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In one of the most haunting phrases contained in Inside Outside (1992), the Australian Jewish autobiographer Andrew Riemer comments on the persistent sense of loss that still shapes him, many years after his entry to Australia as a child immigrant. He writes, ‘exile seals your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and your sense of loss will permit’. Earlier, Riemer reflects on his longing for a vanished world, ‘a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies’. With the undercutting of his own position, so characteristic of his writing, he writes: ‘Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging ... is shared by many …’ And yet, he adds, the experience of migration ‘brings that predicament into sharper focus than might otherwise be the case’.

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Three Companions

It is now thirteen years since OUP Australia published the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (nine years after ‘Whitlam, Edward Gough’ launched the first edition). Peter Pierce, generally welcomed OCAL2 in his ABR review (‘A bountiful companion’, December 1994– January 1995): ‘The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature may be a touch too reverential towards its subject, but has enriched its study.’

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Dying: A memoir by Donald Horne and Myfanwy Horne

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December 2007–January 2008, no. 297

Eighty-four is a good age. To die then is not a tragedy, or at least no more than that the knowledge we must all die is the great human tragedy (some might think the alternative, to live forever, would be an even greater one). Donald Horne does not consider his death a tragedy, in this account of his dying. What pervades this thoughtful book, written by Donald Horne and his wife, Myfanwy Horne, is the sadness that comes from the endings of things; in this case, the ending of the life they shared. They both know the end is inevitable, but it is no less sad for that.

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The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer by Paul Barry & Who Killed Channel 9? by Gerald Stone

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November 2007, no. 296

Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.

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First impressions are unfavourable. The cover is ugly, and too cute: human-headed sheep, male and female, wait motionless for a drought to end while wearing prime ministerial bush-visit hats. We have read Frank Campbell’s rebuke in the Australian: the author Jeanette Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s. Inside, however, there is a cheering profusion of illustrations, placed in unusually reader-friendly closeness to the relevant discussion, and they include a feast of the best Australian paintings. There are some interesting sources in English eighteenth-century art and, much less familiar, some parallels in German fascist art.

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Event by Judith Bishop

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November 2007, no. 296

In her other life, Judith Bishop works as a linguist. A passionate concern with the intricacies of language, with the visceral effect of words on the tongue, aurally, and as they are knitted and unravelled on the page is manifest in her first collection of poems, Event. These poems are deeply immersed both in a complex observation of, and engagement with, the natural world, in particular with the ways in which poetic language can intervene in the world of perception, experience and desire. ‘You have to lean and listen for the heart / behind the shining paint’, Bishop writes in ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize and which Dorothy Porter included in The Best Australian Poems 2006. Like the beautiful illusions of the still-life painting, Bishop’s poetry creates an aesthetic surface which mimics the stasis of death and also harbours the ‘flutter in its flank’, the pulse of possibility visible to the attentive reader–observer. Look closely, her poetry exhorts, yield to the currents of language and image, become witness to death and life in intimate and endlessly renewing ‘events’ of struggle and embrace.

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Alex Miller, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award for Journey to the Stone Country (2003) and The Ancestor Game (1992), is one of our most profound and interesting writers. His latest novel, Landscape of Farewell, tells the story of Max Otto, an aged and disillusioned German professor of history, devastated by the death of his beloved wife. He knows now that he will never write the historical study of massacre that was to have been his crowning achievement. Instead, paralysed by a sense of guilt-by-association – he has good reason to think that his father took part in the atrocities of World War II – he has retreated to a remote and bloodless historical study, that of intellectual upheaval during the twelfth century.

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Long hair flowing around his face, he grasps his sword firmly in one hand, the regimental banner held high in the other as he strides purposefully onto the bridge, leading his men to victory. It is one of the most familiar portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, immortalised by the painter Antoine-Jean Gros: an image of courage, of leadership, of calm determination. And it is not quite what happened. The attack on the bridge at Arcola was a dismal failure and ended in an ignominious withdrawal, in the course of which the diminutive Bonaparte fell into a ditch and nearly drowned. It was hardly the stuff of heroic legend. 

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Behind Philip Jones’s Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers are many books about the interaction of settlers and indigenes. Writers relevant to this book include the museum curator Aldo Massola (writing in the 1960s and 1970s) and retired archaeologist John Mulvaney (writing in the 1980s and 1990s). Massola brought out objects and archival material from the Museum of Victoria, writing their stories for a tourist or localhistory readership. He was a pioneer whose work is no less valuable for presenting an undifferentiated mix of hearsay, intuition, document, object, science and human observation. Although he rarely named his sources, they exist for most, if not all, of what he said so lightly.

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Back in 1981, Richard White, in his seminal study Inventing Australia, dubbed the Australian concern with defining national identity ‘a national obsession’. It was a time when ‘the new nationalism’ associated with John Gorton and Gough Whitlam had reignited debate about anthems, flags and the paraphernalia of nationhood. The converse of this fixation has been the recurrent fear that the ‘cultural cringe’ has still not been laid to rest.

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