Hidden Author
The puzzle of PhDs
Dear Editor,
It’s pretty clear that historians can’t win, especially if they have the audacity to use a doctoral thesis as the basis for a book. As I read Aviva Tuffield’s puzzling review (ABR, December 2003/January 2004) of Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, and Wright’s understandably puzzled response (ABR, February 2004), I was reminded of a debate that occu ... (read more)
Latent violence
Dear Editor,
In reviewing my biography of Clifton Pugh, Brenda Niall, a distinguished biographer herself, arrives at this puzzling last sentence: ‘Whether or not Morrison intended it … the Clifton Pugh of these pages emerges more as opportunist than true believer’ (ABR, February 2010). She states earlier that it surprises her that a large number of women were attracted to P ... (read more)
Bauman’s point of departure
Dear Editor,
Boris Frankel bursts in through open doors. He gives Zygmunt Bauman and me stick for speaking our truths (ABR, October 2001). Viewed in its own terms, what remains of the Left in Australia is in a bad way because it has failed (1) to clarify its ethics, norms and values and (2) to develop alternative visions and policies upon them; because (3) there is ... (read more)
The Frank Hardy I Knew
Dear Editor,
Frank Hardy was a larrikin. It was probably one of his most endearing qualities, but he did tell me once that his membership of the Australian Communist Party enabled him to become something more than a larrikin. He didn’t always pay his debts, except for the one big debt and the only one worth remembering: the debt of living, to the end, a writer’s life. ... (read more)
From Denis Altman
Dear Editor,
I suspect I’m the ‘(male) baby boomer academic who should have known better’ referred to by Delia Falconer in her piece in the Gangland symposium (ABR, November 1997). I have an unfortunately hazy memory of the event, but I certainly don’t assume a common age and education makes for ‘the same ideological viewpoint’: if it did I would have far more in co ... (read more)
From Gerard Hayes
Dear Editor, If Mark Davis had wanted to concoct a parody of babyboomer fogeyism, he could hardly have done better than Peter Craven’s review of Gangland. Opening with a quotation from Anthony Powell and doing his best to parrot the Powellian tone of bored hauteur, Craven details the shortcomings of Davis’s age: not young – in fact a ‘late bloomer’ – but still not ol ... (read more)
The missing five years
Dear Editor,
Kerryn Goldsworthy’s valuable piece on the early years of ABR (‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’, ABR, April 2003), giving details of Australian Book Review under Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton from 1961 to 1973, does not mention what caused its disappearance from 1973 to 1978, when John McLaren and the National Book Council revived it. ... (read more)
From Paolo Bartoloni
Dear Editor,
As the convenor of the conference ‘The Public, the Intellectuals and the Public Intellectual’ (La Trobe University, May 1996), and as co-editor of the collection of essays, Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory and Practice, I have followed the discussion generated by the publication of Mark Davis’s book Gangland with great interest. Besides ... (read more)
Dear Editor,
It has always been my understanding that the National Book Council’s principal function is the promotion of Australian books.
Therefore I cannot understand why the Council has allowed the publication of a review in its Australian Book Review journal which calls for the public destruction of a book. To quote from Meredith Sorensen’s review (ABR, October 1994, p.67):
take one Big ... (read more)