Archive

Nickers and bogles, fulgars and wits: these newly minted creatures populate the Monster Blood Tattoo series. This world has the depth and complexity that characterises all good fantasy, and fans of D.M. Cornish’s Aurealis Award-winning Foundling (2006) will eagerly continue the journey and be well rewarded for doing so. Beautifully presented, the second novel is as impressive inside as out.

The Australian Performing Group (APG) and its associated theatre space, the Pram Factory, form one of the legends of Australian theatre. And like all legends, the stories that people tell of it inevitably conflate the truth of what it actually was – or wasn’t, as the case may be. Somewhere back in 1969 – or was it 1970? – a group of enthusiastic thespians decided to take on the world (or at least their own preconceptions of it), and shake up the theatrical Establishment. Legend has it that Australian theatre has never been the same since.

It has been the opinion of many, most Christian Queen, that the ancient Greeks and Romans, in representing their tragedies upon the stage, sang them throughout. But until now this noble manner of recitation has been neither revived nor (to my knowledge) even attempted by anyone, and I used to believe that this was due to the imperfection of the modern music, by far inferior to the ancient.

Thus writes poet Ottavio Rinuccini to Maria de’ Medici, dedicatee of Rinuccini’s Euridice. Set to music by Jacopo Peri and performed in Florence in 1600 as part of the festivities to mark the marriage of Maria de’ Medici to Henri IV of France, Euridice is one of the earliest surviving operas. Rinuccini, Peri, Caccini and the other inventors of opera sought to address ‘the imperfection of the modern music’ by advocating a type of solo vocal music that took as its starting point the meaning and sentiment of the poetry (as Claudio Monteverdi later put it, the words were ‘the mistress of the harmony’). Hand in hand with this was a manner of delivery that placed emphasis upon dramatic declamation and expression.

Not many Australian historians have managed to publish major books, based on years of scholarly research, which have evoked both immediate and enduring acclaim. It therefore says something both about intrinsic value and about the tastes of the book-buying public when such a book goes into a second or even a third edition, ten or more years after its first appearance. The weeks preceding Anzac Day are always a popular time for the publication of books on military history, but this year has been especially notable for witnessing a number of reissues, alongside a flood of new titles. The two under review here are the third edition of Jeffrey Grey’s A Military History of Australia, and the second edition of David Horner’s and Jean Bou’s history of the Royal Australian Regiment, Duty First. Others include the third edition of Ken Inglis’s highly acclaimed study of war memorials, Sacred Places, and new issues of Ross McMullin’s biography of Major General ‘Pompey’ Elliott and Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese.

I have commented before in ABR that literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, so perhaps it is not surprising that Ann Vickery has had to find an overseas publisher for this important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history. Whatever its provenance, I have a particular reason for welcoming this contextualising study of the work and times of six women poets of the early twentieth century: Mary Gilmore, Marie Pitt, Mary Fullerton, Anna Wickham, Zora Cross, Lesbia Harford and Nettie Palmer.

Sarah Hay’s new novel is set in north-western Australia against a background of intense heat and bone-hard country, a continent away from the grim southern island setting of her previous novel, Skins (2001). Although this second novel by the Vogel-winning author explores a very different place and time, the two novels share some common terrain. Both unfold in remote locations where conditions of survival are harsh; both explore themes of loneliness, will, desire and the impact of colonisation.

We begin by peering through a window, watching a carpenter hard at work, engaged, precise, among tools and apprentices. Suddenly, we are glimpsing a lab technician working on rabbit cadavers; next, we are in a concert hall, our eyes keenly directed toward the conductor. We encounter these three craftsmen many times throughout Richard Sennett’s enthralling inquiry into the nature of craftsmanship. Their ranks are joined by ancient weavers, medieval goldsmiths, Linux programmers, brick-builders, luthiers, architects, glassblowers and those who constructed the first atomic bomb.

Laura Riding, sometime poet and citrus-grower has risen from the grave to deliver this series of attacks on poetry and its untruthfulness. She comes back to us now in a posthumous gathering of essays and shorter notes, The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. It will certainly get people’s backs up.