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Archive

The Greenshank

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September 2006, no. 284

Miklos Radnoti, marched from forced labour
in Yugoslavia back into Hungary, came to rest
near a bend in the Radca, at what his translator
describes as ‘a strange lonely place’ where

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Vale Byron Bay by Wayne Grogan & Tuvalu by Andrew O’Connor

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September 2006, no. 284
Vale Byron Bay

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

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This sporting life

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September 2006, no. 284

Life’s not easy when … (fill in the blank according to your main story issue). It is a line that appears frequently on back covers and in press releases for junior fiction. But life is getting a lot easier for parents and teachers of reluctant readers who would far rather race around with a ball than curl up with a book. With the arrival of the sports novel, they can now read about somebody else racing around with a ball – or surfing, swimming, pounding the running track, wrestling, or cycling (the genre covers a wide field). Balls, however, seem to predominate. And problems. Life isn’t easy for publishers without a sports series. Hoping to emulate the success of the ‘Specky Magee’ books written by Felice Arena and Garry Lyon, publishers have been busy throwing authors and sport stars together, one to do the creative business, and the other to add verisimilitude and sporting cred.

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To Exercise Our Talents: The democratization of writing in Britain by Christopher Hilliard

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September 2006, no. 284
To Exercise Our Talents: The democratization of writing in Britain

Once the prerogative of connoisseurs and bibliographers, the study of the book has become an increasingly popular field of cultural history. Earlier scholarship was concerned with rare and variant editions of canonical texts; recent work is more inclusive, comprehending a wide range of popular and ephemeral literature that extended the reach of print. Attention has turned from production to consumption, tracing the spread of literacy and analysing the changing interests of readers. Hence Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s Australian Readers Remember (1992) sits alongside a number of similar studies for other countries.

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On Holidays by Richard White & The Cities Book by Lonely Planet

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August 2006, no. 283
On Holidays: A history of getting away in Australia

Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, it is impossible to buy an airline ticket online in the United States with a credit card issued abroad. When I needed a ticket from Boston to Washington last year, and after numerous unsuccessful arguments with airline websites and 1800 numbers, I dropped into the local Harvard travel agency. There was a welcome familiarity in discovering that it was a branch of STA, one of more than 400 branches operated around the world by the Australian-based company.

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Careless by Deborah Robertson & Madonna of the Eucalypts by Karen Sparnon

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August 2006, no. 283
Careless

The first thing about Deborah Robertson’s first novel, Careless, that strikes the reader is the way that her prose style cuts like sand. The story of three individuals united by the murder of six children is compelling, but what impresses is Robertson’s love of language, the precision of her sentences, as well as her gentle philosophical imagination and the deeper questions her book seeks to answer.

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Wet Ink, Issue 1 by Phillip Edmonds and Dominique Wilson & Wet Ink, Issue 2 by Phillip Edmonds and Dominique Wilson

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August 2006, no. 283

St Augustine suggests that it is impossible to love something until we know it. Yet desire, he continues, prefigures the amount of love we will have for it once it is known. With an alluring collection of new writing, and the support of a prestigious advisory board, Wet Ink has made its début in the market of print journals, and it clearly intends to woo.

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Great Writers Great Loves: The reinvention of love in the twentieth century by Ann-Marie Priest

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August 2006, no. 283
Great Writers Great Loves: The reinvention of love in the twentieth century

If this is love, then we are all in trouble. Addiction, infidelity, cruelty, violence, obsession, depression, repression, jealousy, impotence, the neglect of children and a whole lot of hysterical personal correspondence are features of the love affairs conducted by the eight writers who are the subject of this disconcerting book.

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Art is Not Life

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August 2006, no. 283

You set down orange, with a dab of blue
and this grows into art
of a non-offender’s kind,
innocent as a fart in the footy crowd.
Meanwhile, the killing stumbles on

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Ming’s Legacy

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August 2006, no. 283

Australian historians admire Robert Menzies. Pardon? Aren’t historians, like the rest of the Australian academy, left-wing propagandists? Don’t they all loathe the prime minister’s political role model? Regardless of how historians view Menzies’ attitudes to the monarchy, appeasement, the middle class and the Communist Party, they have reached a consensus on one point: Menzies played a significant role in the consolidation and expansion of Australia’s university sector. When Ben Chifley laid the foundation stone of the Australian National University during the election year of 1949, Menzies refused to politicise the initiative; as prime minister in 1956, he appointed a committee to inquire into the plight of Australian universities and insisted on the provision of life-giving funds by the Commonwealth government under conditions which preserved university autonomy. As his biographer, A.W. Martin, notes, ‘Menzies’ support of universities, and the university life, was never at any time in doubt’.

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