Brandl & Schlesinger

It is time to raise our glasses: Australia’s oldest literary magazine is now a sprightly septuagenarian. The latest number of Southerly marks the occasion by encasing itself in what appears to be a reproduction of one of its covers from the middle of the last century, complete with foxing and a pencil notation of its pre-decimal price. This retro jacket should serve as a reminder of the journal’s longevity. It arrived on the scene at a time that was hardly auspicious for any new literary venture – Hitler invaded Poland the same month. Thankfully, Southerly outlasted the Third Reich (and a few other empires, too).

The Nugan Hand merchant bank was the nexus of one of the most significant criminal conspiracies in Australian history. Established in Sydney in 1973, Nugan Hand was backed by the CIA in concert with domestic and international crime organisations. It acted as a front for a plethora of illegal activities, including gun-running, money laundering and tax fraud, most of which were ancillary to the main business: drugs, specifically heroin. Its legacy lives on in the heroin market that the bank helped to build and entrench.

'Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it,’ wrote Watkin Tench of his companions on the First Fleet. Governor Phillip’s 1786 Commission had instructed him to build castles. Fitting their vision of the new into the old, settlers named the rocky outcrop above Middle Harbour as ‘Edinburgh Castle’, below which, in 1905, Henry Willis built ‘Innisfallen’, one of many would-be castles strewn around the continent. The newcomers’ lament that the local flowers were scentless and the birds songless had its parallel in the regret that settler Australia would never support a literary culture because it lacked ruins

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

Gunther Grass, in his suave and controversial memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, 2007, trans. Michael Henry Heim), rehearses many of the modern autobiographer’s qualms about the biddability of memory. Grass, with his long history of attacking other Germans’ wartime activities while concealing his own service in the Tenth SS Armoured Division, has every incentive to question the memoirist’s primary tool. ‘When pestered with questions,’ Grass writes, ‘memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.’ Changing metaphors, Grass contends with memory’s caprices and slippages: ‘Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.’

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.

Love, family, hope, death and grief have always been among fiction’s chief concerns. The Gospel According to Luke and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, both second books from their authors, share many of these themes. The Gospel According to Luke adds faith, belief, religion and prayer; and Emily Maguire adroitly pulls off what would, in lesser hands, be a farce.

When Prince Hamlet cried ‘The play’s the thing’, he was about to use a performance of The Mousetrap to demonstrate a point central to his purpose: he intended to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Nearly 400 years later, British playwright David Hare endorsed and expanded Hamlet’s utilitarian approach, writing: ‘Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since the war, then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period … than by looking at any comparable documentary source.’

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.