Archive

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television series Hypotheticals.

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?

David Lange’s autobiography was published on 1 August 2005. Twelve days later, he died in Auckland, at the age of sixty-three, after kidney failure and a long battle with amyloidosis, a rare disorder of plasma cells in the bone marrow, having been kept alive by a pacemaker, chemotherapy, peritoneal dialysis, and blood transfusions. He had been a diabetic for many years. When My Life appeared, press reports concentrated on isolated paragraphs and sentences, containing critical remarks about his former ministers, and about Bob Hawke. The book could have been dismissed as shrill vituperation, but it is far more than that. My Life is a touching, searching and reflective work, deeply analytical and self-critical. David showed great courage in completing an autobiography so close to death.

The poems collected in Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (published by UQP as winner of the 2004 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize), are often marvels in their own right – street-savvy, sensitive, intelligent lyrics. Together, even more impressively, they generate a many-branched, collective meditation on lateness.

These two first novels are based upon events and people from Australian history. Noni Durack recasts the story of the pastoralists of the north-west of Australia in terms of an enlightened awareness of land degradation, but the narrative remains oddly captive to the legend of heroic conquest that she is trying to critique. Wendy James, on the other hand, has written an elegant feminist account of the lives of women in Melbourne at the time of the struggle for women’s suffrage.