Journals

One of the best things about the latest issue of Westerly is the cover, a detail from Helen Norton’s painting The shores of the excommunicated. Norton’s image is a wonderfully disquieting take on the modern Aussie beach. It inspires fresh ideas and imaginings, it unsettles, it punctures complacency, it provokes counter-reactions, but it also entertains – typifying what literary magazines should do.

The latest Antipodes opens with Katherine Bode’s provocative discussion of Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Dissecting McDonald’s ‘fantasy of an all-white, all-male Australian society’, Bode’s essay also criticises Inga Clendinnen for exempting McDonald’s novel from her much-aired arguments against historical fiction. Bernadette Brennan draws on Maurice Blanchot to explore ‘the ungraspable experience of death’ evoked in works by Alex Miller and Noel Rowe, and Lyn McCredden has philosopher René Girard in mind when revisiting the familiar territory of the Lindy Chamberlain case and the ‘rituals of perpetual scapegoating’. Helen Gildfind ‘meets’ Janet Frame through Frame’s autobiographies, and reflects on the ‘reader’s power to decide the autobiographical status of a text’. The result is interestingly self-reflexive, but some readers might prefer more Frame and less Gildfind.

For once, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. Stephen Ives’s busy image of Buster Keaton captures, in co-editor Lisa Greenaway’s words, ‘the essence of [Going Down Swinging] the slapstick/serious; the cultural ruckus; the unwavering stare’. Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic miscellany, distinguished by its vibrant eclecticism.

'It’s in your hands, Julianne,’ proclaims an e-mail from Barack Obama. So opens the latest Griffith Review, which explores the many ways that, across the globe, individuals and groups are taking social, political and environmental matters into their own hands. Addressee aside, the Obama e-mail sent to editor Schultz in the final week of the US election campaign landed in the virtual hands of millions. But as Schultz notes, the Obama campaign saw ‘social networking’ on a massive scale, made millions feel involved and, she posits, saw a concomitant end to the ‘era of mass media politics’. Marian Arkin’s memoir picks up on campaign engagement, recalling her involvement with a large-scale community of volunteer lawyers working to protect the integrity of the US election process. Arkin’s article provides a useful guide to those who find the US electoral college system a mystery.

The key theme of HEAT 19 is death. In 224 pages, a collection of Australian writers and academics pay homage to the departed in a range of essays, poems and short stories. The journal opens with Judith Beveridge’s moving and personal tribute to the poet Dorothy Porter. According to Beveridge, ‘Dot’ (as she was known to her friends) was a ‘consummate professional and her public performances were unfailingly polished’. However, Porter ‘also had a very fragile side, vulnerable to the pain of exclusion and rejection’. The title of Beveridge’s piece is ‘Trapper’s Way’, which is the name for a strip of land in the New South Wales suburb of Avalon where Beveridge once lived with Porter.

What makes a good short story? Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, editors of the fifth Sleepers Almanac, say there is no objective measure of quality; that everyone likes something different; and that they simply choose what appeals. As I sit down with their funky-looking volume, I don’t want to believe it. If that is the case, there is no place for literary critics, no real justification for academic literary study, and the premise for an editor’s judgement is shaky. Why should what they like matter particularly?

One year after Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, Griffith Review 23 features comment from selected summiteers in the ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ group, and others. Editor Julianne Schultz’s introduction provides a short history of support for writers and artists beginning 250 years ago when Lord Bute, the prime minister, granting Samuel Johnson a government-funded pension for life, warned against ‘Reducing discussion of the arts, creativity and culture to economics …’

In their introduction, editors Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell explain that in 2009 their annual journal will become a twice-yearly publication (a move first announced in 2007, but delayed due to funding shortfalls). A new, mid-year issue will be devoted to ‘creative work’, so Westerly’s format for end-of-year reviews – surveys of fiction, non-fiction and poetry – may remain; but all three reviewers here make highly respectable jobs of labour-intensive tasks. Roger Bourke’s fiction survey identifies Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell as ‘easily the most memorable and rewarding Australian novel of 2007–08’. Meriel Griffiths considers mostly new work from established poets, but her quotes from Jennifer Kornberger’s début collection, I Could Be Rain, suggest a poet worth reading. Ron Blaber’s non-fiction appraisal – sadly in need of a proofread – engages when he uses Anna Haebich’s Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 as a vehicle to interpret recent biographies of Kerry Packer, John Howard and Ronald Wilson.

Blue Dog, the Journal of the Australian Poetry Centre, has a democratic approach to Australian poetry. Submissions are judged anonymously by a team of editors from each state and territory. The journal, as the two reviews of small-press publications reveal, shows no preference for big names. The results, however, are mixed.

Highlights include Andy Jackson’s ‘Severance’, which provides a measured expression of nostalgia. The poem reflects on a childhood marked by sexual misadventure – ‘You and I were the first in our group to buy porn, / though it took us two attempts – we’d assumed Playboy / couldn’t cost much more than TV Week. Honestly, / it was the soft light palming pale curves / that drew us, not the shock of shallow gynaecology’ – and loss – ‘Years before, / our legs patterned with gum tree shadows, / we sat on either end of a bench, waiting for your mum / to come again to comfort you in your homesickness’.