Archive

Writing about music, it is frequently said, is in a parlous state, with ever-falling word counts contributing to the dumbing down of the genre. A publication such as Extempore, focusing on Australian jazz, should be well placed to step into the breach, but its second issue struggles to assert its importance.

In the vein of classical Hollywood films such as The Lady Eve and All About Eve, Airlie Lawson’s début novel recounts a familiar narrative involving a mysterious career woman named Eve. A kind of The Devil Wears Prada for the publishing industry, Don’t Tell Eve scrutinises the dealings of Papyrus Press, ‘a respectable, old-fashioned publishing house’ – until the arrival of the new boss, that is.

In what now seems to be the vanished country of the early years of my career, begun in the State Library of Victoria in the 1970s, I vividly remember John Arnold enthusing about his interest in the polymath Jack Lindsay (1900–90), son of Norman (another polymath) and one of the founders of the short-lived but gorgeously named Fanfrolico Press, whose legacy of fine books excited the keen interest of collectors. I was impressed that my precocious younger colleague had devoured Jack Lindsay’s three volumes of autobiography and had entered into an admiring correspondence with a man who in his Australian youth had found himself possessed by the written word.

Reading the leaves

ABR readers, it is now abundantly clear, are great democrats and colossal readers. You love to vote, and you read like clairvoyants. We have been inundated with votes in the ABR FAN Poll – hundreds of them most days. With two weeks to go before voting closes (December 15), some clear favourites are emerging. Below we list twenty of them, in alphabetical order:

Patrick Allington

Of 2009’s emerging Australian novelists (such a silly term: emerging from what?) Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin), stands out. A dark and funny morality tale set in a 1960s Western Australian mining town, it ruminates on death, secrets, racism, dodgy parenting and adolescence. For anybody who once dreamed of sporting greatness, the cricket match is pure joy.

On the morning of 12 August 1864, Hannah Duff sent her three children – Isaac, aged nine, Jane, seven, and Frank, almost four – to gather broom from bushes growing a short distance from their one-room slab hut in the West Wimmera district in Victoria. They walked into the mallee scrub, and that was the last their mother saw of them for over a week. By some miracle, the children survived and were eventually found on the evening of August 20 by a search party which included three Aboriginal trackers. The children had walked nearly one hundred kilometres in those nine days, including twenty kilometres on the first day and six on the last. News of the rescue swept the state and the intense press interest in the siblings and their extraordinary adventure led to the establishment of an educational fund for them, but in particular to reward Jane for her nurturing of her brothers. The Aboriginal trackers were also financially rewarded. When Jane died in 1932, the words ‘bush heroine’ were inscribed on her gravestone.

Patterned play

Dear Editor,

Reviewing my On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction in ABR, Lisa Gorton writes, ‘Boyd shows a troubling lack of interest in the female of the human species’ (October 2009).

It continued snowing.
The furniture hadn’t drifted away in a removal van.
We kept Sam. We didn’t catch a taxi
to Heathrow. The hi-fi kept going.
We didn’t fly twelve thousand miles.
We stayed at home.

This is the dangerous time, sky clouding:
lifesavers on the alert, intermittently moving the flags,
shoals of swimmers still keening the fray.

A pause for thought and you lay down your pen,
Then have the inspiration to look up.
At first you’re scarcely able
To lift your focus past the coffee cup,
The paper-cluttered table.
But then the window gathers you again