Archive

This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Gurr’s speech for the 1999 campaign – one made famous by the unexpected defeat of Premier Jeff Kennett – was launched in Ballarat. The 2006 campaign will be launched in Ballarat. Gurr is known in Labor circles as a ‘creative type’ (read: prolific, award-winning playwright of works such as Jerusalem and Sex Diary of an Infidel). I am also known as a ‘creative type’ (novelist and poet). And yet, despite all these coincidences and intersecting lines, not to mention the backbench of associates we have in common, Gurr and I had never met when a speech request landed on my desk a while back with the title ‘Michael Gurr book launch’. Of course, I knew of Gurr. Sort of.

Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998).  It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contributions and in her orchestration of others. She has understood that there can be many sides to such a story; the way politics and culture have been entangled in this building’s history gives rise to questions worth unpacking indefinitely.   

Thirty years have passed since Richard Ellmann’s magisterial New Oxford Book of American Verse: a hard act to follow. Now David Lehman – poet and founder of the Best American Poetry series – has produced a successor. It is even longer than the Ellmann, and similarly generous in its individual choices. There is no stinting here, no mark of the tyranny of permissions that blights so many anthologies. Walt Whitman gets seventy poems; Emily Dickinson (who published a handful in her lifetime) has forty-three, including the cautionary ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man’.

In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)

There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

‘As far as books are concerned, I find life no help at all. Books grow out of other books.’ So said the great Ivy Compton-Burnett, and her comment is at least partly pertinent in relation to Lloyd Jones’s luminous Mister Pip, trailing as it does clouds of Dickensian glory. Increasingly, there seems to be a sub-genre of novels that have their roots in other novels. Some of these are vile, like Emma Tennant’s vulgarly opportunist Pemberley Revisited: or Pride and Prejudice Continued (2005) and Emma in Love (1996), which traduce two great novels. Others work more evocatively, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a post-colonial reimagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the madwoman in the attic, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which, with elliptic brilliance, re-situates Magwitch at the heart of the narrative of Great Expectations (1860–61).