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Absolutely Revolting

May 2007, no. 291

Welcome to the May 2007 issue of Australian Book Review.

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Contents Category: Advances
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Article Title: Advances - May 2007
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The ups and downs of biography

Hazel Rowley is the 2007 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecturer. That title is quite a mouthful (the acronym doesn’t bear thinking about), but one that Dr Rowley will handle in her stride, as those who recall her appearances on Australian literary stages will attest.

Dr Rowley – born in England and educated in Australia – taught for many years at Deakin University before moving to the United States. In 1993 she published Christina Stead: A Biography. In her review in The Independent, Doris Lessing said, ‘Christina Stead has long needed a good biographer, and here she is.’ Miegunyah has just issued a revised edition of the biography, in time for Dr Rowley’s Annual Lecture – and her appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
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The ups and downs of biography

Hazel Rowley is the 2007 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecturer. That title is quite a mouthful (the acronym doesn’t bear thinking about), but one that Dr Rowley will handle in her stride, as those who recall her appearances on Australian literary stages will attest.

Dr Rowley – born in England and educated in Australia – taught for many years at Deakin University before moving to the United States. In 1993 she published Christina Stead: A Biography. In her review in The Independent, Doris Lessing said, ‘Christina Stead has long needed a good biographer, and here she is.’ Miegunyah has just issued a revised edition of the biography, in time for Dr Rowley’s Annual Lecture – and her appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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Owen Richardson reviews Eugenes Falls by Amanda Johnson and Nights in the Asylum by Carol Lefevre
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Conjuring exiles
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Here are two novels of exile, one contemporary, the other about coming to Australia in the nineteenth century. In Carol Lefevre’s Nights in the Asylum, Miri, a middle-aged actress, escapes from Sydney and her tottering marriage, and drives back to the mining town of her childhood. On the way, she picks up an escaped Afghan refugee, Aziz, and drops him off in town, where he immediately falls foul of the inhabitants and ends up on the doorstep of Miri’s family home, uninhabited while her aunt is in hospital. The house becomes asylum for more than one outcast: Zett, the abused wife of the local cop, has already found herself there, baby in tow.
Book 1 Title: Nights in the Asylum
Book Author: Carol Lefevre
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $32.95 pb, 316 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: www.booktopia.com.au/nights-in-the-asylum-carol-lefevre/book/9781741665338.html
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Here are two novels of exile, one contemporary, the other about coming to Australia in the nineteenth century. In Carol Lefevre’s Nights in the Asylum, Miri, a middle-aged actress, escapes from Sydney and her tottering marriage, and drives back to the mining town of her childhood. On the way, she picks up an escaped Afghan refugee, Aziz, and drops him off in town, where he immediately falls foul of the inhabitants and ends up on the doorstep of Miri’s family home, uninhabited while her aunt is in hospital. The house becomes asylum for more than one outcast: Zett, the abused wife of the local cop, has already found herself there, baby in tow.

The style is sober enough, and has body and presence. While at one level the book is a melodrama of victimisation, the Manichaeism never swamps you or becomes completely overbearing. The central situation may put you in mind of Riders in the Chariot (1961): there is the same contrast between the underdogs and the just, on the one side, and the slavering sharp-toothed Philistines on the other. It may make you wonder at the triumph of Howardism that contemporary writers should be able to summon up, consciously or not, Patrick White’s vision of Australia in the 1950s as a materialist wasteland where the sensitive and the wounded are ground down by unfeeling, unthinking force. Jude Moran, the local policeman, is as much an avatar of the Australian ugliness as Blue in White’s novel: he beats his child and betrays his wife with a teenager from the roadhouse; oafishly oversexed, he also makes a pass at Miri. Almost inevitably, in a subplot that Lefevre handles without much finesse, Moran has beaten an Aboriginal prisoner to death. Lining up against him is not only Miri and her charges but also the local vet, Artie Rose, whose name suggests White’s Harry Rosetree, the assimilated Jew who stands by while Himmelfarb is crucified by the mob.

Read more: Owen Richardson reviews 'Eugene's Falls' by Amanda Johnson and 'Nights in the Asylum' by Carol...

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Shelley McInnis reviews Inside the Welfare Lobby: A history of the Australian Council of Social Service by Philip Mendes
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Most of you will have heard of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), but for those who have not, it is the peak lobby group of the community welfare sector. ACOSS’s website will tell you that its aims ‘are to reduce poverty and inequality by developing and promoting socially, economically and environmentally responsible public policy and action by government, community and business while supporting non-government organisations which provide assistance to vulnerable Australians’. ACOSS has seventy member organisations, including eight Councils of Social Service at state and territory level, and another four hundred associate members. Every year, Council of Social Service staff lobby federal, state and territory politicians and bureaucrats with proposals and budget submissions. And every year, bureaucrats and ministerial staffers craft careful speeches for politicians game enough to face the Council’s tough questions about budgetary allocations.
Book 1 Title: Inside the Welfare Lobby
Book 1 Subtitle: A history of the Australian Council of Social Service
Book Author: Philip Mendes
Book 1 Biblio: Sussex Academic Press, $49.50 pb, 145 pp, 1845191196
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Most of you will have heard of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), but for those who have not, it is the peak lobby group of the community welfare sector. ACOSS’s website will tell you that its aims ‘are to reduce poverty and inequality by developing and promoting socially, economically and environmentally responsible public policy and action by government, community and business while supporting non-government organisations which provide assistance to vulnerable Australians’. ACOSS has seventy member organisations, including eight Councils of Social Service at state and territory level, and another four hundred associate members. Every year, Council of Social Service staff lobby federal, state and territory politicians and bureaucrats with proposals and budget submissions. And every year, bureaucrats and ministerial staffers craft careful speeches for politicians game enough to face the Council’s tough questions about budgetary allocations.

Read more: Shelley McInnis reviews 'Inside the Welfare Lobby: A history of the Australian Council of Social...

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Christina Hill reviews The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles by Elizabeth Stead
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Article Title: Wait and see
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The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.
Book 1 Title: The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles
Book Author: Elizabeth Stead
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $32.95 pb, 301 pp, 9780702236020
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.

Read more: Christina Hill reviews 'The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles' by Elizabeth Stead

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Ian Holtham reviews A New Melba? The tragedy of Amy Castles by Jeff Brownrigg
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: The Castles claque
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The roll-call of Australian female singers of the past resounds like a comforting resurrection of anachronisms: Ada Crosley, Florence Austral, Gertrude Johnson and the epitome of stardom, Melba. The name Amy Castles represents another thing, as Jeff Brownrigg’s recent addition to the cultural history of early Australian songbirds attests. Born into a Catholic and unmusical background in Bendigo in 1880, she was destined to suffer a condition not unknown to musical novitiates: vastly more hype than talent or accomplishment.
Book 1 Title: A New Melba?
Book 1 Subtitle: The tragedy of Amy Castles
Book Author: Jeff Brownrigg
Book 1 Biblio: Crossing Press, $49.95 pb, 300 pp, 0957829191
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The roll-call of Australian female singers of the past resounds like a comforting resurrection of anachronisms: Ada Crosley, Florence Austral, Gertrude Johnson and the epitome of stardom, Melba. The name Amy Castles represents another thing, as Jeff Brownrigg’s recent addition to the cultural history of early Australian songbirds attests. Born into a Catholic and unmusical background in Bendigo in 1880, she was destined to suffer a condition not unknown to musical novitiates: vastly more hype than talent or accomplishment.

Read more: Ian Holtham reviews 'A New Melba? The tragedy of Amy Castles' by Jeff Brownrigg

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