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Donald Horne, pleasantly surprised that he is now a university professor, looks back at the journalist and aspiring novelist that he was in the 1950s. This is to be the third (and final) instalment in the saga of the education of Donald.

Three sections at the beginning of Marion Campbell’s second novel, Not Being Miriam, initiate its preoccupations and problems. They relate incidents from the childhood of Bess Valentine, its major character. In the first and shortest, Bess creates a transforming ritual, a childish game with significant narrative implications. Bess strips herself and Sean, paints their bodies with clay, the children enter the water which washes away the clay; then she dresses in Sean’s boxer shorts and clothes him in her bubble bathers.

Staining the Wattle is the fourth volume of a series edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee collectively entitled A People’s History of Australia since 1788. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, is not popular history, that is to say history written to be of interest to the general reader. This book actually makes very dull reading. Nor is it exactly, at least to judge by this volume, social history, that is to say history dealing with the lives of ordinary people. This book is about politics. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, seems, rather, to be ideologically useful history; history as a weapon of social change, as a means for the unmasking of the forces of oppression which have shapes, and for the glorification of the forces of progress which have struggled to reshape, Australian history.

It seems strange to describe Diamond Jim McClelland as, really, rather an old-fashioned man. Few septuagenarians have anything like his energy, his forthrightness, his optimism, or, most of all, his receptivity to new ideas. But if there is a continuous thread in his extraordinarily full and complex life, it can probably be best summed up as a very untrendy, passionate commitment to morality. The catch is that his ideas of what constitutes morality – or at least what is the best way of achieving it – have gone from here to there and back again.

Barry Hill, who is among a few Australians who write from the head as well as from the emotions, sets his latest novel in a Buddhist Teaching Centre in a Queensland forest. Not so deep in the forest that the glorious coast itself cannot be seen, a fact that causes young Mark, who has just learned that his girlfriend Robin is pregnant, to remind himself that (as he gazes at the breakers hurling themselves into spray one hundred kilometres away) he may never surf again: paternal responsibility implying no more surfing. The reader may feel that as Robin is only thirteen years old the partnership, even if she has the baby, may be over in plenty of time for Mark to have a few good surfs before his muscles collapse.

Narrative history, the sort that tells a story starting at one point in time and ending at a later point, is now out of favour. Some write sociological history focused on class, gender, race, or the family. Others prefer the slice approach concentrating in depth on specific years, or the semiotic spatial history of Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay. Before all else there must be a Theory.

A crucial clue is given right at the beginning in the form of a lavender plant punningly sent to Claudia Valentine, our detective heroine. Like just about everything else in the novel, it turns out to have been put there by the novel’s Mr Big, Harry Lavender. And finding out the extent of his influence is what keeps us going through the back alleys and one way streets, more often than the smoothly flowing highways, of a clever detective narrative.

I am sure it was a difficult book to write: the issues are extremely complex, the transdisciplinary range of the areas covered extensive and detailed, and the finished product extremely succinct and presented with an admirable clarity. Yet throughout, the passionate commitment to the task of making women’s oppression visible, readable, audible, indeed refusing to let it not be seen, read and heard modulates, in a specifically feminine voice, the social science genre of expository prose and factual representation which Rowland, as writing subject, adopts from her particular institutionalised position as both woman and writer of a Women’s Studies text.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 

Ian Hicks, the assistant editor of the Herald, took over the literary editorship after the brief reign of Chris Henning, who went back to work on page one, and the very lengthy incumbency of Margaret Jones. He remains assistant editor, and sees his books job as a short-term ‘appointment. His policy over embargoes on imported books is controversial. Like Valerie Lawson in her heyday at the Times On Sunday, he ignores them, especially if the book can be seen as having ‘some news interest’. Disregard of embargoes quite often drives overseas publishers to airfreight in the entire Australian run of a book and drive up its cost unconscionably. Hicks says he attempts to publish a new poem each week. But Australian fiction and poetry get more lip service than serious attention in the Herald. Often they’re dealt with in job-lot reviews of four books. Recent victims include Robert Gray and Gerard Windsor.

Hicks has employed a number of European expert reviewers, which is a healthy sign, but he relies too much on the old Herald standby of giving an inordinate number of books to ex-editors Pringle and Kepert. Reportedly, he has not changed another of the Herald’s legendary policies – demanding return of reviewers’ copies.

Christopher Pearson

Now is the season of good will towards all specimens to which your correspondent replies ‘Bah humbug’. He does not like Christmas and has always considered Ebenezer Scrooge to be far more sinned against than sinning. Naturally this hack receives no yule time gifts; after all what do you give a youngish fogey whose only wish is to command a Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Shiloh? Yet if reality was suspended (and given the Australian book community’s tenuous grasp of it, this is not altogether unlikely), there are two presents which the wise, the good and the rich amongst Australia’s publishers and writers could confer upon this hack.