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Living in Shanghai late last year, I found myself one evening around a banquet table with a large group of expats – writers, journos, academics – in one of the city’s pricier Chinese restaurants. I don’t remember how the conversation steered toward Cuba and Castro, but, before long, there were coos of admiration and toasts to the hero of the Cuban revolution.

No chick non-fic lit

Dear Editor,

Aviva Tuffield’s review of my book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge (ABR, December 2003/January 2004), sends disturbing mixed messages that. I believe, require further dialogue. Tuffield acknowledges that the book is ‘a fine scholarly work’ and an ‘important contribution to Australian history’ by a writer with ‘evident skills’. She grants that the work ‘adds complexity’ to both the historical record and certain theoretical paradigms. Yet Tuffield is evidently perplexed that this ‘thesis-turned-book’ should be ‘brilliantly promoted’ and ‘engulfed in a haze of marketing’.

My apologies if Tuffield expected to snuggle up with a ripping good yarn on a sexy topic only to find herself trawling through an argument-driven work of scholarship, complete with notes and manifest historiography. No one is more aware than I that BLL is not a page-turner. Given Tuffield’s concern that BLL ‘feels like a missed opportunity’, she might be interested to know that I did in fact have ample interest from commercial publishers to produce a ‘narrative history’ in keeping with the ‘current vogue’ that Tuffield identifies. Though tempted. I decided to reject these advances (and, no doubt, far flashier marketing campaigns than a university press can offer) in favour of publishing a ‘harder’, more analytical book. My instinct was that the iconic status of the subject matter (pubs) and the ground-breaking nature of the research (women mostly ran them) required the legitimacy of scholarship in order to be taken seriously by academic and popular audiences alike. The sort of anecdotal, biographical, interview-based book about women and pubs that Tuffield would have preferred could too easily have been dismissed as ‘chick non-fic lit’. My aim was to produce a book that had crossover appeal; a detailed laying out of the historical evidence, written in a direct and accessible style.

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Loyalty and love she lavished free
On lowly friends and well-born,
Like Murdoch, Melba and like me,
She was marvellously Melbourne

The ‘she’ is actress Coral Browne (1913-1991); the ‘me’ is Barry Humphries; the quatrain is from Humphries’ eulogy – or elegy – A Chorale for Coral, which was ‘Very Privately Printed’ in 1992 after her funeral. In his memoirs More Please, which came out the same year, Humphries recalls listening to Browne ‘in the forties’ on the Lux Radio Theatre. In his subsequent autobiographical volume, My life as Me (2002), he recounts how she ‘had come to England to further her theatrical career in the early fifties ... and she was not only a marvellous actress but an infamous wit and the author of many legendary exchanges’.

In The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of 3 November 2004, Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing argued that young scholarly writers have been ‘abandoned by the academy’. Tom Griffiths replies to her article, which was titled ‘Let’s End This Dissertation Dissipation’:

The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.

Greg Craven, professor of Government and Constitutional Law at Curtin University, attempts to steer a delicate course: to rescue Australia’s founding document from irrelevance and scorn; and to preserve it from the impatient hands of reformists. Although he is more interested in demonstrating the Constitution’s resilience than in exploring in detail the contours of our constitutional democracy, Craven raises important questions about the legitimate roles of the judiciary and parliament, the future of federalism and the prospects for an Australian republic. He writes with zeal and obvious enthusiasm, and, while his rhetorical extravagance is often distracting, his discussion is never dull.

Welcome to our many new subscribers who have joined us in the past couple of months, including a large number in NSW and the ACT, further evidence (if we needed it) of the value of our new partnership with the National Library of Australia. We hope you enjoy the September issue.

No doubt there is a diverse readership for a book about the geological evolution of Australia. In fact, the last comprehensive text intended for experts was The Geological Evolution of Australia and New Zealand (1968), by D.A. Brown, K.S.W. Campbell and K.A.W. Crook; and nothing of major scope for a lay audience has appeared for a longer time. In the past forty years, of course, the subject has advanced enormously in a general sense, not the least being the revolution in our understanding of the mobility and interactions of the outer shell of the Earth through the processes labelled ‘plate tectonics’. Our specific geological knowledge of Australia has also progressed significantly.

Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch

toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we’ll never occupy

again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass with you,

searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet winds cut

the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp, Quickly, I must go —

Towards the end of the last century, Australian little magazines were forced to make a choice: become more interdisciplinary, or die. Those that have survived, and the new ones that have emerged, have taken on a new coherence and cohesion. Still mostly featuring a varied mix of writers, genres and approaches, they tend these days to have some unifying topic, or topos, and to be conducting a kind of internal conversation within their covers.