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Review

Clara’s Witch by Natalie Andrews & Midnight Water by Gaylene Perry

by
November 2004, no. 266

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

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Luther’s Pine is a beautiful account of an old man’s encounter with his younger self. John Molony’s life has an iconic quality. His father fought on the Western Front during World War I, sustaining injury from mustard gas, before returning to marriage and settlement in the Mallee area of Western Victoria, close to Sea Lake. Sea Lake was also the home of John Shaw Neilsen. Young Molony, born in 1927, shared some of Neilsen’s ability to find beauty in an arid landscape: ‘in that poor country, no pauper was I.’

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Frank Welsh is ill-served by his publicists. His history of Australia, we are told, is the first to be written by a non-Australian. It is not: the American Hartley Grattan wrote probably the best of a number of earlier such works. Great Southern Land is trumpeted as drawing on sources from Britain, the US, South Africa and Canada to place Australia fully in a world context: in fact, it incorporates some material from British archives and fragments from elsewhere to illustrate Australia’s more obvious international links.

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In 1830, Georgiana Molloy stepped ashore at the remote settlement of Augusta, accompanying her husband to a new life in Western Australia. Maggie MacKellar tells us that:

Three weeks later, in the month of May, when in England spring bursts from every hedgerow, Georgiana lay on a plank of wood in her tent, with an umbrella held over her to keep off the drips that leaked in through the canvas. Outside the rain poured down. There was no sweet scent of spring; instead the air was filled with the rank, harsh smell of eucalyptus. Around her the earth opened itself to welcome the winter season. Racked with contraction after contraction, Georgiana fought to give birth to her first child.

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I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

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The leading early geologist in Australia was Reverend William Branwhite Clarke (1798–1878). His father was a blind schoolmaster in a Suffolk village, and the family was not well off. Still, they managed to send William to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied to enter the church. During his time as a student, he came under the influence of the redoubtable professor of geology Adam Sedgwick and took up geology seriously. Nevertheless, he became a clergyman and held a series of minor ecclesiastical positions, besides teaching at his father’s old school for a period. He also undertook geological studies, was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society and published a number of (fairly minor) papers in Britain.

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Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.

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Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

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Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Quite who is to blame for this occupies much of the first half of Timms’s book. Artists hell-bent on having careers rather than seeking vocations are part of the problem, and so are curators of contemporary art who nourish the artist’s every need. Art schools are next, where cultural theory has replaced the teaching of art history. The superficialities and the susceptibility to trendiness in the Australia Council are further contributors.

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Proof & Truth: The humanist as expert edited by Iain McCalman and Ann McGrath

by
June-July 2004, no. 262

In his opening essay in this book, Hal Wootten, former judge and law dean, asserts that lawyers and historians are ‘natural allies’. It is certainly true that the common law system builds on reports of the resolution of cases decided long ago and far away. In that sense, legal history lies at the heart of the technique of Australia’s legal system.

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