Archive

A startling début novel by Melbourne-based author Caroline Hamilton, Consumed is a truly macabre story that will disturb and alienate some of its readers. The (at times patchy) prose revels in its gratuitous descriptions of the preparation of food, especially meat, but this may be a deliberate choice in the face of sanitised offerings available at your local supermarket.

In her contribution to Britishness Abroad, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, Anne Dickson-Waiko writes that ‘the experiences of the colonised Other in relation to empire and colonisation needs [sic] urgent investigation, so that the colonised other can … move on to the post-colonial’. She shows a touching belief in the usefulness of research in the humanities: I envy her confidence that her efforts will have such a beneficial effect on the world beyond the academy.

A History of The Great War alludes to an encyclopedic work that appeared in the wake of World War I. Bound in red leather and embossed with gold, it exemplified officially sanctioned history. Peter McConnell’s recommissioning of the title is more than mere irony: it throws down a challenge to our acceptance of conventional history. His central character is a latter-day Penelope, a decent, ordinary woman who nonetheless possesses many of the noble attributes often evinced by the Anzacs: endurance, resourcefulness, patriotism and courage.

The concluding volume to Raymond Howgego’s epic Encyclopedia of Exploration completes a remarkable undertaking by a small publisher. Hordern House, best known as one of Australia’s leading antiquarian booksellers, has a record of producing high-quality publications, and Howgego’s Encyclopedia – now totalling more than 3,500 pages – is by any standards a great reference work. Volume 1 (published in 2003) covers the whole of human history up to 1800CE; Volume 2 (2004), 1800–50; and Volumes 3 and 4 (subtitled The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions and Continental Exploration, respectively), 1850–1940.

John Mateer’s Elsewhere is a collection of poems from elsewhere – other small-press publications – and about elsewhere. The book is divided into three parts: ‘Azania’, which documents Mateer’s return to his homeland, South Africa; ‘Medan and Zipangu’, which contains poems inspired by travels in Asia; and ‘Americas’, which takes the United States and Mexico as its subjects. In ‘Uit Mantra’, one of the poems in the collection, Mateer describes the poet as ‘another name for emptiness’. As he traverses the various landscapes and cultures that inspire him, Mateer acts as a cipher for both the tangible particularities of experience – landscapes, history, people – as well as the unsayable and the unsaid – the repressed, metaphysical and hallucinatory.

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth ...

Marry an artist? Never! So I always thought, and reading these autobiographies does nothing to change my prejudice. Married to artists, both Judith Pugh and Irena Sibley spend a good deal of their time cooking and, even more, socialising. Not that they mind. Judith declares that ‘cooking was my deep pleasure’, essential to the story of her life with Clifton (‘Clif’) Pugh. Irena concedes facetiously, ‘it’s too hard painting pictures. It is easier to bake cakes.’ The importance of food is apparent in the chapter titles. Eleven of Sibley’s chapters refer to food, while all of Pugh’s have subheadings that, typically, jumble up evocative ingredients.

In 1938, the year of Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations, trade unionist William Ferguson and former boxer John Patten helped to organise the first Aboriginal Day of Mourning and Protest on January 26; later that year, they co-wrote the pamphlet from which the above excerpt is taken, on behalf of the nascent Aborigines Progressive Association ...