Archive

After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

In an intriguing coincidence, three recent novels by notable male writers feature central characters who, former members of world-famous rock bands, ruminate on the mess they made of the past. The notion of faded rock stars clearly provides much scope for exploring issues of male ego, sexuality and mid-life crisis. Unlike Nick Hornby (Juliet Naked) and Nick Earls (The Story of Butterfish), Steven Lang is no ‘lad-lit’ writer, though he does delve into similar thematic territory in his second novel, 88 Lines About 44 Women.

It is genuinely hard for countries like Australia, which have never regarded a powerful and alternative intelligentsia as particularly crucial, to appreciate either the role such an entity famously played in Russia or what a homegrown one might offer.

The slightly odd title of this volume – not Marcus Clarke, but Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke – is reminiscent of a spate of movies in the 1990s, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Those weren’t the authentic products, but this book does present Hopkins’s Clarke, in that much of the volume is made up of his childhood memories of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and long extracts from Clarke’s letters to Hopkins.

The discipline of art history in Australia has passed through four stages. The foundations were laid in the 1940s with the arrival of three eminent émigrés. Ursula Hoff, schooled in the rigours and erudition of the Warburg Institute, came first. Franz Philipp, a Dunera survivor, well educated in the Viennese School, under Julius von Schlosser and others, came next. Then came Joseph Burke, first Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and a product of the Courtauld Institute in London and the Anglophiliacs of Yale. Hoff would become the first trained art historian to work in a public Australian art gallery. Over the years, she made the Prints and Drawings Room at the National Gallery of Victoria a powerhouse of scholarship and connoisseurship. Burke and Philipp joined forces to create the Department of Fine Arts. Burke modestly proclaimed that ‘Franz was the architect and I was the builder’; I suspect that Philipp felt he was both.

Eighteen years ago, Gerald Murnane gave up writing fiction. At least, that is what the unnamed narrator of Barley Patch says happened to him in this new work of fiction, the first to be published by Murnane in fourteen years. It is tempting to think that this book might offer some kind of insight into what led to this hiatus in Murnane’s career. After all, if Murnane is Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction, as the book’s blurb tells us, this period of silence is an absence that should interest careful readers.

In one of Kenneth Slessor’s surviving notebooks now held in the National Library, there is a curious entry consisting of approximately eighty names. This appears to be a list of those people the poet counted as friends over his lifetime; many of the names are marked in pencil with the forlorn abbreviation ‘d’. What might a literary historian make of such a list? It might be evidence of a romantic sensibility, a sign of Slessor’s faith in the commemorative powers of language, arguably the precondition for writing elegiac poetry. On the other hand, the list might be held up as proof of a bleak modernism, indicative of Slessor’s existential anxiety, the names being little more than fragments shored against the ruins of time. Of course, the question of whether a particular poet should be regarded as a romantic or a modernist depends entirely on what is meant by those loaded terms. This is one of the pitfalls of literary history: its basic terms of inquiry are often equivocal.