Mark Gomes

Australian author Helen Hodgman depicts writing and domestic love as apotheoses of self-annihilation. In Jack and Jill (1978) – Hodgman’s second novel and the second to be reissued by Text Publishing this year, after Blue Skies (1976) – literary imagination acts as a sexual Strangling Fig, and childbearing poses a threat to psychic wherewithal. Mind and body, this stylish short work suggests, are equally appalling, are contradictory, are destructive in combination. Proxies, effigies, and symbolic recurrences abound in the novel, as Hodgman charts her characters’ changing allegiances to sex and art-making in pathological detail.

Rock music does not usually accommodate the likes of Dave Graney. Few Australian performers have been as resilient, and few have presented as many ideas in song form. While his contemporaries – Nick Cave, Tex Perkins, Robert Forster, and the late Grant McLennan – have not strayed far from blueprints forged during the late 1970s, Graney’s music and writing have undergone striking reinvention over thirty years. Equally, few of Graney’s generation have met with such indifference from the Australian public, except for a year or so in the mid-1990s, when, ‘for a brief moment’, in Graney’s words, ‘too many people listened, as opposed to too few … walking in on a line I’d been stringing out for quite a while’.

Novelist Gilbert Parker’s appraisal of Brisbane, penned during his visit in 1889 and quoted by Matthew Condon in this new, impressionistic history of the city, is not one that Condon wants to repeat, yet is powerless to refute: ‘Brisbane is not the least poetical … There is a sense of disappointment, which grows deeper as the sojourn in the capital is continued.’

Suburban crime narratives featured in many Australian films in the 1990s, partly due to the influence of director Rowan Woods’s film The Boys, which drew inspiration from the ‘kitchen sink’ cinema of 1960s Britain. Twelve years after its theatrical release, this seminal film – based on the play by Gordon Graham and written for the screen by Stephen Sewell – remains the best example of an Australian genre that illustrates Marcus Clarke’s conception of ‘weird melancholy’ in the criminal element of our cities’ troubled underclass.

Mother of Rock is an Australian journalist’s adoring biography of one of our great social journalists. Sydney newsman Robert Milliken’s life of expatriate writer Lillian Roxon (1932–73) is foremost an account of the birth of celebrity tabloid press in the 1960s and its close links with the emergence of rock music as an art form and breeding ground for ‘stars’. Like Roxon’s writing itself – a generous selection of which is reproduced at the back of the book – what little discussion of the qualities of the music of the times there is comes second to an account of its social and market implications and its dramatic leading personalities. Roxon emerges as a radical, under-acknowledged progenitor of ‘new journalism’.

Billy Thorpe’s story is the perennial one of an Australian artist dissatisfied with domestic success. In this account of the late pop star’s career, Jason Walker bypasses discussion of Thorpe’s music per se to present him as ‘truly Australian … a battler, a doer [and] a self-promoter’ who lusted for international recognition. While it vividly recounts Thorpe’s life (1946–2007), including enough sex, drugs and equipment fetishism to delight boyish music fans, the real strength of Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth is its profile of Thorpe’s careerist, provincial psyche and the lengths he went to in search of adoration.

Although Nick Cave’s second novel makes strong claim to the musician’s skills as a writer, in the end it is too morally opaque to succeed as a work of sustained fiction. There is an overwhelming didacticism to The Death of Bunny Munro that delights too much in its own surety to be persuasive, and leads to a disappointing suspicion that, despite Cave’s renown as a populist intellectual, there is little in the book to consider besides the sexual conscience of its titular protagonist. Bunny Munro is certainly entertaining, and his exploits memorable, if puerile, but the final authorial judgement of the character is predictable, and, worse, leaves little room for readers’ thoughts. Exactly what Munro’s version of family life undone by libidinous desire contributes – even when told with remarkable lyricism – remains moot in the novel.