Review

The title of this book suggests that it will be less concerned with industrial aspects of Australian cinema than with ideological, but, as if this might limit its scope and resonance, Peter Malone’s subtitle suggests that other lines of inquiry and response might be accommodated as well. This proves to be the case.

Reading Australian novels is often like gazing through an album of snapshots taken by various photographers attending the same party. The subject matter will depend on what stage of the evening the photos were taken – all the way from pre-dinner drinks to the finale of a Bacchanalian brawl – and it will depend, of course, on who is taking the photos. What is the photographer looking for? Who are the subjects that captivate?

It wasn’t long before myths and legends grew up around the story of St Francis of Assisi. James Cowan is right to suggest that this process began before Francis died and that Francis himself allowed or willed it to happen. He may even have encouraged it: ‘Francis endeavoured to make a metaphor out of his own life.’

I remember reading a book entitled Deeds That Won the Empire at primary school. Mainly, it seemed to be about the slaughter of various groups of native races by the superior technology and organisation of the West, always personified by focusing on an intrepid leader called Carstairs or Hethington-Bloggs, or some such name. Even in the 1950s, the book had a desperately old-fashioned feel to it. This type of writing, one felt, could not last.

Five of Laurie Moore’s ancestors were in the party that finally captured Jimmy Governor in October 1900, ninety-nine days after his murderous onslaught on the Mawbey family. He and his wife have assiduously traversed the terrain of the manhunt for Jimmy and his brother Joe. Moore’s book, The True Life of Jimmy Governor, written in conjunction with Stephan Williams, is an admirable amateur labour: loving, painstaking, yet never without a tinge of irony about fashions of remembering folk anti-heroes in Australia. As the authors remark near the end of their story: ‘the brothers held up, or were fed by, everyone’s great aunt or grandfather’.

The huge changes that have occurred in Australia in the space of a century were reflected in the recent centenary of Federation celebrations in Melbourne. They were evident, for example, in the repeated acknowledgment of Aboriginal Australians and in the selection of a young female Asian-Australian to speak on behalf of the future.

Wifework is a good term for the things that women have been doing in Western marriages for centuries. It evokes all those other phrases coined in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists that resonate in the consciousness of modern women (including many of those who preface any discussion of family life with the mantra ‘I’m not a feminist’). Wifework embraces the sacrifice of ‘the burnt chop syndrome’, the exhaustion of the ‘the double shift’ and the psychological burden of ‘emotional labour’. The title of this new book raises hopes for a spirited discussion examining and updating earlier complaints, showing how things have changed and suggesting what needs to be done about marriages in the new century. As a been-there-done-that reader (married in the 1970s and feeling guilty about letting down feminism by doing so, divorced in the 1980s and feeling guilty about that, cohabiting and parenting in the 1990s), I was interested at once.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Elvis Presley, the Tarot, unsettled weather, love, ducks and a megasupermarket: they’re not subjects that one would often be moved to mention in the same breath, but it is on just this unlikely affiliation that Julie Capaldo’s cunningly plotted second novel is based.