Vintage

Don Watson sits low in his chair, shy and silent when faced with a group of university administrators gathered to hear him talk about management speak – those weasel words that Watson has hunted down with grim enthusiasm. He speaks hesitantly at first, struggling to recall examples of misleading expression, evasive phrases, dishonest communication. Soon the rhythm quickens. There is indignation now in the voice, derision anew at the decay of public language. The speaker rocks forward, ranging more widely as he explains the link between thought and expression. Jargon hides intentions. Clichés abandon serious engagement with an issue. This is not the pedant’s obsession with grammar, but anger when the contest of ideas is undermined by impenetrable language.

The Hare With Amber Eyes tells the migration story of ‘a very large collection of very small objects’, specifically 264 netsuke (pronounced like ‘jet ski’, from the Japanese characters for ne and tsuke, meaning ‘root’ and ‘attach’). Netsuke are small pieces of ivory, wood, metal, ceramic, or some other material, carved or otherwise decorated, and perforated for use as a toggle that tucks behind the belt or sash of a kosode or kimono (obi). From it a purse or more usually a small box with compartments (inro) may be suspended by a stout silken cord, and fastened with sliding beads (ojime). Netsuke evolved in seventeenth-century Japan to embrace an almost limitless number of decorative forms and shapes, increasingly prized, through the eighteenth century, as miniature sculptures on their own, nevertheless conforming to the basic requirement of their original function: namely, to allow a cord to be threaded through some sort of eye – in the case of the eponymous hare with the amber eyes this is achieved by the contrivance of a cocked hind leg; such strategies became more and more ingenious as netsuke proliferated – and also adhering to a roughly uniform size of between one and two inches in diameter, occasionally more. Ideally, netsuke nestle comfortably in the palm of the hand. Indeed, part of their aesthetic appeal is to the sense of touch, so deployed.

Maggie Mackellar’s stunning new memoir, When It Rains, narrates her journey through the disorienting landscape of loss and mourning. As a young academic, pregnant with her second child and uncomplicatedly in love with her athletic husband, the boundaries of Mackellar’s world seem fairly secure. With her husband’s sudden psychic disintegration and suicide, the foundations of that world collapse. She gives birth to a son, struggles to juggle single motherhood and an academic career, and, with her mother’s help, learns to appreciate small moments of beauty amid the pain.

According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.

Though born and bred in Brisbane, I had never read anything written by Nick Earls prior to this assignment. The closest I had come was a book reading over a decade ago when Earls amused the audience with excerpts from his Bachelor Kisses (1998), before the late Grant McLennan beguiled them with an acoustic rendering of The Go-Betweens song of the same name. The Go-Betweens connection remains palpable in Earls’s latest novel, The True Story of Butterfish. The title of the failed third album of the fictional rock band Butterfish, Written in Sand, Written in Sea, can be nothing other than an allusion to ‘Man O’ Sand to Girl O’ Sea’, the song which rounds out Forster and McLennan’s classic record Spring Hill Fair. Beyond that, references abound to the streets, monuments and cloying humidity of the Queensland capital Nick Earls what to Brisbane as Lou Reed is to New York.  Earls is also one of a long line of individuals Anton Chekhov, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard and others who gave up a career in medicine for a life of literary endeavour. Yet while the work of Ballard, to take the most contemporary example, includes disfigured bodies, transplanted limbs and exotic diseases, Earls seems to have left his life as a sawbones far behind. It is rather his misfortune to have been associated with the style known as ‘lad lit’, for which Nick Hornby is poster-boy.

In characteristically symbolic fashion, the Rudd government chose the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 2008) to announce a consultation process into human rights protection in Australia. Attorney-General Robert McClelland appointed a committee, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, to consult the public on issues including whether Australia needs a bill (or charter) of rights and responsibilities. Geoffrey Robertson’s latest book, The Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights, injects much-needed energy, imagination, and international context into this rather circumscribed debate. ‘I have spent my professional life making arguments based on bills of rights,’ says Robertson. As a distinguished and courageous human rights lawyer-activist, his emphatically pro-charter stance commands the thoughtful consideration of supporters, opponents, and equivocators alike.