University of Queensland Press

How effective is a voice of reason in a climate of fear? In his introduction to this book, Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University says that he is ‘incorrigibly optimistic’ about the role of education in assisting us to make wise decisions about our future. Over the past twenty years, he has written twelve books, including A Big Fix: Radical solutions for Australia’s environmental crisis (2005) and Living in the Hothouse: How global warming affects Australia (2005), forty-five book chapters, more than thirty journal articles and six hundred columns for various publications. That work has been written for the general public, not just the scientific community.

This is Tom Shapcott’s thirteenth individual collection of poetry (two Selected Poems have appeared, in 1978 and 1989) in a writing life that – at least for his readers – began with the publication of Time on Fire in 1961. It continues something of a late poetic flowering, which, to my critical mind, began with The City of Home in 1995. All in all, Parts of Us is no disgrace to its twelve predecessors.

Having disposed of World War I in a couple of brief chapters, our shell-shocked soldiers wonder what to do next. During the war, sinister balloons carrying out surveillance had hovered over the trenches. This now gives Axel Glover and Edward Llewellyn an idea. They have become mates in an understated English way, never making eye contact.

‘The first time I saw Axel Glover he was standing stark naked in a wide shaft of sunlight,’ begins the novel, which is written in the largely monologic voice of a diary or memoir. It records the lives of these two ‘very deep friends’ who, having survived the war together, commit to the somewhat eccentric adventure of ballooning to ‘New Albion’, in the Western Pacific of the imagination.

In 1858, a year before Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales, Theophilus Pugh wrote in the first history of Queensland: ‘Difficult indeed will be the task of the historian who hereafter attempts to chronicle the events connected with the early days of this now important settlement.’ Authors of the subsequent nineteen histories of Queensland, including Ross Fitzgerald, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons, would have been well advised to heed Pugh’s prescient warning.