Black Inc

Even the name is confusing: think of it as Belgian Congo/Zaire/Congo DRC to avoid confusing it with the Republic of Congo/Congo Brazzaville across the river. Officially, the name is Democratic Republic of Congo – DRC – so you could roll out the usually accurate cliché that any country with ‘Democratic’ in the name definitely isn’t that. In fact, the DRC had an election a few years back which was reasonably democratic and certainly inspired an impressive voter rollout.

The pretext of this book is as simple as it is delightful. In 1982, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Sandy Mackinnon found himself on the windswept island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. Iona is one of those places, familiar in the world of spiritual tourism, that is layered in irony. In ancient times it became home to a community of monks, most notably St Columba, for the simple reason that nobody in his right mind would follow them there. Now, of course, it is a popular destination for those who value more than their right minds. Iona, like Santiago de Compostella, has a small but cogent literature of its own. It weaves a spell. There is very little to buy there. It creates debt in other ways.

John Hirst is a distinctive figure in Australian intellectual life. As an academic, he has had a distinguished career at La Trobe University in teaching, supervision, and research. He developed new subjects and methodologies with which to teach them. In addition to those concerning Australian history, there was his pioneering subject designed to inform students about Australia’s European cultural heritage, with some of the lectures recently published as The Shortest History of Europe (2009).

It is a critical truism, if not a cliché, that poetry estranges: it makes things strange, so that we can see the world and ourselves afresh. Defamiliarisation, the uncanny, even metaphor, are all fundamental to poetry’s estranging power. Unsurprisingly, madness, vision and love have also long been poetry’s intimates, each involving the radical reformation – or deformation – of ‘normal’ ways of seeing the world. One might describe poetry as surprisingly antisocial, since poets have from ancient times been associated with social isolation, distance or elevation, as well as with madness.

Why do otherwise sane human beings decide to become music critics? It’s often to jump on the PR treadmill of free passes to gigs and free records for review. There’s the writer who wants to be closer to his idol, the careerist who sees it as one more step to editorial power, or the music junkie who’s compelled to make the leap from mute fanaticism to the written word.

The Bee Hut, Dorothy Porter’s fifteenth book, is a collection of poems written between 2004 and her death in December 2009. Many poems address mortality: ‘nothing lasts / not Forster. not Cavafy’s eloquent doomed mediocrities. not you.’ Another important motif is travel and how it affects the traveller. There are two almost contrary themes in the travel poems: the recurring image of the artist as vulture or vampire, destroying what feeds it; and the stately museum or gallery preserving the past intact: ‘I hold in my hand / the greedy, bleeding / pen / that has always / gorged itself’ (‘Blackberries’); ‘Each new ghost in my life / living and dead / smells of mulch’ (‘Vampire’).

What we might call ‘ordinary Australians’ produced a stream of novels about Asian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, but this is now a mere trickle. Some of the flow may have been dammed by the effect of market forces on publishers; some of it may have been diverted to Middle Eastern channels; some may have drained into the pools of Asia-enthusiasm that stagnated during the Howard years; and some may have dried up in the face of Asian diaspora fiction of the 1990s. Among the few Anglo-Saxon Australians who kept writing novels about Asia, several have turned to narratives set in a historical comfort zone, where they may still have a chance of competing with Asian Australians like Brian Castro, Teo Hsu-ming and Michelle de Kretser – although they too write of the past – or with Nam Le, Alice Pung and Aravind Adiga, who concentrate on the here and now.

Up from the Mission is a powerhouse of a book. One would expect no less from Noel Pearson. This collection of thirty-eight essays combines to provide multiple overarching narratives: Pearson’s personal trajectory from the mission on Cape York, where he grew up; his intellectual development; and his political efforts at regional and national levels to redevelop Cape York communities and to influence the nation. The writings date from 1987 to 2009, from his first essay as a radical graduate student to his latest pronouncements.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.