Archive

The latest issue of Meanjin is excellent. Ian Britain and his co-editor, Jennifer Digby, have assembled a group of learned contributors to address the theme of ‘Crime and Law’. The interaction between their wide range of experiences and orientations – professional, personal, poetic – makes the journal a fascinating read. The essays are strong, diverse and engaging.

Justice Michael Kirby’s affecting meditation on the significance of the 1957 Wolfenden report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution is both an erudite professional opinion and a personal account of how devastatingly the law can impinge on individual liberty in the name of religious morality. Despite the forceful recommendations of the report, widespread law reform on the decriminalisation of homosexuality was slow to occur. Australia only began to see legislative change on this issue as a part of Don Dunstan’s reforms in South Australia, in 1975. Drawing upon the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Kirby argues that ‘criminal law, with its heavy-handed punishments, stigma and shame, [is] not to be deployed on the basis only of scriptural texts and private sensibilities’.

There has been talk recently about the loss of regionalism in Australian literature and culture, and about the decline of Australian literature generally, but these two novels suggest that not only is Australian fiction flourishing but it is finding new ways to engage with the cultures of the region. They represent innovative interactions between Australia and Asia, for a popular audience.

Pam Macintyre

Top of my list is Sonya Hartnett’s bitter-sweet story of love and loss, The Ghost’s Child (Viking), for its emotional punch, mixture of realism, fairytale and magic realism, and exquisite prose. Also written with emotional clout is Bill Condon’s witty and frank Daredevils (UQP). Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin), by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, gives sheer pleasure in a double-double writing act: Earls writes the wannabe Matthew Reilly contributions to a joint school writing task, while Sparrow has Cat channelling Jane Austen. The consequences of the uneasy school and personal relationships between the two, their increasingly intertwined lives, and the story they create are hilarious.

I was given to this body as haphazardly
As the monster of Frankenstein.

Lightning is a man’s metaphor,
But like fire it provides

A force alien to question.
Perhaps I am only this, this flesh,

Nolan On Nolan: Sidney Nolan in His Own Words, edited by Nancy Underhill, is an important publication which elucidates the importance of literature and poetry in Sidney Nolan’s creative process. The collection also highlights the painter’s relationships with a diverse range of celebrated artists and writers, including Benjamin Britten, Robert Lowell, Samuel Beckett and Patrick White. Drawn from archives in Britain, Australia and the United States, the publication does much to rescue the artist from his overly valorised years spent with John and Sunday Reed at Heide. In place of the artist’s well-documented Australian associations, here we find Nolan the internationalist.

As convenor of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (January 2008), I have become increasingly aware of what others want to know about Australia and of the gaps in our agenda. It is equally clear that there is much that we do very well that is not yet recognised internationally.

Helen Ennis’s book Reveries: Photography and mortality, published by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra to accompany her recent exhibition, is a fascinating choice of subject for an institution that deals with portraiture. As the author notes, ‘In the face of mortality the touchstones of portraiture are gently nudged aside … to encompass the possibility of dissolution or dispersal of self.’ This expanded definition of portraiture is apparent from the cover of this sensitively designed book, which features a photograph by Ruth Maddison. Titled The beginning of absence, the photograph shows a domestic interior dissolving into light and suggests Maddison’s feelings when confronting the imminent death of her father. It is a ‘portrait’ composed not of physical detail but emotion, and is no less descriptive of a person and a relationship for that.

The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,
volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret

1 preface
I could, if you prefer, create a list
like a birdwatcher, concealed
in a reedy hide, with binoculars,
field guide and record book, a mnemonic
of migration lines, our lines of sight,
a cladogram of our evolving past.

Peter Skrzynecki’s substantial Old/New World comprises selected work from his eight previous collections plus a new collection. From it we could extract his autobiography. We find the youthful son of Polish migrants; his growing awareness of his migrant ‘otherness’; his employment as a teacher in New England; the birth of his first child; the ageing and death of his parents; his passage through middle age and growing sense of his own mortality. Halfway through, ‘Letters from New England’ posits the poet as ‘the stranger from Europe’ – a surrogate title for this often moving compilation. Skrzynecki’s Polish parents came to Australia from Germany in 1949, and exile, for their four-year-old son, would be a recurring theme.