University of Queensland Press

'This is a book about friendship and storytelling’, writes Marilla North in her prologue to this artfully arranged selection of correspondence. It begins in 1928 and covers the next twenty-seven years, chronicling the large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, and Miles Franklin, three of Australia’s most vital, fluent, and committed women writers.

In the penultimate chapter, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’. 

Sophie Masson’s first novel deals with the probing of emotional wounds. It alternates from present to past as a journalist goes back to her village to write a story on a Family Court tragedy about people with whom her past is inexorably entangled. Set in northern New South Wales and Sydney, it examines the slow death of the rainforest areas and their rebirth as alternative lifestyle habitats for people fleeing the city.

The dustjacket designer Christopher McVinish has given the title of this novel an unforgettable identity, with the figure of a soldier superimposed in red on the second one of 1915, which is in black. It is a powerful image that immediately announces the subject of the novel. Most of what follows is disappointing, and apparently not due to McVinish. 

Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.

All those years ago when the Literature Board was set up and given a moderate budget, taking over the excellent work of the Commonwealth Literature Fund, many sceptics expressed doubt that our small nation had enough spread of writing talent to warrant what they considered excessive expenditure on books and writers. The record stands for itself and, even if we consider only the established writers who have so far showered us with their works in the 1970s and 1980s, the scheme must be reckoned highly successful. The wonder is, however, that each year new writers spring up with works of high quality as though talent has bred talent or we have established a cultural climate which has allowed the muse ample room to breathe and take flight. Who had heard of Kate Grenville five years ago, Rod Jones or John Sligo three years ago, or Mark Henshaw before April of this year?

The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.

Bates and Middleton are certainly valiant in their attempts to make a giant hollow rampaging male ego appear cute in Big Bad Bruce. Just look at it go! Indiscriminately swallowing everything in sight, making its way through the world astride a giant throbbing machine. But don’t toss this big glossy number aside – it can serve an excellent purpose. Treat it, allow me to suggest, thus.

Jessie Street, the subject of this biography, is one of the women we have ignored. She is an important figure in our history, but few people know much about her life. She was involved in feminist and socialist movements, in the Labor Party, in campaigns for Aboriginal rights and in the movement for world peace – in a long active career which spanned the years 1911–70.