ABC Books

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – partners in life and work – made three documentaries in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: First Contact (1983), Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These films have won several awards which is fitting, given that each exemplifies what is possible in the medium of observational filmmaking, where the drama evolving from real situations outdoes anything that could be imagined in a Hollywood studio. Of course, they were shrewd in their choice of subject. With its mixture of cultures and traditions, PNG offers plenty of conflict, the essential salt in the documentary pie. Anderson and Connolly had a special taste for salt – who else would have recognised local mayoral elections as a site of grand drama as they did for Rats in the Ranks (1996)?

Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.

There is an almost overwhelming tide of historical texts for young people being published at the moment. Fictional accounts of actual events are enormously popular, and frequently the diary form is used, as this is felt to be more accessible to young people, and also gives the writer licence to use the historical present tense with impunity.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

Henry Pollack, the founder of Mirvac, one of Australia’s largest and most successful property development companies, started life in Lodz, a booming Polish textile town. Born in 1932, he belonged to a well-to-do family and became a bookish boy. He writes about his youth with vivid openness, describing not only events but his feelings, thoughts and youthful ideals. With this memoir, written towards the end of his life, Pollack comes close to being the writer he dreamt of becoming as a boy. Memories of his childhood have a fidelity and clarity that may well be the result of a life lopped and restarted at the age of sixteen; those early years are preserved as if in a time capsule.

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’.

At the age of twenty, Peter Conrad slammed his Australian door shut behind him. He was travelling into the ‘wider world’, away from his native Tasmania to take up his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford; he went with barely a backwards glance. Growing up as an omnivorous reader of English literature in the years of what he has called his ‘colonial childhood’, the young Conrad had become increasingly resentful at the perverse randomness of his exile. What he could only think of as an administrative error had relegated him to an Australia that seemed vacant and vacuous. When his time came, he ruthlessly withdrew his affection from parents and country. This snake-like shedding of skin was his liberation. Crossing Waterloo Bridge in August 1968, he had – like Wordsworth before him – a moment of epiphany. As the bridge ‘ran out into the Aldwych in a sunny crux of blue dust’, the young Conrad passed innocuously through the door by which he stepped into life. In confessional mode, he later celebrated this as the exact moment of his birth. That was when the years of his Australian youth were cancelled out, relegated to a phase of mere ‘pre-existence’.

Dr Rudolph (Rudy) Brasch’s career as a rabbi took him from Germany to London and, finally, in 1949, to the Temple Emmanuel in Sydney, where he remained for thirty years. His learning was wide and eclectic, and this is reflected in The Book of Beginnings, which he compiled with the assistance of his wife, Li Brasch. Dr Brasch died in November 2004, at the age of ninety-two.

Australians like to believe they live in the best country in the world. Plenty of space, abundant  natural resources and lots of sunshine for this nation whose inhabitants have come from all corners of the earth to a land of opportunity. It’s an appealing national smugness that has comforted generations of Australians as they looked with tolerant amusement at the congested societies of industrialised countries elsewhere in the world. Aren’t we lucky!

Occasionally, there may have been some nagging doubts as we looked at the growing wealth of the Asian economies and the technological sophistication of overseas manufacturing. Are we as smart as they are? Do we work hard enough? Are we falling behind? Is this the land of the long weekend? In recent years, have we become hard-hearted and lazy? Good questions, and easier to answer anecdotally and instinctively rather than empirically. Generally, we thanked our lucky stars.