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John Hooker

'Andrew Fabinyi – A memoir' by John Hooker

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February–March 1983, no. 48

I first met Fabinyi in November, 1963 – he had offered me an editorial job sight-unseen at F.W. Cheshire while I was living in London. On my first day in the basement in Little Collins Street, Melbourne, I shook hands formally with a handsome, greying man in his early fifties with a slight stoop and a thick European accent. Within a week or two of my arrival, my new acquaintances warned me about him: he was ambitious, and he was circuitous. Then followed the tired, old (and to me, offensive) joke about the Hungarian in the revolving door. I shall comment on these accusations later.

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Patterns of Australia by Geoffrey Dutton

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October 1980, no. 25
John Hooker reviews 'Patterns of Australia' by Geoffrey Dutton

As I write this, the Aboriginals have been forced to capitulate at Noonkanbah. The Western Australian Government is hell-bent that Amax should drill on the Blacks’ sacred site, and the National Aboriginal Conference is in Geneva to state its case at the United Nations. Patterns of Australia, funded to the tune of $120,000 by Mobil, one of the most powerful trans-nationals the world has ever known, could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Although author Geoffrey Dutton deals dutifully with the Aboriginals in the course of this book, Noonkanbah or what it stands for – energy resources, land rights and the exploitative activities of trans-nationals – is not one of the ‘patterns’ (along with many others) discussed in this smooth coffee table creation.

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