Garrie Hutchinson

It is one of life’s ironies that war can bring out the best in people, and writers are no exception. Picture Australian seaman Ray Parkin as he toiled like a slave for the Japanese on the Thai–Burma railway during World War II. Despite the brutality and privations, Parkin felt that the experience would ‘not be entirely wasted’ if he could somehow get his diary and drawings home when it was all over. These were crucial, for, as he wrote, ‘Memory is not enough’. Parkin’s reflections go to the kernel of oral versus written memory, and why humans write in the first place: to make a record that can speak by itself, even when the writer is dead. His words could also serve as an appropriate epigraph to Eyewitness, a collection of diaries, memoirs, correspondents’ reports and analysis, all composed by Australians at ‘the front-line’ of wars and conflicts.

Gideon Haigh likes cricket, literature and history, and his writings on cricket are accordingly shrewd, learned and illuminating. He writes particularly well of Jack Gregory and of George Headley. Gregory was the embodiment of the Anzac legend: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, an artilleryman in the Great War. He played for an AIF eleven in England after the war, took dazzling close catches, demolished Cambridge University with ferocious fast bowling and went on to test match triumphs with Australia against Eng-land in the 1920s. Injuries that so often cut down bowlers of explosive pace curtailed his career. Headley, on the other hand, was a batsman in the early West Indian sides, a black man in teams of mixed race captained always by whites, representing a divided nation of particularist energies. Haigh writes with great understanding of the immense difficulty of maintaining form, as Headley did, in a team that always lost.

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.