Letters to the Editor
Endemic yowling
Dear Editor,
A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowling’, according to Miles Franklin), and a reminder of the then image of English departments and their hangers-on as ‘the Garrison’. J.I.M. Stewart was another. Maybe the problem is endemic.
... (read more)Dear Editor,
In responding to Peter Craven’s broad-brush review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in last month’s ABR, which I suppose you ran for the sake of controversy, let me touch on the wider debate about what’s in the book, and why.
In compiling such an anthology, where you obviously can’t have everything, a principle of metonymy comes into play, in which the one is asked to stand for the many. In the Macquarie PEN, this is a principle of inclusion, not exclusion. Where space permits no more, authors are indicated by association or citation, making the whole greater, we hope, than the sum of the parts, more open and many-layered, as anyone will discover who reads the essays and author introductions in the book. Thus Gerald Murnane’s fiction is implied by a superb piece of non-fiction, ‘Why I Write What I Write’, showing him at his best. The only other answer to why the editors did not choose this particular work is that they chose that one, after careful consideration not only of the work itself but of its interaction with other works in the collection. Nothing’s perfect, of course. If readers have suggestions or corrections, we’d be grateful to hear them. See the feedback link on the home page of the anthology website: www.macquariepenanthology.com.au.
... (read more)
Delights and jolts
Dear Editor,
ABR is always engaging, even when one disagrees with the thrust or standpoint of particular reviews, but surely the May issue is the most brilliant ever. An edition which has a poet (Peter Rose) reviewing David Malouf’s new novel, Brian Matthews on Henry Lawson, Elizabeth Webby on Xavier Herbert, and Robert Phiddian on Penny Gay’s monograph about Shakespearean comedies, has to be special, thoroughly deserving of the endorsements of literary luminaries with which ABR has promoted itself over the years. In fact, a writer who, as Dr Phiddian did, can use the phrase ‘industrial-strength literary-criticism’ in his first paragraph and one of my favourite words, ‘rebarbative’, in his second, has my unremitting admiration. And I haven’t yet mentioned the appearance of John Burnheim and Ian Britain on the Letters page.
... (read more)Dear Editor,
This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.
... (read more)DIAMETRIC OPPOSITES
Dear Editor,
I concur with Daniel Thomas’s high opinion of the collection of Eva and Marc Besen and of their TarraWarra Museum, and share his admiration of the essays by Christopher Heathcote and Sarah Thomas in his review of Encounters with Australian Modern Art (February 2009).
...
The past is in Scotland
Dear Editor,
Christina Hill’s review of Peter Goldsworthy’s latest novel, Everything I Knew (November 2008), seems sure-footed in both its negative assessment of an ‘overwrought, undisciplined’ work and its appreciation of the novel’s compositional play, both intricate and subversive, with L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. It makes no mention, however, of the novel’s pointed intrigue with lyricism.
... (read more)Do we need them?
Dear Editor,
Forgive me for taking advantage of the hospitality of your letters column to reflect on the matter of our national honours. Evidently some professions are better than others at nominating and supporting worthy candidates. If eminent writers and artists tend to go unacknowledged, to some degree we have only ourselves to blame for not taking more active steps to insure that a case is made through the Australian Honours Secretariat in Yarralumla. The procedure is relatively time-consuming, but all relevant particulars may be found at www.itsanhonour.gov.au. (I do not find the name of this website particularly reassuring.)
... (read more)Setting the record straight
... (read more)Dear Editor,
I have to write in support of your reviewer, Nicholas Brown, in expressing reservations about the speculative nature of much of the material in Susanna de Vries’s Desert Queen: The Many Lives and Loves of Daisy Bates (April 2008). I judge only by her treatment of Ernestine Hill (whom I knew very well as my mother’s cousin, and for whom I am literary executor). Since some people are proposing a biography of Ernestine, it is most important to set the record straight.
There was never any parallel between Ernestine’s pregnancy and that of the typical ‘girls’ of that period. An abortion was never even considered. She was delighted with her pregnancy and recorded that the birth of her son, Robert, was the ‘happiest day of my life’.
Not just another depressive
Dear Editor,
Barcroft Boake has suddenly become trendy, with a fictionalised (shudder) account of his life (Where the Dead Men Lie, by Hugh Capel) just published, as well as a Collected Works, Edited, With a Life, the review of which by Patrick Buckridge (July–August 2008) suggests that the old misconceptions about the poet, based on a biased account by A.G. Stephens, on which Clement Semmler based his biography, are in danger of achieving the status of fact.
Boake had a lot to be sad about. His much-loved mother died when he was thirteen; he had been apprenticed to a bankrupt who conned him out of a large inheritance; an employer neglected to pay him; and a couple of love affairs went bust. But to write him off as a depressive, with death his ‘single theme’, is to fly in the face of the reality I discovered when researching the biography that won the Walter Stone Award in 1986.
... (read more)Patrick Allington replies to John Carmody
Dear Editor,
I sort of but don’t exactly agree with John Carmody, who sort of but didn’t exactly agree with my mixed review of Tony Jones’s edition of The Best Australian Political Writing (May 2008). Carmody suggests that the anthology should have been called ‘Best Political Journalism’ because it ‘completely lacks’ academic writing or reflective essays. I agree that the book was journalism-heavy, but there’s nothing to be gained by overstatement. It also included a number of longer essays, the best of which were intelligent, learned, thought-provoking and impassioned.
... (read more)