Letters to the Editor
From Aldi Wimmer
Dear Editor,
This is the first time I am responding to something I read in ABR, and the reason is Ivor Indyk’s outrageous review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 (July ABR). Actually, it isn’t so much a review as a piece of character assassination. How Indyk, whose reviews are usually excellent, can fall into a ranting mode in which he totally loses sight of the texts that he should be evaluating, is beyond me. What can have possessed him? Envy that a younger man is an accomplished writer?
... (read more)Dear Editor,
I am flabbergasted at the savage, totally unjustified hatchet job that Richard Hall has done on Hugh Mackay in the National Library Voices Essay (ABR, Feb/March 1996). Is the National Library now paying for character assassination?
I know both Hugh Mackay and Richard Hall. I think that the Pot should always think carefully before calling the Pan sooty-arse. If Mr Mackay looks like ‘a possum thinking about an apple’, the curmudgeonly Mr Hall looks a bit like the possum’s bum.
... (read more)From 1994 two letters to the editor published now for the first time ... The first letter, from Helen Demidenko, was offered for publication; the second, from B. Wongar author of Roki was marked ‘not for publication’.
... (read more)From Paul Salzman
Dear Editor,
It is a shame that allegations of plagiarism in The Hand That Signed The Paper were trivialised into questions of literary echoes that would certainly not have worried any serious member of that curious entity, the literary community. As someone deeply troubled by the anti-Semitism manifested in the novel, I have been interested to know where the Ukrainian material that ‘Demidenko’ defended as family history may have come from. Perhaps we will never know, but now it seems that the plagiarism issue was really something of a red herring, distracting attention from what was most disturbing about the novel and its attendant prizes. I cannot see that ‘postmodemism’, under any definition, could be blamed for this situation, given that the Miles Franklin judgment is based, I believe, on a bankrupt and outmoded humanism that sees abstract moral truth in literary works without having any sophisticated regard for politics or history.
... (read more)
Dear Editor,
Dr Jenna Mead claims, among other things in her most recent attempt to discredit The First Stone, that I have ‘invented dialogue’ and written ‘hypothetical meetings with imaginary characters’. All the conversations and encounters in the book are documented in detailed, scrupulous notes. This includes my account of a telephone conversation between Dr Mead and me, which she would perhaps prefer to think of as a figment of my ‘merciless imagination. If only Dr Mead were an imaginary character – but it would strain the ingenuity of a better writer than I am, to have dreamt her up.
Helen Garner, Elizabeth Bay NSW
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Dear Editor,
How disappointing your cover feature on The First Stone turned out to be. I feel very let down by the most mediocre review I’ve read on this most talked-about work. Your former Editor, Rosemary Sorensen, wrote a superb, thought-provoking piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. I expected the review in ABR to be of similar quality.
Brian White, Elwood, Vic.
(Ed’s reply: You might be interested to know that the Sydney Morning Herald chose to republish a shortened version of Cassandra Pybus’s review of The First Stone, on Wednesday 10 May, acknowledging it was first published in ABR.)
... (read more)Dear Editor,
Congratulations to Fiona Capp for her excellent essay in the Feb/March ABR on journalism and fiction. Parts of it have etched themselves in my memory. It’s great to see work that is not only well written and structured but is also about something that matters.
It’s a pity that ‘Microstories’ is no more. It’s been a showcase of fresh names and approaches, one not offered elsewhere. ‘That Was Jeff’ by Michael McGirr, for example, stands out as an example of tight, powerful fiction. We can find previews of longer pieces by established writers in other journals but if we must have them, why not continue microstories in every second issue?
... (read more)Dear Editor,
In a generous review of my recently published novel, A Grain of Truth (Penguin), Andrew Peek mentioned an article I wrote for ABR two years ago, in which I suggested that the hostility of critics and reviewers in this country to novels dealing with current social issues threatens to suppress political fiction in general and the contemporary novel of ideas in particular.
... (read more)Letters to the Editor - May 1993
Dear Editor,
I was encouraged and shamed by your account of Mabel Edmund’s comments about violence against women. You are so right, even if you understate it a bit, in saying ‘if we don’t get the gender stuff right, then we’ll never get any of it right’. Bodo Kirchhoff’s smug sexist fantasy about finding a Filipina beauty in the monastery kitchen ...
Dear Editor,
Ron Pretty’s review of Jane Interlinear & Other Poems raises a few lexical points with me. One is my spelling of ‘til’ for ‘till’. While I recognise that the dictionaries are unanimous, what I see and hear is a straightforward and widespread contraction of ‘until’, with neither the suggestion of agriculture (till) nor the redundant apostrophe (‘til) which Stephen Murray-Smith forbids in Right Words. Today’s solecism is tomorrow’s orthodoxy.
... (read more)