Allen & Unwin

Almost 100 years ago, Justice Higgins was asked to determine a ‘fair and reasonable wage’ for the average worker. In a landmark decision, Higgins declared that an unskilled labourer should receive a wage of seven shillings per day. This, he said, reflected the needs of an ordinary person living in ‘frugal comfort’ in a civilised community with the responsibilities of providing for his family. Higgins was explicit in setting this basic wage based on the needs of a worker, not the business organisation for whom he worked. ‘Fair and reasonable’ must also be something which the individual employee could not otherwise get through individual bargaining directly with employers. For, if it was, there would be no need for such regulation. Higgins’s decision shaped Australian wage regulation for the last century, and institutionalised the concept of collective regulation of workplace matters. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission thus became a ‘bedrock’ institution of Australian capitalism, civilising market forces and mitigating the adverse consequences for individuals of the uncertainties associated with them.

One of the contestants on television’s Australian Princess last year was a stripper, the oscillation in whose carriage was queried by the judges. ‘Of course I wiggle when I walk,’ the young woman protested, ‘I’ve got booty.’ Another competitor found that the going got tough when she was called upon to make a cup of tea. ‘I’m more of a bourbon girl,’ she shrugged. We were meant to laugh and cringe, and we did, but the show, for which nearly 3000 hopefuls had auditioned, was also a ratings success, reinforcing the widespread belief that anyone can become a princess. After all, it seemed as though anyone had.

The heroine of Marion Halligan’s latest novel has little time for reviewers. More often than not, she complains, they are ‘patronising ignorant nobodies’ who wouldn’t know a book from a biscuit. I will not hazard a biscuit metaphor, but I will venture a complaint. The Apricot Colonel is as elegantly written as any of Halligan’s novels. It provides the linguistic curios, surprising digressions and insights into storytelling that made Lovers’ Knots (1992), The Fog Garden (2001) and The Point (2003), among others, so exciting. Next to these, The Apricot Colonel is startlingly slight. In Halligan’s best novels, strong story lines tether the witty digressions and thoughtful asides together. In The Apricot Colonel, the plot never seems quite sturdy enough to hold them.

Don Aitken was born in 1937, Hugh Stretton in 1924. They have both had distinguished academic careers, making important contributions to the development of Australian social science, and at various points have been prominent in public debate. Both of these books might be seen as reflections on the current state of Australia, about which the younger Aitken is clearly more optimistic than is Stretton.

In 1961 a young Noeline Brown was playing in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1954) at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham – ‘just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip’, as she characteristically locates it – when Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic, came to see a specially arranged Sunday evening performance. From the moment she emerged from the chauffeured limousine, Leigh was the star of the show. She was, Brown recalls, ‘wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket’, and ‘there were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands’. Brown, on the other hand, ‘was in a dress my Mum had made’. That contrast, between theatrical elegance and put-upon pathos, has been the essence of Brown’s own style ever since, and the key to her success as a comedian and an actor. She hid under a large picture hat to introduce Mavis Bramston, a parody of English self-assurance, to a bemused public in 1964. At the other end of the register, her world-weary, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’, delivered in a way that was both funny and sad, outlived its many iterations on the televised version of The Naked Vicar Show (1977) to become part of the Australian lexicon.

The only surviving image of George Bass is surrounded by as much mystery as his death. It is a photograph of a painting that has now disappeared, thought to have been painted in about 1800. A handsome young man looks straight out at the viewer, with a faintly supercilious smirk. His hair is tied back and perhaps powdered – old-fashioned, I would have thought, for a young man in 1800, when Bass was only twenty-nine. Bass is known to every eastern-states schoolchild as half of Bass and Flinders, famous for their exploits in Tom Thumb – actually two different small open boats in which they explored the south coast of New South Wales at different times. Matthew Flinders proposed that Bass Strait be so named because it was Bass’s 1797–98 voyage in a whaleboat that had convinced him that it must be a strait rather than a bay, and led to their circumnavigation of Tasmania in the Norfolk, in 1798–99.

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.