Australia

The extraordinary photographer Richard Woldendorp joins writers Roger McDonald and Amanda Burdon in Wool, a sumptuous presentation that celebrates with every glossy page. But is Wool a celebration or a wake? Why publish such a book in 2003? Who is it for?

On the afternoon of Tuesday 23 December 1958, all work in the remote South Australian coastal towns of Thevenard and Ceduna came to a halt for the funeral of nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam, who on the previous Saturday afternoon had been violently raped and then bashed to death in a little cave on the beach between the two towns. On the morning of her funeral, a 27-year-old Arrernte man called Rupert Max Stuart had been formally charged with her murder: he had arrived in Ceduna with a small travelling funfair on the night before her death. He spent Christmas Day in Adelaide Gaol, penniless, illiterate and terrified. How the Hattam family spent Christmas Day can scarcely be imagined.

The title of this book suggests that it will be less concerned with industrial aspects of Australian cinema than with ideological, but, as if this might limit its scope and resonance, Peter Malone’s subtitle suggests that other lines of inquiry and response might be accommodated as well. This proves to be the case.

This Gauche intruder into the Australian book scene is sure to annoy many readers. Their annoyance, even disgust, will be various and peculiar to their own preoccupation with what they consider a good read, good literary criticism, good Australian cultural identity. Jennifer Rutherford presents us with a passionate, scholarly, rude and uncompromising discussion about Australian culture, reading identity at both individual and collective levels. She is a Lacanian (sure to annoy some), an unapologetic deployer of psychoanalytic insights into Australian identity fantasies; she is an astute and forthright literary and cultural critic (critics past and present, quake!) who offers a range of non-partisan and theoretically consistent readings of the novels of Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Handel Richardson, George Johnston, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Patrick White; and she is a canny, amusing, serpent-toothed reader of the broader Australian culture, from Hansonism, to the streets and suburbs of Canberra, to contemporary academia. She bites hard.

The memoirs of Australian war leaders have not enjoyed the commercial success gained by American and British commanders. Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 is possibly the only book of its sort which has ever had any real success. In the last few years the Australian Trenchard, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, could not attract a commercial publisher for his autobiography, though it covered the entire creation of the RAAF. Public interest apart, the fact is that Australian generals, admirals and air marshals do not tend to be literary. We just cannot imagine an Australian Slim. The only classic works produced by any Australian connected with the armed forces and aviation in general have been P.G. (Sir Gordon) Taylor’s finely wrought books.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.