Review

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

While the imminent demise of the Australian novel continues to be predicted in the pages of the nation’s broadsheets, a curious thing is happening: two Australian publishing houses are creating new fiction lists. Australian Scholarly Publishing will present its fiction titles under the imprint Thompson Walker, and the University of Western Australia Press has come up with a New Writing series to showcase work from the postgraduate creative writing programmes of Australian universities.

Art research is an absorbing occupation, not for the faint-hearted. The researcher must brave airless libraries, wrestle with gigantic volumes of old clippings from The Bulletin or the National Times, and listen to ubiquitous taped artist interviews by Hazel de Berg, all the while perched on precarious stools and suffering under low-wattage globes.

Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in favour of Quadrant, of which Les Murray is poetry editor. It’s the hubris in the title – Best Poems – that makes one cantankerously inclined to point to incomprehensible omissions. Readers with a mind to play that game can scrutinise some of the contenders that Murray passed over by reading Peter Porter’s rival anthology (David McCooey reviewed UQP’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 in the October 2005 issue of ABR). We have to accept, I think, that any anthology cannot help but bear signs of its editor’s preferences and prejudices, and no anthologist can hope to read every poem of the year. What matters, bearing in mind the need to be reasonably representative, is whether the chosen poems are good ones (although Some Good Australian Poems of 2005 might not be a highly marketable title).

The Poet is an unusual book. Dispensing with many of the conventions that underpin most extended works of prose fiction, such as significant characterisation, it presents a central protagonist, Manfred, who is ‘honest’ – as the author repeatedly states. Manfred is also a poet. The novella is written in formal and refined prose, as if the narrative style is designed to reflect Manfred’s obsessional nature and estranged condition: he has never been ‘in love’, is ‘something of a loner’ and is highly anxious.

Don Aitken was born in 1937, Hugh Stretton in 1924. They have both had distinguished academic careers, making important contributions to the development of Australian social science, and at various points have been prominent in public debate. Both of these books might be seen as reflections on the current state of Australia, about which the younger Aitken is clearly more optimistic than is Stretton.

It is one of life’s ironies that war can bring out the best in people, and writers are no exception. Picture Australian seaman Ray Parkin as he toiled like a slave for the Japanese on the Thai–Burma railway during World War II. Despite the brutality and privations, Parkin felt that the experience would ‘not be entirely wasted’ if he could somehow get his diary and drawings home when it was all over. These were crucial, for, as he wrote, ‘Memory is not enough’. Parkin’s reflections go to the kernel of oral versus written memory, and why humans write in the first place: to make a record that can speak by itself, even when the writer is dead. His words could also serve as an appropriate epigraph to Eyewitness, a collection of diaries, memoirs, correspondents’ reports and analysis, all composed by Australians at ‘the front-line’ of wars and conflicts.

The first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography appeared in 1966, the sixteenth in 2002, by which stage the series included persons who had died prior to 1981. This one-volume Supplement includes those who were for one reason or another omitted from the main volumes. It is an impressive achievement. There are 504 biographies, written by 399 authors. Almost all are well written and carefully researched, with up-to-date lists of sources. The editor and his associates have had the Herculean task of melding all these biographies into a work of reference in which the entries have a consistency in the type of information presented, while at the same time allowing for the individuality of each subject and author. In this, they have succeeded admirably. The volume has the air of authority.

Judith Johnston and Monica Anderson have assembled a book full of quotable quotes for future scholars: ‘The typical Australian is an Englishman with a dash of sunshine in him’; or ‘Why has God given to England nearly all the waste places of the earth, unless she is to fill them?’ (1899). Perhaps even more chilling: ‘the acknowledgement of sin amongst a good many blacks proves the working of the Spirit of God’ (1861). Australasia might be ‘the Paradise of the working man’, but it was ‘the Sahara of the scholar’ (1895). The book reminds us how commonly ‘Australia’ was imagined as ‘Australasia’. The idea of a ‘Federated Australasia’ embraced the Australian colonies, Fiji, British New Guinea, and ‘any other British territories in the South and West Pacific’ – not least, of course, ‘the Britain of the South, New Zealand’ (1896). On the other hand, ‘of all the disunited states of Greater Britain, Australasia appears to be the most disunited’ (1890).