Gerard Windsor

In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’ 

Gerard Windsor had a rocky start to his writing life. Out of the Jesuits after seven years, he scored a contract with his old school, Riverview, in Sydney, to write its centennial history. I was one of the alumni he interviewed; I remember suggesting that he take steps to guarantee the publication of his text. After all, I argued, a school run by a religious order was like a family commissioning its history: it would have tender feelings towards its dead and be wary of any diminution of their legends.

In 2005, Murray Bail published Notebooks: 1970–2003. ‘With some corrections’, the contents were transcriptions of entries Bail made in notebooks during that period. Now, in 2021, dozens of these entries – observations, quotations, reflections, scenes – recur in his new book, He. It’s to be assumed that this book, too, is a series of carefully selected transcriptions from the same, and later, notebooks.

Collected Stories is a misleading title for Louis Nowra’s new publication. It’s nothing as uniform as that. Apart from poetry, is there any genre in which Nowra has not made his mark? He’s a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, memoirist, local historian, essayist, reviewer, feature journalist – and the author of one enduring Australian gem in Così (1992), in all its multiple forms. Yet he has scouted out other territories and the results jostle together in Collected Stories. Such a title conjures up a lifetime’s labour in the genre – gatherings of Anton Chekhov or John Cheever or Alice Munro. But Nowra’s volume is essentially a ragbag of disparate writings.

The Plains is a book for the critic, not the mere reviewer. It is a strange creature, to be approached with care. Several omens made me cautious. My review copy reached me three months after the date of posting.

For more than thirty years, Paul Collins has been His Holiness’s loyal opposition. Absolute Power is the latest round in his spirited debate with the Vatican, the government which has the largest constituency of any in the world. Collins’s interest, in fact obsession, is in the nature ...

Gerard Windsor has worn various literary hats – as reviewer, biographer and literary commentator – and in one of them does he shrink from controversy. Indeed, this provocative identity is mentioned as a matter of pride in various publicity blurbs. The history of his old school that he was commissioned to write was deemed too negative and was never printed, and he has come under fire for views expressed at both Adelaide and Sydney writers’ festivals. So it was unsurprising that with his latest novel, he has also chosen a controversial subject matter: the sexual life of a Catholic priest.

‘Ken Wark,’ says Linda Jaivin on this jacket, ‘makes postmodernism sexy.’ First cabbages, now postmodernism! Where can she take us from here? The trouble is I don’t believe her. Now that’s too easy a write-off. I’m not instinctually warm to The Virtual Republic, and I think Linda Jaivin’s line is a more than normally meretricious blurb, but Wark’s enterprise is essentially a request for conversation and why not accede to that. Still I want to protest even as I converse. The book is an olive branch masquerading as a polemic. Or, like Lindsay’s parrot who was a swagman, is it the other way round?