Archive

During the past fifty years far-reaching changes have occurred in the manufacture of dairy products in all developed countries. Some of these changes have been dictated by much stricter health and hygiene standards. Other changes were made possible by rapid advances in food engineering.

Today, milk is collected and transported in bulk tankers and the manufacture of dairy products is carried out in very large factories by mechanised and often fully automated processes. There is no more need for the dairy farmer’s wife to set the pans for the cream to rise, or to churn her own butter. She no longer coagulates milk with rennet, or strains the cheese curd through a cloth, setting aside the whey to feed the pig. The art of making dairy foods on the farms or at home has almost died.

But in recent years a strong trend has emerged, particularly among young people, towards ‘natural’ foods. In the case of dairy products this means – milk your own cow or goat. If this is not possible, buy the milk and make your own yoghurt, sour cream or even your own challenge to Stilton! But how?

In Tirra Lirra by the River, an elderly woman, Norah Porteou, returns to live in her childhood home in Brisbane after forty years as a ‘London Australian’. The house is empty, so is her life. Norah is a ‘woman whose name is of no consequence’. She is sensitive, vaguely artistic, slightly superior (‘Mother,’ she appeals in a childhood scene, ‘don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’) The novel consists of a review of her past, with interruptions from half-remembered neighbours offering curious and resentful help.

The title of David Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life, must be read three ways. Most obviously, the novel is an imaginative recreation of the last years of the life of the Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), who was exiled to a village on the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus in the last century BCE. The life is imaginary because it imagines – most successfully – the circumstances of this exile.

The first thing the general reader will need to know about this book is that it is not for the general reader. It too often and too closely approaches the clipped and densely allusive style of the average scientific paper, designed for initiates only and a small band of them at that. It uses too many words from the jargon of physics, chemistry and even geology with insufficient or no explanation. Even if Scientific American and New Scientist are your cup of tea, this book could exceed your powers of digestion.

Dear Sir,

I liked Geoff Muirden’s review of The View from the Edge in the August issue, even though he got a bit confused here and there.

‘Aussiecon’ (dreadful name, but we had to sell the idea to the Americans and they like that kind of thing) was the 33rd World Science Fiction Convention, held in Melbourne in 1975. Ursula K. Le Guin was our guest of honour.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.

Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Australian urban history. It took some time for historians here to take up Briggs’ challenge, but with the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Australian urban history has come of age.

This book in praise of the potato, the most versatile and delicious of vegetables, is one I thoroughly enjoyed. Having a penchant for the potato I am an easy mark for the creative use of this lovely vegetable.

Ms Souter shows us over and over again in this well defined book how very diversified one can be with the potato. She gives general information on the types of potato grown in Australia and those types usually available at the local markets, which type to use according to methods of cooking, and growing and storing potatoes.

Beverley Kingston’s review in this issue draws attention to the effect the Women’s Liberation Movement has had on our understanding of our past. By asking the questions insistently imposed by the present, the historians of women’s affairs have not only forced us to see a segment of our history which had been hidden, but have made us realise that this omission was just part of a total distortion of our view of history, and therefore of life. This distorted knowledge of the past affects the way we see ourselves, and thus diminishes our recognition of the possibilities open to us in the present. The unreasoning hostility which the Women’s Movement has aroused can be explained only in terms of our fear of the unknown. These new ideas do not threaten just the security which a male-dominated world offers to men and women alike. Rather, by taking away our comfortable structure, they take away our personal identity, and therefore threaten the existence of any kind of order.

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.