Archive

Dissection was recently launched by Helen Garner, who described it as a novel like no other she had read. This impressive first novel is indeed astonishingly polished. Like Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), it dissects morally complex issues of life and death with a deceptively simple touch, using telling domestic detail to bring its characters and settings vividly to life on the page. The prose is clean, crisp, precise; as if carved by a scalpel. It might be the instinctual approach of a writer used to dealing with weighty issues in succinct fifteen-minute blocks.

On 17 July 1990, President George Bush Snr declared the 1990s as the ‘Decade of the Brain’, with the primary aim ‘to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research’. These benefits included better understanding of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and psychiatric disorders. In addition, remarkable advances occurred in functional brain imaging. This still-evolving technology reveals which parts of the brain are active while people carry out tasks of varying complexity, ranging from the manipulation of objects or the processing of sensory information, through to the analysis of problem solving, the voluntary control of emotional responses, or the reconstruction of imaginary events. Faced with a wealth of new experimental data, disciplines such as linguistics and philosophy can no longer develop theoretical models that treat the brain as a black box within which structure and function do not matter.

Blue Dog, the Journal of the Australian Poetry Centre, has a democratic approach to Australian poetry. Submissions are judged anonymously by a team of editors from each state and territory. The journal, as the two reviews of small-press publications reveal, shows no preference for big names. The results, however, are mixed.

Highlights include Andy Jackson’s ‘Severance’, which provides a measured expression of nostalgia. The poem reflects on a childhood marked by sexual misadventure – ‘You and I were the first in our group to buy porn, / though it took us two attempts – we’d assumed Playboy / couldn’t cost much more than TV Week. Honestly, / it was the soft light palming pale curves / that drew us, not the shock of shallow gynaecology’ – and loss – ‘Years before, / our legs patterned with gum tree shadows, / we sat on either end of a bench, waiting for your mum / to come again to comfort you in your homesickness’.

In an excellent essay on the poetics of art criticism in this issue, Robert Nelson writes of the nature of rapturous poetic perception: ‘Suddenly the world is larger, more meaningful … one reality gives onto another and the world is seen as an extension of the ways that you might imagine it.’ HEAT consistently provides its readers with opportunities for such aesthetic insights.

The Nugan Hand merchant bank was the nexus of one of the most significant criminal conspiracies in Australian history. Established in Sydney in 1973, Nugan Hand was backed by the CIA in concert with domestic and international crime organisations. It acted as a front for a plethora of illegal activities, including gun-running, money laundering and tax fraud, most of which were ancillary to the main business: drugs, specifically heroin. Its legacy lives on in the heroin market that the bank helped to build and entrench.

The new Meanjin, edited by Sophie Cunningham, is exciting to behold. With its varied font, though, it runs the risk of being like Federation Square: striking to look at but difficult to negotiate. The small, faint font made this issue taxing to read. Perhaps younger readers, targeted by some of the content (such as the serialisation of a graphic history), will have less difficulty.

The Australian landscape boils with lava and shudders with quakes; acid rain scars its parched surfaces. It provides little succour to human survivors; cockroaches outlive other animal species. Adapt or die, the story commands, though enforced adaptations (personified by the transfected Daughters of Moab) are considered the source of the apocalypse.

The narrative is haunted, riddled with nostalgia and regrets. It jumps between fascinating points of view: Assumpta’s human/dingo hybrid single-mindedness; Eustace’s calculating duplicity; Easter’s ex-sanguinated hallucinations; Angus’s longing for his unblemished homeland. Scenes change abruptly; the narrative transforms and folds in on itself unexpectedly, like a surrealist film. Readers must adapt or they will become lost in the plot, stuck in the molasses of Kim Westwood’s prose. She entices us with her unique treatment of the themes of loneliness, Stolen Generations, climate change, misplaced religious fervour, and searching for identity. Her world and her characters are attractive, but her dense prose can often be off-putting.

Serge Liberman’s new book contains a series of short stories and one novella, all narrated by Dr Raphael Bloom, a Melbourne physician who variously plays the roles of healer, confidant, confessor and counsellor to patients and their families. In doing so he explores existential and theological problems which often revolve around the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and the post-memory of second-generation migrants. For members of this traumatised community, brushes with illness and mortality raise the spectre of that terrible event and show how the past is not easily laid to rest.

In Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives, Anthony Elliott casts an unforgiving eye over the astonishing growth of ‘cosmetic surgical culture’. No longer the province of the rich and famous, Botox and skin peels, laser surgery and liposuction, face-lifts and breast augmentations have become part of the fabric of everyday life. Elliott’s analysis lays bare the culture of nip and tuck, and the era in which ‘many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships’. Yet what compels people to act upon the desire for self-improvement in such drastic and sometimes life-threatening ways? Elliott identifies celebrity, consumerism and globalisation as fundamental to the increasing popularity of surgical solutions to social and personal dilemmas.

Scattered across Lake Ballard, a vast salt lake north of Kalgoorlie, are fifty-one androgynous abstracted cast-iron alloy figures created by British artist Antony Gormley in 2002, all based on scans of the inhabitants of a tiny goldfields settlement. Gormley described his figures as ‘strangers in a strange land’. It is not too wild a stretch of the imagination to see them as explorers or prospectors driven by powerful dreams to wander endlessly across a shimmering landscape. One of these figures provides an evocative cover image for Land of Vision and Mirage.