Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Archive

Now is the season of good will towards all specimens to which your correspondent replies ‘Bah humbug’. He does not like Christmas and has always considered Ebenezer Scrooge to be far more sinned against than sinning. Naturally this hack receives no yule time gifts; after all what do you give a youngish fogey whose only wish is to command a Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Shiloh? Yet if reality was suspended (and given the Australian book community’s tenuous grasp of it, this is not altogether unlikely), there are two presents which the wise, the good and the rich amongst Australia’s publishers and writers could confer upon this hack.

... (read more)

These books in the Touch the Sun series are very good. But as all reviewers have to do, I will compare. I had three favourites which were, Top-Enders (McPhee Gribble 114 pp, $6.95) by Jennifer Dabbs, Captain Johnno (McPhee Gribble, 122 pp, $6.95 pb) by Rob George, and Peter and Pompey (McPhee Gribble, 114 pp, $6.95 pb) by John Misto. These three books compelled me to read, they were interesting as far as I think it is possible to be when writing for this age group.

... (read more)

This book has drawn comment from press gallery journalists that the author’s background as a finance writer has led to weaknesses in its political analysis. The political sections, however, strike this reader as every bit up to the standard of the press gallery contributions on the subject, and, indeed, add some useful detail on Paul Keating’s early years, which were devoted with such unswerving dedication to entering parliament at the age of twenty-five. Both the gallery and Carew agree that Keating is an outstanding politician and enormously successful treasurer. While it is not always fair to lament that a book is different from the one you might have preferred to read – the author’s task is hard enough as it is – I would have hoped that the economic issues would have been explored with a much broader brush.

... (read more)

Apart from Abbott’s booby (the gannet Sula abbotti, which now breeds only on Christmas Island), all entries on the first two pages of the Australian National Dictionary pertain to race and white foundation. Is this mere chance, or do we here have an instance of the knack of language to trap and reticulate human experience from its very springs? Probably a spot of both. Whatever: how apt that a dictionary of Australianisms based on historical principles should start with words such as Aboriginalabolition act, abscond, and absolute pardon. Absolute pardon is followed by acacia, whose bloom is the emblem of our national besottedness.

... (read more)

When Martin Boyd returned to Australia in 1948 after twenty-seven years in England, he set about restoring the Grange, the derelict former home of his mother’s family, the à Becketts. He had been disappointed to find how little known his novels were in Australia and he had difficulty in re-establishing himself with the Boyd family. Nevertheless he persevered with his impulsive scheme until he could draw ‘the curtains at night in the little sitting room ... [and] indulge the illusion of being in an English manor house.’ Among the à Beckett portraits and eighteenth-century furniture were his nephew Arthur’s biblical frescoes. In trying to be an English squire in the Australian countryside, surrounded by the artefacts of two continents and centuries, Boyd presents the image of a man who never quite found himself wholly at home anywhere.

... (read more)

The cover story of the first issue of The Australian’s new coloured magazine was of five people who had made a million dollars in their twenties. These young people’s achievements were presented for us to admire and to envy. Nowhere in the interviews with them was it suggested that people might be motivated by different values from the ones that drive these lives.

... (read more)

Lionel Murphy was a prominent and colourful figure in the ALP renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, and a significant legal intellectual. The extraordinary saga of his final years, when he was hounded by political foes and the press, created a farrago of misunderstanding and innuendo that clouded his reputation. Jenny Hocking has set out to recover Murphy’s public life and to correct the record. Curiously, her emphasis on philosophy and consistency works against the interest of this story: the larrikin edge and the complexity of the man are smoothed away.

... (read more)

Two women really did walk into a bar recently. Their four elbows met the bar in unison. Their two schooners were embraced by four lips with the precision of guardsmen at the palace.

There was a bit of a silence.
There was no eye contact.

By and by one enquired about the other.
‘Have you heard about Bill Hayden?’
‘What’s he reckon, now?’
‘Well, he reckons that he’s prepared to take the job of Governor-General. He reckons he’s prepared to take the cut in salary.’
‘That’s very good of him.’
‘Yeah. He reckons that if he gets Dallas to do the shopping, he’ll just about break even.’

... (read more)

The mind, a friend of mine (female) once said to me, is the sexiest organ. I agree absolutely; and this extremely uneven anthology is replete with evidence that what turns us on – in the flesh, in art, in literature – is not genital activity per se, but the reactive imagination.

Of or pertaining to sexual love; arousing or satisfying sexual desire, the Macquarie Dictionary says of erotic, though the Greek erotikas means simply ‘pertaining to love’. The editorial introduction to this book (though, happily, not the actual editorial exercise of selection) opts for the Macquarie’s first definition and interprets it narrowly:

... (read more)

La Mama: The story of a theatre by Liz Jones, Betty Burstall, and Helen Garner

by
August 1988, no. 103

The most impressive building in the village of Tepoztlán, near Cuernavaca, is a huge sixteenth century Spanish monastery. But high up on the cliffs, when the mist rises, you can see – if you know where to look – a tiny Indian temple which everyone in the valley knows is where the gods really live.

La Mama is like that – to those who know it. But even the watchers on the bank know that theatre is built on a foundation of human sacrifice, so it is not surprising that La Mama should, on close inspection, turn out to be a regular little charnel house, a bloody altar on which all sorts of queer and callous rituals are performed in the hope of raising up the great gods Laughter and Applause. Apparently I sacrificed a wife and child there myself.

... (read more)