Melbourne University Publishing

In recent times, we hear, stars of TV serials such as Neighbours and Home and Away have been mobbed on arrival at Heathrow Airport, and recognized even in Finland – Australian production houses appear to have a talent for capturing on screen alluring fantasies and traumas for purveying to mass audiences, both home and away. The foundations for this sorely-needed export industry were doubtless laid in the 1940s and 50s, when Australian radio serials and drama were heard around the globe, at least in English-speaking countries (subtitles are difficult on radio). At home, hundreds of hours of drama were pumped out every year on ABC and commercial stations ...

Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood).

One of the defining features of recent years in Australian ‘literature’ (as I suppose we must call it), in tandem with a perceived growth in the quantity of fiction and poetry by women, titles reflecting the ethnic diversity of origin in more and more writers, and a growth industry in Aboriginal studies, has been the remarkable increase in sophistication of approach to biography. Perhaps more specifically, cultural biography.

At the conclusion of the fascinating essay ‘Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Cook’s Second Voyage’ in his recently published book Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, Bernard Smith writes:

The most carefully planned and the most scientifically and efficiently conducted expedition ever made up to its time in the realm of reality provided the poet with a world of wonder and a nucleus of recollections from whence emerged in its own good time the most romantic voyage ever undertaken in the realm of the imagination.

Sir Harry Chauvel, one of the founding fathers of the Australian Armed Forces, died in 1945. His involvement in the military and political history of Australia stretches back to the Boer War, through Gallipoli and Beersheba to the Volunteer Defence Corps of World War II. A.J. Hill’s affectionate and painstaking biography of Chauvel also implies concern for the present and future defence of the nation. At a time in popular repute when military sympathies of any kind are regarded as sabre-rattling, Hill’s book is welcome in both tone and content