Review

When we think of Charles Dickens, we think of London – not the imagined medieval London of William Morris, ‘small, and white, and clean’, but the contemporary London Morris described as among the ‘six counties overhung with smoke’. For Christopher Koch, in Crossing the Gap (1987), the London of his imagination was full of ‘rooms where great fires blazed in open fireplaces’. He saw it this way because ‘Mr Pickwick had warmed his coat-tails before such fires’. We know, of course, that there are plenty of other English localities in Dickens’s novels, such as the memorable marshes in Great Expectations (1860–61). We even remember that parts of his novels are set in other countries altogether, such as the American scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and the Marseilles setting at the beginning of Little Dorrit (1855–57). Yet if we think of the quintessential Dickens setting, it is to London that we turn.

In a discussion on election advertising, an American political operative was asked whether it is preferable to run a ‘negative’ advertisement (criticising an opponent) or a ‘positive’ message (extolling the client candidate). He replied: ‘If it’s negative, it works. If it’s positive, save it for your tombstone.’ In Australia, the major political parties are similarly inclined: according to Sally Young’s research, sixty per cent of television advertisements in federal election campaigns since 1993 have been in the ‘negative’ category. The public’s general dislike of politicians facilitates this approach. For the same reason, the advertising party usually employs an actor to dish out the dirt. Young, a political scientist, has extensively researched political advertising in Australia. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising covers the evolution of political advertising in this country and the effectiveness (or otherwise) of various campaigns over the last fifty years.

A full-blown history of sperm can’t be too long in the coming given the current academic vogue for studies of the body, and the huge spurt of curiosity prompted a few years ago by the appearance of a couple of tell-tale stains on the dress of a White House intern. It is possible the subject (or the object) first came into its own as a more than private matter when, nearly a hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey spotted a similar stain on the dress of his just-married friend Vanessa Bell and dared to name it in the mixed company of his assembled friends, the legendary Bloomsbury group in its embryonic days. ‘Semen?’ he enquired, with forensic candour, and forever after, so the legend goes, the group would never recoil from calling a sperm a sperm. ‘With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.’ So recalled Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, about a decade and a half later, when she had long since become the wife of Leonard Woolf and was already on the way to becoming one of the twentieth century’s most famous novelists and pin-up feminists.

The Marsh Birds, by Eva Sallis, is a bleak but poignant account of one boy’s consuming loss and bewilderment as war and internal political tension separate him from his family, his home and his country. It is the story of parallel journeys in the life of Dhurgham Mohammad As-Samarra’i as he grows to manhood in an unforgiving world and searches for love and acceptance. Throughout this pilgrimage, Sallis examines concepts of anguish and hopelessness, social hostility and exclusion, fear of difference and the collision of cultures. In the tradition of Sallis’s City of Sea Lions (2002) and Mahjar (2003), themes of self-discovery, escape, constraint, and the obstacles to freedom and solace in other societies are revisited.

Professor Anthony Reid has added this volume on Sumatra, with special attention to Aceh, to his already huge corpus of publications about Indonesia. The book reveals that he remains master of the telling phrase. In this case, the phrase emerges, almost casually, when he tells us that since 1998 the ‘Indonesia project’ has been increasingly challenged. Indonesians might be startled to learn that their country was a project, but Reid presents plenty of evidence here for its incompleteness. Anyone tempted to superficial judgments about the Aceh problem and what it means for Indonesia and the region would do well to read this book.

Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.

To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.

On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.

‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.

Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.