Archive

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

ON CLOUDSTREET

When we sought readers’ nominations for the ABR Favourite Australian Novel of any era or genre, we anticipated goodly interest in the poll, partly because we know you are a well-read and passionate bunch, but also because Oxford University Press and Penguin had offered us a couple of outstanding prizes to complement our three-year subscription to the magazine.

In 2004, Somersault, a drama of youthful coming to terms with life’s challenges, scooped the pool at the Australian Film Institute’s annual awards. It was a melancholy comment on the state of the local industry that no other films could compete with this affecting but scarcely remarkable work. How different the situation will be in 2009.

Clive James has been at the business of writing now for so long that his literary activities have almost outlived the fame that used to get in the way of their apprehension. Twenty or so years ago, it was possible to think that the man who clowned around in those ‘Postcards’ travelogues on television, and who seemed to reach some apogee of self-satisfaction and self-definition chatting to celebrities on the box, was just slumming it when it came to literature; that he had bigger fish to fry than this diminished thing, even, if he was forever reminding us of the grandness of the refusal he had made.

In the anniversary week of Barack Obama’s election, the New York Yankees won the World Series, as all the world surely knows by now. The victory might have guaranteed a celebration, even in an America where unemployment hit ten per cent in the same week, but the glitz of the Yankees’ Friday ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s sombre but not sobered financial district was overshadowed by the news of the mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas by American-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

Could it be that there is less to Julia Gillard than meets the eye? She is a woman of fierce intelligence, Australia’s best parliamentary performer, and one of the sharpest wits in Canberra. I met Gillard a couple of times early in her political career, when she was shadow minister for immigration, and engaged her in a lengthy discussion about refugee policy. This was not long after the Tampa affair, when Labor was searching for a way back from the wilderness of electoral defeat and the party was bleeding internally from wounds caused by rank-and-file anger at its response to John Howard’s handling of the asylum seekers issue. I found Gillard to be charming, engaging and funny. She was well briefed, open to argument and ideas, but questioning and critical. I had the sense even then that her feet were firmly grounded in the reality of electoral politics: that no policy proposal would pass muster if it might constitute a serious obstacle on the path back to power in Canberra.

Maya Linden

Amid the proliferation of fiction inspired by supernatural themes, it is refreshing to find several débuts concerned with the more mundane – yet perhaps more pertinent – quests of adolescence. Tohby Riddle’s The Lucky Ones (Penguin) explores a period of change in the life of Tom, an aspiring artist, as he negotiates the purgatory between high school and adulthood. Told in a conversational voice, punctuated with poetic observation, it is a meditation on ‘the faint sadness that seems to underpin all things wonderful’.

George Barrington was a fascinating man, and Nathan Garvey is his latest ‘victim’. Barrington’s life was a source of almost daily fascination to eighteenth-century contemporaries; some mystery still surrounds him. His birth date remains equivocal – was it 1755 or 1758? Church records don’t survive to help here, but it was probably the former. Were his parents artisans to the Irish gentry – a silversmith and mantua-maker – or less skilled workers? Even his name is a matter of antiquarian enquiry. The fact remains that George Barrington, the gentleman Prince of Pickpockets, well-known convict traveller to Botany Bay and putative author, appeared to the world in various celebrated guises and captured popular attention. He occupies an ambiguous place in the world of crime, history and fiction.

Why do you write?

To find out what I know, to remember what I can, and to make sense of it all – but also to make nice patterns; to get less ignorant if not adequately wiser; and because, like all obsessives, I get morose if I don’t.

Anne Manne’s publisher invites us to include So This Is Life in the classical canon of autobiographies of Australian childhood – Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. In Australian letters there has been a long tradition of autobiographical writing of childhood; this produced some of the earliest critical writing on autobiography – by Richard Coe and Joy Hooton, for example. But I remain unconvinced by the MUP blurb, for Manne’s essays do not take us back to Porter or Gaita at all. Rather, they suggest the rich and dreamy vignettes of David Malouf’s autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street or the precisely observed rural domesticity that is captured in Olga Masters’s Cobargo stories. Daisy, Lily and Ivy, Manne’s great-aunts, all unmarried, who live together in the formerly grand but now decaying two-storey house where ‘absolutely nothing happened’, recall Masters’s ‘home girls’; Manne’s affective memory of her grandmother’s linen cupboard recalls the childhood perception and memory work that Malouf captures so powerfully.