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Archive

Self-portraits

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September 1983, no. 54

So, my lad, you’ve got yourself born. It happens to all of us, and say what they will, those Deep-South Born-Again Americans, it is a-once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. One birth, one life, one death. You are fortunate; you have a good, a very good pair of parents, you have a strong body, and a questing mind. I had the same, a firm base from which to start out. I had ...

Publishing or perishing

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June 1983, no. 51

Over the last few years Australia has undergone a nationalistic cultural renaissance. Just as manufacturers have discovered that the addition of the Advance Australia logo has added a healthy percentage to retail sales, so too the ‘manufacturers’ of popular culture have discovered a more receptive home market, which has helped them weather the recession better than other industries.

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Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs by Michael Thwaites

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June 1980, no. 21
John Stubbs reviews 'Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs' by Michael Thwaites

When I was in London working on a book that Nicholas Whitlam and I wrote on the Petrov Affair, I became friendly with Dr Michael Bialagouski. Bialagouski and I went out several times with our wives to places selected by Michael; a gambling club that had once been run by George Raft, a Chinese restaurant that had a reputation in intelligence circles, that sort of thing.

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The Everlasting Secret Family by Frank Moorhouse

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June 1980, no. 21
Laurie Clancy reviews 'The Everlasting Secret Family' by Frank Moorhouse

This sixth work of fiction by Frank Moorhouse consists of four groups of related stories. The first and by far the best group, ‘Pacific City’, contains six stories centred around the figure of Irving Bow, proprietor of a cinema located near an unbuilt town named Pacific City during the late nineteen-twenties (not the nineteen-thirties as the back cover claims).

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The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy by John N. Molony

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June 1979, no. 11
Desmond O'Grady reviews 'The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy' by John N. Molony

After Italian troops had invaded the Papal States to establish the nation’s capital in Rome in 1870, Italian Catholics were prohibited from voting in political elections. When this policy began to be relaxed in late 1918, a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), founded the Partitio Popolare Italiano (PPI) which was to be aconfessional but ‘inspired by Catholic principles’. It was the precursor of the Christian Democratic party that has ruled Italy for the past thirty years.

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An interview with Ken Ruthven

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May 1993, no. 150

A new series called Interpretations, published by Melbourne University Press, aims to provide up-to-date introductions to recent theories and critical practices in the humanities and social sciences. Series Editor, Ken Ruthven, answers some questions about the role and reception of critical writing.

 

Does the brief introduction to the series, which says it ...

An interview with Dorothy Hewett

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June 1993, no. 151

When Dorothy Hewett won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction with the first volume of her autobiography, Wild Card, it was a popular choice on the night. She’s a writer who has attracted all kinds of controversy, from libel suits to outrage over her flamboyant politics, both sexual and social. She has published four volumes of poetry, thirteen plays, but only one novel, called Bobbin Up, back in 1959. Jack Beazley, in a review for the Communist Review, criticised the novel for ‘an overstressing of physical relations’; a judgment that evidently didn’t deflect Dorothy Hewett from her interests, since physical relations, and the way that women feel about them, are still stressed in The Toucher. Setting herself a difficult task, Hewett has placed her central character, a woman writer, in a wheelchair, and without the company of a male lover, in order to talk about some of the things that preoccupy her now: old age, loneliness, physicality, relationships, personal history. She’s a generous talker, open and friendly, willing to think about any topic that is presented, and obviously very pleased to have produced another novel after years of believing that she couldn’t write one. I began by asking Dorothy Hewett how she felt about returning to the novel after so many years writing poetry and plays.

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The Toucher by Dorothy Hewett

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June 1993, no. 151
Elaine Lindsay reviews 'The Toucher' by Dorothy Hewett

The publicity for Dorothy Hewett’s first novel in thirty-four years bills The Toucher as ‘a story of sexual intrigue, memory and death’. Maybe, but there’s also a lot more going on, as Hewett subverts conventional ideas of romance, ageing, morality, fiction and autobiography, and the end to which we come.

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The Habsburg Café by Andrew Riemer

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May 1993, no. 150
Carmel Bird reviews 'The Habsburg Café' by Andrew Riemer

Who made the best Sachertorte in the world? Andrew Riemer’s mum. The recipe is lost now, but it came from the Ursuline nuns in Sopron, a small Hungarian town where Andrew Riemer’s mother grew up. This information comes early in The Hapsburg Cafe, which is an account of the author’s second visit to the places of his childhood (the first account being recorded in Inside Outside). I waited and waited for him to go to the Ursuline Convent in Sopron and get the recipe, but the duffer never did. Even though he called a part of the book ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Men. What’s a Madeleine when you could have a Sachertorte?

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Power and Protest: Movements for change in Australian society by Verity Burgmann

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May 1993, no. 150
John Docker reviews 'Power and Protest: Movements for change in Australian society' by Verity Burgmann

Verity Burgmann’s Power and Protest is an evocation of the major social movements that have arisen and thrived in Australia since the late 1960s, the black, women’s, lesbian and gay, peace and green movements. The writer is a well-known historian of Australian radicalism as well as a political scientist, and in combining history and politics she joins other social scientists such as Terry Irving, Judith Brett, James Walter, Murray Goot – an interesting tradition. In each chapter she offers an evocation of the various movements, outlining origins, developments, aspects, divisions, conflicts, difficulties, dilemmas, successes, achievements, as well as the opposition and resistance to these movements in the wider society. Burgmann writes with ease and energy, often with enjoyable irony and sarcasm. I liked her reference to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as ‘ovarious’. Power and Protest is entertaining as well as clear, and will surely prove indispensable for teaching.

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