Archive

These four titles are reissues of well-known texts, or of the work of well-known writers, from four different publishers. A good sign perhaps, very welcome at a time when publishing seems ever more ephemeral and when many works, even from the recent past, are unavailable.

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Shirley Walker’s autobiography, Roundabout at Bangalow, is a remarkably rich book and a significant addition to the distinctive group of life stories that continue to fascinate Australian readers. It seems that at least once a year a striking memoir appears that strangely alters our relationship with the national past. These books are more than books. They are transforming cultural events. Inserting their stories into the generalised narratives of historians, autobiographies such as Sally Morgan’s My Place, A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Bernard Smith’s The Boy Adeodatus, or Andrew Riemer’s Inside Outside appropriate the past in new and compelling forms. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, they make the past ‘knowable’, and they do so with an immediacy available to no other form of writing. For this reason alone, they inevitably win a large popular readership. ... (read more)

These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the perceiving self into alternative ficto-autobiographies, but with different expectations of resolution. Both conjure up real worlds of political and institutional corruption on an international scale and pit moments of fragile subjectivity and domestic harmony against grubby injustice. Both register their authors’ age at around fifty. Caesar hankers after an ethical response; Boyle juxtaposes aesthetic possibilities. Caesar’s poetry is restrained, measured, spare; Boyle’s is crowded, insistent, histrionic.

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In 1969,’ says Venero Armanno in the letter to the reader that prefaces his new novel, ‘my parents took me to Sicily for the first time, and we lived for six months in the tiny village of their birth. What I remember most clearly … is the presence of the volcano, and just how absolutely it dominates life. It’s there smoking silently in the day, and at night … you can see the fiery glow in the mouth of cratere centrale – that fire which can never be put out.’

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Talk about unlikely associations. My first response to the opening chapter of Tim Winton’s latest novel was how its sense of a life at a standstill, awaiting some new impulse, reminded me of Jane Austen’s Emma. Winton’s protagonist, Georgie Jutland, with a string of unsatisfactory relationships behind her ...

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This is the tale of a quest driven by an obsession. At its heart are the Krakouers, an Australian family of five generations. The author is a descendant of the first Krakouers to settle in Western Australia. Terri-Ann White’s project is to record the gaps and silences, to piece together fragments, and ‘rescue’ family members ‘from obscurity’.

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From a small island, messages in a bottle floating out to sea. That was Gwen Harwood’s image for the poems she sent out during her early years in Tasmania, long before she had due recognition. Her letters, by contrast, knew their destination; they were treasured for decades by her friends, and they now make up the remarkable collection A Steady Storm of Correspondence ... ... (read more)

Despite Australia’s heavy involvement in wars throughout the twentieth century, few notable war memoirs by Australians have emerged. Frederic Manning (The Middle Parts of Fortune) and Richard Hillary (The Last Enemy) identified as Englishmen, despite being born here. A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life and Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight are literary benchmarks against which Australian soldier–writers must measure themselves. Allen & Unwin is doing an invaluable job with its extensive series of Vietnam memoirs. Whether any of them will become classics, only time will tell.

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‘It’s the essence of Bollockshire / you’re after: its secrets, blessings and bounties.’ So Christopher Reid reads from his hilarious poem at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival.

park and pay ...

assuming this isn’t the week

of the Billycock Fair, or Boiled Egg Day,

when they elect the Town Fool.

From here, it’s a short step

to the Bailiwick Hall Museum and Arts Centre.

As you enter, ignore the display

of tankards and manacles, the pickled head

of England’s Wisest Woman;

ask, instead, for the Bloke Stone.

Surprisingly small, round and featureless,

pumice-gray,

there it sits, dimly lit,

behind toughened glass, in a room of its own.

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and you think of
the statements you have lost,
all the things unlearnt,
the words you no longer say.
It has all been one long giving away.

(David Kirkby, ‘Water’)

The six books in Series 8 of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program come highly recommended, if only by the blurbs on their own back covers. These blurbs border on the hysterical. Cate Kennedy has ‘her heart in her eyes’, while Sheridan Linnell has written a book ‘which grows great lines like buttercups’. Michael Sharkey admires Lesley Fowler’s precision but, since he goes on to say that her poems ‘conscript experience in both hemispheres’, one assumes that precision is not his suit. Even Bruce Dawe gets carried away, assuring us that, whilst David Kirkby’s poetry may look effortless, ‘its mechanisms are merely hidden’. Hidden, that is, to all except Bruce Dawe.

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