Politics

This is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages, and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies.

The thing that has distinguished the ‘inspired genius’ from the run of the mill ‘practitioner’ in all creativity is quality of mind. Michael Leunig, few Australians have to be told, has this. But astonishingly, quality of mind has not been a gradual, developing part of Leunig’s work, for it was evident as an integral part of his art, first widely seen in the pages of the fondly remembered National Review fifteen years ago. This is not to say he has not developed – he has in subtle directions and of course his graphic expression too has developed, as it should, with the discipline of creating for the Melbourne Age newspaper.

Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.

Her satiric themes have almost always focused on Australian society or that of the Pacific region – that ‘tropic cliché’ which she identified in her Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture – ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of’ Literary and Geographical Conceit’.

The favoured Astley microcosm is an enclosed or isolated community, the small northern town of many of her novels, or the tropic aeland of A Boat Load of Home Folk and her latest novel Beachmasters. Within this environment she is apt to place an isolated and vulnerable individual – perhaps an adolescent like Vinny Lalor of A Descant for Gossips or Gavi Salway of Beachmasters – who must, under the pressure of the social dialectic, learn the complexity of human response.

Secrecy in human affairs seems to me as useful in grappling with problems as flat-earth dogma is in navigation. I have the belief that the most dazzlingly effective stroke the U.S. Pentagon could make toward dissipating nuclear nightmare would be to throw open the whole spectrum of its weapons experimentation and innovation to anyone who wanted to walk in and look it over. My further belief is that the sheer weight, variety and thrust of all that would be revealed would be such a horizon-expander to, say, Soviet scientists that those scientists would be too caught up in the sheer challenges to the understanding of it all to constrict themselves into any scramble to winnow out immediate military advantage – and indeed that the very process of assimilation of and adaptation to the revealed data would very likely have so many sorts of extraordinary and mutually beneficial (that is, both to the U.S. and the non-U.S. world) effects that the very reasons for nuclear confrontation would vanish from sheer irrelevance and inanity.

Billy Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia from 1915 to 1923, had that same acerbic larrikin quality in his dealings with enemies at home and abroad that has become familiar to us in our current elected leader. Yet Hughes never forsook the heedless and stubborn directness that seems to have deserted Bob Hawke in recent and more sober times. Peter Spartalis’s book is about Hughes’s colourful and dynamic international role and achievements as Prime Minister and about the many protracted battles he fought in what he believed to be Australia’s diplomatic interests though there was nothing at all diplomatic about his style.

In an essay on ‘Equality’ Craig McGregor tells us that when he was a kid he was mystified by those tales where the fisherman’s wife or whoever would be given three wishes by the Good Fairy and she ‘always wished for crazy self-indulgent things like ‘ I wish everybody I touched turned to gold’, and of course it always rebounded on them ... and I always wondered why they didn’t wish for something more general, like wishing that everyone in the world ... should be happy every afterwards, because then nothing could ever go wrong again and the world would be a perfect place to live in ... all it needed of the fishermen and fishermen’s wives and shoemakers and others was a bit of imagination, and a bit of common sense, and just a hint of generosity ... Ah! the birth of utopianism.’

‘“No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.’ In her introduction to There's Always Been A Women's Movement this Century, Dale Spender admits that the elan of involvement in the recent women’s movement made her overlook ‘the unlit corridor of women's history’. She deplores ‘the process of reducing women to invisibility’. In a patriarchy, ‘sexism’ is ‘something that all members do ... There weren’t many patriarchal traps that I did not fall into’. Wanting to ‘generate a tradition of strong authoritative women’, she interviewed five ‘elder stateswomen’, all born between 1890 and 1910: journalist and leader of the six Point Group for equality Hazel Hunkins Hallinan; journalist and novelist Rebecca West; pacifist, educationalist and writer Dora Russell; journalist and Fawcett Society stalwart Mary Stott; sociologist Constance Rover. The result was ‘a genuine educational experience’ that prompts some flushed prior publicity: ‘it would be a (patriarchal) mistake to think of these discussions as insignificant but pleasant gossip about old times. This is a form of women's history ... each women tells her own story ... despite all the many limitations, we have here a valuable record’.