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Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.

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Dear Editor,

I was surprised, on reading the August Issue of ABR, to find no comment or tribute to the former editor, John McLaren. I understand too well the pressure of deadlines and have no doubt that ABR will, at some future date, provide a fitting tribute to its former editor.

In the meantime, I would be grateful if you would publish my own small and inadequate tribute.

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Australian Women Poets edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn

by
September 1986, no. 84

In a paper entitled ‘Anthologies and Orthodoxies’ given recently at the Australian Literature Conference in Townsville, Jennifer Strauss, herself a poet as well as an academic, analysed the contents of six recent poetry anthologies, including this new Penguin collection. She came up with the same revealing statistics as editors Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn had discovered from a larger sample of fifteen collections: the average of female authors represented was only seventeen per cent. Obviously one of the orthodoxies enshrined in anthologies is in need of critical scrutiny if we are. unwilling to accept the implication that there are either fewer or less talented women writing poetry than there are men.

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From the enlightenment to post-modernity, there has been one common rallying cry: ‘This is the age of criticism.’ Religious authority, natural rights and philosophical dogmatism have all been under critique for so long that criticism has almost come to seem natural, authoritative and is in danger of hardening into dogma. Little surprise, then, that outside the academy the word ‘criticism’ is seldom linked with the venerable discourse of theology, politics and philosophy but rather with a comparatively recent and fluid phenomenon: Literature.

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With Dryden out of favour and Rochester still only a cult enthusiasm, ‘Restoration literature’ is likely to evoke for most readers only stage comedy, yet likely to seem to a casual reader to promise only scholarly drudgery in justly neglected corners, crowned by an inadequate, hurried examination of a major work, Samson Agonistes, looking sadly astray in this company.

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Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’

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The autobiographer faces a real problem: the self. ‘Which self?’ may also be the reader’s question and it may also be the question of the autobiographer. Should one write about the known self, the self vaunted or scorned by others, the public one, parts of which can be found in archives, on record, in the books and conversations of friends and enemies? Or should it be the private self, the self-protected and defended by jokes, chiack and taciturnity, hinted at here or there, but never accepted as real when defined by others?

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The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

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The two lots of new-look literary pages in the Age Saturday Extra and the National Times on Sunday are bidding fair to brighten up the weekends, especially for Victorians and for Other-Staters who also read the Age on Saturdays and will therefore get the benefit of both.

On the retirement of Stuart Sayers, Rod Usher has taken over the editorship of what is now the ‘Books’ part of ‘Arts and Books’ in the Age Saturday Extra, and is making a pretty classy fist of (and here I speak from experience and from the heart) an extremely demanding job. The few reservations I’ve heard around the traps have been to do with the number of Age staff reviewing books, and with the possibility that the ‘Books’ may get swamped by the ‘Arts’ now that they’re a double act. These odd mutterings are fair enough, but overall the whole section’s looking good.

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It must have seemed as natural to Penguin as money in the bank to ask Helen Gamer to provide a few enticing words for the cover of Jean Bedford’s new book, Love Child. Here, it would appear, is a book very much in the Garner backyard – short, domestic, ‘certainly not ‘loud’ or attention-seeking, but nicely crafted.

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