Vintage

There was no chaplain aboard the troopship Transylvania as it travelled across the Mediterranean Sea for France in 1916, so the sermon was left to Frank Bethune, a Tasmanian clergyman and private soldier. Bethune rose on the promenade deck and informed the soldiers that, god-fearing or not, they were righting a great wrong and were not heroes, but men. ‘What else do we wish except to go straight forward at the enemy?’ he asked. ‘With our dear ones far behind us and God above us, and our friends on each side of us and only the enemy in front of us – what more do we wish than that?’ Also aboard the ship was Australia’s official war correspondent, Charles Bean. After describing the effect of Bethune’s sermon on the soldiers, Bean delivered the ultimate praise: ‘[There] were tears in many men’s eyes when he finished – and that does not often happen with Australians … And that was because he had put his finger, just for one moment, straight on to the heart of the nation.’

So often, the language used to discuss Australian literature is that of anxiety. A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’, coined in 1950, is never far from the critical surface as readers and commentators grapple with questions of national and literary identity. The report of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award’s judges offers one such example ...

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.

Kate Finlayson’s first novel is a bumpy bronco ride, as exhilarating, confronting, and messy as the Northern Territory that she writes about so passionately. Finlayson’s protagonist, Connie, is stuck barmaiding in a rough city pub. Despite her street smarts and university degree, Connie is starting to go to the dogs along with the pub’s patrons. She decides to leave Sydney to pursue a post-adolescent obsession with Rod Ansell, the inspiration for the Crocodile Dundee films. Ansell (his real name) is hiding somewhere in the Territory, and Connie fantasises about finding him and turning him into her ideal lover, her longed-for soul mate.

If history is a graveyard of dead aristocracies, the novel is their eulogy. It is now, for instance, a critical commonplace to explain the young Proust’s entry into the closed world of France’s nobility as an occurrence made possible by its dissolution. Close to death, holding only vestigial power, the fag ends of the ancien régime lost the will or ...

These two second novels are rapid follow-ups to acclaimed début novels, Anson Cameron’s Silences Long Gone and Michael Meehan’s The Salt of Broken Tears. Each is, in its own way, resolutely vernacular. Meehan writes about the past and the country; Cameron writes largely about the city, very much today.

In Tin Toys, nevertheless, the characters are very aware of the Australian past. The central dilemmas of Cameron’s novels concern relations between blacks and whites. In Silences Long Gone the narrator’s stubborn old mother refuses to leave her house in a mining town that is being dismantled so that the territory can be returned to its native custodians. In the new novel, the narrator is himself the focus of the dilemma, as the offspring of a white father and black mother (in very peculiar circumstances). He begins life as a black baby, becomes a white boy and ends up a slightly confused young adult. After an opening flashback the narrative is driven by two things that happen to Hunter around the same time. His design for an Australian flag (which he has come up with by complete accident) is selected as a finalist in a national competition and his Japanese girlfriend goes missing in Bougainville.

In one sense, the publisher’s blurb on this novel says it all.

On a day which began with Eve finding her children ‘half naked and purple with cold … crying on their bed’, she was visited by a detective. He was there to ask questions because ‘La Gauss’, the old woman who let rooms to the family, had accused Eve’s husband of stealing. Langley let him know that she wrote everything down, including all of La Gauss’s lies, and that she would one day make a book of it. He is surprised that she could write of her life in these parts, and waves ‘his hand toward the ferns and gorse on the hill outside’. Eve replied, ‘The tragedy of life down here would amaze you. I have everything down sympathetically, and someday it shall be published.’

As I turned the last pages of Christos Tsiolkas’ new novel The Jesus Man, the news broke of the killings at Columbine High School. I had just noted that the novel reminded me of some feminist art from the 1970s in which a woman exhibited a series of used Modess, and that The Jesus Man was the literary and male equivalent – a series of used condoms. The Jesus Man will always exist between these two images for me. Tsiolkas makes a genuine effort to explore adolescent male sexuality and its connection to pornography and violence and how these relate to contemporary media and technologies, important issues certainly.