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Vulgar Press

1980: a red-haired girl in my Year Ten art class at John Gardiner High School asked me if I knew there was a radio station that only played ‘that new wave music’. She said it with a measure of contempt in her voice – for me and for it. But I was tempted, and soon became part of 3RRR’s small, staunch audience. A quarter of a century on comes Mark Phillips’s lively, if listy (though no more than Ken Inglis’s ABC histories) narrative of this Melbourne institution’s first thirty years.

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Radical Brisbane edited by Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier & Radical Melbourne 2 by Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow

by
August 2004, no. 263

Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.

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In her searing novel, The Colour of Walls, Janet Kelly writes about child abuse and incest with clarity and understanding. The subject matter alone is disturbing, and the sense of cyclical hopelessness is both enduring and arresting. Still, Kelly brings us to a faintly optimistic resolution. This somewhat redeems an otherwise bleakly realistic story.

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The title, cover and blurb of this collection of essays, articles and interviews promote it as a sequel to editor Paul Adams’s literary biography of Frank Hardy, The Stranger from Melbourne (2000). The invocation of the iconic writer, communist and media personality’s formidable reputation should ensure reasonable sales, but it is to the detriment of the book’s internal logic and thrust that Adams and his co-editor, Christopher Lee, underplay the contribution of other communist writers of his era. Several chapters in the book do focus on the work of Jean Devanny, Dorothy Hewett, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Ruth Park, but (in a manner similar to how their works were dismissed in their own time) the prioritisation of Hardy as the definitive communist writer ensures that they play second fiddle.

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