Archive

Two new young adult novels explore the complexities of family. While Maureen McCarthy’s Somebody’s Crying details a daughter’s painful loss of her mother, Alyssa Brugman’s Girl Next Door negotiates the hardships of teenage life while coming to terms with family bankruptcy.

There is no sound of the sea, a long row down the mirror-like waters of Wagonga Inlet crowded with forest reflections. The wind twists and dives in the tree canopy, the soft whisper mixing with bird calls and the occasional barking of a dog from across the water. The small flower heads of clover quiver in the gulps of wind pushing the big-bellied clouds, rain stained, across the mountains. I am cosseted in a snug cottage kitchen with the smell of apples, warm milk and the sweet taste of honey on chunks of freshly baked bread. My eyes follow the patterns smudged across the mangrove flats where the tides tell me the time of day. I am holidaying on the south coast of New South Wales, the perfect place to be reading Martin Harrison’s collection of new and selected poems, Wild Bees.

The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.

While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.

What do you do when you can live for thousands of years, travel nearly everywhere you wish in the galaxy, and customise your environment and your body to be exactly the way you like? When there is no risk of starvation, injury, or disease? When your back-up simply takes over when, for some reason, you die? What do you do if the whole universe is your playground and you’re just plain bored?

If the back-flap biography did not proclaim John McDonald as ‘Australia’s premier arts commentator’, if the author himself did not describe The Art of Australia in the preface as ‘a massive work of synthesis intended to bring together the most recent scholarship’, and if it were not being puffed in advertisements as ‘destined to take its place as the definitive work on Australian art’, one might be inclined to take this book on its merits.

Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.

In characteristically symbolic fashion, the Rudd government chose the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 2008) to announce a consultation process into human rights protection in Australia. Attorney-General Robert McClelland appointed a committee, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, to consult the public on issues including whether Australia needs a bill (or charter) of rights and responsibilities. Geoffrey Robertson’s latest book, The Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights, injects much-needed energy, imagination, and international context into this rather circumscribed debate. ‘I have spent my professional life making arguments based on bills of rights,’ says Robertson. As a distinguished and courageous human rights lawyer-activist, his emphatically pro-charter stance commands the thoughtful consideration of supporters, opponents, and equivocators alike.