Archive

Novelist Fred Dagg, the alter ego of New Zealand refugee John Clarke has quickly established an audience in Australia for his erratic political and social comments. In ‘Novelist’, transcribed here from his record of The Fred Dagg Tapes he offers advice to aspiring writers.

Perhaps because of the coloured marquee with elm leaves pressed against the top like alien faces watching, Writers’ Week had a slightly theatrical air which added to the pleasure. All kinds of people were there, in all kinds of clothes, so that one was torn between wanting to watch the crowd and to listen to the speakers. The marquee seats three hundred people – it was always full, and the organisers estimated that on each day, another two hundred stood outside to listen.

New Guinea 1942–44 is frankly disappointing, not only to me but to those veterans of the campaign who have told me that they have read it. I missed New Guinea, but even so I was shocked by Hall’s account of the cannibalism of the Japanese, and retaliatory brutality by Australians. The pity is that Hall had all the potential for a great history, but fluffed it.

I’ve always had a terror of one day having to explain a joke. And now it’s happened. Moonlite is one of the jokiest books since Such Is Life which in its turn reminds us of the even jokier Tristram Shandy and behind that no less than Rabelais himself. The best way to talk about Moonlite, then, is perhaps to say that it is bouncing, bewildering, wilful and – very occasionally – boring, just as these books are.

There nine stories in this volume are rich in people, satire, compassion, and humour. And set like ambushes, unexpected and surprising, are several cameos. It is a captivating, ensnaring book, but to call it a book of short stories would be so inadequate as to be misleading. There is an uncommon coherence, slender but powerful enough to raise it above that easy classification.

As soon as I read the title, I welcomed Mr Gough Whitlam’s pamphlet following perhaps an instinctual and rather biased interest in all that concerns both Italian and English literatures, and even more so whenever I come across an analysis of cross-currents between the two. My enthusiasm, however, was but short-lived. What the booklet offers, in fact, is only an enormous and indigestible amount of information, collated in a hopscotch fashion, with hardly any attempt to classify it in any way or to illustrate the purpose of such a mammoth task; it eventually fails to offer the reader a satisfactory overall picture, however superficial, of what the author means by ‘Italian Inspiration in English Literature’.

The memoirs of Australian war leaders have not enjoyed the commercial success gained by American and British commanders. Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 is possibly the only book of its sort which has ever had any real success. In the last few years the Australian Trenchard, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, could not attract a commercial publisher for his autobiography, though it covered the entire creation of the RAAF. Public interest apart, the fact is that Australian generals, admirals and air marshals do not tend to be literary. We just cannot imagine an Australian Slim. The only classic works produced by any Australian connected with the armed forces and aviation in general have been P.G. (Sir Gordon) Taylor’s finely wrought books.

Crank back on roller, belt left front ...’ So begins the sequence. Stuart’s novel, the fifth in a series of six called The Conjuror’s Years, depicts Colin of Drought Foal and Wedgetail View following the instructions for preparing his Vickers gun to fire against the Vichy French in the 1941 AIF invasion of Syria.

I am sure A.B. Facey intended no irony in calling his remarkable autobiography A Fortunate Life. He is at once too unassuming and, too serious for smart games with words though he does find humour sometimes among the grim and frightful events of his earlier years and, after his perfect marriage, there were times of fulfilment and true happiness. He has chosen to emphasise triumphs as well as struggles, and, while such brave qualities determine his title, they are also what make this chronicler a great man and his book a classic to equal Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Beyond all Pity. It surpasses anything else I know of to which it might be compared; even Shaw Neilson’s autobiography must yield before Facey.