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A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.

On 30 March 2001 Helen Garner attended a Victims of Crime Rally on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House.

The sun shone on a loose crowd that was forming at the top of Bourke Street. Many of the demonstrators had attached pictures of their murdered loved ones to their T shirts … On their backs people wore the slogan MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A common poster read LET THE VICTIM HAVE THE LAST WORD IN THE SENTENCE.

Garner describes suffering faces, clumsy and sob-broken speeches, anger sharpened to ‘rough, skin-prickling eloquence’, recitations of lists of the dead, lists of crimes and sentences. At the end of the rally, Garner asked some of the speakers for their addresses. When she told a man who had impressed her with his eloquence – he wore an Akubra and his face was ‘sun-creased, sparkly-eyed and intensely like-able’ – that she was writing a book about a murder, he shook her hand and said, ‘[T]hanks for takin’ an interest’.

Different attitudes

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.

The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.

The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British assisted emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, putting their personal accounts into historical and statistical context, or rather, fleshing out the statistics with the human stories from which they are extrapolated. These emigrants are working-class people for the most part, ambitious and, of course, self-selected by their literacy, with social networks strong enough to encourage them to write their shipboard letters or diaries to keep in touch with those they had left behind in Britain. They are also, as Haines points out, self-selected for success in the new colonies, since the successful were the most likely to have descendants who would preserve the diaries and letters of their fortunate ancestors.

A 'ground-breaking’ analysis of the Beatles through their lyrics? One is put irresistibly in mind of  the cover of Abbey Road: barefoot Paul McCartney out of step with his fellows, apparently confirming the sad circumstance at which John Lennon had hinted in the last line of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’: ‘I buried Paul.’ Except, of course, that what Lennon really slurred was: ‘I’m very bored.’ And that McCartney, far from dead, was alive, well, rich and ripe with sappy tunes sufficient to see him through another couple of decades. Scholars in the field of popular music have an unfortunate way of seeming pointlessly po-faced, rapt in the intertextual resonances of ‘A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom’. Not everyone can be Greil Marcus – sometimes not even Greil Marcus.

‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.

It all seems so obvious. So why is the practice of non-violence, peaceful negotiation and conflict resolution so hard? ‘To realise a vision of peace with justice requires inspiration and commitment,’ writes Stuart Rees, in an affirmation that shapes his inspirational new book, Passion for Peace. Rees explores the complexities and possibilities of peacemaking from varied perspectives: political, sociological, legal, biographical and, not least, literary. Rees’s text is studded with quotations from poets: the great Romantics, Wordsworth and Shelley; Denise Levertov; war poet Wilfred Owen; Australian poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson – more than fifty all told.

In the long tradition of printmaking, print workshops have played a critical and often unacknowledged role in encouraging, supporting and teaching artists to become printmakers, providing facilities and technical expertise, and, above all, producing prints. It is well known that Picasso’s unconventional experimentation with print techniques was often directly inspired by his printers’ abilities, while the rise of interest in lithography in America in the mid-twentieth century was due to lithographic workshops established by printers such as Tatyana Grosman and June Wayne. Nevertheless, the printer’s part in the creation of a print is still often overlooked.

While we are apart I will
wear no shoes, walk barefoot
over Nevada sands, tune my heart
to 33 kilohertz, synchronise
my inner ear to terra firma, and,

While my brother milks
I return to mist drifting up the fence posts.
The night’s sheet slowly evaporating
giving in to day – already a process of action.

Cows backing off the platform
make their way up the track –
the stumps of their tails flicking at flies
they regard me with surprise.