Archive

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.

Almost 100 years ago, Justice Higgins was asked to determine a ‘fair and reasonable wage’ for the average worker. In a landmark decision, Higgins declared that an unskilled labourer should receive a wage of seven shillings per day. This, he said, reflected the needs of an ordinary person living in ‘frugal comfort’ in a civilised community with the responsibilities of providing for his family. Higgins was explicit in setting this basic wage based on the needs of a worker, not the business organisation for whom he worked. ‘Fair and reasonable’ must also be something which the individual employee could not otherwise get through individual bargaining directly with employers. For, if it was, there would be no need for such regulation. Higgins’s decision shaped Australian wage regulation for the last century, and institutionalised the concept of collective regulation of workplace matters. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission thus became a ‘bedrock’ institution of Australian capitalism, civilising market forces and mitigating the adverse consequences for individuals of the uncertainties associated with them.

There is no minimal safe exposure to free asbestos fibre. It is the most lethal industrial material of the twentieth century. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are the common diseases arising from exposure to it. Mesothelioma, a cancer, is distinctively brutal in the way it causes its victims to die. Typically, there are no symptoms for as many as forty years; when the disease appears, death follows after a few excruciatingly painful months. James Hardie, a conservative icon of Australian industry, was established in 1888 and its core business was fibro-cement manufacture, the fibre being asbestos. Gideon Haigh traces the postwar success of the company and its turning away from the gathering evidence of asbestos’s toxicity. Asbestos, it dissembled, was dangerous (like many industrial materials) rather than lethal. Hardie comforted itself in the belief that the incidence of disease reflected past periods of exposure and not the current changed practices. At the same time it failed even to meet these inadequate dust standards in its workplaces.

The old country is, by his own admission, George Seddon’s last book. Last books are generally the products of two factors: posthumous recognition of work-in-progress, or a generous sharing of one lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. Happily, this book falls into the latter category. The opening chapter does nothing to jolt this impression; with avuncular ease, Seddon introduces his characters and stories. We sit with Uncle George at the fireside – or more realistically, given the irony of the title, around the campfire. The stream of consciousness is conversational, discursive and often intensely personal. Seddon has a gift for storytelling. While still in the roman numerals of the preface, we have a telling example: ‘The past lies at the author’s feet,’ Seddon observes epigrammatically, his boots juxtaposed over 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites at Marble Bar in Western Australia’s far north-west. We immediately under-stand that the author’s time frame is very wide indeed. We were half expecting a gardening book – or at least a book about plants, judging from its Dewey classification – but should not be surprised by this un-conventional opening gambit. ‘We live in old landscapes with limited water and soils of low fertility,’ Seddon explains, ‘yet with a rich flora that is adapted to these conditions, as we are not. There is much to learn from it, but we have been slow learners.’

One of the contestants on television’s Australian Princess last year was a stripper, the oscillation in whose carriage was queried by the judges. ‘Of course I wiggle when I walk,’ the young woman protested, ‘I’ve got booty.’ Another competitor found that the going got tough when she was called upon to make a cup of tea. ‘I’m more of a bourbon girl,’ she shrugged. We were meant to laugh and cringe, and we did, but the show, for which nearly 3000 hopefuls had auditioned, was also a ratings success, reinforcing the widespread belief that anyone can become a princess. After all, it seemed as though anyone had.

In The Rope Dancer, Rob Leach sets himself the ambitious task of using Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a template for an impassioned meditation on mountaineering, authoring one’s life and owning one’s injuries. It seems like formidably brainy material, and the novel can certainly be excavated for its philosophical underpinnings. Yet it’s equally possible to disregard them and to simply read The Rope Dancer as an engagement with the ordeal of living and the unspoken bargains one strikes with life.