Australian Fiction

This novel raises more interesting questions about its author than about its characters and action.

I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

None of the writers who emerged from the Australian bush has dealt as powerfully with its horror as Barbara Baynton, yet she is probably mainly known only for the two anthologised short stories, ‘Scrammy ’And’ and ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, the latter of which has been made into an excellent short film by David Baker.

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.

On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.

Australian children’s literature has its own established heavies, writers whose work is well enough known both here and abroad, frequently in translation, and whose names would be well up in the Public Lending Right cheque lists. Some are so much in demand these days, that the time taken in preparing and giving speeches at conferences of librarians and others leaves them little time for the actual business of writing. However, they continue to dominate; each new work from them is eagerly awaited, read, reviewed and avidly discussed, if not by children then certainly by the growing adult following.

I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.

In The Mango Tree, McKie captured through a rich and tightly controlled prose the pain and bewilderment attendant on the shifting of a child’s consciousness towards the adult. At the same time, he evoked the shapes and textures of the remembered world of a Queensland town, of a way of life in the act of changing, with a muted note of lament. In Bitter Bread, there is a curious mixture of the mellow prose of The Mango Tree and passages where McKie’s control is loose, passages which spill over into the maudlin and smudge into bathos. Its narrative has not the inner logic of the earlier novel, tending to dart off into peripheral characters and events only limply tied to the central narrative line. At times, McKie seems to be shying away from the task of exploring the central relationship of two widely different consciousnesses caught up together in Melbourne during the Depression.