Review

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Quite who is to blame for this occupies much of the first half of Timms’s book. Artists hell-bent on having careers rather than seeking vocations are part of the problem, and so are curators of contemporary art who nourish the artist’s every need. Art schools are next, where cultural theory has replaced the teaching of art history. The superficialities and the susceptibility to trendiness in the Australia Council are further contributors.

Cole Porter’s jazz-age musical Fifty Million Frenchmen features a song addressed to a woman with mysterious allure:

Your fetching physique is hardly unique,

You’re mentally not so hot.

You’ll never win laurels because of your morals,

But I’ll tell you what you’ve got ...

You’ve got that thing.

The ‘certain thing’ that according to Porter ‘makes birds forget to sing’ is broadly the subject of The Secret Power of Beauty. Of course, beauty is not just sexual, and indeed the definition could be expanded to include all things under the sun. To quote another popular song from a different era, everything is beautiful in its own way.

The turning point in the life so far of Australian actor and writer Kate Fitzpatrick seems to have been the moment, sometime around the end of 1989, when she saw her unborn baby son on the ultrasound screen. ‘And that’, a friend observed, ‘was the end of the glamour years.’ Fitzpatrick herself defines it rather differently: it was, she says, ‘the moment I realised I was no longer alone.’

Pregnant by accident and for the first time at the age of forty-two, she somehow found herself staying with Germaine Greer in the latter’s Cambridge house. They apparently drove each other berserk for three days before Fitzpatrick turned and fled. On the second night of her stay, she recalls, she had a nightmare ‘about germs’. When she reported this dream to her friend Mike Brearley, ex-captain of the English cricket team and now a psychoanalyst, Brearley replied, ‘I love your subconscious, Kate. It’s like a hot knife through butter.’

A decade ago, former Prime Minister Paul Keating made a telling comment on the treatment of speeches in modern politics. ‘If Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1992,’ he said, ‘the chances are the journalists wouldn’t report the speech but the “doorstop” that followed it. And the first question they’d ask is, “How come you’re talking about democracy and freedom when there’s a war going on?” And there’d be learned articles at the weekend about whether it had been a lapse of political judgment for Mr Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg instead of Philadelphia.’

In his introduction to this collection of academic essays about different aspects and types of contemporary Australian masculinity – or, as the authors prefer, masculinities – R.W. Connell notes that: ‘It is now a familiar observation that notions of Australian identity have been entirely constructed around images of men.’ This is a familiar observation. Another old chestnut that better sums up recent discussions of masculinity and men, including this book, is that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, and that, at least in part, the solution lies in ‘problematising’, ‘deconstructing’, ‘destabilising’, and then collapsing’ it. It’s all, as such language makes clear, terribly sociological and cultural studies in approach. Which is not beyond interest, once one swims beneath the dense disciplinary jargon to the ideas below.

Douglas Mawson died in 1958. Unlike Ernest Shackleton, Mawson was not charismatic, and his descriptions of the Antarctic lack Shackleton’s poetry; unlike Roald Amundsen, he did not reach the South Pole; unlike Robert Scott, he did not perish tragically; but it is no exaggeration to say that the scale and achievements of his Antarctic expeditions dwarf those of his three famous contemporaries.

Mawson was two years old when he arrived in Sydney with his family from England in 1884. As a young man, he studied mining engineering and geology at the University of Sydney. His interest in the glacial geology of South Australia led to his investigation of the highly mineralised Precambrian rocks of the Barrier Range, extending from the northern Flinders Ranges through Broken Hill, work for which Mawson obtained his doctorate from the University of Adelaide in 1909.

For those of us at the centre of the storm, Sharleen – the demonised HIV-positive Sydney prostitute, the tragic Eve Van Grafhorst – and ACT UP and its often surreal activities are all familiar memories from the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in Australia. All feature in this first book-length account of Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic. National histories of the epidemic have already appeared in Britain, the Netherlands and the US, and Paul Sendziuk’s work bears comparison with them. Indeed, in the breadth of its sympathies, the sophistication of its conceptual approach and its focus on the working out of policies on the ground, it is the best national study I have read. For a book that originated in a PhD thesis, it is well written, with challenging illustrations, mostly drawn from AIDS campaign material. I should, of course, confess an interest, since this book provides an eloquent defence of the policies I pursued on AIDS during my period as the Commonwealth minister for health.

The official account of James Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour (1768-71) was published in 1773. The account, being an edited version of Cook’s journal, occupies the second and third volumes of John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. The first volume includes voyages by Byron, Wallis and Carteret – all seminal voyages in the history of the British Empire. We need to remember that Cook represents the culmination of the scientific discovery in the southern hemisphere, beginning with William Dampier in the late seventeenth century.