Non Fiction

Attempting to theorise or intellectualise rock‘n’roll, one could argue, is to miss the point. As Almost Famous’s egomaniac Stillwater vocalist Jeff Bebe put it, ‘I don’t think anyone can really explain rock‘n’roll – [except] maybe Pete Townsend’. In which case, Bebe would probably get a kick out of editor Theo Cateforis’s lovingly composed The Rock History Reader, which, unlike other publications in a similar vein, allows the theorising and intellectualising – the explaining – to nestle alongside autobiographical passages and personal anecdotes, providing a complex view of rock’s annals. If you didn’t already know who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp, you’ll probably find more than a few clues in this volume.

Joanna Mendelssohn is best known as an art critic and historian. After the publication of an essay in The Griffith review entitled ‘Going Private’, Pluto Press commissioned her to write a piece for its Now Australia series. Similar to Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essays, but even more determinedly non-academic, the Pluto Press format is part of a publishing phenomenon and covers a range of political, intellectual and cultural views on public issues and debates. The authors are not necessarily experts in the area they write about, nor are their views always based on systematic, in-depth research.

A little over a year ago, the contents of George W Bush’s iPod were made public. The revelation offered momentary respite to the beleaguered president as the international press seized upon the playlist, scrutinised its contents and, much to the relief of the White House, made tallies of song titles and popular music genres instead of the latest casualties in Iraq. IPod One, as it was dubbed, was shown to be heavy on country and western music and 1970s rock, and light on just about everything else. ‘No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles,’ reported the London Times.

The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand is the thirteenth of Wallflower Press’s ‘24 frames’ series, but there is no need for the editors to feel superstitious on that account. This is a series which presents certain problems. It requires the editor(s) of each volume to choose twenty-four films that are, in some degree, representative of the titular country, or, as the case sometimes even more dauntingly is, of two titular countries – and I know whereof I speak. Having edited Wallflower’s The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005), I can sympathise with the difficulties involved in trying to achieve any sort of representativeness across not one but two film-making countries. And I might add resentfully that Canada gets a whole volume to itself. Canada!

One of the major cliches of recent years is the retiring politician’s parting statement, ‘I’m leaving politics to spend more time with my family’. Indeed, the tensions between work and family commitments have become a regular topic in the media. Newspaper articles sometimes cite the views of prominent social scientists, whose academic publications affirm the popular view that society as a whole benefits from fostering a working environment that acknowledges the importance of family and community. With Weighing up Australian Values, Brian Howe, a former deputy prime minister (1991–96), becomes the latest in a long line of Australian authors to promote public policies that encourage work-life balance.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book, Romancing Opiates, slams societal and professional attitudes to heroin addiction. Dalrymple argues that heroin users are not blameless patients, as the medical fraternity would have us believe. ln fact, he tells us, heroin users have to work quite hard to get addicted; withdrawal is about as difficult as the flu; and the support industry, which he calls the ‘addiction bureaucracy’, is ineffective and self-serving. Dalrymple contends that the heroin epidemic cannot be dealt with until it is recognised as a moral and spiritual problem rather than solely as a medical one.

The history of Cobb & Co. belongs as much in the territory of folklore as it does in the annals of business. Within forty years of its inception, the company had become synonymous with coach travel in Australia, and later became the subject of a nostalgic tribute in verse by Henry Lawson. There is much ground to cover, and this book blazes new trails as it travels between the commercial and the iconic aspects of Cobb & Co.’s operations.

Diane Coyle has a passion for economics and believes that the object of her passion should possess a soul. She fails to convince on this point, but that is of little account. She has written an absorbing book that sets out what economists do and that provides a commentary on current thinking.

Language shapes identity: everyone knows that, in theory. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that exact equivalents do not exist for every word. Translation cannot be perfect: something is always lost. So what happens when people, used to one linguistic identity, have to translate themselves into a new language? Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka have assembled twelve witnesses to give personal accounts. All are academics or writers who possess the intellectual resources to make sense of what they have encountered, while at the same time registering the dislocations they have experienced. All write English fluently: they are not concerned with the difficulties of learning English but of being themselves in Australian English. Some make the comment that they are perfectly comfortable writing academic English while still finding the small transactions of daily life a challenge.

Reading literary criticism can be like viewing a portrait: you are essentially subjected to another person’s vision of the subject. One can feel that the perspective is unduly harsh at some points, lavishly lenient at others. It is easy to project one’s own bias onto the work, and to take issue with the representation too quickly. This is particularly true of a critical monograph on a subject such as Christopher Koch, who has been both prominent and controversial throughout his career. It is difficult for any commentator on Koch not to be drawn into the ‘Australian Melodrama’ that Peter Pierce identified in Australian literary culture in 1995.