Commentary

Who has not heard of “Yabba”, Sydney’s greatest barracker?’, asked the Listener In in February 1937. The Listener In was not the only radio magazine intrigued by a new Australian cricketing identity. Two identities, in fact: Myra Dempsey, who was covering the 1936–37 Ashes series for 3BO Bendigo; and Dempsey’s discovery, ‘Gabba’, a female counterpart to ‘Yabba’. A fixture at the Sydney Cricket Ground for a generation, ‘Yabba’ (Stephen Gascoigne) scored an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and remains a fixture in Australian cricket histories. But Dempsey, a minor celebrity in her day as the first female cricket broadcaster in Australia (and probably the world), remains unknown to broadcasting and cricket historians alike.

Algeria, June 1835. General Camille Alphonse Trézel’s expedition to pacify the western tribes had failed. Under the leadership of Emir Abdel Kader, Commander of the Faithful, the Algerians had bloodied the French invaders badly. Outnumbered and compelled to withdraw to the port of Arzew to resupply, Trézel’s column fought desperate rearguard actions for three days and nights. On the fourth day, the Algerian cavalrymen outflanked the exhausted French and were waiting in ambush on the edges of the Macta marshes.

It is pleasing to see the following publishing advice in the report: ‘a book should contain a poet’s best work. It is better to have a good, small collection than a bigger one with weak pieces that are there because of theme or because the poet liked them too much’ (or, maybe, because someone once admired them). First-timers tend to be more careful about this than some poets who have made a name. I know that major poets, in tune with their audience’s level of acceptance, will sometimes rightly present lesser and better work together, to show the spectrum. That aside, there is a myth among poets that a short book doesn’t look good, as if bulk is the proof of something. Yet the buyers of poetry are sensitive to padding – a good book, whether lengthy or not, is as long as there are strong poems for it. Has it been forgotten that such a landmark book as Judith Wright’s The Moving Image (1946) comprised just thirty-one pages of poems?

Australia’s fraught journey with China continues. The Albanese government now wrestles with the same harsh global and regional realities as its predecessors. The crisis brought about by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August now appears to have ruptured much of the initial attempts on both the Australian and Chinese sides to at least begin talking to each other again. 

The federal government’s proposal for a multicultural television network has sparked off once more a row about the nature of the Australian national identity.

The opponents of the network seem to fear that it will cause all kinds of divisions in our community by emphasising the different places and cultures to which we owe our origins. They would like to restore the myth of a single nation, bounded and defended by a single shoreline (plus, of course, Tasmania), giving allegiance to a single flag and monarch and united by a single tongue. The myth is glorious in its simplicity, and marred only by the fact that it corresponds to no historical truth.

While the art of the ghost writer has a long and honorable history, the court case concerning the extent of Graham Yallop’s responsibility for the book on the recent test series raises a number of general issues apart from the outcome of this particular dispute. At its best, the practice of ghost writing enables the general public to share the experiences of people who have had interesting lives but do not command the verbal skills necessary to constructing a book. Yet the ghost writer may also be the unacknowledged creator of the characters who figure in his work. Few politicians now will risk either the off-the-cuff remark or even the considered epistle, so that the contest of political leadership can degenerate to a trial of speechwriters’ skills. The most proficient comedians are, of course, creatures of their scriptwriters, but they at least exact nothing from us but our laughs. As our sportsmen and women become media figures there is a danger that the players as well as the game will be taken over by the media barons, with the ghost writer acting as puppet master. Fortunately, cricket, a sport which seems able to elicit passions altogether out of proportions with the leisurely pace of the game, has always had players who are as much at home with words as with bat and ball. One of these, Jack Fingleton, was the subject of a review last month; another, Frank Tyson, is a regular contributor to our pages. Their individuality provides some security that the age of the manufactured human is not yet quite triumphant. It would seem, however, that in a world of instant media heroes, publishers have a responsibility to their readers to tell them whether the words they are reading belong to the ostensible author or to an unseen ghost.