Archive

I know I’m going to sound like a boring old fart, but are we becoming a disposable culture, or what? We throw out everything from old cars to ex-prime ministers. This is a Bad Thing. Our continued growth as a lively, vigorous society depends on our having strong foundations. There could have been no Kylie Minogue had there not been a Little Pattie. No Brett Whiteley without a Sidney Nolan. No Anson Cameron without a Joseph Furphy (literally as well as artistically – they are related). ... (read more)

This book, My Other World, is in Margaret Whitlam’s words, ‘the story of my travels as the leader of group study tours around the world’ in the 1990s. It is also another episode in the life journey of a remarkable woman who has the capacity and the vitality to go on inventing new lives. Previously a swimming champion, social worker, suburban mother, prime minister’s and ambassador’s consort, advocate for adult education, Margaret Whitlam in her seventies embarked upon a new career as a travel guide, leading her companions not only into Britain, France and Italy, but also into China and Central America and the Russia and Siberia of the early 1990s. Now in her eighties, she has begun another life, writing her first book.

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Movies are often criticised for their lack of fidelity, for not keeping faith with their sources, especially novels, their audience, or their glorious antecedents. Infidelity is also a key plot device, especially of genre films: melodrama, comedy, crime, even the western. We keep going back to the movies partly because they don’t give us what we want. The New York poet Frank O’Hara suggests this in ‘An Image of Leda’, his breathless adaptation of the myth of Leda and the Swan as an allegory for watching films:

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You are going to Singapore, they said. Yes, but which way? was the natural response. If I’m flying to the island-city, my flight should take in something with a more exotic range of scenery, perhaps even a sniff of nature. Birds and stuff. So the painter and I decided on Portugal: and why not throw in Spain? My own travels had never taken me further than Catalonia, which so determinedly is, and is not, Spain. Off, then, for the long flight west with good books and red wine; en route I looked down on Cairo for the first time in my life. The Ptolemaic map of lights spread out as though forever.

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Forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia: this is a five-star title for a three-star book of essays. Several of the essays are slight and pedestrian, and overall the subject of gold gets a patchy treatment; the contributors write about their specialties and we are not given much help to reach a new understanding of the whole phenomenon. But there is much that is interesting here; and some of the material is arresting. The editors have fulfilled their modest intention – ‘to illustrate, amplify, complicate or update’ well-traversed themes.

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Neither the agapanthus nor the tango is native to Australia: their juxtaposition, when an Argentinian man and the Austrian woman he possibly loves dance amongst the plants on a remote property in the Riverina, suggests the kinds of familiar patterns we are dealing with here. Like their dance, the dancers are displaced; they find the Australian bush alien; they have endured disappointments in getting here, and one of them is going to go mad as a result. ‘Agapanthus tango’ is a conceit, a contradiction that represents the nonsensicality (to foreign sensibilities) of Australia.

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I’ve been trying to place love
in the exhibit for inspection
but there are fees to be perfected.

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How good is Shaw Neilson? The question has hung around ever since A.G. Stephens, publishing the poet’s first book, Heart of Spring, in 1919, prefaced it with comparisons to Shakespeare and Blake and declared this unknown to be the ‘first of Australian poets’. The claim provoked competitive jealousies in a possessive, parochial literary world and reviewers responded by insinuating doubts. The question remains: is Neilson the greatest Australian poet? For those who want literature to be a horse race, it is unsatisfactory that there is no declared winner, brandishing medal and loot. Neilson loved horses but he disliked the hold that the sporting mentality had over his fellow Australians – especially men. Yet like most writers he was anxious about his standing and, in his perfectionist’s concern to put his best foot forward, he probably contributed to his readers’ uncertainties. Difficulties with his singularity as a poet were compounded by Neilson’s circumstances, particularly the bad eyesight that made him dependent on others in preparing final versions of his work. That was part of a more general dependency on editors, critics, and supporters who had their own ideas of where they wanted to take him

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It isn’t difficult to establish conversational tone in writing. And since a column about language and usage ought to be a conversation, we’ll go for that tone. Let’s start with a workout for a current, overused device. There’ve been three of them before this sentence: four now. You’ll find them if you look (Five.) Yes, we’re looking at the conversational contraction, and it’s time to stop counting.

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