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Given the measure of promise in Archbishop Booth’s formative years, what this memoir calls his ‘golden years’ seem sadly unproductive of lasting substance. The outward flourish of his last years in public office, and the great farewell at the Olympic Pool, do not conceal but rather emphasise the feeling the reader has that he did not nourish his diocese at the spiritual depth it needed to face the sixties.

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Perhaps no other social attitude has changed so markedly in this century as the prevailing public reaction towards the question of the limitation of population growth and the use of birth control devices.

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This is a book that is unashamedly intended for the Aunty market, not the arty market. It will flourish in circulating libraries and must have solved many a Christmas dilemma (the publishers, I’m sure, budgeted on that). It is happily and old-fashionedly enthusiastic in tone, and tells the story – as authorised – with admiration and lots of incident. As a Helpmann compendium, it is sufficiently detailed to warrant a sub-title such as ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Robert Helpmann That He Wanted You To Ask’. And Elizabeth Salter did. The things Elizabeth Salter might have been afraid to ask, we can safely surmise the Aunties, also, would not really be interested in anyway. We meet, here Helpmann the Institution, the Public Performer (performer in public and private) whose surprisingly long career is, let’s face it, quite engrossing enough. Perhaps, even, the man IS the performance.

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Sir Harry Chauvel, one of the founding fathers of the Australian Armed Forces, died in 1945. His involvement in the military and political history of Australia stretches back to the Boer War, through Gallipoli and Beersheba to the Volunteer Defence Corps of World War II. A.J. Hill’s affectionate and painstaking biography of Chauvel also implies concern for the present and future defence of the nation. At a time in popular repute when military sympathies of any kind are regarded as sabre-rattling, Hill’s book is welcome in both tone and content

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This biography was commissioned by the late Sidney Myer’s trustees shortly after his death in 1934 and completed within a year or so. The author, Ambrose Pratt, was a personal friend of Sidney Myer as well as being a prominent man of letters and the biographer of David Syme. ... (read more)

‘To paint’, Ian Fairweather once observed, ‘one must be alone.’ True enough, you think, though hardly deserving of quotation. Down the years all kinds of artists have made the same observation, yet not many of them have been as consistently forthright when essaying the value and aesthetic nature of their lonely activity. Fairweather was an exception. ‘I paint for myself,’ he went on to add, ‘nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’

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Every book of poems is to some degree a selection, unless it’s a record of work and gets down among discarded drafts. Anthony Turner’s unpromisingly-titled first book (Musings: A collection of poems, 1965-1977, Hawthorn Press, $4.50 pb, 74 pp) needs so much more editing that it was an unwise venture into covers.

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Although the policy of the Australian Book Review is to review only Australian books, every now and then a publisher sends us a book which is so important or so relevant to issues of current concern that it cannot be ignored. Recent debate in Australian newspapers makes The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, by Yehuda Bauer (published in Australia by ANU Press), such a book.

The book consists of four lectures originally delivered in Seattle, and concerned with the question of why the Holocaust is the central experience of our civilisation, and of how it was allowed to occur.

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I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.

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One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.

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