Review

This insider’s account of the sexual abuse crisis facing the Christian churches is an engaging read – not only for believers, but for us heathens as well. The author wears various hats. A journalist and regular commentator on religious issues for many years, Muriel Porter now lectures in journalism at RMIT. She describes herself as a ‘committed Anglican laywoman’ who has been involved in high-level structural decision-making within the Anglican Church for the past fifteen years. These multiple roles add much to her discussion, but can also produce some tensions.

Many of us, as we get older, become curious about relatives we hardly or never knew. Perhaps, if we have children of our own, we become more aware of the biological ties that bind us to those relatives and seek self-illumination through the lighting of the shadowy places in our ancestry. This process is beautifully implied by Peter Singer’s title, Pushing Time Away, a phrase taken from a letter written by his maternal grandfather, David Ernst Oppenheim, to his maternal grandmother, Amalie Pollak, in which Oppenheim declares: ‘what binds us pushes time away.’

Singer never knew his grandfather, but was prompted to discover him on learning that Oppenheim ‘wrote about fundamental values, and what it is to be human’. For Singer, who apparently rather surprised his family by deciding to be a philosopher, this was a spur to enquiry. Moreover, ‘[t]he handful of people who knew my grandfather are getting old’. If anything, indeed, bound Singer and Oppenheim together, it had to be found now, or not at all.

It’s easy to see why Michael Farrell already has something of a reputation as a stylist, though this is his first collection. Inventive, sharp-witted, entertaining and meticulously made, the poems in ode ode offer a lower-case, unpunctuated take on style (‘i perforce have metamorphosed / more than once for a ball at short / notice’) in which style is energised, orchestrated substance.

The untitled, undated first section of the book, consisting of a series of poems called ‘codas’, begins with the explanation that ‘this is cinema made by people / shuffling in gumboots’. Cinema is wonderfully evoked here in poems that are themselves fast-moving, flickering montages, in which ‘time doesnt / just move forward not even the / past’. Scenes and characters, perhaps from films the poet is watching ‘in the mainstream in the arthouse’, slide into one another (‘the boys ugliness becomes / magnificent his screwy behaviour / erases alan bates from the mind’), or cut suddenly to others. Spliced-up scenery and partial sentences are rudely interrupted by utterance-fragments, lines get broken mid-word (‘julia ro / berts robot’), the sense and syntax take a turn for the unpredictable, and we start bumping into cinema’s roles ‘off / screen’ – as public outing (‘just stop me at the festival / a couple of fingers on my / wrist the word drink with a / rising tone’), private world (‘more red more / white i yell from my closeup’), social production (‘a collective / cry from all our hearts’), or confidence trick (‘per / haps his last laugh on holly / wood hmmm what do you think’). But ‘cinema’ is also a metaphor (‘reels / lives its all any of us have’) whose star if you like, or anti-hero, is the lower-case, dotted but unpunctuated first person: ‘this is a movie of the day i was / born the horses are actors all.’

Edmund Campion’s latest book, Lines of My Life, is an elegant hybrid, part meditation, part gossip (of edifying kinds), part political testament. Its genial tone is suggested by the source of the title, which comes from Psalm 16: ‘the lines of my life have run in pleasant places’. Not that this is at all a self-satisfied book. Campion begins his ‘Journal of a Year’ in New York in September 2001. He had gone there to conduct research on Thomas Merton, an American monk and writer. This took him to the great public and university libraries of the city. In one of the moments when Campion pauses to praise, he says that ‘libraries are our richest cultural asset, their custodians singular servants of our intellectual lives’.

It is a Pam Brown moment when, flicking through her Dear Deliria, I read of ‘historic butter sculptures’ and hear at the same time David Bowie on the stereo singing ‘yak-butter statues’. It’s a Pam Brown moment because her poetry is one of incidents and coincidence. In its interest in both the quotidian and in critique, Brown’s poetry illustrates the endless interplay between texts and contexts, between art and life. These latter categories are most vivid in Brown’s poems when they are collapsing into each other – like drunk friends at a party.

After Ned Kelly, the story of Burke and Wills ranks high among Australians’ favourite tales of heroic failure. Simpson and his donkey are on the list, followed closely by any number of stories from the locker rooms of sporting clubs both great and small. There are strict conventions governing the telling of these stories. However pointless, futile, and even bloody they may have been, they are handed down as stories of romance. Kelly, Simpson, and Bradman all had a final stand. The hero, in his final stand, is alone on a pedestal. The other people around at the time are reduced to the role of extras. It’s a pity. Arthur Morris, the man at the other end when Bradman was dismissed for a duck in his final innings, went on to make 196. Nobody much remembers. Joe Byrne, Kelly’s closest ally and confidant, happened to speak Cantonese. An addict, he had picked it up among the opium traders of Beechworth. Byrne’s acquisition of a Chinese language is far more interesting than the dreary question that has been provoked by yet another movie version of the Kelly story – whether or not Ned spoke with an Irish accent.

If you like business bodice-rippers, these are blissful days. After the host of books that emerged from the dot com Götterdämmerung, another wave of cautionary tales has hit the shelves. I reached for Mark Westfield’s HIH after reading my third book about Enron, Mimi Swartz’s Power Failure, and was struck at once by a casual coincidence: that both Enron’s Ken Lay and HIH’s Ray Williams insisted on being referred to as ‘Doctor’. In Lay’s case, this was on account of his PhD in economics. Williams laid rather flimsier claim to his honorific, after Monash University rewarded him for various endowments with an honorary doctorate in laws in 1999.

Renée Goossens, born in 1940, is the youngest daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Married three times, he had three daughters with Dorothy Millar, and two more with his second wife, and Renée’s mother, Janet Lewis. His third marriage, to Marjorie Foulkrod, was childless. It is characteristic of this memoir that Renée Goossens remarks early in the narrative that she never met one of her half-sisters and that it was decades before she met the other two. Her life seems to have been marked or scarred by a series of disappearances on the part of significant family members and by unexplained absences.

Reading Swan Bay, one is quickly struck by a sense of the familiar. A damaged, misanthropic man meets a damaged, unbalanced woman. He attempts to penetrate her almost mystical reserve and, in the book’s central flashback sequence, she recounts the past that has almost destroyed her. Back in the present, the truth of her account seems uncertain. The two achieve some sort of equilibrium. This narrative outline could equally be applied to almost any of the novels of Rod Jones.