Fremantle Press

According to the summary on the inside of Women of Note’sattractive jacket, being a female composer in the twentieth century was a ‘dangerous game’ – strong words indeed, but not without justification. Rosalind Appleby notes her own initial surprise to discover how many women composers there actually were in Australia. My own experience while writing a PhD about four Australian composing mothers is consistent with this perception. I have lost count of the number of times I described my topic to polite questioners and, on explaining that it was about Australian women composers, was asked, ‘Are there any?’ Well, yes – in 2011 the Australian Music Centre recorded that twenty-five per cent of Australian composers are women.

‘Perhaps,’ Andrew Relph muses, ‘some people love reading but don’t require it.’ Relph is a psychotherapist who grew up in a dysfunctional family in South Africa, with an undiagnosed reading disorder – which he hasn’t exactly overcome. Reading, though vital, is still slow and intense: ‘I read nothing I don’t want to read. I’m like a person with a breathing problem, restricting themselves to oxygen.’

Equator, a rambunctious, unwieldy novel, begins in a Spanish orphanage with an elderly watchdog, Pinski. According to the narrator, who is addressing a large orange butterfly, Pinski has succumbed to the heat of the day and cannot be bothered protecting his human charges. The human characters – and therefore, by association, those who are reading his story – are called ‘the custodians of the nectar’. This rather beautiful metaphor is used many times in Equator, as are dialogues, which become incantations about good and evil.

I will always remember the first time I heard Kim Beazley Sr speak. It was at Kingswood College at the University of Western Australia, a year or two before the election of the Whitlam government. He spoke on the question of Aboriginal land rights, culture and spirituality. It was a spellbinding address which put the sword to the prevailing doctrine of assimilation. It wasn’t just the content of the speech which captured the interest of the student audience but the passion with which it was delivered. Like many there, my own thinking on the subject changed forever.

‘There’s a fine line … between fear and desire’ muses Shutterspeed’s adolescent protagonist, Dustin. His may not be a novel revelation but A.J. Betts provides an intriguing study of obsession and its disastrous results through a narrative set on this tremulous boundary.

On a first reading, the accomplished poetry of Tracy Ryan seems spiky, colloquial, earthy and enjoyable. But the more subtle accomplishments of the poetry lie in wait on a second reading: the musicality, the careful crafting, an honouring of the traditions of poetry, the rhythms and experiences of the everyday and the bodily. To name her themes draws us into the poetry: motherhood, the vicissitudes of the body, childhood and parenting, work, love, poetry, death. But it is in beginning to hear the musicality of Ryan’s metaphoric language that a second step can be taken. Alliterative, demotic, formally playful, morally serious, the poetry of Scar Revision is craft and presence finely balanced.

Another poet might invoke Edmund Burke’s famous treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful as a piece of phraseology or a pleasing adornment, but with John Kinsella, such a title is dead serious. Elliot Perlman’s superb novel Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) ingeniously makes the reader think of William Empson’s, and the idea of plural signification it evokes, but not instantly to reread it. Kinsella’s use of Burke’s title prompts one to reread the original – ideally, in a Kinsellan métier, on the internet, late at night. Additionally, the ‘shades’ in Kinsella’s title is an important supplement – shades as variations, colourings, but also shadows, undertones.

First impressions are unfavourable. The cover is ugly, and too cute: human-headed sheep, male and female, wait motionless for a drought to end while wearing prime ministerial bush-visit hats. We have read Frank Campbell’s rebuke in the Australian: the author Jeanette Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s. Inside, however, there is a cheering profusion of illustrations, placed in unusually reader-friendly closeness to the relevant discussion, and they include a feast of the best Australian paintings. There are some interesting sources in English eighteenth-century art and, much less familiar, some parallels in German fascist art.

Readers of Kayang and Me should not be lulled by the beauty of its prose or by its seemingly easy location within the now-familiar genre of indigenous life story. This book dislodges its white readers from positions of quietude or certainty, and takes us into a world marked by irredeemable loss – our own as well as Noongars’. Among other things, Kayang and Me points to the crucial things that settler-colonisers have lost or forsaken in the mistaken pursuit of the bounties of colonisation, and it calls for nothing less than a radical remaking of the Australian nation-state. Significantly, it installs writing and reading as practices through which the past, present and future might come to be differently known and newly imagined. The white reader is shown to be implicated in the story she holds in her hands, in its vision of another future as well as in its tragic present and past.

What is the comparative of prolific? John Kinsella, in this latest extension of his ‘counter-pastoral’ project, manages a tricky balancing act between the extreme givens of the bush and the fashions of art gallery and English Department. A belligerent posturing is implicit in Kinsella’s term, while there is only so far a poet can be anti-Georgics or extra-Georgics or post-Georgics before the game becomes exhausted or obvious. Nevertheless, ‘counter-pastoral’ is an extended essay that takes the pastoral concerns and illusoriness of ancient and eighteenth-century Europe and tests them against our own realities: environmental degradation, both random and systematic destruction of nature by humans, and a seeming indifference on the part of many Australians to doing anything about them.