Review

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.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’

Breaking The Codes was published last August. The time that has subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.