UNSW Press

Sometimes books date quickly. This is the fate of To Firmer Ground, which was published in October 2007, one month before the change of government in Canberra. Had it appeared one year earlier, or had Kevin Rudd not triumphed at the ballot box, then this book might have provided a timely critique of the policy failings of the Howard government. Six months later, with Kyoto ratified and the new parliament having apologised to the ‘stolen generations’ and amended WorkChoices in its first sitting week, this volume seems bogged in the past.

Peter Sculthorpe must already be the most written-about of Australian composers, by a comfortable margin. One might legitimately wonder whether we need another Sculthorpe book in preference to an in-depth study of one of his comparatively neglected colleagues. However, this imbalance is not merely quantitative, but points to an underlying phenomenon: Sculthorpe’s position, in the concert-going public’s imagination, as the very incarnation of Australian ‘serious’ music. This phenomenon is, in a way, the real subject matter of Graeme Skinner’s new book – a meticulously detailed biography not only of the man but also of his almost mythic persona as The Great Australian Composer, created by Sculthorpe himself and by others.

‘I am really only an oppositionist, distrustful of power wherever I see it,’ wrote Jack Barry (1903–69) in 1951; and perhaps his oppositional instincts held him back from the heights of power to which he sometimes aspired. Instead, this biography argues, his impact was that of ‘a public intellectual before the term was invented’.

In this fascinating and irritating book, Elizabeth Farrelly hits out at almost everything about the modern world. She is an architect, and urban sprawl and ugly buildings are her bêtes noires, though obesity, kitsch and fakery also attract her coruscating attention.

Blubberland is a curious mixture of diatribe and philosophical treatise on cultural theory. Farrelly makes many good points: tight-knit cities, for example, are more energy-efficient than sprawling suburbs, and the ‘sea-change’ fad destroys beauty spots with little increase in happiness. She wonders ‘[w]hy we demand a built lifestyle whose habitual over-indulgence is, by even the standards of our parents’ generation, extraordinary? … Why these houses, and the suburbs full of them, are so ugly? Is it an aesthetic or a moral repugnance?

The Torch and the Sword began life as Craig Stockings’s PhD thesis, and shows its origins on every page. He presents a hypothesis and refers to it often as he proceeds systematically through a chronological and thematic exposition of his subject.

There are few times we use words related to what we throw away in any sort of positive manner; if, for example, this weren’t a nuanced, careful book, I might call it trash. Certainly, one might refer to, say, a crime novel or a Jerry Bruckheimer film as ‘trash’, but mean it with love and affection, and ‘wasted’ or ‘trashed’ are words used with affection and some pride by people when referring to drug-fuelled exploits. In general, though, we use such words – trash, junk, garbage, waste, rubbish – in a pejorative sense, and it is this sense of waste that Hawkins wants to challenge and complicate in this brief study.

The trouble about identifying great mistakes in Australian history is that most of them seemed like good ideas at the time. When, for instance, a recent IPA Review identified as one of Australia’s major errors the rejection in 1905 of George Reid’s free-trade federal government in favour of Alfred Deakin’s tariff protectionists, it indulged in anachronistic hindsight. However suited globalisation may be to the geopolitics and technology of the present day, things were different a hundred years ago. Every nation except Great Britain and Turkey used the tariff to protect local capitalists and employees. A whole anthology of ‘great mistakes’ risks deteriorating into a facile exercise in ancestor-bashing.

There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.

Activist Wisdom is the latest addition to the field of studies about Australian social movements. The authors, Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, are academics who aim to take ‘knowledge from the streets back into the academy’. They try to do this by considering how ‘practical knowledge’ (that is, the knowledge that activists have gained ‘from experience’) has contributed to the survival of different movements.