Letters to the Editor - July 1999

Dear Editor, ‘Who reads it?’ asks Gerard Windsor of HEAT (ABR, June 1999) and admits he no longer does. In fact, he confesses, he never reads stories or essays by writers who don’t have a book to their name. What a strange and limiting conceit! But as for who reads HEAT, well, I for one do – every issue, from cover to cover. And there must be more like me; people who read for enjoyment, who read for reasons other than job or duty, who read to please themselves. I like HEAT. It may be a mélange, but there are few duds in the mix, and patterns and themes can often be glimpsed in the juxtapositioning of writers and text, poems and visuals, allowing pieces to resonate and spark off one another. This is a hallmark of HEAT and evidence of Indyk’s skill as an editor. HEAT is challenging, stimulating, and thought provoking. Few would like everything with equal fervour, and personally I admit that pieces have lost me or left me puzzled. But never bored. Windsor questions the pulling power of the literary journals, and yes, one worries for the future when people like Windsor have jumped ship already. But imagine a future without the journals? There are books, admittedly, though here as well the range is narrowing (soon only books by authors who already have a book behind them will be published). And books are not like the magazines. They lack the astringency, the sharp cutting edge which acts as a prophylactic against the dumbing-down of society. Let’s support HEAT, let’s read it with open minds, let’s enjoy it. And ABR as well, of course. Lisbet de Castro Lopo Newcastle, NSW Dear Editor, I don’t read a great deal of contemporary fiction, nor much memoir. Asked to review, say, Gerard Windsor’s next, the memoir I Asked Cathleen To Dance, I might do as he did in his review of HEAT and point out that I don’t usually read this stuff (I don’t find it very interesting, that’s all), wonder at the mindset of those who do read it, and recall some high points in my past romance with the genre, of course comparing Windsor’s book unfavourably with them. Windsor begins guiltily (‘rather guiltily, I ceased to subscribe’) then proceeds to refuse this guilt and to blame the magazine: he’s got ‘must-read’ books to look at, it’s not uniformly interesting, it’s not all an easy, entertaining, ‘seductive’ read. The first objection might have disqualified him from the job – should have – but he gave up his precious time for ABR’s tiny reviewing fee? As to the second: magazines aren’t expected to be read cover to cover. I don’t read ABR or any magazine all the way through – and as well, one goes back to neglected or barely glanced at articles later, often – and often with a good deal of interest. Thirdly, ‘it’s not all an easy read’: this seems to be Windsor’s own desideratum – and that of the legions whose not reading of literary magazines validates his own unwillingness and whose numbers give him such comfort and the confidence to denigrate an interesting magazine he feels guilt at neglecting. How much better does he feel now? What, in fact, is he reading, when not ‘seduced’, as he says, by Harper’s Bazaar? If he answers should we believe him – after all, most people read less and less, surely he’s ‘got a life’! Ken Bolton Adelaide, SA. Dear Editor, Don Anderson is a critic of considerable skill and prestige and many readers, myself included, have for years welcomed his articles and reviews for their audacity, verve, and intellectual openness. His championing of high-modernist and postmodern writing, in particular American contemporary fiction, has intercepted Australian letters with a spirited anti-parochialism and an implicit plea for brave, innovative, and syncretic textual production. It was with dismay and disappointment, then, that I read Don’s review of Marion Campbell’s novel Prowler. In a context of publisher-driven confection, grunge celebration, and apolitical narratives of denuded and disabled sensibility, there are many readers who greet a new novel by Marion Campbell with relief and delight. Her work obliges us to recover the beauty of complexity and to consider serious-minded exploration of memory, identity, sexuality, race relations, and the social function and possibilities of aesthetic understanding. It is work of genuine integrity and genuine intelligence; it is work, in short, that deserves the most careful and conscientious consideration. That Don does not like the novel is not excuse enough for a dishonourable, lazy, and perfunctory review that cites the blurb, quotes Flann O’Brien, and ruminates on incomprehension in the place of a fair and poised critical appraisal. Newspaper reviews are often predictably wedded to a conservative economy of literary value; in the pages of Australian Book Review, however, one might expect that a challenging novel like Prowler could be met by a reading that seeks properly (and honourably) to engage with its radical, heterodox, and inspiring qualities. Gail Jones Nedlands, WA Don Anderson replies: ‘Dishonourable, lazy, and perfunctory.’ I confess to not understanding what the first epithet means in this context. ‘Perfunctory’? I observed the word limit offered me. ‘Lazy’? I dispute this – I endeavoured in my review to dramatise my difficulties with Marion Campbell’s novel – thus the appropriateness of the Flann O’Brien quotation. Should I have declined to review the book because I did not like it? Having re-read the review, I believe it contributes to debate about Prowler. Dear Editor, Thank you for devoting space in your magazine to a discussion of Uncanny Australia. Unfortunately, Sister Veronica Brady has not understood what the book is about – mostly because she wants the Aboriginal sacred to be something only religious commentators such as herself can grasp. Her argument is that the Aboriginal sacredness should remain as ‘unknowable’ as possible to everyone except a chosen few (theologians and the occasional gifted ‘artist’) who have privileged access to it. These special folk can then transmit their enlightenment back to the rest of us – we ordinary mortals who apparently remain hopelessly trapped in the limits of our own cultural perspectives. This vision of things, incidentally, was played out recently in The Matrix. What is interesting here, though, is that Brady has replaced Aboriginal sacredness with a western mystical-theological version of it. She effaces it so that her theological view of sacredness per se can flourish. What she wants to protect, in other words, is not Aboriginal sacredness itself (about which she has almost nothing to say), but an already beleaguered intellectual field which imagines its time is coming again and which therefore wants to police the boundaries of who gets to speak about sacredness as a general concept, as well as dictate the terms in which it is spoken. Aboriginal sacredness has unknowable features which we clearly respect in our book. Our concern, however, is with the ways in which the Aboriginal sacred has come to function not just spiritually, but as a material and discursive reality in modern Australia. Brady says we only see the ‘outline’ of Aboriginal sacredness – but our point would be that the ‘outline’ has much to tell us. Expressed as claims upon the nation, the Aboriginal sacred is far from something ‘unknowable’ and remote: It occupies a very real place in Australia’s everyday life. Sister Brady suggests that we are ‘anxious’ about all this. In fact, our book is highly critical of anxious views about Aboriginal claims on the nation. Nevertheless, we do recognise that anxieties are expressed whenever Aboriginal claims for sacredness flow into the public sphere. We also recognise that this flow has produced some very positive results for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike. Our book is all about the nature of this flow, which we celebrate. Misreading a passage from Uncanny Australia, Brady suggests at one point that we disapprove of the word ‘promiscuous’ to describe this flow. Quite the opposite is true. This is a key word for us and we always use it positively to point to the ways in which Aboriginal claims over their sacred interests have productively reconstituted the nation. We might even modestly claim to have taken ‘promiscuity’ out of its conventionally sexual context and given it some real cultural application: who has ever talked of a ‘promiscuous sacred site’ before? It would be difficult to imagine Sister Brady coming to grips with the materiality of this idea. For her, Aboriginal sacredness remains an ‘unknowable’ thing, remote and (except for theologians) inaccessible. It is the Big Other, to which she pledges her faith – an interesting postcolonial symptom that might itself be worth examining further. All this Big Othering, however, means that Aboriginal sacredness can only be conceived negatively by Sister Brady, as ‘an absence’. This is about as much as she says about it. She never mentions Coronation Hill, Hindmarsh Island, Uluru, the Old Swan Brewery, the repatriation of sacred objects, etc. All this, for her, would make Aboriginal sacredness too proximate, too real, too political, (she especially disapproves of this) and therefore intolerable. Ken Gelder Brunswick, Vic. Jane M. Jacobs Singapore Authors of Uncanny Australia Dear Editor, Are some Premier’s Literary Awards more equal than others? We were so delighted when one of our writers, George Alexander, won a 1999 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for his book Mortal Divide, but we were puzzled when we read last month’s ABR to find that your list of this year’s Awards failed to mention him. Coincidentally, it was the second time that Alexander had been omitted from such a list. His award from the Ethnic Affairs Commission was for ‘an outstanding contribution to Australian literature in portraying the interaction of Australia’s diverse cultures’. Is there something second class about ‘ethnic’ awards for literature? Do the eyes of the literary establishment glaze over at the mere mention of ‘cultural diversity’? Is this a reflection of the current government’s blind spot in regard to Australia’s ‘multicultural’ reality? Mortal Divide deals with the universal themes of identity, art, power, sex, death, and has earned its place amongst other major works of Australian literature. Veronica Sumegi Publisher Brandl & Schlesinger Ed’s reply: George Alexander’s award was omitted purely on grounds of space in Bulletin Board. Dear Editor, I’m writing, chiefly, to thank you for the review of my novel, The Hunter, in the last issue. I’m pleased my work touched a chord with Andrew Peek and am grateful for his insightful comments. One thing, though: it is apparent that he reviewed the uncorrected proof as he refers to a quotation which does not appear in the book itself. I appreciate that ABR must set a review in action well before a book’s publication date, but is there any way to ensure quotations are checked against finished copies? Julia Leigh Tasmania

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