Archive

This handsomely produced anthology reflects much that is admirable about the ABC, and indicates the vital role an independent public broadcasting organisation may play in a mature and civilised society. Sad to say, it also exemplifies the current state of the corporation.

American English, with its vigorous ability to get to the core of things, has an implacably visual word for the kind of person this novel is about – the ‘shut-in’. A shut-in is a recluse, perhaps a cinéaste or stay-at-home opera queen. He (I use my pronouns advisedly – the shut-in is usually a ‘he’) has a rich, century-long genealogy in books and on-screen, from Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Sunset Boulevard’s Nora Desmond and Chatwin’s Utz. Alfred Hitchcock specialised in shut-ins; in Australian cinema, Norman Kaye played a lonely voyeur in Man of Flowers. The shut-in has also given birth to a critical tradition of his own. Some critics like Walter Benjamin have suggested that the habit of collecting may be a response to the twentieth century itself, a kind of specialised aesthetic reflex against consumer culture. Because he is associated with brittleness and the arts, the shut-in is frequently depicted as gay or as a sexual neurasthenic: in his wonderful book The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum has made a bravura anatomisation of the coded campness of the shut-in opera fan.

In March 1944, George Szego, a sixteen-year-old student in a provincial town, watched apprehensively as German troops replaced its Hungarian army posts. The massive deportations that ended in the near annihilation of Hungarian Jewry in the extermination camps and slave gangs of Eastern Europe were not long in coming. Szego had been christened a Roman Catholic. His Jewish parents converted in the 1920s at the height of anti-Semitic sentiment and prohibitions, mainly by reason of prudence and ambition, but also because of the genuine admiration that gifted and educated Jews often conceived for the great cultures that have – if only grudgingly – harboured them, an admiration that found uncustomary expression in Szego senior’s pride in his military exploits and his desire to be a ‘Christian gentleman’.

Travelling to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference on the morning tram, I marvel at Melbourne’s sophistication and self-regard. In Swanston Street, new sculptures honour John Brack’s satire of Melbourne’s regimented workers, while in front of the State Library there’s a classical portal half buried in the pavement, as if the ancient world lies below. At the Trades Hall in Carlton, the framed wall directory is ‘Heritage Only’, so I follow the photocopied paper arrows to the conference venue. There’s more historical self-consciousness here than in the new National Museum in Canberra. Banners assert the importance of eight hours’ work, recreation and rest, and there is a massive socialist realist representation of good Australian workers toiling to keep the country alive. We’re in the sacred place of the Left: Frank Hardy, Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten surely haunt us here. 

Of all major South-East Asian nations, the Philippines is least known in Australia, and rarely studied, even in our universities. The material and historical differences between the two countries seem to have blinded us to the interests our two countries share. Australia did not support the long Filipino struggle for independence, as with Indonesia’s, nor actively oppose it, as with Vietnam’s. Nonetheless, both countries were part of SEATO and supported US involvement in Indo-China. Within ASEAN, the Philippines has often been the country most sympathetic to greater links with Australia, and the Philippines is regarded as a high-priority country for development assistance by Ausaid.

In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two-year-old Australian Rules footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community ...

Those readers who were sympathetic to the arguments in The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft et al., will experience in Post-Colonial Transformation the pleasures of engaging with a reinvigorated friend. For others, like this reviewer, who found this influential earlier volume both theoretically and politically troublesome, Ashcroft’s new book will provoke familiar objections.

Attending a poetry festival is not normally considered a life-threatening event (not even if you are prone to deep vein thrombosis from constant sitting) but when I told my family I was going to Struga, I was greeted by worried looks and expressions of deep concern. Struga is in the Republic of Macedonia. Just days before, Macedonian hotheads had set fire to a mosque in Prilip (not that far from Struga) in revenge for the death of a Prilip policeman in a road-mine explosion planted by Albanian terrorists. The hair-trigger tensions in that country were clearly dangerous, and possibly escalating.

In Neil Armfield’s recent production of Dallas Winmar’s play Aliwa – about the struggle of the Davis family in Western Australia in the 1930s to avoid becoming members of the stolen generations – the character of Aunty Dot Collard, Jack Davis’s sister, was played brilliantly by Deborah Mailman. Aunty Dot herself, flown over to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, introduced the show and then sat on the side of the stage on an old red sofa smiling benignly, and interfering occasionally, as she watched her history being performed. But which was the ‘real’ Aunty Dot was something the show left up to the audience to decide.

Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’ ...