From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades. And it is also a reaction against our increasingly alarming political climate: economic rationalism, poll-driven government, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the threats to the ideals of reconciliation and multiculturalism. Won’t someone take them on?

Picador has done rather well in this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award (worth $28,000), with three of the five short-listed novels: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, Joan London’s Gilgamesh and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. Completing the quintet are Steven Carroll’s Art of the Engine Driver (Flamingo) and John Scott’s The Architect (Viking). The winner will be announced in Sydney on June 13.

Perpetual Trustees has been kept busy with short lists, including the one for the 2002 Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers. This one, to be announced in Sydney on May 7, is worth $20,000. Three works in different genres have been short-listed: Marion Halligan’s novel The Fog Garden, Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Beatrice Davis, A Certain Style, and Hilary McPhee’s memoir, Other People’s Words.

The Australia Council for the Arts has a new Chairman. David Gonski will chair his first meeting of the Council in June. This follows the unexpected resignation of Dr Terry Cutler, who was appointed in mid-2001.

ABR readers will not want to miss our next two ABR Forums, which could hardly be more topical. On Tuesday, May 28, John Button will be in conversation with Don Watson about the latter’s biography of Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. The following week, on Wednesday, June 5, Terry Cutler (see above) and Jean Battersby, with Michael Shmith in the chair, will discuss the topic of arts funding and arts bureaucracies. The first two Forums have attracted capacity audiences, so early bookings, through Readings in Carlton, are desirable (see our advertisement on page 10). ABR Forums start at 6.30 p.m. promptly. Radio National is recording them for broadcast later in the year.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival will begin on May 27, when Bob Carr will announce the winners of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. Guests include Anthony Bourdain, Bernard Cohen and Kate Jennings.

Jamie O’Neill, visiting Australia for the Festival, will read from his novel At Swim, Two Boys at La Bar in Darlinghurst at 6 p.m. on June 3. The Bookshop is hosting the event.

On May 8, at 6.30 p.m., at the Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, Melbourne, Brenda Niall will discuss her book The Boyds with Peter Rose, Editor of ABR.

In the Contributors’ Notes in the April issue, we managed to misstate Martin Krygier’s university as the University of Sydney. He is of course Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales. We also referred to the novelist Ian Kennedy Williams as Ian Kennedy Smith. Apologies to both.

Robert Menzies cast such a large shadow that the contribution of his immediate successors has tended to be belittled, if not forgotten altogether. Each of the three is remembered mostly for things unconnected with their prime ministerships: Harold Holt for the manner of his death; John Gorton for his drinking and rumoured philandering; and William McMahon for the shapeliness of his wife’s legs. Until now, each has suffered from not having had a decent, retrospective biography.

Yet together, the three of them successively led Australia through seven of its most tumultuous years. They presided over a society in which the generation of post-war baby boomers were demanding wide-ranging social changes and an end to the fear-driven politics of the Cold War. Holt had been Menzies’s anointed successor, and may have been able, with the help of his bikini-clad daughters-in-law, to bridge the wide gap between the Depression and the Hair! generations. But it was not to be. When Holt disappeared without trace in the surf in December 1967, the gnome-like figure of his Treasurer, Billy McMahon, seemed certain to step into his shoes until the formidable Country Party chief, ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, stipulated that he would not serve under McMahon. The Liberal Party was faced with the daunting task of finding another leader from among the crop of second-rankers who put their hands up. Although the erudite Paul Hasluck appeared to be the front runner, the rather stuffy historian was reluctant to sully his hands by fighting for it. This gave John Gorton his unexpected chance.

So it was that a process of unexpected tragedy, political veto and happenstance allowed the relatively unknown senator to snatch the prime ministership. As Gough Whitlam loftily observed: ‘for the first time, the House of Representatives has been unable to provide the leader of a major Australian political party.’ Just as he was an outsider in the prime ministerial race, Gorton, as Ian Hancock’s new biography shows, was something of an outsider throughout much of his life.

Born out of wedlock, it remains unclear whether Gorton was born in Melbourne, as a birth certificate would suggest, or in New Zealand, as his father later claimed. Whatever his birthplace, he always had this burden of shame, caused by his ‘bastard’ status in a relatively prudish society. He was raised by his maternal grandparents and later, after the untimely death of the mother he hardly knew, placed in the care of his father’s estranged wife to live with a sister he had not known existed. Then he was sent off to boarding school.

You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs (Duffy & Snellgrove, $22 pb, 106 pp, 1876631236) is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover). A few are only two lines, and most would fit on a postcard. Murray, the master of sprawl, also turns out to be a connoisseur of concision. Moreover, this new book confirms a contrarian tendency always to do something slightly unexpected. There is a ludic streak in Murray, something he shares with the American poet A.R. Ammons, who, after his Selected Longer Poems, published The Really Short Poems. Murray, it appears, is never short of poems and, the longer he goes on writing, the wider his reputation grows. The two other books under review here attest to his increasing stature.

The new book, despite its size, seems a compendium of Murray’s characteristic poetry. I would gather the poems into half a dozen general categories: Bucolics, Polemics, Knick-knacks & Riddles, Yarns, Ideations, and Lauds. This is more a parlour game than a taxonomy, but it gives a sense of Murray’s range and variety. Thus, a poem such as ‘Uplands’, which is made up of a series of fine-grained images like ‘Hills lie where they fell; / boulders sultana their steeps’, is clearly a country poem, of which there are a dozen others. There is a lovely one about an encounter with a young fox that innocently wants to play; the poem ends with a sense of transfiguration: ‘I remember / how sharply perfumed the leaves were / that lay on the pavement in that world.’ This is familiar territory in Murray’s work, but his ability to render rural experience intimate for the reader is consistently refreshing. The polemical poems are also by now familiar, and they are the most ephemeral of his creations, since most of them fall away when he compiles selected poems. But they are legion in this volume, with a score of them excoriating modern mores and shibboleths. ‘Cool History’ tells us ‘Identity oversimplifies humans. / It denies the hybrid, as trees can’t’; ‘The Machine-Gunning of Charm’ bemoans the rise of modernist architecture, with its ‘icy ambition / and scorn’; while ‘The Poisons of Right and Left’ takes a swipe at both sides: ‘You are what you have got / and: to love, you have to hate.’ While many of these poems may not survive a subsequent process of selection, they are nonetheless central to Murray’s poetry, for they express fundamental ideas and attitudes that underwrite the rest of his work. My third category is a basket for the two dozen unusual and usually delightful poems that are scattered throughout the book. Like other poems, they have governing ideas, but the performance is usually what is most memorable. Thus, ‘Pop Music’ describes two girls in a station wagon: ‘one bunging a pop bottle boinc / against her head and bocc / against the wagon. The other blows / music into hers: Doe roe to hoe soon / but no throe for woe yet, moon!’