Fiction

T.A.G. Hungerford’s new book Stories from Suburban Road is sub-titled ‘an autobiographical collection’ and comes complete with an appendix of photographs in the style of a family album with captions such as ‘Mick and me, 1922’, ‘Me, aged 16, and Phyllis Kingsbury, Scarborough, 1931’, and ‘Mum and Mrs Francis Victoria Wood, Como Beach, 1930’. Also, throughout the collection each story, sixteen in all, is accompanied by a photograph of the period of the author’s childhood and adolescence between the wars. The impression this provides is that the reader is invited to participate in Hungerford’s nostalgia for his past which consequently may be an inaccessibly private world – more reminiscence than substance. This impression proves to be quite incorrect. The photographs are moments frozen in time, enclosed in a period before this reader was born and the stories offer insight into them. They mutually contribute to the impression created, generally, of a world of innocence and delight. The happy and robust youth in the photographs looks contentedly into the camera from an ordered, acceptable world. They also perhaps complement the selectivity of the author’s imagination.

“I wrote this book to show what dogs can do”, writes Archimedes the red setter in the preface to his book, and what follows are the experiences, observations and reflections of a dog both ordinary and extraordinary.

Archimedes’ physical life is constrained by his ‘employment’ with the Guests, an average Sydney suburban family – father, mother and three children. He is taken for walks – the dog laws make unaccompanied walks too dangerous, he leaves his “messages” in appropriate places, he knows the electricity poles intimately, and the dogs in his territory, Lazy Bill, Princess, Old Sorrowful Eyes and Victor the bulldog.

I occasionally still deliver a lecture I first gave in 1966 though with appropriate variations. One version was published in Quadrant, March-April 1974. There I describe our long tradition of documentary writing or, as H. M. Green called it, “applied writing”.

One of my arguments that I expanded in a series of unpublished lectures was, and is, that from the earliest white settlement to now, writers in this country, and indeed in America and other new world colonies, devoted, and still devote, time and skills to describing matters that older cultures and places take more for granted. I think this tradition delayed the writing of good novels in Australia and also accounts for certain early Australian novels, and indeed novels as late as the 1930s, being over-weighted with descriptions and explanation. It takes time for the generality of authors to find voices to express inner scenery in an external fashion.

Ian Donaldson’s The Rapes of Lucretia is a book so rich in ideas that a review can only be unfairly perfunctory. It starts from ancient accounts of the rape of Lucretia and tracks the transformations of the myth through two millennia. This is no wearisome catalogue, no tedious grinding of PhD mills. Donaldson is, as he puts it, “especially interested in the close relationship that may exist between the creative and the philosophical processes of mind; between art and argument”. What emerges is a sturdy contribution to the history of ideas, a book showing how a myth which sustained Roman ideas of heroism and political liberty was used at different periods of history to reflect and embody changing political and sexual ideas.

Thomas Shapcott uses as a basis for his novel the fascinating life story of Karoly Pulszky, who left Hungary as the disgraced Director of the National Gallery of Art and who committed suicide after two months in Queensland. Pulszky, a forceful and flamboyant man, followed in the footsteps of his distinguished father in building up Hungary’s art collection. He was married to Emilia Markus, ‘The Blonde Wonder of Budapest, the Greatest Actress in Hungary’. Financial mismanagement enabled his family’s political enemies to bring him down and he left Hungary in shame. Years after his death, one of his two daughters, Romola, married Nijinsky, and she wrote extensively about her own colourful life. Shapcott draws on her writings with considerable skill.

Gary Catalano is perhaps better known for his poetry and art-criticism rather than as a writer of short fiction. The Woman Who Lives Here, a book which contains five short stories and sixteen ‘Sketches’, will do little to alter this. For though the writing is stylistically unexceptionable, Catalano's material is perilously thin, lacking in dramatic situation, intellectual vigour and point. Of the five stories which comprise the opening section of the book, four deal with those ubiquitous themes of ‘modernism’: alienation and absence. Given the by now long and rich literary heritage which concerns itself with these concepts it is hardly surprising to find that Catalano's various formal devices rely heavily on earlier models. Techniques of discontinuity, fragmentary notes and deliberate concealments are variously used in these stories giving them an air of unresolved mystery and sometimes menace. But unlike the pioneers in such forms Catalano seems to be experimenting for experimentation's sake; no pressure of feeling informs the writing, leaving the reader with a sense of the writer's ennui, as well as that of his characters.

Douglas Stewart is one of the great all-rounders, perhaps the greatest, of our literature; one recalls that Nancy Keesing once described him as probably t

Foremost as a poet, the subject matter of his poetry is astonishingly wide-ranging from ballads and narrative poems to the most delicate and delightful of nature and love lyrics. He has been a notable and inspiring literary editor; in a period that has now passed into history he so exploited the creative potentialities of radio to communicate culturally that he achieved an international reputation as a verse playwright; and his literary criticism down the years has been consistently respected by his peers.

In Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin Johnson presents the invasion of Australia by white men, referred to as ‘nums’ or ‘ghosts’, through the eyes of the Aborigines, ‘humans’. With the central character Wooreddy and his wife Trugernanna, (Truganinni) we witness the annihilation of a race of people, the breakdown of their culture.

Nigel Krauth’s first novel is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction – or rather, a reworking of a little known set of factual events. As the novel explains, in 1895 the famous Australian poet ‘Banjo’ Paterson travelled to Queensland to visit his fiancée. Two events of importance occurred during that short period: Paterson’s engagement was broken off, and while there he wrote what was to become his and the nation’s most famous song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Paterson always refused to speak of the period in later life so that what exactly happened between himself and Sarah Riley remains unknown and Nigel Krauth feels free to speculate. There are ethical problems, I feel, in the fictional reconstruction of an historical personage and Krauth’s portrait of Paterson, while by no means wholly unsympathetic, is that of a man in many ways vain and narcissistic; certainly, it enraged the poet’s descendants to the point where they refused Krauth permission to quote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in his novel. Copyright does not run out until 1991 when, presumably, if the novel is still in print Krauth will fill in the blank spaces he has left.

We have to thank Julian Croft for this selection of Slessor’s light verse first published in Smith's Weekly between February 1928 and November 1933. Here is a worthy successor to Slessor’s Darlinghurst Nights, until now the only selection of frivolous Slessor available to the general reader. The verses here are no less charming than those of the earlier selection and their omission from Darlinghurst Nights, first published in 1933, seems merely to be based on the fact that they do not fit easily into the theme of that volume. They are certainly no less delightfully capricious in their rhyme schemes and no less artfully artless.