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Archive

Indigo 1 edited by Donna Ward

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October 2007, no. 295

More than a journal, Indigo represents a vibrant creative writing movement based around the Fremantle Arts Centre. Submissions are accepted from those who currently reside in Western Australia or who have lived there for at least ten years. But why start a journal for Western Australian writing alone? Is there something distinctive about Western Australian experience? Certainly, the way sandgropers see themselves in relation to the rest of Australia suggests this, and editor Donna Ward’s claim that there is ‘something distinctively Western Australian filtering through the short stories in this volume’ appears true, difficult though it is to quantify.

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Gina Mercer is not a prolific poet, and reading her latest collection it is evident that her poems are not written in haste. It has been eight years since her first, well-received book Oceans in the Kitchen (1999). More recently, she was featured in the Wagtail booklet series, where it would seem that many of the poems in Handfeeding the Crocodile have already appeared, in addition to their original publications in literary magazines.

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Notwithstanding the old adage, you can tell a certain amount about a book by its cover, especially if it has two covers, each displaying a different subtitle. The British edition of Forgotten Wars, on sale in Australian bookshops, has the subtitle ‘The End of Britain’s Asian Empire’. The cover photograph shows Lord Louis Mountbatten, in spotless white naval uniform, inspecting a guard of honour of Burmese soldiers in 1948. The soldiers appear smart and loyal, while the Burmese civilian accompanying Mountbatten is deferential. The American edition of the book, published under the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, has the less precise but more evocative subtitle ‘Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia’, and a cover with a blurred photograph of a truckload of Asians celebrating ‘Independence Day’. The caption identifies neither the country nor the date, but a likely candidate would be India in 1947.

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As the full extent of the American misadventure in Iraq becomes increasingly clear, liberal hawks, neo-conservatives and others who lent their voices to the initial call to arms have had cause to reconsider their positions. The rush to recant, however, has not exactly been a stampede. For the majority of its proponents, the decision to invade Iraq was so tied to an entrenched philosophy or ideology that to renounce the invasion would entail a more wide-reaching abandonment.

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When I am rotting patiently where
my eldest, Ben, now lies
And the bright prunus petals are dropping away
faster than flies, ... (read more)

They change colour

before your eyes,

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The Master by Sean Fagan and Dally Messenger III & The Ballad of Les Darcy by Peter FiztSimons

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October 2007, no. 295

Before and soon after Federation, Australia established itself as a sporting nation. Australia enjoyed good weather, with space for play. Despite the hardships of these times, youngsters, especially boys, found time to indulge in a wide range of sports. Two boys in particular, one the son of a boat builder/operator in Sydney, the other an East Maitland farm boy, became legendary figures in their chosen sports. The first was Henry Herbert (‘Dally’) Messenger, an all-round athlete and champion rugby player who turned away from the amateur rugby union and became a professional. Its best player, Messenger was a mainstay of the ‘new’ game, rugby league, in the lead-up to World War I. The second was the boxer Les Darcy, who, fighting mainly as a light heavyweight, won a series of titles in Australia prior to and during the war.

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Barry Hill’s latest collection is both delightful and substantive. Australia has a minority tradition of the urbane, exuberant, even bouncy poet – Andrew Sant, Peter Porter. It is a constant in American poetry – early John Hollander, Frederick Feirstein, L. E. Sissman, John Frederick Nims, X.J. Kennedy – with the difference that, as the above examples show, urbanity in the United States would be less romantic and would have rejected romanticism outright, severed, as it were, Ezra Pound’s famous pact with Walt Whitman.

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Meanjin vol. 66, no. 2 edited by Ian Britain & Griffith Review 17 edited by Julianne Schultz

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October 2007, no. 295

They were once called literary magazines, or journals, though dailiness was never aimed for. Monthliness is popular now, or, in the case of Meanjin and Griffith Review, quarterliness. But what kind of currency do these two magazines aim for? ‘New writing in Australia’ proclaims the subtitle of Meanjin’s latest volume; along with the banner title ‘Globalisation and Postcolonial Culture’, and the subheading ‘Before and After’. ‘New Stories’ and ‘New Poems’ are also listed on the cover, along with a serious frontal portrait of novelist Amit Chaudhuri, on ‘The Fate of the Novel’. There’s quite a bit of semiotic activity going on here, not to mention marketing. Currency – newness, fingers on the pulse, predictive ability – is on the agenda.

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This is a timely book. Alan Parkinson argues that the Howard government, which is on the verge of committing Australia to a future in which nuclear power will play a major role, cannot be trusted with the implementation of such an undertaking. A key part of a nuclear programme will be the disposal of nuclear waste, including high-level toxic wastes which will have to be encased in safe storage for thousands of years. Yet the government, which advocates this future, has proved to be singularly unsuccessful in cleaning up the more modest problems from the past – the ongoing saga of the clean-up of the Maralinga test site.

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