Alas, Peter Hill has confused this Sydney prosecution of the early 1960s with the later attempt in London in 1971 to prosecute Neville and his fellow editors for the May 1970 Schoolkids Oz issue of a new version of the magazine. The Sydney Oz cases were complicated affairs, given that there were two prosecutions with varied sets of editors. The first 1963 summons was not heard until September 1964 (the defendants pleaded guilty), by which time the editors had been charged again, being subsequently found guilty by the magistrate Gerry Locke. The Sydney and the London Oz prosecutions ultimately failed on appeal.

Why Hill should have made such as egregious error is difficult to understand, since my book details the relationship between the earlier Sydney Oz and the 1966–67 Brown prosecutions, noting in particular that both Brown and the Oz editors were found guilty by the same magistrate, and that their appeals were also both heard by the same judge, Mr Justice Levine. The irony was, of course, that whereas the case against the Oz defendants was dismissed on appeal, Brown’s conviction was upheld. Although his prison sentence of three months’ hard labour was quashed, he received a fine and a good behaviour bond. Even more than the Oz affair, Brown’s case resulted in a major civil liberties campaign, led by Sydney art dealer Frank Watters and gaining the support of leading Sydney artists.

The Oz prosecutions continue to remain fixed in the public consciousness; the equally significant Brown case, however, somehow slipped from our cultural memory. The unfortunate confusion demonstrated in this review can only serve to muddy these waters even further.

Richard Haese, Warrandyte, Vic.

Comedy as dark matter

Dear Editor,

I am delighted at Maria Takolander’s perceptive remarks on the poetry of the seven poets in the book I edited, Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (April 2012). I should, however, address a misapprehension in the review, in case it becomes accepted as fact. My book is not a ‘corrective’ to another anthology published five weeks before it, Felicity Plunkett’s Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, reviewed by Fiona Wright in the December 2011–January 2012 issue of ABR). My text and Preface were prepared without my knowing more than a smidgen of its list of poems and poets. This is still so, from circumstance, but I look forward very much to reading it.

The suggestion of a scarcity of comedy in Young Poets caught my attention. Comedy strikes me as being largely dark matter. As such, I think it’s nearly everywhere in L.K. Holt and Petra White, and elsewhere to a strong extent, and I reckon it is political. An instance would be the disturbing contemporariness of the myth of Noah’s Ark to the fundamentalist cult indicted in the comedic desolation of White’s extraordinary poem ‘Grave’.

John Leonard, St Kilda, Vic.

‘So completely French’

Dear Editor,

Perhaps as an excuse for putting down on paper any sequence of interesting thoughts that might occur to him, Robert Dessaix, in his essay ‘Pushing against the Dark: Writing about the Hidden Self’ (April 2012), presents autobiography, biography, fiction, and memoir as promiscuously coupling entities all floating around aimlessly in some creative protoplasm, when in fact, despite obvious correspondences, they are long-established and reasonably distinct literary forms.

Many of those distinctions arise from the different contracts established in each form between writer and reader, and from the particular expectations that naturally result. In a memoir, for example,  we grant the writer some indulgence for the fallibility of memory and subjectivity, but we do expect that they have tried to remember their lives as truthfully as possible. Like Dessaix’s French translator, I was ‘flabbergasted’ to learn that a major figure in Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev had been completely invented. This significantly affected my recollected enjoyment of the book.

Dessaix obviously regards this as witty or ‘ludic’, even to the extent of complimenting himself (‘so completely French, so believable’), but I can’t see it as anything but misleading for readers.

Leigh Swinbourne, Bellerive, Tas.