Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Archive

Dear Editor,

That twice but incompletely published review of mine of recent architectural books continues to cause trouble for all concerned. Noting the letter (ABR, August) from the Townsville City Council, I’m delighted to learn of their concern for the preservation of old buildings, and fully understand their distress at being misrepresented by me. As they have magnanimously conceded, I was merely working with ‘facts’ found in the books under review. I therefore gladly volunteer my apologies to the Townsville City Council.

... (read more)

Peter Cowan’s new novel The Color of the Sky is an elliptical, even enigmatic, narrative. Although specifically labelled a ‘novel’, it is a novella in its concision pf narrative explanation; as well as in its length. The layers of event and reminiscence are multifarious enough to fill out a hefty tome but are compressed in such a way that they become almost cryptic messages requiring considerable deciphering on the part of the reader.

... (read more)

Generally, Dimitris Tsaloumas’s publications in Australia have been discussed in terms of translation, translation from Greek into English which made most reviewers long for an understanding of the original. Tsaloumas’s ‘otherness’, the difference in his poetry, has been connected with, on the one level, its bilingual presentation, its obvious physical difference. This difference is obvious again in this latest publication, the Queensland University Press’s anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry. On first glance it too tells you that it is different; it has an excess, the Greek, for the Australian reader – not however, for the Greek. Ironically, for her this functions the other way around; the English is excess, it is strange marks on a page. Published in Greece by Nea Poreia Press in 1985, its aim was, in the words of its compiler, ‘to give some idea of the variety and wealth of the poetic production of this distant but very young and vigorous world of the antipodes’. The means through which it achieves this end are the familiar ones of translation.

... (read more)

Malcolm Fraser On Australia edited by D.M. White and D.A. Kemp

by
September 1986, no. 84

There have been two major cycles in Australian political rhetoric since the war. The first occurred during the postwar reconstruction period, from 1943 until 1949, when contest over a new social order impelled an unusually clear articulation of philosophy and policies by the contenders for influence – represented in public debate by Curtin and Chifley on one hand, and Menzies on the other. The eventual ascendance of Menzies and the dominant ideas that emerged from that debate informed our political life for the next two decades. Not until the late 1960s, when the Liberal-Country Party coalition’s grasp of events slipped, and when the new problems of the modem world economic system and Australia’s precarious place within it dislodged the assumptions engendered in the 1940s, did the debate about the nature of our policy gain a new edge.

... (read more)

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Ken Goodwin must have found this a brute of a book to write. Not that difficulties are apparent in the writing. Far from it. It is simply that, in looking at it from a reviewer’s point of view, I am increasingly aware of the constraints under that the author must have suffered while managing to produce a book which the general reader and the interested undergraduate will find both interesting and useful.

... (read more)

Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.

... (read more)

Dear Editor,

I was surprised, on reading the August Issue of ABR, to find no comment or tribute to the former editor, John McLaren. I understand too well the pressure of deadlines and have no doubt that ABR will, at some future date, provide a fitting tribute to its former editor.

In the meantime, I would be grateful if you would publish my own small and inadequate tribute.

... (read more)

Australian Women Poets edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn

by
September 1986, no. 84

In a paper entitled ‘Anthologies and Orthodoxies’ given recently at the Australian Literature Conference in Townsville, Jennifer Strauss, herself a poet as well as an academic, analysed the contents of six recent poetry anthologies, including this new Penguin collection. She came up with the same revealing statistics as editors Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn had discovered from a larger sample of fifteen collections: the average of female authors represented was only seventeen per cent. Obviously one of the orthodoxies enshrined in anthologies is in need of critical scrutiny if we are. unwilling to accept the implication that there are either fewer or less talented women writing poetry than there are men.

... (read more)

From the enlightenment to post-modernity, there has been one common rallying cry: ‘This is the age of criticism.’ Religious authority, natural rights and philosophical dogmatism have all been under critique for so long that criticism has almost come to seem natural, authoritative and is in danger of hardening into dogma. Little surprise, then, that outside the academy the word ‘criticism’ is seldom linked with the venerable discourse of theology, politics and philosophy but rather with a comparatively recent and fluid phenomenon: Literature.

... (read more)

With Dryden out of favour and Rochester still only a cult enthusiasm, ‘Restoration literature’ is likely to evoke for most readers only stage comedy, yet likely to seem to a casual reader to promise only scholarly drudgery in justly neglected corners, crowned by an inadequate, hurried examination of a major work, Samson Agonistes, looking sadly astray in this company.

... (read more)