No 242 - June / July 2002

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Kerryn Goldsworthy's Essay 'After the Academy'; Dorothy Porter's Diary; Dennis Altman's 'Letter from New York; Gideon Haigh reviews Paul Strangio's Keeper of the Faith

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Browsing No 242 - June / July 2002 by Issue Date

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    New Pearls in the Magic Garage. "Magic Garage", by John Donnelly. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Broinowski, Alison
    John Donnelly’s "Magic Garage", with a stunning cover by Amelia Mollett, comes as a welcome surprise. Donnelly the insider prefers to avoid the foreigners’ Jakarta. Knowing his way around, he takes you off the highways and into the alleys and canals of Setiabudi, a fringe settlement targeted by corrupt developers and the even more corrupt army. You meet the ‘little people’ of Setiabudi who get in their way; you taste their salads and satays, sample their herbal medicines, smell their drains, see them bleed. All Donnelly’s ordinary people are manipulated and deceived by the system, but they are no slouches at manipulating and deceiving each other, whether they deal in Amway, massage, holy water, secrets or sex.
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    Two Poems. "Komikaze" and "Compression", by Peter Porter.
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Porter, Peter
    This item contains two poems written by Peter Porter.
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    Two Stylists. "Homage to John Forbes", by Ken Bolton (ed.) and "David Malouf: A Celebration", by Ivor Indyk (ed.). [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) McCooey, David
    Literary reputation, especially the posthumous kind, is a deliquescent thing. If it’s not going to melt away, then work is needed from friends and publishers, even critics. Forbes, while not exactly ignored in his lifetime, didn’t get his due. "Homage to John Forbes", published as a companion volume to last year’s "Collected Poems" (reviewed in ABR, September 2001), shows friends, publishers and critics making up for this neglect. "David Malouf: A Celebration" is the latest in the ‘Celebrations’ produced by the Friends of the National Library of Australia. These are short and smartly produced. Not surprisingly, this example is less critical and more circumspect than "Homage to John Forbes", but the five contributors cover disparate aspects of Malouf’s varied, and immensely successful, career.
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    The Cow-pat Agenda. "Fields of Discovery: Australia's CSIRO", by Brad Collis. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Robin, Libby
    If you are looking for a rattling good yarn of national success that is, for a change, neither military nor sporting, "Fields of Discovery" is your book. Rich with Eureka moments, Brad Collis has created a great read. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is ‘an Australian icon’ according to the book’s front flap. It provides a framework for a national(ist) story with scientists as heroes. Science is a very important and distinctive aspect of Australian nationhood, but frequently sidelined by cultural historians. The challenge is to write an interesting narrative about ‘Big Science’, which is typically dominated by large teams of workers and labyrinthine administrative structures. Collis has grasped the nettle of the ‘human-sized narrative’ with great success.
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    Occupation: Housewife. [poem]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) James, Clive
    This item is a poem by Clive James.
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    Lord of the Flies with Grown-Ups. "Batavia's Graveyard", by Mike Dash. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Goldsworthy, Peter
    The Batavia, the finest ship of the Dutch Golden Age, left Amsterdam for the colony of Java in October 1628 on its maiden voyage. Approximately three hundred men, women and children were on board. It was wrecked on Houtman’s Abrolhos, a string of Western Australian atolls. Pelsaert set off in a small boat with his second-in-charge, the ship’s skipper, and reached the city of Batavia (now Jakarta) in an epic of small-craft navigation. In his absence, a group of men led by Undermerchant Jeronimus Cornelisz established a reign of terror on the island known as Batavia’s Graveyard. Killings commenced, at first secretly, and on semi-judicial disciplinary grounds, then more openly.
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    Not So Tickety Boo. "Rich Kids", by Paul Barry. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Griffen-Foley, Bridget
    Paul Barry’s "Rich Kids" tells the story of both One.Tel, the telecommunications company launched by Jodee Rich and Brad Keeling in 1995, and Imagineering, a software company, which was founded by Rich in 1981 and also collapsed. Despite the widespread heartache, Rich, Keeling and some key executives emerged from One.Tel with millions of dollars from bonuses, royalties and selling shares. "Rich Kids" is a tale of breathtaking greed, self-aggrandisement, mismanagement, ineptitude and duplicity.
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    Tales for a Dry Country. "The Very Super Adventures of Nic and Naomi", by Venero Armanno and Anna Pignataro and "Quetta", by Gary Crew and Bruce Whatley and "The Magic Hat", by Mem Fox and "Old Tom's Holiday", by Leigh Hobbs and "A Year on Our Farm", by Penny Matthews. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Lowe, Virginia
    Virginia Lowe reviews several children's books here: picture books that relate the dryness of Australia and the joy of the rainy season; stories of forging unusual friendships; the familiar tragedy of shipwrecks; and the delight of Mem Fox's wacky rhymes.
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    Cinemadope. "Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy", by Christopher Falzon. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Pataki, Tamas
    Christopher Falzon, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle, has written what seems to me, overall, an admirable introduction to philosophy. His selection of philosophical themes is balanced and judicious, and his presentation is unusually lucid and economical. His idea of using film as a resource to illustrate and explore philosophical ideas will appeal to most beginners, and probably assist with the marketing problem. Falzon’s book is not about the philosophy of film, although his discussion does shed light on the philosophical content of some films. It is an invitation to philosophy that domesticates its subject by using film to illustrate, dramatise and, occasionally, propose philosophical themes.
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    Green Dreams. "The Wearing of the Green: A History of St Patrick's Day", by Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Campion, Edmund
    Each year, around 17 March, someone asks, ‘What is St Patrick’s Day all about?’ and each year someone gives a different answer. This capacious book is a compendium of all the answers. There is no single answer to the question, because each celebrant has his or her own take on the day. Academics Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair have combined to produce a fact-filled study of how St Patrick’s Day has been celebrated in New York, Dublin, Sydney, Melbourne, and some British and Canadian cities. This is dedicated work, for writers and readers alike, as events, statistics, history, memories, comments and stories compete for attention. The authors achieve a lofty impartiality, allowing readers to make up their mind about what is being read, and not invading the telling of the stories too much. The book will be a trove for journalists who have to write one of those 17 March articles.
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    Spanish Epiphanies. "Night Train to Granada: From Sydney's Bohemia to Franco's Spain: An Off-beat Memoir", by Grahame Harrison. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Kitson, Jill
    This is not a travel book. Grahame Harrison snapped the minute photographs of Spain that cover this book’s jacket in the 1950s. Inside is the memoir he waited half a century to write: about his experiences in Granada under 'franquismo', Franco’s version of fascism, and his earlier, intellectually formative years as a member of the Sydney Push. He brings to these recollections the deeper insights of an historian in love with his subject.
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    Worms and Fishes. "Lifeboats for Victoria: The Story of Lifeboats and Their Crews in Victoria 1856-1979", by Marten A. Syme. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Hill, Barry
    It is the story of these boats and their communities that we have here, told for the first time by Marten Syme in his crisp, impeccably researched, beautifully illustrated and produced little book. For a short book that could have happily been much longer, Syme has done a splendid job, subtly evoking the political and psychological realities. He calculates that between 1857 and 1940 the lifeboat service in Victoria carried 440 people to safety at a cost of thirty-eight pounds per life.
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    Facets of Love. "Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy", by John Armstrong. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Levy, Neil
    Love is a central preoccupation of art and literature, of popular culture and autobiography. This book is an attempt to understand its central themes, to discover why love is so important to most of us, why we seek it, and why we so frequently fail to hold on to it. John Armstrong is a philosopher whose primary interest is aesthetics. Accordingly, his meditations on love often proceed by way of reflection upon works of art and literature.
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    Advances, Contents, Letters, Imprints and Contributors.
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06)
    This item features miscellaneous information from this issue.
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    Scabs in the Cloth. "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women", by Tara Brabazon. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Lusty, Natalya
    Tara Brabazon’s "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women" is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects — including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner — Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie "Fight Club", Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that.
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    National News.
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Powell, Graeme
    Graeme Powell recounts his meeting with Christina Stead in 1975; Stead subsequently decided to bequeath her manuscripts and papers to the National Library of Australia.
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    Letter from New York.
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Altman, Dennis
    Did September 11 reinforce the centrality of New York in the global imaginary, or did it, rather, mark the symbolic end of New York as the centre of the world? In a perverse way, it seems to have done both: the assault on the World Trade Towers was clearly an assault on the symbols of global capital, but it also showed that even hegemonic powers are vulnerable. Americans speak of their loss of innocence, echoing the rhetoric of previous shocks — the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam — but the world they inhabit is rather different from that of the Cold War. It is unlikely that any country has ever enjoyed such unrivalled economic and military power while remaining so untouched by the world they dominate. The paradox is that the country most responsible for promoting globalisation is at the same time the country least touched by the flow of ideas that globalisation represents.
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    Battle of September 11. "September 11 and the Agony of the Left", by Gregory Melleuish and Imre Salusinszky. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Carroll, John
    At present, there is no more important subject for serious reflection than September 11 and its consequences. Those consequences range across a wide spectrum, from the military and diplomatic at one end — practical action to destroy al-Qaeda and its leadership — to the cultural at the other end, cued by the metaphysics of "Heart of Darkness". In Australia, the first book to take up this challenge has just appeared. "Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left" is a diverse collection of essays that reflects on the significance of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington. As with most essay assortments, the quality is uneven, and, in this case, the title misleads: only a third of the book is devoted to Leftist reactions to September 11. The editors, Imre Salusinszky and Gregory Melleuish, made a mistake in choosing a political orientation for their collection. Neither the Left nor the Right are coherent entities any more. In relation to the grave issues of the time, it is a distraction and wasted effort to conjure up an ideological enemy and imagine that, by humiliating it, progress has been made. September 11 is so difficult and engaging a topic that dwelling on the foolishness of some Left opinion seems trifling.
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    Coetzee's Siberian Wastes. "Youth", by J.M. Coetzee. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Davidson, Jim
    In "Youth", the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began some years ago with "Boyhood". We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible. But there is little doubt that it is autobiographical, if not autobiography; if it is a novel, then the claim resides essentially in its being an exploration of mood and feeling, rather than external events — with perhaps an occasional fictional elaboration. Whatever the case, Coetzee is intent on tracking the Siberian wastes of himself.
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    After the Academy.
    (Australian Book Review, 2002-06) Goldsworthy, Kerryn
    Having elderly parents is a common condition of middle age, and so is the compulsion to examine your life so far and see how you feel about the shape of it. And for women, middle age means adjusting once and for all to the fact that you either have children or do not have them, and either way it will affect the choices you make, the way you are perceived in the workplace, the way that you relate to whatever other family you have, and the quality of your own old age. Asked now to write about this mid-life shift and its aftermath, I can see for the first time that, if I hadn’t already come home, my mother’s death would probably have brought me back.
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