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The True Life of Jimmy Governor by Laurie Moore and Stephan Williams

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July 2001, no. 232

Five of Laurie Moore’s ancestors were in the party that finally captured Jimmy Governor in October 1900, ninety-nine days after his murderous onslaught on the Mawbey family. He and his wife have assiduously traversed the terrain of the manhunt for Jimmy and his brother Joe. Moore’s book, The True Life of Jimmy Governor, written in conjunction with Stephan Williams, is an admirable amateur labour: loving, painstaking, yet never without a tinge of irony about fashions of remembering folk anti-heroes in Australia. As the authors remark near the end of their story: ‘the brothers held up, or were fed by, everyone’s great aunt or grandfather’.

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‘AT NIGHT,’ wrote Charmian Clift one summer in the late 1950s on the Greek island of Hydra where she lived with her husband and children, where the harbour village had been invaded by summer tourists, where teams of local Greek matrons invaded the kitchen in relays to monitor the foreign woman’s housework and mothering techniques ...

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Selected Poems: A new edition by Gwen Harwood, edited by Greg Kratzmann

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July 2001, no. 232

Although her work is often surprisingly varied, there is no doubt that when you read a Gwen Harwood poem you enter a highly distinctive poetic world. If it comes from her first twenty-five years of productivity, there is a good chance that you will be in a landscape of psychic melodrama. Everything will be liminal. The setting will be a sunset, the late sun will be flaring a dangerous gold on some intertidal stretch, the protagonist will have awoken from a menacing dream or, pace Kröte, be moving backwards and forwards across the threshold of one. The history of her poetry may be the way this scene increases in intensity as the voices that communicate in dreams increasingly come from figures in Harwood’s own past.

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Peter Goldsworthy, doctor and poet, is a writer of significant style and concision. This new selection of his lyric poetry lives up to its jaunty, graffitied, lavender cover; it bespeaks lightness. And lightness is damned hard work. You don’t get there just by smiling and going to book launches ...

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A few weeks ago, I attended the session on ‘What is an Australian Classic?’ during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. My own definition of what makes a classic is a simple one: a book from the past that retains significance, that still entertains and enlightens us, even though we may respond to it in quite different ways from its initial readers. In some cases, of course, classics were not so highly regarded on first publication. Even Gerard Windsor, at the festival, had to concede that Joyce’s Ulysses was a classic; it was of course banned in Australia, and elsewhere, for many years. And one of the eight titles in the first series of A&R Classics, Come in Spinner ($21.95pb, 0 207 19756 3), also received a very mixed reception, as one of its authors, Florence James, remembers in the introduction she wrote in 1988 for the first printing of the unedited version of the novel. In 1951, the Sydney Daily Telegraph called Come in Spinner ‘a muckraking novel fit for the literary dustbin’, even though it had earlier won the newspaper’s own novel competition!

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Querulous impatience has overtaken discussion of Aboriginal matters in some quarters. ‘If we apologise, they must forgive and then assimilate. Invite them to discussions about how to ameliorate their misery – the disintegration of community, the alcoholism, the glue sniffing. But they mustn’t talk “ideology”. We’ve had enough brooding over the past, heard enough about treaties and self-determination, and more than enough about genocide. It’s time to move on.’ That’s what I hear and in that tone.

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Contemporary Australian fiction continues to lean on the national past. Perhaps that’s a comment on the present, or the future, for that matter. It seems to be not so much a matter of the past being experientially ‘another country’, but a more engaging version of the literal one ...

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The privileges of artistic ambiguity have been stretched a little by the publishers in choosing such a broad subtitle for this work. So, as the author does, let’s clarify what Erotic Ambiguities is about: ‘While focusing on the female body in art, this book considers the way in which visual art produced by women was informed by feminism.’ This statement, as it turns out, is also not entirely true, as some works by male artists are discussed and the author does not limit herself to literal depictions of the human form. Furthermore, feminism is acknowledged as too loose a term and McDonald clarifies her territory by adding ‘contemporary feminism is a coalition of various conflicting feminisms that are neither co-existive nor independent’.

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One of my all-time favourite short stories, ‘The Shipwreck Party’, opens this volume of Collected Stories. Any book of short pieces invites readers to enter wherever they like. I decided to start at the last piece and work backwards so that I could end up with my old favourite. The pace, structure, rhythm, images, restraint, wit, irony, and tone of this short narrative always work their magic on me, and I wait for the last thirty lines in joyful and horrified expectation. Having read the book backwards, I write this review in a mood of sheer pleasure.

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We demand difference and variety in our lives – in the food we eat, in our friends, in our distractions and aversions. And we know that diversity is desperately needed in the biological world. There is debate, however, on how much is enough, and where the balance lies, and it’s hard to judge because we remain ignorant about natural processes.

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