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We fell into the ocean backwards, making the OK signal for the camera. Later I replayed that footage several times, but it never seemed accurate: all flailing flippers and ungainly limbs, smiles stretched around the mouthpiece, that messy shattering of the surface. Nothing like the slow, deadly grace of being underwater.
What we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling. Carlyle, miserable and unwell at Kirkcaldy, read the whole of Gibbon straight through – twelve volumes in twelve days – with a kind of horrified fascination. I recall one friend who, at a time of ineffable tension, calmly read Les Misérables, one thousand pages long, in a single week. (I would have been incapable of reading a tabloid.) Another time, lovelorn in Siena, I stayed in my ghastly hotel room and read The Aunt’s Story right through while the handsome Sienese sunned themselves in the companionable Campo.
This week on The ABR Podcast Jonathan Ricketson reviews The Season by Helen Garner. Ricketson explains that The Season is a memoir of Garner watching her grandson ‘Amby play for the Flemington Juniors in the Under-16s, from February to August 2023’. The experience involves an effacement of self, the grandmother on the sidelines rendered a ‘silent witness’. Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University, where he is working on a novel. Here is Jonathan Ricketson with ‘Silent witness: A “little life-hymn” from Helen Garner’, published in the December issue of ABR.
Fighting to the Finish does not get off to a good start; its title is overstated. The First Australian Task Force (1ATF), trimmed down in 1970 from three to two battalions, withdrew from the Vietnam War by December 1971. The small remaining advisory group withdrew in December 1972. Fighting finished in April 1975, when more than 180 battalions of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) swarmed around Saigon, causing it to fall. It hardly seems sensible to declare that the Australian Army fought to the finish over two years before the end of the war.
Bruce Beresford has left a greater imprint on the national sensibility than most people might think. From The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) through The Getting of Wisdom (1977) and Breaker Morant (1980), he has demonstrated a virtuoso ability to dramatise Australianness, classic and modern. His films Don’s Party (1976) and The Club (1980) mean that we are never likely to forget the idiom in which David Williamson first represented us, because Beresford has made it part of the cinematic argot of the country; a new production of a play is automatically measured by how much the actors stand up to the classic performances of Graeme Kennedy or Ray Barrett or John Hargreaves in Beresford’s vision of the plays.
Editor Matthew Lamb stands by his decision to end themed issues of Island. ‘General issues,’ he explains in his latest editorial, ‘allow for more serendipitous encounters with new ideas.’ Cohesion in any literary journal can be tricky, and Island 135 offers a mostly complementary mix of new and old ideas.