Allen & Unwin

Not another novel about heroin, you might ask. You might as well say, not another novel about addiction to anything, including love or death. Luke Davies’ novel risks being seen to jump on the bandwagon of relevance, or grunge, or whatever turns you off. But this a good book, a true book, which left me feeling sad for some days, not a bad thing in these times of numbing busyness in which many of us seem to be trapped.

The way we organise our deaths offers insight into the meanings and significances we attribute to life. The sidelining of organised religion has allowed Australians to voice our own ideas about the muddles of existence through the choice of music for funerals. The regularity with which ‘I did it my way’ is heard at wakes is a reminder of how much more pertinent that song is for individuality than are newspaper columns by Bettina Arndt or Hugh Mackay, still less from Andrea Dworkin or the late Christopher Lasch.

In the last eighteen months three Australian feminist collections have appeared, each apparently addressed in its different way to the women’s studies market. Each title, or subtitle, is anxious to proclaim itself of the moment: Australian Women: Contemporary feminist thought (OUP); Contemporary Australian Feminism (Longman Cheshire); and now, only prevented by the limits of the print medium from flashing its red light, Transitions: New Australian feminisms from Allen & Unwin. To cultural analysts that extra ‘s’ will speak volumes.

This book is full of sadly ironic observations, such as: Most adult sons have no memory of telling their mother to stop kissing them; decades later they are simply anguished and resentful that she has shown them no affection.

For over twenty years Bob Connell has been a leading figure in the development of an Australian sociology, and his move from Macquarie University to the University of California several years ago was a significant loss to Australian academic life. I wish I could write Australian public life, but our press, which is fond of academics with far less to say than Bob Connell, has largely ignored his work. Nonetheless Connell’s work in class, sexuality, gender, and education is arguably the most distinguished body of social theory written in this country, and deserves far greater acknowledgment.

Whether you track backwards in time from the hidden pestilence that is Chernobyl, or forwards from the vengeful terror of Stalin’s collectivisation and anti-nationalist policies, it is an inescapable fact that the Ukraine has had a bloody and awful century. In the winter of 1932-33 alone some four to five million Ukrainians died in ...

Volatile Bodies is an important book: its challenge is nothing less than the development of a non-essentialist, feminist philosophy of the body.

Each of the three parts that make up Thea Astley’s new novel, Coda, is prefaced by a newspaper report, real or imaginary, detailing cases of ‘granny-dumping’, the ruthless abandonment of old, frail, and disoriented people by their unidentified children. This sets the scene for a reflection on old age and the rejection of those whose physical and mental capacities no longer meet the stringent requirements of the standard economically viable unit of modem civilisation. The manifest duty of such objects is to be as discreet as possible, providing minimal inconvenience to others (especially their adult children) until they can fade into oblivion.

Lyn Hughes’s One Way Mirrors begins with a white horse impaled on headlights. It’s autumn, ‘the stars look cold and pinched’. You know it’s going to end badly and it does, mostly.

Diane Langmore has given us a fascinating account of the lives of ten women, from Pattie Deakin to Hazel Hawke. She has explored the background of each, the attraction which ended in marriage to a politically ambitious man, and the adaptation of each to her husband’s obsessive struggle for the most powerful political post in Australia. Her analysis of the women’s relationship to their partners throws light on the personalities and attitudes of the men chosen by Australians to lead the nation. For the early sketches Langmore has drawn on diaries, newspaper reports, and the opinions of contemporaries; for the latter she has been able to add to her sources the opinions and musings, given in interviews, of the women themselves. Langmore writes with clarity and style, never belittling or patronising her subjects, and her sympathetic viewpoint enables the reader to appreciate the varied personalities of her subjects. She does not, however, fall into the trap of assuming that the public face of each woman is always the private one.