Non Fiction

This is a book about pain. In December 1999, Arthur Reilly was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. The methods of relief offered to him, principally morphine, had drastic side-effects which undermined what pleasure he might have found in living. For four months, he lost weight and showed little interest in his usual activities. He became depressed and contemplated suicide.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

Following True Stories, published in 1996, The Feel of Steel is Helen Garner’s second collection of non-fiction. It comprises thirty-one pieces of varying lengths. Longer narratives such as ‘Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice’, about a hair-raising trip to Antarctica, and ‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’, about the outcome ...

How to shape the fiction of one’s life? There is something to be said for the no-nonsense narrative thrust of Errol Flynn in kicking off My Wicked, Wicked Ways, one of the most readable and also self-consciously ‘literary’ of all showbiz autobiographies. ‘Detesting’ books that begin after the fashion of ‘there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard’, the actor-autobiographer gets straight to what he archly calls ‘the meat of the matter’: his tumultuous film career and the associated carnal exploits that constituted his notoriety.

Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling that, apart from the fresh face of Natasha Stott-Despoja, there’s nothing new around; no new ideas, no articulated vision of where the country might be in ten or twenty years’ time, nothing inspirational. Perhaps something might emerge before the next election. But no one’s holding their breath. All the signs, surveys, focus groups, radio talk-backs, flirtations with maverick independents show that Australians are looking for something better from Canberra. And they have vestigial hope. So the word ‘new’ in the title is not so stupid after all. It’s based on the theory that hope usually triumphs over experience. People might buy the book hoping for the revelation of a ‘new Liberal’.

Nothing divides people as much as the idea that history is a text and, in many cases, a fiction. It’s the sort of notion – more or less accepted by academics in the Humanities – that really annoys ‘among the barbarians’ public intellectuals. Point out that history is written by the victors, that much of what we think of as gospel was written decades after the event from secondary sources (the Gospels, for example), and that the bulk of tradition, from Scots tartan to Christmas, is a nineteenth-century confection, and their anger becomes tinged with panic. It’s vertigo, but one of time rather than space – the sudden realisation that you are standing on nothing but the present, with the texts and living witnesses (whose memories are texts) inhering in the present.

I first encountered Francis Adams when various sharp or mordant observations from his The Australians kept cropping up in my reading about Henry Lawson and his times. For one thing, Adams’s widow, Edith (though there is apparently doubt about their marital status), invited Lawson and his wife, Bertha, to stay with her in the village of Harpenden while they looked for accommodation. Lawson duly rented ‘Spring Villa’ in Cowper Road, Harpenden, and thus began his disastrous English sojourn.

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.

A brief moment of reflection on the quantum of grief in Australia associated with wars of the twentieth century is, to say the least, unsettling. Nearly 100,000 killed in combat, many seriously wounded, many dealing with the physical and mental consequences long after the cessation of hostilities. Lives snatched from the everyday and made into noble sacrifices. The darker dimensions of the Anzac legacy have seeped into the national imagining in recent years, and we are now more open to the poignant melancholy of remembrance, undercutting the bellicose flag-waving of former years. But our sense of the costs of sacrifice has largely been focused on those who served. Joy Damousi in this and her previous book, The Labour of Loss (1999), opens our eyes to those others who have borne the pain of grief most acutely: the wives and families of those killed and those forever transformed by the experience of battle. These illuminating books are a long overdue acknowledgment of the burden of mourning that many Australian families have had to bear.