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Cambridge University Press

Following years of debates with people who denied that Bob Dylan was worthy of serious literary study, I eventually conceded, albeit in a somewhat roundabout fashion. Having brought enjoyment and illumination to millions of people, what on earth had Dylan done to deserve being beaten about the head by literary criticism? But after a hiatus, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan has brought me up to date with the field of Dylan studies, and I can confidently declare that there is hope. This collection consists of nine ‘big picture’ essays on subjects such as Dylan as songwriter, Dylan and collaboration, Dylan and gender, and so on, followed by shorter pieces on eight of Dylan’s most influential albums (how they chose from the fifty-odd on offer is anyone’s guess).

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The prospect of discovering another work by a favourite author is always a pleasing one, even if the reality, when it is actually encountered, is sometimes disappointing. With a writer like Jane Austen, with only six published novels, who would not wish for some further delights to be unveiled? When Austen died, her sister, Cassandra, was left with the unpublished manuscripts of a number of juvenile writings and later works. After Cassandra’s death, members of her family had them in their hands (or perhaps one should say ‘on their hands’, given their subsequent feeling that the possession entailed a level of somewhat burdensome responsibility).

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Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty years in the field edited by David Horner, Peter Loney and Jean Bou

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July-August 2009, no. 313

The recent, sometimes heated, debate among policy experts and commentators about Australia’s Defence White Paper has helped give focus to a curious paradox: that for the last two decades or so, since the release of the Defence of Australia White Paper in 1987, there has been a profound disconnection between defence planning and procurement and the actual operations conducted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). With its focus on major new spending commitments on submarines, frigates and the Joint Strike Fighter in the midst of ongoing operations in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands – which require none of these big-ticket items but which have, at times, stretched the ADF’s deployable capacity – the present White Paper risks falling into the same trap.

This excellent new volume, a product of the Australian War Memorial’s major research project on the history of Australian peacekeeping, provides a stirring corrective to this enduring paradox. Peacekeeping, its editors argue and contributors demonstrate, is a distinctive military activity that requires special skills, resources and equipment. It is always complex, and sometimes highly dangerous.

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The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1: 1929–1940 edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck

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June 2009, no. 312

The play that made Samuel Beckett famous, Waiting for Godot (1953), must be the most unlikely box-office success in theatre history. Its upending of dramatic expectations – its bathetic preferencing of repetition over development, tedium over excitement – is an act of aesthetic brutalism as outrageous in its way as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ four decades earlier. Yet its depiction of two grubby tramps waiting interminably for someone who never shows up has become a definitive representation of humankind’s state of metaphysical suspension. Life is a conceptual joke: we wait for an explanation that will never be given, beholden to someone or something that, if it is not nothing, might as well be nothing.

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War, on a sudden, and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals – no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flock are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husband-man butchered, villas and villages burnt – cities and states, that have been ages rising to their flourishing state, subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good; of destroying than of building!

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Operating submarines has been a very expensive part of Australian naval history. The first two boats (submarines are referred to as ‘boats’ rather than ‘ships’) were lost in wartime operations: AE1 with all hands off Gape Gazelle (New Guinea) in 1914, and AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey) in 1915. After World War I, Australia was given six ‘J’ Class submarines by Britain, but lacked the personnel and funds to maintain them. They were soon scrapped. Two submarines acquired in the late 1920s – Oxley and Otway – were decommissioned during the Great Depression. Thirty-five years later, the RAN took delivery of the first Oberon Class submarines built in Scotland. All six boats served with distinction during the Cold War, several engaging in highly classified ‘special operations’. By the mid 1980sthe RAN’s ageing submarine fleet needed replacing. Australia was about to learn that submarines were even more costly to build. Although submarines had been refitted and extensively modernised in Australia, none had been built from plans.

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Rebel Journalism: The writings of Wilfred Burchett edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin

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March 2008, no. 299

Though he died a quarter of a century ago, the life and career of the Australian-born reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911–83) continue to attract significant critical attention. On the heels of Tom Heenan’s political biography, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (2006), and Burchett’s re-released autobiography, also edited by Burchett’s son George and Nick Shimmin (2007), comes this collection of Burchett’s writings, spanning much of his long, eventful career.

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In the late twentieth century, museums throughout the world faced a number of challenges. Confronted with a plethora of flashy new technologies, they struggled to overcome a perception of irrelevance and fustiness. Bureaucrats demanded that museums pay their way, entertain the masses, and meet the growing expectations for instant gratification and information without effort.

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An earlier version of this history of Victoria first appeared in 1984 as Our Side of the Country. Though for the past sixteen years Sydney-born politicians Paul Keating and John Howard have usurped Victoria’s former almost constant ‘top position’ in Canberra, the possessive pride reflected in that early title still runs through this modern version ...

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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’.

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