Reviews

To borrow from Jones and Bassett: ‘Not another Kelly book!’ Well, yes; in fact two more can be added to last year’s bumper crop. One of them comes from Kelly Country itself, written by two local residents. And the two books provide a perfect example of the extremes in the Kelly publishing game.

We who have a colonial past may not remember, nor want to remember, that our forebears had an attitude towards the French something akin to the attitude currently being shown towards them by those thugs in the White House and the US fast-food chains who have declared that they will stop adding to global obesity with ‘french fries’ and do it instead with ‘freedom fries’.

Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

When the shiny new word ‘Surrealism’ was first minted, it was easy to find a shower of retrospective applications for it. The congested canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, for one, still spring to mind, though we need retrace our steps no further than that cauldron of economic and philosophical instability – the period between the two world wars – to pinpoint its official beginnings. In 1917, one year before a combat wound despatched him, Guillaume Apollinaire used the term to describe the ‘unleashing of zany creativity’ in the ballet Parade.

There were many players. Some were unsuspecting recruits; others signed up with alacrity. One of the former was Sigmund Freud, whose exploration of the subconscious mind and how it underwrote the inclinations of humanity at large gave a boost to those painters whose strange conjunctions of imagery had been prompted by free association and a dragging of the subconscious seabed to snare the detritus of dreams and nightmares.

This is a novel about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Two of these women are artists, and the third is a medical practitioner. Wendy James explores creativity and the price it exacts, especially if the artist is a woman. James is also interested in biography, its limitations and potentially destructive effects. The title, The Steele Diaries, refers to the journals of a celebrated book-illustrator, Zelda Steele. In the 1960s, Zelda is a young mother of two, temporarily living separately from her husband when, mysteriously, she dies by drowning in the local river. This occurs just as she is fulfilling her potential as an artist. The main narrative is a first-person account by Zelda’s (now adult) daughter, Ruth, a doctor who has spent her life resenting her famous mother and modelling herself on her beloved father, Richard, the respected GP of an outback country town. Ruth’s inner journey towards an adult understanding of her mother and, thence, herself provides the central narrative. The trajectory begins immediately after her father’s death in the late 1990s, when Ruth is contacted by Douglas Grant, an international art critic and biographer of her long dead grandmother, modernist landscape painter Annie Steele. Annie was the first wife of painter Ed Steele, Australia’s most famous modernist artist. Douglas Grant, a lover of Zelda’s when they were young, is aware that she kept a journal and now wants to base a biography upon it. Grant is convinced that it must have been in Richard’s possession during the years since Zelda’s death.

This is Agnes Nieuwenhuizen’s third guide to teenage reading: Good Books for Teenagers (1992) was followed by More Good Books for Teenagers (1995). Thankfully, this latest instalment is not Even More Good Books for Teenagers, but the much less prescriptively titled Right Book, Right Time: 500 Great Reads for Teenagers. Whereas ‘good’ collocated all too easily with ‘a good breakfast’ – as in bran – ‘great’ communicates a certain quality of excellence or a joyful exclamation. Either way, we immediately understand that when there is chemistry between young people and books something exciting, of both literary and personal significance, is going on.

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.

The Currency Press’s series ‘Australian Screen Classics’ is off to a good start. With playwright Louis Nowra’s Walkabout, thorough in its production, analysis and reception mode, novelist Christos Tsiolkas’s The Devil’s Playground, a study in personal enchantment, an Age film reviewer Adrian Martin’s The Mad Max Movies, an action fan’s impassioned response to the trilogy, the series makes clear that it will not be settling for a predictable template.

For anyone who has not seen Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) for some years, Nowra’s study will evoke it with clarity and, because the book is also at times provocative, make another viewing essential. Nowra makes his intentions clear from the outset: he plans to trace ‘the process from the novel, to the preparation, to the filming and then, reception of the film’, and the structure of the book follows this blueprint. His admiration for the film is palpable, though this doesn’t stop him from criticising effects he finds too obvious.