Archive

The Blue Mountains glimmer on many horizons. For Sydney-siders, they are a blue haze that promises a weekend away among the gums and spooky grand hotels. For visitors from further afield, they offer wilderness supported by tourist kitsch: statues made from chicken wire; bogus Aboriginal legends; 3-D movies; and, best of all, the scenic railway, a sardine can on a high wire that sways across the valley beneath Echo Point.

The mountains are a place of beginnings and endings. In 1813 three white men made what they called, in their blindness and arrogance, The First Crossing of the mountains. Convicts tried to cross them, too, searching for China or for colonies of whites who were free and happy. A century later, the mountains were becoming a place for final steps and breaths. People leapt to their deaths from beauty spots. Descendants of the first inhabitants of this breathtaking place, including the Darug and Gundungurra people, still live there, although in public discourse the Aboriginality of the mountains is more often inscribed in inanimate objects such as The Three Sisters or the Orphan Rock.

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Surely, here at the heart of things,
Here is the ideal place for the attempt,
Here where the Christmas sales dispose
Their day-late offerings
(From which, it seems, scarcely a soul’s exempt):
Whitegoods and videos,
The manchester, the saucepans and CDs,
The swimwear, lingerie that sings
The body and its moistening promises. ... (read more)

In the late 1960s the English film scholar Alan Lovell presented a paper on British cinema to the British Film Institute. His paper’s title, ‘The British Cinema: An Unknown Cinema’, seemed a reasonable assessment of the situation at that time. Film studies was establishing itself as a legitimate area of intellectual and academic research in Britain; film courses were being set up in universities, with some lecturing positions funded by the British Film Institute; and academic and trade presses had embarked on a vigorous programme devoted to books on cinema. Even so, the initial flurry of film books favoured American genres (the western, the gangster film) and American and European directors.

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Oh, happy days indeed. These are good times for readers and perhaps not so bad for writers either, as Griffith Review joins Meanjin and Heat in publishing work that might otherwise struggle to reach us. That such thoughtful and sometimes excellent writing should often be rewarded with risible rates of pay is less satisfactory, but it was ever thus, apart from the pennies from heaven offered so briefly, and controversially, by the conjunction of the Australia Council for the Arts and The Australian. The Council helps keep Meanjin and Heat afloat, and for this we should all be grateful. Griffith Review, however, is the result of a collaboration between the university and ABC Books, which is perhaps why, unlike the other two, it includes a subscription offer with the usual earnest blandishments of so-called highbrow journals (‘celebrates good writing and promotes public debate’). Still, judging by its second issue, Dreams of Land, no one could dispute the former claim, and, with the latter building up steam. the Griffith Review looks set to brighten our days for the foreseeable.

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The National Library holds a vast array of items relating to Australian childhood. Within the general collection there is the literature itself, ranging from the first children’s book published in Australia (Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, 1841) through sundry omnibuses, to the latest work by Ursula Dubosarksy or Andy Griffiths – not to mention the glories of the John Ryan Comic Book Collection. This material is supplemented by biographies and autobiographies, and by a wide range of non-fiction publications documenting childhood in Australia. The Newspaper and Microform Collection is also a major resource in this area.

This vast amount of material is hugely amplified by holdings in the Library’s special collections. Among Oral History recordings are a great number of interviewees from all walks of life, who have given accounts of their childhood experiences. These range from Mary Gilmore’s recollections of the 1870s, through to the experiences of street kids in the 1990s. Likewise, the Library’s Folklore Collection incorporates children’s play songs and nursery rhymes. And the Oral History Collection includes Professor Fiona Stanley’s recent National Library Kenneth Myer Lecture on the subject of children’s rights and welfare.

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Dark River is John Jenkins’s fourteenth collection of poetry (including the six volumes he has produced with Ken Bolton) and a welcome addition to his oeuvre. This new solo collection contains the wit, language play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins, as well as emotional depth and an infectious delight in language. Demonstrating this are the touching love poem ‘Why I Like You’ and three key elegies, or ‘dedicatory’ poems. The first of these, ‘Long Black’, dedicated to John Anderson, opens the book. This fine poem captures Anderson’s philosophy and his way with light and landscape. Anderson, a shy poet who died at the age of forty-nine without troubling The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, left behind three books whose cadences and unique way of writing about nature and its interconnectedness are still held in great esteem by those who are aware of his work, mainly other Australian poets. In ‘Long Black’, Jenkins (who accompanied Anderson on bushwalks) speaks to his departed companion, reiterating and questioning some of Anderson’s philosophy:

I watch the long black drink
turn in my hands. You say that
where you come from is where
you go to. You say the nothing in
everything is just nothing again.
Air fills the winter trees, but their
cold leaves can’t bring you back.

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Like several other publishers, UNSW Press and Text Publishing have produced responses to the recent war against Iraq. The intention appears to be to engage critically with popular perceptions of the war before these harden into accepted historical ‘memory’. The potential benefits of quickly produced, historically aware and politically critical books, which collate and deal comprehensively with the existing evidence and arguments raised by the mass media on a particular issue, are obvious. The two main dangers with publications of this type are that editing and production standards may slip and that the desire to compete with mass-media forms may lead to a replication of, rather than an alternative to, standard journalistic commentary.

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‘The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker.’

The speaker of these lines, fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, is a literary descendant of Huckleberry Finn.

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He sang of old coins buried beneath the dunes,
to the north of the island, near the old artillery battery.
For forty years he rowed for mullet north, and south,
where the war epic motion picture was shot recently.

To the north of the island, near the old artillery battery
we played hide and seek as kids in acres of bladey-grass.
Where the war epic motion picture was shot recently
no one was allowed within a thousand metres.

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Then, there were spires in every landscape
Tall, tapering fingers pressed together,
The supplications of early sainthood –

Those that the early painters made
To teach the unlettered, while the spires
Called them to listen and to pray.

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