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John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Senator Bronwyn Bishop (imagine it!) – that is the John Button Australia knows. His achievements have been many and they are exemplary.

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The juxtaposition of the three words ‘fashion,’ ‘history’ and ‘nation’ in the title of Antonia Finnane’s study of Chinese clothing indicates the ambitious nature of her richly illustrated book. Her account is an engaging one, based in detailed analysis of the social and political circumstances that shaped not only what people wore but the body shapes they cultivated as well. Finnane, an associate professor of history at the University of Melbourne, tells us that her narrative of vestimentary change across a century or more in China is aimed at showing how ‘the relationship between national politics and fashion is not simple, predictable or steady’, in tandem with an analysis of how technology, industry, commerce and modern communications each played a significant part in changing Chinese styles of dress.

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On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.

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This sixth poetry collection by Barry Hill is a fine, intense book of journeying and returns. Poems are based on pilgrimages made in the flesh (to Carrara, to Assisi, to Kyoto) and on those made in the mind as we visit works of art. But there is nothing blandly celebratory about these pilgrimages: the focus is always on the self of the journeyer. Indeed, at a deeper level, its poems are really about the experience of becoming, of being ‘drawn’. And one of the book’s central metaphors is the way there is a double process going on in the creation of the self: we emerge as human beings out of inchoate experience in the way that a sculpture emerges from stone; and, at the same time, we are shaped by the loved ones who surround us.

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On page sixty-two of Ann Blainey’s thoroughly researched, excellently written and beguilingly human biography of Nellie Melba there occurs a transition that is simple but that defines, in an instant, the moment the singer went from learner to legend. It happens when the young singer, under the wing of Madame Marchesi (née Mathilda Graumann; nickname ‘the Prussian drill-master’), is ready to make her public European début and requires a new surname. ‘Armstrong’ had to go; in its place, there had to be something ‘distinctive and memorable’:

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Australian Book Review has been in a sombre mood since April 8, having lost one of its great friends and contributors. It had been clear for some time that John Button’s condition was grave (he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer late last year). Just four days before his death, he resigned from the ABR board with customary punctiliousness. ... (read more)

In The Best Australian Political Writing 2008, the ABC’s Tony Jones, a latish replacement as editor for the Canberra-bound Maxine McKew, has assembled forty-two pieces of non-fiction first published in 2007. The result is a mixed bag of genres, including columns, investigative journalism, polemic, book extracts and essays (but, alas, no fiction). The subject matter includes the November federal election, indigenous affairs, the environment, the ‘war on terror’, Australian values, and the artlessly named ‘culture wars’. The package sounds enticing, but while there’s plenty of insightful and relevant commentary – and some sublime prose – there’s also sometimes an ephemeral limpness, and an earnestness, to the anthology.

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The Word Spy by Ursula Dubosarsky (illus. Tohby Riddle) & The Reading Bug and How to Help Your Child Catch It by Paul Jennings

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May 2008, no. 301

Ursula Dubosarsky is an original and sensitive author of books for children and young adults, while the inimitable Paul Jennings is the author of many books for younger readers. His books engage readers through their hilarious plots and the insight he brings to the reading experience. Dubosarsky has won many literary awards for books such as the haunting The Red Shoe (2006), while Jennings, whose books have hooked many a reluctant reader, has won numerous children’s choice and other awards for books, including Unreal! (1985). They also have in common a driving passion for words, language, literature, reading and children. Both authors have poured this passion into these non-fiction releases, The Word Spy and The Reading Bug and How to Help Your Child Catch It.

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Genius Squad by Catherine Jinks & At Seventeen by Celeste Walters

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May 2008, no. 301

In the essay ‘Pay Attention to the World’, written shortly before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag argues that fiction is ‘one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives … [it] educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us how to be in the world’. While Sontag’s insight recognises the power of literature in general, the qualities she identifies are particularly significant in young adult fiction. Genius Squad and At Seventeen are two examples of the ‘rite of passage’ novel, where adolescent characters’ quests for self-discovery illuminate parallel themes in the lives of teenage readers.

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Lifting the flap

Dear Editor,

I had always believed that the only thing worse than a bad review was not to be reviewed at all, to be ignored. Now I find that there is something even more galling: to be reviewed by someone who is more concerned to air his and other peo ...