Abbreviations

My first contact with Arthur Phillips was through a note signed A.A.P., attached to a short story that an editor couldn’t find space for. The note pointed out that the story lacked reality, e.g. a child was allowed to sit in a hotel bar. When I finally got to meet A.A. Phillips, it was over a drink. The pleasure at meeting was enhanced by a child at the next table. I ribbed Arthur about this, telling him that he had sinned against the commandments of social realism. He allowed me my small victory (the story is still unpublished) and then told a number of very funny stories against himself. I knew him only slightly, but that minimal acquaintanceship showed him to be as extraordinary and as delightful in his living as he was in his writing. He claimed that he was sick of hearing the phrase ‘cultural cringe’, which he said initially appealed to him because of its alliteration. But the phrase, and Phillips’s writing, still touch a nerve. Like my friend and first teacher of Australian literature, Tom Inglis Moore, Phillips did not know how to cringe. The contribution of these two to Australian writing and to Australian confidence is impossible to assess; but it is possible to say that it was vast and of continuing importance and relevance. It seems to me that Australian writing is today in an extraordinarily healthy state. And that we are a literate people. I share all the concerns of booksellers and publishers, especially as recently formulated by Laurie Muller of University of Queensland Press. (See Mark Rubbo’s column.) But I take heart from the presence of so many writers of outstanding talent, from the revival of the short story, from the existence of so many interesting magazines and journals. In this context I draw attention to the Adelaide Review. Edited by Christopher Pearson, this consistently impressive magazine is distributed free. However, for $12 a year you can subscribe to this excellent monthly – the address is Room 26, Paringa Building, 13 Hindley Street, Adelaide, 5000, phone 08 212 1677. From Room 26 comes a well-designed journal in tabloid format, with articles, interviews, stories, poetry, and reviews. The November issue contains a strong and beautifully written story by Helen Garner. A few issues ago, the Review published a story by Kerryn Goldsworthy, which is one of the best stories I have read in a long time. The standard is kept high through nineteen issues and for twelve dollars a year you are getting a bargain and a very good read. Better I think than The Age Monthly Review, which has published some important articles and reviews, and raised some central issues. But it does often ramble into dullness, and often reads like the younger son of the Times Literary Supplement sent to vegetate in the colonies. But it is pleasant to report that the child of Murdoch meretriciousness, The Australian, is now producing a literary supplement of considerable value, with some very impressive creative writing. It still seems to me true that the major dailies don’t, with some exceptions, do enough to support Australian writing. I do know the pressures literary editors face. And some of them are involved in continuing and important achievements, such as The Age Australian Book of the Year Awards. I’m sure Arthur Phillips would urge you to send your twelve dollars to room 26. He might even approve of your buying the Saturday Australian. Throw away the first sections which pretend to be news, and you get some good reviews, and, once a month, some good creative writing. Talking of Adelaide and cultural cringes, making no connections – this column aims at a soggy coherence – the Adelaide festival beckons us, with a Grand Prix smile. Writers Week. The National Book Council Awards will be announced. So will the ABR Reviewers Award. If that is not enough excitement, we will be honoured – plagued – by those famous writers from over there. From the deserts the prophets come. I for one am happy to know that I am waking up on the same continent as Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie. But as I shower in the joy of knowing that these great writers are probably now resting in their separate baths in Adelaide, I wonder if I’m not culturally cringing just a little. So let’s have a competition. ABR hereby formally invites you to submit the names of those overseas writers whom you would like to see invited to this colony to enlighten us. My recommendations would be the writer of Ronald Reagan’s cue cards and the writer of Maggie Thatcher’s speeches, and the sprayer of her hair. Some writers seem to be always on the conference circuit, as ubiquitous as Philip Adams, or God, or Prue Acton. The list needn’t be entirely serious, but speculations on whether we are still culturally cringing, or at least knee-jerking towards a gymnastic grovel will be welcome. The prize will be a year’s subscription to ABR and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot – or Great Western, which must be just as good because they import Peter Ustinov to advertise it. Talking about over there, I. was heartened to read in Harper’s magazine American publishers wondering about the state of books. Elisabeth Sifton of Viking Penguin was lamenting that she expected to sell between 2,000 and 5,000 copies of certain books. Phyllis Grann, president of Putnam’s, grieves that for seven out of eight fine novels they publish, the sales figures will be between 5,000 to 7,000. I know many that Australian publishers would jump up and down on their overdraft for such figures, but we are talking about the American population, one nearly sixteen times bigger than our own. So standing as close as I can get to attention, I humbly acknowledge Australian literacy and·welcome Angus and Robertson’s revival of Coast to Coast, to appear in 1986, edited by Kerryn Goldsworthy. I also hope the same for a book that’s not a book. This is a collection of poems by Le Van Tai, who came to Australia from Vietnam as one of the ‘boat people’ in 1979, after being accused of divorcing himself from party guidelines on art. The poems are recorded on cassette and are read by Dindy Vaughan. Tai writes in both Vietnamese and English. He is also a painter. He can certainly write poetry. Copies of this cassette are available from Dindy Vaughan, 41 Beaufort Road Croydon, Vic, 3136. The price is $8.50. I have mentioned A. A. Phillips. Another person who was central to my own love of Australian books also died recently. He was my father. Minimally educated to stand behind a plough, as was the predicted future for one coming towards the end of a farmer’s family of thirteen (from about twenty pregnancies and there are still some who do not understand the long anger of feminism), he spent a lifetime reading. He had his own anthologies of poems, written in his terrible handwriting in black notebooks. After a day of good behaviour, rare enough because my sisters and brother sometimes gave me cause forcefully to correct their behaviour, we would have bedtime readings of Lawson and Paterson and Gordon. And forgotten names like Ogilvie. I have never read Fair Girls and Gray Horses but I started hearing from it when I was five. I honour Arthur Phillips, and Tom Inglis Moore and my father. And my grandmother, by all accounts a gentle, vivacious, and loving woman, who died worn out with childbirth years before I was born. Baynton and Lawson would have understood them all.

John Hanrahan

From the New Issue

Fat Chance: Journalism poems by Kent MacCarter

The Cancer Finishing School: Lessons in laughter, love and resilience by Peter Goldsworthy

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

‘Rinbo Abdo’, a new poem by Philip Mead

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'Abbreviations' by Kerryn Goldsworthy September 1986