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Much of the evidence and source material used in Depraved and Disorderly, particularly in Part One, will be familiar to the scholar of female convict history. But Joy Damousi provides some additional material which is both original and evocative. For example, her discussion of lesbianism and tattooing as both challenging to contemporary concerns about sexuality and social order, and as another means by which these women could express their own identities, provides evidence of the diversity of characters among convict women, as well as broadening our understanding of colonial society. More importantly, however, Damousi adds a further theoretical dimension to the already complex and contradictory historiography which surrounds the female convict.

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Ours is not a visually literate culture – architects and designers are not the household names they are in countries such as Spain, nor is design understood or appreciated to any discernible degree – so it is always a particular pleasure when a publication appears that celebrates design. However, it is therefore also doubly important that such a publication should enliven or enlighten a public already so impervious to what design has to offer.

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Salt: Volume 10 edited by John Kinsella

by
September 1997, no. 194

When a poet reviews a poetry magazine, it can be like walking out over a virtual minefield. I have a few more books to write before they take me out, so let me say straight away, I come in peace. These are cynical times, so maybe nobody will be taken in by this tone. After all, Salt is published and edited by John Kinsella, a highly successful poet who has established himself in record time. Let’s face it, this is poetry as strategy. As Hilary McPhee pointed out, the literary community in this country can be particularly vicious, and if anyone tries to hose that down they are having themselves on – the response McPhee got in relation to what she actually said proves the point really. It doesn’t have to be bland and polite though. There has been a lot of talk about the careerist approach to poetry lately. Ramona Koval noted at the first National Poetry Festival in Melbourne recently that some American poets have taken on this ‘professionalisation’ of poetry even down to their ‘Brooks Brothers suits and leather satchels’. Fay Zwicky replied, ‘I think careerism in poetry is contrary to how a poem comes into existence in the first place.’

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George Seddon is well-known as an environmentalist and academic. Western Australian readers will remember in particular his Sense of Place (1972). He is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne.

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Mark Twain did Australian literature a service when he remarked that Australian history ‘does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’. It is an observation with which Australians are happy to identify, for it stimulates the imagination, accommodates the larrikin we like to see in ourselves, and has the effect of sanctioning the revision of a past that is not all that we might, from the vantage of hindsight, have wished. At least three writers have adopted it as an epigraph, including Peter Carey, who wove Illywhacker around the notion, and now David Astle, personalising a possible past for a corner of country Victoria.

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Peter Carey has constructed a labyrinth. Let me gropingly try to lead you through it. The year is 1837. A convict, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, returns to London intent on finding the boy who years before did him a kindness. The boy, Henry Phipps, has grown up a gentleman ...

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Nuns supply the world with a wonderful source of all-singing, all-dancing, laughing or weeping material, from The Abbess of Crewe to A Nun’s Story, from The Sound of Music to Nunsense. Where would novelists and filmmakers be without the sisterhood? Catholic girls have strong feelings about nuns ...

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Fremantle Arts Centre Press published its first collection of John Kinsella’s poetry in 1989, only eight years ago. ... (read more)
Bert Kelly has had three careers and one idea. He was a farmer by inheritance and turned himself into an agricultural whiz who could pick flaws in subsidised projects from the Ord River to Kathmandu. ... (read more)

Not another novel about heroin, you might ask. You might as well say, not another novel about addiction to anything, including love or death. Luke Davies’ novel risks being seen to jump on the bandwagon of relevance, or grunge, or whatever turns you off. But this a good book, a true book, which left me feeling sad for some days, not a bad thing in these times of numbing busyness in which many of us seem to be trapped.

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