Rigby

The novelist’s art is wide ranging; he is concerned with a multitude of things that comprise the fabric of his book. The short story writer, however, is concerned with one thing that implies many, since singularity and intensity are the essence of his art. The best short story writers depend on a marked personal attitude and this is the distinguishing characteristic of David Martin’s second collection of stories whose common denominator is his compassionate understanding of the problems of New Australians.

Tom Howard is a new character/pseudonymous author in the same general region inhabited so prominently by Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy, although with the publication of his first two novels it remains to be seen how far Howard will be able to rival Corris’ talent for bringing out the local flavour of crime and corruption, and how far his books will simply have Australian settings grafted on to classic forms of the whodunnit. Of the two Howard novels under review The Health Farm Murders follows the formula of a small isolated community with its numbers dropping off like ninepins, while The Beach-Front Murders is a much more credible account of passion and loneliness, of the lure and isolation of the big city.

At a time when novels by women must run the gauntlet of feminist criticism it is surprising to find one which is prepared to discuss love and female dependence without any deference to feminism. Natalie Scott makes it clear that her heroine lives in ‘liberated’ times but she insists that the need for love remains a fundamental human weakness or strength. Furthermore, she is not afraid to link a woman’s desire for beauty with her need for love. The traditional feminine concern for beautiful things and personal beauty becomes in The Glasshouse part of a search for completeness, though the other interpretation – that it is evidence of feminine materialism and obsession with security – is also acknowledged. At the same time, Natalie Scott’s writing is careful, considered, occasionally witty, and always finely crafted. Her narrator, Alexandra Pawley, convincingly conveys the attitudes of an intelligent and well-groomed woman who desperately wants to form her life into a beautiful pattern.

I’d wager that if you offered men the opportunity when they died, of being reunited with their deceased father, many would find the prospect unattractive. A surprising number of men fear their father and spend most of their life coming to grips with the complex. Hardie, the protagonist of this story was a bad father. He meant no evil nor was he evil by his own lights, yet he did systematically, emotionally at least, destroy every member of his family.

Proponents of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons have often argued that the debate on these matters is best confined to those expert enough to comprehend the technical complexities involved. These two books are contributions to that debate based on an alternative view – that the nuclear issue is increasingly central to national and international politics and indeed to the question of human survival. As such it demands the widest possible debate and understanding.

How, not being an anthropologist, do you set about reviewing tales and fragments of experience from Aboriginals of the Kimberleys? You might begin by stating your difficulties.

People like me can usually establish some kind of empathetic link with the arts and traditions of many cultures. If we cannot feel our way into them, at least we can derive intellectual pleasure from contemplating them: as a rule there is some point of contact, although to us, of the western heritage, nothing can ever be as real as what belongs to the family of Hellenism. I can ‘make something’ of Hindu sculpture, Inca masks, Negro jazz; perhaps even of shamanic spells.

Soon after our Dip.Ed. begins, I solemnly warn my students that, when they go out into schools for their English teaching practice, they will be asked to teach poetry: indeed, in many cases, the poetry they present will be the only poetry those classes will have for the whole year. They smile and even laugh indulgently, and we talk about why teachers wouldn’t want to teach poetry. It’s a pleasant academic point. But when the students come back in late April after some weeks in schools, their eyes are wide and they say, ‘It’s true. We have to teach the poetry!’.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.