Review

According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were required to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital, to be aged between twenty-one and forty, and either single or widowed. The rules about marriage, however, were not always strictly observed, and as men sometimes fudged their age and other circumstances to get into the army, occasionally a woman may have disguised her marital status. But once in the Army Nursing Service, marriage usually meant resignation. If a nurse wished to keep working after she married, she had to join one of the private medical or hospital services that had come into being.

This novel is Sonia Orchard’s second book, published six years after her first, the compelling and intimate memoir Something More Wonderful (2003). For those who read the memoir – the harrowing story of her thirty-one-year-old friend’s battle with cancer – The Virtuoso may come as a surprise. Orchard has abandoned her own assured voice for that of a fictional and unreliable narrator, a young Englishman besotted with a concert pianist, slightly older than himself. The milieu is an eccentric circle of musicians and writers in 1940s London. If there is any similarity between Orchard’s memoir and her novel, it is the narrator’s stance as the observer, with a beloved and idealised friend at centre stage.

‘Read monkeys for pre-existence’ wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Darwin in one of his notebooks, pondering Plato’s assertion that our ‘imaginary ideas’ derive from the pre-existence of the soul. Two years earlier, when HMS Beagle had returned from its circumnavigation of the world, Darwin was still a creationist, albeit one who had entertained doubts. Keen to capitalise on his wide-ranging collection, and to make a name for himself, he arranged for various experts to examine the specimens. Fairly quickly during the ensuing discussions, Darwin realised that his doubts concerning the stability of species were ready to burgeon into a new and disturbingly materialist worldview.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

Glowing reviews of an author one is not familiar with can inspire scepticism, but in the case of David Francis these tributes are justified. Stray Dog Winter – an impressive political thriller – is set mostly in Moscow in 1984, with occasional flashbacks to Melbourne during the 1970s.

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

Imagine a street with a neo-Gothic church, a fish and chip shop, and bronze statues of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and Shakespeare. Someplace in England? No, it’s Thames Town, a satellite on the outskirts of Shanghai. German, Czech, Spanish, Scandinavian and American suburbs are also planned, to cater to the new Chinese middle class, for many of whom, like the Chinese for most of the twentieth century, ‘modern’ equals ‘Western’. Or recall your local Chinatown, with its ‘Chinese’ shops and restaurants, curved roof façades and resident diaspora, many of them convinced that they are preserving the ‘real’ Chinese culture, now lost in the mainland’s twentieth­century convulsions. How does each of these represent modern Chinese culture?

Moral panics, which Stanley Cohen, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), said involve any group of people who are defined as a threat to societal values and interests, were grist to John Howard’s mill during refugee debates. Applying the classic analysis, his governments were ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who employed scare tactics whenever a perceived threat arose. Asylum seekers and their supporters were ‘folk devils’, outsiders and deviants responsible for the problems placing our values and principles in jeopardy.

There has always been a problem with locating conservatism in Australia’s political traditions. As a new settler society dedicated to development, it is hard to see a natural place for a political philosophy that advocates taking things slowly and respecting the wisdom of the past. Nevertheless, the term has been in use as a political label in Australia since the nineteenth century, generally to refer to the defence of privilege and wealth and to the political arrangements that protect them both. It is often used to refer to the Liberal Party and its predecessors, even if at various times these parties have themselves denied the label in favour of the term liberal which stresses the party’s positive commitment to civil and economic liberties and its faith in individual rather than collective and state action. And recently John Howard proudly described himself as a cultural conservative and an economic liberal, as if one could promote radical economic change without also causing cultural and social change.