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Absolutely Revolting

September 2009, no. 314

Welcome to the September 2009 issue of Australian Book Review. 

Anna Ryan-Punch reviews ‘The Winds of Heaven’ by Judith Clarke
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Contents Category: Children's and Young Adult Fiction
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Article Title: Accidents of circumstance
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Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.
Book 1 Title: The Winds of Heaven
Book Author: Judith Clarke
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $22.99 pb, 268 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Judith Clarke’s new novel for young adults, The Winds of Heaven, is a moving story about the strength and difficulty of friendship, and how accidents of birth, family and situation can combine to overwhelm the brightest spirit.

On her first trip to Lake Conapaira in 1952, ten-year-old Clementine meets her cousin Fan for the first time. Fan is a whirlwind: beautiful, impulsive and imaginative. Clementine is entranced by Fan’s strength and liveliness, and the two girls quickly become friends. But Fan’s childhood is a world away from Clementine’s cautious but loving family home. Stranded with her violent mother amid the prejudices of a country town, the beautiful Fan is labelled ‘stupid’ at school, and regularly beaten and emotionally abused by her depressive mother. Her sister has left home, and her father disappeared long ago. Fan fights for happiness, and fights hard. She has her miyan, or spiritual guardian, an elderly Aborigine who lives in the bush and tells her stories. He calls her Yirigaa, ‘Morning Star’, and is the only positive adult influence in her life. Clementine wants to stay with Fan, but the holiday draws to an end and she must return home, leaving Fan with her mother in the house that smelled of ‘anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears’.

Read more: Anna Ryan-Punch reviews ‘The Winds of Heaven’ by Judith Clarke

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John Hirst reviews The Colony: A history of early Sydney by Grace Karskens
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Contents Category: Australian History
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This is not so much a history of Sydney as a tour with a sensitive and alert guide who knows her history. The site is modern Sydney. Although Sydney was only just beginning to develop suburbs when the book ends – in the 1820s – Karskens tours the whole of the Cumberland Plain, the area that metropolitan Sydney now covers.   For the modern suburbs, as everywhere else, Karskens describes the land and how it was used when occupied by the Aborigines and the first Europeans. She points to what remains from earlier times in the routes of roads, remnant vegetation, the built environment and place names.
Book 1 Title: The Colony
Book 1 Subtitle: A history of early Sydney
Book Author: Grace Karskens
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $59.99 hb, 692 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/k5a5M
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This is not so much a history of Sydney as a tour with a sensitive and alert guide who knows her history. The site is modern Sydney. Although Sydney was only just beginning to develop suburbs when the book ends – in the 1820s – Karskens tours the whole of the Cumberland Plain, the area that metropolitan Sydney now covers.   For the modern suburbs, as everywhere else, Karskens describes the land and how it was used when occupied by the Aborigines and the first Europeans. She points to what remains from earlier times in the routes of roads, remnant vegetation, the built environment and place names. The first settlement on the Hawkesbury was known as Green Hills, established by convicts and ex-convicts who found this good soil and settled without official approval. When Macquarie tidied up the river towns, Green Hills became Windsor, but the naming of the first settlers has survived along the river in less formal and more expressive terms: Halfmoon Reach, One Tree Reach and Foul Weather Reach. Public farming under direct government control with convict labour did not last long, but the government’s control of these lands meant that they survived and were turned to other public uses. Castle Hill farm had a convict barracks before Sydney; when the farm closed it became a church; when the church was demolished the stone went into a Gothic parsonage, which survives. In recent times, there has been greater concern with ‘heritage’, but this often means only that the houses of the rich, shorn of their outbuildings and workers’ huts, get preserved. By her eloquent evocations, Karskens wants to remind us of much more.

Read more: John Hirst reviews 'The Colony: A history of early Sydney' by Grace Karskens

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Free Article: No
Contents Category: Advances
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Article Title: Advances - September 2009
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Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Work of Marcus Clarke’ is published for the first time this month as Cyril Hopkins’s Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing).

Drawing on Clarke’s early journalism, Hopkins’s memories of Clarke from their time as schoolboy intimates in England, and the pair’s decades-long correspondence after Clarke’s emigration to Australia in 1863, this volume provides an unprecedented glimpse of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life. It is laced with anecdotal riches, including Clarke’s habit of depositing his unfinished cigars in the mouth of a green metal lion as he entered the Melbourne Public Library. The lion, smoking the cigar, became a signal to his friends that Marcus was within.
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Marcus Clarke’s cigar

Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Work of Marcus Clarke’ is published for the first time this month as Cyril Hopkins’s Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing).

Read more: Advances - September 2009

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Jenny Hocking reviews A Certain Granduer by Graham Freudenberg
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: Too inspissated, too dithyrambic
Article Subtitle: Seismic times for Whitlam’s speechwriter
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Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1967, Freudenberg eagerly joined his staff as press secretary, a position he had previously and less happily held with Arthur Calwell, who was leader from 1960 to 1967.
Book 1 Title: A Certain Grandeur
Book 1 Subtitle: Gough Whitlam’s life in politics
Book Author: Graham Freudenberg
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $35 pb, 486 pp, 9780670073757
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Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1967, Freudenberg eagerly joined his staff as press secretary, a position he had previously and less happily held with Arthur Calwell, who was leader from 1960 to 1967.

Read more: Jenny Hocking reviews 'A Certain Granduer' by Graham Freudenberg

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Nicholas Brown reviews Andrew Fisher: An underestimated man by Peter Bastian
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: Andy, come up!
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Andrew Fisher fares well in the new Museum of Australian Democracy, at Old Parliament House, Canberra. The entrance to the galleries is framed, on one side, by E. Phillips Fox’s dark 1913 portrait of an imposing and resolute Fisher, in contrast to the garish, spreading corpulence of George Lambert’s 1924 Sir George Reid on the other. Inside, in the procession of prime ministers, Fisher is represented more comprehensively and intimately than his peers. There is his miner’s crib – for this leader of Australia’s first majority Labor government definitely came from the working class – and his fountain pen, presented by his granddaughter to Kevin Rudd (who, the caption reads, is a ‘passionate admirer’ of his Queensland predecessor). Elsewhere in the Museum, in commemorating the suffrage movement, the key exhibit is a replica of the hat worn by Fisher’s wife, Margaret, when she marched beside Vida Goldstein in a London protest for women’s franchise in 1911.
Book 1 Title: Andrew Fisher
Book 1 Subtitle: An underestimated man
Book Author: Peter Bastian
Book 1 Biblio: University of New South Wales Press, $49.95 hb, 419 pp, 9781742230047
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Andrew Fisher fares well in the new Museum of Australian Democracy, at Old Parliament House, Canberra. The entrance to the galleries is framed, on one side, by E. Phillips Fox’s dark 1913 portrait of an imposing and resolute Fisher, in contrast to the garish, spreading corpulence of George Lambert’s 1924 Sir George Reid on the other. Inside, in the procession of prime ministers, Fisher is represented more comprehensively and intimately than his peers. There is his miner’s crib – for this leader of Australia’s first majority Labor government definitely came from the working class – and his fountain pen, presented by his granddaughter to Kevin Rudd (who, the caption reads, is a ‘passionate admirer’ of his Queensland predecessor). Elsewhere in the Museum, in commemorating the suffrage movement, the key exhibit is a replica of the hat worn by Fisher’s wife, Margaret, when she marched beside Vida Goldstein in a London protest for women’s franchise in 1911.

Read more: Nicholas Brown reviews 'Andrew Fisher: An underestimated man' by Peter Bastian

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