Non Fiction

One of the truly astonishing accounts to emerge in Munster’s account concerns another US president, John F. Kennedy, whose press secretary, Pierre Salinger, forged a cable in Murdoch’s name to kill a Murdoch report of an off-the-record talk he had with the president. The cable, sent through State Department channels, was signed ‘Murdoch’.

This is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages, and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies.

It is 116 years since Charles Harpur, Australia’s first poet of real eminence, died with his own collection of his works unpublished. Except for a couple of small selections – the most recent of which, made by Adrian Mitchell in 1973 and containing only about 120 pages of the poetry, was the most comprehensive – and the infamously corrupt 1883 ‘collection’, it has remained so. This has been a blot on the reputation of Australian critical and academic workers and a loss not only to Australian literature but to Australian history. Now Elizabeth Perkins, of the English Department of James Cook University, has handsomely remedied a long injustice.

Self-publishing has always happened. Once the province of the very rich who like to press their thoughts in slim monogrammed volumes on friends and governments, or the last desperate resort of the very nutty, books published by their authors were usually given away and probably rarely read.

Lloyd Robson has produced a finely researched and lucid book which will become a standard reference on the early political history of the island of Tasmania. Volume One deals with the intrigues, conflicts and self-indulgences that were endemic in the emerging society and boldly illustrates the path to ‘self rather than ‘responsible’ government, together with the feelings of animosity that were generated towards particular colonial governorships.

While most of us know something of the great figures of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, the more painstaking and routine, although often equally courageous, work of the scientific expeditions in the last fifty years rarely commands public attention. Dr Phillip Law, Leader of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions from 1949 to 1966 redresses this neglect in the first volume of his autobiography, reviewed here by Clive Coogan, who assesses Law’s own contribution and the Importance of his work to Australia.

In an essay on ‘Equality’ Craig McGregor tells us that when he was a kid he was mystified by those tales where the fisherman’s wife or whoever would be given three wishes by the Good Fairy and she ‘always wished for crazy self-indulgent things like ‘ I wish everybody I touched turned to gold’, and of course it always rebounded on them ... and I always wondered why they didn’t wish for something more general, like wishing that everyone in the world ... should be happy every afterwards, because then nothing could ever go wrong again and the world would be a perfect place to live in ... all it needed of the fishermen and fishermen’s wives and shoemakers and others was a bit of imagination, and a bit of common sense, and just a hint of generosity ... Ah! the birth of utopianism.’

‘“No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.’ In her introduction to There's Always Been A Women's Movement this Century, Dale Spender admits that the elan of involvement in the recent women’s movement made her overlook ‘the unlit corridor of women's history’. She deplores ‘the process of reducing women to invisibility’. In a patriarchy, ‘sexism’ is ‘something that all members do ... There weren’t many patriarchal traps that I did not fall into’. Wanting to ‘generate a tradition of strong authoritative women’, she interviewed five ‘elder stateswomen’, all born between 1890 and 1910: journalist and leader of the six Point Group for equality Hazel Hunkins Hallinan; journalist and novelist Rebecca West; pacifist, educationalist and writer Dora Russell; journalist and Fawcett Society stalwart Mary Stott; sociologist Constance Rover. The result was ‘a genuine educational experience’ that prompts some flushed prior publicity: ‘it would be a (patriarchal) mistake to think of these discussions as insignificant but pleasant gossip about old times. This is a form of women's history ... each women tells her own story ... despite all the many limitations, we have here a valuable record’.

Mapping the boundaries of relationships between church and state is a vital part of religious history. Walter Phillips makes a major contribution to our understanding of the changes which followed the ending of state aid in the nineteenth century. The pressures of voluntaryism made the retention of vision of a Christian country very hard, for protestant individualism and denominational competition made the shaping of a common ethos impossible. Nevertheless, Phillips makes it clear that the protestant churches, through their leadership, put up stiff resistance to the trends of the times.

The authors’ respective backgrounds gave them excellent qualifications to write this history of the FIA and the result is a book which should have much wider interest than its bland title suggests.