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A bloke I know classifies all birds as either shitehawks or dickybirds. Who knows, perhaps he doesn’t believe it either. Problem is, the line keeps shifting. Too many birds just don’t fit these categories. Take the shearwater. It flies fifty thousand kilometres a year in an endless quest for summer. Small it may be, dickybird it ain’t.

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This is the first novel for Jane Messer who, we are told, is writing a second book as part of a Doctorate of Creative Arts ­– and, I must admit, that put me off a bit. Not that I think writers should be uneducated, but academic qualifications in ‘creative writing’ are still a bit suss as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like the thought that I’m reading someone’s term paper, or Master of Arts in Writing from John Hopkins University.  

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Beatrice Wood, banished by those around her to ‘the category of the aged’, is both the focus and the strength of Julian Davies’s third novel, Moments of Pleasure. Choosing to live her life as a single woman, she has been the unforgiven Magdalene of her family because for fifty years she has been the lover of Mark, a man twice married. A dapper moustache of a man, Mark drifts in and out of both Bea’s life and the novel.

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Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood).

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Tourism is, I suppose, the quintessential postmodern activity – I’ve been to Bali too. This particular tourist, Gaile McGregor, described as a ‘Canadian itinerant scholar’, offers us EcCentric Visions as part of a trilogy; the previous two titles featured Canada and the United States. The link is, she says, that all three are ‘post-frontier societies’. It’s a definition that depends on whether or not you’ve got past the post.

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On a current affairs segment devoted to the events in Rwanda an Israeli doctor spoke with a great sense of purpose about the work he wad doing to save lives, especially those of Rwandan children. I feel so proud to be here, he told the interviewer, pointing out how the water he was providing to the patients could make all the difference between life and death. There was no denying his commitment, but there was something in his answers which subtly conflicted with his humanitarianism. Another interview followed with an African woman, an army nurse, who was forced to attend to the Rwandan refugees by virtue of her employment. When asked how she felt about the situation, she replied, with admirable precision, that it was horrible. This response clearly perplexed the interviewer. Of course, the crisis itself was ‘horrible’, but surely her role in it partook of the heroic. He tried again: Yes, but how do you feel? A long pause, and then her angry reply: I don’t want to talk about my personal feelings.

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For some time now literary criticism has been fascinated by the role of naming, and the inscription of the name, in relation to the identity of the self. There are rich pickings to be had from examining autobiography for the way the writer reveals and hides behind the words with which a life is described. And in this era of autobiographical and biographical tumescence, it is most important that the analysis of such writing is done by those with the ability to do so. Think of the recent debates over biographies and autobiographies in Australia and you will quickly recognise how unsophisticated is our general understanding of what is going on when a life is inscribed, and yet how different the living is from the writing.

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Sometimes I long for beauty – in a book I want beautiful writing and even some beauty illuminated in everyday experience. Fiona McGregor’s short story collection does little to ease my longing.

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When I discovered that a novel set in my native Newfoundland had won the 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize, I was a little surprised. Newfoundland, isolated and little known outside Canada, seemed an unlikely setting for an acclaimed novel.

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Bryce Fraser takes a break from his inner city flat and moves to the ideal writer’s retreat: a waterfront cottage amongst the trees – and only twenty minutes from the centre of Sydney. He goes fishing and spears, in a most unsportsmanlike fashion, what turns out to be Lennie, the neighbours’ pet leatherjacket who lived beneath the jetty. Oddly enough, these same neighbours entrust him with the job of becoming minder to Rummy, the dingo.

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