Allen & Unwin

Each of the three parts that make up Thea Astley’s new novel, Coda, is prefaced by a newspaper report, real or imaginary, detailing cases of ‘granny-dumping’, the ruthless abandonment of old, frail, and disoriented people by their unidentified children. This sets the scene for a reflection on old age and the rejection of those whose physical and mental capacities no longer meet the stringent requirements of the standard economically viable unit of modem civilisation. The manifest duty of such objects is to be as discreet as possible, providing minimal inconvenience to others (especially their adult children) until they can fade into oblivion.

Lyn Hughes’s One Way Mirrors begins with a white horse impaled on headlights. It’s autumn, ‘the stars look cold and pinched’. You know it’s going to end badly and it does, mostly.

Diane Langmore has given us a fascinating account of the lives of ten women, from Pattie Deakin to Hazel Hawke. She has explored the background of each, the attraction which ended in marriage to a politically ambitious man, and the adaptation of each to her husband’s obsessive struggle for the most powerful political post in Australia. Her analysis of the women’s relationship to their partners throws light on the personalities and attitudes of the men chosen by Australians to lead the nation. For the early sketches Langmore has drawn on diaries, newspaper reports, and the opinions of contemporaries; for the latter she has been able to add to her sources the opinions and musings, given in interviews, of the women themselves. Langmore writes with clarity and style, never belittling or patronising her subjects, and her sympathetic viewpoint enables the reader to appreciate the varied personalities of her subjects. She does not, however, fall into the trap of assuming that the public face of each woman is always the private one.

Janine Haines’s book, Suffrage to Sufferance is a good read. For women who are in public life and who insist on equality, it is a realistic and often humorous read. For those women who aspire to public life or simply equal rights, it is an entertaining – lost journalistic – account of where women’s aspirations might lead them. For men who understand or want to understand women’s drive for equality, there is an idea of the barriers, seen and unseen, that women face. And there is some sense of women’s struggle for political influence and recognition.

Wolves and goats. The goats represent the ego. They control time, represent culture, continuity, the status quo. They live in the grandfather clock that is at once history and the records of the psychoanalyst. The wolves are the id, the unconscious, desire. They are also reason, and they triumph over time. The Wolf-Man led Freud to his understanding of the war of the id on the ego. Freud identified as neurotics those who, unable to live with the war, regress to the instinctive, the primitive, the animal.

Mr Jackson’s book narrates his experience and that of a friend as prisoners of the Japanese in Thailand during World War II. It is neither a good nor memorable book, but it does raise, however unintentionally, significant issues. In a nation still bereft of a civil religion, that amalgam of myths and tales of heroes which defines a country’s sense of self and values, the experiences described by Mr Jackson should be honoured.

Anyone interested in Aboriginal history or race relations will probably be familiar with the work of Henry Reynolds. His books include The Other Side of the Frontier (1982), Frontier (1987), and The Law of the Land (1987). This latest book is a collection of documents, ones that provided much of the source material for Reynolds’s earlier works. In this book, he tell us in the preface, ‘our forebears speak for themselves and speak in many voices’.

In some ways, John Hirst presents his tale of colonial New South Wales as if it were a book for today. In the preface he comments: ‘But why should we care what it was like? – because in many fundamentals this is the political world we still inhabit.’ This theme is sketched and hinted at several times in the text but it is never argued in a systematic and rigorous manner. What are we to make of the claim?

About ten years ago, I was asked to give a talk to a Sydney group of Australian writers. (Actually, they asked Leonie Kramer, but she was busy.) I decided to talk on ‘Some unknown Australian women writers of the nineteenth century’ in ‘the hope of interesting some of them in researching the lives and careers of their predecessors.

A crucial clue is given right at the beginning in the form of a lavender plant punningly sent to Claudia Valentine, our detective heroine. Like just about everything else in the novel, it turns out to have been put there by the novel’s Mr Big, Harry Lavender. And finding out the extent of his influence is what keeps us going through the back alleys and one way streets, more often than the smoothly flowing highways, of a clever detective narrative.