Review

Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Gurr’s speech for the 1999 campaign – one made famous by the unexpected defeat of Premier Jeff Kennett – was launched in Ballarat. The 2006 campaign will be launched in Ballarat. Gurr is known in Labor circles as a ‘creative type’ (read: prolific, award-winning playwright of works such as Jerusalem and Sex Diary of an Infidel). I am also known as a ‘creative type’ (novelist and poet). And yet, despite all these coincidences and intersecting lines, not to mention the backbench of associates we have in common, Gurr and I had never met when a speech request landed on my desk a while back with the title ‘Michael Gurr book launch’. Of course, I knew of Gurr. Sort of.

In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)

At the heart of Anna Wierzbicka’s book is the argument that what people now call World English is not culturally neutral; that it has embedded in it the Anglo values of its origin. Wierzbicka points to many seemingly ordinary English words, words that we would never suspect of being culturally distinctive, that have no equivalents in other languages. Anglo speakers will be surprised to discover that the values these seemingly commonplace words carry are not universals. Good and bad are universals, but right and wrong are not; the concept of fairness is Anglo, and most other languages do not have words that correspond to fair, fairness and unfair. Even at the level of verbal phrases such as I think, I guess and I believe, and in English’s proliferation of adverbs such as probably, possibly, apparently and conceivably, English differs from all other languages.

When does an explorer become an adventurer, an adventurer a traveller, a traveller a tourist? This third volume of Raymond Howgego’s monumental Encyclopedia of Exploration moves into a period when the lines become increasingly blurred.

Volume One (2003) covered all of human history up to 1800. In that period, any traveller who left a written account of his or her journey could be counted as an ‘explorer’, and Howgego’s sheer stamina in seeking them all out made this one of the extraordinary books of our time. Most reference works of this scale are assembled by small armies of writers, researchers and editors, funded by major international publishers. The Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 was the work of one man, supported by the comparatively modest resources of Sydney antiquarian bookseller and boutique publisher, Hordern House.

Photography has always had a close relationship with death, indeed one of the more poignant catch cries of early portrait photography exhorted clients to ‘secure the shadow, before the substance fade’. An intriguing part of this emotionally charged territory is spirit photography – a sub-culture of photographs from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that purport to show ectoplasms, ghosts and auras of the dearly departed.

Michela Canepari-Labib is an Italian scholar of English literature and cultural theory. In Old Myths: Modern Empires, she sets out to map J.M. Coetzee’s work onto the major cultural theories of the twentieth century. Coetzee is just as familiar as she with the theories, and no doubt they have had their influence. But anyone can write novels based on Freud and Lacan: what is missing from Canepari-Labib’s account is everything that makes Coetzee worth reading.

Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.

Of late there has been a good deal of agitated conversation about the political attitudes of ordinary Australians. As Judith Brett and Anthony Moran point out in this compelling new book, this has often taken the form of a ‘war of words within the political élites’, with the right using its supposed empathy for everyday people as a weapon against intellectuals, and the left blaming the deficiencies of John Howard’s Australia on the narrow-minded selfishness of ordinary voters. As it is, those of us who live in ordinary outer suburbs can hardly open Melbourne’s Age newspaper without finding ourselves accused of something, from a new Australian ugliness and the death of manners to the decline of civilisation. Mind you, the thought of being spoken for by anything-but-ordinary people like Janet Albrechtsen is even more distasteful.