Barry Hill

Barry Hill’s latest collection is both delightful and substantive. Australia has a minority tradition of the urbane, exuberant, even bouncy poet – Andrew Sant, Peter Porter. It is a constant in American poetry – early John Hollander, Frederick Feirstein, L. E. Sissman, John Frederick Nims, X.J. Kennedy – with the difference that, as the above examples show, urbanity in the United States would be less romantic and would have rejected romanticism outright, severed, as it were, Ezra Pound’s famous pact with Walt Whitman.

There are at least three reasons why we left-leaning, right-thinking, middle-class readers value Robert Manne’s essays. Over the last twenty years, he has – in books, as editor of Quadrant from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist – been writing with an uncommon intellectual lucidity. He is that rare combination of good scholar and good journalist. His style is transparently reasonable: his essays shine as models of speaking rationally.

Victoria’s coastal borough of Queenscliff is fortunate indeed to have esteemed poet and scholar Barry Hill (a local resident since 1975) as its official historian. He combines an eye for events that will resonate as part of the ‘big picture’ of Australian history with a local’s affection and instinct for the telling details that pinpoint the intrinsic character of the place.

This book was partially written in the Queenscliff Historical Museum: at a mess table recovered from a shipwreck, surrounded by vintage diving equipment, a skull recovered from the sea, music boxes and silver teapots. It is an apt metaphor for the character of the town: on one hand, a sedate seaside resort known in its heyday for its boarding houses, grand hotels and ‘solid respectability’; on the other, a notorious shipwreck site and home to both a military barracks and, more recently, an Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) training ground for spies.

It seems to be only a couple of years ago that my students declared gender and race to be the ‘hot’ topics in culture. Now, I confidently predict, they will relegate gender (still acknowledging its importance) and reformulate the second term by adding a third: race and its intersection with religion, in its broadest definition.

This eccentric, laborious book is designed to correct what most of us think about the 1967 Referendum. The popular belief – the authors call it a myth – is that the Australian people then voted to acknowledge citizenship by giving Aborigines the vote, and that this was a Commonwealth thrust towards, crucial, deeper involvement in Aboriginal affairs.

This is Caroline Caddy’s sixth collection of poetry. It comes to us after her well-received Antarctica, which the publicists mention in terms of her interest in ‘hinterlands and extreme land­scapes’. Working Temple is not so much about that, it seems to me, as the sensual encounter one might have with exotic puzzles and puzzlement. It is a collection that almost advances a notion of experience as a temple within which the signs of that experience are worked and worked again.

Barry Hill, who is among a few Australians who write from the head as well as from the emotions, sets his latest novel in a Buddhist Teaching Centre in a Queensland forest. Not so deep in the forest that the glorious coast itself cannot be seen, a fact that causes young Mark, who has just learned that his girlfriend Robin is pregnant, to remind himself that (as he gazes at the breakers hurling themselves into spray one hundred kilometres away) he may never surf again: paternal responsibility implying no more surfing. The reader may feel that as Robin is only thirteen years old the partnership, even if she has the baby, may be over in plenty of time for Mark to have a few good surfs before his muscles collapse.

The Australian Year looks like the dreaded coffee table book, yet another gloss on the national ‘identity’, backed by Esso, and fit for export only. Certainly, the cover picture of parroty water gives that impression, as do many familiar ones inside, though the main photographer, Peter Solness, does turn in some good homely details as well. Generally, the photographs stand like an avenue of plane trees, their density and hues changing with the seasons of Les Murray’s fully ripened, free-ranging text – which meets the high expectations we might be forgiven for holding when a major Australian poet, a well-versed country boy and populist by persuasion, an erudite and vernacular singer of the old and new, writes a book on a phenomenon as democratically inclusive and resonant as the seasons.