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Geoff Dutton was a man-of-letters who for many years made (with Max Harris) Adelaide seem one of the lively centres of Australian literary culture. One thinks of him in association with the magazines Angry Penguins, Australian Letters, and the original Australian Book Review, not to mention the inauguration of an Australian publication list for Penguin Books, and then, when that soured, the setting up of Sun Books, one of the most innovative of Australian publishing ventures at that time – which was in the difficult slough period of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s.

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What do we talk about when we talk about Helen Garner? About her writing, that is, about such a consummate novella as The Children’s Bach, about extraordinary stories such as ‘A Vigil’, in Cosmo Cosmolino, about the eponymous ‘Postcards from Surfers’, and a dozen others? We talk about domestic realism, we talk about fiction that encompasses not merely the present supposedly self-obsessed Baby Boomer generation but children and grandparents also, we talk about discipline, control, and the assurance that more is less.

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The Justice Game by Geoffrey Roberston

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June 1998, no. 201

The memoirs of any barrister still in harness are, by definition, advertising. The mystery of The Justice Game is what on earth Geoffrey Robertson needs to sell. He is much too busy already. A queue of life’s victims wanting his help in court would stretch twice round the Temple. But drumming up business is not what the book is about. Its real purpose, I suspect, is to show that, despite a certain radical reputation, Robertson is a sound man.

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Marion Halligan’s new novel has as its centrepiece, shiny and assertive, flagged by its title, a dress made with loving care but, nonetheless, improvised just so that the fabric will go far enough. A dress that Molly Pellerin wears to a party at the laundry where she works, an event that becomes a defining moment in her life, the dress a legacy, offering an image of Molly as dazzling, beautiful, and loved. The photograph sustains her memory, potently, permanently.

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Tommo & Hawk by Bryce Courtenay

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June 1998, no. 201

I suspect that Bryce Courtenay’s novels about early Tasmania, The Potato Factory and Tommo & Hawk, have introduced countless general readers to aspects of Australian literature which might otherwise remain terra incognita. For this reason, I applaud his enterprise.

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In retrospect it’s not surprising that Andrew Riemer wrote so insightfully about Shakespeare’s comedies. Those green worlds of transformation are expressive of longing and nostalgia, of social order being restored through the acceptance and reconciliation of opposing forces. That the brute, material world is partly dealt with through nostalgia, fantasy and parody is an idée fixe of Riemer’s elegantly written autobiographical books.

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Murray Bail has passed muster as an important Australian novelist for quite a while now.  His 1980 novel Homesickness, with its sustained parodic conceit of Australian tourists forever entering the prefab theme park, rather than its ‘real’ original, was an early national venture into what might have been postmodernism. Holden's Performance, a good time later ...

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My great-grandfather Robert had a beard, a pointed one, presumably grey. He stands in a sepia-coloured photograph, gazing steadily at the camera, leaning on a walking stick and wearing a grainy-looking overcoat. But these are only dimly recollected details: I have not looked at the relevant album for years. Much more vivid is the voice I never heard. It was transmitted by my mother, who is now also dead. Throughout my childhood my imagination was peopled by various characters, as she recalled their exact words, entertaining my sister and me as she herself had been entertained: by using remembered voices she recreated her past and created one for us.

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For the eighteen months or so that I taught novel writing a few years back, I was haunted by a remark of Somerset Maugham’s: ‘There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’ In his teasing way, Maugham is suggesting that while the novel has a recognisable form, it cannot – for a multitude of reasons – be reduced to a formula. What escapes definition is what makes the journey into the unknown worth the effort for both the writer and the reader. The danger is, of course, that such a remark can be used to mystify the whole process and imply that creative writing can’t be taught. You either have what it takes or you don’t.

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If presence in literary journals, anthologies and at writers’ festivals may be taken as an indication of a poet’s importance, Anthony Lawrence has for some time been regarded as one of Australia’s foremost poets of the post-­’68 generation. He has published five books of poetry, all of which to my knowledge have been well received, and he has also been the recipient of many prizes, most recently the inaugural Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize and one of the Newcastle Poetry Prizes for 1997. With the publication of his New and Selected, Lawrence seems to have been canonised.

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