Anthology

You are perfect for this story. I will never meet you.’ We are invited into Australian Love Stories and into Bruce Pascoe’s erotic reverie with this line from ‘Dawn’. The reader is embraced, as the luxuriating eye of Pascoe’s narrator embraces the recumbent body of the woman beside him. His gaze is illicit, touch forbidden. We are privileged voyeurs, given temporary access to hidden thoughts and lives. Love. This paltry word hardly describes the myriad guises of friendship, affection, homosexual and heterosexual relationship, desire, lust, loneliness, and satisfaction; the gamut of emotions expressed in the twenty-nine stories editor Cate Kennedy selected from the ‘sea of stories’ she received. I do not have enough room here to mention each singular invocation of love by name. Some stories follow the constraints of realism, others are more expressionistic, but each holds a gift – a kernel of some essential truth about the human condition. The ones I mention simply struck a special chord for me.

The title of Cassandra Atherton’s anthology, Travelling Without Gods, alludes to the particular brand of agnosticism that has run through Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s work over many decades. Journeying sans deity is evidenced strongly in the poet’s latest collection, a book which, like Atherton’s, has been published to coincide with Wallace-Crabbe’s eightieth birthday.

For a non-believer, Wallace-Crabbe’s My Feet Are Hungry makes frequent reference to Christian ideology. This is in marked contrast to a number of Australian poets – Judith Beveridge, Barry Hill, Robert Gray among them – whose work in recent years testifies to the influence of Buddhism. Wallace-Crabbe’s Christian saviour is located firmly in the historical rather than the sacred. Only mildly irreverent, the poet shows respect for a figure who sides with the disadvantaged in an era of raging commercial interest and power-mad politicians: ‘Did Roman nails deserve his blood? / Even for someone who venerates money / Here is a story of absolute good’ (‘And the Cross’).

In her foreword, Emily Maguire says, ‘You need a desperate, hungry energy to tell a story, to write a poem, to scratch at the surface of a life and see what slithers beneath.’ For some, the university campus is the place for this desperation and hunger to find a voice and have a public hearing. For the University of Sydney, the public hearing is in the form of Perspectives, through which we experience almost thirty new writers and artists, who reveal diverse themes, points of view, and technical abilities.

In his essay on James Bulger, the British toddler murdered by two ten-year-old boys in 1993, novelist Andrew O’Hagan tells the story of his own experience of childhood bullying – as the perpetrator, not the victim. Bulger’s ‘childish child-murderers’ remind him, he avers, of himself as a boy, and with this extraordinary expression of solidarity he launches into an account of the unremarkable violence layered into his own Scottish childhood, beginning with the story of how, at the age of six, he and a friend systematically beat a younger child to the point of serious injury.

Mark Dapin’s anthology, From the Trenches, is a timely but not opportunistic book. At more than 400 pages, it is long enough to suggest the sheer scale of the war and its centrality to European (if not world) history ever since. It samples all the relevant genres (letters, memoir, journalism, fiction, poetry) and offers a multiplicity of viewpoints (senior ranks, subalterns, NCOs, privates, and nurses). The book is not simplistically pro- or anti-war, but its overall message is unmistakable. The whole enterprise was a huge and bloody mistake, stupidly prolonged by inadequate politicians for more than four years.

Australia is a country that will not be intimidated by its own decency. On 28 August 2001, as a detail of Special Air Services soldiers was dispatched to MV Tampa, Prime Minister John Howard spoke about the 438 people – mostly Afghan Hazaras – who languished aboard the freighter ...

All scientists are writers. Science only exists in the written form. What is not written is not published, is not accepted, is not knowledge, and does not exist. It is written science that is scrutinised, peer-reviewed, and cited – nothing else matters but to ‘publish or perish’. Scientific articles, in all their clever, compacted, content-laden complexity, may well be impenetrable to all but the most specialist reader, but this does not mean they are poorly written. Articles are extraordinarily difficult to craft; writing them is the hardest and most intellectually challenging aspect of scientific practice. Evidence – the experimental result or the novel observation – may well lie at the heart of science, but until this evidence is written up and published it remains an unpolished gem which cannot be appreciated or understood. Through the medium of the written word, science has taken us to new worlds. Charles Bazerman argues that ‘scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments … [and has] literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own’.