History

Uranium is a word which has become so highly emotive in this country that it is embedded in the national psyche; but not one person in 10,000 who would react instinctively and dialectically to the word knows anything about the element itself apart from connotations of Doomsday … the world on fire or the seeping shroud of radiation sickness laying waste the entire earth in sterile despair.

Most of these books are Oztalgia reprints of the more respectable and desirable kind, but three are original works, two of them by senior men of letters of the kind that any country is fortunate to have a corps d’elite of: I mean of course Howard and Pearl. Cyril Pearl, in Five Men Vanished, relates in 128 pages the facts relating to the disappearance of five men at Bermagui in 1880. One was the well-connected Lamont Young, 29-years-old and a government geological surveyor. Another was Maximilian Schneider, a young German assistant to Young, whose foreign accent and facial scar appear to have been enough to make him a prime suspect. The other three were fishermen. It was their boat which was found, stove in, on a beach some nine miles north of Bermagui. The boat contained articles belonging to Young and Schneider, though there was no reason why these two should have been in the boat.

It is difficult to decide whether this well­researched book is an important addition to the media history of Australia, or whether it deserves a place among the chronicles of the country’s moral development, or even as another testament to the differences and divisions that are created by federal systems of governance. Ina Bertrand has diligently collected all the details of lust, licence and legislation that have beset the entertainment industry over the past century and a half. She painstakingly leads the reader through the reasons and ramifications behind the Acts of State and Commonwealth Parlia­ments (starting with the first Public Entertainment Act in New South Wales in 1828) by which successive attempts have been made to regulate how and what the Australian public were allowed to see.

Five years ago prominent architectural historian, George Tibbits, rated the dearth of books available to guide people’s appreciation of their historical environment as one of the major brakes on the conservation movement in Victoria. Since then a growing number of excellent publications have attempted to redress this weakness, the latest being Grant Blackman and John Larkin’s Maldon. It follows closely on the heels of Burchett’s work on East Melbourne and has a similar format and high quality of production. Blackman’s photographs in black and white and color beautifully capture the town’s flavor and are at their best with the more intimate details of verandah variances, padlocked intimate doors, details and of cemetery headstones. Some of the more panoramic plates might have been more sharply reproduced and it is unfortunate that one or two of the captions are repetitive. Well-chosen historical photographs are interspersed to complement the modern views. The Gill sketches do not portray Maldon itself and will be familiar to readers other goldfield histories. The four David Drape paintings, on the other hand are of early Maldon scenes and one regrets that they were not reproduced in colour.

Few families in Italian history have enjoyed a fame greater than the Medici whose name has become inseparably linked with the Renaissance. It is paradoxical, therefore, how little has really been known, until recently, of how Cosimo, the founder of its predominance in Florence, paved the way for the establishment of the power it was to exercise over that city. Nicolai Rubinstein, some years ago in his Government of Florence under the Medici, showed how its ascendancy was maintained through a complex system of electoral controls, but it is only now, with the appearance of Australian historian Dale Kent’s study, The Rise of the Medici, that a clear picture is beginning to emerge of the process by which the Medici first issued from the ranks of the Florentine ruling class to the position of dominance which they gradually consolidated over the six decades following Cosimo’s triumphant return from exile in 1434.

This is the jubilee history of a unique Australian institution. Legacy, initially a club of World War I veterans, aiming to help each other re-establish themselves in civilian life, quickly became an organization concerned to assist the dependents of dead or incapacitated servicemen. Though the age of legatees is rising, the number of elderly widows increasing, and the number of dependent children declining, this remains its raison d’être. Forty-seven Legacy clubs today spend nearly $3,000,000 annually on some 100,000 widows and children in addition, personal assistance – leading youth groups, acting as advisers to bereaved families – continues the paramount part of Legacy’s service.

Perhaps no other social attitude has changed so markedly in this century as the prevailing public reaction towards the question of the limitation of population growth and the use of birth control devices.

The functions of literature in a society are many and varied and often there is a good correlation between what a people’s literature says about them and what they say about themselves. This is certainly true of the traditional literature of the Aborigines of Australia as exemplified in their myths and legends and of the traditional pattern of life which, laid down in The Dreaming, was followed so well until the European settlement and the resultant culture clash.

One of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful view­point on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book.