Review

Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliation process ground to a halt during the Howard government, Aboriginal issues receded into the background. They re-emerged spectacularly in 2006 with the cataloguing of widespread sexual and physical abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This was in the lead-up to the government’s Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory.

There is an unfortunate tendency in contemporary fantasy for plots to become elongated, ungainly and unmanageable, much like teenage boys. Thankfully, Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series is an exception, perhaps because the protagonist, Arthur Penhaligon, is not yet a teen-ager himself.

What if Kenneth Myer, not Sir John Kerr, had been Australia’s governor-general in 1975? There would still have been storms in Canberra, but no intervention, no Dismissal. Readers of Sue Ebury’s fascinating biography of Myer (1921–92) may be tempted to play the ‘what if’ game, speculating on how Gough Whitlam might have used a full second term as prime minister.

In an age when cricketing biographies predominantly lionise one-dimensional and vacuous individuals, this is a pleasurable reminder of an earlier era when even test players had regular jobs and a better sense of balance about life’s priorities.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.

‘Dress me and put my shoes on; it is time, it is the hour before dawn, so that we should get ready for school.’ This colloquy, probably from Gaul in the third or fourth century, prescribes the ideal child’s conversation, from waking and greeting his parents politely to walking home, with his slave, from school at noon.

Seth Lerer’s history of children’s literature starts with papyrus and ends with Harry Potter. It is called a ‘reader’s history’ because Lerer does not only look at literature written for children – a comparatively recent phenomenon. He also looks at what children actually read: abecedaria, excerpts from Virgil and Homer, versions of Aesop, lists and plays, folktales, prayers and psalters, boy scout manuals, magazines, and chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe.

My mother, a fine mezzo soprano, had three all-time favourite singers: Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas and our own Joan Hammond. When I was a child, my parents took me to see the famous diva perform Tosca in Melbourne – standing room only at the back of the circle. I remember red velvet, a thrilling voice, my own tired legs and a sense that I was in the presence of greatness. Sara Hardy’s biography of Joan Hammond (1912–96) is a timely publication. The number of people who remember the Australian soprano is dwindling, her fame eclipsed by another Dame Joan (who once, early in her career at Covent Garden, understudied Hammond in Aida).

Dissection was recently launched by Helen Garner, who described it as a novel like no other she had read. This impressive first novel is indeed astonishingly polished. Like Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), it dissects morally complex issues of life and death with a deceptively simple touch, using telling domestic detail to bring its characters and settings vividly to life on the page. The prose is clean, crisp, precise; as if carved by a scalpel. It might be the instinctual approach of a writer used to dealing with weighty issues in succinct fifteen-minute blocks.