Matilda

Camilla Nelson CROOKED Random House, 258 pp. Source: review copy Review by Bernadette Gooden

Set in the late 60's in Sydney, Crooked tells the story of the criminal underworld at that time, and the network of corrupt police and politicians that supported it and used it to gain power and influence.

Using the election of the Askin Government as a backdrop the era is imaginatively reconstructed by Camilla Nelson, who meshes real historical figures and fictional characters into an ultimately interesting story, although I found it a bit slow going at the beginning. It takes a little time to work out who everybody is, not being familiar with the real criminal characters portrayed.

The seedy back alleys of Kings Cross and Darlinghurst are moodily evoked and peopled with prostitutes, gangsters and bent coppers, the dirtiest copper of them all being Senior Sergeant Reginald Tanner.
Tanner recruits a young detective, Gus Finlay, and it is assumed that he will do as he is told and keep his mouth shut. However, as he takes part in investigations into brutal gangland murders, Gus begins to put two and two together, and he must make a choice about what he must do.

Nelson recreates the feeling of the 60's in Australia admirably. The slang, the fashions, the interiors give a racy edge to the narrative. There is a real feeling that you are there. She also describes the murders and violence well, without being gratuitous. The gangsters and their women are particularly well drawn. I was a child at the time, but I can remember the cars and the clothing and many of the cultural references. She really brings this back well with her great descriptive writing.

It's interesting to contrast this story with the recent TV series "Underbelly". The motivation for killing each other is so similar, even though the events are separated by many decades.

I do think that this story has been kept very tight and could have been expanded a little and the characters fleshed out a little more. For example, we are introduced to Agostini, who seems to know what is really going on, but we know nothing about him or why he hasn't been dealt with. I think we could have had a little more back-story on some of the gangsters and their women also. Maybe there could have been a little more insight into the motivation of the corrupt police officers as well.

As Gus pieces together what we already know through hindsight, and a black book is discovered that names names, the story rushes towards its shocking conclusion. Camilla Nelson knows her stuff.

Matt writes the Happy Antipodean weblog out of Sydney, and has been known to post comments on this weblog from time to time. He doesn't restrict himself to one genre or another; recent posts have covered Chinese pornography, readings from Paradise Lost, and works by Freud and Orwell. He's idiosyscratic and opinionated - the way all good bloggers should be. You don't have to agree with all of it, and Matt probably wouldn't like it if you did.

1. How would you describe your weblog to someone who wasn't at all sure what this blogging business is about?

Not all bloggers are the same. Which is a blessing because otherwise the web would be a boring place.

Not all bloggers are different. God knows there are enough geniuses in the world. But there are definitely too many careful bloggers.

Good luck to them, I say.

My blog started at a time of calm. It started at the same time as postgraduate study and continued past the award of my masters.

I love to criticise. I love to praise.

At the time I thought it would be fun to participate in a world of ideas. It seemed that the paradigm of the editorial god and the adoring addicts could be broken like a sappy twig.

But sometimes it just bends. Full participation in the public sphere demands active participants.

I mostly blog about books. After reading one I sit down at the keyboard and tap out a post.

It's part of the reading process now. I certainly express an opinion but I take pride in always retailing in each book's merits.

People are lazy and companies exploit the stickiness of predictability. The most interesting blogs are not necessarily the most popular.

Publishers quickly understood this and most bloggers can relish the opportunity to do nothing else. Greed is an uneasy housemate in the mind's mansion, though - to be sure - not all can afford a residence as ample as Strawberry Field.

Blogging is mainly about writing. Don't blog if you're not into writing. Most important - what I go for - is being happy with your own results.

The apt phrase, the concision of afterthought, the dynamics generated by dissimilar posts on consecutive days - these are my pleasures.

A torment is the lack of a spell checker in the Blogger interface. I often repost a dozen times in order to complete a single day's post. Two hundred words can easily take an hour to get up.

I stick to opinion - a baseline requirement. Since everyone has one, you'd say anyone can blog.

Writing is another thing entirely, however. Some have no aptitude, others less interest. Those in the latter category usually give up.

Those with interest but little aptitude can improve over time. But put simply: if you don't enjoy writing, don't blog. Build a vegie patch on the nature strip. Buy some chickens and throw up a coop on the veranda.

Esse quam videri.

2. Have there been any major changes in your weblog's direction, theme or subject since you started?

My first post was some rubbish but I soon moved into book reviews and I've stayed there since. I avoid a system and follow my reading, which is eclectic.

I have more Australian books as a percentage of the total than I did a year ago.

This choice is a sign of a contrary nature and not a penance or even a hobbyhorse. Admittedly some comments I made about being non partisan helped in questioning a lack of Oz lit knowledge.

I now have more Australian books - by my LibraryThing account ("Antipodean") - than American ones. I still have more British ones but this is an index of maturity.

Of course, you could say that ours - also - began in the late Renaissance. A book by Joseph Furphy is as thickly studded with quotes from Cowper and Scott as a book by George Eliot.

Australian literature is somewhat less than adequately lauded. A great many of 'our' writers are ignored by the countrymen and -women.

This is a shame. Miles Franklin is as great a writer as Somerset Maugham or Henry James. Native conservatism made her modify her talent and write fairly conventional stories.

She may be less flamboyant, but this is a stamp of the nation rather than an indication of a soft mind or a limp will.

She is as great a writer but not as great a stylist, an innovator. But peer into the water, past the pond's calm surface, and you see a welter of life.

Xenophobia is an issue with dead Australian writers. The stain of native anti-Semitism - just one, relatively visible, aspect of a still inhering xenophobia - cannot be removed until its extent is realised.

Exposure to the blogging world has changed my reading habits.

3. Do you have more books in your house than you can possibly read? If so, why?

Yes. I love books and always have. Well, not always. I started reading for pleasure quite late - at about 12 years of age.

4. If there were three things you'd like to include in your weblog if you had more time/money, what would they be?

Better writing. It takes time to write small and, unfortunately, I've only got so many hours in the day. I work full time and I need time just to fuck around a bit, even before blogging.

A certain slackness around the edges of a blog post is a virtue.

5. How would you eat an elephant?

I'd first shoot it like my grandfather's brothers did. He left Africa in his twenties and settled in Melbourne. A year later - in 1925 - he married Phyllis Elsie Pearl Caldecott.

My maternal grandmother loved elephants. She filled a display case made for our Sydney house, into which she had moved after abandoning her husband to his twin pleasures: the Carlton Football Club and a number of other - no doubt younger - women.

When granny died I was overseas but I returned briefly for the funeral. I wept because it was granny's bed we resorted to when, as children, we had nightmares.

Karen Chisholm runs the AustCrime Fiction weblog, which covers a staggering amount of crime fiction - both local and overseas. I doubt there is a local crime fiction release that she doesn't read and review, or at least mention. If you're at all interested in Australian crime writing then you should be reading this weblog.

1. How would you describe your weblog to someone who wasn't at all sure what this blogging business is about?

It's a light amusement. I guess some people would think of a blog as a conceit, publicising your opinions on books constantly. AustCrime started out with the grand aim of providing a database of books, then it expanded to include reviews, chats, all sorts of things in one place. It really started out as a place to accumulate the ramblings and notes from post-it notes, emails, notebooks and whatever else I had spread around the place. It's interesting for me to look back and see what I have been reading, how I've reacted to a book or a series and whether that initial reaction holds in the event that I reread a book (and I do reread - not as often as I once did, but I do). Of course, there is always the sneaking suspicion that the site justifies my obsession with books of course, but I really don't want a justification. I've always been a book accumulator - since my first Agatha Christie books when I was a child.

2. Have there been any major changes in your weblog's direction, theme or subject since you started?

Not really - a long time ago I gave up pretending that I want to read much "literary fiction". I prefer crime fiction stylings - interesting, engaging books with plots and characters. Whilst I've always read an enormous number of books (I was one of those kids with the torch under the blankets of a night), I've been called more and more to crime fiction over the years. The blog does cover the occasional True Crime book (local only), as I sometimes like to balance fiction with reality, but mostly its crime and thriller fiction.

3. Do you have more books in your house than you can possibly read? If so, why?

Of course - doesn't everybody? I have a profound fear that publishers will stop producing books if I stop accumulating them. There's also the "saving for my retirement" argument. But really - pick any reason you like - being surrounded by the years of accumulated books - read and to be read - makes me happy.

4. If there were three things you'd like to include in your weblog if you had more time/money, what would they be?

I'd like to be publishing writers work - directly on the website - subscription or free or any combination, published or unpublished authors - local only, as a showcase of the absolutely terrific work that's going on out there.

5. How would you eat an elephant?

With a steak knife, a fork, and a serviette. Table manners are very important.

John A. Flanagn is best known for his series of "Ranger's Apprentice" books for children. He has now turned his hand to adult crime novels and was interviewed recently by Leonie Jordan on the "Boomerang Books" weblog.

You are best-known for your "Ranger's Apprentice" children's fantasy series. What prompted you to branch out into adult crime and what appeals to you most about this genre?

I've always chosen to write the sort of books I enjoy reading. Typically, over the years, this has meant fantasy and crime fiction. And Storm Peak isn't a branching out. In fact, I was developing it at the same time I was working on the "Rangers" series. It's just that "Rangers" found a place in the market first. As to the crime genre, I'm more concerned with character interaction against a crime and/or action background than in creating a "whodunnit?" type of book. There's obviously a mystery to be solved in Storm Peak but personally, I think it's secondary to the action and the interaction of the main characters.

Your prose style in Storm Peak is at times reminiscent of "hardboiled" crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: laconic, wry, punctuated by terse, deadpan remarks. Which authors were you most influenced by when writing the novel?

Thank you for the reference to Raymond Chandler. He was one of my earliest influences and I loved his style. Then I followed the English author Gavin Lyall, who had a wonderfully wry style in his earlier novels. Since then, I've loved the work of Ed McBain -- the master of dialogue, Michael Connelly, Nelson de Mille and James Lee Burke. All of these writers excel in character-driven stories. They all create characters the reader cares about.

Kerrie Smith runs the Mysteries in Paradise weblog, and mysteries are what she reads. But you'll also find her posting about her parents wedding anniversary dinner, and anything else that seems to fit. She lives in Adelaide and started her weblog in January 2008.

1. How would you describe your weblog to someone who wasn't at all sure what this blogging business is about?

I began my blog as the result of a New Year's resolution. I had been writing a blog for my work place for over eighteen months and had been thinking of creating one where I could post my book reviews. So that's what MYSTERIES IN PARADISE basically aims to do. It talks about crime fiction, books that I've read, and snippets of information I come across. I see my blog as a chance to share with others my opinions about what I read, but also as the beginning of a conversation with the wider world about crime fiction. Blogging also gives me a chance to clarify my ideas about what I've read.

2. Have there been any major changes in your weblog's direction, theme or subject since you started?

I've stuck pretty well to the original purpose of my blog. I've played around a lot with various gadgets, tried to make sure it loads pretty quickly, and that people find lots to interest them. I have joined one or two "challenges" such as Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books and the Sunday Salon. I'm never really at a loss for things to write, and would even go as far as to say that writing every day has become almost an addiction.

3. Do you have more books in your house than you can possibly read? If so, why?

I can't be trusted in a bookshop or a library. Homeless books simply leap off the shelves and beg to be taken away. And then there are book sales, where perfectly good titles can be bought for 50 cents each. How can I resist? I also review books for Random House Australia, and then there are the authors and agents who also send me books to review. And I think I'm slowing down as a reader. I manage about 2 books a week, but there must be another hundred vying for my attention. I think the only solution is a desert island for a year!

4. If there were three things you'd like to include in your weblog if you had more time/money, what would they be?

It is probably good that I don't have more time at my disposal. I'd just write more posts. I can't think of anything I'd spend my money on. All the things I use on my blog are free-to-use. I would like to be able give more books away, but at present postal rates are a prohibitive, so that's probably something I'd be happy to spend money on.

Sorry, I just realised you said 3 things. I've read somewhere that you should get your own domain name. Perhaps that would be something I could spend money on. But I'm not convinced.

5. How would you eat an elephant?

Perhaps the only way to eat an elephant is as a birthday cake. The real thing would really be as tough as old boots, and rather too large for those of us who watch our weight.

Review of The Fat Man in History

"Aussie Reads" weblog: "Overall, these stories are a little odd (some are just downright weird) but they each have an important message to impart. Most importantly they are all enjoyable to read."

Review of Wrong About Japan

Kelly McClintock on "Student Travel Blog": "The book is an engaging mix of observations, history, anecdotes, and description in which the author comes to re-examine his own preconceived ideas about Japan. Peter Carey exposes a startlingly modern view of Japan while pursuing his son's love of anime and manga -- Japanese comic books. Carey reveals a country where the past is becoming as forgotten as the museums that house it."

Other

Contemporary Australian composer, Brett Dean, is writing an opera based on Carey's first novel Bliss. A selection of songs from that piece, titled "Songs of Joy", premiered in Liverpool, UK, recently. "The Times" reports that the complete work will debut in 2010. Doesn't say where, however.

Carey appeared on a panel, at the New Yorker Festival, along with Hari Kunzru, and Gary Shteyngart, on the subject of "Outlaws."

Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go, discusses his literary influences: "The author I admire most is Peter Carey, who I think is amazing, particularly in how his books seem to be just a smaller slice of a larger imagined world. I love that, the way you can pick up all kinds of richness in his books just by inference, so I'm huge fan of that."

Ross Raisin is a bit of a fan as well.

Milk and Honey by Elizabeth Jolley, 1984
(Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1984 edition)
Cover photograph by Roger Garwood
This novel won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 1985.

Back in March this year, Damien Gay, Karen Chisholm and I published a number of short interviews with Australian crime writers. [See this post for the full list.] This followed on from a couple of similar exercises involving Australian sf and fantasy writers undertaken by Ben Peek, and others, over the previous few years.

This "Snapshot", as it was called, aimed to introduce crime writers to our readers that they may not have been aware of. It seemed to work okay, if our feedback was anything to go on.

Not being one to let a good idea lie for too long I thought it might be time to do something along the same lines again, but this time with Australian bloggers; especially those who ran weblogs dealing with literature in a major way. I wasn't worried what field of literature these litbloggers covered, just so long as they showed a liking for books, authors, and things to do with the publishing world.

So over the past month or so I've been getting in contact with these webloggers, sending off the same set of questions to each of them and generally cajoling them into taking part. Some have been extremely busy and have taken a little while to get back to me, and others have turned around their answers in about the time it took me to open a bottle and pour myself a decent glass of red.

I've been impressed by, and grateful to, all of them, and as I now have the bulk of the answers back I intend to start publishing them as of tomorrow. One a day, with Sundays off, should see us most of the way through December before I'm finished.

I hope you find some interesting responses here, and that those responses prompt you to check out the relevant weblogs. There really is a lot of talent out there.

Jill Rose, author of Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, the new biography of the author that took some 26 years to finish, is interviewed in "The Courier-Mail" by Christopher Bantick.

After the publication of My Brilliant Career in 1901, Franklin was compared in the Glasgow Herald with the Brontes. She left Australia in 1906 for America with several unpublished works in her luggage. She was a feminist and for a decade she worked for the women's labour movement in Chicago. For Roe, Franklin's independence and feminism underscored something else.

"What I find most admirable about her is her resilience. She just kept going. Writing is a disease and she did this while being fiercely independent. She was in the foreground of the first wave of feminism and she didn't take a step back as a person in anything.

"She left Australia for a long time and she did this for literary reasons. Miles wanted to see how she would be regarded abroad. She had the belief that she'd pull through but, even so, she took a risk leaving Australia and she wondered if she had made the right choices."

Review of Waiting for the Barbarians

Zach Hitchcock on the "Floggin' and Bloggin'" weblog: "After reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a few weeks, one would generally not be extremely excited to explore yet another short colonization novel that takes place around the turn of the century; however, after only reading three chapters, I can honestly say I am surprised to find I thoroughly enjoy J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. Given the long, tedious, and often tangential narration of Conrad's novel and considering the fact the curriculum intends for us to compare the two books, I found myself not at all apprehensive about reading Coetzee's story and constantly procrastinating on the completion of the assignment. Yet, as I began reading, I honestly could not put it down. One of the first things that jumped out at me is simply the style in which Coetzee writes. Using prose, colloquial language and a vivid present tense, the style of the book's narration creates a very captivating discussion effect, as if the Magistrate is actually with you face-to-face, telling you his story."

Review of Life and Times of Michael K.

Michael Cheney, whose "The Mumpsimus" weblog is one of the best litblogs around, has been teaching Life and Times of Michael K. for his course on Outsiders, considers what appeals to him about Coetzee: "As I read Michael K. this time, I tried to think about what it is in Coetzee's work that so appeals to me. It's no individual quality, really, because there are people who have particular skills that exceed Coetzee's. There are many writers who are more eloquent, writers with more complex and evocative structures, writers of greater imagination...And then I realized that I was marking up my teaching copy of Michael K. as if I were marking up a poem. I looked, then, at my teaching copy of Disgrace, from when I used it in a class a few years ago. The same thing. Lots of circled words, lots of 'cf.'s referring me to words and phrases in other parts of the book. Lots of sounds building on sounds, rhythms on rhythms in a way that isn't particularly meaningful in itself, but that contributes to an overall tone-structure, a scaffold of utterance to hold up the shifting meanings of the story and characters."

Review of Disgrace

The "Among the Tumbled Heap" weblog ponders "The Tao of Coetzee": "Against the sometimes brutal backdrop of rural South Africa, Coetzee's story illumines the complexities of disgrace and what it means to be disgraced, spiraling deeper and deeper into both our personal and corporate conceptions of guilt and justice...There is no dualism for Coetzee. An act of 'disgrace' is simultaneously [an] act of 'redemption.'..There is nothing but dualism for Coetzee. There is disgrace and redemption. There is justice and injustice. Good and evil."

Review of Diary of a Bad Year

"Irish Times": "This is a novel for our times in its content and in the exacting way it may be read -- the essays first or in parallel? It ranges in tone from news-stand fiction to Joyce's artistic distance of a writer sitting on a cloud. It's full of surprises but not for the slothful."

Article by Coetzee

Coetzee reviews David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair by Irìne Nímirovsky, for "The New York Review of Books": "The problem for Nímirovsky as a budding writer in the 1920s was that aside from her facility in the French language, the capital she commanded on the French literary market consisted in a corpus of experience that branded her as foreign: daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia, pogroms and Cossack raids, the Revolution and the Civil War, plus to a lesser extent the shady world of international finance. In the course of her career she would thus alternate, according to her sense of the temper of the times, between two authorial selves, one pur sang French, one exotic. As a French authoress she would compose books about 'real' French families written with an irreproachably French sensibility, books with no whiff of foreignness about them. The French self took over entirely after 1940, as publishers became more and more nervous about the presence of Jewish writers on their lists."

The Nobel Prize

Apparently Coetzee had two very different reactions to winning the prize.

Doris Lessing is friends with Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer and so was forewarned about what to expect in her Nobel year.

Other

Coetzee was recently a member of the jury for the Estoril film festival in Portugal.

The world has had enough of bards who wish that they were dead,
'Tis time the people passed a law to knock 'em on the head,
For 'twould be lovely if their friends could grant the rest they crave --
Those bards of `tears' and `vanished hopes', those poets of the grave.
They say that life's an awful thing, and full of care and gloom,
They talk of peace and restfulness connected with the tomb.

They say that man is made of dirt, and die, of course, he must;
But, all the same, a man is made of pretty solid dust.
There is a thing that they forget, so let it here be writ,
That some are made of common mud, and some are made of GRIT;
Some try to help the world along while others fret and fume
And wish that they were slumbering in the silence of the tomb.

'Twixt mother's arms and coffin-gear a man has work to do!
And if he does his very best he mostly worries through,
And while there is a wrong to right, and while the world goes round,
An honest man alive is worth a million underground.
And yet, as long as sheoaks sigh and wattle-blossoms bloom,
The world shall hear the drivel of the poets of the tomb.

And though the graveyard poets long to vanish from the scene,
I notice that they mostly wish their resting-place kept green.
Now, were I rotting underground, I do not think I'd care
If wombats rooted on the mound or if the cows camped there;
And should I have some feelings left when I have gone before,
I think a ton of solid stone would hurt my feelings more.

Such wormy songs of mouldy joys can give me no delight;
I'll take my chances with the world, I'd rather live and fight.
Though Fortune laughs along my track, or wears her blackest frown,
I'll try to do the world some good before I tumble down.
Let's fight for things that ought to be, and try to make 'em boom;
We cannot help mankind when we are ashes in the tomb.

First published in The Bulletin, 8 October 1892

I'm not sure why the "New York Times" didn't include these children's books in with their earlier list of "Best Books of 2008". Nor, for that matter, why I missed them earlier. Anyway...

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury: "A witty and winsome look at babies around the world that has a toe-tapping refrain: the words sound easy and familiar, as though they have been handed down to children forever. And the story ends with a pitch-perfect moment: one little baby who is 'mine, all mine.'"

James Cowan, who won the Australian Literary Society's Gold Medal back in 1998 for his novel A Mapmaker's Dream, is interviewed in the "Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times".

James has returned to Australia with a swag of new manuscripts which he is now preparing to publish with planned visits to agents in America and the UK.

"The novel The Deposition was published in Argentina before I left. It's a novel set in Palestine 6 months after the death of Christ. It looks at the doubts in the mind of one of the Jewish high priests on the Sanhedrin that convicted Christ, and his doubts about the good sense of that decision.

I've written a book of four essays called Quartet on the nature of power. I've just finished my first modern novel in 20 years called The Shores of Philae, set in Egypt. It's a modern love story.

[snip]

James Cowan commented on his astonishing range of literary interests and at 66, where he is headed as a writer.

"I've never wanted to be pigeon-holed. I think I have come from that old tradition of literature where writers should not just be writing good novels or poetry, but should also try to take on big themes. For example, in my latest book (The Deposition) I am looking again at the story of those who survived the death of Christ. At first I thought, you can't write about Christ, it's been done to death. But, as a writer, you've got to take on some of the big subjects to see if there's anything new to say about them. So I am constantly looking for ways of re-expressing old virtualities; seeing whether or not you can extract new flecks of gold out of old stories. A writer can't afford to just sit there and write about realities as they are. He has to dig deeply into the great issues of all time.

The "New York Times" picks its best 100 books each year. The Australian books on their list this year include:

Fiction & Poetry

The Boat by Nam Le: "In the opening story of Le's first collection, a blocked writer succumbs to the easy temptations of 'ethnic lit.'"
Breath by Tim Winton: "Surfing offers this darkly exhilarating novel's protagonist an escape from a drab Australian town."
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "Coetzee follows the late career of one Señor C, who, like Coetzee himself, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia and the author of a novel titled Waiting for the Barbarians."
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey: "In this enthralling novel, a boy goes underground with a defiant hippie indulging her maternal urge."
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 by Clive James: "James, a staunch formalist, is firmly situated in the sociable, plain-spoken tradition that runs from Auden through Larkin."

Non-Fiction

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer: "With a polemicist's vision and a scholar's patience, Greer sets out to rescue Ann Hathaway from layers of biographical fantasy."

THE DISCERNMENT OF FRIENDS.

People do not easily remember dates. Though there are many admirers of the verse of Adam Lindsay Gordon, most of them, it is safe to say, cannot recall, and would like to be reminded that October 10 was the date of the poet's birthday, and that he was born in the year 1833. More would be able to tell the date of his death, June 24, 1870, for it is chiselled on the base of the pillar that marks his grave in the Brighton Cemetery, and thousands have visited that spot for the pilgrimages held annually without a break since 1910. From the inscription on the monument, admirably designed - no doubt the Yorickers, of whom Gordon had been one, saw to that - the visitors learn also the names of his three volumes - "Ashtaroth," "Sea Spray and Smoke Drift," and "Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes."

In spite of the large sale of the poetical works of Paterson, Lawson, and Dennis, "The Argus" referendum, taken about this time last year, served to show that Gordon was still what he became in the 'seventies, when the first collected edition of his poems was published, the most popular poet of Australia. Students of Australian literature, and they are increasing in number with the Commonwealth's development, have put into print a great deal about Gordon's life. In reading these biographical details, one cannot but pause at times to note by what rare good fortune incentives to the using of a talent that would other wise have remained dormant were supplied.

COMPOSING THE "GALLOPING RHYMES."

For considerable periods before 1853, in which year his father, a retired Indian army officer, engaged in teaching Hindustani in the Cheltenham College, England, packed him off to Australia, Gordon had lived at home, a ne'er-do-well, frequenting training stables and racecourses, and getting a mount when he could. Among his associates he was the "squire." When, in 1860, he wrote "How We Beat the Favourite," his memory took him back to those days.

"Aye, squire," said Stevens, "they back him at evens;
The race is all over bar shouting, they say."

"Here's a health to every sportsman, be he stableman or lord,
If his heart be true, I care not what his pocket may afford."

"My hopes are gone, my time is spent,
I little heed their loss,
And, if I cannot feel content,
I cannot feel remorse."

VERSES FROM PARLIAMENT.

By-and-by, however, marriage, a legacy of several thousands of pounds, and election to the South Australian Parliament produced more favourable conditions. From the Parliamentary library Gordon sent some sporting verses to "Bell's Life in Victoria" (August, 1865). The discerning editor, seeing in them a quality above that found ordinarily in such compositions, printed them, and wrote expressing the hope that more would follow. Ambition was aroused in the young poet, and during the next year or so "Hippodromania" and "Ye Wearie Wayfarer" appeared - extracts from which are familiar on the tongues of thousands. Here are two from "Ye Wearie Wayfarer":-

"No game was ever yet worth a rap
For a rational man to play,
Into which no accident, no mishap,
Could possibly find its way."

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own."

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
To scorn delights and live laborious days."

AT YALLUM PARK.

The fates were kind. John Riddoch, who had got to know and like him when they were in Parliament together, invited him to spend the slack season for racing at his homestead in the Mount Gambier district, at no great distance from Gordon's old home. The period during which he was at Yallum Park - January and part of February, 1869 - gave him an opportunity and an environment for composition rare in his chequered life, the quiet of a comfortable home, the admiration of its inmates, and the certainty of publication in the leading literary journals of Australia - "The Colonial Monthly," edited by Marcus Clarke, and "The Australasian." Gordon used to go out after breakfast and climb an old gum tree in the home paddock, to a seat in its branches, and there jot down his verses, of which he made fair copies in the evening. Thus came into being, among other poems, "The Sick Stockrider," "The Ride from the Wreck," and "Wolf and Hound" - those that Kendall had in mind, no doubt, when he penned the following lines in his "In Memoriam" to Gordon:

"A shining soul with syllables of fire,
Who sang the first great songs these lands can claim
To be their own."

First published in The Argus, 20 October 1928

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Note: you can read the full text of all the Gordon poems mentioned here at Project Gutenberg's Library of Australiana.

Hanifa Deen THE JIHAD SEMINAR University of Western Australia Press, 271 pp. Source: review copy Review by Michael Freedman

Human nature is a strange thing. Who we are as individuals is partly defined by our differences from each other, but it is those differences that are the biggest cause of conflict in our lives. This is particularly so of racial and religious differences, which have been the catalyst for individual and global conflict since the dawn of time. By attempting to examine these differences within a legal trial framework, The Jihad Seminar is thus an important book, but, by its end, the obvious and depressing conclusion is that after thousands of years of war and death blamed on disparities of ideology and physical appearance, the greatest lesson we are taught is that history is constantly repeated.

The Jihad Seminar chronicles a protracted legal battle fought in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) in 2003, following multiple, unsuccessful attempts at mediation between the parties. The protagonists were the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) and Christian organisation Catch the Fire Ministries (CTF), not the first time in history Muslim and Christian groups have been at loggerheads. Yet, while the conflict did not exactly capture the minds of the nation, some pretty important principles were at stake. Ms Deen considers these principles at some length, but this is only part of the story -- this tale is also about a legal system coming dangerously close to spiralling out of control. What was supposed to be a VCAT hearing of only three days, took closer to two years to finally complete. Then came the inevitable appeals, and finally a stalemate in 2007, described euphemistically by Ms Deen as an "out-of-court agreement".

To discover how we got to this sorry state, we have to go back to January 2002, when the Victorian Parliament, amid some controversy, passed into law the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. The Act, among other things, prohibits "conduct that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of" others "on the grounds of religious belief or activity". Fair enough, you might think, but it is these words that became the subject of intense scrutiny just months after they were passed into law. It was on 9 March 2002 that CTF, headed by Pastor Danny Scot, held a seminar entitled "An Insight Into Islam" which was, on any view, somewhat critical of Muslim beliefs. Attending the seminar were three Australian-born Muslims, who reported back to the ICV. In turn, the ICV made a complaint of religious vilification under the Act.

It needs to be stated immediately that Ms Deen is a Muslim, and this meant that she was treated with suspicion by most of the CTF supporters and hangers-on, who refused to speak to her. It is fair to say that the book at times is a little one-sided, but this is more due to the CTF refusal to talk to the author rather than any pre-existing bias on her part. It also probably reflects the intransigent attitudes displayed at times by both sides to this conflict, which no doubt added significantly to both the length and ferocity of the battle. Few ideologies polarise people more readily or more completely than religion.

Overall, Ms Deen does an admirable job of covering a complicated legal hearing from a layman's point of view, and while she does have some fairly caustic things to say about CTF and their organisers, for the most part she stays to the objective side of the line. Issues such as religious freedom, free speech, and right not to be vilified, along with prolonged legal action that is not really fully understood by anyone participating in it, including the lawyers and appellate judges, combined to make Ms Deen's task a less than enviable one. Nonetheless the book remains at all times interesting, and her commentary is never condescending.

According to the webpage: "The Warwick Prize for Writing is an innovative new literature prize that involves global competition, and crosses all disciplines.

"The Prize will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form, on a theme which will change with every award. The winner of the inaugural Prize will be announced in February 2009.

"The winner of this award will receive £50,000 and the opportunity to take up a short placement at The University of Warwick."

The 2008 longlist includes Someone Else by John Hughes, a collection of fictional essays. "The Sydney Morning Herald" asked him about it all.

Reviews of Tender Morsels

Van Ikin, in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "Proclaimed as Lanagan's first novel 'for adults', Tender Morsels is far more than that: it is a towering work of imagination in which a supremely talented writer opens rich new frontiers."

"Eva's Book Addiction" weblog shows the cover of the US edition, with the note that the book is aimed at grades 9 and up. I assume that means 14+: "From its truly horrifying and brutal beginning to its satisfying but bittersweet end, this novel is mesmerizing. Language (characters speak in a country dialect that sounds both fantastical and utterly authentic) and tone remain consistent, whether the story is being told from Liga's damaged but sweet perspective, from the perspective of one of the Bears who ends up in Liga's heaven, or from those of any number of other carefully drawn characters. No one is perfect -- all have flaws, some much more than others -- but we can understand, if not sympathize with, each person. Often wrenching, at heart this is a truly tender story of healing, growing, and redemption."

Sarah Miller, on her "Reading, Writing, Musing..." weblog: "Once upon a time, the skeleton of this story was called Snow-White and Rose-Red. Like all fairy tales, it left much unexplained. Too much. Well, Margo Lanagan took those bones and added muscle and guts, bracing the loose joints of the plot with her characters' emotions, motivations, and histories. That's the secret of successful retellings: fleshing out the gaps that relied almost entirely on the readers' willful ignorance or suspension of belief, yet still leaving room for the existence of magic. And Lanagan knows how to handle magic delicately enough to make it believable: Tender Morsels revolves around magical doings, but never degrades enchantment to the level of coincidence." Miller concludes that this was "quite possibly THE best reading experience" she had had all year (her caps).

Lucas Klaus goes all zombie on us in his short note, stating that "Bottom line, I envy Margo Lanagan's brain and want to steal it."

The "Chicago Tribune" newspaper: "This dark, medieval fairy tale is as complex and brilliant as it is disturbing...The prose in this extraordinary fantasy is exquisite."

Interviews

David Larsen in "The New Zealand Herald".

Lanagan has been writing all her life, ever since she and her older sisters began competing to get stories and poems published in the local Catholic weekly as children. She continued writing poetry through her teens and 20s. "But I really wanted to have an audience, a bigger audience than poetry was probably ever going to reach, and I also wanted to write more generously. I wanted to write big flowing things, rather than just fill up one page with very intense language and thought."
[snip]
The particular thing she needed to clear her mind in order to write was, literally, "tender morsels'" She was working full time at this point, as a technical writer for a food packaging manufacturer, commuting 90 minutes every day. This, and bad memories of her previous crash and burn novel experience, made her decide she needed to break her intended novel down into bite-size pieces - into tender morsels. "I made a deal with myself that I would produce one short story every week, while I was commuting, and that every story would jump off from one central story. So that at the end, at the worst, I'd have a bunch of connected short stories, and at the most I might have something that could eventually turn into a novel."

Other

Lanagan launched her book once at "Conflux", an sf convention held in Canberra in early October. Sarina Talip, of "The Canberra Times", spoke to her there: "I moved over into fantasy partly because my ideas were just getting odder and odder and I thought I would see what fantasy writing was like," the author said.

The other book launch was at Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt, Sydney, and Judith Ridge was there with her camera.

On Stephanie Campisi's eponymous weblog, Lanagan lists her favourite bookshops.

Other works

Lanagan has a short story, "The Goosle", in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow. Richard Larson reviewed the book on the "Strange Horizons" website: "There are plenty of other brave choices by Ellen Datlow in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Most notable is the inclusion of Margo Lanagan's 'The Goosle', an update to the Hansel and Gretel story which has generated a fair amount of controversy..The subject here is child abuse, and the power dynamics of abuse in general, during an apparent sequel to what is already a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story, one in which Hansel has escaped the witch's evil intentions but his sister (Kirtle, not Gretel, in Lanagan's telling) has, alas, been consumed...'The Goosle' is not an easy story, and Margo Lanagan is not a writer who makes easy choices. Aversions to certain pieces of fiction, however, should be based on the quality of the writing and the effectiveness of the storytelling rather than knee-jerk reactions to particularities of troublesome content.."

Larson points us to another review of the same book and the same story, by Dave Truesdale on the SF Site website, who sees the story in an entirely different light: "I really don't know where to begin in describing 'The Goosle' by Margo Lanagan, except to say it is a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story. Lanagan turns this traditionally gruesome fairy tale into one of child porn (depending on your point of view) and repeated homosexual rape of a child (Hansel)...With several other stories in this collection aimed at juveniles or teenagers (the Ballingrud and the Cadigan), I find this story highly inappropriate." He criticises the story for its "shock value", using that word-set no less that six times in his short review. I think I got the impression he wasn't keen on it.

Mr Scobie's Riddle by Elizabeth Jolley, 1983
(Penguin Books 1983 edition)
Cover illustration by John Burge
[This novel won the The Age Book of the Year Award in 1983 and the Fiction section of the WA Premier's Prize in the same year.]

David Malouf has been announced as the winner of the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award for his short story collection, The Complete Stories.

The shortlisted works were:

Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog, Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin, Publisher: Atlantic Books
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Publisher: Penguin
David Malouf, The Complete Stories, Publisher: Random House
Janette Turner Hospital, Orpheus Lost, Publisher: HarperCollins

"Kirkus Reviews", one of the major reviewing outlets in the USA, has released its list of Best Children's Books of 2008 [PDF file].

Included on the list is: The Donkey of Gallipoli: A True Story of Courage in World War I by Mark Greenwood, illustrated by Frané Lessac

As her new novella, Vertigo is released by Black Inc., Amanda Lohrey is interviewed by Christpher Bantick for "The Courier-Mail".

Lohrey, who lived for a while in Brisbane, has based the book on a place that is not identifiably set in Tasmania. It is far more like Queensland, with its warmer temperatures.

"Landscape affects people," she says. "I think there is a great love for your country. For me, it is more intense as I get older. D.H. Lawrence writes in Kangaroo that there is a strange beauty about Australia. I do think, though, that with sea-changers, the change takes place before you actually make the move.

"This might be partly to do with age. As you get older, many people become jaded. Australians have a great love of the open spaces and this is what many sea-changers look for. Still, while men may exhale a great sigh of relief, women may miss the social contact more."

We know thy tale, and rashly deem it crime,
   O Bard! who won us with thy wild bush songs;
No more shall we in thy deep passionate rhyme
   Read the fresh utterance of a poet's wrongs.
Thy end was sad-cut off in Life's full prime,
   When Fame seemed nigh, and all else that belongs
To high endeavour. Who, alas! can tell
   The hidden sources of thy soul-felt woes ?
Thou did'st not murmur, but th' untimely bell
   Rang out that thou and this cold world were foes.
Ah! when he sailed, young, resolute, and proud,
   From England's shore, to make a home on this.
Perchance some maiden weeping in the crowd,
   Cared for naught else beside his parting kiss.

First published in The West Australian, 3 October 1885

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

The "New Statesman" magazine asks contributors and critics to pick their best of the year. No indication is given whether all contributed to the magazine during the year, or whether all are critics or...

John Lanchester chose People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

THE LONDON EXHIBITION.

(From Our Correspondent. )

LONDON. Oct 1. - The Australian Literature Society may congratulate itself upon the success of Australia's Book Week. It was inaugurated by Mr. A. P. Herbert, of "Punch," and Mr. J. C. Squire, and it has already attracted hundreds of booklovers to Australia House. The exhibition hall on the ground floor has been converted into a vast display library, devoted to books of Australian origin. But this is only the beginning of the valuable work. Every publisher, bookseller, and critic in Britain has had his attention directed to the fact that there is a body of Australian literature comparable with the painting and sculpture which have come from Australia. Editors of the literary weeklies and monthlies are tumbling over one another for authoritative articles upon Australian books and authors, and every great daily newspaper has published some account of the opening ceremony on Tuesday afternoon, including an excellent article on Australian literature in "The Times" Literary Supplement from the pen of Mr. A. W. Jose.

This alone would have justified the trouble which the London committee and the staff of Australia House have taken to ensure the success of the venture. Two thousand invitations were sent out to booklovers, critics, publishers, and others in the London area, and a representative gathering, numbering many hundreds, filled the cinema hall at Australia House, when the High Commissioner (Sir Granville Ryrie) introduced Mr Herbert and Mr. Squire to the audience. They treated their task of introducing Austialian literature to London with happy frivolity which manifestly delighted their hearers. Nor was a light note out of place, for the Australian Authors' Week makes no claim to place Australian literature on the map of world letters, in any final sense. The 2,500 books which are on show this week are miscellaneous in character, and the lighter forms of poetry, fiction, and belles lettres are dominant.

Nevertheless the Australian Authors' Week afforded evidence of unexpected achievement in the realm of letters -- unexpected because Londoners, at any rate, had not realised how many of the books they treasured were written by men and women of Australian origin. All readers know that Henry Handel Richardson is an Australian, because the subject matter of her novels betrays the fact, but many forget that the high scholarship of Miss F. M. Stawell also belongs by right of birth to Australia, as does the work of Sir Gilbert Murray, Mary Gaunt, A. G. Hales, W. H. Fitchett, who is represented by several very interesting exhibits which first saw the light in "The Argus," W. J. Turner, the poet, and Arthur Lynch are other writers who had been taken into the cosmopolitan stream, until the present display recalled the debt they owed to Australia.

The display of books was interesting and ingenious. The best of the books were in glass cases. The novels were collected on a huge shelf at one end of the exhibition, where the gay covers added a welcome note of colour. One case was devoted to the "Art in Australia" publications and other books relating to Australian painting and architecture. This case showed that a high level of colour reproduction had been reached by Australian printers, particularly in the reproduction of their own brightly lighted landscape art. Mr. A. W. Jose's "Art of George Lambert" and "Australian Landscape Painters of To-day," by MacDonald and Burdett, are examples of books with which Londoners were glad to make acquaintance, not only for their intrinsic worth, but also for the Australian matter which they contained. Charles Barrett's "Aboriginal Art," published by the Government printer, Melbourne, was another book that tempted one to study. The books of the Lindsay family also aroused interest and attracted the attention of Mr. J. C. Squire, who made special mention of them in his address. Ida Rentoul's fairy books, with their deliciously juvenile illustrations, also made a brave display.

The sections devoted to the war naturally attracted attention, and again there was general praise for the production of such volumes as the Official History of Australia in the War, by C. E. W. Bean, H. S. Gullett, F. M. Cutlack, and their colleagues in the records department. It was interesting to compare them with another official record, "The Australian Contingent to the Soudan," which dealt with Australia's first overseas expedition, dating from 1885. Thanks to the Royal Empire Society and Lady Coghlan, there was a good show of early Australian books dealing with the voyagers and explorers. Aboriginal and early settlers' life has also been excellently treated by native authors. Mr. James Bonwick's volumes alone suggested study for months. More substantial and scientific were the volumes of Sir Baldwin Spencer. Indeed the whole section devoted to Australian science and natural history has a manifest value in introducing books to English readers which they might well miss. Not every scientific bibliography will record books upon the platypus or the native bear published in Australia, though bibliographers might well be trusted to search the London catalogues. For this reason the 20-page catalogue of Australian Authors' Week should have permanent value. It sets out the exhibits under the names of their Australian authors, these being under certain general headings, such as Exploration, History, Poetry and Belles Lettres, Fiction, Art, Drama and Music, Agriculture and Industry, Natural History. It is hoped that many of the authors represented will leave their works in the possession of Australia House with a view to future exhibitions, not only in London, but also in such provincial centres as Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, and Hull. Inquiries have already been received regarding the possibility of such exhibitions.

First published in "The Argus", 7 November 1931

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

David Francis, author of Stray Dog Winter, is a guest blogger on PowellsBooks.Blog.

Readings Bookshop has compiled a list of Australian Fiction titles published during 2008. It's pretty good, even if it does leave out most genre titles, and even some that we have reviewed here.

Garth Nix is the first confirmed guest of honor for the 2009 World Fantasy Convention to be held in San Jose, California. This follows the announcement of Jenny Blackford from Melbourne as one of the World Fantasy Award jury of judges.

Katherine Howell, author of the Davitt Award winning novel Frantic, is a guest blogger on the UK crime weblog "It's a Crime (Or a Mystery...)".

According to Wikipedia: "The Martin Beck Award is an award given by the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy (Svenska Deckarakademin) for the best crime novel in translation." Text Publishing have announced that Peter Temple's novel, The Broken Shore, has been shortlisted for the 2008 award.

"The Spectator" magazine uses the technique of asking a number of their reviewers to pick their best and worst of the year. It works.

Rupert Christiansen picked Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, as it was new in paperback this year. "I loved it -- a daringly original piece of scholarship and speculation which makes one rethink received suppositions and opens up fascinating new possibilities."

Reviews of The Boat by Nam Le Hamish Hamilton 2008

From the publisher's page:

The Boat will take you everywhere.

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world.

The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war.

Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.

Heidi Maier in "The Courier-Mail": "In this, his ambitious and compelling debut collection of short stories, Australian expatriate writer Nam Le blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction with an ease that might be disturbing were it not so beautifully executed...Occasionally, parts of Le's stories can feel more like student exercises in characterisation or plot than fully realised works of short fiction, but when he succeeds he does so with an astonishing deftness and originality."

James Ley in "The Age": "This is a remarkably accomplished collection, not merely on account of its uncommon breadth, but for its consistently high level of craftsmanship. Each of its seven stories is, in its own way, a substantial and well-developed piece of writing...Indeed, if there is a criticism to be made of this collection it is the relatively mild one that among the various modes and settings it attempts, there are some that are more successfully realised than others."

Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times": "[The title story of this collection], like many in The Boat, catches people in moments of extremis, confronted by death or loss or terror (or all three) and forced to grapple at the most fundamental level with who they are and what they want or believe. Whether it's the prospect of dying at sea or being shot by a drug kingpin or losing family members in a war, Nam Le's people are individuals trapped in the crosshairs of fate, forced to choose whether they will react like deer caught in the headlights, or whether they will find a way to confront or disarm the situation."

Michael McGaha in "The San Francisco Chronicle": "You may never have heard of Nam Le, but with the publication of his first collection of short stories, The Boat, you can expect to hear much more about him in the future. Nam Le was born in Vietnam, grew up in Australia and worked as a corporate lawyer before coming to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Not yet 30, he is already an extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated writer."

Heller McAlpin in "The Christian Science Monitor": "The opening story in Nam Le's debut collection, The Boat, is as dazzling an introduction to a writer's work as I've read..."Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" begins as a metastory about a blocked, Vietnamese-born student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. His estranged father visits from Australia just when he's struggling with his last assignment of the semester. What first appears to be a story about not knowing what to write-- yawn -- becomes, through sophisticated literary legerdemain, a devastatingly powerful exploration of a fraught father-son relationship and the son's gradual understanding of how his father's brutal wartime experiences at the hands of Americans affected them both."

Peggy Hughes in "Scotland on Sunday": "Nam Le takes us around the world in 271 wince-making, heart-breaking pages of a debut collection disarming for its grace and notable for its incisive, memorable prose. Containing deft slices of portraiture which feel like they've been taken from larger canvases, his stories touch upon fragmented lives of hardship, with assurance, tenderness and an honest eye to the capriciousness of reality."

Short Notices

Readings: "There is something audacious about an author who, in their first collection of stories, moves between six continents, yet Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le navigates the globe confidently and convincingly...As a collection of stories Nam Le's The Boat is certainly impressive; for a debut collection, it is exceptional."

Web Wombat: "These are very well written poignant tales that would position many a reader outside their comfort zone. Don't read this if you are looking for happy endings. Be prepared for the dark side of life where emotions plummet the depths and all seems desperate."

Interviews

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in "Bookninja" magazine.

Michael Harry in "The Advertiser".

Angela Meyer on the "Literary Minded" weblog.

Michael Williams in "The Sydney Morning Herald".

Profiles of the author

"The Australian [PDF file]
"The New York Times"

Other

Le won the Dylan Thomas Prize for this collection of stories.
"Publisher's Weekly" named the book as one of their Best Fiction Books of 2008.
Amazon.com named it as #29 in their Editor's Picks: Top 100 Books.

John Romeril, Melbourne playwright and screenwriter, has been announced as the winner of the 2009 Patrick White Award.

This award was set up by Patrick White, using the prize money from his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. The aim of the annual award is to recognise Australian writers who may not have received their due recognition. The relevant Wikipedia page carries a full list of past winners. The most recent of which are:

2007 - David Rowbotham
2006 - Morris Lurie
2005 - Fay Zwicky
2004 - Nancy Phelan
2003 - Janette Turner Hospital
2002 - TAG Hungerford
2001 - Geoff Page
2000 - Thomas W. Shapcott

Reviews of Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008

Abigail Deutsch reviews the collection for "The Village Voice": "James's artistry lies in his ability to seem both casual and careful: He observes an imperfect world with acerbic off-handedness, often setting his informal voice within formal verse. His ambling iambics snap into regularity right when they should, just when they become, as James writes, 'Scared into neatness by the wild sublime'...For all the piercing confession that marks these pages, James's is a roving sympathy, landing on the handicapped child, the inspired vagabond, the fellow poet. And, being James, he's occasionally less than sympathetic."

David Orr in "The New York Times": "What James wants to do here, of course, is establish that one may be a full-fledged, divinely inspired Romantic poet without doing the things that full-fledged, divinely inspired Romantic poets supposedly do. (You know, striding across darkling moors, engaging in passionate and poisonous affairs, swooning, judging the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, etc.) This is both touching and unnecessary. As he rightly notes, the only thing that actually matters is the poetry itself, and while the politics of the literary world can sometimes obscure that fact in the short term, the truth will generally out -- if only because readers eventually stop caring who had coffee with Robert Lowell or slept with Lorine Niedecker."

In "Newsweek", Katie Baker takes a brief look: "Part anthology of his best, part showcase for his new verse, the book displays the same formidable erudition and giddy love of pop culture that infuses James's prose: in his stanzas, Hamlet and Plato get equal play with Elle Macpherson."

Articles by James

Interviewing Secrets - "The Australian broadcaster gets far better results webcasting in his own home than making television studio interviews".

Salman Rushdie talks to Clive James.

"A Point of View: The name's Bond, Clive James Bond".

James ponders elections, especially in the light of the recent US Presidential version.

James pays tribute to Pat Kavanagh, the UK literary agent, who died recently.

Video Interviews by James

James interviews Barry Humphries

Short Notices of Other Things

The "Christmas Reading List" weblog on Cultural Amnesia: "...at the heart of the book is something that I often brood over, the pursuit of knowledge and the way in which knowledge and talent are drained by death. Where do memories go when the vessel that carries them ceases to be? And perhaps, more importantly, is there a responsibility in reading. Is it increasingly a revolutionary act."

"The Guardian" looks at James's poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" in an essay about remaindered books.

Miss Peabody's Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley, 1983
(University of Queensland Press 1987 edition)
Cover design by Christopher McVinish using an illustration by Cynthia Breusch

Ivan Southall, Australian writer of children's books and memoirs, has died at the age of 87.

Southall won the CBCA Australian Children's Book of the Year on four occasions: Ash Road in 1966, To the Wild Sky in 1968, Bread and Honey in 1971 and Fly West in 1976. His novel Josh won the Carnegie Medal (UK) in 1971, becoming the first Australian book to do so.

A retrospective of his work was held by the State Library of Victoria in 1998 and is still available online.

Notices about the author can be found at:
ABC News
"The Age"

Adrian Hyland, author of Diamond Dove which has just been published in the UK, is interviewed by Stuart MacBride for "Shots Magazine".

SM: Diamond Dove is one of those wonderful novels that really envelops the reader in a culture that they probably never get to experience first hand. What made you decide to set the story in the world of the outback?

AH: I lived for many years in the outback -- went there straight after Uni, and the place kind of crept -- well, roared like a wildfire into my soul.

I did a bit of mining and station work, then ended up working in Aboriginal community development -- which sounds impressive, but in fact meant bouncing around the Tanami Desert with a Toyota full of Aboriginal people -- sometimes taking them back to places they'd walked out of thirty years before.

I've travelled pretty well everywhere, lived in a lot of far-flung places, but Central Australia remains the most fascinating place I've ever seen. All of the big questions -- development vs. environment, the spiritual vs. the material, toast vs. cereal or fry-up -- are there, in your face. The human comedy unravels before your eyes: you've got hippies and rednecks, superannuated commies, grey nomads, miners, pastoralists, boozers, bruisers, substance-abusers and some really weird people -- have you seen Wolf Creek? - living cheek by jowl.

Most importantly, of course, there were the Aboriginal people: they were the touchstone for me.

SM: Well, it certainly comes across. Emily Tempest is a great central character, someone who's got a foot in both camps -- the settler and the aboriginal -- but as a middle-aged white bloke did you get any stick for writing from the point of view of a young black girl?

AH: Not yet, but there's still plenty of time, if anybody's interested.

I was writing about people I knew and loved. I've never met anyone quite like em. They're beautiful people, rich in spirit of place and the funniest buggers you could ever hope to meet -- I spent many a night by a camp fire rocking with laughter. I wanted to bring that world to life, and I'd like to think that my intentions were honourable.

[Thanks to Aust Crime Fiction for the link.]

Melbourne horses have been suffering greatly with influenza. - News Item.

Horse poets have sung in this cantering metre the deeds of the moke and the way they were done,
Of brave steeplechasing, mad charges and musters; of cups of great value and how they were won;
The race-horse, the pack-horse, the colt and the filly, the mare and the gelding -- they've all had their say.
Now here's how the dray-horse contracted the "flu" by absorbing the germs that were hid in the hay.

The life of a dray-horse is dreadfully sordid -- he toils in the shafts that the fav'rite may fling
The mud of defiance on following horses when flying for home to the "roar of the ring"
(Which technical phrase is a trifle confusing unless you're well up in the verses of those
Who've sung in this jiggity-joggity metre the) -- What's that? The dray-horse's story? Here goes!

His name doesn't matter -- his pedigree either. I'm ignorant, too, of the date of his birth.
I really don't know whereabouts he was bred, but no doubt it was somewhere on top of the earth.
He hadn't a point you could hang one poor verse on; not once in his life had he been near a course;
He worked for his living by drawing a milk-cart; he was, in plain speech, "just an average horse."

The life of the suburbs -- that doleful existence -- ne'er quickened his stride nor affected his ears
(You've noticed no doubt, in the horse poets' verses how his brute goes on when the multitude cheers);
"He pricked up his ears and shot out like an arrow by shouting released from the galloping crowd;
I muttered 'Good boy!'" -- and so on and so forth. (I'm convinced such verses should not be allowed.)

He had no adventures, this dray-horse I speak of; his nerves they were steady -- he lived on a farm,
He had no occasion to rush at high fences, nor gallop like mad at a midnight alarm;
He knew not bush-fires, nor troopers, nor bookies; he'd no habit of snorting when war trumpets blew;
He hadn't a vice and he hadn't a virtue. His only performance was catching the "flu."

I may be allowed to remark ere proceeding, a horse of this kind makes a terrible job,
You simply can't stretch him much more than a column; his value in ink is about twenty bob;
But having adroitly made up five long verses, I'll put down the fact that you all along knew.
In proper horse language: "The gallant old fellow was down in his stall. He'd contacted the 'flu.'"

"We treated him well" -- you observe I continue to write in the poet's pathetical strain --
"But spite of bran mashes and ev'ry attention, he never got up in the stable again;
He died like the game 'un he was just at daybreak. I broke down and sobbed as his last breath he drew.
God grant his old ghost in the Paddocks of Peter will never again catch the merciless 'flu.'"

First published in The Bulletin, 8 October 1908

The longlisted works for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award have been announced. This is always one heck of a list so don't be surprised if I miss an Australian entry. (Feel free to write and inform me of any omissions.)

Australian books longlisted:

The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon
Love and the Platypus by Nicholas Drayson
The Widow and her Hero by Tom Keneally
The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller
A Curious Intimacy by Jessica White
The Seamstress by Geraldine Wooller

The shortlist will be announced on 2nd April 2009, and the winner on 11th June 2009.

[Update: Doh, wrong year!]
[Update 2: Added books by White and Wooller.]

Steve Toltz's novel, A Fraction of the Whole, continues to impress as it is named on the shortlist for the "Guardian" First Book Award. The full shortlist is as follows:

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews
God's Own Country by Ross Raisin
The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The winner will be announced in early December.

Remarkable evidence was given by Arthur William Upfield, when the Coroner to-day opened an inquiry in an effort to solve the mystery surrounding the death of a man believed to be Leslie John Brown, also known as Louis Carron, who disappeared near Mount Magnet in 1930.

It is also hoped that the inquiry will lead to the solution of the strange disappearance of George Lloyd and James Ryan, who were Brown's companions.

John Thomas Smith, alias "Snowy" Rowles, who has been charged with the murder of Brown, is alleged to have been seen driving a motor lorry accompanied by Brown, which had previously been seen in the possession of Lloyd and Ryan.

Upfield, in evidence, said that he was a writer of mystery stories, but was formerly a boundary rider. Some time ago, while Rowles was working as a stockman on the Narndee Station, witness discussed with him and a man named George Ritchie, the plot of a mystery novel which he proposed to write.

The witness told Rowles that his story required to be written around a murder mystery, but there must not be any corpse. The story required the corpse to be disposed of in such a manner that it would be thoroughly destroyed. On October 6 1929, he discussed with Rowles a scheme suggested by Ritchie, under which the corpse in the story was to be burned and the ashes sifted for metal and other unburned parts. These metal parts were to be dissolved in acid.

In order to heighten the mystery a kangaroo was to be burnt on the same spot.

The witness said that since then a book embodying this plot had been written, under the name of "The Sands of Windee."

Evidence by the police showed that human bones, thought to be those of Brown, were found in the ashes of a fire.

A pathologist giving evidence said that he had examined some of the bones found in the fire, but they were so broken that they could not be recognised as human. However, several teeth found were human.

A representative of a city jewellery firm identified two watches produced by the police has having been repaired for Lewis Carron.

First published in The Canberra Times, 19 January 1932

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Susan Johnson, author of Life in Seven Mistakes, has reprinted an interview she gave with "The European English Messenger" journal.

Q: The idea of a writer struggling to combine the demands of creation with a child and husband is a common floor in some of your books such as A Better Woman, The Broken Book and Life in Seven Mistakes. Can it be seen as a gleam of your own life?

A: Most definitely. I read an article by the Irish writer and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright recently in which she said that she didn't understand writers who felt children were the enemies of promise, and she felt that the pram in the hall was a fine thing for a writer. Well, yes, I agree emotionally -- having children is the ultimate way of engaging with the world in a very hands-on, visceral way, and it stretches you emotionally in very challenging ways (Fay Weldon says you can believe you are a nice person until you have children!) However, it is also exhausting, time-consuming, expensive and very, very hard.

I have discovered that, deep-down, I believe in a very unreconstructed, antediluvian way that a "real" artist gives her life over to art, and doesn't compromise her art by having children! In some ways I DO think that having children slowed me up, and profoundly compromised me for all times. And yet having children also engaged me with life on the deepest level, and who knows if my writing might be a more sterile, impoverished thing if I hadn't had them? I think all writers are quite good at giving reasons why they are as never as brilliant as they might have been, and perhaps the having/not having of children argument is simply another version of that! (Arguably the world's deepest, richest, most wonderful books have been written by childless women, so having a child is therefore not a passport into a "better" or deeper emotional state, or resonance: having a child does not automatically make you a "better" person, or indeed a better writer).

I do know my life is enriched by my children, but I am not entirely sure my art is...it is very, very hard for me to combine writing with running a household, having children, and a marriage. Most of the world's greatest women writers did not have children. This is not an accidental fact.

The longlisted works for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award have been announced. This is always one heck of a list so don't be surprised if I miss an Australian entry. (Feel free to write and inform me of any omissions.)

Australian books longlisted:

The Time We Have Taken by Steven cCarroll
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon
Love and the Platypus by Nicholas Drayson
The Widow and her Hero by Tom Keneally
The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller

The shortlist will be announced on 2nd April 2009, and the winner on 11th June 2009.

[Update: Doh, wrong year!]

Nam Le has been announced as the winner of the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize, for his collection of short stories, The Boat. This prize is awarded to writers under the age of 30, who write in English, and is worth a cool £60,000.

This book will feature in a Combined Reviews post next week.