Allen & Unwin

About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

Several years ago, I was privy to a breakfast conversation with one of our venerable literary critics, in which he lamented the proliferation of novels in Australia by young women. Of particular concern, he announced, was the tendency of said young women to construct ‘itsy-bitsy sentences from itsy-bitsy words’. And he smiled around the table warmly, secure in venerable male polysyllabic verbosity. As a young woman myself of vague literary urges, I felt thoroughly rebuffed. The only words I could think to form were both too itsy-bitsy and obscene to constitute effective rebuttal, and they remained unsaid.

‘White’ and ‘earth’ are not words that sit easily together in an Australian context, so much so that placing them thus seems almost deliberately unsettling. Juxtaposed, they only serve to remind us of things that are mostly too hard for us to look at directly, a claim to a possession all know to be ill-founded ...

Book covers are just expensive hints, and the jacket adorning Philip Jones’s memoir of Heide and beyond is suitably suggestive. Jones may not be especially literary, but he looms at us – first youthful, now in his early seventies – as a kind of antipodean Auden: languid, floppy-tied and with searching eyes. That direct, if hooded, gaze introduces us to a soi-disant minor figure in our cultural history, but one who had an intimate place at Heide in the 1960s and 1970s, and who has known some of the authentic characters and creators in Australian art and letters.

In 1984 British feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism.

Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the name Morrison seemed to be almost everywhere I looked. Scraping and stumbling through Geelong College, I attended assemblies in Morrison Hall, was a member of Morrison House, and daily passed a trophy cabinet in which was exhibited a copy of Morrison of Peking (1967), Cyril Pearl’s biography of George Ernest ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862–1920), a scion of the founding family in whom its pride was visible.

It would be nice to say that the example of Morrison’s life spurred me to tackle journalism, what he called ‘the noblest of all the professions’, with its emphasis on ‘energy, courage, temperance and truthfulness’. But truth be told, he was at the time a little too exotic to take in – as Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin put it in their new biography, ‘a Scot by breeding, an Australian by birth and experience, British imperialist by choice and a Sinophile by compulsion’. Only later did I find myself bewitched by An Australian in China (1895), the vivid pedestrian’s panorama that Morrison wrote about his foot slog from Shanghai to Rangoon, which became, as it were, his successful job application to The Times.

Setting is a particularly important feature in fantasy texts. One of these three fantasy novels for young adults is set in a self-contained world, while the other two have their main character travel from the ‘real’ world into a secondary one.

In Justin D’Ath’s Shædow Master, fourteen-year-old Ora – related to the royal family of Folavia – knows there is a mystery surrounding her. Why was she the only person to survive falling into Quickwater Lake? And why does she have the despised fair hair and blue eyes of the lower-class skiffers, instead of the dark eyes and hair of Folavian aristocracy? Ora’s search for the truth about herself is intricately linked to the destiny of Folavia. The country is in the grip of drought, its people are divided into rigid classes where the rich oppress or ignore the poor, and the ‘history’ being taught by the aristocracy proves to be seriously flawed. Through her courage, compassion and willingness to examine herself, Ora gradually realises the secret that haunts her family, and comes to understand what she must do in order to give Folavia a future.

Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a hardboiled who’s-got-the-loot thriller in which the police and the criminals are morally indistinguishable and largely interchangeable. Each solves some crime problems, of course; each devotes considerable time and energy to documenting their home city: Sydney, Melbourne and environs. And each uses films and film viewing as a lingua franca, a cultural currency exchanged among its characters (and readers).

Spinning Around is reminiscent of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), the story of Kate Reddy, a full-time fund manager who also juggles a husband, a nanny, and two young children. The voice of both novels is confessional and conversational. Both use existing brand names as descriptors, employ time as a structural device – Jinks uses days, Pearson, hours – and end with a quick summary of a brighter future illuminated by enlightening experiences. They also open with very similar sentences and sentiments (Jinks: ‘How did I ever get into this mess?’ Pearson: ‘How did I get here?’), and in each novel there is a daughter named Emily, a younger son and a helpful, slightly hopeless husband with less earning power than his wife. It’s hard to tell if this is evidence of the genre’s inherent features, the ineluctable truth of the situations, or a happy coincidence.

So who did murder Juanita Nielsen? Years of corrupt police inquiries and coronial and parliamentary investigations have failed to identify her killers, but this excellent history of Sydney’s most famous unsolved disappearance provides most of the answers. However, while it may fill many of the gaps in the record, the question of justice for Juanita is quite another matter. A number of key identities, such as Jim Anderson and Frank Theeman, are now dead. Others have had their testimony tainted by a lifetime of drug addiction and turmoil. Like the ultimate fate of Victoria Street, Kings Cross, the battle for which ultimately cost Nielsen her life, there is no neat ending to this story.