NonFiction

Nigel Starck has read a lot of obituaries. His doctoral thesis was on the obituary and newspaper practice, and he teaches obituary composition in South Australia. This book, though, rarely rises above the commonplace. I suspect it is written as a text for students; the final chapter is ‘How to Write Obituaries’. Even students would find the content fairly undemanding. A chapter telling us that those who have their obituaries published are the famous, those who did famous things, those who associated with the famous, national heroes, villains and eccentrics is not rocket science.

On 18 January 2004 the Victorian cricket team defeated South Australia in an ING Cup match. After the game, some of the cricketers and officials, including the Victorian coach David Hookes, and their girlfriends, assembled at the Beaconsfield Hotel, in St Kilda. Hookes had played twenty-three test matches for Australia between 1977 and 1986, at an average of 34.36 runs. After retiring as a player, Hookes, beside his coaching duties, had carved out a successful career as a broadcaster and media commentator. As closing time approached, security staff informed the group that it was time to leave. Approximately fifteen minutes later in the car park, Hookes received a punch from security guard Zdravko Micevic, and fell and hit his head on the ground. He died in the early hours of the next morning. Micevic was charged with the crime of manslaughter, but was subsequently acquitted by a jury on the grounds of self-defence.

Occasionally, a television series on history is accompanied by an excellent book. Jacob Bronowski, anchorman for The Ascent of Man (1973), produced a book of the same name, the more remarkable because it lucidly explained complicated topics in the history of science. John Kenneth Galbraith’s challenging and quietly amusing The Age of Uncertainty (1977) came from another BBC series. Now the history of the twentieth century – or essentially the first half of it – is told and interpreted in this fascinating book by Niall Ferguson, a talented British historian who is a professor at Harvard University.

In Alice Pung’s memoir of her childhood, Unpolished Gem, her young self is drawn into a conflict between her mother and grandmother, both Chinese-Cambodian refugees. The child becomes a double agent, informing each about the other, until her mother accuses her of ‘word-spreading’ and threatens suicide. The child frets over her breakfast: ‘I always spread my jam on toast all the way to the very edges – no millimetre of bread is left blank and uncovered. My word-spreading habits are similar.’

Hands up those who know where Upper Ulam is. In what Melbourne convent school was Veronica Brady’s spiritual and aesthetic education nourished? Can anyone name Eva Sallis’s latest work of fiction or identify the school, somewhere outside Adelaide, where Sallis practised the violin and took her turn at milking the cow?

Mark Bowling was the ABC’s man in Indonesia from 1998 until 2002, and this book is an excellent account of the period of his posting. It covers a turbulent time in Indonesian life from May 1998, the end of the thirty-year Suharto regime, until May 2002, when the newly fledged nation of East Timor spread its wings. An epilogue adds his involvement in reporting on the most significant event in Indonesian affairs for Australians, the Bali bombing on 13 October 2002.

Phil Sparrow lived and worked as a UN aid worker in pre-9/11 Afghanistan for nearly three years. Evacuated when the country was attacked by the US, he returned to Australia and worked as an interpreter for Afghan refugees in Australia. In this book, Sparrow writes about his experiences in Afghanistan and Australia, and his reading of the Australian government’s response to refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan.

As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

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.

In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.