Review

It’s Sydney – and Saturday night. The Great Jazz Orgy has begun … a million people are moving, turning, swaying, shuffling to the accompaniment of pianola, gramophone, or jazz band, and are beating out the barbaric time of syncopated melody. (Home magazine, 1923)

Historian Jill Julius Matthews takes us back to Sydney between the 1890s and the late 1920s, when cinema and the phonograph were exciting new imports, their impact on the local culture at once exhilarating and threatening. Matthews examines the way modernity – in the form of popular music, dance and film – was brought to and embraced by Sydneysiders. Her focus is on the ‘mediators’ of the new: entrepreneurs who imported the products and the technique of making them indispensable to people’s lives; the traditionalists who hoped to protect audiences from ‘corruption’ by seductive popular culture; and the government officials who negotiated these voices, seeking to regulate content.

Kerrie Davies’s Delta is touted as ‘the first ever biography on Delta Goodrem’. This is not entirely surprising, given that the singer–songwriter is only twenty years old. But Davies makes no secret of the mythical terms in which she views her subject: ‘[Delta] has raged against failure and exulted in the euphoria of success. Delta has felt the power of youth and the fear of death. And she has fallen in love, had her heart broken, and been betrayed. For Delta, this is just the beginning.’

To the outsider, the Anglican Church may well seem one of the more liberal of the Christian denominations. While the Roman Catholic Church refuses even to debate the issues, Anglicans have gone ahead and ordained both women and homosexuals to the priesthood. In Canada, one Anglican diocese has gone so far as to bless same-sex marriages. Theologically, the best-selling books of retired US bishop John Shelby Spong represent progressive Anglicanism at its extreme. Not only does Spong argue that the world view of the Bible is incompatible with contemporary scientific knowledge, but he also suggests that St Paul was gay and that Christians need not believe in god.

There are at least three reasons why we left-leaning, right-thinking, middle-class readers value Robert Manne’s essays. Over the last twenty years, he has – in books, as editor of Quadrant from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist – been writing with an uncommon intellectual lucidity. He is that rare combination of good scholar and good journalist. His style is transparently reasonable: his essays shine as models of speaking rationally.

Disclosure: I am a humanities academic. It is, therefore, entirely inappropriate for me to be reviewing this book. After all, the author maintains that most academics in humanities departments are post-modernists or post-structuralists, prescribing as dogma ‘the bizarre and outdated theories of a handful of French philosophes’; worse, much of academic thought in the last two centuries has been related to the ‘partial removal or even the overthrow of capitalism, of the free market and of the private enterprise system’.

This book explores an unprecedented phenomenon: coast-to-coast Labor governments in the states and territories. The peculiarity of the current situation is magnified by Labor’s continuing failure at the national level. Where state politics can boast political ‘stars’ such as Bob Carr and Peter Beattie, federally the cupboard seems bare. Yet this collection reminds us of the unfairness of comparison between Labor’s national failure and sub-national success. Victory is great for your image. It takes considerable historical imagination to appreciate that there was a time when Carr was regarded as ‘a stopgap leader’ – as he was in the aftermath of Labor’s 1988 electoral humiliation. David Clune shows that Carr’s first year or so in office, when the government had a majority of one seat, was no raging success.

Tasting Life Twice is a collection of twenty-six interviews conducted by Ramona Koval over the past ten years at literary festivals, on radio programmes and in the homes of such writers as Les Murray, Morris West and Joseph Heller. Any randomly selected shortlist of these writers would impress among them are Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and P.D. James, and some who have recently passed away: Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Malcolm Bradbury. Koval, of Radio National’s Books and Writing, is passionate about books and ideas, informing us in the introduction that her interviews revolve around ‘questions of how one evaluates a life, the getting of wisdom, facing death, the meaning of love, and whether a book ever changed the course of history’.

Adolf Gustav Plate (1874–1913) was a German artist, photographer and writer who spent much of his youth on merchant vessels in the South Pacific, eventually settling (or trying to settle) in Australia. Cassi Plate, his granddaughter, researched his life for a higher degree at the University of Sydney; her thesis has now been revised for publication (the first of six such volumes to be published by Picador in association with the University of Sydney, as reported in ‘Advances’ last month).

I came away from this book with an unexpected insight – not into George Rose as a photographer, but as a man. His de-facto biographer, Ron Blum, has revealed that Rose was an adventurer who travelled hugely, photographing in at least thirty-eight countries in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. He was also an expert mountaineer who, with his cumbersome photographic equipment, scaled the peaks of New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland during a long and healthy life (he was vegetarian, never smoked and apparently drank only milk and water).

Carmel Bird stakes a great deal on her prose style. The delicate latticework of imagery, the fascination with detail and colour, the allusions, the linguistic gamesmanship, the florid descriptive passages (and Bird’s writing is literally florid: there are flowering plants everywhere) – these are at least as important to her fiction as narrative. Her writing does not just revel in the sensuality of language; at times, this sensuality shapes the form. In her long story ‘Woodpecker Point’, for example, the action is veiled in lush rhetoric. The intention is to tease out small correspondences and to develop an intricate verbal pattern. So, while the narrative is disjointed, the finely woven imagery is rolled out like one long strip of carpet. This is often true of Bird’s short stories. They frequently centre on strange or sinister happenings, around which grows a delicate bubble of linguistic indulgence.