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Kate Ahearne

Reading Frank Moorhouse is a bit like learning to cook silver beet in some newfangled way and discovering that for years you’ve been chucking the best bits out.

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It must have seemed as natural to Penguin as money in the bank to ask Helen Gamer to provide a few enticing words for the cover of Jean Bedford’s new book, Love Child. Here, it would appear, is a book very much in the Garner backyard – short, domestic, ‘certainly not ‘loud’ or attention-seeking, but nicely crafted.

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There must be something horribly deformed about a society in which the lowest paid work is often the most demanding and the least dispensable. Why, for instance, is the wellbeing of our elderly not worthwhile enough for people to be paid to deliver Meals on Wheels? Who doesn’t believe that the nurture of children is an enormously responsible job? Does a rubbish tip attendant get better paid than a clerk? Course not.

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The idea of the sequel probably goes back to the earliest cave drawings in the bowels of the oldest hills. ‘What happened next?’ was surely .among the first words babies ever gurgled as parents grunted bed­time stories around ancient camp-fires. It is not given to the armchair anthropologist to know whether· ‘What happened before that?’ is quite so fundamental, but I suspect not – otherwise, stories would begin with an end at least as often as they do with a beginning.

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Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years edited by Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly

by
May 1985, no. 70

The first idea I remember having about the past as history was that people were more brutish then and more unjust because they were more ignorant. History was progress. This was the enlightened age.

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