Archive

Many of our strongest writers are also numbered among our most commanding critics; and in some cases – Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, and Eliot – it is not easy to tell whether their greater contribution is to literature or literary criticism. Part of the problem, of course, is that at this high level the distinction tends to break down: criticism becomes literature in its own right and often on its own terms.

If, as Dr Johnson opined, a lexicographer is a harmless drudge, what does that make a lexicographical reviewer? A potentially harmful drudge perhaps. Who else feels the need to consume a dictionary whole in one indigestible sequence?

Miracles can still happen. Robin Klein and Max Dann, two of the most popular and successful contemporary children’s authors, have combined forces to write a comedy with a boarding school setting which might, just possibly, start a whole new trend in Australian children’s literature.

‘The settlement of returned soldiers on cultivable land,’ wrote Ernest Scott in Volume XI of the Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918 (1936), ‘is one of the most ancient policies of governments after wars.’ Soldier settlement in Australia after World War I is a major instance of a practice dating back as far as Assyria in the thirteenth-century BC. In early twentieth-century Australia, the need to raise an army entirely from volunteers, and the insatiable demands of modern war, made soldier settlement as much an inducement of recruitment as a means of calming things down afterwards, its traditional function.

About a year ago, when The Woodpecker Toy Fact and Other Stories was just a gleam in its author’s eye, I chanced to hear this very fancifully dressed woman read a story about childhood perception, semantic confusion, and small-town gossip. It was one of those welcome breaks at an academic conference, when we turned our attention from the analysis of art to the thing itself. And it was perhaps the context, along with the exceptional performance of the reader, which made this particular story stand out so vividly. For while it satisfied, they (by then quite desperate) desire to be enthralled by something fictive, it also played up cleverly to the critic in us all.

Ally is fifty-four when her husband leaves her. Her best friend and her daughter – neither of whom she has ever really talked to before – are each thousands of miles away. She descends rapidly into an undignified breakdown. Retreating from everyone and everything, she grows increasingly fat and fearful. Ally has never been terribly confident in her own identity (‘People tend to look past her, rather than at her. Shop assistants tend to give her bored glazed looks and a sharp “What?”’) and now, unloved and unneeded, she is threatened with disintegration. The woman in the mirror is a stranger, she imagines herself as a white grub that she can make vanish by closing her eyes.

At various times in its history, the Australian short story has been predictable, as editorial and public appetites have limited experimentation. I am glad to be reading now, when approval can be conferred on collections as different and as variously excellent as Julie Lewis’s The Walls of Jericho and Peter Skrzynecki’s The Wild Dogs. Lewis’s work is more formally experimental than Skrzynecki’s, but both collections offer insight into the social and the literary.

The perennial and increasingly tiresome question of Australian ‘national identity’ will probably diminish rapidly after the point where the design of a new and truly Australian flag is determined.

That it is a question at all, after just on two hundred years of settlement here, is curious. Part of the condition was diagnosed by the late Arthur Phillips in his studies of our colonial culture, The Australian Tradition, where he perceived in this country what he termed ‘the cultural cringe’. Phillips’ book, together with Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties and Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, were emancipating surely.

Disraeli considered that biography – in contrast to history – is life without theory, though the result of such a policy can be arid. It needs, as well, to be portrayal without betrayal, but it more often errs in the opposite direction: who is likely to write about someone for whom she or he feels an antipathy or an indifference? Yet I am inclined to think that there is a case to be made for ‘arranged biography’, analogous to the ‘arranged marriages’ of other times and cultures.