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Absolutely Revolting

February 2005, no. 268

Welcome to the February 2005 issue of Australian Book Review.

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Article Title: A Reply to Let’s End This Dissertation Dissipation
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In The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of 3 November 2004, Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing argued that young scholarly writers have been ‘abandoned by the academy’. Tom Griffiths replies to her article, which was titled ‘Let’s End This Dissertation Dissipation’:
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n The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of 3 November 2004, Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing argued that young scholarly writers have been ‘abandoned by the academy’. Tom Griffiths replies to her article, which was titled ‘Let’s End This Dissertation Dissipation’:

Read more: A Reply to ‘Let's End This Dissertation Dissipation’ by Tom Griffiths

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James Upcher reviews ‘Conversations With The Constitution: Not Just A Piece Of Paper’ by Greg Craven
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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: Joining the Future
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The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.

Greg Craven, professor of Government and Constitutional Law at Curtin University, attempts to steer a delicate course: to rescue Australia’s founding document from irrelevance and scorn; and to preserve it from the impatient hands of reformists. Although he is more interested in demonstrating the Constitution’s resilience than in exploring in detail the contours of our constitutional democracy, Craven raises important questions about the legitimate roles of the judiciary and parliament, the future of federalism and the prospects for an Australian republic. He writes with zeal and obvious enthusiasm, and, while his rhetorical extravagance is often distracting, his discussion is never dull.
Book 1 Title: Conversations With The Constitution
Book 1 Subtitle: Not Just A Piece Of Paper
Book Author: Greg Craven
Book 1 Biblio: UNSW Press, $34.95pb, 250pp
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The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.

Read more: James Upcher reviews ‘Conversations With The Constitution: Not Just A Piece Of Paper’ by Greg Craven

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Gail Jones reviews The Best Australian Stories 2004 edited by Frank Moorhouse
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Contents Category: Short Stories
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In a recent feature article in the Guardian Review, William Boyd proposed a new system for the classification of short stories. He constructed seven stringently categorical descriptions and ended his article with a somewhat predictable – that is to say, canonical – list of ‘ten truly great stories’, among which were James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Spring at Fialta’ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’. Most of the writers cited were male, and the classifications were confident demarcations in terms of genre and mode (‘modernist’, ‘biographical’). It is difficult to know, and no doubt presumptuous to speculate, what Boyd would make of Frank Moorhouse’s edited collection The Best Australian Stories 2004. Garnering them ‘at large’ by advertisement and word of mouth, Moorhouse received one thousand stories, from which he selected ‘intriguing and venturesome’ texts, many of which display ‘innovations’ of form. Of the twenty-seven included, six are by first-time published writers and twenty are by women. This is thus an open, heterodox and explorative volume, unlike its four predecessors in this series in reach and inclusiveness. It is also, perhaps, more uneven in quality: a few stories in this selection are rather slight; and the decision to include two stories by two of the writers may seem problematic, given the large number of submissions and the fact that the editor claims there were fifty works fine enough to warrant publication. A character in one of the stories favourably esteems the fiction of Frank Moorhouse over that of David Malouf: this too may be regarded as a partisan inclusion.
Book 1 Title: The Best Australian Stories 2004
Book Author: Frank Moorhouse
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $24.95 pb, 231 pp, 1863952454
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In a recent feature article in the Guardian Review, William Boyd proposed a new system for the classification of short stories. He constructed seven stringently categorical descriptions and ended his article with a somewhat predictable – that is to say, canonical – list of ‘ten truly great stories’, among which were James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Spring at Fialta’ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’. Most of the writers cited were male, and the classifications were confident demarcations in terms of genre and mode (‘modernist’, ‘biographical’). It is difficult to know, and no doubt presumptuous to speculate, what Boyd would make of Frank Moorhouse’s edited collection The Best Australian Stories 2004. Garnering them ‘at large’ by advertisement and word of mouth, Moorhouse received one thousand stories, from which he selected ‘intriguing and venturesome’ texts, many of which display ‘innovations’ of form. Of the twenty-seven included, six are by first-time published writers and twenty are by women. This is thus an open, heterodox and explorative volume, unlike its four predecessors in this series in reach and inclusiveness. It is also, perhaps, more uneven in quality: a few stories in this selection are rather slight; and the decision to include two stories by two of the writers may seem problematic, given the large number of submissions and the fact that the editor claims there were fifty works fine enough to warrant publication. A character in one of the stories favourably esteems the fiction of Frank Moorhouse over that of David Malouf: this too may be regarded as a partisan inclusion.

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Read more: Gail Jones reviews 'The Best Australian Stories 2004' edited by Frank Moorhouse

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La Trobe University Essay: Famous Battles in the War between Words and Music: From Monteverdi to Puff Daddy by Peter Goldsworthy
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An excuse first. This can only be a magpie’s look at a marriage – between poetry and music – that has a near-infinite history of complex living arrangements, recurrent divorces, remarriages and impromptu de facto cohabitations. I’ve chosen a few marital battles of particular interest to me, a writer for whom song is a sometime thing. I’d like to claim those battles as representative of some epochs and musical styles, at least within various Western traditions; they are certainly representative of my musical obsessions.
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An excuse first. This can only be a magpie’s look at a marriage – between poetry and music – that has a near-infinite history of complex living arrangements, recurrent divorces, remarriages and impromptu de facto cohabitations. I’ve chosen a few marital battles of particular interest to me, a writer for whom song is a sometime thing. I’d like to claim those battles as representative of some epochs and musical styles, at least within various Western traditions; they are certainly representative of my musical obsessions.

The first of these obsessions is this: why music? Most writers, especially most poets, tend to think that words are enough music in themselves. Words don’t need musical backings, or settings, or singings. To flog the metaphor: why get married to a composer at all? Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyrics for Jerome Kern’s musical Showboat. Mrs Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, once overheard someone praise ‘Ol’ Man River’ as a ‘great Kern Song’. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she interrupted, ‘but Jerome Kern did not write “Ol’ Man River”. Mr Kern wrote dum dum dum da. My husband wrote Ol’Man River.’

So, mine will be a biased, poet’s eye view of the relationship. My starting point again: why music? We all know ‘why’ language – because nothing much that is uniquely human happens without it. We can see why a capacity for language might evolve in our brains over a million years – its survival advantages are obvious – but why a capacity for music?

Read more: La Trobe University Essay: 'Famous Battles in the War between Words and Music: From Monteverdi to...

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Contents Category: Reference
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Article Title: Permanent White Water
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Our age likes to think of itself as a time of constant change – leadership gurus call it ‘permanent white water’ – but how fast and fundamental were the changes around the end of the eighteenth century? In 1779, when Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii, Europeans were settled in South and Central America and the Dutch East Indies, and were nibbling at the edges of India and Africa. Jesuit missionaries had been in China for the better part of two centuries. The rebellion in Britain’s American colonies seemed to be under control, despite the instability of George III and the interference of Louis XVI – whose position, despite some economic problems, looked unassailable. No sane person would have imagined that the traders, pirates, missionaries and scientists probing remote parts of the globe were harbingers of anything more than an expansion of trade and knowledge.
Book 1 Title: Encyclopedia Of Exploration 1800 To 1850
Book Author: Raymond John Howgego
Book 1 Biblio: Hordern House, $245 hb, 690 pp
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Our age likes to think of itself as a time of constant change – leadership gurus call it ‘permanent white water’ – but how fast and fundamental were the changes around the end of the eighteenth century? In 1779, when Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii, Europeans were settled in South and Central America and the Dutch East Indies, and were nibbling at the edges of India and Africa. Jesuit missionaries had been in China for the better part of two centuries. The rebellion in Britain’s American colonies seemed to be under control, despite the instability of George III and the interference of Louis XVI – whose position, despite some economic problems, looked unassailable. No sane person would have imagined that the traders, pirates, missionaries and scientists probing remote parts of the globe were harbingers of anything more than an expansion of trade and knowledge.

Read more: Ian Morrison reviews ‘Encyclopedia of Exploration 1800 to 1850’ by Raymond John Howgego

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