Review

Butterflies are perhaps the most agreeable of insects: harmless, highly visible, diurnal, brightly coloured and almost whimsical in their movements. Because of these qualities, they have attracted considerable attention from naturalists and artists throughout recorded history. Since Victorian times, their diversity and natural history have been documented in great detail – more than for any other group of invertebrate animals. Butterfly collecting was a popular pastime until recent decades; many a colonial home contained a wood cabinet with neat rows of carefully pinned butterfly specimens. More recently, butterflies were the subject of the first nationwide biological atlas scheme: the Atlas of British Butterflies conducted through the 1970s by the British Biological Records Centre. This project drew upon the energy of 2000 butterfly enthusiasts across the British Isles to record the presence of species in ten-kilometre grid cells. The biological atlasing concept has subsequently been applied to other groups, particularly birds and flowering plants.

Early in 1900, bubonic plague travelled by ship to Sydney, then erratically made its way up the coast. Ian Townsend’s accomplished first novel, Affection, traces the arrival of the plague in Townsville during the autumn of 1900. His story is factually based and is particularly concerned with three of the doctors who treated the outbreak: Linford Row, recently settled in the town as its municipal medical officer; long-term resident Ernest Humphry; and the English bacteriologist and butterfly collector Alfred Jefferis Turner. How they cope, not only with horrible and random deaths, but with politics and prejudice in North Queensland, is the dramatic core of the book.

A good travel book is usually more than the mere chronicle of a journey, and a journey is often, but not always, a metaphor for something else altogether. Meanwhile, the act of departure can be read as an affirmation of life, an act of faith or, as is the case with James O’Loghlin, one of utter desperation.

The foreign correspondent Eric Campbell is lucky to be alive. In March 2003 he was filming in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, with Paul Moran, a freelance cameraman whom he had just met, when a car bomb exploded in front of him. Moran was killed instantly, his body shielding Campbell from the worst of the blast. Both Moran and Campbell were new fathers. Although vastly experienced in covering conflicts, both men had decided at the start of the Iraq war that they would stay at the tail of the media pack when entering dangerous areas. They wanted to see their children grow up; Moran’s daughter was only six weeks old.

While it is not immediately apparent from the back cover of Hazel Smith’s The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing, the preface and introduction both make it clear that this book is intended as a textbook for tertiary students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Smith’s book is based on experiences gained over more than a decade as a teacher of writing at the Universities of New South Wales and Canberra; such experience enlivens this book, making it the best creative writing book I’ve seen thus far aimed at the Australian university setting. In many English departments, postgraduate creative writing numbers now exceed those undertaking more traditional research degrees. Even at the undergraduate level, some creative writing electives attract more students than is the case with literature courses, so, on the surface at least, there is a real market for such books as The Writing Experiment.

In 2003, I edited a book called Whitewash, a critique of Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist account of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). Even before Whitewash was published, Windschuttle told a journalist at The Australian, D.D. McNicoll, that he was preparing a book-length reply. Nothing came of this promise. Rather than answer his critics directly, what Windschuttle seems eventually to have decided to do was to finance, through the Press he owns, Macleay, the publication of John Dawson’s Washout. By its publication, Windschuttle hopes, presumably, to have saved face.

These days, children’s non-fiction is not as stuffy as it once was. Instead of the encyclopaedic and often boring lists of facts that used to constitute the genre, authors are now encouraged to use fictional techniques in style and voice to produce a collage of ideas; and designers are required to present them as interactively as possible. These three very different books share some of these characteristics.

With the recent Tony Abbott paternity saga unfolding in spectacular fashion, adoption is back in the news. Not that it ever really went away. Adoption was such a common practice in postwar Australia that there is a ready-made constituency for reunion stories. Many birth parents, especially birth mothers, hunger for details of successful reunions. Adoptees search out familiar patterns in the biographies of other relinquished adults. But more than that, there is something primal about separation, loss and reunion that attracts a wider audience to adoption narratives. It is not simply that almost everyone over thirty knows someone who was adopted. There is something about postwar adoption experiences that sharpens our sense of human relationships as both fragile and resilient.