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UQP

John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in several reworkings of his mental illness.

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Four artists have taken the natural world – its wildlife, its ecology, and its geology – and produced four books with entirely different aims. Kim Michelle Toft describes The World That We Want (UQP, $26.95hb, 32 pp) as ‘one that protects, feeds and shelters everything that lives on it’. Essentially, this is a factual book, but one suffused with a sense of wonder because of Toft’s exquisite pictures. Are We There Yet? (Are We There Yet? A Journey Around Australia, Viking, $24.95hb, 32 pp) is Alison Lester’s bubbling account of a family’s ‘journey around Australia’, with cheerful pictures of boab trees, fairy penguins and everything in between. Again, it is factual; if you want to know what a quokka looks like, just find the right picture. This is not so true of Graeme Base’s Jungle Drums (Viking, $29.95hb, 38 pp); although the leopard, the elephant and the warthogs are clearly recognisable in the early pictures, by the middle of the story they all look strange.

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These titles are aimed at a primary school readership, yet there’s a wide gap in both ability and life experience between the emerging readers at one end and the almost-teenagers at the other. Some novels successfully bridge that gap, but I’m not sure The Reef (FACP, $14.95 pb, 128 pp) is one of them, despite the publisher’s classification that this is ‘for children aged 8–12 years’. It is certainly an exciting story of suspected murder and missing silver coins, but consider some elements of the plot: Tom, the young protagonist, is menaced and harassed by two nasty out-of-towners who threaten him with death and so terrify him that he has nightmares; while swimming, he’s pursued and threatened with a speargun; later, he’s assaulted and kidnapped, a sack is tied over his head, and he’s taken out to sea and thrown overboard in the expectation that he’ll be battered to death on the reef.

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Home by Larissa Behrendt

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August 2004, no. 263

A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.

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‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.

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The Secret World of Annette Robinson by Paulette Gittins & Percussion by Jay Verney

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June-July 2004, no. 262

Jay Verney’s voice is not unlike Gillian Mears’s – rich, confident and brimming with adroit asides. Verney frequently stops to smell the roses, and dig around the compost. She observes the variations of a landscape, the behaviour of her characters, the nature of an institution. Here she is on a McDonald’s restaurant in Palm Springs: ‘It was America in metaphor, though without the crazed gunman to add that final touch of piquant authenticity.’

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Pastures of the Blue Crane by Hesba Brinsmead & The Green Wind and the Wind is Silver by Thurley Fowler

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June-July 2004, no. 262

Classics, like policemen, are getting younger. Pastures of the Blue Crane (1964) and By the Sandhills of Yamboorah (1965), the first two books reissued by the University of Queensland Press in their welcome ‘Children’s Classics’ series, are not those Australian children’s books (strangely supposed by many of my age cohort not to exist) that I read as a child, but the next generation, published in the mid-1960s when I was a young adult.

Thurley Fowler’s books were first published even more recently, in 1985 and 1991 respectively, but, like those of Reginald Ottley and Hesba Brinsmead, they are classics in that they breathe wonderful, idiosyncratic life into the people, times and legends that have helped to form today’s Australia.

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In ‘St Patrick’s College’ a poem that appears in his 1975 collection Immigrant Chronicle, Peter Skrzynecki recalls the last day of school, when ‘mass was offered up for our departing intentions’, after which the young Peter makes his way home, ‘taking the right-hand turn out of Edgar Street for good’. It is characteristic of Skrzynecki that he should locate such a crucial turning point in his life so precisely, naming the very street that led him to it. It is this impulse to map, to plot the coordinates of a life, that lies behind much of Skrzynecki’s work, forming a grid by which he reads the past and makes sense of it. ‘The streets of Regents Park,’ he says elsewhere, ‘run through my blood /even though I don’t live there anymore’.

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Kathryn Lomer’s Extraction of Arrows is a fine first book. It is more unified than most, but with a varied enough poetic base to make one interested in the poems that Lomer will write in the future. Its essential feature is a tight focus on the self; as lyric poetry should be, it is ‘self-centred’, without any of the pejorative overtones of that phrase. At almost all points, we are aware of the poet herself, a body existing alongside a compendium of moods, experiences and emotions. It is a carefully observed body, especially in a poem such as ‘Linea Nigra’, which begins:

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The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the South Sea Islands edited by Roslyn Jolly & Robert Louis Stevenson edited by Roger Robinson

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April 2004, no. 260

Whether it’s fate or mere coincidence, the life stories of the two most celebrated writers of the Pacific – Robert Louis Stevenson and Albert Wendt – dovetail together on the small tropical island of Upolu in Western Samoa. In 1889, when Stevenson concluded his third Pacific cruise on the Janet Nichol, he told his readers in Europe and America that: ‘Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm trees and trade-wind fan them till they die.’ In hindsight, this reads as a premonition, but, after years of ill-health Stevenson was seduced and invigorated by sweet air and unexpected interests, describing his time during the Pacific voyages as ‘passing like days in fairyland’.

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