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This book is suspended from a question mark, and all of Australia’s history is suspended with it. Henry Reynolds has been doing it for twenty years. What happens if we try to understand the coming of the Europeans from the Aboriginal viewpoint, from the other side of the frontier? Did the European invaders really think they were occupying a country that belonged to no one, a terra nullius? If we, the white people, had a legal title, how did we acquire it? If everything was fair and above board, why then this whispering in our hearts? And if so many big questions were left unanswered, if so many black people died so that we could live in prosperous comfort, Why weren’t we told?

Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as I can and hope it doesn’t choke going down. Whether it is nourishing or not, I leave you to decide.

Dawn Fraser had a hundred or so pages of fair prose in her and she put them in this book, her autobiography. The trouble is that the book is 400 pages long. But that’s not a bad result. If a David Malouf or Helen Garner lined up for an Olympic swimming final, you’d expect them to sink.

There is about Lisa Merrifield’s second novel a quality of aqueousness, an obsessive returning to states of immersion, whether in water, sleep, waves, a glass of gin. Hers is a superb exploration of the gelatinous margin between mind and world, innocence and experience, madness and sanity – those interregnums in the government of the self. And while it is from the weird clarity of this amniotic silence that Arriving at Night draws its various strengths, it is the same somnolence – the torpor of fiction in aspic – that comprises its singular flaw.

If T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
Came back to life, again it would be found
One had the gab, the other had the gift
And each looked to the other for a lift ...

Kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos abound, literally, on our farm, as do platypuses, echidnas and wedge-tails. We’ve even been told by visiting bushwalkers that we’ve got a few koalas up the mountain. But we don’t have wombats.

It wasn’t long before myths and legends grew up around the story of St Francis of Assisi. James Cowan is right to suggest that this process began before Francis died and that Francis himself allowed or willed it to happen. He may even have encouraged it: ‘Francis endeavoured to make a metaphor out of his own life.’

Gerry Turcotte’s Flying in Silence is a book of boyhood memoirs and family secrets, yet it creates a genre all its own. It contains an anatomy of depression and speaks of a family’s inability to cohere. Nevertheless, it swells with compassion and a deep commitment to life and living.

Better off without him

Dear Editor,

James Griffin, in his effort to rehabilitate John Wren (ABR, June 2001), attacks me and other historians. Stuart Macintyre has replied strongly; and Manning Clark, the main target, is unfortunately dead.

My turn now. Griffin refers to a book by me and two co-authors, Doc Evatt (1994), and says that ten letters from Evatt to Wren were ‘made available’ for the writing of this biography. Actually, no such letters were made available to me by anyone, and there was no reference to them in my main source, the Evatt Papers at Flinders University. I had never heard of the existence of the letters until I read an article on the subject by Griffin in Eureka Street (September 1992).