Review

The facing island in Jan Bassett’s memoir is Phillip Island, where her maternal grandparents had a dairy farm and where it seems she was most emotionally at home. Summer holidays there as a child in the 1960s, in the midst of her grandmother’s extended family and surrounded by familiar tokens of past decades reaching as far back as the early 1900s, undoubtedly sparked her lifelong commitment to Australian history. The title, taken from Peter Rose’s poem ‘Balnarring Beach’ (‘The facing island, a mortal blue, / beckons, intensifies, vanishes’), could hardly be more appropriate, compressing in a few words much of the emotional intensity of Bassett’s autobiographical last journey.

Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.

If Cheryl Kernot writes another book – and if Speaking for Myself Again is anything to go by, you had better hope she doesn’t – her publishers should at the very least make sure the punctuation police do their job. It appears they didn’t even show up to the scene of the accident this time. Exclamation marks are strewn throughout the work. Each time Kernot wants to bitterly labour a point, up pops an exclamation mark, as if she’s hitting the keyboard and cursing, ‘Take that you bastards’. Thus we get: ‘And some people can be so rude!’; ‘Women have sustained me!’; ‘I could write a whole book on my experiences with the media. Perhaps I will!’; and ‘Opinion rules!’ In a teen diary, that’s fine, but not in a book by a former senior federal parliamentarian.

The current legal regime for the regulation – I use the term advisedly – of drugs has many unintended consequences. One of its minor tragedies is the number of thinkers and activists whose valuable energies are thus diverted to the Sisyphean labour of undoing it. So many words have now been written on the failure of prohibition that there is surely little more to be added. More than a decade ago, former Senator Peter Baume expressed it well: ‘Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of substances, and fail to do so.’ Instead, our laws and policies make all these activities that much more dangerous, more corrupt, more poisonous and more destructive.

Since 1982, Robyn Rowland has published three poetry collections at roughly ten-year intervals. She has also been an eminent, sometimes controversial, academic. Her poetry must have been a release from the stylistic and emotional restrictions of her academic work.

Fiery Waters, her new collection, is a leisurely and deeply felt progress across most aspects of a middle-aged woman’s life. Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the ‘real world’, whether in apparently autobiographical poems of love and loss or in her more political poems against injustices here and overseas.

Clare Bradford is an Associate Professor in Literary and Communication Studies at Deakin University. She writes from within her discipline, and addresses other academics. Reading Race, despite its broad title, is principally a discussion of forms of racism that the author identifies in books published in colonial times, compared with contemporary examples.

‘I felts as if I had fallen into hell,’ reflects the Keeper of the President’s Clarinet of his visit to the city of Baha. The statement is almost redundant. The sun cannot penetrate the toxic pollution of this city; he has just passed a group of children betting on the imminent death of a fly-infested man; and he is there to kidnap an hermaphrodite child-prostitute. However, his words could be voiced by most inhabitants of the fictional land of Abaza; this novel is filled with such baroque, nightmare imagery.

We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next eighteen months. Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons. Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners …’ reads a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Does it sound familiar? However, the date is 18 November 1948, a time when aggrieved readers were bombarding the papers, protesting against the influx of postwar refugees.

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.