Archive

Am I alone in becoming suspicious when a writer’s previous profession is the focus of a publicist’s blurb? To me, it smacks of desperation. ‘I can’t think of anything to say about this writing,’ such an approach confesses, ‘but let me tell you about the writer’s stellar career as a motor mechanic, or their prowess in tae kwon do, or their interest in growing orchids.’ Call me an old New Critic, but I prefer to read the work and to let the author lurk darkly in the background.

There were seven of them, as in a folk tale. The family was too poor to put shoes on their feet. They lived in a village called New. Hard though life was, they knew it would be worse without Kindly Leader, who was carrying the land into prosperity and joy. At present, however, the seven sons had little to eat.

Writing history combines empiricism, theoretical scaffolding and historical imagination. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, historians are simultaneously concerned with ‘facts’ – their definition, selection and analysis – and captivated by Steven Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’. Historians, drawing on psychoanalysis, have attempted to expose relationships between the inner and outer worlds of individuals and groups in order to write the history of emotions. Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians (1985) clarified that psychoanalysis provided historians not with a ‘handbook of recipes’ but rather with ‘a style of seeing the past’. It allowed historians not only to explore and analyse those aspects of the past the individual and/or nation chose to remember and celebrate, but to interrogate the inner world by examining those aspects of the past they chose to rewrite, amend, reconfigure, deny or forget. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) has been revered and reviled, and some might consider it brave to tackle the evolution of psychoanalytic applications in an historical context in the light of much debunking by feminist historians among many other ‘others’.

It is interesting to recall the number of times, in book titles alone, that Max Dupain’s name has been linked to ‘Australia’. Joining Dupain’s own Max Dupain’s Australia (1986) and Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes (1988), this new book is the third in a series by his former printer and assistant Jill White. Dupain’s Australians joins the similarly all-inclusive titles of Dupain’s Sydney (1999) and Dupain’s Beaches (2000). The pairing of Dupain with aspects of Australia says much about how we position this photographer as quintessentially ‘local’. Despite his evident contributions to modernism and, I would argue, classical modernism, it is Dupain’s apparent ability to capture a ‘national essence’ that still dominates accounts of his work.

From 1768 until 1779–80, in a series of remarkable voyages of circumnavigation, Captain James Cook ‘fixed the bounds of the habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern hemisphere’. During these voyages, Cook sailed further, and further out of sight of land, than anyone had previously done. He discovered – or rediscovered – numerous islands. He demonstrated how the new ‘time keeper’ (chronometer) might be used to determine longitude much more accurately than ever before. He showed how scurvy might be controlled. He encountered and left detailed descriptions of peoples about whom Europeans had little or no knowledge. The scientists who sailed with him made very extensive collections of birds, animals, fish and plants, and obtained a wealth of information about the atmosphere and the oceans, all of which contributed significantly to the emergent modern scientific disciplines. In short, as one of his companions observed after his death, ‘no one knew the value of a fleeting moment better and no one used it so scrupulously as [Cook]. In the same period of time no one has ever extended the bounds of our knowledge to such a degree.’

Assuming the Chair of a business regulatory authority might not be thought of as an ideal path to media stardom, but Allan Fels showed otherwise. Fels is easily Australia’s best-known cartel buster and the scourge of price-fixing business and anti-competitive behaviour generally. For years he was regularly on the nightly news. In a savage sea of rapacious price-gougers, Fels was the consumer’s friend.

I first met a refugee from Laos, a teacher in her former life, while working part-time in a miserable egg-packing factory in the early 1980s. I had only a hazy notion of what had brought Ping to this country. Christopher Kremmer’s Bamboo Palace has now clarified those circumstances, and what a sad and painfully human story it is: of a 600-year-old socially iniquitous, politically benign kingdom destroyed and replaced by a totalitarian state.

The scene of Paul Hetherington’s ‘verse novel’, Blood and Old Belief, is established in the opening stanza: ‘ironbarks that wander / on ancient hillsides /stringybarks and cypresses / blackening horizons / in the western country.’ The stanza unrolls in a leisurely twelve-line sentence, but working in opposition, in tension, are the terse trimeters of each line. The effect is to simulate an eye’s isolation of individual elements of this rural landscape. From the start, we are in the hands of a skilled verse practitioner for whom ‘conservative’ metrical forms are both the bedrock and the supple medium of the story that he tells.

The Currency Press’s series ‘Australian Screen Classics’ is off to a good start. With playwright Louis Nowra’s Walkabout, thorough in its production, analysis and reception mode, novelist Christos Tsiolkas’s The Devil’s Playground, a study in personal enchantment, an Age film reviewer Adrian Martin’s The Mad Max Movies, an action fan’s impassioned response to the trilogy, the series makes clear that it will not be settling for a predictable template.

For anyone who has not seen Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) for some years, Nowra’s study will evoke it with clarity and, because the book is also at times provocative, make another viewing essential. Nowra makes his intentions clear from the outset: he plans to trace ‘the process from the novel, to the preparation, to the filming and then, reception of the film’, and the structure of the book follows this blueprint. His admiration for the film is palpable, though this doesn’t stop him from criticising effects he finds too obvious.