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Patrick White is a downy old bird. He has always shown remarkable ability to keep up with the game, even to keep ahead of it. Whether the game is currently being called Modernism, or Postmodernism, or some other ismatic title, he can handle it as a writer and still be himself. From The Aunt’s Story to The Twyborn Affair, he has displayed this ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to go in with the ferrets and also come out with the rabbits. In other words, of all Australian writers he most convincingly builds a bridge between what critics ask for and what readers want.

Jenny Boult’s sixth book ‘I’ is a versatile character is also her first book of prose. It follows her play Can’t Help Dreaming which was performed by the All Out Ensemble in Adelaide, and four books of poetry, including The Hotel Anonymous, which won the 1981 Anne Elder Award.

The stories in this collection vary greatly in form and content, but they share a particular ‘poetic’ style which is rare among contemporary Australian prose writers. Although Boult is by no means the first Australian poet to publish fiction, she has been more successful than most in bringing to her prose many of the skills she has developed in writing poetry.

This dainty, delicate, savage book is lovely and rare because it is truthful, vicious, brimming with the blue eyes of memory, the red eyes of defeat, the open mouth and congo drum of childhood. When Barry Oakley writes of his childhood, it is you booting him the footy of laughter.

He writes, wonderfully, sweetly, dreamily of taking his sore-footed mum and soft-drink-eyed son for the satiric day to Taronga Zoo. Among the gorillas and orchids, you watch him scribble in the light. A journalist cobber to fellow mysteries, his friends.

The everlasting dance of sounds and feelings and colours, the taste and scent of life, comes to us in its most explicit form in words. Even when Proust’s famous Madeleine led him back through its scents and associations in search of a time that was lost, he followed its tracks through words that brought back the images of the past and tied them down into clear grammatical patterns of form and relationship. Because language teaches us how to think and feel and see it is always political. The speaker and the writer impose on us patterns which either reinforce or subvert established power. It is no accident that a failed conservative businessman and politician has been able to recover his fortunes by writing a political thriller, or that Mrs Thatcher has now engaged him on the task of selling her politics of destruction to a wary electorate. The words create the reality.

Greg Chappell’s cricketing career from the mid-sixties until 1984 coincided with developments affecting players, administrators and audiences which reoriented attitudes and expectations, causing schisms and bitterness. McGregor’s biography stresses three related themes: the growth of professionalism, the effects of commercialism and especially colour television, and the difficulties in a cricketer’s life caused by conflicting allegiances, and personal and family considerations. A fourth theme, the ascendancy of speed bowling, gets due attention, but more incidentally. It is a conscientious book: Chappell’s early life and the arc of his superb career are followed carefully, comprehensively, informatively, but too often a false note of the ‘excitement’ of it all is journalistically struck.

It is impossible to know who first said, ‘Get your end in!’ but that is probably the only normal colloquialism of ours left out of this beaut (if you’ve got about forty bucks) book.

Clearly, G. A. Wilkes has had his end in; we all have, haven’t we? But Australia’s greatest saying is not included. Perhaps it is Welsh.

I’m buggered if I could have summoned up the bloody patience to wade through valleys and dusty quagmires of books, newspapers, dead pamphlets, had-the-gong magazines and no-longer-with-us snippets, fragments, skerricks and dust of deceased smartarsedom.

The history of Australia at war has tended to focus on the exploits of the Australian army to the neglect of the other two services. It is usually forgotten, for example, that the most famous of Australia’s military actions, that at Gallipoli, was part of a combined operation, in which the failure to land the troops at the designated spot virtually condemned the attack from the outset. In both world wars, command of the sea was the prerequisite for Australia’s military participation and for her own security. Far removed from the main theatres in World War I, Australian forces had to be transported thousands of miles by sea to the Middle East, Gallipoli and the western front. Allied sea power made that possible.

This book is a testament to the persistence of the legend of King O’Malley. Larry Noye tells the story of the self-proclaimed founder of the Commonwealth Bank and builder of Canberra very much as O’Malley himself never tired of telling it, heavily embellished with the exaggerated ‘spreadeagle’ rhetoric and baloney of the hot gospellers, land-boomers, social reform cranks, and snake-oil salesmen of the American West among whom O’Malley took his first steps in the adult world. The book’s strength is that its author is so intoxicated with the O’Malley legend that it faithfully gives us a picture, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth, full of colour and incident; its weakness is that it fails adequately to step back and separate fact from fiction.