Commentary

What am I, as a self-employed, middle-aged, male with several generations of Celtic forebears supposed to celebrate in 1988?

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.

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.

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.

Some institutions thrive on the blank signification of initials. As with NATO, ACT or indeed ACTU. Cultural items too can have the same austere vitality. OED is an English nonword of high authority (though also the Welsh for ‘age’). Like the American military, the new Australian bureaucracy is much enamoured of dehumanised acronyms and academic life bristles with technical crassness from CTEC to CRASTE.

The winners of the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature, judged by Margaret Whitlam, John Bryson and D. J. O’Hearn, are Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets and Robert Drewe’s Fortune. Here is the Judges’ Report.

Contemporary Australian literature was among the less obscure topics discussed at the recent Modern Language Association convention held in New York. About 15,000 delegates came to the bazaar, some looking for jobs or friends, others attending a boggling array of literary discussions on bat fantasy in Dickens, the future of East European nature poetry and the shape of language in Thea Astley’s work. This last one was a fine lecture given by Robert Ross, tireless president of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies, which will hold its own conference in March at Penn State University. Marcia Allentuck gave a lively talk about Australian Yiddish literature – in particular Herz Bergner’s Light and Shadows, which portrayed the bitter angst of the immigrant almost thirty years before the current wave of immigrant writing.

I have never flown first class on Qantas; I’d love to, but somehow I don’t think I ever will. But next time you fly first class on a Qantas 747, take a look at the inflight library and you might be surprised to find copies of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s Strong Man from Piraeus; Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino; Evan Green’s Alice to Nowhere; Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds; or Kate Grenville’s Lillian’s Story.

This book is about the role played by ministerial staff in Australian federal government. It is particularly concerned with the potential influence on policy making that this group may have through their capacity to advise ministers. It is, then, about the nature of the relations between personal advisers and their principals – a general issue that can be explored through history, and in countries other than Australia (see chapter 2). From the outset, however, it is important to differentiate between advice to ministers and advice to government, and the term ‘adviser’ does not sufficiently alert us to that differentiation. Indeed, the term ‘adviser’ is traditionally used to signify public servants, who are formally charged with the responsibility of advice to government. I have therefore elected to borrow the term ‘minder’, a term that is creeping into journalism and into the vernacular to refer to a member of a minister’s staff. We can thus distinguish at once between minders (personal advisers) and mandarins (public servants).