Accessibility Tools

Macmillan

Despite its faults, this book has the merit of being the first biography on the legendary Australian batsman, Victor Trumper (1877–1915). Young cricket lovers of today may well ask what feats of batsmanship Trumper performed to deserve this handsomely produced volume about him. After all, his test average was only 39.04, not to be spoken of in the same breath as Don Bradman’s 99.96.

... (read more)

The Commanders edited by D. M. Horner & War Without Glory by J. D. Balfe

by
October 1984, no. 65

These books have little in common though they are both concerned with men at war. Balfe’s book is chatty, idiosyncratic, episodic and without any academic intent. Often using the words of three pilots involved, he tells the story of the futile and costly air fighting which followed the highly successful Japanese attacks against Malaya, Sumatra and the Netherlands East Indies. Australian aircrew were forced to fight the Japanese with Hudsons and Buffaloes. Given that the enemy had overwhelming superiority in numbers; that the Buffalo was one of the worst fighters produced, and that the Hudson was no match for virtually any Japanese aircraft, the Australian squadrons after the initial contacts were almost completely destroyed. The causes of this disaster and the eventual outcome of it are well known.

... (read more)

In this short book Peter Charlton suggests that the final campaigns fought by Australian forces in the south-west Pacific were unnecessary, foisted upon our troops by an ambitious high command, notably General Sir Thomas Blarney. He argues that since Curtin had surrendered any Australian control over the use of its troops to MacArthur, it was left to Australia’s own generals to protect the country’s interests in circumstances where its political leaders had conspicuously failed. In so doing, these generals squandered Australian lives in a series of operations of dubious military value, using troops that were under-equipped and maintained, and ultimately seeking to win over public opinion by recommending a large number of decorations for valour in the field. The troops themselves were under no illusions about the value of their activities, and politicians had long ago abrogated their responsibility for setting out the political aims and limits of Australia’s military involvement. All in all, this was truly a “generals’ war”.

... (read more)

Kathleen Fitzpatrick wanted to be an actress. Instead, she became a famous lecturer and teacher in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, and in one of the frequent revealing asides in her memoir implies that perhaps this fact explained her ability as an inspiring lecturer.

... (read more)

In this volume, a valued literary companion of long standing has been stripped of two-thirds of its substance, all of its footnotes and bibliography, even acknowledgments; and the remnant, daubed with illustrations, comes out dressed for a different marketplace.

... (read more)

Geoffrey Blainey must be Australia’s bestselling historian by a very long way. His audience is far wider than Manning Clark’s for instance: and far less critical. Clark is periodically savaged by packs so frenzied they often seem unable to recognise the nature of the quarry. The difference of course is a matter of both style and substance. Clark, as an early critic once said, is ‘full of great oaths and bearded like the pard’, and he has not changed his fundamental spots. Blainey’s picture is inserted in the barren landscape on the front cover of this book, all warm and friendly; not a Jeremiah, but a kindly tribal elder who will unravel your historical landscape sotto voce, and with perfect equanimity. You can step into your past with Geoffrey Blainey and know you’ll be safe. He’s just about the friendliest historian imaginable.

... (read more)

The dustjacket of this novel gives the author grounds for action against his publishers. Bald, bold, equi-width, football scoreboard capitals, half sump oil black and half baby stool brown occupy the left upper corner, announcing author, title and the fact that this is ‘a novel by’. From the lower right corner rises a green, broken ended frond, or wave perhaps, flecked with the same insistent brown, as though the artist, an early morning surfer, had woken with the intermittent sewage-crowded state of Bondi Beach troubling his mind. Granted the visual contradiction manifest here, the quoted words of Geoffrey Dutton, further crowding the surface in the bottom left hand corner, throw their weight behind the bold explicit capitals rather than the vague, Triffid-like thing.

... (read more)

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new creative phase in the post-Menzies and the Whitlam years.

... (read more)

I’ve always had a terror of one day having to explain a joke. And now it’s happened. Moonlite is one of the jokiest books since Such Is Life which in its turn reminds us of the even jokier Tristram Shandy and behind that no less than Rabelais himself. The best way to talk about Moonlite, then, is perhaps to say that it is bouncing, bewildering, wilful and – very occasionally – boring, just as these books are.

... (read more)

As she did so vividly in Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson uses a returning expatriate woman to cast fresh eyes on the social and urban landscape of Australia. Here, it is Sylvia Foley who has spent some twenty years in Europe eschewing the comforts and constraints of suburban life, teaching Italian and conducting tours of the British Isles and the Continent. On a whim, she abandons her peripatetic life to return to Sydney for a few months prior to her plan to settle in Rome. Unbeknown to her, her autocratic father, Jack Cornock, is dying and she is immediately suspected by other members of her dislocated family of returning to benefit from the will – which she ultimately does as the recipient of her father’s vindictive gesture to spite his wife. And Sylvia’s ‘family’ is considerable. There is her illiterate mother Molly, now married to Ken, her brother Stewart, and her stepsiblings: Harry, Rosamond, Hermione, and Guy, the children of her father’s second wife, Greta.

... (read more)