Cambridge University Press

Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.

This book has one of the most beautiful covers you could hope to see: a Margaret Preston woodcut of Sydney Harbour, in rich blue, scarlet and ivory. Nor does the inside disgrace the exterior. It is a long time since anyone attempted a history of New South Wales, more than a century according to the blurb, presumably a reference to T.A. Coghlan’s annual publication, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, the last edition of which appeared in 1901. Beverley Kingston is highly qualified to do the job, and the twentieth-century detail is especially good.

Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectual credentials, but their preoccupation with policy, the mechanics of municipal and national government, and strategies for getting their policies implemented (initially by ‘permeating’ existing political parties, and later, in the case of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, through the Labour party) was such that they could appear ascetic and unmoved by the pleasures – and the potential – of literature and the arts.

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

Henry Handel Richardson, author of iconic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom (1910) and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1917–29), has not fared well at the hands of her biographers. Axel Clark’s account of her early life, though kindly and well intentioned, could not seem to avoid the unfortunate conclusion that Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946) was a rather unpleasant person. At the age of four, Clark tells us, she was ‘unusually showy and forward’, and it was all downhill from there. As a girl, she was ‘overly insistent and overbearing’; as she grew older, she became self-aggrandising and embittered.

Australians like to believe they live in the best country in the world. Plenty of space, abundant  natural resources and lots of sunshine for this nation whose inhabitants have come from all corners of the earth to a land of opportunity. It’s an appealing national smugness that has comforted generations of Australians as they looked with tolerant amusement at the congested societies of industrialised countries elsewhere in the world. Aren’t we lucky!

Occasionally, there may have been some nagging doubts as we looked at the growing wealth of the Asian economies and the technological sophistication of overseas manufacturing. Are we as smart as they are? Do we work hard enough? Are we falling behind? Is this the land of the long weekend? In recent years, have we become hard-hearted and lazy? Good questions, and easier to answer anecdotally and instinctively rather than empirically. Generally, we thanked our lucky stars.

The centenary of the first sitting of the High Court of Australia was celebrated in the same courtroom in Melbourne in October 2003. There followed a conference in Canberra reviewing the decisions of the Court over the course of a century. The papers of that conference will shortly be published for a legal audience.

In advance of that book, CUP has published sixteen essays to give a more general audience an idea of the role the High Court has performed in the leading issues in which it has been involved. The writers are assigned important decisions or major themes. They explain the background. They describe proceedings in the High Court and (whilst it lasted) the Privy Council. They put their subjects in context and evaluate their significance in terms accessible to an informed lay reader. This book contains plenty of new insights that combine to make it a commemorative volume, but without many of the defects normal in that genre.

There is something uncommonly beguiling about a business writer who can insouciantly intersperse his argument with references to Eugene O’Neill and T.S. Eliot. Gideon Haigh is such a man, and the tale he has to tell is wonderfully seasoned by his intelligence and literacy. But that does not make its logic compelling.

Bad Company displays an almost tabloid preoccupation with the excesses of certain charismatic CEOs: particularly, in the local context, Ray Williams of HIH and the Wizards of One. Tel. But to suggest that these fallen idols are typical Australian CEOs is like describing Helen Darville as one of our typical novelists, or Ern Malley as a typical poet.

Cresciani’s very readable revised edition of The Italians is particularly informative on the early history of Italo-Australia. First published in 1985 with ABC Enterprises, based on the excellent television series of the same name, this new edition promises to provide ‘the definitive account’ of Italian life in Australia ‘into the twenty-first century’. Cresciani’s treatment of certain aspects of Italian migration to Australia is worthy of such a bold claim. He is especially good at weaving together the histories of both countries to provide an instructive account of how the vicissitudes of one indelibly affected the other. His treatment of contemporary immigrant life, however, is rather dated.

Is the great white middle class endangered in Australia? If it is, does it matter greatly? Michael Pusey answers ‘Yes’ on both counts. He argues that we are seeing a ‘hollowing out of the middle’. If he is right, this hollowing out has significant consequences. Both major political parties have spent decades courting the wannabe middle class – from Robert Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ to Gough Whitlam’s outer suburbanites, and from Mark Latham’s ‘aspirational’ voters to the recipients of John Howard’s tax welfare and handouts for private schools. A significant contraction of this constituency would create political shock waves. In addition, the decline of the middle class would throw an interesting light on our current prime minister who, more than anyone since Menzies, has represented middle-class values and aspirations while championing the radical economic restructuring that Pusey sees as leading to the decline of the middle class.