Archive

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

Martin Krygier’s deft, discursive prose could persuade anyone except an ironclad ideologue that it is exhilarating as well as healthy to examine one’s prejudices and complacencies. Krygier is also a writer possessed of a frank openness that gives credence to the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. I suspect he’d also enjoy the piquancy of maxim busting. The cover of Civil Passions is a particularly beautiful one: a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338–40 fresco, the Allegory of Good Government. Its Giottoesque precision and its colour – those luminous Sienese pinks and reds – would be reason enough to use it. But there is a deeper fitness to the choice, and it has to do with what Krygier describes as his destined mode of being: one of hybridity.

This is not an airport read; anyone wanting colourful stories about Harold Holt’s private life will have to dig deep. Dr Tom Frame, Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, has written the first substantial biography of Australia’s seventeenth prime minister, who succeeded Robert Menzies in early 1966 and drowned on 17 December 1967. The Life and Death of Harold Holt, about ten years in the making, is a meticulously researched and scholarly work, and should become an essential reference for anyone interested in Australian politics and history. It wasn’t a commissioned work, but Frame deals with his subject sympathetically.

The Young Adult ‘issue novel’ is a difficult thing to do well. To write one that rises above the mediocre requires a careful avoidance of both sentimentality and sensationalism, and the better books succeed by either tackling an unusual or topical issue, or by looking at a situation from a novel angle. These two books – though covering very different terrain – are good examples.

No kangaroos, emus or possums in this lot – just pigs, rats, hares, cats, dogs and fantastic monsters. Australian picture books are in a healthy state if these five beautifully produced, cleverly constructed and thoughtful examples represent the genre. All celebrate that peculiarly human gift, imagination – the unsuspected alternatives, the leap outside the confines of reality. All would provide a happy reading experience for children of any age, and are illustrated without condescension by witty and confident artists. From the child imagining castles in the air to the adult building them a little too high, these authors and artists reveal their insights into all kinds of human behaviour.