Archive

As an ‘imagined community’, Australia ‘imagined imagining needs more that community’, most strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are recolonized over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War II, but our cultural colonization by the United States was probably effective at least sixty-five years ago, by the time Australian cinema outlets had been secured for Hollywood, and closed off for local producers, through the nefarious block-booking system. With film and television, there never was much political will to defend ourselves; nor was there any, a year ago, to prevent the powerful American magnate Rupert Murdoch from taking over two-thirds of the press in what used to be his own country. There are moments and areas where it still seems reasonable to promote cultural nationalism, l not positive xenophobia.

Set in New South Wales during the turbulent years of 1916–19, Graeme Harper’s Black Cat, Green Field evokes the period with particularity and jaggedness. The first of the novel’s five parts introduces the central character: Sidney Nelson, recently wounded in Gallipoli, and now living in Sydney. A former art student, he is yearningly aware he could instead have been in the Paris of Picasso and Gris. He is also a ‘black cat’, a supporter of the radical industrial Workers of the World and when, in the closing months of 1916, the ‘Twelve’ I.W.W. members are sent to prison and police harassment intensifies, the organization goes underground and Nelson loses friends and contacts. Feeling jaded and devoid of artistic inspiration, he decides to leave Sydney and, after a false start, moves up to the north coast of NSW to stay near his sister May. The ‘black cat’ is going to paint the ‘green field’.

It is, of course, impossible to separate this book from the debate partly initiated by Professor Blainey’s comments at a Rotary conference in March of this year, nor is it feasible to judge the book’s merits without considering its likely impact on the continued controversy about the size and composition of Australia’s immigration programme. In many ways, this slim volume will contain few surprises for those who have followed the debate with any degree of interest.

As I became more and more engrossed in this wonderful novel, I asked people I came across ‘Thea Astley?’ And they’d answer vaguely ‘I keep meaning to read her’ or ‘she’s meant to be good’ or ‘I don’t know why I haven’t, she’s written quite a few, hasn’t she?’ Who does read Thea Astley? Me, now; and people I come across will. I’ll make sure of it.

From short stories Peter Carey has proceeded to long novels. This is his third. It is dense with incident and meticulously delineated characters who drop in and out of the narrative, always with a purpose. In some ways it is as surreal as Bliss, in others as naturalistic as Illywacker ...

Some of the narrators of Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories tend to view oceans and coastlines with the fear and loathing of flat earth believers. Just the whiff of the sea breeze is enough to spoil the day for them, the grit and the glare of sun-touched sand distresses them and they speak with contempt of the ‘idiot noise’ of the sea and of those who swim and play in the waves and on the beaches. Seaside holidays, they imply, are for frivolous people stupidly turning a blind eye to the ocean’s treachery – its dark moods, its black holes, and its sinister capacity to gnaw at and dissolve something as solid as rock.

A mixture of courage and an innocent hopefulness seem to be the necessary ingredients for finding rewards and compensations during the painful searching after self-knowledge. Lark Watter, the student daughter of Henry and Mrs Watter, embarks, as so many do, on the voyage of self-discovery.

These two very different novels by women provide a wealth of suggestive information about the women’s history being reclaimed and re-established by Australian feminists. They also happen to be intrinsically good novels, accomplished and charming in contrasting ways. Add Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings, reprinted in the Virago Modem Classics series, was first serialised in 1883 in The Australasian, published in novel form in 1891, and soon became one of Cambridge’s most popular novels. It draws upon the familiar form of the romance, but it also, in its translation into an Australian setting, illuminates an idiosyncratic colonial grafting onto that form.

On Bertrand Russell’s ninetieth birthday, the Daily Express published a congratulatory leader, which described him as ‘an intellectual gadfly on the rump of British society’. Moreover, to demonstrate that this most conservative of British newspapers intended no insult, the leader went on to describe Russell as ‘the second greatest living Englishman’ after Winston Churchill. Australia’s record of producing, much less recognising the achievements of, intellectual gadflies is if anything worse than Britain’s. The only figure of real stature who might qualify for that title is Hugh Stretton, an academic with an unerring talent for tearing the veils of pretension from the ideas and practices we most take for granted. Since this epoch, as much as any other, needs to take a mirror to its real rather than its pretended self, this too is intended to be anything but insulting.