Allen & Unwin

The only surviving image of George Bass is surrounded by as much mystery as his death. It is a photograph of a painting that has now disappeared, thought to have been painted in about 1800. A handsome young man looks straight out at the viewer, with a faintly supercilious smirk. His hair is tied back and perhaps powdered – old-fashioned, I would have thought, for a young man in 1800, when Bass was only twenty-nine. Bass is known to every eastern-states schoolchild as half of Bass and Flinders, famous for their exploits in Tom Thumb – actually two different small open boats in which they explored the south coast of New South Wales at different times. Matthew Flinders proposed that Bass Strait be so named because it was Bass’s 1797–98 voyage in a whaleboat that had convinced him that it must be a strait rather than a bay, and led to their circumnavigation of Tasmania in the Norfolk, in 1798–99.

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

‘Time will tell’ is an old adage that, in a peculiar way, links and separates these three different tales. While Victor Kelleher’s moving and poetic Dogboy lures readers into the harsh ‘Dry’ of a time that never was and never will be, Jutta Goetze’s story plunges into snow-bound Bavaria, in a time both familiar and strange to contemporary audiences. Kerry Greenwood, on the other hand, situates her futuristic sci-fi in a place and era at once known and yet irrevocably altered; creating an anachronistic story that is both challenging and exciting. All of these writers rely on temporality to both weave and anchor their stories with differing results.

True crime is experiencing a boom these days. Its popularity is directly connected to the number of forensic investigative shows on television. The average viewer of CSI probably knows more about criminal profiling and blood pattern analysis than most retired police officers. At least one book, it seems, is published on every major murder committed in Australia. Some murders warrant the public’s attention more than others; they represent turning points in our society. A good example is the disappearance on 15 July 1977 of Liberal parliamentary candidate and anti-marijuana crusader Donald Mackay from a hotel car park in the Riverina town of Griffith. That evening, Mackay left the Griffith Hotel and headed for his van. A local accountant heard a groaning noise and three ‘whip cracks’. By eight o’clock that night, when Mackay hadn’t returned home, his wife became worried. At midnight, Barbara Mackay rang the Griffith police and reported her husband missing. She had been wary of calling the local police earlier because she didn’t trust them – and with good reason. Early next morning, Mackay’s solicitor found the locked van in the hotel car park. Three spent cartridges lay on the ground, and Mackay’s keys were nearby. Blood was smeared on the front mudguard, the side door and front wheel; the blood type matched Mackay’s. Despite an exhaustive search and a large government reward, his body was never found.

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.