Neal Blewett

The most vituperative of the contemporary ‘history wars’ – the conflict over the historiography of the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples – will ultimately be resolved by high-quality regional studies of the processes of occupation. Tony Roberts’s Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (UQP), covering the first stages of European settlement of the Gulf Country, is exemplary: original, meticulous, and dispassionate. Roberts, never unsympathetic, seeks to understand both the viewpoint of the settlers and that of the dispossessed. With a wider perspective than usual on the historiographical debate itself, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Allen & Unwin), by one of the generals in the war, Bain Attwood, is the most effective broadside this year. On a quieter note, Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller’s Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art (Miegunyah) is the definitive account of the seminal modern art exhibition – dispelling myths, documenting missed opportunities by a myopic art establishment, and setting the exhibition in the context of modernism in Australia. So sumptuous and well-integrated in the text are the illustrations that the reader visits the exhibition.

Perhaps it’s the Zeitgeist, but Brenda Walker is the third Australian woman this year, after Geraldine Brooks in March and Delia Falconer in The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, to fix her imaginative sights on men’s experiences of war and its aftermath. Walker’s book, however, directs as much attention to the home front and to the women left behind.

The Wing of Night opens on Fremantle docks in 1915, with two women farewelling their men, who are sailing off with a troopship of light horsemen to World War I. Ostensibly, the differences between the couples are marked: Elizabeth and Louis have been married for more than a year and own a farm, while widowed Bonnie and Joe, a yardman at the local pub, have been together for just a few weeks. To date their lives have barely crossed, but the war is set to change all that.

This book made me laugh, especially during the love scenes. I doubt this was the author’s intention. Short, gnarled, gritty Italian cop meets posh British beanpole and they spend the first half of the book being crisply offhand, the last part sounding like canoodling dorks. Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey it isn’t – but it should be. Whenever they meet, I have an indelible image of the cop looking laconically at her belt buckle. He is Carmine; she, would you believe, is Desdemona.

Or is Colleen McCullough just having fun with us? She certainly claims to have enjoyed writing this, her first whodunit, but for the life of me I can’t think what is enjoyable about a succession of divinely beautiful, sepulchrally innocent sixteen-year-old girls having their vaginas ripped and scoured by fanged dildoes until they die. Serial killers are never nice: one needs good reason to spend a day or so reading about their hideous compulsions. McCullough says she loved ‘the chance to spill lots of blood in a book’.

The story is set in Connecticut, in 1965, long before DNA tests or other powerful CSI-type forensics could wrap up the quest in hours. Parts of a teenage girl are found in the fridge containing the remains of animals awaiting incineration. Normally, they would have been disposed of still concealed in their special bags, but this time someone has foolishly locked a monkey in the fridge. He goes berserk, shredding the bags and revealing the human parts, including the carefully plucked genitals.

If anyone is qualified to speak authoritatively on the nature and role of community languages in Australia, it is Michael Clyne, who has spent much of his academic career researching these languages. His latest book is firmly rooted in research, but it differs from some of his earlier work in that it is clearly directed at the widest possible audience. It is a wake-up call, exploring the relationships between monoculturalism and multiculturalism and monolingualism and multilingualism in present-day Australian society; and showing how the present situation can be explained in part by Australia’s history, and in part by contemporary local and global pressures.

The book begins and ends with a reference to the case of Cornelia Rau, the bilingual, German-born, mentally ill Australian who was imprisoned first in a women’s jail in Brisbane and then in Baxter Detention Centre. The fact that Rau spoke German (‘a foreign language’) seemed to add weight to the case that she deserved to be excluded from Australia, in spite of the fact that German has been spoken in Australia as a ‘community language’ since the mid-nineteenth century. Clyne sees the monolingual mindset that was unable to understand what was going on in this case as a throwback to the days when non-whites and undesirable whites were excluded from Australia by being given a dictation test in a language such as Gaelic. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding or denial of the multilingualism that has always been part of Australian society.