Commentary
I met Patrick White first in 1965. Reduced to 1.9s.6d, he was lying, in an American edition of Riders in the Chariot, on a sale table at Finney Isles department store in Brisbane. So much has changed. Today, we would talk of remainders; the shop has been taken over by David Jones which has in turn been taken over by Adelaide Steamship which later bought up Grace Bros; prices are now given in dollar and cents.
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Writers and readers, it seems to me, are often driven by a need to confess. Everything. Not just sins. But the lot. To confess in the original secular sense of this word; to utter, to declare (ourselves, that is), to disclose and uncover what lies hidden within us. If I’d not been a writer, I used to think I’d like to have been an archaeologist. It’s only recently I’ve located the connection between writing fiction and archaeology. Historians and biographers are probably just as confessional in their work as writers of declared fictions. But they are undoubtedly able to more easily disguise this because they are accountable to the objective – to outcrops of unrelocatable facts along the way, that is.
... (read more)The presence of the Irish ambassador and the muscatel was accounted for by the first theme of the week, which was that of W.B. Yeats and his influence. It is not surprising that a great many Celtic accents could be heard off stage as well as on. Indeed, the previous night saw a private dinner held by the W.B. Yeats Society of W.A. (one of only four Yeats societies in the world) whose only club rule seemed to be that some of Yeats’s poems should be read and suitably appreciated.
... (read more)A slightly unconventional 1950s upbringing – I was nourished on Russia’s virtues as well as Weeties – may be responsible for my inability to believe in that pandemic, the tall poppy syndrome; instead I’ve always seen the naming of it as just one more jaunt down that jingoistic path which supposedly leads to the discovery of a definition of Australian identity – surely one of the dreariest literary pursuits known to person. But having popped my head up over the parapet a few times in the last few weeks, and having attracted an absolute fusillade of complaint, I was thinking seriously about changing my tune.
... (read more)First up, best dressed is a warning for flatmates where the laggard must take comfort from the prospect that ‘An overcoat covers a multitude of sins’.
... (read more)Just one of the interesting things I found out from reading Tom Shapcott’s The Literature Board: A Brief History (reviewed by Evan Williams in the April ABR) was that I appeared to be just about the only person in Australia who’d never received a Lit. Board grant. Well, me and Sasha Soldatow, who’s a minor celebrity because of Private – Do Not Open (Penguin $8.95 pb) but much more famous for never having received a grant in over a decade’s application. One year he even included a naked photo – of himself – with the standard form. That only seemed to contribute to his perfect score: twelve out of twelve knock backs. And that’s just one thing you won’t find in Tom Shapcott’s book, teeming though it is with statistics for every occasion.
... (read more)What am I, as a self-employed, middle-aged, male with several generations of Celtic forebears supposed to celebrate in 1988?
... (read more)David Ireland has been writing for us nigh on twenty years now and this, his ninth novel, more than slightly autobiographical one suspects, allows a perspective on his corpus in all the ambiguity of the term.
... (read more)Blair, it has been suggested to me, is a roman a clef. I can't pretend to have the key, but that doesn’t matter, in the long run. Who remembers the characters upon whom Lucky Jim was based? Who cares? Blair is an amusing novel about English academics stationed in Australia in the past twenty years. Perhaps there really are such characters – anxious readers of the Times Literary Supplement, riders of red Harrods’ bicycles, exiles in a far country, eccentric experts in arcane areas of Eng Lit who carry toothbrushes in their pockets against the chance of intimate contact with alluring undergraduates. It might have been so, some twenty or thirty years past in the major universities, and it probably is so in the far-flung provincial colleges and universities. But John Scott’s novel focuses, to my mind, perhaps too much on these ratbag types.
... (read more)1 When you go to the Salamanca Festival in Hobart remember to take a suitcase of factory-made clothing and household items. The migration of weavers, potters, glassblowers, and carvers down to Tasmania means that the people down there have only craft-made things to wear and to eat with and will kill to get their hands on a factory-made, perfectly symmetrical, cup and saucer. You can do some good deals in polyester clothing — most Tasmanians arc suffering from goats’ wool and shaggy weave clothing. With wine say, ‘I hear you are making a few decent whites now.’ But don’t necessarily order them. Refer to the ‘mainland’ or to ‘the Big Island’, not to ‘Australia’. Remember to refer to the importance of Island Perspective in Australian writing. Don’t make jokes about i*c**t. Talk about the quality of the light in Hobart.
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