Hidden Author
From Gerard Hayes
Dear Editor, If Mark Davis had wanted to concoct a parody of babyboomer fogeyism, he could hardly have done better than Peter Craven’s review of Gangland. Opening with a quotation from Anthony Powell and doing his best to parrot the Powellian tone of bored hauteur, Craven details the shortcomings of Davis’s age: not young – in fact a ‘late bloomer’ – but still not ol ... (read more)
The missing five years
Dear Editor,
Kerryn Goldsworthy’s valuable piece on the early years of ABR (‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’, ABR, April 2003), giving details of Australian Book Review under Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton from 1961 to 1973, does not mention what caused its disappearance from 1973 to 1978, when John McLaren and the National Book Council revived it. ... (read more)
From Paolo Bartoloni
Dear Editor,
As the convenor of the conference ‘The Public, the Intellectuals and the Public Intellectual’ (La Trobe University, May 1996), and as co-editor of the collection of essays, Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory and Practice, I have followed the discussion generated by the publication of Mark Davis’s book Gangland with great interest. Besides ... (read more)
Dear Editor,
It has always been my understanding that the National Book Council’s principal function is the promotion of Australian books.
Therefore I cannot understand why the Council has allowed the publication of a review in its Australian Book Review journal which calls for the public destruction of a book. To quote from Meredith Sorensen’s review (ABR, October 1994, p.67):
take one Big ... (read more)
Dear Editor,
In a generous review of my recently published novel, A Grain of Truth (Penguin), Andrew Peek mentioned an article I wrote for ABR two years ago, in which I suggested that the hostility of critics and reviewers in this country to novels dealing with current social issues threatens to suppress political fiction in general and the contemporary novel of ideas in particular.
... (read more)
Don Anderson
Donald Home’s Looking for Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years (Viking) gives us an octogenarian social commentator in youthful form. Unlike our leaders, Home translates difficult ideas into something with connections to human lives. John Forbes’s Collected Poems (Brandl & Schlesinger) is an invaluable collection of work by a major poet – Sydney’s finest since Sles ... (read more)
Dear Madam,
I don’t usually believe in responding to reviews, but Kenneth Gelder’s review (ABR June 87) of The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Stories, which I edited, raises a few points which are worth a reply.
Gelder may have his fantasies of Adelaide as a city of ‘beautiful spaces’, greys and pinks, colour-coordinated, but I wish he would leave me out of them. I never lived in Ade ... (read more)
Three Companions
It is now thirteen years since OUP Australia published the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (nine years after ‘Whitlam, Edward Gough’ launched the first edition). Peter Pierce, generally welcomed OCAL2 in his ABR review (‘A bountiful companion’, December 1994– January 1995): ‘The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature may be a touch t ... (read more)
The Fortunes of HHR
Last month, in his critique of Bruce Beresford’s memoir (whose title is far too long to reproduce here), Peter Craven, in addition to expressing surprise at film producers’ unwillingness to finance Beresford’s proposed film of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, deplored the fact that the great trilogy (1917–29) was out of print. Well, abracadab ... (read more)