Archive

In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.

At the end of her insightful critical study David Foster: Satirist of Australia (2008), Susan Lever quotes several rather despondent-sounding letters from her subject. In one, he claims to have lost his taste for satire; in another, he declares that he is ‘over’ literature. Yet he also expresses a continuing desire ‘to write books that are strange and beautiful’, and reveals he is at work on a new novel, his first since The Land Where Stories End (2001), one that draws on the framing tale of Arabian Nights and explores his ‘twin obsessions’: sexuality and mysticism.

The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.

Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.

Every now and again, the future of the book emerges as a topic of anxious discussion among literary types. Will books become obsolete, discarded in favour of electronic reading devices with sleek design and smooth contours, or merely lose relevance given all the digital distractions? Literary Melbourne is one publication which betrays no such anxieties. Published to mark Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, it is not only a celebration of all things literary but an assertion of the history, relevance and power of books, writing and ideas. Yet, like the city whose literary culture it celebrates, this volume speaks rather than shouts. The muted tones of its cover, echoed throughout in shades of sepia, brown and grey, announce that this is no flamboyant publication: for all its evocation of city streets, it is an ‘indoor’ book, inviting reflection and discussion. Above all, as indicated by small courtesies such as the ‘Ex Libris’ label on the endpage and the ribbon bookmark, this is a book for booklovers, for those hopeless addicts who like to own, hold and return to their books.

Lawrence warned us not to trust the teller, but to trust the tale. Nevertheless, all writers are apt to suffer the fate of being confused or conflated with their works. Maybe it is part of what Goethe entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit. If truth is going to be let into poetry, many readers want to know the facts about the poet: both the jubilant facts and the disconcerting ones. This is not merely irritating nosey-parkerhood. The shimmering glamour of writers is inevitably part of their stock-in-trade. A Byron, a Plath, a Rimbaud, Dickinson or Dylan Thomas has become inseparable from that poet’s reported life, dazzle, sex and dirt. An early death helps no end. It is an example of fatedness which Al Alvarez explored years ago in The Savage God (1971), a title he derived from Yeats talking about Charles Conder and his decadent allies of the 1890s.

Big business is a hard country. Matt Peacock tells the story of the James Hardie company and its venality as the manufacturer of fibro cement products in Australia. The fibro shack has been as iconic a domestic symbol as the Hills hoist, and Australia used more fibro per head than any other developed nation. However, the fibre in fibro for much of the twentieth century was asbestos, exposure to which is lethal.