Review

We read that 100,000 displaced persons will arrive in Australia in the next eighteen months. Is there no way that the people of Australia can have some control over these sweeping invitations to displaced persons. Surely there is no room in Australia for hordes of foreigners …’ reads a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Does it sound familiar? However, the date is 18 November 1948, a time when aggrieved readers were bombarding the papers, protesting against the influx of postwar refugees.

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

The Russian theorist Yuri Lotman said: ‘Plot is a way of understanding the world.’ On this basis, texts with plots – novels, for example – do more for us than texts without plots. The telephone book, for example, a plotless text par excellence, may promote aspects of communication, but adds little to our attempt to make sense of life. However, Igor Gelbach, a Georgian Russian now living in Melbourne, has challenged this concept with his thought-provoking but virtually plotless novel, Confessions of a Clay Man, which may be narrative in shape but is highly poetic in procedure. At first reading, it is rather mystifying, the story so fabulised that you tend to lose it and concentrate on the word-pictures, which manage to make a completely unknown place hauntingly evocative, as though you had once dreamed about it. Like Goethe’s ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’, we can’t know it, but we feel as though we do. Gelbach’s seaside town resonates with a similar, impossible familiarity.

There is little doubt that few people write letters anymore. Nowadays, personal communication is conducted via e-mails and mobile phone messages, much to the dismay of manuscript collectors and researchers. So, it is surprising to come across what the publishers describe as ‘a novel in letters’, Parachute Silk, by Gina Mercer.

How to shape the fiction of one’s life? There is something to be said for the no-nonsense narrative thrust of Errol Flynn in kicking off My Wicked, Wicked Ways, one of the most readable and also self-consciously ‘literary’ of all showbiz autobiographies. ‘Detesting’ books that begin after the fashion of ‘there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard’, the actor-autobiographer gets straight to what he archly calls ‘the meat of the matter’: his tumultuous film career and the associated carnal exploits that constituted his notoriety.

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?

This book tells how the Irish government gradually rearranged its methods of convict transportation, from a variety of destinations in North America to a single destination on the far side of the world. The story takes place predominately between 1783 and 1791, from the independence of the United States (which effectively closed American ports to British and Irish transports) to the sailing of the Queen, the first ship to take convicts direct from Ireland to New South Wales. It is a subject that has never been properly examined, mainly because we tend to assume that the Irish point of view – as far as administration goes – was nothing more than a footnote to the British.

At school assemblies, when I was ten, I was required to recite a pledge which ended with the words ‘and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law’. The novels reviewed here are all concerned with family, and the way in which young people operate within and outside it.

In his amusing essay, ‘The More Things Change’, John Birmingham writes:

Sydney will always confound, infuriate, engage and seduce. It is a provider/destroyer, madonna/whore and prophet of the main chance. It is hated, feted, loved and envied. It cares not. Self-obsessed and cosmopolitan, tacky, shallow and deeply serious, it knows its own worth and vainly overstates it at every turn – as when one speaker at the last (sic) Premier’s litfest dinner favourably compared the old tart with the Florence of Michelangelo. The gasps at the dinner tables were probably in surprise that anyone could think to bracket Sydney with such a provincial backwater.

While, I hope, ironic, this observation could be said to be indicative of the attitude behind many of the individual chapters in this anthology.

The book, as its editors inform us in their introduction, has grown out of a series of ‘Debating the City’ conferences held at the Museum of Sydney in 1999 and 2000. They, and the Director of the Historic Houses Trust, Peter Watts, in his foreword, are at pains to stress that this book is about cities, ‘the liveability of the modern city’ and ‘the city as an interdisciplinary subject’. However, while the conferences may have been about cities, the overwhelming number of papers selected for publication in the book take Sydney as their almost exclusive subject. In fact, eleven of the eighteen chapters are specifically about aspects of Sydney’s urban development or the experience of living in Sydney. Perhaps John Birmingham got it right.