Review

These first novels by Joel Deane, the Victorian premier’s speechwriter, and Merle Thornton, a former academic who famously chained herself to a male-only bar in Brisbane, focus on radically different social groups. Deane’s Another is about two unemployed adolescents living in an outer Melbourne suburb bypassed by a freeway where the local McDonalds is the town’s nucleus. In After Moonlight, Thornton presents a bookstore-browsing, duck-eating, macchiato-sipping, Carltonish academic. (The novel is replete with such portmanteaux.) That both novels are set in the same city is a shock. Another commonality, more poignant, is a concern with the personal and the enduring effects of tragic pasts.

Wesley College, Melbourne, has a long and intriguing history. Established in 1866, Wesley was off to a slow start that left it, for much of its history, trying to foot it with slightly older, considerably wealthier and rather more prestigious rival public schools (as they were then known, distinguishing them from schools run for profit by private individuals). In its first ‘heyday’ in the opening decades of the twentieth century, under the charge of the colourful L.A. Adamson, Wesley epitomised the Australian public school system. It embodied the transfer to Australia of the values of England’s élite schools, preaching conservative social values, and combining a love of sports with a devotion to intellectual pursuits and a commitment to a national agenda that emphasised imperial loyalty and martial willingness.

Robert Ingpen is one of Australia’s best-known and most distinguished artists. Throughout his long career, he has illustrated scientific publications and numerous books for children and young people. He is the only Australian illustrator to have been awarded the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Children’s Literature. He has designed bronze doors, stamps, and murals, and has acted as designer for Swan Hill Pioneer Village, one of Australia’s first open-air museums. His recent work includes the design of a tapestry celebrating the sesquicentenary of the Melbourne Cricket Ground; illustrating a centenary edition of Peter Pan and Wendy; and holding an exhibition at the 2002 Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Diane Armstrong should have stuck to the facts. The many surprising particulars that illuminated her two fine histories of the Jewish refugee experience (Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, 1998, and The Voyage of Their Life, 1999) have been replaced, in her first novel, by clichés and banalities that turn to soap opera her account of an Australian forensic scientist unearthing the secrets of her own past.

Robyn Eckersley’s provocative new study  of environmental governance reinvests belief in the  democratic state as a site of ethical action and ecological responsibility. She counters a trend in recent Green thinking to see the state, in particular the liberal democratic state, as the enemy of current and future environmental well-being. Eckersley’s own background is in political science, and she largely engages with other political theorists. However, the anti-statist perspective that she questions is common across a range of environmental disciplines, and it is refreshing to see a re-visioning of the political structures we already have rather than an imagined future ‘ecotopia’ as an answer to environmental ills.

I’ve always been interested in trying new things,’ Tim Jarvis declares disarmingly in the opening  line of The Unforgiving Minute, ‘and I’m not sure I know exactly why.’ Unlike Scott or Shackleton, Jarvis has no literary aspirations but is a knockabout bloke who gives motivational talks on his adventures and who believes in a gospel of personal effort, physical challenge and – trailing these two by a long margin – the wonder of the natural world. This account of a series of polar journeys is self-consciously structured using the effective journalistic device of plunging the reader into an intense situation at the opening of each chapter, and finishing each chapter with a teaser for the next. Like most accounts of polar exploration, it is a weird blend of numbing dullness and compulsive interest. Jarvis has taken the lessons of his public speaking and turned them into a pleasing book, firmly in the self-help genre, with gripping accounts of the many crises that inevitably beset extreme adventure expeditions, not to mention the prurient details of toilet habits, tooth decay and muscle wastage.

In 1954, Tom Inglis Moore established the first full-year university course in Australian literature at Canberra University College. English departments in Australian universities had until then resisted anything more than a token presence of Australian texts in their literature courses, many academics agreeing with Adelaide’s Professor J.I.M. Stewart that there wasn’t any Australian literature. Sadly, Inglis Moore’s pioneering initiative was to prove only a provisional victory in the continuing struggle for appropriate recognition of the national literature. When he retired in 1966, his Australian literature course was relegated to alternate years, and his parting plea that the Australian National University establish a chair in the national literature was ignored. In 1973, the ANU English department refused to appoint a specialist lecturer in Australian literature, prompting Dorothy Green to resign in protest. Fifty years after that first dedicated course, there are still only two established chairs in Australian literature in Australian universities – Sydney and James Cook.

This book fulfils two objectives. Within popular culture’s contribution to concepts of national identity, it energises a gap left in cinema studies by taking the contemporary discussion from the 1990s through to Japanese Story (Brooks, 2003). Secondly, it attempts to place films produced in the last ten years within the context of what the authors clearly believe to be the single most important recent event in the positioning of a dialogue between white and Aboriginal populations about belonging. That event is the Mabo decision of 1992 by the High Court that native title did exist at the time of the British invasion in 1788. The authors contend that this decision marks a watershed in the political unconscious of the nation. The assumption of terra nullius, that the land was not occupied and therefore entailed no transaction of settlement rights, was overthrown. More contentiously, they argue that this decision has caused a deep trauma in the white community, symptoms of which may be seen in the movement for reconciliation. At the heart of their study is the idea that this trauma is entangled in the major themes of most, if not all, the films produced locally post-Mabo.

From his precocious youth in inner-city Sydney until his death – still in harness at the age of seventy-five – the Australian photographer Frank Hurley lived for ‘adventure and romance’. By any standards, his was an extraordinary career. Yet the individual delineations of its great landmarks have blurred in the factual catalogue of Hurley’s achievements in two Antarctic expeditions during the cradle period of exploration in that great southern continent; in his work as an official photographer during the two world wars; in his pioneering of filmed documentaries and as a cinematographer in the making of major Australian feature films in the 1930s. In the last twenty years of his career, Hurley travelled the length and breadth of his own country, celebrating its people and eulogising what he saw to be the heroic Australian landscape. Always restless, always yearning for the next challenge, Hurley was a citizen of the world. He was drawn to record the cultures of the ancient world and, closer to home, aspects of New Guinea and the Pacific.