Review

When I was twelve, newly returned to Fiji after World War II, I happened to see a brawl break out in a hotel bar. Two squads of police arrived at the double to break up the fracas, and I noticed that one was composed entirely of indigenous Fijians while the other was Indo-Fijian. When I asked why two squads were needed and why they were divided by race, I was told that if an Indo-Fijian policeman laid hands on an ethnic Fijian, or an ethnic Fijian tried to arrest an Indo-Fijian, the brawl would turn into a race riot. This was an example of the racial discrimination engendered by a system that looked back to the days of indentured labour, when Indian girmitiyas were brought to Fiji to work the canefields. As the Indo-Fijian population increased, pressure mounted for a share in government and the right to own land rather than leasing it. This pressure resulted in the coups of 1987 and 2000.

Pity the professional historian. It is hard to know where to turn these days to avoid being abused, even from the most unlikely sources. According to Andrew Riemer, writing lately in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main reason professional historians castigated Robert Hughes in 1988, when he published The Fatal Shore, was because he had ‘occupied their territory’. Is there any other professional group in Australia so childish, irresponsible, parasitical and useless as the professional historian? Judging from remarks like this, appearing weekly in the press over the last few years, apparently not. And why is it, at a time when the number of living professional historians probably outnumbers the total of their deceased predecessors since time began, we supposedly manage to work as a tiny clique? Someday an historian, maybe even a professional one, will explain this unlikely phenomenon. Allegations such as these are linked somehow with the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of early twenty-first-century Australia, but exactly why historians, among all the others, are hit so hard and so often is a puzzle.

In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting, Les Bergers d’Arcadie, dit aussi Et in Arcadia Ego (1638–40), takes up the theme of dispossession in a more radical key: even shepherds in Arcadia must die. The pastoral mode (taken broadly to include anti- and post-pastoral) has always enveloped threats to the pastoral idyll. John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia – with Poussin’s painting on its cover – is the final instalment of an ‘anti-pastoral’ trilogy initiated by The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995) and followed by The Hunt (1998). In The New Arcadia, as in its prequels, we find the pastoral mode in full-blown crisis: in modern Australia, nature’s small misfires (viz. the goat’s ill-timed birth) have escalated into ecological disaster. In The Hunt, the farmers and their families are killed by their own tools, dying in accidents, falling under tractors, shooting themselves; in The New Arcadia, on the other hand, most of the victims are native birds.

Each of these three books is its author’s first, and each carries a cover endorsement by two distinguished poets. You can tell a lot about the books from looking at who endorses whom before you need even to read one of the poems.

The rear cover of Aidan Coleman’s Avenues & Runways (endorsements by Kevin Hart and Peter Goldsworthy) describes him as an imagist. Whatever the exact significance of that term, there is no doubt that this poetry belongs to the class that has slight outward show and rich implications. And the pleasure of reading them is the shuttling between the two. There are at least two important requirements here: the surface has to be elegant and engaging without being slovenly or cute (ah, if you only knew what treasures I conceal!); implications must be intense and never clichéd.

The Bunburyists is a reminiscence of the author’s five years’ escape from the ‘dependent worlds of politics and journalism’.

I had fled with my family to the bush … where we sought to escape the present by returning to the past and setting ourselves up in business as dealers in antiques. Or at any rate, a superior kind of junk.

Today, as the novel opens, he finds himself again perched in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – ‘I have come back to work, to all I had sought to escape. The admission of defeat is self-evident. One more among many failings.’

Rodney Hall has always been a professional poet in the sense that he professes and declares – indeed, almost seems to make himself – in his poetry. The poetry seems to become a means of coping with experience; more, it becomes perhaps the central part of the experience. So it is in Black Bagatelles. But here, art and its expectations become less something for living than for dying by. Not that this book marks any great break with what has gone before, any rupture of identity. On the contrary, implicitly or explicitly, death has always been a major presence in his poetry. Its preoccupation with art and artifice represents, amongst other things, an attempt to give himself alms against oblivion. But in these poems the note of doomsday, sounded in the title of his first collection of verse, Penniless Till Doomsday; rings out, not portentously, but wittily, with immediacy and perception. Hall has always been concerned with masks, poses, the dance of experience. Now, the ‘masks compose themselves tableau-still’ and the source is revealed of the ‘desperate rustlings going on behind’. This source then is death, but not death majestical and metaphysical as Donne and the seventeenth century ‘knew him, not moralising and the servant of the mighty God as in the middle ages, but jester and joker, the one who calls the tune to life’s comedy, to

 … the hold of

heart

on heart the band

of gristle the bloodtie

just

waiting to be

bled to death by a clever cut

Luther’s Pine is a beautiful account of an old man’s encounter with his younger self. John Molony’s life has an iconic quality. His father fought on the Western Front during World War I, sustaining injury from mustard gas, before returning to marriage and settlement in the Mallee area of Western Victoria, close to Sea Lake. Sea Lake was also the home of John Shaw Neilsen. Young Molony, born in 1927, shared some of Neilsen’s ability to find beauty in an arid landscape: ‘in that poor country, no pauper was I.’

Frank Welsh is ill-served by his publicists. His history of Australia, we are told, is the first to be written by a non-Australian. It is not: the American Hartley Grattan wrote probably the best of a number of earlier such works. Great Southern Land is trumpeted as drawing on sources from Britain, the US, South Africa and Canada to place Australia fully in a world context: in fact, it incorporates some material from British archives and fragments from elsewhere to illustrate Australia’s more obvious international links.

In 1830, Georgiana Molloy stepped ashore at the remote settlement of Augusta, accompanying her husband to a new life in Western Australia. Maggie MacKellar tells us that:

Three weeks later, in the month of May, when in England spring bursts from every hedgerow, Georgiana lay on a plank of wood in her tent, with an umbrella held over her to keep off the drips that leaked in through the canvas. Outside the rain poured down. There was no sweet scent of spring; instead the air was filled with the rank, harsh smell of eucalyptus. Around her the earth opened itself to welcome the winter season. Racked with contraction after contraction, Georgiana fought to give birth to her first child.