Non Fiction

When does an explorer become an adventurer, an adventurer a traveller, a traveller a tourist? This third volume of Raymond Howgego’s monumental Encyclopedia of Exploration moves into a period when the lines become increasingly blurred.

Volume One (2003) covered all of human history up to 1800. In that period, any traveller who left a written account of his or her journey could be counted as an ‘explorer’, and Howgego’s sheer stamina in seeking them all out made this one of the extraordinary books of our time. Most reference works of this scale are assembled by small armies of writers, researchers and editors, funded by major international publishers. The Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 was the work of one man, supported by the comparatively modest resources of Sydney antiquarian bookseller and boutique publisher, Hordern House.

Of late there has been a good deal of agitated conversation about the political attitudes of ordinary Australians. As Judith Brett and Anthony Moran point out in this compelling new book, this has often taken the form of a ‘war of words within the political élites’, with the right using its supposed empathy for everyday people as a weapon against intellectuals, and the left blaming the deficiencies of John Howard’s Australia on the narrow-minded selfishness of ordinary voters. As it is, those of us who live in ordinary outer suburbs can hardly open Melbourne’s Age newspaper without finding ourselves accused of something, from a new Australian ugliness and the death of manners to the decline of civilisation. Mind you, the thought of being spoken for by anything-but-ordinary people like Janet Albrechtsen is even more distasteful.

Lawrence Alloway observed that Abstract Expressionism was the creation of middle-aged artists and not an avant-garde. Jackson Pollock was in his mid-thirties and already a considerable painter when he laid a canvas on the floor and began to swing paint on a stick. Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman were in their forties before they found their signature styles. For twenty years, those painters explored a variety of styles and thoughtfully drifted towards individual expression; yet the change, when it came, seemed to pounce into their art rather than extend neatly from the preparation. The case was similar with Tony Tuckson.

It is hard to imagine that any reader of the text of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be unmoved by the nobility of its aspirations. Born of the determination that human beings would never again have to suffer the oppressions and indignities that reached so hideous a climax in the events of World War II, it promises a world in which all people can enjoy a range of fundamental freedoms in peace and harmony. To observe that the promise has not been kept is a patent under-statement. Even in the most advanced democracies, where notions of universal human rights are foundational, there is a sense of crisis. Here in Australia, as the Victorian government moves to institute a bill of rights, people of responsibility and integrity are forced to confront what appears to be a systemic disregard for human rights by the federal government in its treatment of asylum seekers.

This book has one of the most beautiful covers you could hope to see: a Margaret Preston woodcut of Sydney Harbour, in rich blue, scarlet and ivory. Nor does the inside disgrace the exterior. It is a long time since anyone attempted a history of New South Wales, more than a century according to the blurb, presumably a reference to T.A. Coghlan’s annual publication, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, the last edition of which appeared in 1901. Beverley Kingston is highly qualified to do the job, and the twentieth-century detail is especially good.

Justice Michael Kirby’s launching of Sir Zelman Cowen’s memoirs at the Melbourne University’s Woodward Centre in early June was a great Melbourne occasion. Two of Cowen’s successors as governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth, attended as part of a galaxy of judges, barristers, academics and a scattering of ex-politicians. The occasion was a festival of oratory, with five substantial speeches, possibly an Australian record for a book launch.

There was a time in Australia when right-wing citizens of this country were passionate and organised enough to bring the left-led state of New South Wales to the brink of civil war on political grounds. This violent opposition was led by rebel elements among ‘as many as 30,000 members’ of a conservative and ‘formally constituted civilian reserve’ known as the Old Guard. Impatient with the staid organisation, they had forged a more militant collective under the guise of the New Guard. One of the major players in this evolution was Captain Francis Edward De Groot, an antique-dealer and reproduction furniture manufacturer from Ireland, whose ambition and taste for adventure had led him to Australia. De Groot went on to star in the most famous scene of this political drama and to carve his name into Australian popular myth by usurping Premier Jack Lang as the ribbon-slasher at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

This book opens in Papeete one evening in 1935. Two American film-makers are in Tahiti to take location shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, and director Frank Lloyd laments his failure to find Captain Bligh’s log books. A small white-haired person of indeterminate appearance at the next table leans over: ‘I know where they are,’ she says. Of course she did. The logbooks were in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and the speaker was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946. The Mitchell Library, located in the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales, is based on the priceless collection of Australiana and south-west Pacific materials donated in 1907 by the reclusive bibliophile David Scott Mitchell. Leeson, its second chief custodian, not only knew the vast collection backwards but added significantly to it. She also used it herself, a key to effective librarianship.

In the week that Voting for Jesus landed in my letterbox, the Howard government announced that it was considering dollar-for-dollar support for state school chaplaincies, while, in New South Wales, fresh allegations surfaced of branch stacking by the state Liberals’ ‘religious right’ faction. Those perplexed by such developments in secular Australia will find novelist Amanda Lohrey a helpful, warm-hearted guide. Her colourful, impressionistic and approachable account of Australia’s religious right welcomes readers into a debate that some might previously have been inclined to dismiss as too confusing, or as marginal to secular concerns. Chats with academics, theologians and commentators offer a variety of angles. Far from adopting a didactic tone, the text beguiles with numerous questions that sound rhetorical but often remain unanswered.

Ken Inglis is now as much a part of the history of the ABC as any of the charismatic broadcasters, mercurial managers or audiences – devoted and indignant – that his two monumental histories chronicle. He has become the repository, the source, the critical race memory of the ABC, ‘just three years older’ than the phenomenon he examines.

The list of corrigenda at the end of the new edition of This Is the ABC (first published by Melbourne University Press in 1983) underscores the point: insiders, listeners, viewers and politicians have inundated him with corrections and information to refine and expand his already minutely detailed volume one of the history. Listeners plead with him to include the story of the newsreader who announced that a lady had been bitten on the funnel by a finger-webbed spider. Other responses are less benign. Solicitors for Sir Charles Moses, for thirty years the ABC’s general manager, write to Inglis in 1983 listing ‘imputations’ in his book which they claim are grossly defamatory of Sir Charles’s good name and reputation. Sir Charles himself, at the Broadcast House launch of the first volume in 1983, greeted the disconcerted author with the news that he would be hearing from his solicitors. ‘I did my best to look and sound at ease when Dame Leonie called me to the dais’, recalls Inglis. The case was not pursued, and the relevant documents are now deposited in the National Library. But it is characteristic of the man and the historian that Inglis should ‘remain sad that although my admiration for the ABC’s principal maker was evidently clear to reviewers and other readers, the subject himself could not see it’.