Offering another perspective, Ann-Marie Priest’s recent biography of Gwen Harwood presented the case of a woman writer fighting to be published and recognised despite her husband’s obstruction and the daily grind of domestic life. Charmian Clift is a third example of wifedom: a writer married to a writer who was acclaimed for a novel, My Brother Jack, that he admitted could not have been written without her help.

The lives of Clift and George Johnston retain a certain glamour because they were spent partly on the Greek island of Hydra, mixing with Leonard Cohen, Sidney Nolan and other artists, during the 1950s. Interest has been renewed in recent years with the release of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s study of their role in the Hydra artistic community, Half the Perfect World (2018), Sue Smith’s play Hydra (produced in Brisbane and Adelaide in 2019) and a film rumoured to be in production. Nadia Wheatley, who has long been the leading expert on Clift, published an excellent biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, in 2001 and edited a selection of her essays published in a new edition as Sneaky Little Revolutions in 2022.

Now comes The End of the Morning, the first section of an autobiographical novel Clift never completed but Wheatley believes can be read independently as a novella. Readers of Wheatley’s biography will recognise it as a significant source for her account of Clift’s childhood and adolescence in the quarry community near Bombo Beach, north of the NSW coastal town of Kiama.

The novella presents a vivid and charming picture of a childhood spent amid the freedom of the beach and bushland, Clift’s parents managing their poverty with creative resourcefulness and a commitment to literature as a reliable means of access to a wider imaginative world. Some recognisable tropes of autobiographical fiction appear — the rebellious tomboy narrator in rivalry with a more conventionally feminine sister for her parents’ attention; the narrator’s delight in learning — but this is not the conventional story of workers beaten down by the Depression. The father has chosen to live beyond the grind of English city life, among workers in Australia, so that he can enjoy a life with plenty of fishing.

Wheatley explains Clift’s struggle to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant she’d been given for the novel, and gently outlines the anxieties that led to her suicide (which she refers to indirectly as “a cry for help that went unheard”). She speculates about the direction the novel might have taken without suggesting that Clift would have dealt with the sexual experiences that worried her so much at the time of her death.

Many readers will know that as a teenager Clift had a child who was adopted at birth. (She could not know that the child would become the artist and writer Suzanne Chick, herself the mother of Gina Chick who has gained fame in the reality television series, Alone.) But Clift’s concern at the time of her death was the imminent publication of George Johnston’s novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which depicted some of their sexual liaisons on Hydra.

As a kind of scaffolding for the unfinished novel, the rest of The End of the Morning is made up of a selection of thirty essays from the 225 columns that Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald between 1964 and her death in 1969, chosen for their references to family life and childhood. Where the unfinished novel may frustrate the reader looking for a completed story, these short essays show Clift in total command of her form.

These 1000- to 1500-word pieces are full of thoughtful observations about her life and the social world around her. Sometimes she mentions the artistic community on Hydra, sometimes aspects of Sydney life, including renovations to her home in Mosman and the building of the Opera House. Often, she makes literary allusions to John Donne or Laurence Sterne or the most popular Romantic poets, but she never puts on airs — she has met many contemporary English poets and was struck by “over-reverence” before realising “that poets can be just as vain ordinary, peevish, arrogant, timid or plain dull as other people.” The essays assume that her readers also admit literature into their lives.

Clift understood that her column needed to be upbeat and inoffensive, so she makes no mention of her husband’s debilitating illness or the difficulties of her private life. The closest she comes to a political statement is when she contrasts the goals of younger and older women — helping women return to work in one case, engaging them in handicrafts and theatre parties in the other — at the inaugural meeting of a new women’s organisation. There is a lightness of touch and a clear sense of an audience that is made up, by implication, of other intelligent suburban women.

The same close observation enlivens the essays and the novel. Clift delivers wonderful lists of things: “On a Cluttered Mantelpiece” is made up mainly of descriptions of various objects found on her mantelpieces and their histories. “An Old Address Book” does a similar thing with places and people. Here are the county English:

men wearing either tweeds and caps and driving farm utilities or dinner jackets and driving Bentleys, mucking in with the pigs or serving champagne by candlelight and ladies who alternated between maintaining an Amazonian posture on perfectly frightening horses (and that horn so plangent over the Cotswold hills) and rising with that twitch of the trailing skirt that summoned all females at the table to retire and leave the gentlemen to their port.

Reading this you feel there is a novel waiting to happen.

Clift’s writing conveys a nostalgia for a lost Australia, not only for present-day readers but within the essays themselves, as she often remembers Sydney’s past and her own youth on the south coast. The End of the Morning also looks back fondly at the lost world of childhood, giving some clue to Clift’s role in the success of My Brother Jack. The novel is alive with a sense of what it was like to live in suburban Melbourne in the 1930s that Johnston couldn’t match in the Hydra of Clean Straw for Nothing or the Sydney of A Cartload of Clay. Clearly this detailed observation was Clift’s particular talent, just as her adaptation of My Brother Jack (1967) for television showed her gift for dramatic concision.

Clift’s newspaper columns remind me of Helen Garner’s articles for the Age, collected in True Stories and later books, and her comment that feature writing saved her from the loneliness of fiction and the need to “make things up.” Clift also admits to being gregarious, and it may be that she too found personal journalism suited her personality. But the literary world always rates the novel more highly than this kind of ephemeral writing and she struggled to finish her most ambitious work.

As well as her fears about the revelations in her husband’s next novel, perhaps the attitudes of the 1960s made it impossible for her to write about her teenage pregnancy, let alone sex outside marriage. We can speculate and regret the loss of what might have been an important addition to Australian fiction. At least we have these entertaining essays to enjoy. •

The End of the Morning
By Charmian Clift | Edited by Nadia Wheatley | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post A fragment of a life appeared first on Inside Story.

While Lumby was working on her book Matthew Lamb was embarked on something different and quite unusual: a two-volume cultural history of Moorhouse. Lamb’s project is also a biography, but the extra length allows him room to explore in more detail the writer’s intellectual development and his role in challenging the restrictions on Australian publishing in the years he was active. Lamb’s first volume, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, has just been published.

Both biographers spent time talking to Moorhouse before his death in 2022 and both combed through his extensive archives, so their books raise questions about the role of writers in creating their own lives. In recent years, we’ve seen Ann-Marie Priest’s detailed biography of Gwen Harwood, written after the poet’s archives were opened after many years of restricted access, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous study of Shirley Hazzard, written with the approval of Hazzard and her friends, and Bernadette Brennan’s sympathetic account of the novelist Gillian Mears, so closely based on the writer’s archive that it reads almost as if Mears had written it. All these subjects clearly wanted a biography to be written, even when, like Harwood, they played off the various aspirants to the role of biographer.

Moorhouse certainly wanted his life examined, and he had a keen understanding of his own role in Australian social and cultural change. But the relationship between a writer’s life and their fiction can present difficulties for a biographer who wishes to secure the facts but can’t afford to ignore the parallels. While a biographer is bound by the records, the subject’s memories so often prove unreliable when they’re compared with the documentary record or the memories of their friends and colleagues.

Lamb has written elsewhere about the peculiar difficulties of recording the life of an author whose stories were often based on real events. As Moorhouse told a friend, a fiction, once written, obliterated the real memory on which it was based. And sometimes Moorhouse was not the only writer using the material: Lamb offers examples of Michael Wilding writing counter-stories to those of his then friend.

One of the effects of this fictional use of real life has been an underestimation of the art in Moorhouse’s stories, to the point that he felt the need to constantly insist on it.

Lamb set out to read all Moorhouse’s work, including the short stories he wrote in high school, his journalism and his essays for the Workers’ Educational Association, and place them in the context of the author’s life. He also tries to encompass Moorhouse’s own reading and the influence of his various mentors to build a narrative of his intellectual development. And he keeps an eye on the shifts in Australian cultural life and the legal restrictions it faced.

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. It is this contextual material that justifies this second, extended biography.

Beginning with a short account of governments’ restrictive controls over local publishing from the very beginning of European settlement, Lamb traces the evolution of censorship and copyright laws in parallel with the lives of Moorhouse’s forebears in the colonies — in his father’s case in New Zealand. Young Frank was born into a society in which publishing was tightly restricted and writers were forced to accept low royalties from a British-controlled book trade.

Lamb makes Henry Lawson’s and Joseph Furphy’s difficulties relevant to Moorhouse’s later struggles for authors’ rights. Despite his popularity, Lawson battled financial difficulties; Furphy’s novels satirise the impossibility of recording Australian speech under the prohibitions on obscenity. The book’s treatment of the two men signals Moorhouse’s position in a tradition of Australian writing and sets up his later challenges to censorship and his part in the campaign for author royalties.

Moorhouse’s education in country public schools might appear limited, but Lamb reveals that encouraging teachers gave him access to magazines like Southerly and Meanjin. At home, he could read his firmly anti-communist father’s copies of Free Spirit, the forerunner of Quadrant, and discuss cold war politics. Though he was expected to follow his two older brothers into the family’s agricultural machinery business in Nowra, his parents were ready to accommodate his aspirations to be a writer. His mother even consulted the poet Rosemary Dobson when she visited Nowra for a talk.

Though Moorhouse later became known as a sexual adventurer he was as ignorant about sex as any other school student growing up in Australia at the time. Like so many Australians of his generation, he and his girlfriend Wendy gathered what information they could from biology textbooks and “hygiene” instruction books that often relied on euphemism. He might have appeared more liberated than the rest of us, but he negotiated the same conventional upbringing, churchgoing and smalltown values that dominated Australian life in the 1950s and 1960s. An exceptional high school student, he learnt the importance of self-education and self-discipline early, writing stories that Lamb reads as evidence of his teenage preoccupations.

The influence of his parents’ devotion to self-help, the philosophies of Rotary and the guidance of the scouting movement was obvious in Moorhouse’s fascination with theories of living. As a young man he was distinguished by an eagerness to learn and a curiosity about people and their behaviour. He read the available books on psychology and sexuality by Hans Eysenck, Alfred Kinsey and Sigmund Freud, and was committed to the “spirit of enquiry” advocated by his journalist mentor, John Penfold, though a long-term homosexual relationship undermined the “Frankness and Sincerity Theory” he advanced as the basis of his relationship with Wendy, now his wife.

He also understood that fiction offers a way for a writer to describe and speculate about human behaviour, including intimate desires evaded in journalism and academic writing. His experiences as a journalist in Sydney, Lockhart and Wagga Wagga gave him the chance to make stories from small events (jellyfish on the beaches of Sydney in one case) but also convinced him that he needed to break free from the cynical, heavy-drinking culture of journalism.

A position with the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney gave him the chance to explore his ideas about changing print media, sociology, film and folk music. Explore he did, at one point participating not only in the WEA but also in the Film Study Group, the Sydney Left Club, the Libertarian Society and the Push, though he resisted the libertarian view that literature was only an illustration of a philosophy or directed at some didactic goal.

According to Lamb, he regarded the literary imagination as “a form of inquiry in its own right,” a means of exploring reason and its limitations. In practice he also embraced it as a means of examining social taboos and the sexual lives hidden behind prevailing social and censorship conventions.

Strange Paths provides details of Moorhouse’s several encounters with the law. In 1967 his quite unerotic story about a young man’s disappointing visit to a prostitute, “A Barmaid, a Prostitute, a Landlady,” led to a Melbourne bookstall being charged for selling obscene material. In 1969, when the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the censorship controversy to a head, Moorhouse was part of the Tharunka editorial team that challenged the obscenity laws. In 1973 he was convicted for distributing The Little Red Schoolbook and assaulting the police who had found copies in his car.

Also that year Moorhouse and his publisher agreed to take up the cause of authors’ copyright, successfully suing the University of New South Wales for breaching his copyright by allowing staff and students to photocopy his story “The Machine Gun.” This, too, was an important breakthrough for Australian writers’ freedom to publish and support themselves.

Two things stand out in this account of Moorhouse’s life. One is how his study of popular culture, sociology and the media developed ahead of any interest in such subjects among academics. His time as a university student had been curtailed by his commitment to writing, as a journalist and as a writer of fiction, but he immersed himself in the range of areas that interested him.

Like so many other brilliant Australian writers who didn’t finish university — Hazzard, Harwood, David Ireland, Peter Carey and many others — writing was itself a form of self-education. But the outreach elements of university campuses — the libraries, the magazines, the clubs and visiting lecturers — have provided essential support for the intellectual life of these outsiders; as universities increasingly adopt utilitarian practices they may need to be reminded of their duty to artists and other intellectuals beyond their boundaries.

The second element is Moorhouse’s commitment to fiction writing as an intellectual pursuit free from the demands of political ideologies or moralities. When fiction so often appears to be either mere entertainment or didactic instruction from those who know better than the rest of us, Moorhouse understood that art offers the freedom to explore ideas and areas of life that challenge prevailing conventions. Of course, his work provokes arguments about feminism, sexuality and personal behaviour. That, too, is a role of fiction. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

This first volume takes us to the end of 1974, with the publication of The Electrical Experience and the release of Between Wars, the film Moorhouse wrote for director Michael Thornhill when he was thirty-six. So Lamb’s project has quite a distance to go. Impatient readers will choose to read Lumby’s more concise account, but historians of the recent past will find plenty to absorb their interest here. I may be the ideal reader for this version as I try to make sense of A.D. Hope’s negotiation of Australian censorship at an earlier time. Lamb’s book shows one way that a writer can be placed in an extensive cultural context. •

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
By Matthew Lamb | Knopf Australia | $45 | 480 pages

The post Writing life appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a difficult thing to write a biography of a writer who drew on his own life so fully for his fictions and journalism, and with many friends and lovers very much alive. In Frank Moorhouse: A Life Catharine Lumby allows her subject to take the lead, interviewing him, tracing his experiences through his substantial personal archive and talking to his friends.

Lumby decided not to write a literary biography but to concentrate on placing Moorhouse within his milieu, drawing out some of the contradictions in his personality and adding new information about his background that make his work even more intriguing. She adds to our understanding of Moorhouse’s writing without grappling too seriously with its ongoing significance as literature.

The biography follows a loose chronology, beginning with his parents’ origins and his family life in Nowra and then describing his escape to Balmain and embrace of the writing life. It deals with his idiosyncratic “rules for living,” his fight against censorship, his ambitious commitment to a trilogy of historical novels about a woman working for the League of Nations, and his frequent returns to the Bush. If you are a Moorhouse reader you will enjoy it immensely; if you are part of the generation who grew to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s you will recognise Moorhouse’s role in helping break down the moral constrictions on ordinary middle class Australians.

Moorhouse’s parents, Frank and Purthanry Moorhouse, were not merely upstanding citizens of Nowra but exceptional people in their own right. Readers may have guessed that Frank senior was the model for the smalltown soft drink manufacturer, T. George McDowell, who first appeared in The Americans, Baby and returned in later fictions right up to Grand Days. Moorhouse gave his father’s commitment to community and his belief in self-discipline to McDowell but not his creativity; Frank senior invented a machine to preserve milk that changed the lives of dairy farmers in Australia. His agricultural machinery business prospered so well that he expected all three of his sons to join it. Frank went his own way, but his rigorous daily work routine was a clear legacy of his father.

Purthanry was an equally impressive person, president of the local Country Women’s Association, a girl guide leader and a homemaker concerned with living well. Moorhouse acknowledged that his mother’s concern for aesthetics and social protocol gave him one model for Edith Campbell Berry in his historical trilogy, but he came late to an awareness of the more complex lives of his own parents.

In his last years he realised that his mother had befriended a local Aboriginal woman, Belle McCleod, who helped in the house. Together they set up a CWA branch in the Aboriginal community at Worrigee on the edge of Nowra. He had missed the story of the Indigenous people living close to him.

The entire Moorhouse family were committed to the scouting movement, with Frank senior a scout leader, Purthanry a leading girl guide and all three sons boy scouts. It isn’t difficult to see Moorhouse’s concerns for correct behaviour and good preparation, and his need for regular forays into the bush, as an inheritance from the scouts. Lumby notes the creative tension between Moorhouse’s resistance to convention and his fascination with the protocols that make social and working life run smoothly.

Moorhouse made the journey from a country town to inner-city Sydney and beyond it to Europe. Driven by curiosity about people and their social world he discovered art and fine living at the same time as he was exploring various forms of sexuality. He never completed a university degree but his desire to learn led him to pursue matters often regarded as trivial or beyond acceptability.

Lumby tells us of significant moments in his life, such as his first experience of a camembert cheese, his relish in eating oysters from the shell and, of course, his fastidiousness about martinis. While these subjects may seem frivolous, in his fiction Moorhouse often undermined his obsessions with irony: his oft-quoted advice to anyone lost in the bush was to mix a martini and wait for someone to turn up to correct your method.

After an early marriage Moorhouse realised that he couldn’t remain monogamous, let alone exclusively heterosexual, and set about living a life outside the “bourgeois” confines of conventional suburbia. From his mid-twenties he determined to own neither a car nor a house, and sometimes juggled credit cards to ensure he could eat out for every meal. At times, he relied on the generosity of friends to keep him housed and fed. Women often took the role of provider of financial as well as domestic support, though they sometimes found his rules for living rather self-serving.

Lumby nevertheless renders bohemian life in Balmain as youthful and glamorous, the members of the libertarian Sydney Push meeting for philosophy discussions before seducing each other in pubs. Despite his unfaithfulness and exasperating fastidiousness about domestic life, Moorhouse’s lovers remember him as generous and, of course, he was funny.

In his fiction and journalism Moorhouse reported on his exploits in the sophisticated, cosmopolitan world that many suburban Australians dreamt about. His “discontinuous narratives” resisted the plotting of the traditional novel, observing the lives of characters making their different ways in a shared society. In stories as much reportage as fiction, Moorhouse showed us his version of Sydney’s bohemianism.

Lumby draws on other critics to respond to Moorhouse’s fictions and, apart from the occasional charges of sexism in his early work, they are all positive about his achievements. I am not a member of the Edith Campbell Berry fan club — the club Annabel Crabb imagines to be full of mainly women enthusiasts for Frank Moorhouse’s League of Nations heroine who ask themselves in a crisis: “What would Edith do?”

Edith strikes me as insufferably self-important, a kind of Barbie doll that Moorhouse dresses up in different clothes (cowboy suits, silk lingerie, capes) and tries out in careers impossible for most women of her generation. I was dismayed to see the wonderfully perceptive and funny observer of the foibles of real people in the contemporary world had moved off to a dreamland of historical fiction, where a Miles Franklin award might be (and eventually was) acquired.

In his grand trilogy, unlike his earlier fictions, Moorhouse was not writing about a world he had experienced — except, perhaps, in the sex scenes. After I read the celebratory appendix on file registries in Grand Days, I felt the need to tell him personally that these were familiar to anyone who had worked in a government department. By the time I read Cold Light, I wished that I had also explained to him that married women could not become permanent employees in the public service until 1966. Once he had married Edith off, she could never be promoted. If he had known, he might have kept her single so she would not be relegated to an outer office in Canberra rearranging the pencils on her desk and watering the pot plant.

Of course, that is judging fiction against historical reality and the novels may best be read as documents of Moorhouse’s own imagination and obsessions. Some realities, such as the actual restrictions on women’s lives, could only limit his fantasies.

On the back of Lumby’s book the publishers express astonishment that this is the first biography of Moorhouse, suggesting that they, too, imagine a fantastically cosmopolitan world where authors are given their due. In Australia, literary biographies are usually reserved for the long dead, and they can seem to mark the end of interest in a writer (studies of both Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley, coincidentally, declined after their biographies appeared).

For readers of my generation, Moorhouse takes his place alongside Helen Garner as the recorder of the 1970s and explorer of possibilities for contemporary life. His work will always be significant to us. Pace Annabel Crabb, what reader in their thirties and forties knows of it? The work may yet fade away, like so many other writers who were significant in their moment.

Perhaps the difficulty is in the public preference for the monumental novel over the evanescent observations and speculations that Moorhouse wrote so well. Moorhouse, the performer, may matter more than Moorhouse the writer of a trilogy. This is why this biography matters: it tries to appreciate the performance of a life, not simply its residue of work.

While I will continue to resist the Edith fan club, I am now fully signed up to the Frank Moorhouse club. Frank, forgive me. I wish this book had been published before you died so that you could enjoy more of the acclaim you longed for. •

Frank Moorhouse: A Life
By Catharine Lumby | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 304 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

Biography shouldn’t interfere with our reading of fiction, but it does. Photographs of the well-groomed author with her dark coiffure and pearls suggest that she belonged to an elite world, the New York literati who “sojourned” in Italy each summer. In 1984 this glamorous writer returned to Australia to express her disdain for the provincialism of her homeland in a series of Boyer lectures. She was probably right about the land she had left behind, and those Australians who took umbrage may have been unduly sensitive — even displaying some of the nationalism she deplored.

Given the nature of Hazzard’s public profile, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous new account of her life, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, reads as a necessary corrective to prejudices about the author and her fiction. Olubas clarifies Hazzard’s association with British intelligence and the nature of her work at the United Nations, where she performed basic secretarial duties. In the way of these things, her actual experience was more complex but also more typical of clever women of the time.

Always bookish, Hazzard attended Queenwood private school on Sydney’s North Shore, where she and her older sister Valerie both thrived. But their father’s extraordinary trajectory — from orphaned child to Australian trade commissioner — gave him little sympathy for the educational aspirations of his daughters. After the second world war the sixteen-year-old Shirley left school to travel with the family to Hong Kong, where Reg Hazzard took the pre-eminent diplomatic role for Australia.

Through her father’s contacts she was employed in the office of a British military intelligence unit that had the job of monitoring the Chinese civil war. Shirley did, indeed, travel into China in a failed attempt to gather information about a British expat living in Canton (now Guangzhou).

The more significant figure in the unit was Alexis Vedeniapine, a Russian-born British officer who had grown up in Shanghai. He knew several Chinese languages and had been decorated for his heroic feats behind enemy lines in the Netherlands during the war. Although he was fifteen years older than she was, Shirley fell in love with this dynamic and cultivated man.

Olubas considers the various accounts of this relationship with sensitivity, suggesting Vedeniapine’s embarrassment at this young woman’s intense passion and his reluctant attraction to her. Within a year, though, Valerie had contracted tuberculosis. The family returned to Sydney, where Shirley’s education progressed through Miss Hale’s Secretarial College. She and Vedeniapine considered themselves engaged to marry with a view to reuniting in England once she had come of age.

Hazzard’s readers will recognise this love affair as the basis for her last novel, The Great Fire, which consigns its lovelorn heroine to the dullness of Wellington, New Zealand. Her father took the family there on his next posting, and Shirley continued writing to Alexis, now back in England and planning their future together on a farm. Until she didn’t.

Though Vedeniapine appeared committed to the relationship, Shirley must have realised that life as a farmer’s wife in Hertfordshire might be even duller than that of a typist in Sydney or Wellington. As Olubas puts it, “she simply refused to become provincial again after Hong Kong had connected her to the significant action of the world.”

Then her life opened up again. The family travelled to London, where she failed to contact Alexis, and New York, where her father had been posted. There, Shirley’s secretarial skills led to a job in the technical assistance administration section of the United Nations. Though she could never manage promotion to more senior UN positions, the work gave her the opportunity to mix with an international group of well-educated people and an insider’s view of how McCarthyism destroyed the careers of some of its most talented.

She soon became entangled in love affairs with older, married men. Olubas compares her to the Shirley MacLaine character in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the “lift girl” who has an affair with a senior executive, but perhaps she was more like the office girls at the sexual mercy of married men in Mad Men and romantic enough to hope for ongoing commitment. Stories such as Hazzard’s “A Place in the Country,” republished in her Collected Stories in 2020, suggest the emotional cost of these doomed relationships.

After the collapse of one such love affair, Hazzard escaped to Italy, where she worked, like Jenny in her novel The Bay of Noon, in a UN emergency force office at an airfield outside Naples. It was her first sustained encounter with her greatest love, Italy.

Naples had been partly destroyed by bombing and its people were desperately poor, but Hazzard felt privileged to be in such an ancient and resilient place. Most of all, she found solace for her broken heart in Capri, still unspoiled by tourism in those hard postwar years. Leaving Italy at the end of 1957 she wrote in her diary, “Capri saved me — dear, lovely loved place.”

UN friends organised an introduction to the Vivante family, who ran their house outside Siena as a kind of holiday retreat for artists and intellectuals. Friends made there went on to include her, in turn, in their social circles back in New York. In 1959, partly through these connections, she had her first story accepted by the New Yorker. Italy and writing had saved her from a dreary life as an office worker, and by 1962 she felt confident enough to resign from the UN.

A year later she met the widowed Francis Steegmuller at a party given by their mutual friend Muriel Spark. This middle section of Olubas’s biography is full of people Hazzard met through her New Yorker editors and friends — people like Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and James Merrill, as well as musicians and artists. She was sometimes accused of name-dropping, but her friends genuinely were from the New York and British cultural elite. They satisfied her longing for high culture and good taste. She became an American citizen in 1974.

Olubas devotes a whole chapter to Francis Steegmuller’s life, explaining how he and Shirley shared relatively humble beginnings and how he had become an acclaimed expert on Flaubert as an independent researcher rather than an academic. His first wife had left him in comfortable circumstances, so he and Shirley could live in New York and visit Europe regularly. He was older and better educated than she was, continuing the pattern by which she educated herself through her relationships with men.

The last section of this long biography records her friendships, her difficult relationship with her unstable mother, her occasional irritations with her husband, her many disagreements with friends and her deliberate shunning of relatives. Olubas tells us that Hazzard, perhaps typically for a self-taught intellectual, liked to dominate conversations and display her learning.

Hazzard emerges as a sometimes naive idealist sure of her own intelligence but needing to assert her claim among those with more formal credentials. This tendency goes some way towards explaining her longstanding criticism of the United Nations, no doubt justified to a degree but a little quixotic in retrospect. Perhaps it also encouraged her to return to Australia for those Boyer lectures.

She lived the latter part of her life among American intellectuals at a time when US cultural power increasingly dominated the world. Her friends were sure of their place at its centre though they valued European civilisation as the source of their moral understanding. With Steegmuller, Hazzard participated fully in this cultural homage through their regular trips to Italy, their language studies and their writing. Olubas’s biography offers a valuable tangential perspective on this commitment to high culture by the American intelligentsia in the decades after the war.

Of course, most of us know Hazzard through her stories and novels. If we hadn’t guessed, Olubas makes clear that the early novellas, The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, are based on Hazzard’s own experience in Italy in the 1950s. They are small gems that offer readers vicarious delight in the beauty of Italy and its vivacious people.

Most of her stories, too, observe the emotional crises of women rather like Shirley Hazzard as they negotiate often unequal relationships with men. They are quiet stories told from the point of view of rather passive women but sharpened by wry satirical observation. Hazzard always takes great care with the physical details of her fictions, and her dialogue is concise and witty. She wrote novels of sensibility, closely observing the emotional shifts in her characters as they proceed through an uncaring universe.

Though Olubas claims that The Transit of Venus is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, some readers will resist the way its author so obviously stage manages the lives of her characters. Caro Bell is another passive woman allowing herself to be carried along by the activities of more privileged men. Though Caro’s love affairs seem accidental and passionless, the novel comes alive in interludes where Hazzard gives free rein to her more satirical instincts.

The panoramic view of the daily life of the working girls of London that begins the novel’s twenty-third chapter has stayed with me since my first reading decades ago. This sharpness reveals Hazzard at her best, offering sympathy to all the intelligent women at the mercy of a system that gives pre-eminence and power to men.

Olubas shows how important Hazzard’s experiences in the immediate postwar years were to her sense of the world’s dangers, a residue of the damage she saw in Hiroshima and Naples. They clearly gave her a sense that love and life could be random and imperilled.

It is surprising, though, how much her fictions depend on memories of her early love affairs. Olubas remarks on how memory provides its own form of fiction as Hazzard transforms her affair with Vedeniapine in The Great Fire. Published in 2003, this last novel offered a kind of elegy for those who had suffered and died fifty years earlier. Despite the absence of any reference to the “phases of Australian life” (was New Zealand close enough?) it was awarded the Miles Franklin prize in a retrospective reclaiming of the novelist.

Perhaps Hazzard was most Australian in her autodidacticism, in her snobbery and commitment to good taste, and in her immense appetite for European culture and its deep history of civilisation. But she remained a citizen of the world, receiving honorary citizenship of Capri late in life.

As was the case for Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead, it has taken an Australian biographer to account for an international literary figure who would otherwise be overlooked in favour of her more famous British and American peers. Olubas has managed to create an engaging narrative from a wide range of sources. Best of all, she has incorporated Hazzard’s own versions of her life, both fictional and documentary, to create a character more interesting than we might have imagined. Like all good literary biographies, this one sends the reader back to its subject’s writing. Olubas’s edition of Hazzard’s stories is a good place to start. •

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
By Brigitta Olubas | Virago | $34.99 | 576 pages

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At the time of the performances, I lived in another city and Kath Kenny was a toddler. For us, Betty Can Jump acquired an almost mythical status as a women’s contribution to an important cultural movement. The presence of Helen Garner among the performers — before she wrote any novels — makes it particularly intriguing for readers of Kenny’s new book, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram, but some will also recognise the artist Micky Allan and the actors Evelyn Krape and Kerry Dwyer, who later became well known. Even Carmen Lawrence, married at the time to the one man in the production, Victor Marsh, was in the play’s orbit.

Kenny makes a virtue of the missing record, gathering around this “lost performance” a history of women’s liberation activism in the early 1970s along with an account of the APG’s experimentation and the Vietnam war protest movement. Though her book is based on PhD research, she writes in a personal register, paying tribute to the subjective perspective that women writers, especially Garner, have made part of their challenge to established modes of history.

To signal her own position in the generations of feminists, Kenny recounts her time as an editor of the Melbourne University student magazine Farrago at the time of the Ormond College scandal recounted in Garner’s The First Stone. She recalls a meeting with Garner: “we met over a cup of tea and looked hopelessly at each other across the generational chasm.”

Generational shifts in feminism form one layer of this lively account of women trying to turn their experiences into a dramatic assertion of women’s right to be heard. The APG might have subscribed to democratic principles, with members sharing the roles of actors, creators, set builders and even cleaners, but in practice the “tyranny of structurelessness” meant that dominant personalities took control. (Women noticed which men cleaned the toilet, as Max Gillies once did immediately before going on stage to perform.)

Arguments between writers wanting faithful productions of their scripts and those committed to collaborative creation were a constant. Sometimes the directors, usually Gillies or Graeme Blundell, took charge. In most productions, women found themselves marginalised, acting stereotypical parts in plays by men or not appearing on stage at all. Betty Can Jump expressed their demands for a place in the new drama.

Despite the production’s ephemeral nature, Kenny found an archive of interviews with the participants recorded by Dwyer in 1975. She also draws on reviews and accounts of the performances in newspapers, APG meeting minutes and group members’ memoirs. She supplements this material with her own recent interviews, bringing in parallel activities of the time — consciousness-raising practices in women’s liberation groups, the first meetings of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, and the experiments of US collective theatre groups such as the Caravan Theatre.

Dwyer’s interviews allow Kenny to imagine scenes from the perspectives of the participants in the show. Most chapters begin by focusing on one of the women at a particular moment — Dwyer arriving at Melbourne University for the first time in 1961, Claire Dobbin nervous in the weeks before the performance — or her own encounter with one of the participants.

In homage to the personal nature of the women’s art, Kenny avoids a dry historical approach, depicting the changing emotions and concerns of the women involved and trying to imagine how uncertain they felt about what they were doing. She gives glimpses of her own experience of the interviews, carefully managing a subjective perspective while providing the important factual elements. In this way she acknowledges the influence on her own writing of this generation of women and their struggle to make the personal political.

Most of the APG members weren’t Melbourne University students but schoolteachers and lecturers at the neighbouring teachers’ college. Their university degrees didn’t include any formal drama history or practice, but some of them, like Krape and Dwyer, had experience in amateur performance and a desire to learn about international drama movements.

Dwyer had won a scholarship to study in France with the theatrical innovator Jerzy Grotowski, returning to Melbourne in the late 1960s full of ideas about the need for performers to strip away their egos in order to accomplish the possibilities of performance. At the time, the APG were performing in the cramped quarters of Betty Burstall’s La Mama theatre. Dwyer and Blundell found the disused Pram Factory in Carlton, which gave the group an expanded rehearsal and performance space (with some members living in its “tower,” recognisable as a location in Garner’s Monkey Grip). The couple’s home in Carlton also became a central meeting place for group members.

By the time Betty Can Jump went on stage Dwyer was in the final months of pregnancy with their first child, directing rehearsals from a seat in the audience. Childcare became one of the issues of conflict at the APG, with some of the women exhausted as well as exhilarated by the long hours of rehearsal on top of the need to care for their children. After five months of collaborative creation and a six-week run of performances they couldn’t face doing it again.

It was gone, but not forgotten. Halfway through her book, Kenny reveals how she found a script for the play — a set of roneoed pages collected by Yvonne Marini — in the APG archives. On this evidence Betty Can Jump appears to be a set of scenes and sketches, more like a revue than a structured play. The two sources of material — Laurel Frank and Kay Hamilton’s research into the history of Australian women, and the consciousness-raising exercises of the participants — sit uneasily together.

The play begins with scenes from the lives of the convict women, flogged and bartered in the first days of the colony, and later portrays Louisa Lawson, Vida Goldstein and other early feminists, but audiences responded more warmly to the personal commentary on what it was like to be a contemporary Australian woman. All up, it ran for forty-five minutes.

As Garner tells Kenny, this kind of performance is ephemeral by nature and design. It belongs to its time and was not intended for literary analysis. Yet Betty left behind many traces. It immediately opened up possibilities for the women involved and, beyond them, it showed other women how they could create works in the theatre. The women who flocked to the show recognised its breaking down of barriers around what could be said about their lives.

Was it a success? Jack Hibberd declared it “indubitably sincere but lamentably short on ideas, direction, dramatic skills and contemporary pertinence.” The women involved remain uncertain, remembering their anxieties from the time and the silence of the APG men, and Garner was surprised when Kenny told her it sold more tickets than any of the APG’s other twelve productions.

There never was another Betty Can Jump. But the women who made it pursued ideas from the show in various art forms and performance modes. For a while some performed with the Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group; others formed new companies to reach migrant women or became involved in groups like Circus Oz. Some, like Krape and Dwyer, made careers in theatre and film; others, like Marini and Marsh, sought a more spiritual understanding of their lives.

In the last chapters of her book, Kenny returns to Helen Garner, reading her recently published diaries in the light of her role in Betty Can Jump. Though on the student side of the Ormond controversy in the 1990s, she can now admire the way Garner has always been ready to argue the toss, never shying away from differences of opinion and perspective. Garner’s influence on Kenny’s own writing is obvious as she generously acknowledges the achievements and difficulties of women of the past generation.

One of the pleasing aspects of this book is the way Kenny follows the subsequent history of women in Australian theatre and is ready to address its present state. She finds optimistic signs of the ongoing influence of feminist ideas in recent stage dramas by Nakkiah Lui, Suzie Miller, Anchuli Felicia King and Kendall Feaver, women writers finally finding a place in the repertoire of some mainstream Australian theatre companies. She is ready to argue about these plays, too, noting that Feaver’s brilliant Wherever She Wanders seems to revive the generational battles of The First Stone.

Staging a Revolution raises eternal questions about the relationship of politics to art and the possibilities of collaboration over individual achievement. It is a fascinating contribution to current reassessments of 1970s feminism, from Michelle Arrow’s history of The Seventies to TV series — Mrs America or the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, for example — that recreate the conflicts and debates of the period. It generously acknowledges the continuity between the concerns of the feminists of the 1970s and those of the younger women artists of today. •

Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram
By Kath Kenny | Upswell | $29.99 | 270 pages

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I have been going to Williamson plays all my adult life. I remember the audience exhilaration after a performance of Don’s Party, again in Canberra, when the cast came out in “It’s Time” t-shirts a few months before Gough Whitlam’s Labor won the 1972 election. Then came Jugglers Three, What if You Died Tomorrow and A Handful of Friends. By documenting the energy, the hopes and the failures of the 1970s generation Williamson turned many of us into theatregoers, confident that his plays would entertain us and, often, start an argument.

These days audiences in small theatres may include a sprinkling of eager young people but it’s clear that drama plays to an ageing (and ultimately dying) audience. Though Australia has many gifted young playwrights, none has managed Williamson’s feat of creating drama that compels a generation to attend his or her latest play.

The phenomenon of David Williamson, then, deserves reviewing. His memoir, Home Truths, is his contribution to this process, providing the background to the most memorable of his fifty-six plays and twenty-six screenplays. He details his childhood in suburban Melbourne with a frustrated, dramatically manipulative mother and conciliatory father; the embarrassment and bullying he experienced as an adolescent because of his extraordinary height; his career misjudgements as he studied mechanical engineering and then psychology; and his path from the suburbs to inner-city Melbourne and initial success as a playwright.

Williamson wrote unpublishable novels and revue sketches before a university drama society put on one of his early plays, giving him the courage to send You’ve Got to Get On, Jack to Betty Burstall at Carlton’s La Mama. Unaware that he was in the audience, Al Finney, Bruce Spence and Martin Phelan read the play to show “how good acting could bring a dead script to life.” They later relented, mounting an “electric” production of the play. Watching them, Williamson decided that he couldn’t go the way of his Melbourne contemporaries, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril, nor even his admired J.P. Donleavy — he would stick to observations of real life and risk the charge of “dreary realism.”

By 1971, La Mama was performing The Removalists at the same time as the nearby Australian Performing Group was doing Don’s Party, despite all their reservations about its middle-class subject matter and naturalist style. But it was John Bell’s production of The Removalists for Nimrod in Sydney the same year that made Williamson the playwright of the moment.

This success also attracted resentment from other playwrights and intellectuals, especially in Melbourne, and Williamson takes the opportunity here to gain some quiet revenge on his critics, especially the late Leonard Radic, the Age’s critic, and the late Bob Ellis. The Coming of Stork led to Tim Burstall’s film version, Stork, a box office success full of slapstick farce, and then to Petersen, Williamson’s attempt to mock the snobbery of Melbourne University’s Dinny O’Hearn and other academic critics. Williamson was riding the new wave not only of theatre but also of film, admittedly with fairly unsubtle material; and sometimes, as in the case of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, he was writing scripts that were acclaimed for the wrong reasons.

He declares that all his plays are exaggerations or speculations about people he knows, and he learnt early to give drafts to his models as a preparation for their appearance on stage. For those curious about these models, this book provides the key to his sources, explaining how he adapted elements of his friends to suit his dramatic purposes.

The most frequent of these models is his wife Kristin. When actor Robyn Nevin read the script for Emerald City, she said to her, “Looks like I’m playing you again.” This must have been trying, and Williamson’s claim that Kristin recognised that she was also the inspiration for some of his “most feisty, loyal and ultimately loving characters” sounds like retrospective amends.

In fact, Kristin emerges from this book as at times a full creative partner, intelligent and patient though not always long-suffering. Her biography of Williamson appears to be one of the resources for this account, though Williamson adds the appalling story of how she was ostracised and lost her job when she left her first marriage for him.

By the 1980s Williamson was a celebrity, mixing with glamorous people — politicians, actors, filmmakers, journalists and publishers. His writing changed focus accordingly. I sometimes came away from a play wondering whether he knew about ordinary life anymore. Yet there was always sparkling dialogue and a serious matter for consideration on the surface of each play. And surely we can forgive the man who wrote The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, The Department, Travelling North, Emerald City, The Perfectionist, the Face to Face trilogy and Cruise Control (my favourites) for Dead White Males and Don Parties On? How many good plays must a writer produce for posterity?

One of Williamson’s skills is making it all seem easy, so that you can leave one of his plays thinking that if he only adjusted the ending or was more subtle about one of his debating points — in other words, took notes from you — he might have a certain masterpiece rather than a compromised one. He has received plenty of unsolicited critiques of this kind. I saw Brilliant Lies in Brisbane on its first run, with the cast coming on stage after the production to take questions from the audience. Ray Barrett asked us if we found the ending satisfactory and a show of hands revealed that we didn’t. He explained that the cast had been trying to get Williamson to change it.

Sometimes he has done this, most famously when Madonna changed the ending for her production of Up for Grabs in London. In that case, he can’t resist pre-empting the reader’s obvious criticism: “If you’re wondering why I didn’t fight to safeguard the integrity of my play, the answer is obviously that, like Simone [the central character], I’m an opportunistic Australian and I wanted to have at least one sellout West End show in my career.”

The fact that all my favourite Williamson plays have been made into films (or are in development — a film of Cruise Control is apparently planned) tends to emphasise their naturalism and possibly preclude any new stagings of them. This is a pity: in their original form they are wordy, witty and theatrical, playing with the traditions of satire, domestic comedy and farce. Recent revivals of Emerald City, The Removalists and Travelling North show that a new generation of actors and directors can find unexpected possibilities in them.

Yet Williamson’s experience writing screenplays for American producers gives pause for thought. None of the scripts he wrote over ten years made it to production. The brilliance of Robert Connolly’s Balibo (a production he co-wrote but also has reservations about) suggests that this is a significant loss to audiences. This memoir reinforces the haphazard and capricious nature of drama production in all media. For television, The Last Bastion (with Dennis Whitburn) remains a classic of docudrama, while Dog’s Head Bay (with Kristin) is a lesson in how not to make sitcom. And even after years of guaranteed box office, Williamson could be rejected by major theatre companies right to the end. It’s good to know that Family Values and Crunch Time sent him out on a high.

This cheerful memoir takes a familiar, friendly approach to its readers. It is full of amusing anecdotes and reported dialogue, with those good-natured jibes at his now-dead critics. Like so many of his plays, it is name-dropping, gossipy and wonderfully entertaining. •

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But the typewriter’s appeal for children isn’t surprising. The journey from fingers to printed text is direct, the type appearing on paper before your eyes as you compose. When it works smoothly, the writer can feel in full control, from idea to tangible text. There’s no waiting for a printer to finish the task.

In his new book, The Typewriter Century, Sydney historian Martyn Lyons reckons that this machine shaped how we write from the 1880s up to the mid 1980s, when the word processor established its superior claims. He marks this neat century with photographs of a Remington No. 1, the model bought by Mark Twain out of curiosity in 1875, and of Len Deighton in his London flat, hemmed in by a massive IBM word processor, in 1968. Twain “wrote” Life on the Mississippi by dictating to a typist, and Deighton called in the services of an operator for the IBM.

Lyons begins with a fascinating overview of the typewriter’s development, detailing many of the technical difficulties overcome along the way. Of the various people with claims to be its inventor, he gives most credit to Christopher Sholes, whose ideas were incorporated into that Remington No. 1, which came encased in a wooden cabinet with a foot treadle for returning the carriage.

Lyons soon moves from the typewriter’s technical development to its role in changing how fiction, especially popular fiction, was created in the early twentieth century. While literary writers like Twain and Henry James quickly adopted the typewriter as a way of easing the process to publication — dictating to stenographers who transformed their work into legible copy for publishers — the typewriter also made possible a commercialised form of writing, with a new generation of writers learning to type as part of their work in offices or newspapers. Some successful popular writers even replicated the office hierarchy, with several “typewriter girls” at hand to process their work. The task quickly became gendered.

Along with a rising mass literacy, the typewriter made possible the “pulp fiction” phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, when writers like Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner and the Australian Gordon Bleeck could bash out a new novel in less than a week, selling them for a few pence on the railway stands. Some, like Simenon, were so prolific that they wrote under several pseudonyms to avoid flooding their own markets. Gardner referred to himself as the Fiction Factory. These writers made money by the sheer quantity of what they produced, not its quality, though both Simenon and Gardner longed for some literary recognition. André Gide thought Simenon a “great novelist” but his literary reputation was largely posthumous.

When he examines individual relationships with the typewriter, Lyons finds a range of responses. Some authors were worried by the “distancing” effect they felt when composing by machine. Rather than the intimate, physical experience of pen on paper, the typewriter transformed thought into impersonal, standardised print. Some authors who dictated their words were surprised by the impassive responses of stenographers trained to concentrate on the words rather than their meaning. James, for example, was disappointed when his most frightening passages in the Turn of the Screw made no impression on the demeanour of his typist. Others felt that the presence of the typist disrupted the privacy of composition, making them self-conscious about their creativity and alienated from their own work.

Many, of course, quickly went back to handwriting their first draft, creating a further distancing by handing copy to a typist. John le Carré replicated the elaborate office procedure of the civil service, where he had trained, by writing each draft in different coloured ink before passing it to his wife to type on different coloured papers. He then revised the typed text by hand in the appropriate coloured pen before handing it back to his wife for a further complete draft.

This process could continue for thirteen drafts, as for The Tailor of Panama, and must have slowed the process down rather than hastening it. Le Carré may have resisted acquiring a word processor, but his wife no doubt appreciated its arrival.

Writers trained in typewriter skills appear to have been more likely to develop what Lyons calls a “romantic” relationship to the typewriter, seeing it as an extension of their bodies and even a source of inspiration. The film cliché of the writer ripping paper from the typewriter, scrunching it up and throwing it on the floor appears to have no place in real life. Jack Kerouac, of course, is the archetypal romantic typist, but others, including Enid Blyton, felt freed by the responsive movement of the typewriter.

The Typewriter Century, with its amusing stories about the practices of many writers, is based on wide archival research. But it can hardly be exhaustive given the writing multitudes who have typed their way through the century. As the book progresses Lyons concentrates in detail on the typewriting careers of a handful of popular writers who could not have been so prolific without the machine: Simenon, Gardner, Agatha Christie, Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton. This allows him to give some sense of the processes and self-mythologies of the writers. Simenon promoted himself as a speed typist, and Gardner became successful enough to supervise banks of female typists to produce his work. Christie, Crompton and Blyton professed to fit their writing around domestic routines — Christie is photographed sitting in a dining chair while she types on a drop-sided dining table.

All of these writers knew they were addressing distinct markets and the typewriter was the essential tool for them to meet their readers’ appetites for more of the same. The effect of the machine on literary writers raises more complex considerations. Lyons speculates that Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper experience, including the necessary typewriter, influenced his notoriously succinct and direct writing style. Yet there are examples of typewriter prolixity — perhaps those long and exuberant novels by Christina Stead and Miles Franklin were encouraged by their familiarity with the typewriter as office workers. The shift to dictation, too, must surely have influenced the writing style of James’s masterly later novels, or Twain’s later books. As Lyons concludes, “There is no single answer to the question, what was the impact of the typewriter?”

The book does invite readers to consider how their own favourite writers adapted to the typewriter. An obvious Australian example would be Joseph Furphy, the foundry worker who bought a typewriter in 1897 and revised the manuscript of Such Is Life himself. Scholars are often excited by handwritten manuscripts, as if they offer immediate contact with a revered writer; despite its visual anonymity, though, the typescript may be just as direct a product of a writer’s thoughts.

Readers of The Typewriter Century are likely to reflect on their own writing practices, too. The computer turned writing into a rather mechanical function called “word processing,” but its advantages as an editing tool were obvious and quickly embraced. It may be that it has encouraged different kinds of creative thinking and Lyons cites several writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, who resist it. The typewriter still has its uses, even if it is simply to avoid the distraction of the internet, as Zadie Smith says.

My ten-year-old granddaughter wrote her first film script on the second-hand Olivetti she was given for Christmas, but in the long run she found the keys too hard to press and the ribbon change too difficult. The laptop looks like winning out. •

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Garner began as a novelist of small observations, a recorder of how women try to live out feminist principles in love relationships and domestic life. As she says several times in her diaries, she will never win the Miles Franklin award, yet she has become a major literary figure of her generation. She works close to life, crafting her own responses to the world around her. At this stage of her career, it appears logical for her to throw off all pretence and offer readers her notebooks as well.

There is pretence of a kind at work here, too, of course. This material from manuscript notebooks has been selected carefully to provide us with entertaining and revealing glimpses of the writer’s life.

Yellow Notebook records Garner’s self-doubt and struggle to establish herself as a fiction writer while trying to maintain family life in Melbourne. It is full of the kind of observations that appear in her stories, alongside a growing understanding of the nature of her own art. Amid frequent reflections on her own failings are sharp insights into her approach to art. As far back as 1981 she wrote that “meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

Admirers of The Children’s Bach and Postcards from Surfers will enjoy Yellow Notebook’s account of the creation of those stories and notice the many elements of Garner’s life that would contribute to the screenplay for The Last Days of Chez Nous. The French husband, the father, the daughter and the student boarder, even some of the most memorable dialogue, are on display as Garner’s second marriage falls apart and she leaves the rented house to her daughter and her friends.

For those anxious to know, Garner answers a question she is frequently asked — “Where do you get your ideas for fiction?” — as generously as possible. We see her developing a clear-eyed understanding of her own strengths and limitations as an artist. On the one hand, there is the constant pressure to “make things up”; on the other, the joy when the stories come “pouring out.”

One Day I’ll Remember This reveals a more confident writer, defiant in the face of the condescension that both critics and casual acquaintances frequently offer her. She retains her optimistic commitment to sexual love and begins a new relationship with V, a married novelist from Sydney deeply interested in the visual arts. Despite all her misgivings, this develops into her third marriage to Murray Bail (an identification obvious to any curious reader). The joys and struggles of their relationship give this book a narrative arc that makes it read like a novel.

Together, the two writers struggle to work and maintain their individual confidence in what they do. Garner’s sociability and domestic instincts conflict with V’s need for solitude and resistance to the routine demands of housework. V, a creature of Sydney and its art world, takes Garner to meet famous artists and their put-upon wives. She realises that she belongs in Melbourne, in her own house with a garden, mixing with her wide circle of friends. While Sydney supports the visual art elite that V admires, Melbourne offers a more open and communal music scene where even amateurs like Garner can dance and play instruments. V obligingly moves to Melbourne, but their different perspectives continue to drive the marriage towards its inevitable end.

This relationship produces some significant arguments about art as the two writers engage in an almost parodic acting out of the traditional positions of men and women artists. As the Australian literary world, influenced by poststructuralist theory, moves against realism in the 1980s, Garner acknowledges that her own talent is low on the hierarchy: “I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.”

Bail’s interest in mythic and modernist form fits a more respected artistic mode, and he would go on to win the Miles Franklin in 1999 for Eucalyptus, a novel he began while living with Garner. In their various homes, the argument about artistic hierarchy is symbolised by ongoing disagreements about the placing of V’s cherished painting by the New Zealand modernist, Colin McCahon. In one hilarious scene, Garner cleans the bathroom while V stands at the door advising her to stop writing about that “bullshit” period, the 1970s, and she responds that the portrayal of relations between men and women in his work feels like the 1950s rather than the “no place” and “no time” he believes it to be.

This pattern of self-criticism and mutual criticism, with casual, gratuitous criticism from friends and acquaintances, makes published literary criticism seem superfluous. With friends like these, who needs reviewers?

The publication of Cosmo Cosmolino causes an estrangement from her old friends in Sydney, O and R. It is not the fact that real people can be identified in the story, “The Recording Angel,” that causes the breach but its analysis of Garner’s relationship with O. No one seems to regard the story as fiction. In her defence, Garner insists that it is a loving picture of the complexity of a long friendship, though she also sees that it is “brutal.” She is distressed to have caused her friends pain but finds “a hard nut of something in the centre of my heart,” a kind of ruthless honesty. Eventually, they forgive her.

Garner’s declining interest in fiction may have hastened her movement towards journalism and the subjective non-fiction that has become her forte. The diary reveals the background to many of the essays that were collected in True Stories (1996), including her Walkley award-winning “Killing Daniel.” We learn that Garner’s first experience of a murder trial was to support a friend whose daughter was a victim. She finds the trial of Daniel’s killer harrowing, as indeed is the essay she wrote about it. In keeping with her interest in domestic relations, Garner chooses to write about how the courts handle the intimate crimes of sexual and domestic abuse that are increasingly the concern of public feminism. It is salutary that she rejected the possibility of writing about Ivan Milat’s random murders of strangers.

Garner’s “hard nut” arms her against the critics of The First Stone, soon to lead to her alienation from a generation of feminists. She includes a fateful note about her initial response to the charges against the master of Ormond College: “I wrote the guy a letter. Hope I won’t regret it.” The various legal injunctions before publication draw out what V calls her street-fighting quality, making her more determined to see the book through.

When the storm breaks, Garner receives a mass of letters, many from young women declaring she has betrayed feminism and they will never read her work. She is reviled in cafes and praised in supermarkets. Is any other Australian writer so recognisable? In the course of these diaries, the woman in the post office and the man at the bank declare themselves as her readers, and on one occasion she gets her hot water connected early because the supervisor has read all her books. When The Last Days of Chez Nous appears, she is grateful for the anonymity of the screenwriter.

These diaries reveal the social nature of literary life in Australia, especially in the heyday of publishing in the 1980s and 1990s. In a small community, writers can’t help but meet each other and their critics. Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and Tim Winton (thinly disguised as J) all make appearances. Garner also takes some cheeky swipes at the big names — Saul Bellow is a windbag; Australia’s mighty poet attacks her in his column then insists on walking home with her from a festival reading. Some characters are designated simply as the great reader or the biographer.

Life is so much more complex than any written form can possibly encompass. These cleverly selected fragments gesture towards the many things that happen contemporaneously in every life — family irritations, spiritualism, operations and dental work, motels on the Hume Highway, Sydney’s mighty thunderstorms, the ownership of country cabins and dogs. They can be read as an autofiction of domestic life, as the background to admired books and films, as an account of the life of art at a certain period in Australia, or as an apologia for Garner’s work and a demonstration of it in action. Garner declares that she can only do what she does, asserting the value of her own subjectivity. She insists that one can be an artist and still love ironing. •

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It was a striking demonstration of the themes examined by Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, in her new book, Rooted. The barrister’s language was too formal for his client’s comfort; the man was expressing his anxiety about his son with all the intensity that taboo language can provide; and I was a respectable matron who must be shielded from these words no matter how intrusive my interest. Class, education, ethnicity and gender were all in the mix. Yet it also seemed that bad language was essential to the urgency and emotion of the situation.

Rooted takes on the challenging task of speculating about the spoken language of the past. Using the written evidence, it traces the history of bad language in Australia from the beginning of European settlement, when the profanities used by the convicts shocked many early observers of the new colony. As the free settlement grew, so did the desire for respectability and concern about public language. But in the pastoral districts, bullockies were becoming notorious for the blasphemy they claimed was necessary to control their animals.

Laugesen’s narrative follows the broad changes that came with the growth of urban populations after 1880 and the development of larrikin language in the cities. When the first world war sent thousands of Australian soldiers to Europe, middle-class officers and English people they encountered were horrified by their easy use of “bloody, bugger and bastard.” The diggers’ magazines exploited the comic potential of these words, although they were also, as Laugesen notes, an expression of the fears of those facing death or injury.

Laugesen goes on to consider the attempts to control bad language from the 1920s onwards, particularly in print, and the restrictive censorship of literary writing in Australia right up to the 1980s when, as she puts it, bad language was “liberated.” She then looks at how new digital technologies have disseminated slang and obscenity in recent decades, encouraging a loosening of restrictions on dialogue in film and television.

Drawing on journalism, court reports and literary writing, Rooted provides a concise history of how certain offensive words and phrases have been used over time. Laugesen expertly synthesises a wide range of research into the place of bad language in Australian social history, tracing progress from a restrictive and snobbish puritanism to the “liberation” of offensive language.

Several of the historians cited by Laugesen argue that Australian bad language has been used to challenge authority, whether of British masters (in the case of the convicts), white bosses (Aboriginal people) or the patriarchy (women since the 1960s). In the nineteenth century this transgression was principally expressed in blasphemy, a cursing against the sacred in an age when religious belief was widespread. Even euphemisms that now seem innocuous — “bloody,” “gosh,” “gee whiz,” “crikey,” “hell” — carried a frisson of defiance of God. Nowadays, even children use them with little awareness of their origin. But they may still be used to indicate some sense of group solidarity and a resistance to respectability, as when senator Jacqui Lambie recently expressed concern for “the poor bloody students” facing increased university fees.

Blasphemy is one thing; sex and other basic physical acts are another. Over the past seventy years, censorship has focused on sexual words in publishing or broadcasting, and particularly the use of “fuck” and “cunt,” though the language of bodily excretion also has popular currency. As Laugesen explains, the literary censorship of the past was as much about the depiction of sexual acts as it was about the words that describe them in vulgar speech. To my mind, this makes the fiction writers more interesting than nineteenth-century court reports of specific word usage. Laugesen mentions Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life but not that his name became a euphemism for sodomy. She refers briefly to Joseph Furphy’s inventive substitutions in Such Is Life without appreciating his ingenious attempts to say the unprintable as a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

Rooted surveys the most notorious literary censorship cases from the second world war to the 1970s, from Lawson Glassop’s We Were the Rats, Robert Close’s Love Me Sailor and Sumner Locke Elliot’s Rusty Bugles to Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed and the Oz magazine trials. It considers the role of They’re a Weird Mob and the Bazza Mackenzie films in promoting the idea that bad language is an Australian tradition. In this way, Laugesen argues that the use of blasphemy and obscenity are essential Australian freedoms of expression, almost always used in the service of transgression rather than of power, though this view of bad language may conflict with many people’s experience of its use by powerful groups to exclude and intimidate.

Laugesen is at her most original and insightful in the final section of the book, which examines the present proliferation of public obscenity. Here she uses evidence from television and the informal world of social media to measure the shifts in what constitutes offence. She cites the infamous moment on the sixth series of the reality TV show Married at First Sight when Bronson referred to his assigned wife, Ines, as a “cunt.” With scholarly detachment, she summarises responses to the incident, including the journalist James Weir’s playful account of the episode using “cantaloupe” as a substitute. Yet, even here, the context was more interesting than the word. It was clear that Bronson used it habitually, with little sense that it would cause offence. At this moment, the series reached its lowest point, with the “experts” revealed as hypocrites pretending to be superior to the vulgarities of the show they presented.

The masses of spoken-language evidence now available through social media and reality TV may well overwhelm the dictionary-makers of the future, but Laugesen responds with liveliness to this proliferation of evidence. Though she remains cautious about racial terms, she does acknowledge that there may be a link between verbal and physical abuse.

While I was writing this review, Van Badham posted her observation that “fugly slut” was a term of abuse that every woman who makes a public statement online would find among the comments of trolls. For relief from this nastiness, I hope that researchers at the Australian National Dictionary Centre allow themselves some episodes of Gogglebox, in which earthy jokes and innuendo are supplemented by many cries of “Oh my God!” and convivial, beeped “fucks” as families demonstrate that it’s not so much the words themselves that matter but their comic potential and the speaker’s awareness of who is listening. •

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Paul Giles, an English expert on American literature who took up the Challis chair of English literature at the University of Sydney in 2010, comes to Australian literature from an international perspective. In his book Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature, published in 2013, he identified numerous correspondences between American and Australian literary writing and offered evidence for Australian incursions into the American imagination. In all his critical writing Giles avoids the conventional binaries of postcolonialism, with its privileging of the relationship between the empire’s centre and colony and the assumption that colonial writing is bound to be inferior to that of a “mother” culture. He also evades the nationalist focus of much Australian literary criticism.

Now, in Backgazing, Giles surveys a wide range of writing over a distinct period — the era of modernist literary art, in his reckoning from about 1900 to the middle years of the twentieth century. He argues that, rather than forming a separate, belated strand of the modernist project, Australian modernism participated in an international movement, sometimes in contact with its central ideas, sometimes expressing them in parallel. He considers Joseph Furphy’s writing against the work of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce. He reads the poetry of Kenneth Slessor and A.D. Hope alongside that of T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop. He places the fiction of Eleanor Dark with that of James T. Farrell, and Patrick White’s novels in the context of Samuel Beckett’s fiction. These conjunctions may seem surprising, but in Giles’s readings they reveal significant connections and responses to twentieth-century debates about modernism and its politics.

While modernism is most simply defined as a period, it more accurately reflects an artistic and philosophical perspective. For Giles, it can most clearly be seen in attitudes to time. In the classic nineteenth-century novels, which exemplify the notion of time as progress, characters move in an orderly sequence towards their futures. Modernist writing disrupts this notion of causality, seeking a more universal time, not measurable in terms of daily hours, in which the past changes according to the viewer’s perspective. This is the backgazing of the book’s title.

Modernism also has a spatial dimension, and Giles sees Australian art as having, at times, disrupted mainstream assumptions from the margins. As in Antipodean America, he finds numerous moments when Australia and its writing impinge on a central modernist canon as well as many physical connections between canonical writers and the southern hemisphere: Conrad’s many visits to Australia as a seaman, for example, Joyce’s correspondence with his sister, a nun in New Zealand, and a visit by H.G. Wells in 1939.

Giles is particularly interested in how modernism breaks the barriers between demotic and high culture and how comedy and burlesque intrude into serious works of modernist art. In Australia, the popular embrace of modernity during the 1920s is evident in Australian enthusiasm for jazz and the art deco architecture still apparent in cities like Sydney. This leads him to consider how Kenneth Slessor’s poetry plays with time and modernity and opens a way to putting Slessor’s work alongside that of not only A.D. Hope but also Eliot, Bishop and Wallace Stevens.

In a dense chapter that might have formed a book in itself, he considers the links between modernist art and fascism, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. He explores the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy of time on the “reactionary modernists” who supported National Socialism, quoting Thomas Mann on Nazism’s mix of timely and “efficient modernness on the one hand and dreams of the past on the other — in a word, highly technological Romanticism.”

While Mann and Theodor Adorno resisted this philosophy, Giles sees the 1930s novels of Thomas Wolfe (an American of German background) as influenced by the underlying philosophy of Nazism — an influence that was much more common in the 1930s, he believes, than is usually acknowledged. The second world war involved not only a physical battle between national powers but also a conflict over “conceptions of temporality” as “Western culture set itself on a more rationalist, progressive path, one that rejected mythological fatalism in favour of an emphasis on volition and contingency.” Giles examines the effects through the fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner and Anthony Powell.

The tendency in Australia to see our culture as having been behind the times means that local arguments against modernist art in the 1930s and 1940s are sometimes dismissed as signs of ignorance rather than responses to an influential philosophical threat. Here Giles sets up a framework that invites revision of some critical attitudes, taking the largely forgotten R.D. FitzGerald as a starting place for his discussion of “reverse time” in Slessor’s and Hope’s work. Few contemporary Australians will be familiar with the novels of James T. Farrell, but he discusses them alongside Eleanor Dark’s novels as expressions of the new liberalism that dominated postwar literature. Farrell was the chair of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and visited Australia in 1956 as a guest of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. Because the Australian organisation was better known for its vehement anticommunism than for its liberalism, the notion that the two writers have “imaginative affinities” might appear at odds with their seemingly contrasting political positions. In this way, Giles’s international view brings some local peculiarities into new focus.

Following on from the shifts in modernism in the 1950s, Giles looks at W.H. Auden’s move to Austria in the late 1950s and the poet’s collaborations with the German composer Hans Werner Henze and librettos for Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky. He touches on the burlesque and absurd elements in the work of Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes before considering Patrick White’s “late modernism” and the relationship of his writing to painting, particularly through his friendship with Sidney Nolan and Nolan’s relationship to the American poet, Robert Lowell. In this way, he traces chains of connection across music, painting and literature to find similar patterns of expression in the late modernist art of Australia, America and Britain.

Holding on to these complex notions of time and space can be difficult as this book progresses, and few readers will be sufficiently familiar with the many authors under consideration to engage fully with Giles’s account of international modernism. This includes discussion of music (Wagner, Mahler, Berg) and film (Charles Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk — and another Australian, John Farrow) and ranges from Proust to Patrick White. Giles’s encyclopedic scope may begin to feel overwhelming as he brings together a crowd of writers, many of whom are part of the academic canon (Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, Faulkner) but others of whom (Nancy Cunard, Farrell) are unlikely to be studied and read by Australians. Sharing his wide knowledge, he turns some accepted notions of Australian literary history sideways and offers a new reading of some neglected writers.

Backgazing is full of brilliant ideas drawn from Giles’s considerable knowledge of early twentieth-century writing across the hemispheres. While few readers will be able to match his breadth of reading, many will find parts of the book illuminating and be persuaded by this new arrangement of twentieth-century world literature and Australian literature’s place within it. •

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White had already published The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957), but he’d now been joined in this critical response to contemporary Australia by a new generation of novelists. Christopher Koch (then twenty-six) published his first novel, The Boys in the Island, in 1958 and Thea Astley (thirty-three) her first novel, Girl with a Monkey. The twenty-three-year-old Randolph Stow won the Miles Franklin award for his second book of fiction, To the Islands, and Elizabeth Harrower, then thirty, published her stunning second novel, The Long Prospect.

Of these young novelists, Harrower, like White, was a chronicler of Sydney. She was living in Britain when she wrote her first two novels, Down in the City (1957) and The Long Prospect, recalling life in Sydney and Newcastle with the detachment of distance. Down in the City, which followed the attraction of a well-brought-up young woman to a vulgar man from the semi-criminal world, depicted the conjunction of rackety King’s Cross with the wealthy suburbs to its east; The Long Prospect focused on a girl growing up in the haphazard care of her grandmother in an outer suburb of an industrial town.

That second novel had obvious autobiographical elements. The suburb was clearly based on Mayfield in Newcastle, where Harrower spent the first ten years of her life. Her protagonist, Emily, is a prisoner of her family, kept from intellectual and cultural life by an energetic and sometimes malicious woman whose interests extend no further than dreary sexual affairs, the pub and the radio broadcast of Saturday’s horse races.

Back in Australia, Harrower wrote a novel set in London, The Catherine Wheel (1960), in which a lonely young woman falls hopelessly in love with a feckless young man and is caught in a cycle of emotional abuse. This pattern — young women under the influence of controlling people, denied access to the consolations of art and human sympathy — appeared again in The Watch Tower (1966), which many readers regard as Harrower’s masterpiece. In this novel, the elder of two sisters left to fend for themselves in Sydney decides to marry her boss to give them both a secure home. The husband is Bluebeard transformed into a North Shore businessman and the novel draws us into the psychological games and emotional abuse he inflicts on his two captives.

Harrower sets up situations that echo the beginnings of Victorian novels in which educationally deprived middle-class young women are left vulnerable to sexual and psychological danger. As James Wood has commented, Henry James shadows her novels, her women locked away — like The Portrait of a Lady’s Isabel Archer — in grotesque marriages. James’s What Maisie Knew clearly influenced the shifting points of view in The Long Prospect as the innocent Emily watches with resignation the sexual escapades of her grandmother and is drawn to the sympathetic kindness of an older man. It was a situation that Vladimir Nabokov explored to darker satirical effect in Lolita, published three years earlier — but in 1958 Australians had no access to Lolita.

Harrower’s fiction is firmly located in the Australian suburbs of the mid-twentieth century, and her voice intrudes occasionally with scathing satirical comments on suburban life. As Brigid Rooney notes in her recent book, Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity, Harrower’s fiction shares some of Betty Friedan’s understanding of the way suburbia trapped women. It also added a woman’s perspective to the satirisation of suburban values by writers like White, often conveyed through the derision of women.

As Rooney writes, “Keeping company with Friedan’s housewives — suffering from ‘a problem that has no name’ — [Harrower’s protagonists] find themselves alone in claustrophobic and hostile terrain, contending with what White termed the cultural desert of mid-century suburban Australia.” White became a great supporter of Harrower’s work, constantly urging her to write more in the decades that followed.

For a range of reasons, three of the acclaimed young novelists of 1958, Koch, Stow and Harrower, stopped publishing after 1967, with Koch and Stow re-emerging at the end of the 1970s. Harrower withdrew her next novel from publication in 1971, apparently because she had doubts about its quality. She published occasional short stories but no further novels until Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston of Text Publishing convinced her to let them publish In Certain Circles (2014), the 1971 manuscript they found in her archives. Text reprinted all her novels and collected her short stories in A Few Days in the Country (2015). The new books were reviewed enthusiastically, though they don’t match the force of The Long Prospect or The Watch Tower.

Harrower’s long silence was a matter of puzzlement to many who recognised in those early novels a major talent. In interviews, she made the distinction between writing and publishing, and talked about the need for an urgent subject to write about. Certainly, it would have been difficult to continue writing in the dark mode of The Watch Tower.

Social attitudes in Australia were changing rapidly after the 1960s and Harrower’s fiction focused on domestic life immediately before and after the second world war. It chimed with White’s satirical vision of suburbia in Riders in the Chariot (1961) or Robin Boyd’s in The Australian Ugliness (1960). Fortunately, conditions began to change in the 1970s with women’s growing access to education and work. By the 1980s many other female writers — Helen Garner, Jessica Anderson, Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters — were depicting women’s domestic experiences.

Harrower clearly enjoyed the renewed focus on her work, happily attending public readings and author events in the last decade of her life. Her novels give us an insight into how women and children fared in a narrow and philistine Australia in which their hunger for attention, kindness and some shared understanding of a wider world contended with a sometimes-malicious anti-intellectualism. They remind us how the powerful can psychologically oppress the vulnerable and how hard-won is the struggle against material ugliness and narrow-mindedness. And they do this with an engaging elegance of style. What more can we expect of a novelist? •

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Judith Wright’s “Bullocky” and “South of My Days” are better-known attempts to claim a similar relationship to the land for white settlers. By the 1960s, though, Wright had disclaimed her early poems as glorifying a white nationalist vision that she no longer could support.

Like Wright’s early work, Campbell’s poems were the product of the 1940s and 1950s, when war and postwar reconstruction made the Australian countryside seem more precious than ever. His unpretentious lyrics spoke about daily life in the place where you belong: he once commented that “at times I had the sense of riding around my own world of the imagination, my own creation.” Born in 1915, he was the authentic farmer-poet of Australia, though he also self-consciously called on the traditions of the English lyric and the bush ballad, and was influenced by both Robbie Burns and W.B. Yeats. Poems such as “Cocky’s Calendar” and “Works and Days” made the tradition anew for the Australian pastoral in a form that could be enjoyed by any attentive reader.

Jonathan Persse clearly loves Campbell’s lyrics, and his “Life of the Poet” serves more as a celebration of Campbell than as a traditional biography. Persse edited the correspondence of Campbell and Douglas Stewart in Letters Lifted into Poetry (NLA, 2006) and instigated the posthumous publication of Campbell’s war novel Strike by ANU’s Pandanus Press in the same year. He knows the Campbell archives well, and draws on his substantial correspondence for this account of the life.

In person, Campbell matched the ideal of mid-century Australian masculinity to an almost absurd degree. He was tall and strong, with good looks marred by the sporting legacy of a broken nose. The only son of a doctor who owned a range of properties with his brothers, David’s education followed the regular path for squatters’ sons in New South Wales: King’s School, then off to Cambridge University.

At King’s, he was popular and athletic, captain of the school, with no particular academic distinction. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he was an exemplary Australian, elected to all the desirable clubs and winning the presidency of the Wheatsheaf club (devoted to drinking beer) by downing a pint in the quickest time. He won a Cambridge blue for rugby, even playing for England in test matches against Wales and Ireland, and learnt to fly aeroplanes in his free time. Persse includes half a dozen group photographs in which Campbell poses, with the same facial expression, in the uniforms of different clubs and teams. His English tutor, the critic E.M.W. Tillyard, was surprised that he also wrote verse that showed signs of a genuine poetic sensibility.

After war broke out in 1939 he joined the Royal Australian Air Force, winning a Distinguished Flying Cross for guiding his damaged plane and crew back to Port Moresby under fire after a surveillance flight over Rabaul. He was wounded and lost a finger in the attack. By the end of the war, his DFC had a bar.

After that glorious wartime career, Campbell settled down to life with his young family on Wells Station, close to the growing city of Canberra. His first book of poetry, Speak with the Sun, was published in 1949, largely on Tillyard’s recommendation, and he gained the friendly support of fellow poet and Bulletin literary editor Douglas Stewart, leading to frequent mutual visits and fishing trips that often inspired poetry. The social life of Canberra, with its burgeoning university and diplomatic corps, meant that Campbell and his wife made many new friends, entertaining them with country hospitality. No longer a solitary farmer-poet, Campbell was increasingly surrounded by other writers and intellectuals, and became well known in literary circles.

This idyllic life began to fall apart when the encroaching Canberra suburbs forced a move to a more remote property outside Bungendore. Campbell began drinking more heavily, with periods spent in Alanbrook psychiatric hospital in Sydney. He separated from his wife and moved back closer to Canberra and the community around the university, including his friend Manning Clark, and developed a relationship with Judy Jones, then a tutor in Clark’s history department. In the last decade of his life, his poetry reflected a new engagement with a wider world, particularly after a visit to Europe with Jones in 1975. His style became freer and often more opaque in its allusions. Though it still drew on Campbell’s family memories, it was just as likely to refer to classical European art.

Persse is reluctant to offer his own readings of Campbell’s work, preferring to quote published criticism or admiring letters from the poet’s friends, but he does provide welcome context for understanding the poems. The publication of Campbell’s selected Poems in 1962 marks the end of one phase of his career, with his later books including responses to and translations of other poets, interpretations of the Aboriginal rock carvings in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, and even “My Lai,” a protest poem against the Vietnam war. It helps to learn that The Branch of Dodona (1970) includes poems based on his Alanbrook experiences and that Deaths and Pretty Cousins (1975) draws on family history.

In the mid 1970s Campbell embarked on a project with Rosemary Dobson and Natalie Staples to translate a variety of Russian poems into English, and the examples quoted by Persse show Campbell’s lyric facility. By the time of his death in 1979, he was surrounded by admiring younger poets, including Alan Gould and Geoff Page, who were inclined to value his work above the more ambitious poetry of A.D. Hope or Stewart. Yet he was never prolific and favoured the brief lyric over any extended examination of a subject. Clive James (another poet without a single-minded sense of vocation) once called him an “amateur” poet, a description that need not be seen as derogatory in the context of Campbell’s active life.

While Persse sticks firmly to an account of a heroic, admirable poet and Australian, he gives us glimpses of a more complex man: the solitary farmer who made friends easily, the gentle poet ready for a punch-up, the lover of women who seemed to prefer the company of men, the family man who was often unfaithful. He was the guest of honour who arrived late and drunk to dinner at his old school and kicked a schoolmaster to the ground when he made an ignorant comment about Campbell’s poetry.

It is difficult to convey in a biography the sense of humour and fun that made Campbell socially popular, though Persse notes that, even in Alanbrook hospital, he gathered a group of admiring friends. Campbell’s friendships crossed many of the divides in Australia’s literary society. He was a solicitous friend to the suffering Francis Webb, the fishing companion of Manning Clark and a close friend of Leonie Kramer. When Patrick White was writing The Twyborn Affair and wanted to revisit the Adaminaby station where he served as a jackaroo in the 1930s, he called on Campbell to accompany him.

Campbell’s life might be mapped on to a wider Australian social history, with the second world war as a turning point. The consoling quality in the early poetry and the drinking and depression of the 1960s might now be seen as the after-effects of his wartime trauma. Although Persse allows us to see these possibilities, he is more comfortable detailing Campbell’s practical achievements, summarising flight logs and totting up earnings from the sale of cattle, sheep and poetry. He offers only a few sentences on Campbell’s wartime romance and rapid marriage but provides a full account of his divorce settlement. He resists speculating too far beyond the archives.

Anyone who admires Campbell’s poetry will be grateful for this book, and it will provide new readers with an accessible account of the poetry and the man who wrote it. Persse quotes more than seventy of Campbell’s poems, making this an excellent introduction to the work. •

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Television’s arrival in 1956 brought a fierce new competitor. Movie theatres closed around the country, further damaging the prospects for a local industry. But the new medium also laid the foundations of the 1970s revival of Australian filmmaking by training cinematographers, producers, directors, writers and actors and enabling them to develop professional careers at home. It also taught audiences to enjoy dramas about people like themselves, helping create an appetite for Australian feature films and the kind of theatre that emerged in the 1970s.

As they became aware of the opportunities likely to open up in television, many Australian writers headed to Britain to learn about the new medium first-hand. Some of Australia’s leading dramatists spent most of their careers in Britain or America: Sumner Locke Elliott, whose Rusty Bugles of 1948 foreshadowed the postwar theatre revival, spent the 1950s as a television writer in New York; and the authors of two other suburban-realist plays, Richard Beynon (The Shifting Heart, 1957) and Alan Seymour (The One Day of the Year, 1960), soon followed Ray Lawler to British television. Ralph Peterson was writing for stage and television in Britain in the early 1950s and Peter Yeldham headed there in 1956, convinced that prospects for television writers would be limited in Australia.

Writers who stayed home, meanwhile, struggled to teach themselves how to write in the new medium. Hugh Stuckey had been writing radio sketch material for years when he was asked to write comedy material for the television variety show Sydney Tonight in 1957. His training consisted of a visit to the studios and an explanation of the set and positioning of the cameras. Then he was sent home to write. Like other writers in early television, he watched how the American and British writers tackled the task — though they, too, were transferring skills learnt from radio.

Cliff Green was working as a schoolteacher in a Victorian country town when he wrote his first television script, Christmas at Boggy Creek (1963), based on a Christmas play he had written for his students to perform. He had sent it to the ABC as a potential radio play but they suggested he adapt it for television. At the time he had no access to a television — country Victoria had no television reception — so he relied on a BBC how-to-write-for-television book. “I did an adaptation of it and I sent that off and they made it,” he told me. “So here I was — first script produced!”

After writing the children’s series Riverboat Bill for the ABC and lots of educational scripts for the state education department, Green was snapped up by Crawford Productions, which was desperate for writers. In 1969, he made the big decision to give up the security of schoolteaching for the life of a television writer. With Yeldham and Eleanor Witcombe, he was to become one of the leading adapters of classic Australian novels for television.

Tony Morphett had more conventional literary ambitions, publishing three novels and writing plays while he did interviews for the ABC’s Talks Department and made documentaries for radio and television. On the strength of his published novels, he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant to write another novel. But then he met the Welshman Glyn Davies, a veteran of British television, who went on to pitch a series based on Morphett’s novel Dynasty (1970) to the ABC. The series was a success and Morphett became a television writer.

“What I found, at the age of thirty-four, years ago, when I went out into the wide world from the ABC and stumbled into being a television drama writer, I found I loved it,” he said in an interview for the Australian Writers Foundation/Foxtel Oral History Project. “I loved the collaborative process. I didn’t at first; I was a monster! I wouldn’t let them change a comma. I would go to a read-through and give an actor line readings. I mean, I was a beast!”

Advertising was so closely allied to commercial radio and television that the shift from one industry to the other seemed logical. Ted Roberts, for example, was working as an advertising manager for Johnson’s Wax in 1968 when he was asked through friends to write the words for the theme music of the children’s series Skippy. He took the results to Lee Robinson at Fauna Productions, who suggested he try writing a script for the show and gave him a sample script to take home. When he turned up on Monday morning with his own script, Robinson was surprised but gave him a cheque on the spot. It was more than a month’s salary at Johnson’s Wax, so he quit his job to write for television. “I got into it by sheer accident,” he told me. “Sheer accident! And I loved it. I had no experience; I had no training; I had nothing. But I just sort of took to it somehow.”

Though the evolution of television drama is often discussed separately from developments in film and stage drama, the small screen played an important role in reinvigorating both art forms. By the end of the 1960s, with a new generation of actors and playwrights emerging from the universities and drama schools, stage drama had begun a resurgence. In Sydney, the conglomerate of drama interests around the University of New South Wales (the National Institute of Dramatic Art, the School of Drama and the Old Tote Theatre Company) set up a theatre in a disused church in Jane Street, Randwick, to produce new Australian plays. Its success was mixed until 1970, when Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’s The Legend of King O’Malley energised its audiences with a mix of satire, music, vaudeville and some serious political comment on Australia’s rowdy history and its current involvement in the Vietnam war.

Histories of Australian drama refer to these developments in Australian theatre as the “New Wave,” marking its Sydney emergence with King O’Malley and the growing number of actors and producers studying at NIDA. Simultaneously in Melbourne, the Australian Performing Group grew out of small-scale experimental productions by university graduates at La Mama cafe and later the Pram Factory. This group of writers, actors and producers, influenced by the political crisis brought on by the Vietnam war, were determined to make theatre that was radical in its style and its politics.

This group, which included David Williamson, John Romeril and Jack Hibberd, participated in every aspect of production, sometimes acting in their own or each other’s plays and collaborating with other young creative people. They were aware of the history of Australian theatre and the importance of vaudeville and musical traditions in popular theatre, and some of their productions were agitprop or influenced by the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.

Plays like Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola (1969) and John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974) mined some of the same traditions that Boddy and Ellis employed in King O’Malley. Indeed, Dimboola and King O’Malley have remained popular, making them two of the most performed Australian plays in amateur theatre.

Much has been written about the New Wave drama of the 1970s and its revitalisation of Australian theatre. It seems important to emphasise that this drama was written by people who had encountered Australian television and participated in its production, and that the producers of stage drama and television drama were not separate groups of people.

What would the history of Australian drama look like if its list of the significant productions of the 1960s was broadened to include Charmian Clift’s television adaptation of My Brother Jack (1965) and Richard Lane’s of You Can’t See Round Corners (1967)? Looking at drama history that way would certainly extend the range and depth in the criticism of national attitudes evident in stage productions of the time. It might lead to a more sophisticated account of the development of realism as a dramatic style, rather than its simplistic dismissal as an outdated and conservative form.

The excitement of working in a new or revitalised industry in the 1970s was shared across stage, television and film. The writers, actors and producers of television drama were likely to see all the new local films and stage dramas. Some of them were also writing, acting in or producing these films and stage dramas.

When he became the ABC’s senior television drama producer in Melbourne in 1970, Oscar Whitbread went to every production of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Australian Performing Group, keeping a look out for talent, particularly acting talent. As a result, APG actors appeared in many of the ABC’s televised playhouse productions in the 1970s, becoming familiar to much bigger audiences than they reached in the theatre.

One example of the interchange between television drama, film and the theatre was Whitbread’s casting of APG actors including Graeme Blundell and Kerry Dwyer in Cliff Green’s four-part drama Marion in 1973. When Peter Weir was seeking a screen adaptation for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) he approached an overcommitted David Williamson, who recommended Green on the strength of the scripts his APG colleagues had shown him. In this way, Green, the scriptwriter for children’s shows, Crawford’s Homicide and ABC miniseries adaptations, came to write the film generally regarded as the turning point for the New Wave of Australian filmmaking in the 1970s.

Tony Morphett, now known mainly as a television writer, co-wrote the screenplay for Weir’s second success, The Last Wave (1977). Weir hired him because he had seen Morphett’s television series Certain Women (1973) and wanted the writer to give the film a grounding in contemporary reality to support its more fantastic elements. Morphett commented that his television work effectively subsidised his writing for the film. In a similar way, Australia’s pre-eminent playwright, David Williamson, became better known to many Australians as the writer of Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) than for his stage plays.

These three writers, Green, Morphett and Williamson, were integral to the success of Weir’s early films, just as they were important to the development of quality Australian television drama. Weir himself had begun his screen career as a television production assistant on The Mavis Bramston Show.

Other television writers wrote the screenplays for the landmark Australian films Sunday Too Far Away (1975, John Dingwall) and My Brilliant Career (1979, Eleanor Witcombe). The training they received writing for television was an essential background to the revival of Australian film, and for most of them television provided the financial support that stage and film could not.

The development of the “New Waves” of Australian stage drama and Australian film occurred in tandem, pushed along by a range of social and political changes. Australian television was the third part of that New Wave — except that, of course, it was not a revival of a previously existing phenomenon but a new and rapidly changing technology. •

This is an edited extract from Susan Lever’s new book, Creating Australian Television Drama: A Screenwriting History, published this month by Australian Scholarly Publishing

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Only a writer with Brenda Niall’s command of research materials could notice such a moment of social connection. Her 1979 book, Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, established her as the pre-eminent scholar of these Australian children’s authors at a time when children’s fiction was looked down on as “kiddylit.” She has since become one of Australia’s most important biographers of literary and art figures, her subjects including Martin Boyd and the Boyd family, the artistic Durack sisters and the artist Judy Cassab. On the way, she has gained a wealth of knowledge about Australian society and how its cultural elites have intermingled over decades.

In Friends and Rivals, she draws on this knowledge to produce an entertaining exploration of the overlapping lives of four of Australia’s most admired women writers. It is the kind of book that can only be written by someone immersed in Australian literature and alert to the social and professional constraints on women writers.

Turner’s unexpected friendship with Baynton serves as an introduction to an account of Turner’s difficult childhood as the daughter of a widow who brought her daughters to Australia in a desperate attempt to retrieve her fortunes. Her unhappy Sydney marriage to a man ten years younger confirmed her daughters’ resolve to earn their own living rather than rely on marriage to support them.

By the time Turner married the young barrister Herbert Curlewis she was earning more from her children’s novels and her columns in newspapers than he was from legal practice. After 1917, when Curlewis had become a judge, his wife continued to churn out a novel a year. None would attain the popularity or acclaim of Seven Little Australians, though, and her ambition to become a famous adult novelist fell by the wayside.

Turner’s friendship with Baynton grew at a time when the older woman was a rich widow and canny investor. By the time she wrote them, Baynton’s stories of women trapped in horrific outback conditions appeared at odds with her respectable city life as a rich doctor’s wife. They clearly drew on a past she was anxious to hide, including her marriage to a man who had abandoned her and their three children. Baynton was a magnificent liar, inventing romantic myths about her early life and obliterating her poor parents and the grinding years in the bush. In Sydney she found work as a housekeeper for the wealthy Dr Baynton, marrying him the day after she finalised a divorce.

Niall sees her marriage as Pygmalion-like, with the much older Baynton schooling Barbara in the ways of the middle classes. After his death, she set up house in London and managed to enter the exclusive social world of the aristocracy, who were amused by her extravagant personality. Her marriage to the eccentric Lord Headley appears too improbable for fiction, though she was the model for Martin Boyd’s social-climbing heroine in his novels Brangane and Such Pleasure.

The connection between the writers from Melbourne, Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer, was more formal. Palmer attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College a decade after Richardson and neglected her predecessor’s fiction until Richardson’s schoolfriend, Mary Kernot, drew her attention to the omission of Maurice Guest from Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature (1913). Palmer took her role as the custodian of Australian literature seriously and duly sought the novelist out at her home in Sussex. She became a committed promoter of Richardson’s work in Australia.

Of these four writers, only Richardson can indisputably be termed “great,” though Australians were slow to appreciate her work. The final volume of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Ultima Thule, was not published until 1929, after Richardson’s husband paid a subvention to Heinemann. It would lift the other two novels of the trilogy out of oblivion and lead readers to reassess Richardson’s schoolgirl story, The Getting of Wisdom. Like the other writers, Richardson tried to control public versions of herself, causing many readers and critics, encouraged by her memoir Myself When Young, to confuse the fictions with her life story.

Richardson was witty at Palmer’s expense (“impish,” she would have said) in letters describing the critic’s visits. Niall lets us see how Palmer’s seriousness emerged from her childhood circumstances — more stable than those of the fiction writers but nevertheless engendering an exaggerated sense of responsibility. She was never to know that Kernot and Richardson’s executor Olga Roncoroni were protecting her from the contents of those letters when they obstructed her proposed biography of Richardson. She wrote an important critical study instead.

Though these writers were not really the “friends and rivals” of the title, this loose frame allows Niall to give attention to some of the talented figures clustered around her four subjects who may not warrant full biographies of their own. Louise Mack, a schoolfriend of Turner, came to scorn Turner’s comfortable suburban life and unambitious children’s books, and ventured to England in pursuit of a more illustrious literary career. She published several novels, including a roman à clef that mocked Turner, and she was a war correspondent in Belgium at the beginning of the first world war. Without financial success, though, she spent the last years of her life in Sydney writing Mills & Boon novels and newspaper journalism.

Exact contemporaries, Ethel Turner and Henry Handel (Ethel) Richardson each had talented siblings called Lilian/Lillian whose achievements were eclipsed by those of their sisters. Turner shared various writing projects with her sister, but Richardson always portrayed her Lil as the simpler and stereotypically pretty younger sister. Niall brings her out of the shadows as an active suffragette whose first marriage to a German ophthalmologist collapsed under the strain of the first world war.

Lil later married A.S. Neill, a teacher and educational theorist, and together they set up Summerhill, a school that focused on creativity and self-expression in children. Lil managed all the practical aspects of the school, but, as Niall notes, just as Richardson downplayed Lil’s role in her own household, Neill erased Lil from his version of the founding of Summerhill. Niall also reminds us that while Richardson kept everyone in the house to her rigid routine, her husband George Robertson was downstairs in his study writing a major history of German literature and a biography of Goethe.

The cumulative effect of these loosely connected stories is to draw out the incentives that turned women into writers at a time when they had few other outlets for creativity. Turner and her sister were determined to become writers from their teenage years, while Baynton’s fiction appears to be a rare commitment to paper of her rich imaginative life. Richardson became a writer under the influence of her husband after the failure of her ambitions as a pianist. Nettie Palmer published her early poems but always deferred to the creativity of her novelist husband, Vance. Difficult childhoods may have provided material for fiction but supportive husbands clearly had important roles in the lives of these women. Palmer chose a novelist for a husband and spent her life supporting and promoting his work, probably at the expense of her own creative life.

But these aren’t presented as morals to be drawn from their lives (marry a stable man with potential earning power). They are evidence of Niall’s alertness to the conditions of art and the many talented people, men and women, who never achieve fame. She has evident sympathy for the critic, Palmer, who worked all her life to support the work of other Australian writers and accepted her task with humility. It is, perhaps, a sign of Niall’s own awareness of the secondary nature of the biographer and critic in the literary world. Her learning sits lightly on her narrative as she shares some of the fascinating insights she has gathered over a long career. •

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In Novel Politics, political scientists John Uhr and Shaun Crowe argue that literature can reveal much about how political ideas circulate in Australia. In defining political fiction, the subject of an undergraduate course they have taught at the Australian National University, they follow Irving Howe’s distinction between the “political” novel, which confronts readers with the consequences of political ideas, and the “social” novel, which takes “society for granted” — George Eliot’s social philosophy versus Jane Austen’s wry observation, in other words. Their interest is in novelists as public intellectuals rather than as observers and entertainers.

Because their broad definition of politics covers many more Australian novels than could be discussed in a book of this length, Uhr and Crowe use six case studies to demonstrate their ideas. Uhr examines three pre-Federation novels, by Catherine Helen Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin, while Crowe looks at a novel each by contemporary writers Tim Winton and Christos Tsiolkas, and two by Kim Scott.

Spence’s Clara Morison is an amusing novel, reflecting her devotion to Jane Austen in the period before she encountered George Eliot, but Uhr concentrates on how it deals with the nature of civic virtue in the new “free” colony of South Australia. Spence was the first woman to stand for public office in Australia, and it may be that Uhr and Crowe’s interest in her work partly reflects her increasingly active role in social and political reform.

Rosa Praed also had something of the insider’s perspective. She was the daughter of Thomas Murray-Prior, the Queensland postmaster-general during the period when the post became a political ministry, and for a time acted as social companion to her widowed father, learning about the machinations of colonial politics. In Policy and Passion she writes directly about political intrigue in the Australian colony, and Novel Politics focuses on her analysis of civic virtue and vice in a new society.

Uhr reads Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl not only as a “New Woman” novel concerned with the possibilities for women in the new society, but also as an exploration of the era’s philosophical debates. The heroine of this long novel is committed, in turn, to Newman’s notion of Catholicism, to Kant’s philosophy and then to social democracy. Like Spence and Praed, Martin was writing at a time when fiction was one of the few avenues for unenfranchised women to participate in debates about the future of the colonies.

By contrast, the three contemporary novelists are all tertiary-educated men in a position to claim some public attention outside their fiction. Crowe’s chapters cover the identity politics of recent decades and some of Australia’s most pressing challenges — environmental degradation, inequality, and the possibilities for reconciliation between settler and Indigenous communities.

All three of these novelists are political activists. Interestingly, only Tim Winton gained close attention in Brigid Rooney’s Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009), and only Kim Scott contributes a statement to Bernadette Brennan’s collection of writers on social commitment Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice (2008). But it is the third of Crowe’s subjects, Christos Tsiolkas, who is the most traditionally political in his writing about class and the place of the sexual outsider.

Crowe finds the source of Winton’s environmentalism in his writing’s sensual response to nature, particularly in Dirt Music. He sees Winton’s determined identification with “redneck” attitudes to the environment as “prioritising earned wisdom over the mediated lessons of science.” Winton’s characters often earn their livelihood from nature, and don’t view it sentimentally, and Crowe makes the interesting point that Winton’s championing of Ningaloo Reef follows from his artistic engagement with the natural world rather than a more rational consideration of scientific evidence.

Tsiolkas is a more complicated case, with his self-consciousness about political theory and his allegiance to both gay liberation and the migrant experience. As this book suggests, his negotiation of the contradictions in these allegiances makes for some of the more interesting moments in his fiction. Personally, though, Dead Europe strikes me as more politically engaging (and disturbing) than the popular The Slap, which Crowe examines, with its tenuous narrative premise and selective sympathy for its characters.

For its part, Scott’s That Deadman Dance is astonishing in its disciplined account of early contact history and the brief possibility of a more equal and reconciled nation. At this point, Crowe is inclined to let the novelist make the political argument, limiting himself to a description of the novel’s content and context, including Scott’s more recent novel, Taboo.

Novel Politics opens up a debate about fiction’s role in circulating political ideas and its capacity to engage readers’ imaginations in unpredictable ways. Dirt Music and The Slap were both popular among readers who may have sympathised with their political positions, but they also stimulated wider discussions about current issues. That Deadman Dance, like Scott’s Benang, makes greater demands on its readers but also provides new insights into first-contact history. Of the nineteenth-century novels, Clara Morison has been the most widely read and appreciated, perhaps because its themes are carried along by its comedy, whereas the full version of An Australian Girl requires a considerable commitment of time and attention.

Uhr and Crowe offer distinctive readings of these novels. They anticipate that the people they call “traditional literary critics” may smile at their naivety in taking on such a broad topic, but they might have been more sensitive to the range of contemporary critical writing. Their recourse to important books of the 1970s — Tom Inglis Moore’s Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Brian Kiernan’s Images of Society and Nature and Geoffrey Serle’s From Deserts the Prophets Come — seems to imply that Australian literary studies have somehow ignored the political and social dimensions of fiction for the past forty years. David Marr’s reference on the cover to the need for Australian fiction to be rescued from a “deadening simplicity of patriotic tradition” overlooks a vast amount of feminist and postcolonial critique in recent decades.

Novel Politics will entice those who read Australian literature to propose their own list of political novels. As well as a range of feminist novels from the 1970s and 80s, mine would include Joseph Furphy’s Rigby’s Romance, Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Frank Hardy’s But the Dead Are Many, Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip and, most of all, given our current situation, Andrew McGahan’s Underground. The field is large, and the authors of Novel Politics suggest that the time has come for political scientists to embrace it. Perhaps we will see regular “Politics and Literature” conferences and a “Politics and Fiction” society to continue their work. •

Policy and Passion and the first edition of An Australian Girl can be downloaded for free as pdfs from the University of Sydney Library. Clara Morison is available commercially as an ebook.

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McGahan was a phenomenon in the literary world, a young “dirty realist” of the 1990s with Praise, his Vogel prize-winning novel about a drug-fuelled love affair in seedy Brisbane. Its prequel, 1988, was a hilarious parody of Kerouac-style road-trip novels that had tough things to say about white Australian history. There was a play, too, called Bait, about the efforts of Gordon, the protagonist of Praise and 1988, to conform to a public service job, and also the screenplay for an engaging film version of Praise. McGahan’s novels were both entertaining and serious, and many readers waited with anticipation for what he would do once he had worked through this autobiographical material.

He admitted to baulking at the next step in a literary career, publicly wondering whether he had anything more to say. He tried his hand at crime fiction with Last Drinks, a novel about corruption in Queensland before the Fitzgerald inquiry. Then, in Underground, he imagined an alternative Australia led by an uncharismatic dictator working with international leaders to keep Canberra closed off from the rest of the nation. That novel expressed McGahan’s fury at the Howard government, but re-reading it in the time of Trump, as controls on immigrants and information become even tighter, gives it an even sharper edge. McGahan always understood that the ordinariness of Australia might hide nasty and dangerous possibilities, the pose of “nothing to see here” encouraging a laziness among us when we ought to be galvanised by outrage.

Those novels played with popular genres while insisting that corruption never ends, that politicians always need to be held to account, that secrecy is always dangerous. In The White Earth McGahan moved to the pastoral saga, dealing with Queensland’s brutal race history in the light of the Mabo decision. It won the Miles Franklin award in 2005, as well as several other major prizes, though in some ways it is the least engaging of his novels, without his customary satiric edge. For once, as the novel’s perspectives alternated between a boy trying to understand the hidden history of the Darling Downs and his conniving great-uncle clinging to his tenuous ownership in defiance of the Mabo decision, there was no central figure to express McGahan’s cynical, world-weary view of human folly.

In Wonders of a Godless World McGahan turned to yet another genre. The protagonist of this fantastic journey into a fabled world learns about the power of nature through a series of out-of-body experiences. Like the boy in The White Earth, the Orphan, a girl, is an innocent open to every impression, willing to follow the Foreigner, who shows her a series of natural catastrophes. He explains that these are not part of a cycle of regeneration but merely the result of physical systems: “Life doesn’t matter to the earth.” With magnificent descriptions of the physics of nature — volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms, floods, noxious gases and, finally, the looming destruction of life by a comet — the novel shows McGahan in philosophical mode, contemplating the insignificance of human life in the face of the physical forces around us. A work of both imaginative force and scientific logic, the novel won the Aurealis award for science fiction. During that period, McGahan had also taken up young adult fiction, publishing four novels in his Ship Kings fantasy seafaring series.

Some of the preoccupations evident in those earlier novels come together in McGahan’s final novel. The Rich Man’s House begins with a clever pastiche of historical writing, describing the early discovery of the Wheel, a mountain situated on an island a few hundred kilometres south of Tasmania. Almost three times the height of Everest, it becomes the site of a series of mostly fatal attempts on its summit. Only one man ever reaches its pinnacle, known as the Hand of God, and this is a fabulously wealthy American, Walter Richman, who has built a palace on a mountain on a nearby island so he can observe the Wheel in its changing moods.

The reader’s perspective comes through Rita Gausse, the estranged daughter of the palace’s recently deceased architect, who is enticed to join Richman and his entourage there. She is one of McGahan’s cynical and wayward but fundamentally decent observers, appalled by the extravagance of her father’s vision. She has witnessed nature’s revenge on some of her father’s other buildings and appears to have been invited out of superstition. With Rita we explore this extraordinary place, built in defiance of nature, a monument to human arrogance and the power of money. McGahan clearly enjoys inventing its luxurious rooms and tunnels, a kind of exaggerated version of the building projects on reality television by which rich people, driven by willpower and wealth, create homes filled with unnecessary luxury.

An earthquake wreaks havoc on this Tower of Babel, gradually cutting it off from contact with the world below. The novel follows the conventions of a thriller as Rita struggles to survive and comes to understand Richman’s motivations. Yet it also maintains a biblical dimension, with Richman confidently ensconced in his eyrie, in defiance if not of God then of the powerful natural world. The godless, uncaring world of McGahan’s earlier novel makes way here for the possibility that the Earth may actively seek revenge. He intercuts the narrative with newspaper reports and commentaries that give a background to events, and he vividly describes the geological fabric of the mountain and its meteorological effects. The almost playful conclusion presents reports on the 2075 anniversary climb and tells us more than we might need to know about Richman’s fate.

It is impossible to read The Rich Man’s House without an awareness of its author’s death. McGahan inserts an author’s note cheerfully advising the reader that the book might have been closer to perfect if he hadn’t been forced to rush publication in the face of his “abrupt decline in health.” In this light, the novel’s calm contemplation of death might be read as evidence of McGahan’s equanimity about his own demise and his willingness to face up to the insignificance of individual life. Its satiric elements, though, suggest that he managed to maintain a bemused anger at the way power and money dominate our society. Like all McGahan’s writing, while it is a call to recognise the folly of natural destruction, it resists pomposity.

We’ve lost a rare Australian voice — a talented writer with a strong ethical sense who never took himself too seriously. The Rich Man’s House is thoroughly entertaining, cleverly written and driven by an ethical conception. With Wonders of a Godless World it joins the many recent fictions that speculate about the future of a planet at the mercy of humans heedless of the consequences of their urge to conquer it. •

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The chair was established in the 1960s after a long campaign and a public subscription scheme. Until then, Australian literature had been promoted through a series of Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures, with only a few tertiary courses, such as the one taught from 1954 by Tom Inglis Moore at the Australian National University, concentrating on the national literature. Though the fundraising campaign was insufficient to cover the chair, the university’s decision to make up the difference appeared to be an acknowledgement of the need to nurture, criticise and appreciate the work of Australian writers. It was a public statement about the importance of writing in the cultural life of the nation.

Of course, the chair was part of the university and its appointees behaved like academics. The first, G.A. Wilkes, soon moved to the more firmly endowed Challis chair of English, but his successor Leonie Kramer held the position for twenty years from 1968, eventually becoming a controversial chancellor of the university. Even memories of this illustrious career have not stirred the university to support her old position.

Kramer held herself aloof from the growing cohort of Australian literature enthusiasts emerging in the wake of increased educational opportunities and the commitment to Australian literature in high schools in the 1970s. She rarely appeared at conferences of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, or ASAL, for example, apparently suspicious of the “radical nationalist” tendency among younger academics. At the same time, she was well known for her outspoken views on education, her work on the ABC board, and even her critical attack on Patrick White (and White’s churlish response). She was more a public figure — as a dame of the British Empire from 1976 — than the kind of diligent Australian Research Council–favoured researcher now dominating university positions.

When she was appointed as Kramer’s successor, Elizabeth Webby took a more cooperative approach to her role, attending every ASAL conference, editing Southerly journal, serving on judging panels and public committees, and doing what she could to support the careers of younger academics in the field. She is an expert on her subject — a mine of information about the full range of Australian writing from the nineteenth century to the present — and many scholars and writers acknowledge a debt to her generosity.

Among Webby’s PhD students was Rob Dixon, another expert in nineteenth-century Australian literature who followed a cultural history approach to literature. With a list of ARC grants to support his position, he fitted the more recent model of a university professor, but he also worked with Sydney University Press to establish a series of critical and cultural histories of Australian writing.

As every academic knows, Australian universities now operate like businesses, with CEO/vice-chancellors drawing mighty salaries (excepting Brian Schmidt at ANU, who has had the grace to cut his severely). They have management formulas for staffing, with ARC grant money and student enrolments as the guide to whether positions matter. Individual staff confront performance reviews in which they are urged to publish a specified number of articles each year in international peer-reviewed journals rather than spend time on book reviews or newspaper articles. Their role in the community comes a long way down the list of performance indicators. The universities’ ideal academic wins massive grants for research, supervises a dozen PhD students and publishes regularly in international journals.

That model is based, of course, on an ideal of the experimental scientist. Scholars in the humanities have a different and much less expensive work pattern, and don’t need research students to do time-consuming work on experiments. In fact, the science-research model doesn’t even suit a theoretical scientist, or a speculative thinker in any subject area, who may only need a good computer and time to think; and it certainly doesn’t suit anyone who works on subjects with a national rather than international focus, least of all a constantly changing field like contemporary literature that needs critical discussion to gain any intellectual attention.

The system has undoubtedly distorted research in Australian literature — indeed in the humanities as a whole, and possibly beyond — by forcing academics to seek international perspectives on their work and to find projects that will keep many hands busy and consequently consume large amounts of grant money. Australian literature academics have no incentive to engage with new writing, to take risks on new ideas, or to write for their own communities. “Criticism,” with its negative connotations in the popular mind, has been sidelined, despite its role as the basis of intelligent reading.

The preference for the already known appears to dominate the research community, defeating new ideas and genuine cross-disciplinary research. No matter how much it refers to the national interest, the ARC grants system consistently prefers work in an existing international field by those who already have runs on the board.

Where can Australian literary criticism fit in such a system? It requires time rather than money; it has little international purchase; and, despite its many greenfield opportunities, it is difficult to encourage PhD students to pursue it. When undergraduate enrolments fall — as they have at the University of Sydney — no chair is safe, even when it was established partially at community expense. The archival research still to be done on Australian writing won’t require the hundreds of thousands of external grant dollars that ensure a chair continues to be funded.

The malaise extends to book publishing, too. Since the University of Queensland Press ended its series of books on Australian literature (edited by another professor, Anthony Hassall) in 2007 literary critics have needed to deal with international publishers such as Anthem Press, Peter Lang or, for the series I edit, Cambria Press. Books take a long time to write and publish, and their quality and publication process will vary. Because books’ rating on research performance indicators is well below an equivalent series of journal articles — reflecting the fact that scientists rarely publish full-length books — literary academics are encouraged to publish journal articles, which give little chance to develop detailed engagements with Australian work. That is why Sydney University Press’s Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series is important, and why professors committed to Australian literature matter.

Australian universities’ support for Australian literature has always been uneven. After years of teaching Australian literature as a sideline to its main English courses, ANU advertised for a chair ten years ago; despite interviewing several promising candidates, it failed to make an appointment and has never repeated the exercise. In 2015, student protests at the lack of Australian literature at Melbourne University led to the endowment of the Boisbouvier chair in Australian literature “to advance the teaching, understanding and public appreciation of Australian literature.” As a joint enterprise with the State Library, its emphasis on public outreach has led to the appointment of writers — first Richard Flanagan, and then Alexis Wright — rather than critics to the position.

At the University of Western Australia, the chair in Australian literature has been vacant for almost a year since the retirement of Philip Mead, apparently because the interest earned on the federal government’s establishing endowment has fallen so low. The university has announced plans to fill the chair when its finances recover. At Adelaide University, the newly endowed Sidney Kidman chair in Australian studies was initially filled by an anthropologist, but Anne Pender, an Australian literature and drama critic, will soon take the position.

Back at Sydney University, the major in Australian literature has been reduced to a minor and undergraduate student enrolments in the course have declined. The university’s writing program, on the other hand, has grown exponentially, partly because international students want to improve their English communication skills. The funding follows the student numbers. The logic is obvious, but there remains the university’s duty to the wider community, to the nation and to its own prestige as the oldest university in the country. Perhaps it could dig deep into its archives and find what happened to the initial funds for the chair. I’m sure the Sydney University could come up with the $5 million that appears to be necessary to ensure an ongoing chair of Australian literature •

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The family saw sign language as a form of exclusion from mainstream life, an admission of weakness and defeat, and so Jessica kept away from it. Her childhood was one of speech therapists, lip-reading, support teachers and hearing aids. As a child, she even managed to come second in the elocution section of the local eisteddfod. “The deaf part of myself had been ghosted,” she writes, “to the point where no one knew that I was deaf until I told them, to the point where I barely even knew it myself.”

I have heard White speak at conferences and can vouch for the skill with which she covers her disability. But the decision to avoid appearing disabled, well-meaning though it may have been, consigned her to a solitary life — a life of learning and intellectual achievement, a life of books and writing rather than of social connection. In Hearing Maud she explains how great the price of “passing” has been. She details the immense energy needed to lip-read and the effort to modulate her voice to an acceptable level without any certain knowledge of how it sounds. Her family’s, and her own, resolve has brought exhaustion and a degree of misery.

Yet this is not a memoir of the trials of one deaf woman — or it is not only that. It details the implications of such a decision not just for White but also for a counterpart a hundred years ago.

In the course of White’s research in Australian literature she discovered that Rosa Praed, the Australian novelist who spent much of her life in Britain, had a daughter, Maud, who also became deaf as an infant. Born in 1871, Maud spent the earliest years of her life with Rosa on Queensland’s remote Curtis Island, where no medical help was available when she suffered an ear infection and other childhood diseases. Her parents realised that she had become deaf when she, too, was four years old.

White’s research into Maud’s life provides her with a comparison point for attitudes to deafness over a hundred years. It gives an objectivity to this memoir that leads the reader away from White’s personal life to a meditation on the place of the deaf in a society that can’t see their difficulty and expects them to behave like everyone else.

Maud’s father, Campbell Praed, didn’t have the application to succeed as a grazier in Queensland or as a brewer in Northamptonshire. But his prosperous background meant that the family was able to live a comfortable life in England during Maud’s early years. Rosa’s biographer, Patricia Clarke, believes that Maud was fortunate to live there at a time when the education of the deaf was taken seriously, but White isn’t so sure. Maud was sent to board at Benjamin St John Ackers’s school in Ealing, where the German “oralism” method was used to drill lip-reading and speech into deaf children, and sign language was dismissed as primitive. Ackers believed that this approach would provide his pupils with lifelong communication skills, but White has unearthed an account by a sympathetic clergyman who visited Ackers’s own deaf daughter later in her life, living silently alone and losing her oral skills.

At home, Maud was taught drawing and shared her family’s social life. But by the time she was twenty-one her eighteen-year-old brother, Bulkley, was finding her a social embarrassment, advising his father after a party that “it is an awful mistake letting her go to these things at all.” For a few years, she had a close relationship with her mother, travelling back to Australia and to Japan with her in 1894 and recording her impressions in a series of illustrations that show she had artistic talent.

That changed a few years later, when Rosa met the spiritualist Nancy Harward and quickly developed an infatuation. Maud was left at home while the pair travelled on the Continent. She seems to have had a breakdown after her father’s death in 1901 and spent the rest of her long life in asylums. White finds several of her letters begging to be brought home, but accounts by her rare visitors indicate a growing paranoia, no doubt exacerbated by deafness and her inability to communicate with those around her.

Rosa Praed’s life had been almost as extraordinary as the sensational romantic novels that kept her at the centre of literary and social life in London. She grew up in pioneering Queensland with a politician father who participated in the retributive massacres of Aboriginal people after the attack on the Hornet Bank station. In Britain, she knew figures like Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle and mixed with the Blavatsky spiritualist set. But she shared the eugenic views of the time about racial hierarchy, which also regarded the non-speaking deaf as lower forms of humanity. With her three sons having died before her — Humphrey in a car accident in California, Geoffrey after an attack by a rhinoceros in Rhodesia, and the depressive Bulkley by suicide — there was no one to rescue her daughter Maud.

Hearing Maud shifts back and forth between White’s and Maud’s lives, digressing when the historical story suggests an experience of White’s own, then returning to the task of research. White tells us about her own struggles to find love and a place in the world. Her accounts of loneliness and depression in wintry London will strike a chord with many Australian readers — think how much bleaker it would be without occasional jokes with a garrulous Kiwi or Irishman. She shows remarkable courage and determination in finding satisfying relationships. Eventually, she learnt sign language and, at last, began to participate easily in a social community. She has not embraced Deaf culture but is content to have “come out” as deaf.

For a reader ignorant of deaf life, this book is a revelation and a salutary lesson in understanding that invisible disability. Apparently, “You don’t look deaf!” is a comment frequently directed at deaf people. Given that so many friends and relatives experience deafness with age, it is too easy to dismiss it as a social inconvenience. Sign language offers another mystery to most of us, though I recall an episode of ABC TV’s Employable Me in which a bright young man with Tourette syndrome found regular social meetings with a group of signers the one place he could relax. Perhaps sign language should be a regular part of everyone’s education.

Hearing Maud is a memoir rather than a technical study of deafness and desirable methods of education. White is a novelist and her account sometimes reflects on small incidents or shifts quickly from one idea to another. It leaves behind many questions about our dependence on speech and the judgements we make of each other on the basis of the sounds we produce. As people walk the streets talking into their mobile phones or texting their every move to friends, the evidence that we rely on communication to reinforce our sense of self appears more overwhelming than ever.

Indeed, it seems an obsession. Speech clearly takes priority in our society, but written language in English functions as a record of that speech. Can sign language have a literature? White enjoys the physical expressiveness of sign language, but I would like to know more about how it changes perception and the nature of communication.

Certainly, White’s life of reading and writing seems intellectually deeper than that of the people yakking on their phones. It also means that this book is quietly introverted, observing the small details of the physical world rather than social interactions. It is a voice calling out from that silent world to remind us how important expressive social communication is to mental health and happiness. •

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She believes that the decade’s economic and political crises have dominated public memory, and wants to redress the balance by focusing on its significant social reforms. Many people, particularly women, remember their sudden access to higher education, fault-free divorce and, in some cases, professional opportunities they had only dreamed of. Whitlam’s government can’t claim credit for the contraceptive pill, of course, but its steps towards equal pay, parental leave, increased access to abortion and greater support for single parents made enormous differences to the most intimate aspects of individual lives. Few Australians were untouched.

Arrow makes clear this is not a comprehensive history of the decade. She gives women most of her attention, and the emergence of women as a distinct political constituency forms her major narrative. Her dispassionate view of recent historical material is admirable: though her own feminism is obvious, she restrains her enthusiasm for feminist achievements, writing a history of feminist social reform rather than a feminist history.

The Seventies begins with a survey of the growth in civil liberties during the last years of the prosperous 1960s. The White Australia policy had ended, the Commonwealth had recognised Aboriginal citizenship, capital punishment had been abolished, and some states had initiated abortion and homosexuality law reforms. By 1970, despite its commitment to the Vietnam war, a conservative federal government had begun to loosen censorship laws and was sympathetic to the growing interest in the arts, and particularly film.

Yet a boundary remained between public and private activities, with the white heterosexual men in power conceding privacy to private acts rather than acknowledging their place in the range of social life. The new decade saw sustained pushing against that boundary, with various feminist organisations and public events preparing the ground for the Whitlam government’s reforms. Arrow cites conferences on women’s rights and domestic violence, various consciousness-raising groups, women’s liberation organisations and the Women’s Electoral Lobby’s strategic interviewing of politicians before the 1972 election. Incursions were also mounted by those who felt even more disenfranchised — Aboriginal women and men, and the gay men and women who were vocal in the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, or CAMP, and other organisations — making them the catalysts for wider debates about the nature of Australian domestic life.

A major strand of this story is Elizabeth Reid’s experience as Whitlam’s women’s adviser and the rise of what came to be called “femocrats.” Appointed in 1973 amid a barrage of media attention, Reid travelled around Australia listening to women’s views in order to set priorities for action. Childcare seemed to be the most pressing, but hundreds of letters from women on a range of issues reached her office. She and her small staff redirected many of them to relevant government departments hoping to raise public service awareness of the ways that policies affected women across the board.

Reid and her advisory committee strategically chose to spend their grant for the 1975 International Women’s Year on research initiatives (particularly women’s history), cultural projects (for example, the film Caddie) and public conferences such as the Women and Politics conference in Canberra. They were criticised for the elitism of these projects when so many women’s services, including rape crisis centres and childcare services, were short of funds, but Reid sensed that her moment of influence would be brief, and she wanted to invest in long-term changes in cultural attitudes. As the Whitlam government fell apart there was a backlash from both radical and conservative critics. Reid resigned in October 1975, leaving an impressive legacy from just two and a half years of work.

Her judgement about ongoing influence was proved correct when the new Coalition government accepted many of these reforms, including retaining Sara Dowse as head of the women’s affairs branch. Then, in 1977, Fraser shifted the branch into the new home affairs ministry, where it was cut off from information and influence. Dowse resigned, but the feminist cat was already among the conservative pigeons, continuing to create debates and conflicts. With women’s affairs disappearing into a remote part of the bureaucracy, Fraser appointed a National Women’s Advisory Council, or NWAC, chaired by Liberal stalwart Beryl Beaurepaire and including Quentin Bryce, Wendy McCarthy and other prominent women.

The NWAC’s research reiterated recommendations on law reform, sex discrimination and domestic violence and soon raised the ire of more conservative women, who formed into the Women’s Action Alliance and its breakaway organisation, Women Who Want to Be Women. By 1980 women from these groups had been appointed to the NWAC and asserted their anti-feminist call for women to define themselves by their roles in the family. In their view, as Arrow puts it, “women’s problems were not structural, but personal — a direct reversal of the ethos of ‘The personal is political.’”

In the meantime, Justice Elizabeth Evatt, journalist and social researcher Anne Deveson and Felix Arnott, the Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, were working their way through submissions to the royal commission on human relationships, which had been established by bipartisan agreement in 1974 mainly as a way of avoiding a divisive parliamentary debate on abortion. The commission “audited Australian intimate life in the 1970s,” writes Arrow, “with a particular focus on the problems created by family dysfunction, violence, poverty and poor education,” moving well beyond abortion and issues of sexual freedom to their context in difficult and sometimes violent lives. Gay advocates were successful in getting the commission to include homosexual issues in its purview, so it heard testimony across the full range of Australian sexual and family experience.

Arrow does her best to summarise the main issues arising from the submissions, particularly the evidence of poverty, poor education and domestic violence. More trivial matters take her attention, too, and these indicate the uneven nature of this kind of historical archive: she cites, for example, a man asserting his right against convention to witness the birth of his child at Parramatta Hospital, though I can attest that this was standard practice in Canberra Hospital by 1974. The commission’s archives clearly contain the material for more detailed discussion of the changes in Australian family and sexual life, and it is significant for revealing the hidden violence in Australian families and the implications of social disadvantage for personal life.

Arrow’s coverage of the royal commission leads her away from the main thrust of her study — the unstoppable rise of women as a political constituency. The anti-feminists could not hold the line against feminism, and in 1983 Labor was returned to government federally with more than 50 per cent of the women’s vote. This is the year that marks the end of Arrow’s “seventies.”

The Seventies describes the triumph of a reforming rather than a radical feminism that opened opportunities for middle-class women graduates and ensured there would be many more of them in the generations to come. It is curiously Canberra-centred, in that so many of these reforms were shepherded into legislation by women who were public servants or active as government lobbyists. Arrow uses the term “femocrats” as if it were a banner of pride rather than the derogatory put-down of the time, when the combination of “feminist” and “bureaucrat” expressed the resentment of both conservative and radical observers, especially those outside Canberra.

While the changes these women achieved have provided lasting benefits to the mainstream of middle-class women and their families in Australia, they left behind pockets of poverty and disadvantage, especially among Aboriginal people. But the voices of Aboriginal women kept intruding in the public discussion to contrast their history of sterilisation and forced abortion with white middle-class calls for reliable contraception and access to abortion, and the alliance with middle-class white women helped some Aboriginal women pursue confident activism. In 1972 Aboriginal woman Pat Eatock stood for the seat of Canberra with Elizabeth Reid as her campaign manager and the support of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. She went on to an academic career.

Though the book’s subtitle emphasises the personal as well as the political, it has too much public activity to cover to give much attention to personal experiences. Arrow acknowledges the relationship of film and television to shifting attitudes, with shows such as Number 96 introducing gay characters, and the appearance of four openly gay people on the ABC’s Chequerboard program in 1973. She contrasts the ocker sex comedies of the period (Alvin Purple, Petersen) with more refined female-centred films such as Caddie and My Brilliant Career, but she overlooks ABC television series such as Tony Morphett’s popular and influential Certain Women (1973), which directly addressed contemporary change in the lives of suburban women, or John Dingwall and Margaret Kelly’s Pig in a Poke (1977), which noticed the inner-city lives of Aboriginal people, migrants, abused women and gay men. A later ABC anthology drama series about social problems, Spring & Fall (1980, 1982), might well have taken the royal commission report as a source. Arrow mentions in passing Elizabeth Riley’s little-known novel of lesbian experience, All That False Instruction, but not Monkey Grip (1977), Helen Garner’s much-loved testament to the complexities of feminist change. Sara Dowse’s West Block (1983), a novel based on her femocrat years in Canberra, might have provided another personal perspective on this material.

Of course, I am reading as a literary historian interested in cultural change, and one of the virtues of The Seventies is that it provides a clear frame of public activity and inquiry for other historians and readers to fill with their own discoveries and memories. It serves as a companion to Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia and his earlier The Sex Lives of Australians to give fresh perspectives on how we came to be where we are. •

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Of course, as Kleinhenz comments, Greer has written enough about herself to provide public sources for much of her life. She has revealed all kinds of intimate information about her relationships with other people, and many of those people have put their own impressions on record. So the archive need serve only as a source of context and additional evidence. Kleinhenz mainly uses it to cite correspondence from the hundreds of people, mostly women, responding mainly positively to Greer’s books and public appearances.

This is the evidence of Greer’s importance to ordinary people, and Kleinhenz presents herself as one of their number, influenced by The Female Eunuch to seek her own form of liberation. She has sought out some of Greer’s school contemporaries and even some of the nuns who taught her at Star of the Sea, to emphasise their pride and admiration for their old friend and pupil.

About halfway through her book, to dramatise the point, she introduces an imagined contemporary of Greer’s, “Cheryl Davis,” whose parallel life through Australian marriage and suburban life to education, divorce and career independence might be said to have benefited from Greer’s exploration of possibilities for women. It is women like Cheryl, suggests Kleinhenz, not the academic feminists, who have been the true admirers and supporters of Greer through all her moments of madness and her frequent contradictions.

Kleinhenz understands that Greer is, first and foremost, a performer rather than a feminist, a literary scholar or a serious commentator on world events. She is an entertainer, ready to say and do whatever is necessary to attract attention and controversy. Never the member of a feminist group, she is a populariser of selected feminist (and other) ideas rather than a consistent theorist.

She has become such a celebrity, at least in Britain, that she is sought out for media grabs on a whole range of topics, often saying the kind of outlandish things that you might expect from an eccentric aunt. How many family wits muttered the obvious comment about nature’s revenge on Steve Irwin? How many gossiping women remarked over coffee that Julia Gillard ought to stop wearing jackets? Greer made these comments on national or international media. It is not the originality of her wit so much as her complete absence of concern for the sensitivities of her audience that makes her outrageous.

While many friends and acquaintances refer to Greer as a genius, there seems no obvious reason for her to have become so famous and influential. Kleinhenz quotes Greer herself saying “Bugger me if I know why I’m famous.” Perhaps it’s because feminism needed a beautiful, witty, larger-than-life personality to reach its audience in the 1970s — or perhaps it’s because people love to be outraged and entertained. She made feminism seem fun when earnestness threatened to make it the exclusive province of the puritanical and serious.

A bright Catholic schoolgirl who won a teacher’s scholarship to the University of Melbourne in the days when they offered a living allowance, Greer concentrated on the study of literature, which would prove such a rich source of material on the history of women’s oppression. She moved to Sydney after falling in love with Roelof Smilde, one of the leaders of the Sydney Push, a man now remembered chiefly for the women who loved him. At the University of Sydney she wrote a master’s thesis on Byron’s “satiric mode,” and Kleinhenz shrewdly notes that Greer had something of Byron’s style herself: “Like him she was her own theatrical production.” The satiric mode is also evident in the habitual Greer contrarianism.

Also like Byron, Greer’s sexual conquests have been many, though there is no boastful tallying here. Over her life, she also has fallen in love frequently, often with kind and loving men who returned her affections. Each time, imbalances of power or her propensity for boredom seems to have driven the men away.

Another scholarship took Greer to Cambridge. This time she graduated with a PhD on the portrayal of women in an unpromising selection of Shakespeare’s plays — including that bone of feminist contention, The Taming of the Shrew. Life as an English lit academic would never have catapulted Greer to attention; the most she might hope for was to become one of the tweedy women, like Muriel Bradbrook, who had managed to squeeze a place for themselves in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge. The secret to her fame lies in her other life, as an actress and comedian. She joined the Footlights at Cambridge and, by the time she started her first academic job at Warwick University, she was appearing weekly on a comedy sketch show called Nice Time.

London was swinging, and Greer’s contacts among rock musicians and other television stars meant that she had entrée to all the wildest parties. By 1967 she was writing for the London Oz magazine and had joined the editorial collective for the pornographic magazine Suck, published in Amsterdam, out of a belief that the open discussion of sex was “a valuable service to society.” But it was The Female Eunuch, written with the encouragement of Sonny Mehta, that changed her life. By the end of 1971, she was famous, touring the United States and participating in such legendary events as the New York University’s town hall debate with Norman Mailer.

At the age of thirty-two, Greer was suddenly wealthy, resigning her academic job so she could meet the publicity demands of her new fame. She bought a series of houses and generously accommodated her friends and lovers, though firmly insisting they keep to her own domestic standards. But her new life required her to keep publishing books that sold, to keep being famous in order to maintain her houses, gardens, her friends — and, much later, her Cave Creek Rainforest project in the Gold Coast hinterland. In itself, being famous doesn’t provide wealth, and some of Greer’s more eccentric projects (appearing in Britain’s Celebrity Big Brother, for example) can be explained by the financial needs of her charities.

Kleinhenz sympathises with Greer’s generosity and her enthusiasm. She enjoys some of the more hilarious episodes in her subject’s life — usually reported with verve by Greer herself — such as having her hair brushed by Princess Margaret or finding a kindred personality in Bruce Ruxton. Occasionally Kleinhenz calls Greer a “conflicted” personality, but without much evidence; her initial judgement that Greer has no mask and no “inner” person to expose seems closer to the mark. Nevertheless, the biography does give a strong sense of Greer’s vulnerability and the loneliness that accompanies her courageous individualism. No life — whether it be Germaine Greer’s or Cheryl Davis’s — is likely to end in a cosy reconciliation of all its difficulties and contradictions.

Kleinhenz’s Greer, then, is a kind of secular saint, experimenting with sexual possibilities and domestic arrangements on our behalf and reporting back on their mix of success and failure. She has suffered, too, physically as well as emotionally, as she risked her own comfort to discover what was possible for a modern woman. Wiser heads might have predicted some of the disasters, but wiser heads are usually much more boring than our Germaine, and this biography emphasises her sense of fun and zest for life. •

Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer
By Elizabeth Kleinhenz | Knopf | $39.99 | 432 pages

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Earlier in 2017 the Old Fitz Hotel down the hill in Woolloomooloo had been the venue for the first (and, so far, only) production of Louis Nowra’s This Much Is True. Though the play is the third part of Nowra’s Lewis trilogy, following the acclaimed Cosi and Summer of the Aliens, it was a perfect match for the hotel’s tiny basement theatre. Nowra depicted his local drinking mates in all their eccentricity and neediness, and after the show you might have found the author himself drinking at a table in the bar upstairs.

As theatre blogger Kevin Jackson remarked, Nowra’s play recalls the Australian naturalist plays of the 1950s in both subject and style, depicting a male underclass battling drugs, madness and poverty. It seems part of a wave of nostalgia for white inner-city poverty that pulls us back to the years before the poor moved to the outer suburbs. Despite decades of change, the ’Loo remains a pocket of extremes where film stars can be seen lining up for coffee after a morning run near the early risers from the Matthew Talbot Hostel. The hostel, along with the public housing near the Old Fitz, ensures that some of the atmosphere of poverty remains, but you have to wonder how long that will last.

A few months ago Belvoir St Theatre added Pyrmont to the list of theatre’s lost and lamented inner-city slums. Alana Valentine’s The Sugar House confronted the voracious building developments in the old industrial suburb and the loss of a human side of the city. Her story of a family of Irish-Australian Catholics making their haphazard way up the social ladder from the petty criminal underclass reminded a middle-class audience how recently their own family’s arrival in the professional classes may have been. The feisty grandmother at the play’s centre fought to protect her family, struggling to make a living and keep everyone out of the hands of the law. Her granddaughter grew up to become a successful lawyer, of course, inspecting one of the stylish apartments in The Sugar House, once the refinery where her grandfather worked and now an expensive warehouse-style block in one of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs.

This play, too, drew on the staging traditions of kitchen-sink realism, recalling Peter Kenna’s A Hard God and even Séan O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, with the central figure of the tough, intelligent and self-sacrificing matriarch played with her usual conviction and energy by Kris McQuade (who does tend to be typecast in these roles). Valentine tried to balance the simple moral commitment of the grandmother with the more complex political understanding of the educated granddaughter, but McQuade’s powerful performance suggested that the lost working class may have been more admirable than its educated descendants.

And so, when the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Harp in the South opened in September, it seemed like too much of a good thing — or, too much of a nostalgic thing. This ambitious two-part adaptation by Kate Mulvany of Ruth Park’s postwar novels was staged at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, itself built on the site of a pair of warehouses that once serviced the wharves across the road. Not far from the theatre, public housing tenants are being cleared from their homes and, over the road, the wharves have been transformed into some of the most luxurious apartments in Sydney. Billed as “a portrait of Sydney as it once was,” the play romanticises the old slum life in those Surry Hills terrace houses that are now worth millions.

Some of the people in the audiences for these plays have no doubt paid a great deal to live in Surry Hills, Pyrmont, Potts Point, Darlinghurst or Millers Point. Where I live, in the old slum suburb of Erskineville, the nearby industrial estate has become half a dozen apartment blocks in a matter of a few years. When I moved in, as one of the new professional apartment dwellers, the locals were still a mix of old people, migrants, Aborigines, homeless men, eccentrics and university students. In half an hour, I can walk up to the housing commission towers of Redfern and still see some of these people on the streets.

Traces of the Erskineville slums remain in the old terraces (some of them so tiny that it is hard to believe a family could ever have lived there) and the pocket parks that the Danish ballerina Hélène Kirsova set up in the 1940s when she noticed the local street urchins had nowhere to play. We’re all proud of the suburb’s history — the local Labor Party branch runs a history walk every couple of years, popular among genteel contemporary residents, that recalls violent home evictions during the Depression, the Catholic missions to the poor, and the creation of the “opportunity school.”

Theatre companies and playwrights seem to have picked up a widespread nostalgia among middle-class Sydneysiders for the suburbs that disappeared under the onslaught of their own rise in prosperity. When the first of Ruth Park’s novels was published in 1948, Sydney was suffering a major postwar, post-Depression housing crisis. Park interviewed people in the slums to produce a prime example of the kind of writing that Patrick White later derided as the “dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.” Her depiction of poverty was greeted with shock and horror by the good citizens of Sydney and was one of the factors that led to slum clearances in Surry Hills — and the building of those public housing towers that still stand close to Belvoir St Theatre.

The STC production is a long way from dun-coloured journalism, with the first play bright with ensemble activity and music — so much so that you almost expect it to become full-blown musical theatre. With clever staging and a large and disciplined cast, the production brings to life the novel’s soap-opera narrative of hard times, with its range of stereotypes and token figures: the good-hearted brothel madam, the quiet but generous Chinese shopkeeper, the solitary Aboriginal man making his way. There’s an unsettling figure of a deceitful Jewish boy, too. Bruce Spence, Heather Mitchell and other familiar performers relish the opportunity to show their virtuosity, with Mitchell astonishing in the Kris McQuade, Irish mother part. (Mitchell more often plays upper-class characters like A Place to Call Home’s Prudence Swanson.) The second play, however, stretched the idea too far, exposing the weaknesses of this sentimental material. The afflictions of Dolour Darcy accumulated and the music was reduced to repetition of the dirge-like “The Last Rose of Summer.”

No doubt the second play was intended to remind us that poverty is not a song-and-dance show, and to give a more overtly feminist perspective, with the nuns bowing to the priest’s power and evidence that charming Irishmen like Hughie Darcy can be feckless and generally useless to their women. Yet the warm response to the play could hardly amount to outrage at current poverty, when Sydney’s poor mainly have moved out to the fringe suburbs.

Perhaps, in a kind of remember-where-you-came-from moment, the STC was reminding its well-heeled patrons that they might be the descendants of such people (like the contemporary characters in The Sugar House). But I had the uncomfortable feeling it was celebrating the Old Australia, when the Irish immigrants were the poor and white people dominated society from bottom to top. It was a reminder of the elite nature of Australian theatre, with its blindness to popular culture and the changing life outside. There are still pockets of public housing in the inner city and the city’s homeless problem is difficult to ignore. But the inner city is overwhelmingly the province of those able to manage a hefty mortgage. Does a romantic slum past add to the pleasures of living there?

It is not only the subject matter of these plays that gives pause for thought. Their invocation of the theatre styles of the past seems to reflect a nostalgia for the kind of drama that flourished before television. As it happens, The Harp in the South has been produced twice for television — as a single play on the BBC as long ago as 1964, and by the ABC as a miniseries in 1986, with Ruth Park herself as one of the writers. The Australian director of the British version, Alan Burke, even wrote a musical version in the 1960s, but he couldn’t get it staged; he wrote the script for the musical Lola Montez and has the distinction of writing the book for Australia’s first original television musical about convicts and officers, Pardon Miss Westcott, broadcast by ATN7 in 1959.

What would be today’s equivalent of Park’s novel? SBS’s Struggle Street documentaries about the poor in Western Sydney and outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane seem the nearest equivalent. Like Park’s novels, they faced the criticism that they offered up the sufferings of the poor for the entertainment of wealthier observers. Maybe the ABC’s Redfern Now series might be a better fit, with its stories about Aboriginal families struggling in the inner city, though it, too, drew on British social realist traditions. One thing television does so much better than the stage is portray material detail, particularly material deprivation, and so appeal directly to viewers’ sense of injustice.

At the Hayes, the Old Fitz and Belvoir St, the small performance spaces forced the audience into close proximity with the actors, to share at least their physical struggle to perform if not the material conditions they were portraying. The STC production explores the theatrical possibilities of the stage, dazzling us with the actors’ shifts in character and the movement of a large cast, and contents itself with mere gestures towards the material conditions of poverty. The Roslyn Packer Theatre calls for larger movements and bigger performances, and the STC’s production turns poverty in Surry Hills into bright entertainment.

Perhaps the musical is the ideal form for these nostalgic depictions of the past. Darlinghurst Nights was a delight, and Madeleine St John’s Women in Black had already become a successful musical, as Ladies in Black, before Bruce Beresford’s film finally made it to the cinemas a few weeks ago. You can enjoy the sweet simplicities of the film knowing that David Jones is still there, despite being taken over by a South African company that plans to redevelop the site. It appears that the lower floors will be preserved, sacred to our memories of shopping in one of Sydney’s last palaces of consumerism. Some developers understand the value of nostalgia. •

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You’re more likely to have heard of Louis Becke, whose novels of South Sea adventure were compared by American reviewers to those of Joseph Conrad and R.L. Stevenson. With Rosa Praed, he flew the flag for Australian adventure and romance at the beginning of the twentieth century. And even more likely to recognise the name Arthur Upfield, who came relatively late to the American scene, emerging as a popular Doubleday Crime Club–backed novelist in the 1940s.

David Carter and Roger Osborne have traced the careers of the many “Australian” writers who penetrated the lucrative American marketplace during the decades in which a boom in literacy created a mania for romance, mystery, crime, adventure and other popular fiction genres. Some of them (E.W. Hornung, Fergus Hume, Nat Gould) are Australian only in the sense that they visited Australia and mined their experience to create exotic fictions about the colony; others (Guy Boothby, Carlton Dawe) left behind their Australian birth to become part of an international fiction market with little allegiance to location.

As Carter and Osborne stress, readers across the English-speaking world were reading the same popular fiction. It’s true that most Australian books were published in Britain, but before the US Copyright Act of 1891, which extended protection to foreign books in the US market, American publishers often pirated them. The six American editions of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life published before 1900, for example, were all copied from Bentley’s British edition. Clarke was surprised to receive £15 from Harper publishers, commenting, “I suppose it represents something in dollars — Harper’s conscience, perhaps!”

Under the new regime American publishers claiming copyright needed to be the first to publish a novel, or to publish simultaneously with a British publisher. Cunning operators sometimes published an advance excerpt from a book in a magazine, thus claiming first publication and American copyright for the book. For Australian writers, the road to American publication was usually through a British publisher, though a few enterprising authors found ways to reach the American publishers directly, even to the extent of moving to the United States. The now-forgotten Dorothy Cottrell left her life in remote western Queensland after sending the manuscript for her The Singing Gold directly to an American publisher in 1927. Her popular success was such that she emigrated to America, partly to avoid what Cottrell regarded as the “iniquitous taxation” of alien earnings.

American readers were not as interested in Australia and the Australian experience as they were in escapist fantasies in a new location. Those anti-romantic writers Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy did not get a look-in. But in the 1930s Henry Handel Richardson had good reason to be grateful to American readers for ensuring her place in literary history. After poor sales of the first two novels in her The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy, her husband had to guarantee the British publication of the third and, in many ways, most impressive novel, Ultima Thule. It was greeted so enthusiastically in Britain that the new American publisher W.W. Norton & Co. bought the rights to all Richardson’s novels.

American sales for Ultima Thule were astonishingly high, boosted by selection for the American Book of the Month Club, which had membership of more than 110,000 subscribers. This ensured sales for the first two novels in the trilogy, and for Richardson’s earlier novel, Maurice Guest, which had maintained a small following among American readers. Maurice Guest was later adapted as a Hollywood film, Rhapsody (1954), though it was unrecognisable apart from the name of the Elizabeth Taylor character, Louise, and her love for a musician.

Norton published Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo a year after Ultima Thule and went on to produce an American version of her Haxby’s Circus in 1931 as Fay’s Circus. This edition reinstated material that had been excised from the British edition by Jonathan Cape, and Prichard worked on it further to produce a version of the novel that pleased her more than any other. Strangely, that version has never been published in Australia, where the mangled British edition has always been reprinted. Australian publishers (Text? Sydney University Press?) please take note of this omission — an Australian edition of Fay’s Circus is long overdue.

Norman Lindsay also found the American market congenial and profitable. His Redheap, published in London in 1930, was famously banned from import by Australian customs, but was published in America as Every Mother’s Son and appreciated as a modern sex comedy, “shockingly alive and scandalously amusing,” according to one critic. Lindsay headed off to New York to promote the American publication of what became a total of six books in eight years. His The Cautious Amorist also had the distinction of being banned by Australian customs, apparently on the strength of American reviews that described it as “a delectable entertainment” that might be “extremely shocking” to some readers. Lindsay enjoyed his year in America, finding the kind of serious critical response that he would never receive in Australia.

Lindsay, Prichard and Richardson made money from their American editions, reaching much larger audiences than existed in Australia. And they found American critics more open to their work than were the British gatekeepers. The American historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan visited Australian in 1927 and again from 1936. On his return home he championed Australian literature among his network of publishing contacts. The growing American interest in their work did more to boost the incomes and reputations of significant Australian writers than was possible at home, or likely in Britain.

American publishers were also crucial to the careers of Christina Stead and Patrick White. Stead lived in the United States in the 1940s and five of her novels are set there (though Americans often dispute the authenticity of the setting of The Man Who Loved Children). She had supportive friends in the American publishing world, and the critics Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Hardwick played a vital role in the revival of interest in her work in the 1960s. White had the good fortune to win the commitment of Ben Huebsch, a publisher who never doubted the importance of the Australian’s work and ensured his American publication at times when British publishers rejected it. Some Americans understood that these two writers were worthy of interest precisely because they wrote outside the current lines of development of the literary novel.

This account of American publishing serves as a parallel literary history: of fiction that has become part of our literary canon, and of popular writing that has disappeared from memory. Carter and Osborne quote numerous published reviews and private comments by American publishers that reinforce a sense of the openness, sophistication and perceptiveness of these literary Americans. They place Australian writing in the context of the international development of the novel rather than the conventional local interest in Australianness. The Australian literary world of the same period, with its reliance on British approval and prohibitive customs laws, appears parochial by contrast.

Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s will serve mainly as a resource for historians interested in the way that the anglophone world shared its fantasies through popular fiction in the decades before radio, film and television overwhelmed the novel as popular entertainment. It provides detailed information on the many publishing houses in the booming American market and how Australian writers made money, and lost it to the US tax system. It doesn’t unearth much lost fiction that deserves to be remembered for its literary qualities, but it does acknowledge the brief roles of writers like Greig, Rosman and Cottrell in the history of Australian fiction. •

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In the past few years, Shaun Carney and Jim Davidson have published memoirs of twentieth-century Australian family life dominated by the egos or fecklessness of fathers. Kate Grenville’s One Life: My Mother’s Story of 2015 and now Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter offer counterbalancing daughters’ perspectives on resourceful and independent mothers. While Grenville’s memoir is reticent about her own childhood experiences, Wheatley writes from fragmentary memories of her mother, often using photographs as aide-mémoires before searching out documents to piece together her parents’ lives.

Like Davidson’s parents, Wheatley’s were born before the first decade of the twentieth century. She was the child of the late marriage of a woman in her forties who expected to remain childless and a man who took his right to control women for granted. Like Grenville’s mother, Nina Watkins was exceptional in carving out a professional career for herself at a time when few women could expect more from life than marriage and motherhood, or dutiful drudgery caring for their parents.

Growing up motherless herself, Neen Watkins fought opposition from her father to train as a nurse at the Coast Hospital south of Sydney in the 1930s. When the war suddenly offered access to a world beyond Sydney, she joined the Australian army, working in hospitals in the Middle East. She was in Athens when the German bombardment began, managing to escape with her comrades just as the city fell. In Palestine, she ministered to the casualties from the Syrian campaign before following the troops home in 1943. In this way, she served behind the lines of El Alamein and Tobruk, tending to the wounded as they returned from battles that have become legendary. She also had the chance to explore the ancient cities of Alexandria, Athens and Jerusalem.

Back in Australia, Neen spent the rest of the war at the army base in the Atherton Tablelands, coping with conditions as difficult as those behind the front in the Middle East. By the time she moved to the Concord Military Hospital in 1945 she was suffering physical and mental exhaustion, but she loved the camaraderie of her nursing friends, “the Girls,” and devoted her energies to the care of her “boys.” When the family expected her to return to home duties at the end of the war, she applied to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, or UNRRA, helping the hordes of displaced people across Europe. She remembered the suffering of the people of Athens and wanted to help.

Much of this part of Wheatley’s account is based on her mother’s letters home and the journal she kept. Once Neen became part of the UNRRA, official records provide remarkably detailed complementary information. Where Ian Buruma’s wide-ranging Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013) gives an international overview of the dangerous conditions at the end of the war — when millions of people died from disease and the effects of their war experiences — Wheatley’s book fills in the detail from the perspective of medical staff on the ground in Europe.

Neen was assigned to Germany, where more than a million people from Eastern Europe had been forced into work camps, many of them now suffering from tuberculosis. Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Latvians were crammed together in makeshift hospitals where the only reliable staff were the hated Germans. Neen threw her energies into providing them with comfort and hope, and rejoiced in every sign of reconciliation with the German medical staff, whom she grew to respect. By the time the UNRRA was replaced by the International Refugee Organization, she was the supervisory nursing officer responsible for seven displaced persons assembly centres and three German civilian hospitals.

If this was the high point of Neen’s career, it was also the moment when Dr J.N. Wheatley reached the pinnacle of his profession. A general practitioner in England before the war, he became Hull’s civil defence medical officer during the German bombing raids on the city, and signed on for the UNRRA in 1944, following Montgomery’s troops into Germany after the victory. He was assigned to the displaced persons assembly centre at Belsen, quickly becoming chief medical superintendent. By 1947 he was a regional medical officer for a massive area of Germany, reorganising dozens of assembly centres there.

Nadia’s parents met each other at a time when they were both mature professionals confident in their work, and respected and admired by others. They thought they could continue together, travelling the world with their shared interest in foreign places and people. They married and, to their surprise and John’s horror, found themselves parents. Neen returned to the family home in Lindfield, northern Sydney, to have her baby.

Nadia Wheatley, born in 1949 on the crest of the baby boom, acknowledges her unwitting part in her mother’s tragedy. With a new baby, Neen felt the prison walls of domesticity encroaching as she struggled with her resentful family. When John Wheatley joined her, she found he would rather gamble with investments than return to a medical career. After losing most of their savings, he moved the family from their comfortable house in North Shore Gordon to the unsewered outer suburb of Revesby to set up again in his late fifties as a general practitioner.

From this point, Nadia’s own memory provides more evidence, as she remembers sometimes throwing tantrums, sometimes dutifully trotting after her father on his rounds. She found herself part of the drama of control played out between her parents, with an awareness that her father on the other side of the surgery door was likely to appear at any time to keep her mother in line. With a doctor’s authority he could ascribe any resistance to mental illness, and Wheatley finds evidence that the medical profession supported him when her mother collapsed in “imagined” pain.

In the wonderful photographs of Neen’s time at war she appears among her friends with a wide smile, her army hat slightly cocked and a cigarette in hand. We now know the effects of that comradely smoking but even the Repatriation Board was reluctant to help the ex-army nurse in her hour of need — her two loves, the medical profession and the army, both let her down. She spent her last months trying to ensure that Nadia would escape her father.

If the account of Neen’s life as a wartime nurse reminds me of some of Elizabeth Jolley’s autobiographical writings, her life as a suburban wife recalls nothing so much as Elizabeth Harrower’s grim novel of male dominance, The Watch Tower (1966). There is enough material in Her Mother’s Daughter for five or six novels: the story of a motherless girl in the 1920s, the adventurous career of a wonderfully competent nurse in wartime, the international romance with a doctor, and the suburban hell of her marriage. John Norman Wheatley’s strange other life as a gambler and womaniser might make another. Nadia Wheatley’s own story of a nine-year-old girl consigned to the family of one of her schoolfriends after her mother’s death could comprise yet another dark narrative. But Wheatley is determined to make this book an act of retrieval of her mother’s life that celebrates her intelligence and her kindness.

She is, of course, an accomplished biographer and novelist, revered by young readers for My Place and Five Times Dizzy. Here her skill as a researcher is in evidence, as she gathers a mass of material from family and the official records; but she handles this complex material with a novelist’s assurance. The book shifts through layers of time with ease, bringing its various episodes back to the author’s task of piecing the story together. Though Nadia, author and abandoned child, occasionally expresses her disgust with her father’s behaviour, she manages to control any sense of grievance (though she has much cause for it). She also resists any temptation to sentimentality about her mother.

Many readers of Wheatley’s generation will recognise the misguided practice of protecting children by keeping them away from important knowledge. Nadia is not told of her mother’s death until after the funeral, and it is decades before aunts and uncles disclose the existence of Neen’s letters. Her mother clearly was party to this, mimicking normality as she sent Nadia away to her schoolfriend’s place in the days before her death. Despite frequent requests, she refused even to tell her daughter where her first name came from — what was the fate of the displaced person called Nadia?

This memoir is full of material about aspects of Australian life that rarely receive close attention — both the public experience of war and its aftermath, and the private life of families. Every part of it complicates received simplicities about our history. It is an important addition to the history of Australian social life, and a vivid insight into how individual people can be controlled by repressive social attitudes. Wheatley reminds us of the difference between how family life is supposed to be, and how it is actually experienced. ●

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During the ceremony at St George’s Chapel, we were forced to recognise, just for a moment, that the wealth on such extravagant display — those flowers, the clothes, that tiara — was built on the backs of people who were slaves. In his oration, Bishop Michael Curry mentioned slavery explicitly. It was a celebration of love, but he wasn’t going to let pass the opportunity to remind those white aristocrats that their wealth was derived from the oppression of other races. The Kingdom Choir’s “Stand by Me” was both a love song for the moment and a protest song for the injustices of the past. Three cheers for Meghan, who must have orchestrated this, and for Harry, who chose her.

It worked as theatre, too, with a rare sunny day pouring light through the stained-glass windows of a medieval chapel, sacred in its destiny as the final resting place of the Queen, its class divisions made physical in the screen dividing the elite from the hoi polloi. The bishop’s energetic rhetoric and the choir’s gospel singing intruded into the high European traditions of classical music in a dauntingly impressive setting. Perhaps it was simply a theatrical performance with no impact on the lives of the people who watched it; the sprinkling of black faces in the choir stalls certainly suggested that only a few will be invited into the enclave. Yet millions of British people of African heritage saw representatives of their history mingling with those stiff symbols of white hegemony.

This symbolic acceptance of black people seemed particularly poignant at a time when the West Indian migrants from the Windrush generation were being made outcast by administrative cruelty. The monarchy can’t offer political redress but it can provide a dramatic commentary on the failures of democratic administrations in Britain and other English-speaking countries. In this light, the wedding provided a counternarrative to the current realities of British government. Perhaps it distracted attention from those realities; perhaps it can be seen as quiet criticism.

British royalty is always a public performance, but in the last few years playwrights and screenwriters have been eager to grasp the dramatic possibilities of its counternarrative role. Shakespeare’s history plays set the model for this writing, of course, though he had to please royal patrons and his shadow has inhibited more recent dramatists from attempting royal epics.

Rona Munro’s James plays, first produced in 2014 and performed at the Adelaide Festival in 2016, demonstrate the kind of nerve a writer needs to take on Shakespeare’s models. Munro was so impressed by the English Shakespeare Company’s production of Shakespeare’s history plays in sequence (performed in Canberra and Adelaide in 1988) that she was emboldened to write the stories of James I, II and III of Scotland as a trilogy in high Shakespearean style. James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock has its starting point in Shakespeare’s celebration of Henry V, but delineates the underside of Henry’s heroism by focusing on his prisoner, James, and his difficulties in claiming his crown in Scotland. The ruthless infighting of the Scottish clans and their murderous attempts on the throne make for high drama in the other plays. Performed by the Scottish National Theatre, they were an assertion of Scottish history, if not a call for independence, at a time when Scots were reconsidering their place in the Union.

Taking Shakespeare’s model as a kind of licence to speculate, Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III also appeared in 2014 (with a brief run in Sydney in 2016), exploring the Windsor family in crisis after the imagined death of the Queen. In this play, Charles finally comes to the throne only to find that the parliament is forcing him to act in a way he regards as unethical, demanding that he sign into law restrictions on freedom of speech. How should a constitutional monarch behave when democracy produces governments bent on fascism? The question is not entirely speculative in the present world. Urged by a Lady Macbeth Kate, William takes the opportunity to force Charles to abdicate.

It is quite plausible that individual members of the royal family might have more ethical sense than their parliamentary governments. We were reminded of this in the Queen’s breezy acceptance of the need for action on climate change in the documentary The Queen’s Green Planet, screened by the ABC the night after the wedding. It seems the present monarch doesn’t see this as a political issue.

Bartlett’s play dressed the outrageousness of its speculation in the formality of blank verse, with occasional direct quoting of Shakespeare to remind audiences that it was almost conventional to open with the funeral of a monarch, introduce the ghost of Princess Diana to haunt Charles, and depict Prince Harry as a contemporary version of Prince Hal, resistant to the duties of monarchy. In 2017, the BBC broadcast a shorter version of the play, encountering objections that the princes would be hurt by the ghostly depiction of their mother, not to mention the central conceit of the Queen’s death and Charles’s abdication.

Bartlett admits that he took the most liberties in depicting Kate, but he could reasonably claim that the public knows so little about her personality that he could make free with it. It is a brilliant play, in its witty language and its embroidering of what we know about the royals. It is to be hoped that the BBC version gets some free-to-air broadcast in Australia because there was so little chance to see it on stage here. Perhaps Bell Shakespeare should have a go at it.

The third monarchical drama is, of course, the Netflix television series The Crown, which references popular memories of the Queen and her family — her marriage to Philip, her coronation, the crushing of Princess Margaret’s desire for a divorced man — while placing them in the context of British postwar politics, the diminishing Empire and the miserable austerity of British life in the 1950s. Peter Morgan, the creator of the series, has experience with the material; he wrote the screenplay for the film The Queen and the series is a development of his play The Audience, which followed Elizabeth’s audiences with a series of British prime ministers. In its long seasons on stage (in the United States and Britain — but not in Australia), the play’s selection of prime ministers varied as current events made one or other of them more appropriate, and the production eventually accommodated David Cameron.

The first season of The Crown shows Churchill, the hero of the second world war, as a backward-looking traditionalist, so focused on past Empire glory that he refuses to acknowledge the people dying in London’s smog. He patronises Elizabeth and deceives her about his health, so that, with Anthony Eden also near death, she finds herself at risk of presiding over no government at all. It may not have happened quite that way — but the incompetence of a government led by a doddering old man is clear. While Elizabeth struggles to help her sister, the government’s denial of Margaret’s desired marriage reveals it as a hypocritical patriarchy.

Like the other royal plays, The Crown is wonderfully theatrical, mining the ritual moments and flamboyant costumes of regal ceremony. With film offering wider visual possibilities than the stage (rampaging elephants in Kenya, fog rising from the lakes of Sandringham), the television series relies on visual contrasts and ironic shifts to structure the drama. George VI is operated on in Buckingham Palace with a makeshift surgery under a range of spectacular chandeliers, his bloodied lung removed into a silver dish. There are beautifully orchestrated scenes, such as George’s last Christmas at Sandringham, during which local carol singers present him with a paper crown and he joins in with the singing, aware that he will soon die.

The first season of The Crown exploits Churchill’s Shakespearean sense of importance. He makes a grand entrance into the Abbey at Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding as if it had been staged for him, and refuses to sit for audiences with the monarch even when he is barely able to stand. The economies of drama mean that liberties must be taken with fact, and background information is sometimes conveyed obviously — Churchill whispers in the Abbey about Philip’s sisters being married to Nazis, Elizabeth diagnoses the car breakdown in Kenya with a reminder that she trained as a mechanic during the war. In episode eight, “Pride and Joy,” Elizabeth and Margaret sit opposite each other expressing their sibling resentment and longing for their father’s approval.

Life may not happen this way, but it is dramatically right. Most of the time, the visual contrasts convey a delicious sense of irony — Buckingham Palace, for all the glory of its furnishings, appears perpetually dark and gloomy. Certainly, you can watch The Crown for the pleasures of gossip, for the clothes and palaces, just as you can enjoy the display of wealth at Meghan and Harry’s wedding. Or you can notice the way its depiction of the individuals in the royal family, some selfish and wilful, some with good intent, reveals the limitations of complacent and patriarchal governments.

One of the uses of monarchy, then, appears to be the possibilities it offers dramatists to speculate about history and to criticise governments. Like King Charles III, The Crown makes the royal family a touchstone for the failures of parliamentary democracy. Though such democracy is failing in serious and absurd ways here as elsewhere, Australia’s constitutional monarchy precludes even the ability to explore the royal counternarrative in drama. A series of governors-general and state governors can’t provide the personality or consistency of a long-lived monarch, let alone the dramatic potential of her family’s lives. The disadvantages lie not just in our distance from the monarch but also in the impossibility of imaginative connection with royal history and its relation to parliament. In the republic of the Unites States, television dramatists created The West Wing as an alternative narrative to Bush’s presidency, but our far-flung colonial status continues to keep us from too close an identification with the symbols of government, republican or monarchical.

During the short run of King Charles III in Sydney, Australian audiences found it difficult to take any situation involving Charles and Camilla seriously, and they laughed at the ghostly appearance of Diana. Perhaps this is the reason there has been no other Australian production of the play, and no production at all of Morgan’s The Audience, despite long runs of both plays in both Britain and America. For Australians the royal family has become little more than a collection of celebrities to be gawped at for their wealth and looks or derided for the privilege they represent.

We have our own theatre company devoted to Shakespeare, but no Australian dramatist has managed to produce ambitious plays about the sources of power. We are left with the soap opera pleasures of distant royal weddings. ●

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Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife occupies similar territory. Its collection of stories, parodies and critical essays riffs in various ways on the Lawson short story. Some of the pieces are “genuine” items of literary criticism and journalism, some are fictions that do no more than reference elements of Lawson’s story, others shift into the double imaginary world of metafiction and parody. O’Neill is represented in this collection by an extract from his 2014 PhD thesis on experimental short fiction in Australia, one of the straight critical articles Moorhouse features. A 1980s atmosphere is present here, too, in the games the writers play with Lawson: the frolic documented here began back in 1975 with a story by Murray Bail.

Moorhouse begins with the thirteen-page 1896 version of Lawson’s story, which must then bear the weight of the accumulated speculations and fictions that follow it. He takes an editor’s privilege of writing five introductory pieces about the background to the story, its representation of women and “sexual tension,” Lawson’s “gender precariousness” and the changes to the original versions of the story, in particular its depiction of Aboriginal people. These culminate in Moorhouse’s own take on Lawson — that his intense friendship with his mate Jim Gordon may have been sexual.

Moorhouse argues for a gay Henry Lawson whose relationship with Gordon, recently examined in Gregory Bryan’s Mates: The Friendship that Sustained Lawson, represented an intimacy never broached directly in his writing. He imagines a kind of Brokeback Mountain relationship, giving a romantic gloss to mateship on the track. While their wives stay home with the children, the mates are imagined enjoying a consoling sexual intimacy. Moorhouse is open about his reasons for seeking this reading of Lawson: it speaks to his own experience of a sporadic sexual relationship with another man through their years of marriage to, or uncoupling from, women.

Another recent book on Lawson, Kerrie Davies’s A Wife’s Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson, reads the writer’s life from an opposite direction but with an equally personal perspective. Davies projects her own experience of a retreating husband and single motherhood onto Lawson and his wife, Bertha. She does sterling archival research to expose Lawson as a drunken wife-beater, incapable of supporting his children. Bertha comes out of this version of their story as a heroic survivor, rather than the widely accepted figure of the vengeful wife who put her husband into prison for his failure to provide maintenance.

It seems futile to protest that these readings are ahistorical: that the frequent comments during his lifetime on Lawson’s “effeminacy” do not imply homosexuality, or that Davies’s recent experience of single parenthood is a cakewalk compared to Bertha’s battles in the days when women’s access to work was restricted and social services virtually non-existent. Of course, it is possible that Lawson could have beaten and confined his wife, abandoned his children, run off with the maid, drunk himself to incompetence, and also had an enduring sexual relationship with his mate. How does this change how we read his stories? Reading emerges from these books as a various, individual experience in which a reader can select whatever he or she likes from a story. The pieces collected in Moorhouse’s book offer us a series of these readings, most of them ironic and skewed to a sexual interpretation of the story.

The story by Bail that set this metafictional game in train was inspired by Russell Drysdale’s 1945 painting, a painting that has nothing to do with Lawson’s story of a woman abandoned in an isolated bush hut with her children, apart from its name. Drysdale’s woman is on the track with the drover. There are no children in sight, and Bail writes in the voice of her abandoned city husband, who has been left to care for them. The story wipes away all Lawson’s concern for the isolated and endangered woman, turning it into a comedy of masculine indignation. In 1980, Moorhouse replied to Bail’s speculations with a “conference paper” by an Italian-Australian literature expert, Franco Casamaggiore, who had fallen for the sex-with-sheep jokes of visiting Australians. The poor Italian scholar elaborates on the links between the painting and the story and the identification of the wife with a sheep. Lawson’s fragile story sinks beneath the weight of this boyish mockery.

Women writers challenged these parodies, with Barbara Jefferis publishing her version later in 1980, and Anne Gambling writing a contemporary version in “The Drover’s De Facto” in 1986. That year, Damien Broderick joined in with the voice of the dog, who begins: “Call me Alligator.” Ten years later the game was taken up by Mandy Sayer and David Ireland, both writing about the painting, with another flurry of parodic stories dating from 2006 to the present. I fervently hope this hasn’t become a standard exercise in Australian creative writing courses.

Moorhouse brings together all these versions and variations, regardless of their merit or interest. Most of them are fun to read, with Louisa Lawson’s essay “The Australian Bush-Woman” standing out as more detailed and impassioned than her son’s famous story — though we know that he based it on his mother’s experiences in the bush. The longest piece in the collection, Madeleine Watts’s “Afraid of Waking It,” is also the strongest, though its story of the exploitation of a lonely young woman by a pair of old artists makes only tangential allusions to Lawson as it tracks its way around the inner west of Sydney.

As one might expect, Moorhouse emphasises sexual rather than political responses to Lawson and his writing. He takes little note of the reference to the drover’s being a failed squatter, a “careless” man like Middleton in Lawson’s poem “Middleton’s Rouseabout”: “Type of a careless nation/ Men who are soon played out/ Middleton was.” I would like to speculate that the drover’s wife followed Louisa Lawson’s example and headed for the city with her children, like so many others, as drought and economic depression took hold by the 1890s, but then I would simply be adding my own contribution to the thread.

Much more important is the postcolonial, Indigenous reading Leah Purcell brought to the story with her 2016 play of the same title. Moorhouse includes the notes by Purcell and the play’s director, Leticia Cáceres, from the recent Currency Press edition of the play. The play must have been produced just as Moorhouse was completing his book, and one can sympathise with his difficulty in trying to include some notice of it here.

These notes give only a sketchy idea of Purcell’s drama, which blows previous versions of the story out of the water. She imagines her drover’s wife armed with a gun, facing up to the swagmen and troopers who come her way and ready to protect the Aboriginal man who calls on her for help. She is both a more abused and a much more formidable figure than the women in the other stories, and the secret she is hiding is redolent with anger and violence. Her son’s declaration that he “won’t never go drovin’” amounts to a commitment to join her in outlawry.

Moorhouse struggles to come to terms with the racism evident in the changes Lawson made to his original story, which expanded the references to the midwife “Black Mary” sent by “King Jimmy,” and described the Aboriginal man who built the wood heap as “the last of his tribe and a King.” He calls these additions “coarsened music-hall caricatures” and is disappointed that Lawson seems to have approved them. He recalls that he accepted, as a child, the conventional wisdom that Aboriginal people were dying out, despite the presence of Aboriginal children in his primary school class, but he undermines his good intentions by adding, “Now it is the Anglo-Saxon tribe that is dying out,” with an unfortunate echo of the familiar white nationalist rhetoric.

This proliferation of writers writing on writers suggests that publishers have lost faith in the ability of academic critics — the people Moorhouse generously calls scholars — to offer interesting or helpful readings of Australian writing. Perhaps all the arguments about literary theory and identity politics have drawn them away from the task of clear explication of the fiction of their compatriots. Perhaps it is simply more exciting to publish a creative response to a work of literature rather than a close reading by a self-effacing critic. This is a matter of personal concern, as I edit a series of books intended to give academic scholars the chance to examine the work of Australian writers at length; it seems to be pushing against an overwhelming preference for personal responses from other fiction-makers.

With its series of essays by writers on writers, Black Inc. has joined this trend, beginning with Alice Pung on John Marsden and Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings. Each of them addresses the writer in question, making a sustained case for admiration of the work. At a time when some parents have criticised the gloominess of the texts set for high school students, Pung insists that it is important that teenagers are exposed to the darker side of life, especially when they are likely to be struggling with difficult personal circumstances.

Jensen wears his heart on his sleeve, declaring Jennings’s Snake to be “the great Australian novel.” His interviews with the writer suggest a friendship that extends to sympathetic reading of her fiction. His essay is clear, entertaining and full of interesting context that will send readers looking for Jennings’s work. “Snake failed to find an audience,” he tells us. “It never had a good cover, its subject was unfashionable. Several times it was described as a descendant of Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’.” Of course, a section of Snake appears in Moorhouse’s book.

These essays appear to be a return to what was once called “literary appreciation,” criticism that engages with the writing and reads it sympathetically in context. They are a welcome addition to the array of responses to Australian writing, most of all because they are an invitation to go back to the original writing and read it for itself. ●

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Three recent memoirs by Australian men make this relationship central to the structuring of their life narratives. Each author is the only son of a failing marriage, and each feels the need to investigate the mystery of his father. Journalist Shaun Carney recognises something of his father’s extrovert personality in his own desire for public attention, but is reassured that his mother’s quiet seriousness is equally evident. Broadcaster Mark Colvin enjoys finding himself to be the “reverse coin” of his father: they share an eagerness to learn as much as they can about the world, but Colvin’s own enthusiasm for conveying information to the public is a counter to his father’s secretive life as a spy. For historian Jim Davidson, acknowledging that his talents as a writer and researcher reflect those of his father is more difficult.

Reading the three books together sharpens the contrasts between the personalities of the authors and, even more importantly, highlights their different life experiences. Each bears witness to important changes in Australian domestic and working life as he considers the personal implications of social, political and technological change. Though the three were born within fifteen years of each other, their different class positions and opportunities are telling.

Carney’s account of growing up in outer-suburban Melbourne in the late 1950s and 1960s could be a companion piece for The Art of the Engine Driver, Steven Carroll’s novel set in the same period. It will remind many older readers of their own experiences in the postwar years, when returned servicemen built their own homes and sent their children to state schools that, in turn, gave bright students access to the new universities. Carney went from Kananook Primary School to the newly established Monterey High School near Frankston, and then on to study at Monash University. He claims to have been a mediocre student, the kind of teenager whose reading of choice was Marvel Comics, and to have been inspired to become a journalist by Clark Kent. At twenty, he was offered a cadetship with the Melbourne Herald, moving to the Age eight years later and remaining there for the rest of his career.

His would have been an utterly ordinary childhood if not for his father. To an admiring boy, Jim Carney was the knockabout Australian man, a welder who insisted on putting together their ramshackle two-bedroom house without professional help. As time passed, though, Jim’s absences from home and arguments with his wife forced his son to take a more critical view. Although the family seemed unambiguously Australian, it was peculiarly isolated; as an only child, their son feels it intensely.

In adulthood, he understands that his father’s illegitimacy made him want to start anew, and that his mother’s marriage was an escape from the restrictions of a family who expected her to slave away for them in country Maitland. While Jim wanders, having affairs, changing jobs, seeking outlets for his extroverted personality, Eddie remains the supportive, serious, reliable mother who ensures that Shaun pursues an education. When he asks her why she didn’t leave his father, she explains that her financial situation and lack of work skills cut off that option. It was a familiar situation for women of her generation.

With his father spying for MI6, Mark Colvin has a more exciting story to tell. His grandfather was an admiral in the British navy and his father left the navy a few years after the second world war as a lieutenant commander. By the time Mark was born, John Colvin had begun his secret career in cold war espionage. The family lived in Vienna when Kim Philby and his comrades were shopping British agents, then Malaya as it became Malaysia, then moved back to London while his father lived in Hanoi as British consul general during the Vietnam war.

When Colvin senior was British ambassador in Outer Mongolia, the undergraduate Mark travelled across China by train to join him in Ulan Bator – an extraordinary journey across a nation, embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, that was normally closed to Westerners. The older Mark pursues his father’s trail even more doggedly, reading each new spy memoir and all the newly released MI6 files to piece together an adventurous career in the shadows.

John Colvin’s absences meant that his marriage had disintegrated by the time his son was ready for high school. Mark was sent to board at the brutal Summer Fields prep school near Oxford – in an aside, he wonders that concern about the sexual abuse of children doesn’t extend to other physical abuse – then to Westminster School in the heart of swinging London. He graduated from Oxford with a passion for English literature, and decided that journalism might be the next best thing to an academic life.

Both Carney and Colvin suggest that getting a job as a journalist was easy in the 1970s. Colvin’s Australian-born mother had remarried and was living in Canberra with his younger sister, and he decided to join them. In no time, he was working for the ABC as a news cadet, then on the team at the Sydney youth radio station Double J. A wonderful photograph shows him with long hair and moustache holding the receiver of a phone while balancing a cigarette in the same hand. Colvin was both journalist and performer, his “Pommy” voice familiar to ABC RN listeners for decades.

His ABC news career included a terrifying experience in Tehran when Jimmy Carter instigated an abortive rescue attempt for the hostages in the US embassy, an early arrival at the scene of the Granville train disaster, and the occasion when his good manners rewarded him with a scoop confirming Robert Trimbole’s death in Spain. He is amusing on the relatively primitive nature of news broadcasting in the 1980s, including the need to run between buildings to deliver the Double J news. Alligator clips and public phones feature frequently as the journalists struggle to file their stories back to the studios on makeshift equipment, and Colvin regrets the loss of some wonderful stories because of technical failures.

Carney’s newspaper career was more traditional, starting with police rounds then advancing to the prestige of the Canberra press gallery and opinion pieces. He is aware that he may be recounting a way of working that looks to be lost forever with the collapse of the print media. On the other hand, broadcast journalist Colvin regards the internet as a boon to information gathering and dissemination. By the time of his final illness, he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of Twitter as a news source and grateful that such technology was available when he was least mobile.

Carney claims that his generation is marked more by their lifelong experience of television than by the youth revolutions and pop music of the 1960s. Colvin, five years older, recalls his excitement at the emergence of Bob Dylan, the Beatles (whom he managed to see, but not hear, in London) and the Rolling Stones. Both journalists became reviewers and enthusiasts for rock music.

Jim Davidson was too old to engage with the popular music of that era, though music has had a significant place in his life. He recalls reading Alfred Einstein’s Music in the Romantic Era and responding to its conjunction of his two passions, classical music and history.

The late child of parents born at the turn of the twentieth century, Davidson seems a generation away from the experiences of Colvin and Carney. When he writes about his grandparents, he is recalling people who flourished before the first world war. If Colvin sees his father as a participant in the end of the British Empire and the creation of a new world order during the cold war, Davidson depicts a father active in an earlier iteration of that Empire, born in South Africa and working for colonial companies in Fiji and New Guinea. He interprets his father’s later career as a dealer and collector of Aboriginal art as a continuation of that colonising role.

With his parents separated, Davidson was sent as a boarder to Mentone Grammar in suburban Melbourne, where he suffered bullying (though not the regular beatings dished out at Colvin’s proper British school). He returned to his father’s home on weekends, where a succession of women tried out the vacant position of wife. His father was alert to any failings in his son’s masculinity and appeared ready to deride him as effeminate long before Jim’s own slowly developing awareness of his sexuality.

It is, perhaps, in his account of his life as a homosexual man before law reform and gay liberation that Davidson’s book may offer most to the historical record. He found Ormond College at the University of Melbourne a refuge from the sports obsessions of the outside world, and his dinner companions were a like-minded group of young men who cared about literature and music. Such was the need for secrecy at the time that it was years before he discovered that four of the six were gay. Pursuing postgraduate work in London, he still thought a woman would enter his life, and he ventured timidly into an underground gay scene where he found class division still evident.

He enjoyed the more democratic atmosphere in Melbourne’s gay clubs, particularly the Woolshed Bar, but an unnerving experience of being taken to Russell Street by the police on suspicion of murder served as a reminder of his vulnerability. Even as the editor of Meanjin in the late 1970s, he felt it wise to be circumspect.

Much of the later part of Davidson’s book describes his perseverance with his father’s new wife and sons in an attempt to create the supportive family network denied him in childhood. His father’s will creates a new rupture as the two younger sons strategically distance themselves from him. By this point, a financial inheritance seems to be Davidson’s last hope for some emotional resolution of his relationship with his wilful, controlling father.

Davidson’s book raises questions about the motivations for writing memoirs like these. Carney makes it clear that he has been stimulated by the sudden loss of his career, and the desire to make meaning of a life when his millions of published words threaten to disappear into oblivion. Colvin has the obvious spur of debilitating illness as he races to get down everything he knows and wants to say about the world (his book is the only one with an index). Davidson declares that his book is an attempt to write himself back into his family; rather than a recollection of a career framed by remembrance of a father, it is focused on the personal experience of a rejected son.

Paradoxically, Carney’s and Colvin’s experience as journalists communicating to a wide public has given them a greater reticence about their families than Davidson displays. Carney mentions his own marriages and children only to narrate the terrible experience of his daughter’s leukaemia and a surprising act of support from Peter Costello when treasurer. Colvin includes photographs of his two sons and mentions a wife, but gives us no further information about them. Davidson’s memoir is the most subjective and domestic, at times recalling grievances that might have been allowed to pass. As its title attests, it runs counter to Colvin’s rule of journalism: “Never start with a conclusion.”

There are moments, too, when Davidson makes odd assumptions about the likely experiences of his audience. “Most fathers,” he tells us, would have discussed their wills with their sons. And he comments that Ormond College lacked snobbery because “it was so effortlessly dominated by people from Scotch College.” He knows that he was among an elite, but appears unaware how that may undermine the sympathies of his readers, especially when financial inheritance is at issue.

Carney gives his father credit for providing him with an imagined audience for his newspaper stories: the man who read the paper every day, though his other reading might not extend beyond joke books and the Reader’s Digest. Colvin acknowledges the rich range of experiences given to him by his father, and an instance when he was driven to call on his father’s help to get him out of danger. He recognises that they have shared interests in politics and literature, and similar personalities.

While Davidson refuses to allow his father much leeway, he does depict a man of extraordinary willpower who managed to escape Tasmanian poverty to educate himself as a surveyor and businessman, and then as an expert in Arnhem Land art. His own abiding interest in the history of the British Empire, and his breadth of knowledge about art and music suggest that his father’s commitment to education served him well. This education gave him the cultural background to promote “Whitlamite high culture” as editor of Meanjin, and to write his highly regarded biographies of Louise Hanson-Dyer and Keith Hancock.

Any clichés about poor rich boys and self-made achievers may be knocked sideways by the sheer luck of an individual life. Carney sees himself as part of “one of the luckiest generations in human history,” born in Australia at a time when education was open to every kid from the suburbs, growing to adulthood too late for the Vietnam war. Colvin’s life of relative privilege as a child of the British military elite had its downside of brutality in the school system but also gave him a great education and enthusiasm for discovering the world. His misfortune was to contract a rare disease in Rwanda and face decades of debility and dialysis before his death in May. A child from what his father proudly called “a professional home,” Davidson received the education and material comforts of an upper middle-class Australian but never the affection and understanding he needed. Luck, it seems, can run both ways at once. •

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The clearing of the forests for wheat was a concerted effort of destruction, subsidised by governments that enticed working people onto the land to cut down bush and burn it to ashes. Aspiring farmers willingly joined the rampage, fuelled by the promise of land and a profitable business. In practice, they found that they could earn more from clearing the land than growing crops on it, so the rural cycle turned from the hard graft of knocking over the bushland to the celebration of mighty fires, rather than the traditional round of sowing and reaping. When one area was cleared, they moved on to the next.

These days, the WA wheatbelt produces grain for export and looks like a profitable concern, but its history is a terrible story of the industrialisation of agriculture at the expense of the land, the people who lived there before settlement, the animals, birds and trees, and, ultimately, the people who cleared it.

Such a story might be told in a conventional geographical history, surveying changes to the landscape and the politics of settlement, but Hughes-d’Aeth is a literary critic, aware that the process had a series of literary witnesses. He traces the century-long history of the wheatbelt through the work of well-known writers including Albert Facey, Jack Davis, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Jolley and John Kinsella – and some lesser-known, such as Cyril E. Goode, James Pollard and Barbara York Main. A few others – J.K. Ewers, Peter Cowan and Tom Flood – may be familiar to easterners interested in Australian literature but are hardly household names outside Western Australia.

Hughes-d’Aeth uses Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, not published until 1981, to provide an overview of this history. Facey’s family saw the wheatbelt clearing as an opportunity to rise from poverty to the ownership of land – that European dream. Like others from the eastern states, they were attracted west by the promise of the goldfields but found themselves working as labourers and suffering immense privation. As an eight-year-old, Facey walked 220 kilometres barefoot to get to his uncle’s holding, at what would become Wickepin. He tells a story of child slavery and neglect, but also gives an account of a general phenomenon – the movement of people in search of a fresh start on the land. His later experiences of the first world war, life as a soldier-settler, and ruin during the Great Depression are representative of life in the wheatbelt.

The enterprise of clearing the land had a moral dimension, Hughes-D’Aeth comments, a belief that the people as well as the land would be improved by this massive, grinding effort of labour. Of course, a literary tradition of pioneering and pastoral life already existed in the eastern states, where squatters rode their horses among rolling hills, growing wealthy from their sheep and cattle. It was romanticised – as writers such as Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Barbara Baynton attested – but it adapted a longstanding notion that Australian rural life could be “pastoral” in the literary sense, lived in harmony with the natural world. This notion couldn’t stand a chance in the wheatbelt; Hughes d’Aeth thinks Steele Rudd’s stories of hopeless family labour on a selection are the closest equivalent to the experience there. As James Pollard presents it, farming the wheat was “a numbing and endless cycle of tasks, and not a moving and redemptive expression of life.”

In a range of poems and stories, Goode, Pollard and Ewers tried to reconcile pioneering and pastoral mythology with the lives of the “wheat men.” But their experiences led them to sometimes bitter reflections on the impossibility of the task. Goode’s poem “The Power Farmer’s Soliloquy” makes the contrast clear, with its images of roaring engines and grinding gears – a wheat farm was more like a mechanised factory than a place of communion with nature. He wrote his collection of poetry, The Grower of Golden Grain, in the decade before the Depression drove him from the land; he published it himself and sold it door to door on the streets of Melbourne.

These aspiring literary writers also turned to natural history as consolation. Pollard wrote a weekly nature column for the West Australian in the 1920s that elicited a response from readers wanting to learn about the birds, insects and plants they found in the remnant parcels of bush around them. Ewers, a school teacher, sought him out to share their mutual interests in nature and literature – with Ewers publishing two novels about the wheatbelt experience. It was clear to them that “nature” was not the farm.

Hughes-d’Aeth reads literary writing and history in a novel way, and provides new insights into both. Peter Cowan’s reticence can seem like a wilful refusal to let the reader near the essence of his novels and short stories, but Hughes-d’Aeth reads this “understated prose” as an expression of Cowan’s experience of the “amazingly barren open spaces” and the isolation of his years as an itinerant labourer among the wheat. Cowan was young enough not to know the land before it was cleared, and educated enough to recognise the modernity of the agricultural world in which he lived. “Nature” has no romantic resonance for him, and his work presents an alienated modernist view, appropriate to the monotonous land and work in the wheat.

Dorothy Hewett was also a child of the wheat country, in her case from one of the families who prospered there. Hughes-d’Aeth sees her story “The Wire Fences of Jarrabin” (first published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1957 as “My Mother Said, I Never Should”) as the first literary recognition of the social divisions and the segregation of Aboriginal people there, while her poem “Legend of the Green Country” finds a mythic dimension through her own family history. He regards her musical drama The Man from Mukinupin as the high point of her career because of the way it counterpoints the layers of myth with the realities of wheatbelt life, and introduces a sense of “tragic time.”

Yet it took Jack Davis, publishing after 1970, to speak for the notable absence from wheatbelt literature – the original inhabitants of the land. Davis was not a wheatbelt local – his people came from the Pilbara – but his nine months at the Moore River Native Settlement made him a crucial witness to the treatment of the Aboriginal children and teenagers who were removed to there (mainly from the north) in the 1920s. Moore River, now infamous for its appearance in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, was also in wheat country, and Davis’s play No Sugar put its racist and mercenary principles on the public record. In some respects, his plays responded to Hewett’s Mukinupin by asserting that there were other invisible mythologies and other realities operating in wheatbelt society.

These connections between writers, including the importance of Judith Wright to Hewett and Kinsella, and of Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Davis, suggest an ongoing line of literary engagement with the Australian environment. The work of Randolph Stow, Henry Thoreau and William Wordsworth are also frequent touchstones through the book. Tom Flood, of course, is Hewett’s son, and her influence is clear in his novel Oceana Fine, while his work shares a generational shift towards postmodernist ambiguity with John Kinsella. In 2000, Kinsella and Hewett collaborated to produce Wheatlands, a collection of their poetry about the wheat country, with accompanying photographs.

It is Kinsella who offers a kind of conclusion to this literary witnessing of the damage of twentieth-century history. Growing up partly on a wheat farm with his father, partly in the city with his mother, Kinsella was always aware of the dual inheritance of the wheatbelt. He was the boy who cheerfully shot rabbits and trapped birds, and he acknowledges his own participation in the crime of destruction. As an adult, he finds some satisfaction in the emergence of the salt from beneath the surface of the land, as a sign of a return of a still powerful, if infertile, nature. In 2009, he moved back to live in Toodyay with his family, choosing to confront the dilemmas of the guilty human attempting reparation. This is symptomatic of the situation of all Australians who feel responsible for their environment, recognising that “the undisputed monarch of feral animals is the European human,” as Hughes-D’Aeth puts it. “In Kinsella’s poetry we have the wheatbelt functioning as an allegory for post-humanist despair.”

This is an expansive, monumental book – as lengthy as most literary histories of Australia, let alone a region. Hughes-d’Aeth gives a brief biography of each of his authors and reads their selected work closely and sympathetically. Though he can see the shortcomings of some of their writing, he gives such importance to their life experience and their testimony to a real world that these seem minor. He also takes into account the shifts in literary ideas and genre over time, moving from nature studies and memoir to stories, novels and poetry. It is a generous book in every sense, and a remarkable example of what literary criticism can do when it is not bound by narrow theories or tastes.

Of course, a conventional history could cover some of this ground – Hughes-D’Aeth refers to Geoffrey Bolton’s A Fine Country to Starve in,among others – but this literary evidence lets us see personal and emotional engagements with history. This kind of literary criticism amplifies the writing by putting it into a meaningful context. It demonstrates the centrality of literary writing to our understanding of ourselves.

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Edith Harper was first brought to Australia from England in 1885, before she was two, by her runaway mother. Her parents soon reconciled back in England and, when Edith was six, they returned to Australia, where she was educated in convent and public schools in Queensland and Sydney. Both of her parents had artistic aspirations that they projected on to their talented daughter, and they encouraged her to return to England to seek a career as a singer, after the manner of Nellie Melba. She took lessons in singing and drama, but the career didn’t eventuate, and in 1906 she married Patrick Hepburn, a lawyer and amateur astronomer. Within a few years she was the mother of two sons, living in the London suburbs.

In Australia she had published two plays for children, and she continued to write despite the vicissitudes of life with a husband who, she claimed, disapproved of her writing and singing. She adopted the pen name “Anna Wickham,” referencing the street in Brisbane where she had promised her father to become a poet, and published her first book of poetry in 1911. By 1922, with two further sons to care for, she had published four books of poetry and acquired a reputation as a poetic voice for women. In his introduction to this new selection of her work, Nathanael O’Reilly calls her a “pioneer of modernist poetry” and “a fierce feminist.”

Wickham lived on the edge of the Bloomsbury circle of literary London. During the first world war – when her husband was in the navy – she became friendly with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Perhaps she contributed to Lawrence’s optimistic view of Australia (described in David Game’s recent book about Lawrence), which was to fade so quickly after his direct experience of the country. In the face of her desperately unhappy domestic situation, Wickham embraced bohemia, visiting the wealthy American lesbian Natalie Barney’s salon in Paris and becoming one of the honoured members of her Académie des Femmes.

In 1929, Patrick Hepburn gave Wickham her freedom when he fell from a mountain in the Lake District while climbing alone on a wild day in mid-winter. She later opened her home to indigent writers, including Dylan Thomas. While maintaining a long and passionate correspondence with Barney, she had other intense relationships with women and men, including David Garnett, a member of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s ménage, who would edit a collection of Wickham’s poetry after her death.

The last poem she wrote, “I Hung Myself,” imagines a suicide attempt, and in 1947 she acted this out. Germaine Greer seized on this suicide to berate Wickham as one of her “slip-shod sibyls,” suicidal for twelve years “before, at the age of sixty-three, she completed the process.” Writing in 1995, Greer found Wickham overrated, deriding her poems as “gusty versicles.” O’Reilly’s edition of the poems reveals how much that comment owes to Greer’s inability to resist a witty phrase.

Wickham’s best-known poems are laments of the suburban wife, captive to the routines of housework and childcare. For example, “Nervous Prostration” begins:

I married a man of the Croydon class
When I was twenty-two.
And I vex him, and he bores me
Till we don’t know what to do!

“Divorce” expresses a wife’s desire for activity and risk “in the dark cold winds,” rather than a life smothered by the house fire. “Meditation at Kew” whimsically imagines releasing “all the pretty women who marry dull men” to frolic naked in the sun. “The Tired Man” considers a man who longs for the quiet life while his wife is “on the hillside / Wild as a hill-stream.” “The Marriage” presents marriage as an exhilarating battle where two people are “at each other like apes, / Scratching, biting, hugging / In exasperation” before calling a truce of friendship. There are enough of these poems to justify Wickham’s place in the history of feminist poetry, but they are not so simple as they appear.

Though much of the poetry is confessional in tone, it often adopts an imagined persona and is ironic, humorous, even satirical. “The Egoist,” with its claim that “a faulty rhyme may well be a well-placed microtone, / and hold a perfect imperfection of its own” might be read as Wickham’s own statement on form, but for that title and the pompous nature of the persona. “Multiplication,” dedicated to Lawrence, sends up the novelist’s ideas about women, imagining a woman’s life as a “printing machine” producing sons. Another poem teases George Bernard Shaw about his interest in money. “Lady Biography Comes to Tea” mocks chattering women and silly books.

While Patrick Hepburn might well have resented being classified as a man “of the Croydon class,” “The Homecoming” can be read as mourning the way the routines of married life can destroy both a man and his wife’s love. It grieves for a lost life and a lost love. It is possible, too, that “Invocation” expresses concern for Patrick’s absence at war – “My man is fighting on the open sea.”

This expanded collection of Wickham’s poetry supports Anne Pender’s view that her work encompasses a range of styles and subjects, well beyond feminine complaint. Some poems draw on folk traditions and Shakespearean forms, others experiment with free verse. There are nature lyrics (including delightful songs about boys playing in the garden), aphorisms, love poems, and a sonnet sequence.

The claims for Wickham’s pioneering role in modernism are more difficult to judge. In histories of modernist poetry, the established leaders of her generation are T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who resisted the confessional and autobiographical mode she favoured. Yet her associations (she also knew Pound) and the dates of Wickham’s publications are significant.

The period from 1911 to 1921, when she published most of her poetry, now appears to be a transitional period for literary experimenters like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Eliot. Wickham’s insistence on speaking in a woman’s voice, and her willingness to break with conventional form make their own contribution to the poetic experiments of her time. She sometimes uses archaic language, or wanders into mythological dreams, but she was part of a progress out of Georgian styles to more familiar and personal diction. Walt Whitman and W.B. Yeats are clear influences, but Wickham offers her own originality. The distinguishing quality of much of the poetry is the sheer energy it conveys (those gusty versicles!). Above all, there are poems here simply to enjoy.

O’Reilly has selected 150 poems from around 1000 held in manuscript form at the British Library, to add to one hundred from already published collections. He gives us no principles for the selection, nor any overview of what he found when working his way through them. In practice, it is difficult to find your way around this edition if you want some idea of the dates when the poems were composed, or (with no alphabetical index) to retrieve a poem that you noticed on first reading. There is no attempt to date the composition of the unpublished poems, so the poems are left pretty much to fend for themselves without context.

Two direct references to Australia in the newly published poems come as a surprise. “The Urge” responds to a letter from her father (“fourteen pages of Excelsior”) encouraging her to be both a “prophet of a new morality” and “still be popular”: “Till all Australia see my portrait in the Sphere.” The desire to please Australia with international fame has a familiar ring to it. In “Constantia Columbus Takes a Bus”:

There is a sudden freshening,
As when the southerly wind
Comes blustering up to Sydney,
Bringing South Arctic cold to end the breathless day.

It is not enough to make her a fully credentialled Australian poet, but it gives readers and critics a little more reason to be interested in a woman who held her own in the literary circles of London and Paris. •

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It is difficult to know whether Wright would have been pleased by this adulation. In life, she often bemoaned the popularity of her early poems as school texts, but she also tried to control the public memory by keeping a close eye on her approved biographer, Veronica Brady, and publishing her own account of her life, Half a Lifetime, a year before she died. Brady’s biography was hampered by its apparent reliance on its subject’s faulty memory. In 2010, Fiona Capp’s My Blood’s Country retrieved the situation to a degree by presenting a personal and affectionate account of Wright’s life, based on the various places where she lived and exploring the background to some of her closest relationships.

Now Georgina Arnott offers us the results of her research into Wright’s family background and the first twenty-one years of her life, including her years as a student at the University of Sydney. She identifies a dozen previously unknown poems published in student magazines mainly under pseudonyms, and she argues that Wright had established her poetic voice before she was thirty. She argues that these student poems form the basis for those in Wright’s first book, The Moving Image, published in 1946 when Wright was just thirty-one years old. It contains some of Wright’s best-known poems, “Bullocky,” “South of My Days,” “The Trains” and “Bora Ring.” No wonder that the elderly Wright felt some frustration that her fame relied on her youthful poetry rather than her lifetime of activism. Yet she clearly understood that this fame gave her the platform to speak on the other issues she cared about.

Arnott frequently notes the inadequacies in Brady’s biography, perhaps overstating its authority as the “official” account of Wright’s life. She also finds considerable evasion in Wright’s own accounts of her family background and her beginnings as a poet. As Tom Griffiths notes in his recent book, The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, Wright was a historian as well as a poet, publishing two different accounts of her family’s pioneering experience in New South Wales and Queensland. The first, The Generations of Men, a semi-fictional family history, was based on her grandfather’s diaries and completed as early as 1950 (though published in 1959). More than thirty years later, the second, The Cry for the Dead, drew on a range of public and private material exposed by other historians in the intervening years and recognised the complicity of her forebears in land-taking and the destruction of Aboriginal lives.

Arnott takes a closer look at the history of Wright’s ancestors, the Wyndham family, and finds them part of a determined exercise in land-grabbing and consequent killing of Indigenous owners. George Wyndham was the typical younger son of English landed gentry financed by the family to seek a new fortune as a colonial pastoralist. His intimacy with Robert Scott, the leader of the Hunter River Black Association formed to assist the Myall Creek massacre defendants, suggests that he was more than a “tolerant” bystander in the murders of local Wonnarua people. Where Wright’s histories concentrate on the violence against Aboriginal people on the Queensland frontier, Arnott finds that the family was implicated in these activities a generation earlier in the Hunter region and the Liverpool Plains, when family letters referred to George “shooting the unhappy blacks.”

She also explicates the political commitments of Judith’s father, Phillip, in the twentieth century. Phillip Wright was a founding member of the Country Party and president of the New States movement that campaigned for New England to become a seventh state in the 1950s. Wright remained close to her father, returning for a time to help him on the family property during the second world war, but it is difficult to know how much she was influenced by his political views. In Half a Lifetime, Wright tells us that her period back on Wallamumbi with her father gave her a new identification with the land and its people that changed her poetry. Her poem, “Nigger’s Leap, New England,” was based on her father’s story about the driving of Aboriginal people over a cliff opposite Point Lookout, revealed by later histories as a documented event. Arnott finds Wright’s poem “abstract and a-historicised,” more interested in conforming to the generic demands of Victorian Gothicism, than historical fact. She insists that this “Victorianism” was a legacy of the tastes of Judith’s mother, Ethel, who kept a scrapbook of sentimental verse, one of the few sources of poetry for the child poet.

Through this argument, Arnott tries to correct what she perceives as a postcolonial admiration for Wright’s poetry that absolves it from the tradition of the “Last of His Tribe” lament – a tradition evident in the white Australian poetry from the early nineteenth century that indulged in sadness at the “inevitable” passing of a race. Those of us who remember that Wright’s poetry was regularly derided as “strident” by the New Critics of the 1960s may feel an urge to defend her on historical grounds: by the 1940s, the massacre history of Australia was almost forgotten, and her poem and her attempt to write her family’s history provided timely reminders, even when they softened the narrative.

Readers will be most grateful to Arnott for retrieving some of the missing fifteen years of Wright’s life, in which she travelled to Europe and studied as a non-degree student at Sydney University. She enjoyed several love affairs while travelling and returned to Sydney determined to live beyond family surveillance. She wrote satirical social comments for Honi Soit and published the poems reprinted in Arnott’s appendix in Hermes and other student magazines. She attended lectures by the philosopher John Anderson, the literary critic Arthur Waldock and the historian Stephen Roberts, but later dismissed Roberts’s histories for reasons that Arnott finds unjust. English literature was Wright’s best subject, though she abandoned Honours because of an excess of Beowulf.

This is important background for Wright’s emergence as a literary critic in the 1950s. Her Preoccupations in Australian Poetry remains a foundational text for the discussion of Australian poetry, just as The Generations of Men and The Cry for the Dead are significant interventions in Australian history. As her career progressed, Wright influenced changes in Australian attitudes and was changed herself by those shifts. She also managed to do this while remaining outside the universities that she continued to regard with suspicion.

Arnott’s research adds to our knowledge of an important Australian figure, but she tends to exaggerate the significance of her discoveries. These early poems are the work of a talented young writer, but the shifts in approach and skill evident in the poems published in The Moving Image are considerable. Arnott tells us that she sees herself as a historian rather than a literary critic, which is evident in her positioning of Wright’s early poetry under the vague, simplifying heading “Victorianism” and her lack of concern for the context of other Australian poetry of the 1930s and 1940s. Her book has the merit of opening other questions about how Wright’s attitudes and experiences compare to those of the other writers (most notably Patrick White) who emerged from pastoral families in the twentieth century, or the more difficult literary careers of other women poets, like Gwen Harwood. She notices Wright’s delight in Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career, but leaves me wondering whether Wright might have read Franklin’s later novels of pioneering Australia. All That Swagger would make an interesting comparison to The Generations of Men. It is to be hoped that other critics and biographers may follow some of the leads that Arnott gives.

The mystery of Wright’s career – how a woman poet came to such longstanding prominence in Australia – remains unsolved. As Arnott notes, the noblesse oblige confidence provided by a squatting background and family financial support help to explain Wright’s determination to become a writer and to speak out on public issues. The ambivalent legacy of being “born of the conquerors” (to use Wright’s own phrase) also became a lifelong struggle that can be traced through the activism, the histories, the essays and the poetry. If “Bora Ring,” “Bullocky” and “Nigger’s Leap, New England” suggest a writer ready to ameliorate the past, then “For a Pastoral Family” (published in 1985) reveals Wright’s continuing engagement with her family’s past – her acknowledgement of a continuing bond with her kin and an awareness of their place in white Australian exploitation of Aboriginal people and the land. •

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The place must have changed since the 1960s; it gleams in the sunlight as if fresh-painted, and the cafes and taverns along the seafront are set up to match tourist dreams of the easy life. But Brian, an Australian who came to live here in the 1970s, tells me that most houses still have no sewerage beyond septic tanks, and water is scarce. Tourists seem to confine themselves to the few blocks near the water’s edge, happy just to eat the delicious Greek food and look up at the stony hills in the distance.

We’ve come to honour the writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who lived in Hydra from 1955 until 1964 at the centre of an assorted collection of artists and writers, Australian, English, Canadian, American, German, Scandinavian and Greek. Paul Genoni from Curtin University and Tanya Dalziell from the University of Western Australia have organised a conference here, so we’ve gathered at the Bratsera Hotel to talk about the significance of Clift’s and Johnston’s work and friendships.

It seems like the greatest excuse ever for an escape to an idyllic resort – and as it happens, people commonly assumed that Johnston and Clift were escaping, too, in their case from the tough realities of postwar Australia. They both complained about uninvited visits from passing Australians who wanted to take a stickybeak at their lives – a charge that may rebound on us as we poke around among their old haunts, though the writers themselves can no longer complain.

The current owner of the house in which Johnston and Clift lived has generously allowed us to hold a reception in his courtyard and wander through the now rather stylish house. The old well where the local women gathered water is still there outside the walled garden. It all looks so beautiful it is easy to forget the poverty and hard work, the difficulties of bringing up children in such sparse conditions, and the ominous evidence of Johnston’s incipient tuberculosis.

We view a visual tribute to Charmian Clift by Yianni and Micky Papapetros, based on the ABC radio documentary Persona: The Parallel Lives of Charmian Clift, which reminds us of her brilliance and beauty and her sad end back in Australia. Some of the conference papers are accompanied by vivid black-and-white photographs of the famous or forgotten figures who visited – American poet Allen Ginsberg, the New Zealand journalist Redmond “Bim” Wallis, a youthful Mungo MacCallum carrying a baby in a basket. Diana Thomas’s paper on the novelist Pat Flower is accompanied by a photograph of Flower in Provence with a youthful Margaret Olley, who appears to be wearing pedal pushers.

The best-known of these photographs include James Burke’s Life magazine pictures of Leonard Cohen playing guitar with Clift and others under the olive tree at Douskos Taverna. As a child, Rosemary Burke accompanied her father on his visit to Hydra, and she has come back to help us understand her father’s photographs; she also takes the opportunity to re-enact their ride over the Hydra ridges on horseback.

We have enough celebrity fandom to have our photos taken under the same tree at Douskos’s (the waiter insists that we pose under the olive tree of the Burke photos, though some of us also want to sit under the pine tree of Cohen’s poem about it). Yet the whole enterprise has a bittersweet quality. We’ve read enough of the books and essays to know how much the couple struggled to survive through their writing. Hydra’s chief attraction was that it was a cheap place to live and Clift, in particular, bore the brunt of its lack of domestic amenity.

Of course, most of the photographs show them at leisure, hanging around the harbourfront cafes with friends, drinking and singing in the tavernas, shopping in the markets, sailing around the Aegean on the yachts of their richer friends. Apart from George, they are all young and beautiful, laughing for the camera. In every photograph the tubercular George has a cigarette in his hand. The hard graft of writing and selling books is easy to forget.

Like Bim Wallis and some of the unidentified figures in the photographs (“Who was that?” “Just a German who wanted to write”), Johnston and Clift might have been forgotten if My Brother Jack had not stirred such a response of recognition among Australian readers. It won the Miles Franklin award in 1964, providing enough money for George to return home; Charmian and their three children had to follow by ship as £10 migrants.

The novel is, of course, set far from Hydra in a Melbourne where war had been followed by the Great Depression, which led to shifts in aspirations as Australia entered another international conflict. Like James Joyce writing about Dublin from Paris, Johnston, with Clift’s help, had to conjure up all his memories of the places and language of his past. Brigid Rooney produced a photograph of the model for the hated suburban house in “Beverley Grove,” now in a comfortable tree-lined street in desirable Brighton.

Clean Straw for Nothing, the sequel to My Brother Jack, is the novel of their Hydra lives. It also won a Miles Franklin award, but its account of the struggle by Johnston’s fictional counterpart, David Meredith, to make a living, his physical decline and his obsession with his wife’s infidelity makes for painful reading. Some characters seem to correspond with members of the Hydra crowd – the artist Sidney Nolan and the actor Peter Finch, among others. It may be accurate in its account of the activities and intrigues of the expatriate community, but it couldn’t draw sympathy from Australian readers in the way of My Brother Jack, which seems to say necessary things about the aftermath of the first world war and its damage to returned soldiers and their families, and the prospects for a newly revived postwar Australia.

Johnston may have been expressing his own dissatisfaction with the limits of suburban Australian life in My Brother Jack, but Australian readers, even those of subsequent generations, recognise the novel’s aptness to the raw suburbs of their own experience. Several conference-goers commented that Johnston’s version of Beverley Grove in the 1930s corresponded to their feelings about the new suburbs of Western Sydney in the 1960s or of Canberra in the 1970s.

In retrospect, it seems that Sydney was a more congenial place than Greece for Johnston’s and Clift’s writing careers. While the novels they churned out on Hydra have mostly been forgotten, the first two novels of Johnston’s David Meredith trilogy were acclaimed and Clift won a devoted following for her informed and perceptive columns for the Sydney Morning Herald. Reading these columns today, they appear to monitor the changes in Australian attitudes – towards the Vietnam war, music and dress, relations with Aboriginal people, and occasionally even the current crises in Greek politics. It seems that their decade in Greece gave both writers a sharper insight into the desire among many Australians to throw off our ignorance about the world, the energetic cultural rebellion of the young, and the mix of kindness and prejudice in the old generation.

Beate Josephi drew attention to Johnston’s war novel The Far Road, published immediately before My Brother Jack; and there was discussion of the brilliance of earlier journalistic works, including Journey to Tomorrow (1947), and the importance of his experience of China and Tibet as a journalist at the end of the war – including his journey with James Burke to Tibet. Clearly he is a writer whose work beyond My Brother Jack deserves rereading.

The posthumously published A Cartload of Clay, the third of the David Meredith novels, now strikes me as an extraordinary portrayal of changes in Australian life. Like one of Patrick White’s novels of postwar Sydney, it observes suburban life, including the coarse vulgarity of an Australian “ocker” and the bright materialism of the young women, as its protagonist wanders the streets of Mosman thinking about his career and the death of his wife.

Now, of course, that novel can’t be read without awareness of Clift’s suicide in 1969 and Johnston’s death a year later. Clift’s last column, published after her death on the eve of the release of Clean Straw for Nothing, referred to her own claims on the material in Johnston’s novel and her desire to tell her own version of the story. So the relationship between their lives and their fiction can never be unravelled. Inevitably, what we think we know about their lives and their difficult marriage – based on their own writings – eclipses the writing itself.

Early death from tuberculosis, barbiturates and alcohol is far from glamorous. Yet the photographs, the food and the simplicity of Greek life, which Clift described so vividly in Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, give an inerasable air of glamour to the couple. Online there is even a clip of George and Charmian and their children as extras in a Tony Randall movie set on Hydra, called Island of Love. They were stars, of a kind, and their early deaths leave a sense of potential unrealised.

One of the paradoxes of the period when Johnston and Clift lived on Hydra is that it marked the beginning of the greatest migration of Greeks to Australia. While the writers sought peace on a Greek island, thousands of Greeks were leaving their country in despair. As we visit, the Greek people are again suffering from a declining economy and coping with tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Syria. Many of the shops in Athens are boarded up, and the refugees are noticeable around the Port of Piraeus and in the outer suburbs, though they are kept away from the tourist havens. On Hydra, we appear to be in a dream, apart from political realities, Greek or Australian, and the locals treat us with hospitality and kindness. The disjunctions between the Australian dream of island simplicity and the realities of Greek life remain. •

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It appears to be a modest little book, honouring a friendship, but Idle Talk reads like an epistolary novel, the kind of book Jane Austen might have written if she had found herself a housewife and mother in the Hobart suburbs in the 1960s. Even that comparison may be unfair to Harwood because her interests and language are both earthier and more wide-ranging than Austen’s – it is her perceptive wit and her capacity for social observation that invites the comparison. Idle Talk is full of eccentric characters and ridiculous social occasions. It also has moments of pathos, and gives an immediate sense of the restrictions on women in the Australian suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the sixties, Hobart was a far-flung outpost of the Australian academic world. (“This ugly charm flung in seas of slate,” according to Harwood.) But it wasn’t entirely sleepy: the university was at the centre of a national controversy over its dismissal of professor Sydney Sparkes Orr when the cold war agitator, James McAuley, was appointed as a reader and then a professor of English literature. This was the department in which Gwen’s husband, Bill, taught Old English and Linguistics; Vivian Smith, another poet, taught in the Modern Languages department.

As editor of Quadrant, McAuley already had form with Harwood: he had rejected “magnificent works of Gwen Harwood” (in her words) but accepted a “feeble” effort under the pseudonym “Francis Geyer” for publication. Gwen greets his appointment with horror:

I’m sure McAuley’s presence here will cancel out second-best friends, and feel depressed about it. And feel depressed too that second-rate polemics & politics should be awarded a Readership – look on this Reader, and on this… I am urging the old man to get the hell out of here. Charles [Hardie, professor of education] has suggested that McA is really a Commo infiltrating & insinuating under the guise of Catholicism but it seems all too horribly like what it appears to be. The universal distribution of poisoned rosaries seems called for, I mean distribution among the faithful.

A few letters later the Harwoods are feeding the McAuleys fish, rather than poison, for lunch:

I said “Trumpeter, Jim,” and he said “Wonderful” and went for it like a dog; he had cleaned up his plate before Bill had finished squeezing his lemon, and then sat hungrily eyeing ours while we finished; there wasn’t any more. He had two goes of pineapple pud & plenty of fruit, not to mention beer & coffee.

Within months, McAuley (sometimes with his five children) has become a regular visitor, dropping in to eat whatever Gwen can rustle up and playing the piano with enviable skill: “streets ahead of me.” In no time at all, he has become a friend: “Heavenly Jim is a goody, really, we like him very much.”

The first excitement of 1961, though, is the Bulletin’s publication of two sonnets by one of Gwen’s other alter egos, “Walter Lehmann,” with the acrostic first letters spelling out “So long Bulletin” and “Fuck all editors.” Harwood writes about the visit of Vincent Buckley to Hobart and how they agreed to submit parodic poems to literary editors under each other’s names; the acrostic of “Eloisa to Abelard” originally read “Vincent Buckley” rather than the reference to the Bulletin. Buckley decided not to submit Harwood’s poems as his own, but she submitted Buckley’s parody “The Sentry” to Leonie Kramer for Australian Poetry 1961 over her own name. Kramer was alerted to the ruse, though she did publish another poem by Harwood, as well as poems by Geyer and Lehmann. Harwood later published “The Sentry” in her first collection of poetry, with no indication that it was Buckley’s.

The recognition of the acrostic message in the Bulletin poems (possibly after a hint from Buckley to his students) caused turmoil in the social world of Hobart, with headlines such as TAS. HOUSEWIFE IN HOAX OF THE YEAR! Harwood became briefly notorious, causing distress to some of her friends and leading her to doubt Buckley’s friendship: “Just to let you know that the shit-hawk Vincent Buckley sold me out to the Bulletin. He was offered the job of poetry editor, feared his part would lose him his £5 weekly (nice to know his price).” It is not long, though, before A.D. Hope has convinced her to forgive him: “I like Vin so much that I don’t really care what he did or didn’t do.” She tends to enjoy the company of all these poets, while reserving judgement on their poetry, taking as her standard whether she’d be willing to sign their poems as her own.

She was incorrigible when it came to inventing poetic personae. At the beginning of 1962, Alison Hoddinott began to act as postbox for “Miriam Stone,” the author of Harwood’s famous “Suburban Sonnet” and “Burning Sappho” about the frustrated aspirations of an artist housewife and mother. Harwood’s mischief-making appears to be a subversive way to fight back against these frustrations. Angus & Robertson agree to publish her first collection of poetry, then dillydally about it until it finally emerges in 1964 (dated 1963). It is clear that the men poets are treated differently, and they condescend to her just a little. “I HATE HOBART” becomes a refrain of the letters as, like some Chekhov character, Harwood laments the cold climate, the parochialism and her distance from the centres of culture. Her interest in food, clothes and any good music that comes her way is heightened by her sense of deprivation.

She turns the visit of Leonie Kramer to give Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures at the university into a comic tour de force:

She is beautiful, with ice-blue eyes that shine like jewels, to coin a phrase; tall, with lovely figure & a 30gn. [guineas] suit to enclose it, topped by a velvet silk-lined evening coat. My dear! It would be 50 gns. at Bidencope’s. I sneaked up to the McAuley bedroom to do over my lipstick & finding myself alone opened a few cupboards – Norma has OCEANS of lovely clothes; you’d be amazed, Al, you with your one good dress & me with mine; there must be more money in Quadrant than we think. I also had time to finger the Kramer french velvet & sigh at its quality.

This letter goes on to describe the quality of the food and the difficulty eating it, providing a brief account of the conversations on “littery matters,” building to a hectic account of the further social events surrounding the lectures (“style good, content atrociously boring”) and ending with a visit from McAuley and the poet Evan Jones, during which McAuley hopped into one of the children’s beds for a sleep.

Through all this there are childhood diseases, women’s operations, picnics with the family, visits from parents and grandparents, and lots of cooking (ox tongue features regularly). School holidays lead to bouts of depression as the poet is kept from her work. The book ends on a high point, though, as Harwood’s collection of poetry is finally published to admiring reviews and she declares that she has given up poetry for commerce. She enrols in a shorthand and typing course and finds work as the receptionist for a Hobart ophthalmologist: “You wouldn’t know me: cool, crisp, HAPPY. I love the job & can hardly wait to crack out in the morning.”

Obviously, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Australian poetry. If you own Harwood’s Collected Poems you can read the relevant poems as you go. But it really deserves a wider audience for its exuberant wit and sense of the ridiculous. Many of the letters were written on “Sappho Cards” (like the one below) that Harwood made by pasting bits of Victorian illustrations on card and adding her own “conversation bubbles,” and Hoddinott reproduces them here. Her efforts pre-date the Monty Python animations or Glen Baxter’s comic rejigging of Boy’s Own illustrations.

Harwood was a genius in her own particular way and, reading these letters, one feels for the limitations on her life. She had never been to Europe, though her poetry is rich with references to European art. She is hungry for good music, though reliant on recordings (especially Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) most of the time; she has lived without a piano for fifteen years and laments the loss of her own skill. Her encounters with the prominent men poets reveal how confident she is in her own abilities and her own judgement, though she refuses to become a critic. She seems to have no worldly ambition beyond the quality of her poetry – though she would like money for a car, a good piano or nice clothes. Above all, she manages to be an intellectual, reading avidly from the library and keeping up with international developments in philosophy and poetry.

Harwood could never have written all this as a novel because she was too aware of her responsibilities to her family and the friends whom she loves while mocking their follies. Intimations of the ambivalent nature of marriage and family life appear beneath the comedy, and Hoddinott gives her own perspective on the Harwood marriage when she describes Bill Harwood’s determination to create a computer that might write poetry: “He kept the machine by his bedside and Gwen sardonically referred to it as his mistress.”

Just as she knew how original and brilliant her own poetry was, Harwood clearly had a sense of the lasting value of her letters. She chided Hoddinott for having acted on the command to burn most of those written during 1960. They are delightful in their own right, far beyond their insights into the politics of poetry and the academic world of the 1960s, or even their depiction of family life in the Australian suburbs. Harwood offers an exemplar of how to survive as an artist in the provinces by calling on her friends to share her sense of the ludicrous. •

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Garner is not the first Australian to win a Windham Campbell award; the playwright Noelle Janaczewska was awarded a prize in 2014, its second year. Janaczewska may be little known outside Australian theatre circles, but she works across a range of genres, including what she calls “performance essays.” The award announcement mentions her play This Territory, written in response to the Cronulla riot of 2005, alongside a wide range of theatre works and collaborations. The acknowledgement of Garner mentions not only This House of Grief but also her remarkable ability to shift between fiction and nonfiction.

The prize’s interest in different genres reflects the fact that Donald Windham was a writer of short stories and essays, and his life partner, Sandy Campbell, was an actor and theatre reviewer. The awards are funded from their carefully managed legacy, and they seem directed by the interests of writers rather than the concerns of publishers or the desire for publicity.

Here in Australia we have more modest literary awards, some of them also funded from the legacies of writers and their families. Of these, the Miles Franklin, the Patrick White and the Barbara Jefferis awards are the best known. The Kibble and Dobbie awards for women writers are the legacy of a librarian, Nita Dobbie, who wished to honour her librarian aunt, Nita Kibble. As well as these named awards, literary societies, journals, publishing groups, libraries and communities offer a range of other rewards to writers each year.

With less reliability, we also have publicly funded awards, such as the Prime Minister’s and the Premiers’ prizes. Curiously, though they are funded from the public purse, these awards attract less public criticism than a private award such as the Miles Franklin. In fact, the Miles Franklin appears to be pre-eminent in terms of reputation and controversy. The Sydney Morning Herald’s recent obituary for Leonie Kramer gave more space to her role in the awarding of the Miles Franklin to Helen Darville (Demidenko) than to her years of teaching and supervising university students, let alone her decades of uncontroversial chairing of the award. Though the judges now get a small honorarium, in Kramer’s day they were lucky to get a free drink as recompense for the long hours spent poring over the entries.

As Ivor Indyk has commented, the Stella Prize “shadows” the Miles Franklin award. It was established as a response to the perceived failure of the Miles Franklin to acknowledge the writing of women. It looks for winners who are “excellent, original and engaging” and also runs a supporting program of book talks and events to promote the work of women writers. Three of its four winners have been novels, the fourth a history book.

Though it is too soon to know whether a “Stella” genre will emerge, this year’s winner, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, certainly raises questions about misogynist culture in Australia, suggesting the prize may take a position close to the Jefferis award’s search for an excellent work of fiction that depicts women and girls in a positive way “or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society.” The Jefferis winner can be written by a man, though none has won the prize (just as no non-Australians have won the Miles Franklin, though they are not precluded). Whether or not the Stella has influenced the Miles Franklin judges, the Franklin has gone to a woman each year since the Stella’s inception.

This plethora of prizes may be overwhelming to readers, but for writers in Australia, an English-speaking country with access to the literary publishing of the rest of the world, they offer a little financial support and, sometimes, help in building a reputation and boosting sales. It remains difficult for a literary writer to make any kind of living from publishing in Australia. With an estimated mean annual income for writers of about $12,500 from creative work, a serious literary author may well be grateful for any award that brings annual income closer to the $50,000 of the average Australian worker.

The catch is in the process of staggered longlist and shortlist announcements that goes with most Australian literary awards. Writing begins to look like a competitive sport, with losers eliminated in each round. (In practice, judges often find the winner at a first or second meeting, so shortlists are sometimes announced after the final decision has been made.) The desire for a big announcement ceremony means that organisers may keep the winner secret so that the shortlisted “losers” won’t be discouraged from attending. If you’ve been present when a prize has been announced and noticed unchosen writers carefully composing their faces or slipping speech notes back into a pocket, you will understand their reluctance to attend. The decision by some awards to give consolation cheques to shortlisted authors at least recognises this difficulty.

Some award managers seem to want books, like paintings or singing recitals, to be a communal public experience subject to a voicing of popular opinion. I recently took the opportunity to vote in the People’s Choice category of the NSW Premier’s prize for a novel; I had read only three of the six shortlisted novels, but that’s probably two more than many other voters. Promoting readers’ participation in this way seems harmless but it shouldn’t be mistaken for promoting the interests of writers. It would be fairer to them to release a long and inclusive list of all the good books that have a chance of the award, then simply announce the lucky winner.

For the winner will, indeed, be as much lucky as deserving. Judging panels are not absolute in their taste, and often harbour deep disagreements about the final choice. One forceful personality on a judging panel can drive everyone else into submission. In my various experiences as a judge, complete agreement usually came only on two-person panels. Once three or more judges are involved, the winner is likely to be a compromise candidate, and a safe one. Award managers sometimes seem ignorant or careless about the reputations of the judges they choose: the divided Prime Minister’s award for fiction in 2014 revealed a dispute between members of the judging panel, though some innocents seemed to believe that the prime minister had intervened to reward his personal favourite. As it happened, the Man Booker Prize judges later agreed that Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner.

Perhaps commentators take it quietly when odd things happen with politicians’ awards because they know that these awards are regularly endangered by political change. The Queensland Premier’s awards, for instance, disappeared when Campbell Newman came to power. A range of wonderful artists benefited from Paul Keating’s Creative Fellowships in the early 1990s, but the fate of the scheme was sealed as soon as the prime minister’s name became attached to them. Arm’s-length arts funding through the Australia Council was set up for good reason.

Judges will always have subjective taste, whether because of their academic training, their own reading experience or their place in the market; and in Australia’s small literary world, outright prejudices occasionally attach to particular writers. Despite any declared political commitments, though, judges are likely to be individualists rather than ideologues, and Australian literary judges have never been shy about publicly resigning on principle or declaring their abstention from a judgement. (Carmen Callil took this to an international level when she resigned from the judging panel that awarded the Man Booker International prize to Philip Roth in 2011.)

This is one of the ways that such awards stay in the news and gain extra publicity for writing. But it also detracts from the purpose of supporting writers to do their work. In my view, the funds for the various politicians’ awards would be better added to the severely depleted coffers of the Australia Council or to the state arts funds as part of their regular grants to writers.

In his survey of the Miles Franklin award in Australian Book Review a few years ago, Patrick Allington called for the publication of complete lists of all entrants, and more openness about the decision-making process. To me, the tactful approach of the Windham Campbell prize is more appealing because I can’t see that the public has any right to know how a private award is decided. It is all very well to barrack for the different possible winners, but we can hardly call for “freedom of information” rights.

Why shouldn’t the prize go to an excellent novel about “Australian life in any of its phases,” for instance, if that is the kind of writing its benefactor wanted to promote? If there has been a Miles Franklin genre, it has been the kind of monumental historical novel that Franklin herself wrote in her middle years: winners from Patrick White’s Voss to Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes, to Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, to Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance conform to this genre.

It does seem that this kind of novel is usually written by men. A glance down the list of past winners shows that the prize on occasions has gone to more eccentric writing by Thea Astley, David Ireland, David Foster and Elizabeth Jolley, and to domestic novels like Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra By the River and The Impersonators. But women have been less frequent winners, and first-novel winners are rare. (The controversial Darville was both a woman and a first-time novelist.) The striking thing is that so many Miles Franklin winners have been excellent novels. And this is the real test of a literary prize. The judges and their processes don’t really count. It is whether the novels stand up when read and reread over time.

By this standard, the Miles Franklin has picked more winners than losers over the years – which is not to say it hasn’t picked some weak novels from time to time. Occasionally there are years when there are several excellent novels in contention, and others when there are hardly any. Domestic novels have been rare winners, and comic novels rarer still. In fact, the absence of satire and humour has been a weakness across all Australia’s literary prizes. Andrew McGahan’s serious consideration of Australian history, The White Earth, won the Miles Franklin in 2006, but I doubt that his wonderfully funny 1988, published ten years earlier, was even entered. Fortunately, a farmer called Peter Wentworth Russell noticed this gap, and has left a legacy to fund a prize for an Australian work of humour, so far to be awarded every second year. (Bernard Cohen’s novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies won the inaugural prize last year.)

So, if you feel inclined to leave your estate to support literary writing in Australia, learn the lessons of these various awards. The admirable Patrick White award takes no submissions, with its judges quietly reviewing the body of work of living Australian writers before announcing the winner. There is no need to insult any other writers by shortlisting and elimination, as their chance may well come the next year. There is no need even for a recent book to promote, as the prize is based on a body of work.

If you want to promote a certain kind of writing by setting guidelines beyond excellence, then you will create difficulties. Changing attitudes change definitions: sixty years after Miles Franklin’s death, “Australian life in any of its phases” is not such a clearcut ideal; and one can debate at length what constitutes a positive image of women, or a contribution to their improved status. Even humorous writing is a subjective category. The biographical/biological qualification for writers may not present immediate difficulties – young writers, women writers, new writers, Indigenous writers – but the possibility for imposture lies forever in wait (remember Paul Radley and Wanda Koolmatrie?). Surely the only way to avoid difficulties is to concentrate firmly on the writing, not the writer.

The Windham Campbell prize offers another idea worth considering. For all the public celebrations of writing at literary festivals, there is a paucity of deep critical engagement with contemporary Australian writing. Our literary life would benefit immensely from some sustained critical discussion of the work of winning authors. This might not be possible for individual prizes where first books often win – but surely some enterprising literature department at an Australian university could organise a seminar for the serious study of the work of the winner of the Patrick White award each year, perhaps addressing the backlog of winners by considering three or four at a time. •

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This extraordinary character was not some exotic refugee from a more sophisticated culture but a child of the suburbs of Melbourne. As Rozzi Bazzani explains in her biography of this larger-than-life figure, his family was musical, with his mother conducting the choir and playing the organ in the local Baptist church in East St Kilda. The breakthrough moment for Hector was a choir scholarship to St Paul’s Cathedral School, where he imbibed the teaching and philosophy of the choirmaster, Dr Alfred Floyd, who believed that music nourished the inner life and should be accessible to everyone, particularly working people. It was a solid education in music and in self-discipline, leaving the teenage choirboy with a lifelong passion and a desire to communicate that passion. Nevertheless, Hector’s scholarship ended when his voice broke; he never matriculated and never gained any formal qualifications as a musician and conductor.

The other important element in his career was his relationship with his talented older sister, Dorothy, who shared her brother’s passion for performance. Dorothy sang and played the piano, and wanted to go on the stage. As this would not please their respectable, church-going family, she directed her talents towards elocution teaching. By 1930, she had instigated a Church Dramatic Society, which quickly became the Dorothy Crawford Players, performing in church halls around Melbourne, with her parents and brother contributing as musical directors, managers and performers. Bazzani suggests that the driving force behind the Crawford siblings was their desire to “escape from living a small life in a small place.” At the same time, they were quintessentially of the suburbs, sharing a love of music and community with their family. They found ways to express their talents and energy without needing to venture beyond Melbourne, and their understanding of the tastes and desires of their fellow suburban Australians was a key to their later success in radio and television.

Through the 1930s, Hector held down a clerk’s job at the State Electricity Commission during the day and made himself integral to the Albert Street Melba Conservatorium by night, conducting choirs and orchestras and attending music classes. By 1939 he was conducting the Conservatorium orchestra in the Music for the People concerts in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Always alert to new technology, Hector convinced Radio 3UZ to broadcast the concerts so that the large crowd of 30,000 people listening in the Gardens could share their experience with listeners across the city. In wartime Melbourne, such concerts were an important boost to community morale and they raised money for war comforts for soldiers.

The war also meant limitations on imported radio programs, particularly from the United States. Hector and Dorothy seized the opportunity to move into radio, with Hector establishing a production company initially to make musical programs. Over the next ten years, the Crawfords developed their expertise in broadcast production, Dorothy concentrating on drama and Hector devoting himself to music programming while using his sales talents to pitch new programs to radio networks. They prepared for the arrival of television by travelling to the United States and Britain in the 1950s to observe television production there, and set up their own production school to train Australians in the new technology.

As the big media players, desperate to keep their advertising revenue, moved in on television, the Crawfords found it difficult to sell their products to the networks for a reasonable return. But they persevered, compromising where necessary to produce reality shows (Wedding Day in 1956), slapstick comedy (Take That, an idea stolen from the radio show Yes, What) and game shows until the broadcasters realised that the 40 per cent Australian content requirement meant that drama and quality music shows would be an essential part of the television mix.

The story of the success of their first police drama, Homicide (1964–76), is one of the legends of Australian television history. Bazzani recounts some of the excitement behind the making of the cop show that proved Australian audiences would respond to local drama, no matter how primitive it appeared compared to the American product. The Crawfords would go on to produce such beloved shows as Division 4, Matlock Police, The Sullivans, The Flying Doctors and All the Rivers Run, with a respectable success rate on a range of other shows. Sometimes these folded at the apparent caprice of network owners; sometimes they went on to have long international runs. Hector kept his interest in music variety by devising and supervising talent quests, culminating in Showcase, and taking the performers on the road to regional audiences.

Through all this, he battled to keep the company afloat, going into debt and sometimes scrambling for investment support. As early as 1959, he tried to sort out the Australian content situation by sending every state and federal politician a copy of his “yellow booklet” arguing for the importance of Australian content, particularly drama, for “national identity” – ideas that may have gone out of fashion but still seem essential for the survival of Australian creativity. He referred to the history of the struggling Australian film industry and warned the politicians against allowing a similar situation for television: “Television,” he wrote, “offered a way to unite Australia as a nation with a unique perspective.” Bazzani remarks that Hector’s social and political beliefs were “good for business,” but they were also good for Australian television, Australian performers and producers and, in the long run, for Australian audiences. Though old Crawford staff remember absurd economies in production, profit was clearly not the main driver of the enterprise.

Hector’s outgoing personality and talent for friendship seem to have given him resilience and a determined optimism. As Dorothy’s health declined, he emerged as a mostly benign patriarch. He treated his staff as family, with a rather demanding notion of reciprocal loyalty. Anyone watching Crawford shows will recognise that there were favourite actors and regular writers and directors. Hector was loyal, but he expected loyalty in return – and sometimes the same willingness to go without that a family might tolerate. Eventually, the people he trained and loved – even surrogate sons like writer, director and company executive Ian Jones – would seek the freedom to make their own shows and start their own production companies.

Bazzani remarks that she found little private correspondence or personal material to reveal Hector’s inner life, but he may well have been one of those extroverts who live most fully when performing and engaging with other people. His energy was enormous and photos depict him socialising with stars or in tennis gear, ready to play on the family tennis court. The sub-plots here – the lives of Dorothy, forging a career for herself, and of Hector’s wives, the violinist Edna Stock and the singer Glenda Raymond – indicate something of the difficulties for talented women who also wanted to marry and have family lives in the 1940s and 1950s.

There are many people still living who have stories about Hector Crawford, and Bazzani handles the mass of material by writing short chapters, interspersing the details of policy and business with illustrative anecdotes about the fun of working for Crawford Productions. No one would want to lose the detail that the first Homicide episodes were written by a partnership that included Eric Millar (pen-name “Enid Johns”), a serving police officer who later became deputy commissioner of the Victorian Police, nor the story of Terry Stapleton auditioning for an acting role in front of the assembled Crawford family at their holiday house, only to find himself offered a scriptwriting position (he was too short to play a policeman). Yet the other part of the story – how a man from the suburbs became a major player in Australian television – may have more importance for the history of Australian cultural life.

The Crawford company emerged at a time when private individuals created institutions we now expect to be subsidised by government – theatre companies, music concerts, local drama writing, specialist training schools. (Even the Melba Conservatorium of Music was a private institution.) In the 1950s and 1960s Crawford Productions contended with the big media businessmen and governments that served their interests. The Menzies government preferred to award a television licence to the airline director, Reg Ansett, than to experienced and committed television producers like the Crawfords; it is a testament to Hector’s character that he soon befriended Ansett and became his most reliable television adviser. When Whitlam came to power, the Crawfords had to adjust to a government prepared to subsidise rival activities, including setting up the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and providing grants to support film-making. Hector had difficulty transitioning from the private world to a subsidised one in which writers and actors actively campaigned against his company in the name of equity.

Nowadays the idea that a single individual with negligible assets – or a couple of talented family members like Dorothy and Hector Crawford – could build up a production studio on the scale of Crawford Productions seems unimaginable. Bazzani’s book begins with a scene in which Hector watches the 1988 auctioning of stock from his studios, implying that his career ended in a kind of failure and loss. Crawford Productions expanded into so many areas – training, documentary-making, film, touring artists – and it relied so heavily on Hector and Dorothy’s particular talents that it would have been difficult to find anyone to continue it in the “Hollywood on the Yarra” style he envisaged. He was unable to hand the business on to other members of the family, or to one of his protégés, but his career as an entertainer of his fellow Australians must be counted an extraordinary success.

Crawford Productions had a foundational role in Australian television, and it trained many of the filmmakers and television producers who continue to keep the industry alive. As we watch the parade of reality, game and panel shows that make up current television programming, we may regret that Hector Crawford was unable to convince the government to support 75 per cent Australian content, or to weight that content towards Australian drama. On the occasions that Australian drama does appear, whether on film or television, it is likely to be produced by people who learnt their skills at Crawford Productions. •

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St Helena appears to have been a community of writers. Napoleon’s international fame rivalled that of celebrities today, so everyone in contact with him kept a record, some in the hope of making their fortunes. His doctors, his secretary, his valet, his aristocratic companions, his generals and their wives, and even the wives of the British officials all left accounts of his final years. They recorded not only what he said but what he ate, when he slept, his every movement and social contact.

One of his more entertaining friends was Betsy Balcombe, the daughter of an East India Company representative on the island. She was only thirteen when Napoleon moved into the pavilion behind her family’s country house and she was allowed freedoms with the “emperor” not granted to adults. By the end of 1816 she, too, had become famous after the London Times and French newspapers published the Marquis de Montchenu’s version of her dalliance with Napoleon. Later in life, almost destitute, she wrote her own account of this friendship.

For her new book Betsy and the Emperor Anne Whitehead scoured the archives, including the neglected French records of the years on St Helena, to provide an amazingly full account of Bonaparte’s daily life, and of Betsy Balcombe’s later life in Sydney and England. Her research reveals the way networks of patronage operated across the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, from London to St Helena, the Cape, India and Sydney. Her Betsy is a well-travelled representative of the smart middle-class girls of Jane Austen’s novels, allowed a degree of freedom in her youth but ultimately obliged to deal with faithless fortune-hunters and to follow her father to the ends of the earth.

Though it was the high point of Betsy’s life, Napoleon’s captivity was undoubtedly the dullest period of his. Thomas Keneally shrewdly chooses Betsy as his narrator for a novel about the Great Man’s last years (Betsy refers to him as OGF, Our Great Friend), adding a gloss of youthful excitement to his loss of power and physical decline. The novel begins with an account of Napoleon’s death delivered to the Balcombe family by Barry O’Meara, the Irish surgeon who tended him and fell foul of the British governor for his doubtful allegiances. After his expulsion from the island, O’Meara was forced to make his living as a dentist in London while he completed the book he hoped would restore his fortune. In Keneally’s hands, O’Meara – with Betsy reporting his account – spares no details for the ladies’ sensibilities, including the gruesome touch of a rat devouring the heart and ear of the corpse.

While this emphasis on the horrors of bodily decline reminds us of his predilections in earlier novels, for the most part Keneally makes Betsy’s account plausibly that of a mature woman recalling herself as a lively girl. In order to provide us with necessary information, he has her eavesdropping at doorways, hiding in the basement to listen to the conversation of men, even bursting in on a sexual scene where the cross-dressing Napoleon is surrounded by his naked and half-naked friends – though this last seems a clumsy way to let us know that, with the help of his friends’ wives, he was not living like a monk.

In the early days of their acquaintance, when he lived in the pavilion at the Balcombes’ estate, the captive and his companions regularly came to dinner with the Balcombes, and Betsy took the opportunity to tease him, often causing concern among his protectors. Napoleon may be the character of most interest, but Keneally makes Betsy a sympathetic and perceptive foil. He turns a reported incident where Betsy plays with Napoleon’s sabre into a moment of psychological recognition between the two. An initial teasing moment builds into a drama of threat and possibility as Napoleon goads her on:

So, in frantic excitement I began to make slashes in the air either side of his body, and then, reaching the limits of my strength, swishes above his head, even while holding on in desperation so that the sword would not fall and harm him. A mere cut, as against a serious penetration, would reduce the scene to inanity. It wasn’t what he was looking for. He was looking for something ultimate, and that was marvellous.

As Betsy grows towards womanhood, her life on the island becomes a round of balls, dinners, visits to ships, and social calls on neighbours. Napoleon and his party are settled away from the Balcombes in a larger but less comfortable house, and Betsy’s visits to him become more restricted. She increasingly reports his activities from secondhand sources like Fanny Bertrand, the wife of General Bertrand, or from servants’ gossip. But Napoleon maintains his interest in her, even manipulating her for his own amusement. Banned from any social appearance himself, he manages to arrange for Betsy to ride his Arab horse in the ladies event at the island’s races; she wins easily, of course, much to the annoyance of the watching officials and other ladies.

In the last sections of the novel, Betsy becomes an open supporter of Napoleon in his ongoing struggle with Sir Hudson Lowe, the British governor of the island, whom she calls Name and Nature (as in “low in”). The British government has at last taken over the island from the East India Company, and Lowe takes his responsibilities seriously. For Betsy, Napoleon is generous and heroic, and Lowe is no more than his mean-spirited, officious jailer. We learn that her father has helped Bonaparte communicate with friends and banks in Europe, though such support must be close to treasonous, and the family is finally sent away.

Whitehead’s version of Lowe’s situation and the Balcombes’ fall from grace is necessarily more complicated. She takes Betsy’s story well beyond Napoleon’s life to describe her disastrous marriage to and abandonment by Edward Abell, and her father’s subsequent career in Sydney as the colonial treasurer. William Balcombe kept the colony’s revenue in his house in O’Connell Street and fell into disgrace when Governor Darling, another punctilious colonial administrator, was appointed to investigate the colony’s management. Whitehead’s description of Sydney social life – the turf club, the Masonic lodge, the balls – gives a lively sense of the ambition and greed behind life in 1820s New South Wales. William Balcombe may have been given to shady deals, but his behaviour appears symptomatic of the mixed private and public nature of colonial administration. And Whitehead’s account of the visit by a French naval expedition under the command of Hyacinthe de Bougainville, who engaged in flirtations with the ladies of Sydney, suggests material for at least another novel of Georgian misbehaviour.

In Napoleon’s Last Island, Keneally is content to focus on the character of Napoleon seen at close quarters, then from an admiring distance, by his teenage narrator. He clearly enjoys imagining his way into the mind and experiences of a flighty girl, with her schoolgirl understanding of the Napoleonic wars and tendency to hero worship. As a result, the novel’s allegiances are with the emperor (strangely for a republican author), and Napoleon emerges as a more kindly and less dangerous creature than the many other written accounts might attest. In his introductory note, Keneally describes Napoleon as “ruthlessly enchanting.”

Napoleon’s connections with Australia may seem tenuous at first, but these two books remind us that New South Wales shared the British obsession with him, and that Waterloo had direct effects on our society. Whether you prefer the rollicking story of a novel or the engaging narrative of a detailed history they are a fitting celebration of the 200 years since Napoleon’s surrender. •

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Despite the brevity of their stay in Australia, the Lawrences were no mere tourists. While at Thirroul, Lawrence managed to write all but the last chapter of a novel, Kangaroo, which has impressed and annoyed Australian readers ever since its publication in 1923. He depicted Australians as hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling. Australia’s very modernity exemplified the degenerate nature of industrial society.

These criticisms of Australians have become familiar, but the perceptiveness and idiosyncrasy of Lawrence’s analysis has made some readers all the more defensive. J.I.M. Stewart, professor of literature at Adelaide University, compounded the matter in 1940 when he famously declared that Kangaroo was the only work of Australian literature worth serious attention. This insult to our literary pride was hardly Lawrence’s fault, but it contributed to the residual hostility to his novel. It is, as David Game suggests in D.H. Lawrence’s Australia, one of Lawrence’s least-read works, rarely taught in Australian universities.

Part of the Australian resistance to the novel may lie in the perception that it is the work of a day tripper whose knowledge of Australia came from a few months at Thirroul reading the Bulletin. International readers of Lawrence’s fiction, on the other hand, may see Australia as little more than an odd detour. Game argues, on the contrary, that the Australian experience, and its emergence in Lawrence’s writing, was integral to the way the author understood the world. He suggests that Lawrence’s close friendships with the writers Katherine Mansfield and Eleanor Farjeon (whose father, Benjamin Farjeon, tried his luck on the Victorian goldfields and wrote several novels about it) stimulated his interest in the possibilities of Australia as a new and uncorrupted Britain.

Game traces every reference to Australia across the whole of Lawrence’s oeuvre, finding references as early as in his novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922). He goes so far as to propose an Australian period in Lawrence’s life and work, dating from March 1920, when he began The Lost Girl, to September 1924, when he finished St Mawr (1925). He lists Lawrence’s poem, “Kangaroo,” and the unfinished Mr Noon as part of this group of works. It is worth remembering that Lawrence died less than eight years after he left Australia, at forty-four years of age.

Lawrence prepared for his trip to Australia by reading a range of Australian writers, including fiction by Rolf Boldrewood, Barbara Baynton and E.L. Grant Watson. Indeed, Suzanne Falkiner’s biography of Grant Watson (The Imago: E.L. Grant Watson and Australia, 2011) complements Game’s account of British interest in Australian anthropology and the possibilities for Australian society in a post-Darwinian world. Lawrence read Watson’s novel Where Bonds Are Loosed (1914) and Game notes its influence on Lawrence’s rewriting of Mollie Skinner’s manuscript as The Boy in the Bush (1924).

In the years before his Australian experiment, Game explains, Lawrence was deeply immersed in the current literature of “degeneration.” He read a range of post-Darwinian arguments about the decline of the West and anthropological speculations by James Frazer and Herbert Spencer. He picked up bits of information about the Australian Aboriginal people that excited his interest. He rejected most of the Social Darwinist and eugenic theories of the time, pursuing his own sometimes contradictory theories.

But Lawrence’s experiences during the first world war – the basis for the nightmare chapter of Kangaroo – might have contributed more than his reading to this interest in the possibilities of a new world. Despairing for the future of Britain, he dreamt of a utopia he called Rananim and, it seems, briefly considered Australia as the place for it. But he was quickly disillusioned by the society he found in and around Sydney. When he revised Kangaroo in New Mexico, he added a new final chapter expressing his “deep disappointment.”

While the novels written before the trip to Australia consistently depict Australians in a favourable light, those published after Kangaroo reflect the disillusion Lawrence suffered as a result of his experience of the place. In The Lost Girl the character offering the prospect of renewed life is an Australian, possibly Aboriginal, doctor; in Aaron’s Rod the Australian character, Francis Dekker, represents “a new and vital version of English man.” But in St Mawr the expatriate Australian characters are obsessed with material possessions and modernity.

Game takes on many of the standard criticisms of Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush, arguing that it is Lawrence’s rejection of any political solution in Kangaroo that matters, not its accuracy as an account of Australian politics at the time. The concern about the models for the character “Kangaroo” and other activists are diversions from the novel’s real interest. The frequent criticisms of Lawrence’s depiction of women and his sense of racial superiority are countered by Game’s assertion that Lawrence did not subscribe to establishment attitudes to sex or race – rather, he was critical of them, and his fiction allowed him to grapple with the complexity of sexual and racial beliefs. Rather than asserting an ideological position, Lawrence used fiction to explore possibilities and their limits.

As Game argues, Lawrence is not only a philosophical novelist; he is also a writer of emotional honesty and sensitivity. The speed with which he wrote Kangaroo explains its wonderful sense of immediacy and its freedom from any deference to genre conventions, particularly Australian ones. It may indeed be the first truly modern novel written in Australia, in the sense that it addresses Australia’s industrial society in the years immediately after the first world war. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) springs to mind as coming nearest to Lawrence’s close observation of the urban lives of Australians. Kangaroo’s great strength is its refusal to romanticise Australian life, especially that of the working man.

Lawrence’s generous correspondence with his friends, quoted here, reinforces the sense of the openness of his inquiries into Australian life, or the problems of marriage, or the possibilities of communal living. Though he may have been disappointed in Australian society, he continued to help and like Australians, maintaining contact with Mollie Skinner and trying to help her with later publication, and getting to know Australian-born writers P.R. Stephensen and Jack Lindsay in England. David Game’s book diligently musters every bit of evidence of Lawrence’s interest in Australia, and discusses his Australian books with sympathy and perception. He makes a convincing argument for rereading Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush in the light of Lawrence’s ideas about the degeneration of industrial society, and in the context of his whole life and work.

Perhaps it is time we forgave Lawrence for his criticisms of the Australian way and celebrated the extraordinary events that left us with his acute and still pertinent observations about our society. •

D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire
By David Game | Ashgate | £67.50

Also in Inside Story: Tom Fitzgerald visits Thirroul and the man who remembers D.H. Lawrence

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Few of the women characters hovering around the separated Jonathan Lott need the financial support of a man of good fortune. Some are heiresses, others professional women – even his ex-wife has inherited a fortune of her own. And the fifty-five-year-old Jonathan, father of two grown daughters, is perfectly capable of cooking a meal and has sufficient opportunities for sexual comfort; frankly, he would prefer to have his old wife back. Here we have one of the mysteries of contemporary social life, especially amid calls for marriage equality – why does anyone get married? An argument can be mounted for the religious, and for the young, sexually active and fertile. But for those of mature years, able to earn a decent living and look after themselves, there appears to be little material benefit.

The Landing concerns itself with the wealthy middle class – the present-day Australian equivalent of Austen’s county gentry. In the first few pages we learn that Jonathan is the senior partner in a law firm and a member of the Brisbane Club. He drives to his newly built, architect-designed holiday house on a lake beyond Noosa and most of the action of the novel occurs among his neighbours there. Divorce has disrupted the lives of several of them: Penny has reached the tolerance limit with her misery of a husband and now teaches art; her daughter Scarlett has run off with the elderly next-door neighbour, who has left his wife Rosanna to her new-age therapies. Gordie, an ageing roué and doctor, has been widowed and is visited by his daughter, Anna, trailing European titles and husbands like a femme fatale from a Henry James novel. Despite their separations, most of these characters are quite happy to share neighbourhood dinners with their ex-partners and their new loves.

They are people who are concerned about wine and food, aware of couture labels and informed about the lives of international celebrities. With a light touch, Johnson manages to make them both intelligent and silly. No important matters – and certainly no urgent survival needs – seem to concern them. Over the barbecue, they talk about the threat of Muslim terrorism with more concern about ideological appearances than any real confrontation. The local council’s plans to build a public footpath between the waterfront properties and the lake present a more immediate problem, but for most of the year the magnificent houses at the Landing are empty. Johnson quietly reminds us that the lake and its surrounds once belonged to Aboriginal people, so issues of public access have a clear irony.

Johnson undermines the comfort of her middle-class characters with the vulgar Sylv and Phil, who run the Landing’s one shop and spend their time wryly observing the activities of its wealthier residents. Then there is the waif, Giselle, neglected by her mother, who wanders among its houses looking for attention. No one helps Giselle, and she pops up as if to comment on the frivolity of the main characters.

Alongside this contemporary narrative of material comfort and failed love Johnson tells the story of Penny’s French-born mother, Marie. Fleeing the war, Marie found herself in Brisbane in the 1950s and was bullied into marriage to the heir to the local department store. By the time of the novel’s present, she is a widow in her eighties, still beautiful and domineering. Her experience of marriage reminds us of a possibly forgotten history of deprivation and struggle.

Marie represents a time when women had little choice about marriage – it was necessary for survival, though she certainly did more than survive. Anna, too, comes from a place where marriage provides the luxuries necessary for status – private boarding schools for the children, travel to Europe. Scarlett, with her two babies and ageing husband, is bound to have a struggle ahead (though the inheritance from the department store will no doubt help). Penny regrets Scarlett’s lost education and career, and the way the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s have no meaning for her.

For these women, marriage retains something of its nineteenth-century purpose – to provide financial support and status. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that, for all women’s calls for equality, inheritance and marriage continue to provide more reliable financial support for women than careers that still pay less to women than men. None of Johnson’s women are engaged in workplace battles, and her novel is more interested in love than work. Yet those elements of the nineteenth-century novel – marriage and inheritance – still play their part in her narrative of contemporary Australia. Of course, the romantic decisions of her women characters have none of the moral dimension of those in a novel by Austen, George Eliot or even Henry James. There is not much vice here, but plenty of harmless folly.

With its ironic attitude to its characters, The Landing is a rare thing in Australian fiction – a comedy of manners. In the kind of scenario David Williamson regularly puts on stage for our entertainment, Johnson gathers her characters together at two social events and gives them witty dialogue. Like Williamson’s characters, they are a little too superficial and well-off to invite any strong sympathies, but Johnson likes them too much to mock them with fully fledged satire. Few Australian novelists can manage the consistently ironic tone that is Johnson’s strength in this and earlier novels, like My Hundred Lovers and Life in Seven Mistakes. She is writing to amuse us while raising a few unsettling questions about our understanding of love and our responsibilities to each other. •

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Nabokov readers can become obsessive, and his work has a habit of turning up in strange transformations – the Lolita girls of Japan, for instance – and even in pop songs (the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”). I write as one who has walked the streets of Ithaca, New York, identifying every house the Nabokovs rented there, thrilled to find my flat in Highland Avenue was close to John Shade’s home in Pale Fire.

These effects can be magnified in the case of published fiction writers. Lorrie Moore’s latest collection of stories, Bark, includes her version of Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols,” and Gail Jones, in her new novel, takes her cue from a lesser-known story, “A Guide to Berlin,” first published in 1925 and not translated from Russian until 1975. Jones’s central character, a young Australian woman called Cass, finds herself drawn into a group of Nabokov fans after she is observed photographing the house in Nestorstrasse, Berlin, where the Nabokovs had an apartment from 1932 until they left the city in 1937. She joins two Italian men, an American college professor and two young Japanese who meet regularly in a series of Berlin apartments, not so much to talk as to tell stories inspired by Nabokov. Marco, one of the Italians, is a real estate agent with access to empty apartments suitable for their meetings.

They quickly develop a “Speak, Memory” game in which each of them, in turn, tells a story of past life, full of Nabokovian detail and allusion. Victor, the American, is the son of Polish Holocaust survivors who migrated to New York. He recounts their story of poverty and isolation in an alien culture, and announces his gratitude to Nabokov’s memoir “for this resurrection in formal prose, Russian-style. And for encountering a Europe my family might years ago have known. And for the novelty, above all, of unconventional seeing.” Later Victor and Cass visit the Berlin zoo and Victor stares into the eyes of an ancient tortoise in the aquarium, excited that it may be the same tortoise that looked at Nabokov in his 1925 story. It is an effort to retrieve lost time, the looking forwards and backwards at a given moment, that lies at the heart of Nabokov’s writing.

Other stories contribute some of the history of the world since Nabokov’s time in Berlin: the Japanese couple tell their love story, including the effect of the Sarin gas attack in Tokyo and the phenomenon of young men locking themselves away in their bedrooms for years; Gino, the other Italian, recounts how his father died as a result of a terrorist bomb explosion at Bologna central train station; Marco’s father has disappeared, while his Jewish grandparents died in Nazi camps. Butterflies, chess moves, forced exile, fathers mistakenly killed by terrorists – the Nabokovian patterns emerge. Cass, aware of her own less exotic history, suppresses the story of her loss of a brother in a cyclone, though she links it, privately, to the death of Nabokov’s brother Sergei in a concentration camp. Compared to the European stories, Australia is a kind of Zembla – the “distant northern land” in Pale Fire – a dream-world of reversals. All of the group are writers of one sort or another – academics, bloggers, essayists, aspiring novelists – and their stories are self-consciously eloquent. Cass’s trepidation before her turn to speak and her deliberate editing of her past indicate how fictional such confessional stories must be.

Between the story sessions, Cass explores the messy world of Berlin in winter, a place where signs of the past intrude on everyday life. She rides the U- and the S-bahns and visits Berlin’s many memorials, museums and cemeteries with her new friends. She listens to the difficult German of her apartment caretaker, from the old East, and Gino takes her to meet Afghan refugees camping in Oranienplatz. The present overlays the stories of the past with its own problems of displacement and injustice – but it also offers new discoveries to delight the New World tourist. As the members of the group get to know each other better, alliances and hostilities emerge. Eventually, Gino challenges the literariness of the group – and, indeed, of the novel we are reading – with an outburst about their blindness to the world they are living in: “Where is now rather than our own deeply intoxicating pasts?” He accuses them of literary snobbery, “smug, hidden from the fucked-up world,” and forces a violent intrusion on their story-making. It is, of course, only a fictional intrusion and the novel’s eloquence continues to hold experience at bay.

Jones is an elegant and marvellously controlled writer who knows her Nabokov (and her Italo Calvino) well. She manages to give each of her storytellers sufficient differences of accent and emphasis to be plausible, and somehow writes narratives that reference Nabokov just enough, without becoming programmatic or predictable. Even with English as a supposed second language, they speak lucidly – though it is interesting that there is no Russian, German or French speaker in the group. Jones may be claiming Nabokov for readers of English. (It was his son, Dmitri, not Vladimir himself who translated “A Guide to Berlin” into English.)

Cass may seem a little too passive in the face of these strangers in a strange city but she serves the novel’s need for an observant innocent abroad. In this respect, the novel has striking similarities to Sebastian Schipper’s recent film Victoria, in which a young foreign woman allows herself to be caught up with a group of charming Berlin petty criminals, with violent consequences. Through Cass, Jones observes the discordant details of Berlin – the Italian restaurants run by Sri Lankans, the discomfort of living in rundown grey buildings and the beauty of a snowy winter with the “delicious glassy crunch beneath her boots” of snow, the mix of people on the suburban trains, an old man playing “Nessun Dorma” on a saw in the underground. It is like touring winter Berlin in the hands of an articulate and hypersensitive guide – not Nabokov, but certainly in the spirit of his own Guide.

Indeed, Jones never pretends to be Nabokov. She has little of his playfulness and transgressive comic sense, but she is brilliant at encapsulating the small things that make his work so memorable, and this novel does honour to the master. She gives us the pleasures of beautiful writing while reminding us that all fictions, all writing, have a complicated relationship to reality. Nabokov declared that he despised politics in writing, yet his whole life was shaped by the major political events of the twentieth century. Jones, with her band of Nabokov scholars, places him back inside a small part of this history.

If you love Nabokov you are likely to enjoy this novel. If you’ve experienced the discomforts of contemporary Berlin – or anywhere in old Europe – in the off-season you may enjoy it more. Even without these credentials you are sure to delight in its exquisite writing. •

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Spirit of Progress put the lives of Vic, Rita and Michael on hold in order to explore a moment when high art encountered people on the fringes of Melbourne. Going back to the mid 1940s, the novel explored a Carroll family legend – of an eccentric aunt who became the subject of Sidney Nolan’s 1946 painting Woman and Tent. The novel provided an intriguing tangential view of Nolan’s circle, giving Carroll the chance to consider more self-consciously the relationship between art and small lives lived in relative poverty beyond the interest of history. This is, of course, one of the things Carroll himself is trying to achieve in his series of novels. He is exploring moments in the lives of ordinary suburban people, the kind of people who rarely attract the attention of artists and historians.

For all the references to speed and progress in the titles, Carroll prefers to stand still and contemplate the past. His novels take the time to examine the possibilities of each moment from within the internal consciousness of each character. We learn everything from memories triggered by an event in the narrative present. Michael, in particular, is always looking backwards, often with nostalgia for his rapidly receding childhood and youth. At the end of The Time We Have Taken one of his friends, an artist, paints a commemorative mural for the suburb’s supposed centenary, which depicts all its people looking back at their past rather than turning towards the future with pioneering energy. Technological progress appears in the novels – diesel engines replace steam, cars get faster, television arrives in every home – but the suburb remains a placid, almost silent, haven of domestic life. Curiously, Vic and Michael become obsessed by golf and cricket respectively – contemplative sports whose longueurs are punctuated by moments of excitement. Perhaps this is what suits them so well to Australian suburban life.

Inevitably, in Forever Young Michael has grown older and left the suburb for a wider world – Melbourne’s inner city and ultimately Europe. He is now in his early thirties, on the point of trading his electric guitar and his rock band for the life of a writer and a trip to France. It is late 1977 and Whitlam’s Labor Party is about to be defeated for a second time by Malcolm Fraser. Typically, Carroll avoids the most dramatic and memorable moments of Whitlam’s career – his victories of 1972 and 1974 or the dismissal of 1975 – to mark the forgotten election that sent him from politics. Michael has written an article depicting Fraser as a Macbeth figure, crippled by the guilt of his accession to power, and this leads to a brief brush with Canberra politics.

His old university housemate, Peter, has become a Liberal Party functionary, and he approaches Michael to write sympathetic pieces for his party. This brief encounter allows the novel to reflect on Peter’s mistreatment of his lover in The Time We Have Taken, and see a pattern in his manipulations of women. Michael, too, feels guilt towards the women in his life; he has ended a love affair insensitively and neglects his mother. Political guilt provides only a distant echo of the central guilt of men about their behaviour towards women. (Vic is long gone from Rita’s life.)

But the technique that served Carroll so well in the earlier novels is straining under the need to move to a broader setting and more mature problems. The constant use of the present tense, shifting between the thoughts and memories of different characters, becomes relentless. And new central characters – Peter, and Michael’s grieving girlfriend Mandy – appear without the kind of background that elicits interest and sympathy. The two women suffering from the thoughtless selfishness of men, Mandy and the seasoned journalist Beth, are surprisingly fragile in the face of adversity, but they are sketched figures, rather than full characters.

Whenever Rita gets her turn to think, the novel comes alive. Now that she has left the suburbs behind she becomes feisty and engaged with the world, and she leaves Melbourne to travel to Europe on a tourist bus tour. This allows the novel to loop back to the subject of Spirit of Progress, with a scene in Tuscany in which Rita encounters two expatriate Australians in a village coffee shop. She recognises one of them as Sam, the now-famous painter of the woman and the tent. After this awkward meeting, Rita begins an extended reflection on her life and the relationship between ordinary people, like her, and the art that claims to portray them:

Not people but types. The types that they make jokes about on television, or put in books or on the stage, the types that everybody laughs at. Or that become paintings put up on the walls of public galleries so that everyone can come along and gawk. And it’s not you; it’s the way they saw you. And that’s just it. Once they’ve pinned you to the wall and caught you the way they wanted you to be caught – once you’re there and helpless and pinned up on the wall the way they saw you – that is what you become. It’s a sort of theft.

The other artist in the cafe, Art, begins a corresponding meditation on the meeting:

For it is almost as though she has stepped out of one of his paintings, stepped out of one of those anonymous peak-hour crowds, either going to or coming from work, and entered his studio, offering the nagging observation, “No, no you haven’t got me right, have you?”

He goes on to consider the nature of nostalgia and the way art preserves “mythic memories.” The juxtaposition of the two meditations is brilliant; it is the finest writing in the novel.

Of course, Carroll is offering a self-conscious debate about his own practice. Like Art, he is creating “mythic memories” rather than recording a real world, but he wants to defend his subjects from mockery. The importance of nostalgia as a source of Carroll’s art may be the reason that Michael’s adult experiences are comparatively unsatisfying; they are simply too close to the author’s present. It is the life of his childhood that excites his imagination. Michael travels to France to become a writer, confirming the novel’s suggestion that distance in place (as well as time) may be necessary to give an artist perspective.

Like James Joyce re-creating Dublin from Paris, like Art in Tuscany, Michael will have to rely on his memories of the Melbourne suburbs for inspiration. We are told that Art’s father was a tramway mechanic and his mother a shop assistant. We know that Sidney Nolan’s father was a tram driver – and George Johnston’s David Meredith is also the son of a tram driver. Johnston’s novel of Melbourne suburban life, My Brother Jack, is cited several times in the course of Carroll’s Glenroy series. The novels invite us to compare them with other literary and visual depictions of suburbs and small towns – including the more satirical versions by Patrick White and Barry Humphries.

When a novel invokes relatively recent times it calls on a reader’s own memories. Carroll relies on a shared experience between author and reader to provide background to the moments he chooses to explore. The passions and drama of public events have little impact on the main characters. There is, for example, no delineation in these novels of the importance of Whitlam’s government to Michael’s generation – this is mentioned only in passing. He also avoids any of the repercussions of the Vietnam war. These absences from the novels almost force the reader to remember them.

Carroll has remarked that he is not interested in writing realism, and these novels only distil a few drops of what a man like Carroll – or Michael – might have experienced. Real life in the suburbs is likely to include a noisy crowd of siblings and other relatives, school classes full of other children, people on buses and trains, tradespeople and salespeople, church congregations, fellow workers. Carroll strips his characters back to Michael’s immediate circle – he has no siblings and few friends, just his parents, some neighbours and girls he likes. In the earlier novels, Vic and Rita go out to work – Vic to drive his engines, Rita to demonstrate new appliances in the country – but they bring home no anecdotes, no stories of encounters with the world. At home, they hardly speak to each other as they withdraw into thought.

This slow turning over of the suburban experience is an ambitious project in the style of some of the great literary projects, such as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or Anthony Powell’s more sociable A Dance to the Music of Time, or even Philip Roth’s steady creation of a history of postwar America on the basis of his own experience. It makes one think of Patrick White coming back from Europe after the war to fume at the ugliness of the outer suburbs of Sydney. Things may look rosier at a distance of fifty years – or half the world away. At the end of the novel Michael sits at his desk in the French countryside recalling his mother’s voice: “Tell them how it was, behind the flying ducks and the laughter; behind the quaint feature walls and shadow boxes and ornamental boomerangs; tell them how it really was, if they should ever ask.”

Carroll’s extended version of the suburbs is rich with nostalgia under a peach-coloured sky. But readers will have their own views on whether this is “how it really was.” •

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But no matter how extraordinary a writer’s personality may be, the writing life, with its long, lonely hours of work, can make for dull biography. Astley lived an outwardly ordinary life, growing up Catholic in Brisbane, too young to be much affected by the second world war, teaching in a school for a few years, marrying and living as a suburban housewife and mother, then making a late career as a university academic. Compared to Stead, or to Patrick White or even Elizabeth Jolley, Astley was a homebody living an Australian postwar domestic life most of us recognise all too well.

Karen Lamb has confronted the range of problems that beset any account of a writer’s life, particularly the difficulty of giving due place to the work, and has tackled several others – how to understand the writer’s complex personality without resorting to psychoanalysis, how to placate the many people still alive with personal memories of the subject, how to write well enough with the writer’s posthumous critical eye looking over your shoulder. She has produced an engaging, affectionate account of Astley that relishes the writer’s contradictions and opens up new ways to understand her novels. Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather follows the trajectory of a long writing career, delineating the shifts in Australian publishing and literary criticism.

Astley published her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, in 1958, after it had been commended in a Sydney Morning Herald fiction competition. She sent the manuscript off to publishers Angus & Robertson on spec, and was lucky enough to gain the attention of the renowned editor Beatrice Davis, who was looking for new writing outside the “social realist” mode. Astley found in Davis a soulmate who shared her taste in literature and music; she admired Davis’s style, her worldliness and humour. Lamb even suggests that Astley may have taken up smoking in imitation of Davis; she didn’t smoke until her thirties, which will come as a surprise to those who knew her as a devoted smoker. For her part, Davis supported and promoted Astley’s work throughout her career in publishing (even, perhaps, on the Miles Franklin judging committee).

Girl with a Monkey was the work of an educated, intellectual woman who found herself exiled in the suburbs with a child. Lamb depicts her walking the streets of Epping North, furiously pushing a stroller with her baby son, Ed, on board. The image conjures up Gwen Harwood’s “Suburban Sonnet” or Jessica Anderson’s compulsively walking housewife in Tirra Lirra By the River. She was also a Catholic, with a devout mother and an older brother in the Jesuits. Few readers will miss the heavy sense of sexual guilt in Astley’s fiction, and it is easy to ascribe this to a conventional Catholic upbringing. In her case, it was exacerbated by the fact that her husband, Jack Gregson, was married with a child when they met. Their civil marriage didn’t meet her parents’ standards or, it seems, her own. She entered the long bureaucratic negotiation for a Catholic “validation” in order to achieve the blessing of parents and Church. As in her fiction, Astley was unconventionally conventional, radically conservative in her attitude to sex and religion.

Lamb’s account of Astley’s relationship with Jack is both tactful and revealing, no doubt helped by Ed Gregson’s candour in his discussions with her. They met at a chamber music concert in Brisbane in 1947 when they both felt themselves exiles from the centres of culture. Astley was school teaching in Townsville, Gregson had been demobbed from an army posting in Cape York. Music remained their shared lifelong passion through all the difficulties of their marriage. Jack introduced Astley to jazz, and together they pursued what was then considered “radical” music as part of their defiance of convention. They also built a house in a modernist style in the northern suburbs of Sydney.

Again, this biographical detail reveals an important influence on Astley’s writing. Jazz is the musical equivalent of modernist experimentation, and by the 1970s, in novels such as The Acolyte, Astley was adopting elements of jazz improvisation into her writing. As a musical style it required technical mastery while making room for individualism, wit, flamboyant riffs on a theme – all of which became evident in Astley’s fiction, in which a love of music is often the measure of her characters’ sensitivity and morality. Classical music may be revered in shorter fiction such as The Genteel Poverty Bus Company, but the writing itself is more likely to follow the wayward path of jazz.

Astley had the good fortune to find work teaching at Cheltenham Girls’ High School, where teachers with children organised childcare nearby, and where her fellow teachers included Joan Levick (who wrote as Amy Witting) and other intellectual women. Of course, she was the staffroom wit. By the late 1960s, she had joined the staff of the new Macquarie University as a tutor in English, and she remained there, chafing against the university’s refusal to promote her to lecturer, until the end of the 1970s. There is always plenty to anger academics in a literature department and Astley responded energetically to all the perceived slights that came her way.

By the 1980s feminist critics began to take notice of her fiction and her extraordinary position as the lone woman in Australia with a longstanding reputation as a literary novelist. Astley always read her critics and she tried to accommodate their concerns. In interviews, she began any explanation of her fiction’s lack of “positive female characters” by declaring that she had been “neutered” by her upbringing and work in the male-dominated university. Although her writing changed to include such characters, her fiction was not so much about “representing women,” as Lamb makes clear, as about expressing the complex emotional experience of one particularly clever, cantankerous woman who was part of a generation denied full sexual and employment equality.

Questions about Astley’s mental stability hang over this biography, and Lamb uses the expression “manic depressive” at least once. Astley’s energy was extraordinary, but those who worked with her also saw the low points when she wept in her office. It seems that she never sought professional help, and Lamb thankfully refrains from offering her own psychoanalysis. Instead, she gently tracks the parallel career of Astley’s brother, Phil, who entered the Jesuits and suffered a series of breakdowns. Astley was always ready to attack Catholic institutions (while seeking their approval), and particularly their treatment of her brother, but Lamb argues that the Jesuits cared for him, possibly with greater success than Astley cared for herself. The people closest to Thea made room for her extremes of mood, though she often alienated those meeting her for the first time.

Everyone who encountered Thea Astley has a story to tell about her. She was a writer who would ring up reviewers and harass them about their comments on her novels. In numerous interviews she tried to take control of the critical response to her work, so that many critics (even, at times, her publishers) kept their heads down while she was alive. By and large, Lamb lets other critics make the running on the merits of the novels and she pulls readers’ reports and letters out of the Angus & Robertson archives that show the mixed response they received. She ventures more with A Boat Load of Home Folk: “If there is a book by Astley that ought not to have been published it is Boat Load.” And she goes on not only to chronicle the opinions of this book among A&R staff and reviewers, but also to describe its extreme bleakness as part of “a written dossier of treachery, betrayal and self-loathing.” Lamb seems to get it right when she suggests that Astley was projecting her own state of mind, her sense of “putrefaction of the spirit” on her fiction.

After she and Jack began spending their summer breaks in Kuranda, in the Cairns hinterland, Astley became more observant of the lives of others, including the local Aboriginal people, the hippies and the retirees around her. She is most likely to be remembered for her North Queensland fictions (all published after 1974), Hunting the Wild Pineapple, A Kindness Cup, It’s Raining in Mango and The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. Though Astley alter egos appear in all of them, they also engage with wider political and social changes in Australia, often with a wry satirical commentary. Her self-mockery and disgust with physical ageing and sexuality lingered to the end, but in late work, such as the novella Inventing the Weather, she could reach for some spiritual consolation.

There are many amusing anecdotes in this biography, often involving a performance by Thea: dancing with Helen Garner, doing the same with Mandy Sayer, shopping for an elusive brown corduroy suit with Louise Adler, smoking furiously in her rented apartment under the “Smoking Prohibited” sign. I earnestly discussed possible moves from Cambewarra with Thea and Jack when I met them there in the early 1990s, and now discover in this biography that Thea was a real estate fantasist, known to local agents for her impulsive deposits on unsuitable properties. Lamb ends with some fond images of Astley holding court among her admirers and fellow writers over Friday lunch at the Byron Bay Writers Centre, and sitting outside the library, smoking while she observed the passers-by. Ed recalls that she had agitated the local council for a “smoking bench” there.

It may seem petty to mention factual errors in such an enlightening book, but I feel obliged to note that Tom Keneally’s early childhood in northern New South Wales does not make him a Queenslander, and he trained for the secular priesthood not the Jesuits; and the photograph taken in Memphis is of Ray Willbanks, not the late Robert Ross. More unsettling are some odd vulgarities of expression that you suspect might enrage the dead writer: the suggestion that Astley’s voice and timing in her public readings was “almost sex” and the description of the elegant Beatrice Davis as “a classy dame.”

This biography can be placed alongside biographies of Elizabeth Jolley, Patrick White, Judith Wright, Hal Porter and Beatrice Davis to create a collective history of literary and social change in Australia in the decades since the second world war. Curiously, Christina Stead, Jolley, Wright and Astley all found themselves in relationships with married men (“Reader, he was already married”) though they did what they could to maintain respectability in a narrow-minded society, even to the extent of never addressing the situation directly in their writing. So the biographies matter in understanding both their writing and the society they lived in. Astley’s obsession with the abject female body gains new meaning in the light of this book. It does what good literary biographies should – incite a reader to go back to the novels. •

The post The life of the author appeared first on Inside Story.

James Bradley’s novel, Clade, seizes on our capacity to forget past concerns or lose account of them. It looks at the way our absorption in day-to-day life can mean we are unable to see the whole scheme of things. Many of the changes in the natural world are incremental and easy to overlook; it can take a catastrophe to draw our attention away from our personal concerns. And even the scientists documenting the small changes in our world may not live long enough to see their full implications.

Clade follows an Australian family over decades – into the future of the 2060s – to speculate about how the combination of small losses and catastrophic events might realign our world. At its beginning, set close to the present, Adam Leith is a biological scientist examining the evidence of past climate transformation in Antarctica. He is also worrying about his partner, Ellie, who is undergoing various medical procedures in an attempt to conceive a child. Amid ominous signs – a mighty crack as “the entire landscape on which they stood slipped and fell towards the sea” – Adam is philosophical about the melting ice and about the crisis in his personal life: “What else is there to do but hang on and hope?”

A few years later, Adam and Ellie are the parents of a toddler, Summer, who suffers a severe asthma attack as they cope with yet another power blackout as a result of fires. Adam is working on modelling the decline of the South Asian monsoon, and his colleagues in New Delhi feel a “frightening urgency” about the project. In Australia, it seems, people simply adjust to the inconveniences of unreliable power. And so the novel gently expands many of our current concerns – the loss of crucial parts of the ecology, the arrival in Australia of homeless people from other continents, the threat of natural disasters – to the point where they have begun to change the possibilities for freedom, let alone social cohesion.

Much later, Adam and Ellie’s grandson Noah is an astrophysicist searching the constellations for signs of life, knowing he can’t live long enough to learn what his instruments have found. This episode underlines one of the main emphases of the novel – that our lives are not long enough for us to see large patterns or understand the shifts in our universe.

Clade follows Adam’s life from about 1990 to 2070 or thereabouts, so he lives to the full expectation, surviving all the disasters that impinge on his world. He is aware of the damage to the earth, and occasionally furious with the climate deniers, but powerless to interrupt the steady destruction of the natural world we know. Yet events in this novel are not apocalyptic. Even a devastating tidal flood that he, Summer and Noah survive in the tropical England of the 2040s appears – like the recent hurricanes in the northeast of the United States – to be just another catastrophe to challenge the resourcefulness of people and governments.

The changes the novel imagines are so plausible and so gradual that it hardly seems like science fiction. Technology certainly progresses – an internet/virtual reality system that can operate reliably in all kinds of extreme situations is accessed by “overlays” – and war seems to have diminished as the peoples of the world try to cope with their changing environments. The family at the centre of the novel suffers hardship and loss, but manages to survive more or less intact, possibly because of their advantages as educated, middle-class Australians.

Clade doesn’t explicitly connect the changing environment with infertility, asthma, childhood cancer or autism but those conditions form a clear pattern in the story. It glances, too, at the once-popular idea that we should have fewer children to save the planet, reminding us of the high expectations we’ve developed about infant survival and universal entitlement to parenthood. The desire of the women characters, in particular, to have children appears to be a biological drive in the face of threat, further evidence of the way the personal responds to the universal.

Bradley has taken on the challenge that climate change presents to artists: how to create fiction that is true to the scientific facts while imagining their effect on individual humans, and how to do that without overstating the case. For the most part, he manages to avoid the sense of jeremiad, carefully allowing the familiar problems of family life to foreshadow the impending crisis. Ellie is a visual artist and, at the beginning of the novel, it appears that her art may offer insights into the history of the natural world, but Bradley leaves her behind to follow Adam’s scientific work – as if he accepts that the artist’s engagement with the crisis cannot match the importance of science. All her beautiful creations can do little to help, and yet Adam’s scientific work seems to gain little traction either.

The novel manages the passage of time by presenting a series of fairly discrete episodes, usually in present tense and often from Adam’s point of view. Bradley introduces peripheral characters to cover his range of concerns – the daughter of Noah’s carer, Lijuan, writes a Journal of the Plague Year while her boyfriend, Dylan, is the narrator of a section on memorials for the dead – which means that a relatively short novel can cover leaps of time and explore many ideas. The sacrifice, of course, is in the character development: each serves the larger purposes of the novel rather than taking on clear and engaging personalities of their own. Ellie is already remote and self-absorbed by the time the novel begins, and her mental condition is reflected in her daughter Summer’s sullen refusal to communicate and Noah’s diagnosed position on “the spectrum.”

Bradley may be suggesting that this withdrawal from relationships is a likely outcome of all the time we spend absorbed in screens and unable to confront the world around us. Or perhaps the withdrawal is a human reaction to anxiety about events in the larger world. Either way, it creates problems for the novel: the central characters become relatively silent and unknowable, their dialogue limited to the most basic conversations.

Bradley is at his best in describing the changing world – the landscape on the drive north from London with its genetically engineered trees, Ellie’s work on her bee installation, Noah’s excited engagement with distant constellations, the beauty of the natural world even as its features become more extreme. It is this sense of wonder that provides the slight feeling of hope at Clade’s conclusion. The book’s speculation about the gradual nature of change and the possibility that we may cope with it incites an optimism that is, of course, part of that human capacity for adjustment and forgetfulness. •

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Faber’s literary education is evident in all his fiction. The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) reconsiders the Victorian world presented by a host of Victorian novelists, including Dickens, Trollope and the Brontës, as it examines the underside of Victorian sexual life from a decidedly feminist perspective. Though his novels don’t have the controlled coincidences and neat endings of a nineteenth-century novel, Faber’s narratives uncover mysteries in a tantalising way, and leave a few to puzzle the reader. Each of them has attracted appreciative audiences – particularly Under the Skin (2000) and The Crimson Petal and the White, which have been filmed as dramas. The BBC television production of The Crimson Petal and the White (2011), starring Romola Garai, Chris O’Dowd and Gillian Anderson, received awards and good reviews but, so far, has not been shown on free-to-air in Australia. There is no particular reason that it should be, apart from its apparent quality as drama. And none of Faber’s novels would be eligible for the Miles Franklin award; they make only incidental reference to Australian life.

Regardless of our national sensitivities, his latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things, deserves our attention for its mesmerising narrative and extraordinary emotional power. Ostensibly a work of science fiction, it narrates the experiences of Peter, a recovered drug addict and Christian minister sent to an outstation on a faraway planet by USIC, a multinational company. He discovers that the natives of the planet, called Oasis, have been introduced to the New Testament by an earlier missionary and a condition of their cooperation with the company is the provision of a new spiritual leader, namely him. The New Testament is the Oasans’ “book of strange new things,” as this novel is ours.

Peter has left his beloved wife Bea behind on Earth with their cat, and can only contact her by an unreliable interplanetary internet called the Shoot. As he becomes increasingly absorbed into the lives of the Oasans, Bea grows more urgently desperate about developments on a rapidly declining Earth. As Peter’s engagement with his home planet gradually fades away, her news from Earth has a strange familiarity – tsunamis and floods, corporate collapses, riots in the streets of London, garbage strikes and power failures. Peter finds it increasingly difficult to write so much as a basic message down the Shoot.

There is no authority figure on the USIC station; it works as a techno-democracy with the workers’ mutual agreement on tasks and actions. In that sense it may be seen as a utopia, cheerful and efficient. But it is a society reliant on a dead culture: Frank Sinatra “smarming” through the PA system, magazines that contain no news, Laurel and Hardy posters on the walls. In this place cut off from the passing of time, the workers resist written communication. All the food consists of artificially flavoured plant matter, and there is no image of natural life on Earth to be seen. It is a friendly but loveless limbo.

Peter’s fellow USIC workers reveal themselves to be lost souls – people without relationships or beliefs to sustain them; Peter is unique in his connection with Earth through his devotion to his wife, and his faith in Christianity. The Oasans, on the other hand, have strong relationships and rituals. Their problem is their awareness of their own mortality; their bodies don’t heal when damaged and they rely on the new settlers for medicines. The Oasans want earthly assistance for both their bodies and their souls.

Though individual Oasans are difficult to distinguish, and their sex almost impossible to tell, Peter learns to recognise them and is increasingly drawn to one of them, whom he thinks of as female. He begins to care for a woman co-worker, too, and he finds himself unable to communicate his complex emotional development to his increasingly desperate wife on Earth. There is a clear temptation for him to go native.

Faber makes the Oasan landscape and its inhabitants strange and wonderful, describing its climate and atmosphere in images that make its desolation beautiful, and the dialogue between Peter and his unbelieving fellow-workers is self-conscious and often witty. It pulls the novel back from any suspicion that it is proselytising for religion. Here is Peter marvelling at the Oasans to his colleague, the unbelieving Grainger:

“All along I’ve been telling myself I mustn’t assume the human design is some sort of universal standard. So I was trying to imagine… uh… big spider-like things, or eyes on stalks, or giant hairless possums...”

“Giant hairless possums?” She beamed. “I love it. Very sci-fi.”

“But why should they have human form, Grainger, of all the forms they might conceivably have? Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect from sci-fi?”

“Yeah, I guess… Or religion, maybe. Didn’t God create man in his own image?”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘man.’ The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.”

“Pleased to hear it,” she said, deadpan.

Like Faber’s other novels, The Book signals its debt to other literary work, including the New Testament. Echoes of Orwell’s 1984 make our expectations of the USIC bureaucracy more unsettling than it turns out to warrant. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Peter’s predecessor is called Kurtzberg), and all our knowledge of the history of colonisation, creates apprehension about the way this interplanetary company will exploit the new planet. It takes the length of the novel to understand why USIC has made this extraordinary venture into the unknown. Faber acknowledges the influence of Marvel comics in his afterword – perhaps most evident in his cavalier attitude to the technology behind the space transportation system, or the means of survival in the dense atmosphere of Oasis.

Faber’s interest is in his characters’ confrontation of loneliness and mortality. Peter begins as an earnest but not humourless missionary looking out for opportunities to bring everyone he meets to Jesus. The USIC workers resist any such overtures, and Peter soon loses interest in them as he finds a more receptive audience in the Oasans, who are ready to believe in the eternal life offered by Christ. In fact, his missionary work is easy, with the Oasans working to create Peter’s rather traditional idea of a church. They only object when he deviates from the Word as written in the New Testament. Something of a scholar, he sets about writing versions of the gospels that suit their limited range of speech. They want the real thing, and he can’t bring himself to tell them that it is already a translation.

Christianity is a religion of the Word, and readers may wonder at the literacy of the Oasans. Faber writes their names in a script, though there is no sign that they have a literature of their own. They want the Word, and they respond to it with joy. The images they make for Peter’s church reveal that they have maintained the creative spirit so absent from the USIC station.

As Peter and Bea begin to doubt their faith, the bleakness of Earth’s future becomes apparent. Like John Michael McDonagh’s disturbing film Calvary, this novel asks what remains once we have lost belief in any kind of religious or spiritual world. It does not advocate religion. Instead, it asks us to meditate on the desolate prospect of a universe without caritas, or passion, or a continuing creative history, let alone a Divinity interested in us. It is a philosophical novel that also gives readers the pleasure of adventure and a sympathetic central character.

Faber’s own wife was dying as he wrote this novel, which he has declared will be his last. He is not the first writer to use a journey to outer space as a metaphor for the loss of love, but he has managed to make a science fiction novel into a moving narrative that explores the emptiness of our contemporary culture. His personal grief becomes a more universal meditation as he invents a whole species aware of its impending mortality, and a group of human people exiled from any meaningful culture and experience. At the same time, the novel confronts the possible doom of the Earth, given human mistreatment of it.

Peter may lose faith, hope and love, but Faber gives us a brilliantly inventive novel that restores faith in the possibilities of fiction. This novel may doubt the existence of a caring God, but it hangs on to the comfort of the literary text. That may offer us some consolation, even in the face of its bleak vision of our future. •

The post Strange and wonderful appeared first on Inside Story.

When it comes to sexual understanding, we have a tendency to look back on the past from a superior, bemused position. New readers of Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response confidently declare that its view of female sexuality is laughable. Yet, for those of us who were locked in ignorance when it first appeared, its mere existence (not too many read the actual report) helped make it possible to talk about sex as a serious part of human understanding. Up until then, a woman could have a lot of sex, even a lot of babies, without a clue what was happening during sexual intercourse.

By the mid 1970s, of course, everyone in the babysitting club had Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex openly on their shelves; some also had The Sensuous Woman by ‘J.’ and a magazine called Viva, the women’s answer to Playboy. In the ten years after Masters and Johnson went public, educated women had learnt about how their bodies respond to sexual stimulation. Within a few years, Bettina Arndt, from my own year at ANU, had become editor of Forum magazine and a prominent sexologist, the profession invented by Masters and Johnson.

As others moved in and marketed their ideas more successfully, the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson almost disappeared. Thomas Maier’s 2009 account of their careers, Masters of Sex, explains how they were denied public research funding and forced to stand by while others made money from their discoveries. Maier’s book is full of extraordinary events and personalities, and for anyone over fifty it offers a startling narrative of our times, rich with paradox and pathos.

Still, it was a surprise when a group of television producers, led by the writer Michelle Ashford, saw possibilities for a period drama in Maier’s book. While Mad Men has made a fictionalised view of the 1950s and 1960s newly glamorous, Masters of Sex would deal with actual historical figures, shifts in scientific and medical knowledge and a subject that is still off limits for prime time television. It worked: the show’s first season, screened in 2013, demonstrated the potential of television drama to explore recent history. It showed how historical fiction can sometimes convey the way history is experienced and remembered by people more fully than conventional factual history. In this case, television’s tendency to reduce events to the personal or domestic proves curiously appropriate for a narrative that focuses on the sexual organs of the human body before shifting out to a broader social context.

Season 1 of Masters of Sex debates the most intimate aspects of human relationships. Is sex just a matter of bodily function? Does personality, psychology, even historical context come into it? How do myths about sexuality influence social behaviour? In its central setting, a university hospital in the Midwest, women’s bodies are presided over in childbirth by revered male obstetricians who, it seems, know little about their subjects beyond the cutting and stitching of the delivery room. Bill Masters’s research into sexual response appears initially motivated by male sexual curiosity and ambition, but he quickly realises that the women around him have information he needs.

The series allows us to see the ironies of a hospital hierarchy in which autocratic male doctors lord it over intelligent secretaries, nurses and patients. It not only focuses on the women’s bodies at the centre of Masters’s research but also notices the limits on women’s education and work opportunities, and the restrictive burden of women’s responsibilities for childcare. Virginia Johnson (“Gini,” played by Lizzy Caplan), pushy and sexually confident, must care for her children while she tries to satisfy her ambition and her native curiosity. The second episode ends with Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) interviewing her ex-husband George as a subject for his research; as George praises the sexual willingness of his ex-wife the camera shifts to Gini, missing her bus home to the children and waiting in the rain.

An invented woman doctor, Lillian DePaul (Julianne Nicholson), elaborates these restrictions on women. Despite her intelligence and education, she struggles to find research funds and to promote the use of the Pap smear test to diagnose cervical cancer. One of the most engaging episodes follows Gini’s and Lillian’s frustrating journey to a conference of GPs where they find themselves talking about the test, over tea, to a group of doctors’ wives. The wives, of course, proved to be running their husbands’ practices and were quick to see its importance.

Many of the writers, like “showrunner” Ashford, are women and perhaps more alert to the possibilities of this women’s history. Clearly they were most engaged by the dramatic possibilities of the material, not only its peculiar research and its strange love story but also the inherent comedy of human sexual misunderstanding and ignorance. Despite the vulgar credits for the series, with their images of rising mushrooms and exploding champagne corks, the comic elements are always delivered straight-faced. Some of the episodes in the first season – Dr Masters arrested in a brothel raid, for instance – have elements of farce; some – such as Margaret Scully (Allison Janney) realising that she’s never had an orgasm – are excruciating in their depiction of the humiliation of sexual ignorance; and others – like the enormous dildo-like perspex camera invented to explore the subjects’ vaginas – produce a wry amusement at the clumsiness and the ethical waywardness of the research project.

Some critics recommend watching Masters of Sex as a fiction set in a historical period, like Mad Men, rather than as history. It certainly parades the consumer goods of the period, with the Masters family living in a minimalist modern house, lots of big cars and Libby Masters (Caitlin FitzGerald) looking like Grace Kelly in a series of period outfits. Yet it also experiments in ways to tell history, drawing in parallel developments, such as the Pap smear, or public crises like the nuclear threat. At times it plays off viewers’ knowledge of the television series of its day – Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver – and gently undermines the myths of the happy family and marital joy they presented. Thomas Maier has been happy enough to have his name listed as producer, and most of the time the liberties the writers take with facts are self-conscious and in the interests of explanation or entertainment.

Composite characters make the history manageable and intensify the drama: Barton Scully (Beau Bridges) is Bill Masters’s mentor and provost (based on the real Willard Allen) as well as a married man concealing his homosexuality; the orthopaedic surgeon, Austin Langham (Teddy Sears), represents the kind of man who took part in the experiments with a degree of damage to his libido and self-discipline; the intellectual secretary, Jane Martin (Heléne Yorke), is a composite of the several smart women who gave Masters early insight into the mysteries of female desire.

In a particularly satisfying rewriting of history, Episode 6 begins with wonderful footage of Sigmund Freud in his garden as Anna Freud visits the hospital to talk about her father’s theories. This episode explains the influence of Sigmund Freud’s views on female sexuality, and gives Gini, already aware that their research had put paid to Freud’s authority, the opportunity to shock Anna Freud by asking about the experimental evidence for his theory of the vaginal orgasm. Such a thing would be “indecent,” says Anna. The rest of the episode follows various elaborations of the theme, with Gini and Jane experimenting, and Margaret Scully reading, watching the notorious Peyton Place and then resolving her “frigidity” in an encounter with Austin.

The obvious artifice of such an episode signals to the viewer that this is fiction, but it is fiction that offers important historical insight. Other episodes are so artful that we know that they are moving from history to speculate about character. Episode 8 of the first series, “Love and Marriage,” sets in motion several versions of marriage and its relationship to sexual love, culminating in the Scullys’ recognition that their mutual love has little to do with sexual desire. The crises of the various characters offer implicit criticism of Masters’s mechanical approach to sex, and of Gini’s belief that she can separate love and sex. The next episode picks up a patient’s advice not to “float through life,” as Margaret realises that her husband is gay and Austin learns that he’s impregnated a fellow subject in the course of Masters’s research. None of this has any specific historical basis – though crises like this must have happened. The end of the episode leaves Margaret and Austin sharing their misery in the university swimming pool. They float silently, turning a linguistic metaphor into a visual one.

In Season 2, however, Masters of Sex seemed to become a victim of its own success. It is as if the writers thought that, having established such complex characters, they could use them as the vehicle for their very contemporary take on other important issues. The growing campaign against racial discrimination in St Louis becomes a major story arc, requiring Masters to relocate his research to a black hospital (this didn’t happen) and drawing Libby into an affair with a black man (Maier describes her as utterly devoted to Masters).

Along the way, the drama breaks the integrity of Bill Masters’s character; in order to stop a journalist reporting on his work in a black newspaper, he declares that there is a physiological difference in white and black sexual response. Up to this point Bill has certainly been self-centred, hypocritical and blind to his own emotions, but he has always been reliable, even heroic, in his defence of science. Maier makes no suggestion that the actual Bill Masters was guilty of such dishonesty; it is the point where the show’s liberties with history go too far. Clearly, the writers are more interested in making a statement about the insensitive white middle class than maintaining our commitment to Bill the scientist.

Then there is that familiar influence on a second season: the audience demand for a return of favourite characters from the first season. Once Masters and Johnson leave the hospital, this requires some ingenuity from the writers. They brought back Betty (Annaleigh Ashford), the feisty prostitute, to haunt Masters in his new office, but also created a ludicrous story about diet pills to make Austin the victim of his own sexual promiscuity.

As several US reviewers have commented, Masters of Sex became period soap opera. It was superior soap opera, but it was a disappointment after the brilliance of its first season. The researchers are taking a long time to get to the point where they can actually help people in sexual distress. It is to be hoped that the third season, due for screening this year, returns to some of the other material in Maier’s book. I eagerly anticipate Hugh Hefner’s appearance, and Bill and Gini’s visit to the Playboy mansion. •

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Despite the initial support of the children’s mother and most of Winchelsea, the father, Robert Farquharson, was convicted of murder at his first trial. Even after a second trial and failed appeals, people were still arguing about his guilt or innocence. In 2011 the ABC’s Australian Story presented the view of Farquharson’s family and friends that an innocent man had been imprisoned. Last year, Megan Norris published the mother’s version of events with a title that leaves no doubt about its contrary perspective, On Father’s Day: Cindy Gambino’s Shattering Account of Her Children’s Revenge Murders.

Helen Garner followed the case from the first committal hearing, when Farquharson politely held the door of the courtroom open for her. Two years later, she attended the seven weeks of tedious technical evidence and the heart-stopping statements at the first trial; three years on, she was at the appeal retrial; and she stuck it out through a Supreme Court appeal eighteen months later, and then for the thirty minutes it took the High Court to reject an application for a final appeal in 2013. She forced herself to observe and record every detail of these trials over the years – a commitment that raises the question, what is to be gained from this intent raking over of the horror? This House of Grief answers that question with a vivid inquiry into the operations of our justice system, an acute study of human psychology and the language that can become self-mythology, and an account, almost in passing, of the way communal ethics are shared across classes in Australia.

Garner treats the courtroom as the arena where justice is performed in our society, and she watches with the attention of a perceptive theatre critic, noting every gesture, every shift of voice or wandering gaze, every evasive phrase. She has done this before – in Joe Cinque’s Consolation – but there her interest was in the spiritual dimension of justice, in the gap between legal and moral rights, and in the failure of public justice to provide any psychological restitution for the loss of life. In this case, she positions herself in the courtroom from the start, trying to see what jurors learn and to understand their responses. She takes us into the “beautiful” Supreme Court of Victoria with its “soaring ceiling, pale plaster walls, and fittings of dark, ponderous timber,” she gives us brief character studies of the barristers and judge, and she turns the evidence into a narrative stripped of the tedium of the court experience.

For days, Farquharson’s barrister batters away at the technical evidence and the police failures in marking out the tyre tracks. Experts dispute the probability of “cough syncope,” a condition that can lead to a loss of consciousness after coughing. There are arguments about the camber of the road. With their learning and experience of the system, the judge and the barristers orchestrate events, drawing the admiration and trust of the newcomers to Australian state justice. An artificial process makes order from the messy, disordered human lives that come to its attention.

Of course, Garner adds another layer of order – her own sensitivity to language and gesture, and her recognition of the individual humanity of the gowned barristers, the judge and the jurors locked up with their responsibility. She imagines the life of the defendant, turned out of his home by his wife to spend his nights with his father after days working at a dreary cleaning job. As the wife takes up with her new partner, a concreter, she speculates about the glamour to a housebound mother of a concrete pour on the new house, and she watches the terrible grief of the family as the technical experts speculate on the nature of the children’s last minutes.

The evidence is so harrowing that the reader may wish to join Garner in the restorative martini or gin that she drinks with friends at the end of the worst days. From time to time, she dreams a redemptive fantasy in which the little boys come back to life. “Was there a form of madness called court fatigue?” she wonders, revealing “the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind, and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead.” The children’s parents and most people in the courtroom seem to think the same way.

A criminal court is one of the rare places in Australia where an educated class of professionals engages with poorer people in a struggle to find a shared ethics and morality. The judges and barristers here are acknowledged as clever, even brilliant, while many of the rural people who give evidence are inarticulate and financially burdened. The unknowable jurors strike Garner as ordinary people, struggling to pay attention in their casual clothes. She shows an acute sensitivity to class, enjoying the “democratic counter” at the coffee cart outside the court, where even the occasional judge stops by for a takeaway.

Inside the court the eminent professor who has never seen a “cough syncope” case suffers by comparison with the doctor from Geelong steadily compiling a list of cases. The police expert who appears with a giant protractor and calculator draws a wry “I hate a bloke who thinks he knows his job” from the children’s grandfather. Garner gently mocks the absurdity of expert jargon as a counsellor talks about the “the parental dyad” and “suicidal ideation” but, more significantly, she picks up the phrases that the participants cling to as explanations for their lives. Cindy Gambino repeats the mantra that she “loved” her husband but was not “in love” with him; Farquharson clutches at stock phrases: “I loved them more than life itself,” “I was a very loving father.” Garner shrewdly notes the recurrence of “the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our destructive urges.”

Garner watches the jurors flag under the weight of detail, then notes how they come to attention when a witness invites their sympathy or appeals to their sense of humour. A rattled policeman comments on the excellence of his colleague’s photographs and the court laughs, partly in sympathy for the pasting he is suffering from the defence barrister. Our knowledge of events must always be incomplete, but Garner concludes that we are more likely to rely on our understanding of human behaviour than trust in science. She quotes Janet Malcolm: “Jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character.”

In this account, Farquharson becomes responsible for his own conviction. He claims his right to silence in the first trial, but the recorded statements he made to the police in the days after the deaths, with their anxious grasping at excuses and lack of concern for the boys, prove devastating. When he takes the stand in the second trial he can add no details about the events of the night, and claims his bereavement as an unassailable excuse for his lack of recall. As Garner puts it, “the final fortnight of evidence was like watching, in ghastly slow motion, a man slither down the face of a cliff. Sometimes his shirt would snag on a protruding branch, or his fall would be arrested by a tiny ledge, a fragile outcrop; but the fabric would stretch and snap, the narrow shelf would crumble, and down he would go again, feet first, eyes wide open, arms outstretched into the void.”

Farquharson seems to lack any imagination or powers of empathy, let alone any language skill. These are the very qualities Garner brings to the matter, enriching his miserable actions and failures with an understanding that encompasses not only the horrors of this case but also its effect on the psyche of all of us who know about it. It is as if she is trying to fill the terrible absence there. Yet she writes with restraint and tact, managing to avoid what she calls “the tabloid language that can reduce the purest human anguish to a pulp.” There are no photographs in her book, though the newspapers have been publishing one of the three boys sitting on a couch that shows them to be as appealing as anyone’s young children.

Occasionally I meet women who refuse to read Helen Garner’s books since The First Stone, or who read all her subsequent work through its prism – as if, once they’ve categorised her as a traitor to feminism, she can have nothing worth hearing to say. In the context of recent prominent sexual harassment and offence trials, The First Stone deserves rereading for its concern about the incompetent way our institutions handle such matters, and the difficulty of finding just penalties for the perpetrators. Joe Cinque’s Consolation looked more closely at the spiritual damage of crime, and the failure of the legal system to provide any emotional or psychological restitution, but it also noted the effects of the defendant’s silence in court and the absence of a jury.

Here, Garner offers a more positive view of the courts. Lex Lasry, the defending barrister who delivered the most devastating line in the Cinque book (“Duty of care and duty to act are not the same thing”), appears as the scrupulous and sensitive judge in the appeal trial. The barristers battle on through every detail to the point of tedium. The police hold the line against determined attack. The witnesses struggle with the awful burden of their knowledge, and the jury reveals itself capable of making decisions independently of the opinions of the public and journalists in the courtroom.

In the closing pages, Garner insists that the fate of the Farquharson children is a legitimate concern for all of us. The court has been the place where that concern springs into action, and This House of Grief leaves us with the slight hope that our justice system can maintain some of our shared sense of humanity. •

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