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Archive

The Way It Is by Michael Sharkey

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May 1985, no. 70

On page 87 of Michael Sharkey’s The Way It Is, there is a photograph of the poet reading the National Farmer (a weekly rural newspaper), which shows what happens when you lock up the well-read in a small rural town. Armidale mightn’t Pontus or Bandusia, and you don’t have to have crossed Augustus or have been befriended by Maecenas to get there, but once you are, it certainly changes your idea of ‘the way it is’. Drought, rain, frost, journeys, and drunkenness, obsession with the weather in general, and an almanac of solar and lunar occurrences becomes the raw material of your verse – as it was for those other rural exiles in the Tang dynasty, Li Po and Tu Fu.

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Sam Byrne: Folk painter of the Silver City by Ross Moore

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May 1985, no. 70
Noel Counihan reviews 'Sam Byrne: Folk painter of the Silver City' by Ross Moore

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart.

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'Reviewing the job of reviewing' by Hazel Edwards

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May 1985, no. 70

In Australia, few publications regularly review children’s books for the information of the general reader/buyer. ASA chairman, Ken Methold, suggests that Australian writers need to advertise their varied skills and publicise their works. I agree.

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Love and the Outer World: Selected poems by R.G. Hay

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May 1985, no. 70
Nancy Keesing reviews 'Love and the Outer World: Selected poems' by R.G. Hay

It was my good fortune to be born into a family for whom books and paintings had a central place. My parents subscribed to an excellent lending library and were adventurous readers of novels. During the Depression they could not often afford to buy a painting, but they went to art shows and Sunday visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales were frequent in my childhood.

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Serpent’s Tooth: An autobiographical novel by Roger Milliss

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May 1985, no. 70
Darren Tofts reviews 'Serpent’s Tooth: An autobiographical novel' by Roger Milliss

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

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'Starters & Writers' by Mark Rubbo  

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May 1985, no. 70
I had thought, and still do, that the phenomenon of publishing a book in paperback only was a good thing, especially for fiction. As a bookseller, I observed the paperback achieve sales three and four times what they would have been if the book was hardback. It should be good for the author too, I thought. The lower royalty payment per book would have been more than compensated for by the higher sales and the larger audience. When I suggested this to a writer recently, he was quite adamant that paperback only editions meant that writers got a much smaller return because they missed out on PLR. ... (read more)

Memory Ireland: Insights into the contemporary Irish condition by Vincent Buckley

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May 1985, no. 70
D.J. O’Hearn reviews 'Memory Ireland: Insights into the contemporary Irish condition' by Vincent Buckley

It is often the case that a well-informed outsider can light on structures, habits of thought and patterns of behaviour which, to the people living them out, are neither perceived nor understood.

           Vincent Buckley, who describes himself as a ‘loving outsider’, has visited Ireland on numerous occasions and lived there for long periods over almost thirty years. If he is an outsider, he is certainly a well-informed one, and no-one reading this book – subtitled ‘Insights into the contemporary Irish condition’ – can doubt that it is a book of love and, by that means, penetration.

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Canberra Stages a Good Festival

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May 1985, no. 70

I saw an elderly, quite famous poet sitting all forlorn on a large boulder, neither quite inside a lecture room nor quite outside on the leafy lawn.

Her location, and the droop of her shoulders said, See, I am alone. I knew her, I had taken her once on a short publicity round in Sydney, years ago: should I stop and say, Remember me? Remember that book you wrote, how we thought it might change things, and perhaps it has.

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Abbreviations

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May 1985, no. 70

A tense moment in this household is when two of my children produce books to be read. Mercifully, the Mr Men and the more excruciating of the Golden books have been mysteriously mislaid; and we have gone beyond whiffy Miffy. It is a delight to return to Aranea and John Brown and the Midnight Cat, by Jenny Wagner and Ron Brooks; to look again at Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas. And a bit sad to realise that the great achievement of contemporary children’s fiction is not given enough serious recognition in the community at large.

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Persistence in Folly by Les Murray

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April 1985, no. 69
John McLaren reviews 'Persistence in Folly' by Les Murray

The heat of recent controversy in Australia about the meaning and value of multiculturalism in education, in history and in society at large is an indication of the tenacity with which a dominant culture, in this case that of British Australia, clings to its privileges.

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