Review

Wifework is a good term for the things that women have been doing in Western marriages for centuries. It evokes all those other phrases coined in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists that resonate in the consciousness of modern women (including many of those who preface any discussion of family life with the mantra ‘I’m not a feminist’). Wifework embraces the sacrifice of ‘the burnt chop syndrome’, the exhaustion of the ‘the double shift’ and the psychological burden of ‘emotional labour’. The title of this new book raises hopes for a spirited discussion examining and updating earlier complaints, showing how things have changed and suggesting what needs to be done about marriages in the new century. As a been-there-done-that reader (married in the 1970s and feeling guilty about letting down feminism by doing so, divorced in the 1980s and feeling guilty about that, cohabiting and parenting in the 1990s), I was interested at once.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Elvis Presley, the Tarot, unsettled weather, love, ducks and a megasupermarket: they’re not subjects that one would often be moved to mention in the same breath, but it is on just this unlikely affiliation that Julie Capaldo’s cunningly plotted second novel is based.

‘A king had a beautiful daughter,’ begins David Foster’s new book: 204 pages between grey boards, a reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Madonna con Bambino e due angeli on the covers, the author’s name itself visible only on the acknowledgements page, in rather small writing.

Neither the agapanthus nor the tango is native to Australia: their juxtaposition, when an Argentinian man and the Austrian woman he possibly loves dance amongst the plants on a remote property in the Riverina, suggests the kinds of familiar patterns we are dealing with here. Like their dance, the dancers are displaced; they find the Australian bush alien; they have endured disappointments in getting here, and one of them is going to go mad as a result. ‘Agapanthus tango’ is a conceit, a contradiction that represents the nonsensicality (to foreign sensibilities) of Australia.

This amusing doggerel, furnishing the epigraph to ‘On Queer Street’, the eighth chapter of this book, neatly sums up the status that Oxford Street currently enjoys as an emblem of, and shorthand reference to, the large and vibrant Sydney gay world. Its campy note evokes an older gay world of queens and drag (what in fact the US slang term gay originally meant in the 1920s and 1930s), which was how gay Oxford Street began in the late 1960s. That all receded but did not vanish with the advent of macho fashions and behaviours, clonery, leather, and Muscle Maries in the 1980s, which marked the second wave of US influence following the willing embrace of gay liberation in 1970 and after. Oxford Street is now known to the world as the site of the Mardi Gras parade, far and away the largest street celebration in Australia and probably the largest gay and lesbian street celebration in the world.

Lively and cheerful, these three books aimed at young readers are sure to persuade their potential audience that reading is fun, language can be powerful and magical, and life in books is more exciting than the lived version. What more enticing motivations to read can there be for those starting out?

This book, John Croaker, is a work of convict biography. Its authors are of the opinion that we could do with a deal more convict biography. But convict biography with a difference. Though ‘a well-established medium’, the need is, we are told, to go beyond assessments of ‘colonial figure-heads’, for ‘it is time to examine the men and women on whom the lime­light only flickered’.

Given its present rise in popularity, if you haven’t been to Broome recently, you’re obviously hanging out with the wrong crowd. Even the Queen – always so prescient – visited Broome in 1963. Broome has suddenly undergone another rebirth: as a tourist destination, historical and cultural centre, and as the home of Magabala Books. While Sydney has Williamson and White, Broome has given us the immortal musicals Bran Nue Day and Corrugation Road.

While she was writing her novel, Angela Malone pinned a panorama photo of Hill End, the small NSW goldmining town, over the window near her desk. The photo seemed empty of life until Malone took to it with a magnifying glass and – as authors do – playing the giant game, discovered shadowy traces of some of her characters. No wonder, since the town lies on a bed of quartz which common wisdom invests with certain powers of invocation, much like the magic of the silver particles of photography. Hill End became the novel’s Reedy Creek, a place infinitely embroidered with the history and folklore of its predominantly Irish community.