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The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.

On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy ... 

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’