Review

My one-woman show A Star Is Torn was a sung catalogue of the great women singers who had ‘taught’ me via their recordings. Having assembled a list of twelve, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday among them, I realised that they had all died young. The original draft also included a bunch of survivors, including Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. My assessment of Ella was based on scant information. When I premièred that show in 1979, she was in her sixties and still touring the world at a phenomenal pace. The rest was largely mythology. Judith Tick’s mammoth biography is authoritative enough to make me believe I now have something much closer to the truth.

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

In the introduction to Troubled Minds, authors Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam outline the territory they will cover, indicating that they are experts in psychology, psychiatry, and mental illness, with more than eighty years’ experience between them. They are wary of quick fixes (How to… books) and are also wary of professionals publishing in their own fields (potentially biased expertise). Fittingly, they see mental health and mental illness as complex. They have perceived a reader who is looking for a well-written, easy-to-comprehend book that spans conceptual diversity yet concentrates on ‘understanding’ both the ‘emotional and intellectual’ aspects of mental health and illness; one that emphasises contribution from the humanities as well as from science. They hope the book will assist those who first encounter people seeking mental health help (primary practitioners, counsellors, and others). Indeed, Troubled Minds is wonderfully written, highly readable and a tour de force from authors who have seamlessly brought their voices together.

In the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’.

The concept of Woven, a Fair Trade project from Red Room Poetry, seems simple but the reality is complex: one local First Nations poet is paired with another First Nations poet from another continent, and together they create a poem. This is an ambitious undertaking for the poets themselves and especially for the editor, Māori poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu, who should be commended for stewarding this project through the last few tumultuous years. The resulting book is a gorgeous tapestry of weavings from some fine poets.

In the famous opening sequence of the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, an RAF pilot, flying his burning Lancaster bomber over the English Channel, talks with a radio operator at a nearby English base. Apparently facing certain death, the pilot quotes Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, a poem allegedly written just before its author’s execution in 1618. ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet, / My staff of faith to walk upon,’ the pilot recites, amid the roar of his stricken aircraft.

The final poem of this superb collection, ‘The Darkness’, identifies a primal scene. The young protagonist is a nascent poet, watching over the embers of a desert fire in early morning, awaiting the breath of a Pentecostal wind to rekindle the flames. It is a parable which emblematises the difficult task of transformation that is central to poetry itself: the boy contends with ‘fragments / that will not alchemise to song / that yield not / to the metaphrast’.

In the last decade, Stuart Kells has become one of Australia’s most versatile and fecund non-fiction writers, responsible for a variety of diverting histories, of enterprises, institutions, and ideas. His thoroughly readable The Library: A catalogue of wonders (2017) was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Award; his Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature (2018) felt rather more padded, if not unenjoyably so. Books about Argyle Diamonds (2021) and Melbourne University Publishing (2023) have been welcome. I imagine him in a medieval artisanal workshop, a kind of booksmith studiously occupied in multiple, simultaneous pursuits.

This book is orthodox in its range (from the foundation of Rome to the Covid pandemic), organised into specific historical periods (Renaissance, Illuminismo, Risorgimento), and traditional in telling history largely through eminent biographies and great historical events.