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Katherine Johnson’s first novel, Pescador’s Wake, is a well-paced account of the pursuit of a Uruguayan vessel that has been fishing illegally for Patagonian toothfish in Australian territorial waters south of Heard Island. What follows is a stern chase. The Pescador is followed across thousands of nautical miles by another fishing boat, the Australis (from Hobart), which for six months of the year is chartered by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to deter fish poachers. Johnson’s narrative cuts between action on the two vessels, hauling gales in waters near Antarctica, and more muted domestic dramas in Uruguay and Australia.

As I sat down to write this review, two news stories jostled for prominence on the ABC’s website. One was the unfolding story of two brothers who were trapped on Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain. Only one brother would come back (the other fell 500 metres to his death). Lincoln Hall would understand what the brothers went through. Hall is an Australian mountaineer who was, famously or infamously, left for dead at 8700 metres on Mt Everest. Having made the summit, Hall was heading back down with sherpas when he was struck down by an oedema, a brain malfunction caused by oxygen deprivation. His body gave out. Without a pulse or any sign of life, Hall was abandoned on a rocky ledge. (Ten days earlier, an English climber had been left to die on the mountain as others trekked past him. Hall was luckier, but both these events sparked condemnation, including from Sir Edmund Hillary.)

In 1977, in three consecutive issues, the New Yorker published Hannah Arendt’s ‘Thinking’. Each part was called an ‘article’, a strangely modest, journalistic word in the face of the length of each part of the essay and the profound subject. Thirty-two years ago, the magazine showed curmudgeonly modesty: writers were named in small print at the foot of each ‘piece’, there was never, god forbid, a sub-editor’s catch-all under the title, no short biographies of the writers were printed, and there were never, ever, visual illustrations or photographs to accompany the text. The issue in which the first of Arendt’s ‘articles’ appeared included poetry by Mark Strand; the long book review was by George Steiner; Pauline Kael was the film reviewer; there were four Saul Steinberg drawings; and Andrew Porter reported on classical music. The list of names we revere could go on.

The past is in Scotland

Dear Editor,

Christina Hill’s review of Peter Goldsworthy’s latest novel, Everything I Knew (November 2008), seems sure-footed in both its negative assessment of an ‘overwrought, undisciplined’ work and its appreciation of the novel’s compositional play, both intricate and subversive, with L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. It makes no mention, however, of the novel’s pointed intrigue with lyricism.

If the history of ornithology seems esoteric, of interest only to specialists, this is the book to open your eyes. Tim Birkhead is an eminent field ornithologist and a gifted and passionate science communicator. Each of these elements shines from this book, a wonderful distillation of the vast ornithological literature that has accumulated over the past four centuries. Effectively a history of natural history, it is a delight to read.

Ashley Sievwright’s The Shallow End, an often entertaining début, casts a wry gaze over a steamy Melbourne summer. Narrated by an unnamed observer, the novel attempts to capture an authentically idiosyncratic gay male voice while traversing a myriad of issues, such as heartbreak, sex, media sensationalism, love, cruising and happiness. Both witty and easy to read, the novel, though largely superficial, is filled with moments of droll sagacity.

Movie Of The Week. The MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour. Helen Vatsikopoulos. Andrea Stretton. Tales From a Suitcase. Pria Viswalingam. Italian Serie A Football. Annette Sun Wah. These are just a few examples of SBS programs and personalities that helped me – and no doubt many others – negotiate the fetid swamp that was Australian television in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the swamp is a lot bigger and the stench even worse, but does SBS still provide an effective alternative?

This book follows Michael Brennan’s brilliant début collection, The Imageless World (2003). I do not make this connection lightly; Unanimous Night shares almost everything with its predecessor: themes, methods and tone of voice. They even share the same structure: groups of shorter poems (‘Letters Home’) are punctuated by some tightly organised extended sequences.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.

Richard Walsh – former OZ co-editor, A&R, ACP and PBL director – has proven again that he has keen eye for what fixates Australians. To be remembered is of course an enduring human obsession, while the ability to send off (or send up) a friend or family member is more often an afterthought, a stepping into the breach.