Expressway
Penguin, $12.99 pb, 294 pp
Expressway edited by Helen Daniel
Prelude
From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantocheHanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,His strutting studied through the centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eyeA-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slungThrough Oxidia, banal suburb …
Professor Eucalyptus responds to the host.
If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then Helen Daniel came up with a wonderful recipe indeed. Invite thirty-odd prominent Australian fiction writers to respond to Jeffrey Smart’s 1962 oil-on-plywood painting, Cahill Expressway, hung in the National Gallery of Victoria. Some declined, but twenty-nine accepted, and Helen Daniel can take great pride and satisfaction in regarding herself as a ‘privileged host’ indeed. This is truly a magic pudding of a book.
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