Review

Disclosure: I am a humanities academic. It is, therefore, entirely inappropriate for me to be reviewing this book. After all, the author maintains that most academics in humanities departments are post-modernists or post-structuralists, prescribing as dogma ‘the bizarre and outdated theories of a handful of French philosophes’; worse, much of academic thought in the last two centuries has been related to the ‘partial removal or even the overthrow of capitalism, of the free market and of the private enterprise system’.

This book explores an unprecedented phenomenon: coast-to-coast Labor governments in the states and territories. The peculiarity of the current situation is magnified by Labor’s continuing failure at the national level. Where state politics can boast political ‘stars’ such as Bob Carr and Peter Beattie, federally the cupboard seems bare. Yet this collection reminds us of the unfairness of comparison between Labor’s national failure and sub-national success. Victory is great for your image. It takes considerable historical imagination to appreciate that there was a time when Carr was regarded as ‘a stopgap leader’ – as he was in the aftermath of Labor’s 1988 electoral humiliation. David Clune shows that Carr’s first year or so in office, when the government had a majority of one seat, was no raging success.

Tasting Life Twice is a collection of twenty-six interviews conducted by Ramona Koval over the past ten years at literary festivals, on radio programmes and in the homes of such writers as Les Murray, Morris West and Joseph Heller. Any randomly selected shortlist of these writers would impress among them are Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and P.D. James, and some who have recently passed away: Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Malcolm Bradbury. Koval, of Radio National’s Books and Writing, is passionate about books and ideas, informing us in the introduction that her interviews revolve around ‘questions of how one evaluates a life, the getting of wisdom, facing death, the meaning of love, and whether a book ever changed the course of history’.

Adolf Gustav Plate (1874–1913) was a German artist, photographer and writer who spent much of his youth on merchant vessels in the South Pacific, eventually settling (or trying to settle) in Australia. Cassi Plate, his granddaughter, researched his life for a higher degree at the University of Sydney; her thesis has now been revised for publication (the first of six such volumes to be published by Picador in association with the University of Sydney, as reported in ‘Advances’ last month).

I came away from this book with an unexpected insight – not into George Rose as a photographer, but as a man. His de-facto biographer, Ron Blum, has revealed that Rose was an adventurer who travelled hugely, photographing in at least thirty-eight countries in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. He was also an expert mountaineer who, with his cumbersome photographic equipment, scaled the peaks of New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland during a long and healthy life (he was vegetarian, never smoked and apparently drank only milk and water).

Carmel Bird stakes a great deal on her prose style. The delicate latticework of imagery, the fascination with detail and colour, the allusions, the linguistic gamesmanship, the florid descriptive passages (and Bird’s writing is literally florid: there are flowering plants everywhere) – these are at least as important to her fiction as narrative. Her writing does not just revel in the sensuality of language; at times, this sensuality shapes the form. In her long story ‘Woodpecker Point’, for example, the action is veiled in lush rhetoric. The intention is to tease out small correspondences and to develop an intricate verbal pattern. So, while the narrative is disjointed, the finely woven imagery is rolled out like one long strip of carpet. This is often true of Bird’s short stories. They frequently centre on strange or sinister happenings, around which grows a delicate bubble of linguistic indulgence.

Knitting, the first novel from ghostwriter and former professional knitter Anne Bartlett, tells the story of a newly widowed academic and her unexpected friendship with a gifted knitter that enables her to move on with her life. Bartlett’s rich (and uncredited) experience of writing other people’s stories puts this intimate exploration of women’s friendships in a different category from your average ‘chick lit’. Age journalist Graham Reilly is another writer who transcends his genre in Five Oranges, a crime novel about the ragtag adventures of a tight-knit circle of working-class Glaswegian friends and their on–off tangles with the Saigon mob. Part of the reason that these two novels are so much better than many in their respective genres could be that they go beyond formula and caricature.

‘There is no Australian city other than Melbourne which could have produced Keith Dunstan,’ writes Barry Humphries in his foreword to this collection. Indeed, Dunstan, journalist and writer, has long been a Melbourne institution, particularly remembered for his daily column in the Sun News-Pictorial, ‘A Place in the Sun’. While working as a journalist, he was also busy as a writer of popular history: among his many works is that splendid trilogy, Wowsers (1968), Knockers (1972) and Ratbags (1979), the juxtaposition of those titles telling us so much about the character of Australian culture.

In the winter of 1968–69 the buildings of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt – the symbolically resonant home of what had come to be known as the Frankfurt School – were occupied by students. The police were called in, and Theodor W. Adorno, one of the great radical theorists of the twentieth century, pressed charges against a young man whose doctoral work he was supervising. Two months later, a group of women forced their way into Adorno’s lecture, handed out leaflets proclaiming that ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, and ‘surrounded him, strewing flowers, performing a dumb show and … baring their breasts’. In action after action, the contempt of the students for the radical theorists of an older generation was made clear.

In 1964 the Australian television show Bandstand set up an annual talent contest called Bandstand Starflight International. In its first year, one of the national finalists was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Robyn Smith, who later changed her surname to Archer. The following year, the contest was won by a 24-year-old professional singer called Helen Reddy.