Jeff Sparrow

The key theme of Overland 195 seems to be crisis. The contributors to this edition of the journal address the ‘global financial crisis’, as well as various other moments of tension and unrest in Australia’s present and past.

Robert Drewe, one of Australia’s most absorbing fiction writers, has prime position in the opening pages of the latest Meanjin. ‘The Aquarium at Night’ is so deft and engaging it draws me in, almost despite myself. It is a story about boys, surfing, prison life and ‘easygoing’ Australian masculinity. These topics may not immediately appeal, but the story stirs with the rhythms of memory, desire, the slow burn of maturing manhood, and the role that writing plays in coming to confront one’s self. Drewe’s prose seduces and convinces: a man remembering his childhood self is ‘A skinny, mop-headed grommet leaning out the window to check the morning’s wind and weather for the day’s surf potential and dreaming of legendary breaks. By 6.15 he’d be over the ridge and in the ocean.’ An incidental character in the prison Creative Writing class is ‘[a] twenty-stone Christian who’d decapitated his son-in-law with an axe for infidelity’. This is what draws me in, the sagacity of the prose, its grounded eloquence, its lack of mere aesthetics.

Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.