Review

Justice Michael Kirby’s launching of Sir Zelman Cowen’s memoirs at the Melbourne University’s Woodward Centre in early June was a great Melbourne occasion. Two of Cowen’s successors as governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth, attended as part of a galaxy of judges, barristers, academics and a scattering of ex-politicians. The occasion was a festival of oratory, with five substantial speeches, possibly an Australian record for a book launch.

Cate Kennedy’s name will be familiar to anyone who takes even the vaguest interest in Australian short story contests. Over the last decade, she has racked up an impressive list of awards in regional competitions, but readers are most likely to have noticed her successes in two of the most high-profile ones. In 2001 she took out the prestigious and now-defunct HQ Magazine short story competition; and in 2000 and 2001, two Age short story competitions back-to-back. With such a strong recognition factor, it seems like a smart move by Scribe to publish her first collection. Not only should it appeal to readers looking for new short fiction of established quality, but also, presumably, to the thousands of writers who enter short story competitions each year and who wish to see the gold standard.

Halfway through Border Street, an ageing Holocaust survivor describes a night spent standing in the snow at Dachau. His companion, a young Australian woman desperate to understand what he has been through, tries to simulate his ordeal: she wades waist-deep into the winter surf and is shocked by the terrible cold. It is a futile, melodramatic gesture, but a touching one as well; here and throughout this quietly affecting first novel, Suzanne Leal explores the limits of human sympathy with compassion, understatement and tender humour.

Murder in the Dark is a worthy addition to the vast Phryne Fisher collection. Fans of this well-researched series will be pleased to rediscover the usual St Kilda cast, and will welcome the diverse, if not always likeable, supporting cast of profligate party-goers, polo-playing cowgirls, sultry American jazz musicians, rather luscious young men and the occasional goat.

Fisher, the waspishly slim, ever-fashionable and cunning detective, is endowed with looks as deadly as her pearl-handled Beretta. Despite holding a high social ranking in 1920s Melbourne, she enjoys breaking societal rules as much as author Kerry Greenwood does generic ones (using an unconventional figure as her heroine). If she were male, Fisher’s drinking, smoking, casual sex and choice of profession would be a less entertaining stereotype. Aficionados of the series will enjoy the latest misconstrual of Fisher’s behaviour and femininity: a male character always manages to underestimate her abilities, intelligence or openness to all members of society.

How to convey the pleasures of a whole collection of Laurie Duggan’s poetry? They are so various, one reason why Duggan is a source of perplexity to anthologists in search of a definitively characteristic poem. Anything as long and wilfully extravagant in spacing and layout as the anti-rhapsody ‘September Song’ almost automatically excludes itself; something epigrammatic then, say ‘A Little Book of Wisdom’ – but what about a virtuoso pastiche, the sonnets of ‘In Memory of Ted Berrigan’, or a ‘Blue Hills’ poem, with that imagist ‘minimalistic elegance’, which ‘Upside down’ declares: ‘unattractive / as the description of a potential residence / though ok if applied to / a book of poems ... my poems.’

It is even more difficult to find a Duggan poem that will slot neatly into the discourse of a thematic anthology. Against the grain of solidity in so much Australian poetry, there is something elusive here, an unreadiness to be ‘formulated, sprawling on a pin’ like that prototype of modernist angst Prufrock, whose ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ mischievously morphs to ‘Do I dare to eat a Porsche?’ in ‘Fantasia on a Theme by TS Eliot’. Mischief is part of Duggan’s very considerable satirical armoury against solemnity: consider ‘this country is my mind’: ‘just two minutes after / Les Murray became a republic / somebody cancelled my visa.’ But mischief is not all; there is something coldly sobering about this other glimpse Duggan offers of the relationship between politics and poetry: ‘At the centre of empire / the poets, stitched, bound / and acid-free.’

This book opens in Papeete one evening in 1935. Two American film-makers are in Tahiti to take location shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, and director Frank Lloyd laments his failure to find Captain Bligh’s log books. A small white-haired person of indeterminate appearance at the next table leans over: ‘I know where they are,’ she says. Of course she did. The logbooks were in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and the speaker was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946. The Mitchell Library, located in the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales, is based on the priceless collection of Australiana and south-west Pacific materials donated in 1907 by the reclusive bibliophile David Scott Mitchell. Leeson, its second chief custodian, not only knew the vast collection backwards but added significantly to it. She also used it herself, a key to effective librarianship.

The world conjured by first-time novelist and veteran journalist Kate Legge in The Unexpected Elements of Love is disturbingly familiar. It is peopled by frantic working mothers, lonely single women battling the biological clock, ageing couples ‘rowing against the tide’ of dementia and ill health, and sensitive small children swallowing pill-packed marshmallows for ADHD, all set against the backdrop of an increasingly extreme weather system, frequently referred to as ‘the warming’. It seems odd that this blazingly topical book, published in a year when the effects of climate change have been headline news, was written five years ago.

Longing is the central player in these interlinked short stories, set in India and Australia. Liz Gallois’s characters are questing individuals, resisting the hand that life has dealt them. They negotiate relationships that are fraught with tension – sexual, racial, cultural – all affected by the frailty of their understanding of who they are and what they want.

Western writing that uses India and Indians as counterpoints often veers towards exoticism, but there is a refreshing lack of sentimentality and stereotypes in Gallois’ stories. An individual and confident voice, she often challenges assumptions, sometimes distorting the lens through which the West views ‘India’.

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.