Archive

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.

There is something uncommonly beguiling about a business writer who can insouciantly intersperse his argument with references to Eugene O’Neill and T.S. Eliot. Gideon Haigh is such a man, and the tale he has to tell is wonderfully seasoned by his intelligence and literacy. But that does not make its logic compelling.

Bad Company displays an almost tabloid preoccupation with the excesses of certain charismatic CEOs: particularly, in the local context, Ray Williams of HIH and the Wizards of One. Tel. But to suggest that these fallen idols are typical Australian CEOs is like describing Helen Darville as one of our typical novelists, or Ern Malley as a typical poet.

'Anyone who’s not a misanthrope by the time he’s forty has never felt the slightest affection for the human race.’ It was apparently at this time of life that Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1740–94) began jotting down his thoughts, reflections and anecdotes. As the above sample indicates, Chamfort’s life of excess and disappointment had equipped him with a heightened sensitivity to paradox, folly and absurdity. His massive, albeit fragmentary, literary output was only discovered after his death, and until now has not been available in any substance to readers outside the French-speaking world.

In her recently published collection of critical writing by indigenous Australians, Michele Grossman notes that ‘[s]ince the early 1980s, the burgeoning interest in and publication of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing …has become increasingly well-established’. This is particularly true when we consider the success of life-writing by Aboriginal women in the last twenty years. Sally Morgan is practically a household name, and even the once-maligned work of Ruby Langford Ginibi has taken its place on school reading lists around the country.

The travails of Australian universities have increased in recent years, for well-aired reasons. These considerable difficulties followed unsettling and much criticised structural transformation initiated during the Dawkins era. They have been accompanied by pressures for international benchmarking of performance, the rapid growth of information technology, and an added impetus to form international networking alliances.

Whether it’s fate or mere coincidence, the life stories of the two most celebrated writers of the Pacific – Robert Louis Stevenson and Albert Wendt – dovetail together on the small tropical island of Upolu in Western Samoa. In 1889, when Stevenson concluded his third Pacific cruise on the Janet Nichol, he told his readers in Europe and America that: ‘Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm trees and trade-wind fan them till they die.’ In hindsight, this reads as a premonition, but, after years of ill-health Stevenson was seduced and invigorated by sweet air and unexpected interests, describing his time during the Pacific voyages as ‘passing like days in fairyland’.