Allen & Unwin

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.

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’?

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

Much has been written on Edna Walling’s gardens, first by herself, later by garden historians, although no detailed account of her early career has been attempted, and less still is generally known of her private life. With a play on Walling to her credit (1987), Sara Hardy presents an account of her private life (1895–1973) and of her early career.

Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason.