University of Queensland Press

On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.

In this new book, Beverley Farmer quotes George Steiner: ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device.’ The blurb calls A Body of Water a montage. Well, it’s a difficult book to describe. It’s not a pasting together, there’s no smell of glue about it. Nor is it put together, plonk, thunk, like stones. It’s rather, in her own words, an interweaving.

Professor Mulvaney’s thematic history of encounters between outsiders and Aboriginal Australians is developed through a discussion of events located in specific places. He has selected places which are in the Register of the National Estate (many of which he initially nominated) or are being considered for inclusion. The places, then, are by definition part of Australia’s cultural heritage, and an important focus of the book is to illuminate some of the types of events which have shaped Australian society.

Barbara Hanrahan has made her own the ostensibly artless narrative of simple women. Monologue might be a better word than narrative; the idea of a speaking voice is important. ‘I was born in a war, I grew up in a war, and there was war all along’ is how this one begins. It’s the Japanese War in China, the country is occupied, food is short, rice must be queued for. ‘And if the queue didn’t disappear, the Japanese up above would come to the windows and bring out the chamber pots and pour down all their terrible peeing.’ It’s a harsh world to be growing up in, but there’s a matter-of-factness in the way it’s talked about. ‘War’s war forever, until it ends.’ Or starts again. The end of this war is the beginning of the next; the communists come, one kind of oppression replaces another.

All poets have two chances of being remembered. A few, the strongest of their age, compose a handful of poems that resist time and indifference. Many more never attain anything like poetic strength, yet their works are preserved because they embody a particular style or period. It is still too early to judge where Charles Buckmaster will be placed in the ranks of Australian literature. Already, though, the process of canonisation has started, and at the very least Buckmaster is likely to be read as an exemplary figure of Australian poetry in the 1960s.

This is John A. Scott’s sixth collection of poems since 1975. The volume is slim but not thin. Each poem encompasses its observation, reflection, or moment from which departures are measured, as the positives and negatives of ‘delicious solitude’ are weighed. Amid urban blues, bar-speak, team games and the distorting foci of others’ projections, the ‘predicate adjective alone’ evokes either dignity, pathos, or something in between. Scott considers the prospects.

I first made the acquaintance of Olga Masters’s writing some years back when a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for which her collection of stories The Home Girls had been submitted. I was immensely impressed by the control, passion, and implicit violence of the stories, and was of the impression that the book should win. But another judge, of considerable seniority, carried the day with the opinion that all the stories in the book were ‘at the same pitch’. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that her objection could equally be levelled at, say, Flannery O’Connor or Dubliners, but that’s water under the bridge.

The dominant note of Professor Kramer’s long-awaited James McAuley is control. The volume will no doubt be gratefully received by lovers and adversaries of McAuley’s literary achievement, for many reasons: it brings before a wider reading audience guile a few new poems published only in the little-circulated volume Time Given (1976). These poems can now receive their due and wider admiration. (Unfortunately, only thirteen of the thirty-one poems from Time Given have been reprinted here, in two different sections.) This volume also gives wider accessibility to some of McAuley’s scattered journalism and literary criticism. Fifteen essays have been selected, but I 1hink it a great pity that some of the essays referred to and discussed at some length in Kramer’s introduction do not appear in the text, especially the seminal and highly ambivalent ‘The Magian Heresy’. In a similar way Kramer mentions the importance of the poem ‘A Letter to John Dryden, but summarily dismisses it as ‘the rather strident satire’, and does not include it in the volume.

Soul-searching about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the ‘goodies’, and all those who ignored them in their books or their teaching have become the ‘baddies’. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.