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‘The historical aspects of The Rocks should not be oversold’, declared a recent Sydney Cove Authority strategic plan, ‘it should be used as a background’. In this sanitised heritage precinct, tourists might thrill to the hint of a raffish past, but should be shielded from more intimate and disturbing glimpses. This is always easy in the absence of systematic research.

From Aldi Wimmer

Dear Editor,

This is the first time I am responding to something I read in ABR, and the reason is Ivor Indyk’s outrageous review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 (July ABR). Actually, it isn’t so much a review as a piece of character assassination. How Indyk, whose reviews are usually excellent, can fall into a ranting mode in which he totally loses sight of the texts that he should be evaluating, is beyond me. What can have possessed him? Envy that a younger man is an accomplished writer?

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’

Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t.

It takes a book like Robin Klein’s The Listmaker to remind adults that a children’s book which succeeds in conveying a child’s point of view may well not immediately engage more mature readers. In this instance, Klein so precisely articulates the self-absorbed voice of twelve­year-old Sarah, the eponymous listmaker, that it takes an effort of will for an adult reader to persist past the first few pages of what seem like overstated emotions and overdetermined plot. Children will have no trouble accepting Sarah’s voice and understanding that it’s like it is because it’s been distorted by her circumstances. Adults too, however, would do well to persevere with The Listmaker, for it turns out to be a heart-felt indictment of how our greedy me-first society can damage children.

Gallienus is hardly the best known Roman Emperor. The records of his reign from 235 to 268 are so fragmentary that even the date of his assassination can only be approximated as taking place during a six-month period.

Much of the evidence and source material used in Depraved and Disorderly, particularly in Part One, will be familiar to the scholar of female convict history. But Joy Damousi provides some additional material which is both original and evocative. For example, her discussion of lesbianism and tattooing as both challenging to contemporary concerns about sexuality and social order, and as another means by which these women could express their own identities, provides evidence of the diversity of characters among convict women, as well as broadening our understanding of colonial society. More importantly, however, Damousi adds a further theoretical dimension to the already complex and contradictory historiography which surrounds the female convict.

Ours is not a visually literate culture – architects and designers are not the household names they are in countries such as Spain, nor is design understood or appreciated to any discernible degree – so it is always a particular pleasure when a publication appears that celebrates design. However, it is therefore also doubly important that such a publication should enliven or enlighten a public already so impervious to what design has to offer.

When a poet reviews a poetry magazine, it can be like walking out over a virtual minefield. I have a few more books to write before they take me out, so let me say straight away, I come in peace. These are cynical times, so maybe nobody will be taken in by this tone. After all, Salt is published and edited by John Kinsella, a highly successful poet who has established himself in record time. Let’s face it, this is poetry as strategy. As Hilary McPhee pointed out, the literary community in this country can be particularly vicious, and if anyone tries to hose that down they are having themselves on – the response McPhee got in relation to what she actually said proves the point really. It doesn’t have to be bland and polite though. There has been a lot of talk about the careerist approach to poetry lately. Ramona Koval noted at the first National Poetry Festival in Melbourne recently that some American poets have taken on this ‘professionalisation’ of poetry even down to their ‘Brooks Brothers suits and leather satchels’. Fay Zwicky replied, ‘I think careerism in poetry is contrary to how a poem comes into existence in the first place.’

George Seddon is well-known as an environmentalist and academic. Western Australian readers will remember in particular his Sense of Place (1972). He is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne.

Mark Twain did Australian literature a service when he remarked that Australian history ‘does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’. It is an observation with which Australians are happy to identify, for it stimulates the imagination, accommodates the larrikin we like to see in ourselves, and has the effect of sanctioning the revision of a past that is not all that we might, from the vantage of hindsight, have wished. At least three writers have adopted it as an epigraph, including Peter Carey, who wove Illywhacker around the notion, and now David Astle, personalising a possible past for a corner of country Victoria.