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Essays

Sylvia Lawson’s How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia warrants a second reading to be properly appreciated. The seven pieces in this collection are intricately connected, so that the messages are cumulatively conveyed. The book manifests its author’s ambitious desire to raise the consciousness of her readers. For me, however, the question remains: who is the intended audience?

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Timepieces by Drusilla Modjeska

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September 2002, no. 244

According to the back cover of Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska’s latest collection of essays represents an attempt to follow the ‘paper trail’ of her own life, after ‘nearly thirty years of nosing in other people’s archives’. Readers who have enjoyed Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2000) will find much to intrigue them in Part 1 of this collection, which is largely a series of intimate glimpses into her development as a writer. Like Helen Garner, writing and living for Modjeska are clearly two sides of the same coin, and both enterprises imply struggle, danger and passion. Poppy was arguably one of the most exciting books to appear in Australia in the 1990s. Modjeska’s descriptions of her efforts to find the right voice or voices for the book’s complex mix of biography, autobiography and fiction are especially fascinating. While her first book, Exiles at Home (1981), was ground-breaking, the gulf between its well-conducted research and the sophisticated self-conscious memoir that is Poppy is immense. How many graduate students must have the same experience of travelling ‘on forged papers’ in their academic work, of assuming a supposedly disinterested voice that ignores the personal ‘terra incognita’.

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Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.

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When I was still a jot at uni, a medical student friend stumbled late out of her latest lecture and reassured me. And then she assured me, ‘It was horrible! We had slide after slide of some dead smoker’s lungs. And they were disgusting! I’m gonna be sick! Give me a cigarette!’ That’s when I first understood that ‘smoking’ was not ever going to be a straightforward subject.

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What do the fab four of this book have in common? Not simply that they are Australian and expatriate, that they are writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity and performers who have made skilful use of television.

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The ‘place in the city’ of Fr Edmund Campion’s latest pilgrimage into Australian Catholic life and history is St Mary’s cathedral, Sydney. Campion spent six years here as a young-priest working in the shadow of both the cathedral and the august Normal Cardinal Gilroy.

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The Orchard by Drusilla Modjeska

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September 1994, no. 164

Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.

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R.W. Connell is unquestionably the most intellectually ambitious Australian socialist. To call him a prodigious synthesiser is an insult, yet his mind is hospitable to an amazing variety of theoretical influences and thoroughly digested bodies of empirical data. Since his seminal essay ‘Images of Australia’(l968) he has set out to upgrade radically Australian sociology. While his assumptions are often contested, and his achievements are sometimes regarded as trite or tautologous, there is no doubt that he has originated the most consistent and theoretically sophisticated analysis of Australian society.

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It should be cause for congratulation that a study of Christina Stead is among the first four titles appearing in a series called ‘Essays in Australian Literature’ (general editor John Barnes). Because only two of her novels have Australian settings, because she has lived abroad most of her writing life, because her work evades the usual categories of fiction, because she has no time for the literary marketplace – for a whole complex of reasons Stead’s extraordinary achievement has never been adequately recognised in the land of her birth.

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Essays on Western Australian Politics by Ralph Pervan and Campbell Sharman

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March 1981, no. 28

This is an interesting and important book dealing with Western Australian politics in general but it also manages in depth treatment of various aspects of the political process. The book is divided into two parts: the first part deals with government, which includes the federal-state relationship, the parliamentary system. electoral politics, public administration, the role of the executive and the place of local government in Western Australia. The second part of this well-conceived book deals with party politics and the role, nature, organization and ideologies of the three major political parties. The occasion for publication was the 150th anniversary of the founding of Western Australia and this constitutes a scholarly contribution to mark the occasion. It is easy to agree with Sir Charles Court, the Western Australian Premier, when he writes in his foreword that ‘the collection is seen as a worthwhile contribution to the scholarly heritage of the State’.

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