ABC Books

Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers is a book about overdoing it. Its characters have unwise love affairs, dream foolish dreams, drink too much, engage in criminal activity, amass (and lose) vast wealth, and talk incessantly (usually about themselves). Wearne’s characters usually deal with obsession and with the places you get to in life if you overdo things. Few characters in this second part of Wearne’s epic verse novel age gracefully, and some don’t get to age at all. But The Lovemakers isn’t just about over-doing it: it performs overdoing it. Wearne’s aesthetic is one of excess, of conspicuous idiosyncrasy. Part of its excessiveness and oddity is its oxymoronic status. Wearne’s books are simultaneously poetic and prosy, realistic and outré, stylistically heterogeneous and tonally homogenous.

This handsomely produced anthology reflects much that is admirable about the ABC, and indicates the vital role an independent public broadcasting organisation may play in a mature and civilised society. Sad to say, it also exemplifies the current state of the corporation.

In Grade 5 social studies we ‘did’ Australia. After Captain Cook and the first fleet and settlement, and a couple of lessons spent drawing Aboriginal mia-mias and weaponry came the explorers. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, Hume and Hovell, Major Mitchell, Burke and Wills Captain Sturt, and Edward John Eyre … Their names and achievements were committed to memory as surely as the three times table. But as our sticky hands traced maps from our atlases onto lunch wrap paper and into our exercise books – there to be outlined in accident-prone Indian ink, and the dotted lines of exploration marked – the explorers somehow failed to grasp our imaginations. We experienced little sympathy with their effort or their suffering, and only a mechanical recognition of the importance of their discoveries.