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It should be cause for congratulation that a study of Christina Stead is among the first four titles appearing in a series called ‘Essays in Australian Literature’ (general editor John Barnes). Because only two of her novels have Australian settings, because she has lived abroad most of her writing life, because her work evades the usual categories of fiction, because she has no time for the literary marketplace – for a whole complex of reasons Stead’s extraordinary achievement has never been adequately recognised in the land of her birth.

Since its publication in 1967, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock has exercised a peculiar fascination over Australian readers. Its tale of the unexplained and apparently inexplicable disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher from an expedition to the Rock is so well known that it scarcely needs further elaboration. Interest and sales were boosted by Peter Weir’s 1975 film. With its lyrical progression of girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, which ushered in what we like to think of as the rebirth of the Australian cinema, or at least its serious appraisal by the rest of the world.

Dust jacket blurbs are usually misleading, but at least one point made by the back cover of Blanche d’Alpuget’s new novel, Turtle Beach, is authentic. It refers to the ‘Graham Greene sense of inevitability’ of the events of the work. As an admirer of Greene, especially in his Third World novels, I can confidently recommend Turtle Beach as a worthy successor to such socially important novels as The Quiet American and The Comedians. D’Alpuget has the same keen sense of the inadequacies, irrelevance and wrongheadedness of Western involvement in the East, the same wryly ironic depiction of the frailty of human nature regardless of class, colour, creed or sex.

This book must win the prize for the most lavish and the most amateurish book on an Australian artist. Not one of the 200 odd colour plates is dated; not even in the portentously titled Opus Index (a list of plates without page numbers!) do we get a single date or indication of present ownership. Where dates are given in the text, they are often vague and careless ‘... in the 1950s...’etc.

As she did so vividly in Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson uses a returning expatriate woman to cast fresh eyes on the social and urban landscape of Australia. Here, it is Sylvia Foley who has spent some twenty years in Europe eschewing the comforts and constraints of suburban life, teaching Italian and conducting tours of the British Isles and the Continent. On a whim, she abandons her peripatetic life to return to Sydney for a few months prior to her plan to settle in Rome. Unbeknown to her, her autocratic father, Jack Cornock, is dying and she is immediately suspected by other members of her dislocated family of returning to benefit from the will – which she ultimately does as the recipient of her father’s vindictive gesture to spite his wife. And Sylvia’s ‘family’ is considerable. There is her illiterate mother Molly, now married to Ken, her brother Stewart, and her stepsiblings: Harry, Rosamond, Hermione, and Guy, the children of her father’s second wife, Greta.

Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940 is a memento of the exhibition of women’s art initiated by the Ewing Gallery for 1975, International Women’s Year. An extraordinarily rich exhibition, it convinced me and many others who saw it on its tour of the eastern states, that Australian women painters, for at least the first 30 years of this century, must share the laurels equally with men.

The slump, it seems, has hit at last, the slump occasioned by the competition of television, films and the theatre have felt it for some time, but here it is being registered in literature. In its own way each of these three books represents an attempt to capture the popular imagination.

In 1907, the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable (later Sir) Thomas Bent, purchased for 120 pounds from the artist in England Victoria The Golden, scenes, sketches and jottings from nature, by William Strutt, Melbourne, Victoria, 1850-1862, described by the Hon. F.S. Grimwade in his preface as the greatest treasure in the Library of the Parliament of Victoria. The Library Committee of 1909, on accepting the gift, minuted the note that ‘The Librarian was to acquire a suitable safe in which to keep the volume’.

Patrick McCaughey’s Fred Williams is a rare event in Australian publishing, a substantial and scholarly monograph on a living Australian artist. Fred Williams, born in 1927, belongs to the so-called ‘heroic years’ of modern Australian painting (1940-65), yet his reputation as ‘Australia’s leading painter’ was made during the decade that followed. Unlike his contemporaries – among them Charles Blackman – who made their reputations before going overseas, Williams spent most of his formative years (1951-56) in England. The works from this period are mainly figurative and shaped by his experience of London life music hall and other genre subjects.

This volume is subtitled ‘A novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)