Letters to the Editor

Patrick Allington (May 2008) astutely discerned an essential characteristic – I consider it a flaw – of The Best Australian Political Writing 2008, which was edited by Tony Jones of the ABC. He did not quite nail it down, however: I think that the book would have been better described as the ‘best’ political journalism because that, overwhelmingly, is what it really is (furthermore, it is exclusively print journalism). It completely lacks academic, or what one might term ‘reflective’, writing. That is part of the reason why, as Allington correctly insisted, some of the pieces are dated and, indeed, remain rather flat on the page.

Defending Darleen Bungey

Dear Editor,

To write the biography of an artist as prolific and complex as Arthur Boyd is an ambitious undertaking, as Ian Britain notes in his review of Darleen Bungey’s account (February 2008). Her book took seven years to research and write; it underwent considerable peer review.

As its commissioning editor, I was delighted by Bungey’s highly original, imaginative and evocative prose. If Britain prefers, as he states, ‘the austerities of Franz Philipp’s seminal study ... Janet McKenzie’s beautifully economical monograph ... the poised, elegant restraint of Brenda Niall’, then he is so patently lacking in sympathy with this endeavour that he is unlikely to be fair to its author. And he isn’t.

Calling for a revolution in higher education

Dear Editor,

In his victory speech on 24 November 2007, Kevin Rudd reaffirmed education as a key priority for the future of this country. We believe that a true education revolution must include a new wave of higher education reform - reform that will redress the imbalances that have characterised the sector of the last decade or more. Such reform should redirect resources back into the core university activities of teaching and research. We urge immediate attention and commitment to the following:

Dogs’ tails and other trivia

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Daniel Thomas for pointing out errors and inconsistencies where they exist in my book Australian Pastoral: The making of a white landscape (November 2007). In a work of 90,000 words and 600 footnotes, there will inevitably be some errors. However, most of what Thomas says are errors are not. My reference to ‘Lady Jane Franklin’ follows the Australian Dictionary of Biography. ‘Walter Baldwin Spencer’, although often called Baldwin Spencer, follows his biographers and the ADB. ‘James Stuart Macdonald’ is referred to thus in the first reference and then as ‘James Macdonald’ or ‘J.S. Macdonald’. All are correct and hardly hanging offences, but Thomas, who has known me for more than twenty years, spells my own name in two different ways, one wrongly, in his review. ‘Claude Lorraine’ is not a spelling mistake but accepted usage (The Oxford Companion to Art).

Lifelong love of books

Dear Editor,

Ruth Starke’s review of my book Stories, Picture and Reality: Two Children Tell (October 2007) is a competent, even enthusiastic, summary of the book’s main points, with emphasis on its uniqueness (starting with infants and books, and including siblings). She notes that no other male child has been studied in this way.

Real what?

Dear Editor,

I have followed with interest the dispute between John Carmody and James Ley that proceeded the latter’s exceptionally sensible and even-handed review (March 2007) in which Mr Ley criticised those who maintain the divide between high and popular culture.

Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews makes an eloquent defence of Manning Clark’s Kristallnacht fantasy, but I was surprised to find myself being drafted as a witness simply because I once said that autobiography is ‘a lying art’ (May 2007). Actually, I can’t remember ever having used quite those words, but, as Brian Matthews well argues, memory plays tricks.

Oxford traveller

Dear Editor,

In his ‘Diary’ in the March 2007 issue of ABR, Chris Wallace-Crabbe tells us that he’s been reading Ulysses and War and Peace (‘alternately’) as he travels to Oxford. Then, out of the blue, he adds: ‘Meanwhile, Ken Gelder has written the most appalling attack on literature, and especially on the concept of style, in the latest Overland. His anti-aesthetic position is, of course, indistinguishable from that of John Howard and the right-wing philistines. It has been so for a long time: the right and the far-left in materialist cahoots.’ My Overland essay was a criticism of Tory literary tastes and positions in Australia, including the disdain some writers have for readerships. Only a blinkered literary snob could construe this as an ‘attack on literature’. I found Wallace-Crabbe’s insulting remarks utterly perplexing. For example, what does he mean by ‘the concept of style’? Whose concept? I have no idea. What does he mean by ‘anti-aesthetic’? The term used to be used by postmodernists, but he also attributes it to John Howard – a point which seems to fly in the face of reality.

Swept away

Dear Editor,

I was among the many swept away by Elisabeth Holdsworth’s essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ (February 2007). From the moment she confided, ‘I have returned to the Netherlands to have a specific conversation with the past’, I became an intent listener, almost an inter-loper, following this haunted child’s return after decades away, back to her heritage, Zeeland – ‘The land of my nightmares’.

I do not know the stark Calvinist low country of dunes and ‘massive dykes’, though I flew over it often enough at night. I followed the returning child entranced and often shocked: the fearful Nazi reprisals, the deliberate flooding of the hard-won lands; brother executing brother; the unofficial motto of the province even: ‘never forgive, never forget.’