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In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940), about the ethics of a Catholic priest in southern Mexico. Like Greene, Hardy was driven by a quasi-religious commitment, but for him it was a lifelong commitment to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) rather than to Catholicism.

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Subterranean Radio Songs by Joel Deane & Suburban Anatomy by Penelope Layland

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February 2006, no. 278

Good writing can take many forms, and I have often wished for a greater mutual appreciation, between poets and journalists, of the fine things with words that both are able to do. Joel Deane and Penelope Layland, former journalists, bring well-honed skills to their first volumes. (Deane is currently the speechwriter for the premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks.) In their work we find much clarity and a strong facility for description. Take, for example, Layland’s ‘Muttonbird Island’: ‘In the dark soil chicks incubate / camouflaged by a silence / they instinctively keep.’ Deane, meanwhile, is flexing his descriptive muscles in ‘Freckle’, a poem about childhood and memories of a long-drowned man: ‘… how, last summer, / when the river bed fell, / they found tissue paper, / once the muscle of a man, / stretched over sunken branches.’

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Noeline by Noeline Brown & Much Love, Jac X by Jacki Weaver

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February 2006, no. 278

In 1961 a young Noeline Brown was playing in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1954) at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham – ‘just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip’, as she characteristically locates it – when Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic, came to see a specially arranged Sunday evening performance. From the moment she emerged from the chauffeured limousine, Leigh was the star of the show. She was, Brown recalls, ‘wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket’, and ‘there were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands’. Brown, on the other hand, ‘was in a dress my Mum had made’. That contrast, between theatrical elegance and put-upon pathos, has been the essence of Brown’s own style ever since, and the key to her success as a comedian and an actor. She hid under a large picture hat to introduce Mavis Bramston, a parody of English self-assurance, to a bemused public in 1964. At the other end of the register, her world-weary, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’, delivered in a way that was both funny and sad, outlived its many iterations on the televised version of The Naked Vicar Show (1977) to become part of the Australian lexicon.

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Geoffrey Blainey made his reputation as a prolific and accomplished economic historian, then turned to broader themes and wrote important analytical works, including The Tyranny of Distance (1966), The Causes of War (1973), The Triumph of the Nomads (1975), and The Great Seesaw (1988). When the so-called ‘history wars’ began in the 1980s, Blainey was characterised as an optimistic conservative, critical of ‘the black armband’ view of Australian history attributed to the more radical Manning Clark. I thought the differences between Clark and Blainey were grossly exaggerated. Paradoxically, Blainey took a serious interest in Aborigines and women’s issues long before Clark did.

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ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

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Join us on March 6 during the Adelaide Writers’ Week when the Editor of ABR will announce details of a major new sponsorship and prize to be offered this year. We can’t go into details yet, but this is an event that no common or uncommon reader, least of all Australian writers, will want to miss. We will also be launching our March issue, which is largely devoted to Art and Architecture. Luke Morgan of Monash University is co-editing the issue with Peter Rose. A highlight of this annual thematic issue is Dr Morgan’s long article on the state of art criticism in Oz, which seems likely to provoke a few Cubist expressions in the art world! This launch (a free event) will take place at 12.30 p.m. on Monday, March 6, in the West Tent, Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens.

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Agenda edited by Patricia McCarthy & Jacket 28, October 2005 edited by John Tranter

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February 2006, no. 278

William Cookson was eighteen. He had been writing to Ezra Pound for three years. At last he spent a week in Italy with the great man. ‘Does he ever speak?’ Pound asked his mother. Nonetheless, or as a consequence, Pound encouraged Cookson to start a literary magazine. Cookson founded Agenda in 1959 and edited it until his death in 2003.

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Though we have seen periods during which Australian cinema has been synonymous with period-set narratives and idealised evocations of the outback, there has always been a darker side to our cinematic imagination, a gritty, hard-edged element that is just as crucial to this country’s feature film output as are the sepia-tinged dreamscapes. Many of the pivotal films of the Australian New Wave brought a vivid, finely judged aesthetic to the bleakest of subject matter. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) conjured a harrowing tragedy of grisly murders and manhunts, while Peter Weir’s darkly comic feature début, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), presented a paranoid, murderous rural community whose raison d’être was maintaining its seclusion, even if that meant killing any outsiders who found their way into town.

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When John Tranter reviewed Jennifer Maiden’s first collection, Tactics (1974), he noted its ‘brilliant yet difficult imagery’ and a style ‘so idiosyncratic and forceful in a sense it becomes the subject of her work’... 

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To celebrate the best books of 2005 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Morag Fraser, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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