Archive

This review of some contentious criminal cases in Australia over the last thirty years purports to demonstrate how the processes of the criminal law may, if mishandled, produce an unsafe conviction. The author has made her own investigations into most of the cases. She outlines her own discoveries and compares these to the findings of the police and the courts.

It is hard to become excited about Peter Carey’s new novel, and that is a hard notion to entertain. We are used to being tested, and vastly entertained, by Carey. For a quarter of a century he has written distinctive and highly original fiction, including two or three books (notably True History of the Kelly Gang [2000] for this writer) that triumphantly fulfilled the novel’s enduring claim on our attention. This new work – though comparably imaginative in places – seems to mark not so much a falling-off as a kind of marking time.

The tasteful title of this autobiography echoes the story once told of how the ebullient Italian producer Filippo Del Guidice performed the same disservice to J. Arthur Rank and survived to become a force in the British film industry. David Stratton, after looking sideways in a Venetian toilet, never looked back – despite Fellini’s understandable choler.

Travellers who go to Beijing usually visit the Great Wall. Along the way the government tour operators often take them to the Ming tombs, the final resting place of thirteen of the sixteen emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), three of which are now open to the public. The underground mausoleums have been cleared of all the grave goods and works of art that were set there to accompany the dead.

Marion Halligan is a long-established fiction writer with an impressive list of publications. Even readers with only partial familiarity will recall that many of her novels have been informed by autobiographical material reflecting personal leanings and experiences, particularly her fondness for France, food and cooking, and the profound grief she sustained when her husband died. But in 2006 she changed direction, plunging into crime fiction with The Apricot Colonel, to which she has now produced a sequel. Both are written in the first person by a narrator called Cassandra Travers, a book editor.

Like the theatre backstage, the artist’s studio has the look, sound and smell of the creative moment. For romantics, this is the place where genius ignites invention, where the down-to-earth mess of paints, brushes and canvas is transformed by an inspiring atmosphere. For historians such as Alex Taylor, however, the myth masks a different kind of reality: the social manoeuvring, economic strategies and self-conscious publicity of artists in search of a living. His scholarly book is a welcome alternative to recent photographic publications that attest to the continuing glamour of artists in their studios.

Peter Sculthorpe must already be the most written-about of Australian composers, by a comfortable margin. One might legitimately wonder whether we need another Sculthorpe book in preference to an in-depth study of one of his comparatively neglected colleagues. However, this imbalance is not merely quantitative, but points to an underlying phenomenon: Sculthorpe’s position, in the concert-going public’s imagination, as the very incarnation of Australian ‘serious’ music. This phenomenon is, in a way, the real subject matter of Graeme Skinner’s new book – a meticulously detailed biography not only of the man but also of his almost mythic persona as The Great Australian Composer, created by Sculthorpe himself and by others.

Though he died a quarter of a century ago, the life and career of the Australian-born reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911–83) continue to attract significant critical attention. On the heels of Tom Heenan’s political biography, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (2006), and Burchett’s re-released autobiography, also edited by Burchett’s son George and Nick Shimmin (2007), comes this collection of Burchett’s writings, spanning much of his long, eventful career.