Archive

The way we organise our deaths offers insight into the meanings and significances we attribute to life. The sidelining of organised religion has allowed Australians to voice our own ideas about the muddles of existence through the choice of music for funerals. The regularity with which ‘I did it my way’ is heard at wakes is a reminder of how much more pertinent that song is for individuality than are newspaper columns by Bettina Arndt or Hugh Mackay, still less from Andrea Dworkin or the late Christopher Lasch.

Desmond O’Grady is uniquely placed to interpret Australia for Italians and Italy for Australians. He grew up in suburban Melbourne, but as a journalist, biographer, and writer of fiction he has spent most of his working life in Rome.

As most would know, Brides of Christ was an enormously successful mini-series recently co­produced by the ABC, Channel 4/UK, and RTE/Ireland. UQP have responded to its popularity with the publication of this slim book aimed, primarily, at the education market.

Rather than inundating a potential readership with a set of six one episode volumes or, presumably, the one mega volume, the publishers have decided to provide a representative release containing the screenplay of one episode – three, Ambrose – which the writers considered to be the most likely to translate effectively onto the page. The result is a quick enjoyable read which, although unlikely to lay siege to any bestseller’s list, would certainly prove a flavoursome and challenging text for study.

In a memorable sketch about enrolling a child in an English public school, Peter Sellers had the Headmaster of Cretinbury refer to the child as being at ‘the awkward age – too old for Mother Goose and too young for Lolita’. The Angus & Robertson imprint series, Bluegum, aims to provide quality fiction for thirteen-to fifteen-year-olds – an awkward age indeed.

Two of the most recent publications in this series are books which have much in common: both deal with the experience of young women who migrate to Australia; both are told in the first person.

Some time ago, I was curious about steam cars and found an advertisement, dating from the 1920s, for the sole Victorian distributor of the Stanley Steamer. The address was Flinders Lane, the street in Melbourne which exudes more personality than most of the others combined. I discovered that the building in question had been turned into a printshop. But its origins as a motor garage were obvious. Such unprepossessing buildings as service stations survive more by good luck and stubbornness than by design. So I was strangely impressed. All the more so because Flinders Lane now boasts a boutique hotel with a swimming pool that overhangs the street. You can paddle out and look down on the traffic swimming below you like the lost city of Atlantis.

In the last eighteen months three Australian feminist collections have appeared, each apparently addressed in its different way to the women’s studies market. Each title, or subtitle, is anxious to proclaim itself of the moment: Australian Women: Contemporary feminist thought (OUP); Contemporary Australian Feminism (Longman Cheshire); and now, only prevented by the limits of the print medium from flashing its red light, Transitions: New Australian feminisms from Allen & Unwin. To cultural analysts that extra ‘s’ will speak volumes.

The arguments about control of the media seldom mention radio. Yet, because it is cheap to operate, portable, and user-friendly, radio is powerful and governments are always mindful of its potential.

Lilith Norman’s exquisite novella was first published in 1978 and was an IBBY Honour Book in 1980. Set in a lovingly realised Bondi, the archetypal seaside suburb, the book packs a huge amount into its seventy-eight pages: life, death, love, grief; a question of focus; and, drawn in spare and beautifully controlled strokes, the disparate two worlds that touch at the shoreline.

This book is full of sadly ironic observations, such as: Most adult sons have no memory of telling their mother to stop kissing them; decades later they are simply anguished and resentful that she has shown them no affection.