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Kerryn Goldsworthy

Writing first

Dear Editor,

Rock critic Robert Christgau once argued that ‘writing about music is writing first’. His edict puts paid to all those who have erroneously demanded that music reviewers must be musicians themselves or otherwise musically literate. If you can listen to and appreciate music, then you can write about it.

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‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in print. Literary criticism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Poe argued, was essentially corrupt: a matter of back-scratching, currying favour, and chasing after influence, power, and money.

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‘Too many vampires,’ wrote Patrick White. The year was 1980; the document was a letter to Shirley Hazzard; the subject was their friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who had published nothing but a handful of uncollected short stories since 1966. ‘Elizabeth keeps her principles,’ he wrote. ‘Whether she is also writing, I have given up asking in case I get the wrong answer. Too many vampires make too many demands on her …’

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Admirers of the first two volumes in Frank Moorhouse’s ‘Edith Trilogy’, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000), will remember the gripping and heartbreaking scene at the end of Dark Palace in which Edith Campbell Berry, her British husband, Ambrose, and several of their senior colleagues are humiliatingly informed, in the cruellest possible way, that after two decades of hard work for the now-defunct League of Nations, their presence is neither required nor welcome in the ranks of the new United Nations.

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Adelaide by Kerryn Goldsworthy

by
October 2011, no. 335

This year is the 175th anniversary of European settlement in South Australia. The University of Adelaide presented a series of public lectures collectively called Turning Points in South Australian History. Bill Gammage gave the first and showed by an accretion of primary sources that, prior to white settlement in 1836, Aborigines kept a tidy landscape thanks to the controlled use of fire. First Adelaidians exclaimed that the landscape was close to an English garden. Henry Reynolds gave the second lecture, and made much of the political and social timing of the settlement, after the abolition of slavery in London and just before the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand. The idea of terra nullius was in its preliminary colonial tatters.

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Every book implicitly asks its reader a question: What am I? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer, but at other times, as with Andrew McGahan’s new novel, one must reply, ‘I have no idea; I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

The setting of Wonders of a Godless World is an old hospital housing the mad. Somehow the old-fashioned notion of ‘madness’ suits this story; it’s the word McGahan uses most often to describe the patients, and there is more than a whiff about this isolated hospital of the medieval Narrenschiff – the Ship of Fools. The hospital is under a volcano on a tropical island with a harbour city. We are not told the names of any of these places, and, like everything and everyone else in this book, its heroine also has no name; rather, she is identified, as are all the other characters, by her defining characteristic, and is thus exclusively referred to as ‘the orphan’. Other key characters are identified by their roles in a mundanely realistic way: the police captain, the old doctor, the night nurse. Still others have labels more redolent of fairytale and myth: the duke, the witch, the archangel, the virgin. And then there is the mastermind and perhaps the villain of the piece: the foreigner. As far as archetypal characters and symbolic settings are concerned, this book contains an embarrassment of riches, and the fact that none of them is individually identified or named means that all kinds of significance can be projected onto them.

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In December 1982, publisher Richard Walsh commissioned a ‘life and times of Miles Franklin’ from historian Jill Roe. The book ‘has been a long time coming’, says Roe, ‘due to other commitments and responsibilities, and because of the extent of previously unexamined source material.’ That source material – letters, articles, unpublished manuscripts, journals – exists in quantities that can be inferred from Roe’s comment near the end of the book, where she is describing Franklin’s final illness: that ‘from 1 January 1909 to 1 January 1954, there is some kind of record of what Miles Franklin was doing on virtually every day of her life.’

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Vertigo is to dizziness what a migraine is to a headache, or the flu to a cold in the head; you don’t really grasp the difference until you’ve had the nastier one. True vertigo pitches you into a chaotic blackness in which you lose your bearings utterly; no relief is to be had from sitting or lying down, because the chair, the bed, the floor all fall away from you as well. Disorientation on the flat is bad enough, but in three dimensions it is terrifying, like Satan’s journey through the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost where he meets ‘a vast vacuitie: all unawares / Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour / Down had been falling …’

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Most editors look forwards, not back. We have to: there are pages to fill, readers to court, deadlines to meet. But publication of a 300th issue of a literary review invites retrospection, if not undue nostalgia... ... (read more)

Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

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