Review

The Byron Journals is organised into short, eventful chapters detailing several months in the life of Andrew, its protagonist. Andrew sets out from Adelaide on a schoolies’ trip, hoping to escape the weight of expectation and the fallout from his parents’ personal and professional lives. In Byron Bay he joins a group of street musicians. His prolonged holiday becomes a lost summer of drugs (consumed, cultivated and sold), alcohol, sex and music. Andrew is drawn into intense relationships with the members of the group, particularly with the captivating Heidi, who has herself come to Byron to escape a troubled past.

Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

Kally Palamas is an Australian of Greek descent; a trained and published philosopher barely coping with a personal tragedy in the man-made caves of Cooper Pedy. Estranged from her lover and living a solipsistic life, her world is disrupted when she travels to Greece to deal with the ceremony of her father’s death.

Her father, Akindynos Palamas, had been one of the many Greek migrants to travel to Australia in search of freedom and fortune. However, after achieving success in his adopted land he succumbed to the lure of the myths of his old country while his family continued their lives in Australia.

Apples with Human Skin is a collection of taut but detached poems. Well crafted, with superb use of diction coupled with tight and inventive forms, the poems remain, however, unrelated to anything in modern-day usage or consciousness. There is a coolness to the writing which can become relentless. Imagery and line structure are evocative and precise, and Shepherdson successfully invents a minimalist syntax in each of the longer chaptered poems. There are also shards of social comment hidden amongst the granite-like structures.

A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.

Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.

John Armstrong hails from Scotland and is currently philosopher in residence at the Melbourne Business School. He is well known for several popular but elegant works on, broadly speaking, aesthetic matters: among them, Conditions of Love (2002), The Secret Power of Beauty (2004) and Love, Life, Goethe (2006). His recent book is more ambitious than its predecessors, but remains essentially in their fold.

Ostensibly, Roger’s World is an account of Charles Siebert’s whistle-stop tour of primate retirement homes in America. By the author’s reckoning, there are approximately two to three thousand chimpanzees in America, as well as a substantial number of their primate cousins. He travels across the country, visiting captive chimpanzees on an ‘impromptu farewell tour of our own kidnapped and caged primal selves’, until he encounters Roger, with whom he feels a profound connection.

One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.

The Bee Hut, Dorothy Porter’s fifteenth book, is a collection of poems written between 2004 and her death in December 2009. Many poems address mortality: ‘nothing lasts / not Forster. not Cavafy’s eloquent doomed mediocrities. not you.’ Another important motif is travel and how it affects the traveller. There are two almost contrary themes in the travel poems: the recurring image of the artist as vulture or vampire, destroying what feeds it; and the stately museum or gallery preserving the past intact: ‘I hold in my hand / the greedy, bleeding / pen / that has always / gorged itself’ (‘Blackberries’); ‘Each new ghost in my life / living and dead / smells of mulch’ (‘Vampire’).