Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor,
Defending Inga Clendinnen against my criticisms (ABR, July 2001), John Clendinnen attributes to her a controversial view about the nature of moral judgment. I don’t hold it and, if I were to judge solely by her practice, I would be surprised if she does. Be that as it may: I’ll try to put my points by keeping philosophical assumptions down as much as possible.

Better off without him

Dear Editor,

James Griffin, in his effort to rehabilitate John Wren (ABR, June 2001), attacks me and other historians. Stuart Macintyre has replied strongly; and Manning Clark, the main target, is unfortunately dead.

My turn now. Griffin refers to a book by me and two co-authors, Doc Evatt (1994), and says that ten letters from Evatt to Wren were ‘made available’ for the writing of this biography. Actually, no such letters were made available to me by anyone, and there was no reference to them in my main source, the Evatt Papers at Flinders University. I had never heard of the existence of the letters until I read an article on the subject by Griffin in Eureka Street (September 1992).

James Griffin and John Wren

Dear Editor,

Some of your readers will be familiar with the problem. You set aside a few days to get to the National Library to pursue a research project. You obtain the manuscripts, order the material in the Petherick Room, and settle down to uninterrupted industry, when an avuncular bore with too much time on his hands buttonholes you and bangs on about his own project. You do not wish to appear uninterested, yet hope that the windbag will leave you alone and get back to his own table, perhaps even write the book that he rehearses so insistently as the precious minutes tick by.

From John Tranter

Dear Editor,

You may not be aware of it – indeed, the readers of ABR have hardly ever been made aware of it, for some reason – but over the last twenty years John Tranter has published the following books:

Dear Editor,

As the convenor of the conference ‘The Public, the Intellectuals and the Public Intellectual’ (La Trobe University, May 1996), and as co-editor of the collection of essays, Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory and Practice, I have followed the discussion generated by the publication of Mark Davis’s book Gangland with great interest. Besides a certain repetitiveness of some of the pieces comprising the symposium featured in the last issue of ABR, I found that discussion much more relaxed than the somewhat visceral and even hysterical responses filling the pages of Australian newspapers days after Gangland was released. Incidentally, it was good editorial vision to combine the symposium on gatekeeping with two related and important essays, ‘Literary Authority’ by Ivor Indyk and ‘The Role of the Critic’ by Brian Castro.

From Gerard Hayes

Dear Editor,
If Mark Davis had wanted to concoct a parody of babyboomer fogeyism, he could hardly have done better than Peter Craven’s review of Gangland. Opening with a quotation from Anthony Powell and doing his best to parrot the Powellian tone of bored hauteur, Craven details the shortcomings of Davis’s age: not young – in fact a ‘late bloomer’ – but still not old enough to know better, indeed ‘rather earnest and plodding’.

From Aldi Wimmer

Dear Editor,

This is the first time I am responding to something I read in ABR, and the reason is Ivor Indyk’s outrageous review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 (July ABR). Actually, it isn’t so much a review as a piece of character assassination. How Indyk, whose reviews are usually excellent, can fall into a ranting mode in which he totally loses sight of the texts that he should be evaluating, is beyond me. What can have possessed him? Envy that a younger man is an accomplished writer?