University of Queensland Press

When it was first published, Tasmanian army nurse and prisoner of war Jessie Simons entitled her memoir of captivity While History Passed (1954). It was reissued as In Japanese Hands (1985). This was one of the numerous autobiographical works produced after their ordeal by POW survivors, whether they were driven by an enduring hatred of their captors (Rohan Rivett, Russell Braddon) or by a striving for forgiveness (Ray Parkin). In his study of ‘Literary imagination and the prisoner-of-war experience’, Roger Bourke has turned instead to what he regards as the neglected area of fiction (sometimes autobiographically tinged) of captivity by the Japanese in World War II. His range encompasses British as well as Australian authors. He is particularly concerned with what the film industry made of such novels as Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice (book 1950, film 1956), Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1954, 1957), James Clavell’s King Rat (1962, 1965) and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984, 1987).

How to convey the pleasures of a whole collection of Laurie Duggan’s poetry? They are so various, one reason why Duggan is a source of perplexity to anthologists in search of a definitively characteristic poem. Anything as long and wilfully extravagant in spacing and layout as the anti-rhapsody ‘September Song’ almost automatically excludes itself; something epigrammatic then, say ‘A Little Book of Wisdom’ – but what about a virtuoso pastiche, the sonnets of ‘In Memory of Ted Berrigan’, or a ‘Blue Hills’ poem, with that imagist ‘minimalistic elegance’, which ‘Upside down’ declares: ‘unattractive / as the description of a potential residence / though ok if applied to / a book of poems ... my poems.’

It is even more difficult to find a Duggan poem that will slot neatly into the discourse of a thematic anthology. Against the grain of solidity in so much Australian poetry, there is something elusive here, an unreadiness to be ‘formulated, sprawling on a pin’ like that prototype of modernist angst Prufrock, whose ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ mischievously morphs to ‘Do I dare to eat a Porsche?’ in ‘Fantasia on a Theme by TS Eliot’. Mischief is part of Duggan’s very considerable satirical armoury against solemnity: consider ‘this country is my mind’: ‘just two minutes after / Les Murray became a republic / somebody cancelled my visa.’ But mischief is not all; there is something coldly sobering about this other glimpse Duggan offers of the relationship between politics and poetry: ‘At the centre of empire / the poets, stitched, bound / and acid-free.’

Swallow the Air won the 2004 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers. Judging by this slender volume of work, the choice was a judicious one. Thematically, Tara June Winch’s début effort travels along the well-worn path of fiction based on personal experiences, with the protagonist propelling the narrative through a journey of self-discovery. In this respect, Swallow the Air nestles snugly in the semi-autobiographical framework favoured by first novelists, but the sophistication and subtlety of the prose belie Winch’s age; she is twenty-two, but writes with the élan of those much more accomplished. Swallow the Air can either be read as a novel with short chapters or as a series of interlinked short stories.

This novel is about the redemption of a man believed to have committed murder. E. Annie Proulx, in her discontinuous novel Postcards (1993), sympathetically traces the tragic life of a protagonist who raped and accidentally killed his lover. Heather Rose poses a similar ethical question about a protagonist who was a real person; she imagines a post-murder existence for the infamous Lord Lucan, who in 1974 was accused of murdering his children’s nanny and of violently attacking his estranged wife.

The poems collected in Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (published by UQP as winner of the 2004 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize), are often marvels in their own right – street-savvy, sensitive, intelligent lyrics. Together, even more impressively, they generate a many-branched, collective meditation on lateness.

The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still, called on him in the early 1970s, it was a natural meeting of minds. In one poem in The Long Game and Other Poems, Beaver says that ‘poor Dransfield draped / me with a necklet of dandelions / once and kissed my forehead / in what must have been / a satirical salute’. I have a feeling that the salute was heartfelt, but Bruce was painfully modest.

A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

The country south-west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where wild rivers tumble from stony ramparts through coastal scrub plain to the sea, was one of the last places in Australia where settlement was attempted; more integrated with Asia to the north – thanks partly to the sojourning Macassans – than Melbourne or Sydney to the south, let alone London; a world where Aboriginal society was strong enough to resist dispossession, surviving, despite everything, to this day. It has also been something of a last frontier for historians.

These two exceptional books should be sent to every household in Australia free of charge. They would be a perfect curative after the federal election. The campaigns of the conventional parties demonstrated how far indigenous Australia has fallen off the political radar screen. Fortunately, the independent creative work of Aboriginal thinkers, writers and artists continues to set high standards and often leads the way in the exploration of social, political and philosophical issues that many in mainstream culture are still unable to face.

Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.