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Absolutely Revolting

May 2005, no. 271

Welcome to the May 2005 issue of Australian Book Review.

Judy Armstrong reviews Playing with Water by Kate Llewellyn
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Kate Llewellyn has written sixteen books, which is quite an achievement. They include poetry, fiction and autobiography. One book, The Waterlily (1987), has sold 30,000 copies, a notable accomplishment for any author. The Waterlily was the first book in Llewellyn’s Blue Mountains trilogy; the second was called Dear You (1988). I read it years ago, having borrowed it from a library because I suspected the title might be an indication of the tone. It was not the epistolary format that gave me pause: I have relished many correspondences, ranging from the passionate exchanges of Julie and St Preux in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) to Robert Dessaix’s grapplings with life-threatening illness in his acclaimed Night Letters (1996). But for my taste, the series of missives beginning ‘Dear You’ betrayed an irritating archness. The author seemed to be caught between the heady excitement of Revealing All and a coy fear of saying Too Much.
Book 1 Title: Playing with Water
Book Author: Kate Llewellyn
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $29.95 pb, 424 pp, 0 7322 8131 8
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Kate Llewellyn has written sixteen books, which is quite an achievement. They include poetry, fiction and autobiography. One book, The Waterlily (1987), has sold 30,000 copies, a notable accomplishment for any author. The Waterlily was the first book in Llewellyn’s Blue Mountains trilogy; the second was called Dear You (1988). I read it years ago, having borrowed it from a library because I suspected the title might be an indication of the tone. It was not the epistolary format that gave me pause: I have relished many correspondences, ranging from the passionate exchanges of Julie and St Preux in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) to Robert Dessaix’s grapplings with life-threatening illness in his acclaimed Night Letters (1996). But for my taste, the series of missives beginning ‘Dear You’ betrayed an irritating archness. The author seemed to be caught between the heady excitement of Revealing All and a coy fear of saying Too Much.

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Read more: Judy Armstrong reviews 'Playing with Water' by Kate Llewellyn

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Lisa Gorton reviews Imagining Australia: Literature and culture in the new new world, edited by Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe
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Contents Category: Cultural Studies
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Imagining Australia collects nineteen essays from a 2002 conference on Australian literature and culture at Harvard University. Of course, as the proceedings of a conference, it is on occasion hard work. There is something about conferences – the dedication of their audiences, perhaps, or the vulnerability of their speakers – that encourages a somewhat defensive formality. That said, almost every essay in this collection repays a reader’s investment with interest: in describing the history of Australian literary journals; offering a new direction for Australian pastoral poetry; providing surprising perspectives on popular Australian myths; or looking at how contemporary poets use form.
Book 1 Title: Imagining Australia
Book 1 Subtitle: Literature and culture in the new new world
Book Author: Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press, $59.95 hb, 399 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Imagining Australia collects nineteen essays from a 2002 conference on Australian literature and culture at Harvard University. Of course, as the proceedings of a conference, it is on occasion hard work. There is something about conferences – the dedication of their audiences, perhaps, or the vulnerability of their speakers – that encourages a somewhat defensive formality. That said, almost every essay in this collection repays a reader’s investment with interest: in describing the history of Australian literary journals; offering a new direction for Australian pastoral poetry; providing surprising perspectives on popular Australian myths; or looking at how contemporary poets use form.

As these examples suggest, Imagining Australia has no overriding theme or approach; this is perhaps why it appeals. It includes broad surveys and detailed studies, academic arguments and genial narratives. With this variety, it complicates and enlivens one’s sense of Australia’s history.

Read more: Lisa Gorton reviews 'Imagining Australia: Literature and culture in the new new world', edited by...

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Lisa Temple reviews ‘Alison Says’ by Suzanne Hawley
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Bridget Jones stripped bare
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First, the good news or the bad news about this novel? Perhaps the bad. Presenting the worst face of a character to the world is not in itself fresh or especially amusing any more. We are overrun with sitcoms reflecting us, warts and all. Bridget Jones was among the first of these types of characters in popular fiction, and I was variously amused and pained by her hapless and heart-warming antics. More recently, the anonymous Bride Stripped Bare startled me for the statutory fifteen minutes, and left me wondering where all the attractive taxi drivers were hiding. In Alison Says, a conflation of the above, I found the central character, Maggs, to be a bit tiresome – and tired. Maggs is a 24-year-old drama teacher who has recently been dumped. Two months later, Jamie, the ex-inamorato, becomes engaged to Lorelei, aka ‘the Rhine slut’. In the wake of these events, Maggs is emotionally vulnerable, but it’s all rather in the manner of someone in an arrested state of adolescence. Suzanne Hawley’s Maggs is a stock characterisation based on the humour of self-absorption and victimhood, narcissism and obsession. Hawley’s novel does not fully realise the key ingredient of chick lit: a central character that the reader either loves or loves to hate.
Book 1 Title: Alison Says
Book Author: Suzanne Hawley
Book 1 Biblio: Random House, $22.95 pb, 220 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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First, the good news or the bad news about this novel? Perhaps the bad. Presenting the worst face of a character to the world is not in itself fresh or especially amusing any more. We are overrun with sitcoms reflecting us, warts and all. Bridget Jones was among the first of these types of characters in popular fiction, and I was variously amused and pained by her hapless and heart-warming antics. More recently, the anonymous Bride Stripped Bare startled me for the statutory fifteen minutes, and left me wondering where all the attractive taxi drivers were hiding. In Alison Says, a conflation of the above, I found the central character, Maggs, to be a bit tiresome – and tired. Maggs is a 24-year-old drama teacher who has recently been dumped. Two months later, Jamie, the ex-inamorato, becomes engaged to Lorelei, aka ‘the Rhine slut’. In the wake of these events, Maggs is emotionally vulnerable, but it’s all rather in the manner of someone in an arrested state of adolescence. Suzanne Hawley’s Maggs is a stock characterisation based on the humour of self-absorption and victimhood, narcissism and obsession. Hawley’s novel does not fully realise the key ingredient of chick lit: a central character that the reader either loves or loves to hate.

Read more: Lisa Temple reviews ‘Alison Says’ by Suzanne Hawley

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Contents Category: Theatre
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Article Title: An opera looking for its music
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Patrick White had rather more success than Henry James with his plays – though that is not saying much. James’s attempt in the 1890s to conquer the London stage was a theatrical and personal disaster, but has, remarkably, provoked two recent novels, Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. The plays were no great loss, and it was to our ultimate benefit that James returned his creative energy to the novel.
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Production Company: Malthouse Theatre

A review of the Malthouse Theatre production of Patrick White’s ‘The Ham Funeral’, playing in repertory with Tom Wright’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, April 11 to May 9.

Patrick White had rather more success than Henry James with his plays – though that is not saying much. James’s attempt in the 1890s to conquer the London stage was a theatrical and personal disaster, but has, remarkably, provoked two recent novels, Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. The plays were no great loss, and it was to our ultimate benefit that James returned his creative energy to the novel.

Read more: John Rickard reviews productions of ‘The Ham Funeral’ and ‘Journal of the Plague Year’

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Marilyn Lake reviews ‘Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier violence and stolen Indigenous children in Australian history’ edited by A. Dirk Moses
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: Genocidal moments
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Is ‘genocide’ a useful concept for understanding colonialism and, in particular, the destruction of Aboriginal communities during the settlement of Australia? Dirk Moses, the editor of this stimulating collection of essays on Genocide and Settler Society, thinks so, but with qualifications. Many of his contributors agree, but tend to be more comfortable using the concept in its adjectival form: there were genocidal ‘moments’, ‘plans’, ‘processes’, ‘relationships’, ‘tendencies’ and ‘thoughts’ in Australian history, but ‘genocide’ – the crime of deliberately exterminating a people – is another matter. The charge of ‘genocide’ tout court gives historians pause, for it is essential to prove intent and state sanction on the part of the perpetrators.
Book 1 Title: Genocide and Settler Society
Book 1 Subtitle: Frontier violence and stolen Indigenous children in Australian history
Book Author: A. Dirk Moses
Book 1 Biblio: Berghahn Books, $25 pb, 325 pp
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Is ‘genocide’ a useful concept for understanding colonialism and, in particular, the destruction of Aboriginal communities during the settlement of Australia? Dirk Moses, the editor of this stimulating collection of essays on Genocide and Settler Society, thinks so, but with qualifications. Many of his contributors agree, but tend to be more comfortable using the concept in its adjectival form: there were genocidal ‘moments’, ‘plans’, ‘processes’, ‘relationships’, ‘tendencies’ and ‘thoughts’ in Australian history, but ‘genocide’ – the crime of deliberately exterminating a people – is another matter. The charge of ‘genocide’ tout court gives historians pause, for it is essential to prove intent and state sanction on the part of the perpetrators.

Read more: Marilyn Lake reviews ‘Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier violence and stolen Indigenous...

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