Penguin

The decisive influence on Australian politics and culture has been the fact that our society has always included a large minority who, even if they considered themselves British, were definitely Irish and not English. The fact that this minority has been Catholic and, as a result, has felt itself discriminated against, has shaped the church into an Irish rather than a European mode, so that, as Campion points out, not only was to be Irish to be Catholic, but to be Catholic was to be Irish.

One heady day in the mid I920s, sculptor and Lindsayite recruit Guy Lynch (brother of the elegaic subject of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’), held forth in a pub at Circular Quay on his plan for Sydney to become an Hellenic city. The Quay itself he saw as a magnificent ampitheatre for the incarnation of the Lindsay group’s Nietzschean dream of Dionysian joy, as revealed in the vital art affirmed as the salvation from the twin vices of bourgeois philistinism and modernistic decadence, the canon that ran from Shakespeare, Rubens and Beethoven, to Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. He-men would lean against pillars, girls would stroll about, and grand opera would be played amongst forests of statues.

People tell you one week that they liked Gallipoli, but the next they’re not so sure. Gone are the days of intuitive gut felt reaction – everyone wants to make sure their judgements are intellectually sound. They read every ‘expert’ on the subject and come back with another opinion. Reading the script gives you another variation. The skeleton is there, warts and all.

Kathryn Cole’s book sets out by means of thirteen contributions to evaluate ‘two assertions about trade unions (which) are pervasive’. These are that they are very or too powerful, and that they are usually the aggressors in industrial disputes. Its conclusion is that unions are more sinned against than sinning, or, to paraphrase the words of Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited describing Lady Marchmain, ‘they are saintly without being saints’.

There nine stories in this volume are rich in people, satire, compassion, and humour. And set like ambushes, unexpected and surprising, are several cameos. It is a captivating, ensnaring book, but to call it a book of short stories would be so inadequate as to be misleading. There is an uncommon coherence, slender but powerful enough to raise it above that easy classification.

This book covers an important historical era in Aboriginal–European/Australian relationships. It describes in admirable detail the negotiations between the Pitjantjatjara people of north-west South Australia and their advisors on one side, and the South Australian government and bureaucratic departments on the other during the long hard battle to obtain title deeds to their land.

Beatrice Faust manages to write so persuasively, that even when you have your reservations with some details, she manages to sway you. All her years of dedication to feminist and civil liberties campaigns, to the craft of good polemical writing, and to extensive research have resulted in a powerful work that has every chance of making its mark felt in England and America as well as in Australia. The book is helped along considerably by photographs of Hindu erotic art, some notable Beardsleys and genitalia from varying cultures.

The appearance of anthologies which have the intention of representing the poetic output of a specific ‘era’ often indicates that era's having achieved a status of authority. Harry Heseltine’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse anthologizes poetry of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and just as surely as in any such anthology, the poetry of these decades becomes relegated to the past tense.