Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia Falconer’s task, as editor of The Penguin Book of the Road, is less straightforward, being concerned with how we travel rather than where we arrive, with highways but also with indirect, crooked ways. In a masterly and challenging introduction, she warns us of what to expect.

Australia’s obsession with Greece goes back a long way; it has not always been as warm as we might like to think. The George Johnston–Charmian Clift–Sidney Nolan kind of love affair with the islands could sometimes turn a bit sour: think of Patrick White or demeaning references to the ubiquitous Olympic Café in films and stories. The temptation of writing in these well-established furrows is to exploit the subject matter rather than explore it.

Antarctic exploration began with Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the continent (1772–75) and continued intermittently until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Douglas Mawson’s three expeditions coincided with what has been called the ‘heroic era of Antarctic exploration’, beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4) and ending with Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–17). Four out of the twenty expeditions undertaken in this period stand out: those of Roald Amundsen, Mawson, Shackleton and Scott. However, the present-day polar adventurer Ranulph Fiennes has argued that Mawson did not achieve the fame of the other three, even in Australia, because he survived his explorations and died in old age.

Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.

In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern writing, not just as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a modern aesthetic based on the experience of city life. More than any other French poet of his time, he marks the transition from the Romantic to a proto-modernist poetic style and stance. T.S. Eliot recognised the nature of this achievement when he said that for him the significance of Les Fleurs du mal was summed up in the first lines of ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’), in Baudelaire’s vision of the ‘teeming city, city full of dreams, / where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passer-by’. ‘I knew what that meant,’ Eliot said, ‘because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.’

Does it matter whether Robert Schumann suffered a slow, passive and continuous decline towards the madness of his last two years or, as John Worthen strongly affirms, a sudden descent into psychosis after a creative lifetime marked by personal resilience and determination? Many people would argue that it is particularly important in music not to let biography get in the way of hearing what the composer has created in sound, if for no other reason than that it could hinder music’s special freedom to mean quite different things to different listeners.