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University of Queensland Press

Diego Maradona is the greatest football player I have ever seen, but as a coach he sits somewhere between a comic opera and a train wreck. Philip Larkin was one of Britain’s finest poets, but to read his music criticism is to wish someone had heaved his typewriter into the nearest river. Ronald Reagan qualified as an A-grade B-movie actor, yet as president – the biggest acting role on the planet – he proved decidedly C-grade. Switching genres can be tough.

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Steve Holden’s début novel puts us inside the head of a transsexual mortician living in a small Tasmanian town. It could be a stifling and lonely place to be, but the nameless protagonist draws us persuasively into her world. As a mortician, her job is to disguise death, but as a storyteller she is able to illuminate it for our benefit.

Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh’s third book of poetry, Ashes in the Air, reclaims some themes from his earlier poetry collection, Eyes in Times of War (2006). Autobiographical sequences once again interweave with accounts of recent wars and oppression. Alizadeh also explores some ...

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Australians quite like the idea of freedom of speech, except in almost any situation you can think of. We hold that speaking freely is acceptable and commendable except when it is rude, upsetting, unpatriotic, in poor taste, or blocks the traffic.

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How effective is a voice of reason in a climate of fear? In his introduction to this book, Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University says that he is ‘incorrigibly optimistic’ about the role of education in assisting us to make wise decisions about our future. Over the past twenty years, he has written twelve books, including A Big Fix: Radical solutions for Australia’s environmental crisis (2005) and Living in the Hothouse: How global warming affects Australia (2005), forty-five book chapters, more than thirty journal articles and six hundred columns for various publications. That work has been written for the general public, not just the scientific community.

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Parts of Us by Thomas Shapcott

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April 2010, no. 320

This is Tom Shapcott’s thirteenth individual collection of poetry (two Selected Poems have appeared, in 1978 and 1989) in a writing life that – at least for his readers – began with the publication of Time on Fire in 1961. It continues something of a late poetic flowering, which, to my critical mind, began with The City of Home in 1995. All in all, Parts of Us is no disgrace to its twelve predecessors.

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Having disposed of World War I in a couple of brief chapters, our shell-shocked soldiers wonder what to do next. During the war, sinister balloons carrying out surveillance had hovered over the trenches. This now gives Axel Glover and Edward Llewellyn an idea. They have become mates in an understated English way, never making eye contact.

‘The first time I saw Axel Glover he was standing stark naked in a wide shaft of sunlight,’ begins the novel, which is written in the largely monologic voice of a diary or memoir. It records the lives of these two ‘very deep friends’ who, having survived the war together, commit to the somewhat eccentric adventure of ballooning to ‘New Albion’, in the Western Pacific of the imagination.

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Made in Queensland: A new history by Ross Fitzgerald, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons

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July-August 2009, no. 313

In 1858, a year before Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales, Theophilus Pugh wrote in the first history of Queensland: ‘Difficult indeed will be the task of the historian who hereafter attempts to chronicle the events connected with the early days of this now important settlement.’ Authors of the subsequent nineteen histories of Queensland, including Ross Fitzgerald, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons, would have been well advised to heed Pugh’s prescient warning.

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The Adelaide River in the Northern Territory is both a small township and a river that is an infamous cruising zone for sizeable salties. Here, thrill-seekers frequent ‘Jumping Croc Tours’ and dine out on the local specialty of barramundi and hot chips. Resting on the Stuart Highway, 201 kilometres north-west of Katherine and 114 kilometres south of Darwin, the township’s population is around 250. The location’s in-between status is ideal for this story of splintered lives.

Brown Skin Blue’s hero, Barry Mundy, is on the threshold of adulthood, and like most adolescents he is wrestling with identity; but in Mundy’s case the struggle is compounded by not knowing who his father is, or even his own racial heritage. Some call him an indigenous Australian; others call him ‘Darkie’, ‘Brownie’ or ‘Dirt’. His mother is white-skinned; he is not. In the midst of this bewildering ambiguity, the seventeen-year-old’s troubled introspection and sexual awakening are spiked by unwelcome flashbacks of a devastating childhood trauma. Suspended somewhere between longing to forget and wanting to remember, Mundy is deeply conflicted.

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While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.

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