Archive

David Marr, in his biography of Patrick White, makes the statement that White saw suffering as a force of history shaping human life and events. The worst suffering of all being loneliness and the need to be rescued from it. White is quoted as saying; ‘I have always found in my own case that something positive, either creative or moral, has come out of anything I have experienced in the way of affliction.’ Marr explains that White admired, in others, signs of his own ambivalence: ‘men of unexpected gentleness and women with masculine strength’. A realisation, an explanation, sensed in childhood and expressed when he was an old man. Perhaps the inheritance for many sensitive and perceptive children.

Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.

Remarkably to some, this cultural history of the drafting of the Australian constitution is an exciting and triumphant book. Helen Irving manages to fill in adroitly the blank pages of our constitution as a cultural artefact and to celebrate the complicated processes whereby Australia became a nation on the first day of the new century.

To actually write the framework for a nation by agreement indeed represents a concentrated act of the imagination. Moreover, it demonstrated, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a profound optimism in this country’s future. As Irving rightly argues, the nation of Australia itself was the product not of external pressure or crisis, nor due to any religious or ethnic imperatives, but was created in a time of peace. This achievement, and the codification of our national powers and institutions, despite their obvious limitations, rightly deserves celebration.

John Docker

Mark Davis’ Voltairean Gangland is one of those rare books that prise open a space for revaluation of the direction of a culture. Like The Dunciad’s evocation of the Grub Street hacks of its time, Gangland exposes tentacular networks of chummy patronage, mutual puffery, and cultural power. Gangland is especially enjoyable on the clown-like behaviour of the ex-Scripsi diaspora – in a curious sexual division of labour, a B-team of male critics, captained by the felicitously named P. Craven, has successfully promoted a coterie of writers like Jolley, Garner, and Modjeska. Compared to those I analyse in Australian Cultural Elites (1974) and In A Critical Condition (1984), this new élite is the most intellectually thin in Australian cultural history. Assisted by a passive, grovelling middle-class readership, it both creates such writers as canonical and then tries desperately to shield their texts from critique and challenge.

It all depends. If living in an old, run-down Queenslander peopled with ten eccentric, loveable losers on government benefits is your idea of heaven, then John Birmingham’s new book, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, (the sequel to his 1994 bestseller He Died with a Falafel in His Hand), could be the realisation of your most fervent desires. For the rest of us, the lives of the characters in Birmingham’s latest offering roughly approximate hell on earth.

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.

Samuel Johnson

Sometimes the situation in Australia, with respect to writers, resembles that in early eighteenth-century England.

‘Gordon Jacobs …’ Glass’s voice echoed around the columns of City Hall’s marble foyer as they climbed the stairs to Tuesday Reed’s office. He was as bitter, as irascible and stirred as she had ever seen him. ‘Was your Al, teflon-hearted scumbag.’

Broken Land is a collection of twelve poetic sequences which record five days spent in the small outback New South Wales town of Brewarrina (the Bre of the title). It’s a drama, almost operatic in complexity and intensity, in which the central players are Dad, a Bre man who lives in solitary retirement and ‘doesn’t own much, but he likes it that way, he likes to make do, doesn’t want a new heater or a mattress, just wants to listen to the radio, roll a smoke and check on lotto …’, and Coral, the stranger in town:

The introduction to this collection(Horns of Dilemma, Papyrus Publishing, $14.95 pb, 108 pp), and the poems themselves, make it clear that Helene Brophy is a woman of much compassion and experience in the humane realms of feminism, teaching and social work, as well as in the more personal spheres of serious injury, illness and death.

Tony Austin and Rosalind Kidd are non­indigenous Australian scholars whose special contribution to the history of black-white relations in this country is to have researched the policy detail, culture, and interpersonal intricacies of the white bureaucracy that dealt with Aboriginal affairs in a large part of northern Australia. As each of them documents over and over again, the white males who exercised government power over indigenous Australians went to great lengths to avoid consulting those they governed or to include them in the decision-making process. The present books therefore do not claim to represent an Aboriginal point of view; their object of study is white policy and malpractice. Never Trust a Government Man and The Way We Civilise are each the outcome of archival research using government departmental documents, beginning at roughly the same period – from the time early this century – that a newly created Australian Federal Government first began to face its responsibilities towards indigenous people.