Melbourne University Press

On 4 October 1918, one month before he was killed, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother describing the ‘mop-up’ operations in which his division was engaged. ‘It passed the limits of my Abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an angel.’ Owen assured his beloved mother that his nerves were ‘in perfect order’. This letter, written by the poet who gave us ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the metaphor of a generation sacrificed like cattle on the battlefield, is a terrible indictment of war and its effect on the human psyche.

Australian conservatism, for all its political dominance, is little understood and has been studied by surprisingly few scholars. The very industrious and perceptive Peter van Onselen is almost single-handedly determined to correct this imbalance. He has brought together a timely collection of essays on the Liberal Party and its future, coinciding with yet another term in unaccustomed opposition, an experience invariably chastising for the conservatives. The immediate predecessors to the modern-day Liberal Party on the non-Labor side of politics disintegrated on losing office, and the Liberal Party’s own spells in opposition have been periods of both blood-letting and soul searching. There is a happy focus (for the Liberal Party, at least) on the latter in this necessarily mixed bag.

The new Meanjin, edited by Sophie Cunningham, is exciting to behold. With its varied font, though, it runs the risk of being like Federation Square: striking to look at but difficult to negotiate. The small, faint font made this issue taxing to read. Perhaps younger readers, targeted by some of the content (such as the serialisation of a graphic history), will have less difficulty.

The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.

This is the latest volume of a reference work which should sit on the shelves of every municipal library. It assesses the lives of people, mostly prominent, who died in the years 1981–90. It lists them in alphabetical order; a further volume will be needed to embrace the 600 or 700 people whose surnames began with the letters L to Z.

From the horror of ‘traumascapes’ – the eponymous subject of Tumarkin’s first book (2005) – to the noble quality we call courage is one of those small steps that equate to giant leaps. Having spent a long time thinking and writing about the devastation caused to particular sites during the harsher episodes of recent history, Tumarkin has moved on to the human sentiments associated with those acts. Courage is not the only one, but because it appears so positive and universal it is a prime subject for interrogation, even deconstruction. (Yes, Maria, I know this is the theory-speak you disdain, but like the language of science, its vocabulary can lead to clarification as well as obfuscation.)

Pamela Bone has written a remarkably brave book. She writes about how the chemotherapy which she underwent after the diagnosis of multiple myeloma in 2004 robbed her of the fearlessness of her life as journalist, human rights activist, feminist, and public speaker. She pays tribute to the late British journalist John Diamond, who insisted that writing about his cancer was not brave at all. Bone disagrees: ‘I think he was very brave. And although he is dead, his voice, with its decency and wit, speaks to me from the pages of his book.’ Bravery, decency and wit are among many words that could equally be used to characterise Bones’s own voice, which mercifully is still strong, always profoundly intelligent and humane as she addresses the big questions of death and dying, poverty and injustice, all the while paying tribute to the love of family and friends, the dedicated and good-humoured care of health professionals, and the kindness of strangers.

For almost half of the twentieth century, train passengers travelling into Sydney from the western suburbs and beyond could observe a large sign, painted in drop-shadow lettering, on the vast blank brick wall of an industrial building facing the tracks between Redfern and Central. It carried the message: TEAGUE’S HAMBURGER ROLLS – WHAT YOU EAT TODAY, WALKS AND TALKS TOMORROW.

John Kinsella’s new memoir, Fast, Loose Beginnings, may have been published by the august publishing house of Melbourne University Publishing, but it is nevertheless a garage-band of a book. It is, as its title signals, both fast and loose. Its rhythms aren’t always graceful, and its timbres aren’t always smooth. You can almost hear the hum of the amplifiers. The poet Jaya Savige, in his review of the book for the Sydney Morning Herald, commented on the book’s lack of polish.

The travails of Australian universities have increased in recent years, for well-aired reasons. These considerable difficulties followed unsettling and much criticised structural transformation initiated during the Dawkins era. They have been accompanied by pressures for international benchmarking of performance, the rapid growth of information technology, and an added impetus to form international networking alliances.