Archive

Big business is a hard country. Matt Peacock tells the story of the James Hardie company and its venality as the manufacturer of fibro cement products in Australia. The fibro shack has been as iconic a domestic symbol as the Hills hoist, and Australia used more fibro per head than any other developed nation. However, the fibre in fibro for much of the twentieth century was asbestos, exposure to which is lethal.

‘I am interested to know all about you: who you are, how your life developed, from the time your mother was pregnant with you, till today. Are you willing to tell me?’ This request, made by Paul Valent to one of his first patients, is as seductive as it is impossible. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century approached their characters with the same voracious desire to know everything, to explain everything, to have everything revealed. But the psychotherapist’s mission is far more daunting than the novelist’s, for the secrets he aims to uncover are those the subject hides from himself.

Apples with Human Skin is a collection of taut but detached poems. Well crafted, with superb use of diction coupled with tight and inventive forms, the poems remain, however, unrelated to anything in modern-day usage or consciousness. There is a coolness to the writing which can become relentless. Imagery and line structure are evocative and precise, and Shepherdson successfully invents a minimalist syntax in each of the longer chaptered poems. There are also shards of social comment hidden amongst the granite-like structures.

Perhaps the most influential guide to ‘theory’ in Australia in the 1980s was Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The cover of my paperback edition features a detail from Jan Vermeer’s painting Mistress and Maid, in which a respectful domestic servant hands a document to her mistress, who is seated at a writing table. I take this to be a visual allusion to Alexander Pope’s formulation in An Essay on Criticism that ‘Criticism [is] the Muse’s Handmaid’. Eagleton’s polemical refusal of that secondary and facilitating role was influential in turning a generation of Australian literary critics from ‘criticism’ to ‘critique’. From Graeme Turner’s National Fictions (1986) and Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush (1987) to my own Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995) and Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines (1995), the cultural-nationalist and new-critical canons alike were supplemented by alternative canons – feminist, realist, postcolonial and ‘popular’ – as texts were subjected to rigorous ideological critique for their representations of class, race, gender and nation. Criticism was no longer the handmaid to literature; a hermeneutics of scepticism and suspicion prevailed.

Endemic yowling

Dear Editor,

A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowling’, according to Miles Franklin), and a reminder of the then image of English departments and their hangers-on as ‘the Garrison’. J.I.M. Stewart was another. Maybe the problem is endemic.

A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.

Piano lessons have been a source of joy or frustration for generations of Australians. By the early twentieth century, there was a piano for every three or four Australians. Skill at the pianoforte was an accomplishment that bourgeois parents desired for their children, especially daughters.

This is a complex book from an anthropologist who has carried out research and established close relationships with indigenous people for four decades. Peter Sutton has lived through and participated in the Aboriginal protest movement from the early 1970s onwards, done extensive studies in support of securing tradition-based rights in land, and faced firsthand the well-publicised tragedies of many indigenous communities.

After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

The new English edition of a selection of Harwood’s poems comes with an excellent editorial pedigree. With his co-editorship of Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003) and his editorship of A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995 (2001), Gregory Kratzmann has established himself as the foremost of Harwood scholars. As a major critic of Australian poetry, Chris Wallace-Crabbe was an early champion of Harwood’s poetry, with a particular affinity, demonstrated in his own poetry, for the wit and wordplay that are distinguishing marks of Harwood’s work.