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Visitants marks the welcome return of Randolph Stow the novelist. Stow’s last novel, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, appeared in 1965, and since then this once prolific writer has been extraordinarily reticent.

The publication of Visitants, the promise of a sequel in the near future, and, coincidentally, his selection for the Patrick White Award for 1979, may point to a decisive break in the long silence which has puzzled and indeed dismayed his admirers.

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In a world which has lost its faith and its standards, the situation of the creative artist is both central and precarious. As Wallace­-Crabbe sees it, he must stand inside and outside society at once, be both totally involved with himself and totally responsive to his society. While doing this, he must create not only his own audience but even his own language.

In this series of essays, Wallace-Crabbe explores this dilemma in the work of contemporary English-language poets ranging from Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop, and from W. H. Auden – ‘the good Christian practices light verse’ – to Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. The essays both illuminate the work of the writers he discusses and contribute to our understanding of the crucial problem of contemporary culture.

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Australian Conservatism edited by Cameron Hazelhurst & The Deep North by Deane Wells

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April 1980, no. 19

It is impossible to think clearly about modern ideologies without perceiving their rootedness in class-related concepts of a better society. Nor can we understand this without seeing that class is a radical rearrangement in fact and in political discourse of the realities previously referred to as ‘orders’ and ‘ranks’. This vast shift into simpler and fewer forms of relation to the means of production is one way of understanding the enormous change in power and dynamism of western capitalist societies that we abbreviate for discussion into the familiar terms of the French and Industrial Revolutions.

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The Music of Man by Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis & The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium by Gerald Durrell

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April 1980, no. 19

Irrespective of their countries of origin, books by remarkable men must command attention in the expectation that they will add to or consolidate knowledge, provide grounds for thought or useful debate or, hopefully, entertain.

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In his uncommonly long life, Mahomet Allum, a native of Afghanistan, combined the vocations of camel driving, herbalism and philanthropy – not in Kabul, but in Adelaide. Allum believed himself ‘God’s messenger’, but a Crown Prosecutor described him as a particularly deceitful and cunning ‘quack’ and brought about his conviction under the Medical Practitioners Act. ... (read more)

Uranium is a word which has become so highly emotive in this country that it is embedded in the national psyche; but not one person in 10,000 who would react instinctively and dialectically to the word knows anything about the element itself apart from connotations of Doomsday … the world on fire or the seeping shroud of radiation sickness laying waste the entire earth in sterile despair.

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Dear Sir,

I have not so far seen a review of what I take to be a new series of Australian poets of whom only Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon have yet appeared. The publisher (Australian Heritage Books, Brisbane) is aiming to produce a cheap paperback, retailing at $2.

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It may seem callous at a time when so much human life is being wasted to spare any concern for the destruction and dissipation of the archaeological collection in the National Museum at Kabul. Yet the loss in both cases is irreplaceable, and it may even be that the loss of the artefacts is, in the long run, qualitatively more important than the loss of individual human lives.

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The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

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Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today. He also works in the theatre. His play Glitter was performed at the Adelaide Arts Festival, and he has written the libretto for an opera with music by Helen Gifford. Black Light, his first published book of short stories, shows him to be a craftsman of the first order in yet another field.

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