Archive

Australians like to believe they live in the best country in the world. Plenty of space, abundant  natural resources and lots of sunshine for this nation whose inhabitants have come from all corners of the earth to a land of opportunity. It’s an appealing national smugness that has comforted generations of Australians as they looked with tolerant amusement at the congested societies of industrialised countries elsewhere in the world. Aren’t we lucky!

Occasionally, there may have been some nagging doubts as we looked at the growing wealth of the Asian economies and the technological sophistication of overseas manufacturing. Are we as smart as they are? Do we work hard enough? Are we falling behind? Is this the land of the long weekend? In recent years, have we become hard-hearted and lazy? Good questions, and easier to answer anecdotally and instinctively rather than empirically. Generally, we thanked our lucky stars.

Here are two engaging books that trade on the romance and exoticism of northern Australia. Neither makes much demand on the reader nor offers profound insights, but both in their different ways abound in atmosphere and a genuine ‘feel for place’.

Rosemary Hemphill’s childhood was one of extreme contrasts. Her father, the product of Jewish Orthodox parents and Sydney Grammar, washed up in Broome with the dream of becoming the master of a pearling fleet. As so many do, he fell in love with the place and stayed until forced out by the fall of the pearling industry. He served in World War I and, while recuperating from wounds in England, fell in love with the beautiful and cultured daughter of a conventional upper-middle-class couple. The English in-laws insisted that he convert in order to marry their daughter. Back in Sydney, his father declared ‘my son is dead’, as is the custom of Orthodox Jews whose progeny ‘marry out’, and forced the rest of the family to cut ties as well. Louis Goldstein, now Louis Goldie, returned to Broome with his wife and pursued the half-glamorous, half-arduous life of the ‘master pearler’. The life was harder on the women, who were forced to battle the extreme physical conditions, isolation and monotony.

War stories are never extrinsic to war. The us-and-them plots, domino theories and governing metaphors, the operational jargon and vast naming schemes, even the post-hoc synopses (we won, we should have won, another win like that and we’re finished): these are not patterns laid over something real; they stream from the enabling code.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Australian Task Force Vietnam administered its own war in Phuoc Tuy, a province south-east of Saigon. The Australians had their own allocation of enemy (D445 local guerrilla battalion and elements of the NVA 5th Division), their own style (US gear and fire-support, Vietnamese patrol tactics) and, of course, their own story. They were the latest Anzacs. Right?

About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

The Lu Rees Archives of Australian Children’s literature is a collection of children’s books and manuscripts whose stated purpose is to ‘provide resources for the study and research of Australian authors and illustrators, including both the literature and the historical and cultural context in which it was created’. Officially owned by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and housed in the University of Canberra’s library, the collection of about fourteen thousand items provides a ‘particularly rich and comprehensive overview of Australian children’s literature, its creation and publishing endeavour’. Lu Rees, a foundation member of CBCA, started the collection with her own substantial holdings, and the collection encourages donations. Walter McVitty has made a gift of more than 3000 books and the entire archive of his publishing company, Walter McVitty Books, which existed from 1985 to 1997. In order to aid future researchers who might find the vast array of material in that archive bewildering, McVitty wrote explanatory notes of about twenty thousand words. He has expanded these into this book, which Lothian (the company that bought his imprint) has published.

In the era of gay liberation, ‘coming out’ has for many taken on the character of a religious experience. Gays and lesbians in the US draw easily on a religious culture of personal salvation even while denying the sometimes oppressive institutions it has created. In Australia, we are not given to the same public display of emotional and spiritual commitment, but ‘coming out’ has nevertheless come to be regarded as a gay rite of passage.

France in 1914 was in many ways almost completely different from how it was in 1789. In the 1780s France was an ‘agrarian pre-capitalist society’ in which the ‘location of most industry and the sources of power and most wealth were rural’. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a capitalist society in which ‘an urban, bourgeois and republican culture had become as hegemonic as had been that of the Church and the aristocracy under the ancien régime’. The second edition of Melbourne academic Peter McPhee’s remarkable book, A Social History of France 1789–1914, explains why and how this occurred.

Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constitution in favour of the environment; Les Verts have been doing pretty well in the European elections. Labor lassoes Peter Garrett. Even John Howard, while giving much aid and comfort to the fossil fuel industries, tries to sound as though he really supports renewable resources.

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.