Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

October 2000, no. 225

Welcome to the October 2000 issue of Australian Book Review. 

Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right? by Raimond Gaita
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Commentary
Custom Article Title: Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right?
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right?
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

‘We’ve given Ayers Rock back to the Aborigines!’ Perhaps I remember those words so clearly because a friend spoke them to me over the telephone when I was in England, surprised almost daily at the reforms of the Whitlam government and at the international interest they excited. Years later I reflected on the meaning of that ‘we’. Had he said the same words to an English person, the meaning of it would have been different. Addressed to me, that ‘we’ wasn’t so much a classification that included or excluded me: it was an invitation to be part of a community whose identity was partly formed by its relation to Australia and its past and by its preparedness to accept responsibilities for what head been done to the Aborigines – at that time (before we knew about the stolen children), the taking of their lands and desecration of their sacred places. Had I thought about it, that would partly have answered the question I did ask him. ‘What does giving it back mean?’ He couldn’t say. In fact no one I asked could. No one was interested. Everyone was heartened by the generosity expressed in the gesture and enthusiastic in their hopes for a new era.
Display Review Rating: No

‘We’ve given Ayers Rock back to the Aborigines!’ Perhaps I remember those words so clearly because a friend spoke them to me over the telephone when I was in England, surprised almost daily at the reforms of the Whitlam government and at the international interest they excited. Years later I reflected on the meaning of that ‘we’. Had he said the same words to an English person, the meaning of it would have been different. Addressed to me, that ‘we’ wasn’t so much a classification that included or excluded me: it was an invitation to be part of a community whose identity was partly formed by its relation to Australia and its past and by its preparedness to accept responsibilities for what head been done to the Aborigines – at that time (before we knew about the stolen children), the taking of their lands and desecration of their sacred places. Had I thought about it, that would partly have answered the question I did ask him. ‘What does giving it back mean?’ He couldn’t say. In fact no one I asked could. No one was interested. Everyone was heartened by the generosity expressed in the gesture and enthusiastic in their hopes for a new era.

Read more: 'Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right?' by Raimond Gaita

Write comment (0 Comments)
Philippa Hawker reviews The Horror Reader edited by Ken Gelder
Free Article: No
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Horror. It’s a word you are forced to utter emphatically, almost to expel. On the page, it seems to contain a form of typographical echo – it looks as if it is repeating itself. The term has tactile, physical associations; it once meant roughness or ruggedness, and it also describes a shuddering or a shivering movement. (There’s a wonderful word, horripilation, a synonym for the phenomenon also known as gooseflesh.)

Corporeal sensations, outward and internal – the frisson of creeping flesh, the visceral clutch or contraction of the bowels. Horror is the response and that which causes it, the emotion of disgust or repugnance which provokes a shudder or a shiver. Instinctive, immediate, something that can’t be moderated or regulated. But there is also a dynamic of attraction and repulsion in and around horror: it is both what you cannot bear to contemplate and cannot bear to look away from.
Book 1 Title: The Horror Reader
Book Author: Ken Gelder
Book 1 Biblio: Routledge $47.30pb, 413pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-horror-reader-ken-gelder/book/9780415213561.html
Display Review Rating: No

Horror. It’s a word you are forced to utter emphatically, almost to expel. On the page, it seems to contain a form of typographical echo – it looks as if it is repeating itself. The term has tactile, physical associations; it once meant roughness or ruggedness, and it also describes a shuddering or a shivering movement. (There’s a wonderful word, horripilation, a synonym for the phenomenon also known as gooseflesh.)

Corporeal sensations, outward and internal – the frisson of creeping flesh, the visceral clutch or contraction of the bowels. Horror is the response and that which causes it, the emotion of disgust or repugnance which provokes a shudder or a shiver. Instinctive, immediate, something that can’t be moderated or regulated. But there is also a dynamic of attraction and repulsion in and around horror: it is both what you cannot bear to contemplate and cannot bear to look away from.

Read more: Philippa Hawker reviews 'The Horror Reader' edited by Ken Gelder

Write comment (0 Comments)
Laurie Clancy reviews Henry Handel Richardson: The letters edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Letter collection
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

The status of Henry Handel Richardson as a writer in Australia has always been somewhat problematic. Some people put that down to the fact that she was an expatriate. Leaving Australia at the age of eighteen, she returned only once, very briefly, in 1912. Expatriates, however, have often been paranoid about their reputation in this country and inclined to imagine that the Australian public is punishing them for leaving whereas in most cases it is indifferent to or even ignorant of that fact.
Book 1 Title: Henry Handel Richardson
Book 1 Subtitle: The letters
Book Author: Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $88 hb, 660 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/9WWVb0
Display Review Rating: No

The status of Henry Handel Richardson as a writer in Australia has always been somewhat problematic. Some people put that down to the fact that she was an expatriate. Leaving Australia at the age of eighteen, she returned only once, very briefly, in 1912. Expatriates, however, have often been paranoid about their reputation in this country and inclined to imagine that the Australian public is punishing them for leaving whereas in most cases it is indifferent to or even ignorant of that fact.

The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Richardson wrote in a stubbornly naturalistic style during a period when modernism was all the rage. A professor of English in Australia once told me that he admired Richardson far less after discovering that her work was much more recent than he had thought, a statement I found extremely puzzling.

Read more: Laurie Clancy reviews 'Henry Handel Richardson: The letters' edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele

Write comment (0 Comments)
John Docker reviews Greene on Capri: A memoir by Shirley Hazzard
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Memoir
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Why I’m gripped by this book I don’t know. Well, I do know. When I was in Vietnam late last year, on a gourmet tour, I purchased a pirated copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, my first Greene novel. (Why I hadn’t read Greene before I also don’t know, though I’d loved his wonderfully bizarre script for The Third Man.) In Saigon I took green tea in the Hotel Continental, imagining I was sitting where Greene might have sat in the early 1950s. At last, I thought, I’m doing a bit of cultural geography. When I returned to Canberra, I read it, and immediately decided it was a great novel, extraordinarily prescient of the Vietnam War. What also impressed me was the sensibility of Fowler, the English narrator, resigned to knowing himself undignified, unkempt, duplicitous, lying, opium-enveloped, absurdly deluded in love; an active accomplice in murder, of Pyle the appalling American intelligence agent come to do good in Southeast Asia, and always innocent in his own eyes, whatever he disastrously does.
Book 1 Title: Greene on Capri
Book 1 Subtitle: A memoir
Book Author: Shirley Hazzard
Book 1 Biblio: Virago, 149 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/WDNq1O
Display Review Rating: No

Why I’m gripped by this book I don’t know. Well, I do know. When I was in Vietnam late last year, on a gourmet tour, I purchased a pirated copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, my first Greene novel. (Why I hadn’t read Greene before I also don’t know, though I’d loved his wonderfully bizarre script for The Third Man.) In Saigon I took green tea in the Hotel Continental, imagining I was sitting where Greene might have sat in the early 1950s. At last, I thought, I’m doing a bit of cultural geography. When I returned to Canberra, I read it, and immediately decided it was a great novel, extraordinarily prescient of the Vietnam War. What also impressed me was the sensibility of Fowler, the English narrator, resigned to knowing himself undignified, unkempt, duplicitous, lying, opium-enveloped, absurdly deluded in love; an active accomplice in murder, of Pyle the appalling American intelligence agent come to do good in Southeast Asia, and always innocent in his own eyes, whatever he disastrously does.

Read more: John Docker reviews 'Greene on Capri: A memoir' by Shirley Hazzard

Write comment (0 Comments)
Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

I recently took part in a forum on contemporary Australian fiction, a discussion during which the publisher on the panel talked about popular and/or ‘middlebrow’ fiction, and about her ire with reviewers who either simply trashed such novels, or else insisted on emphasising their status as ‘popular fiction’, and on discussing them within the context of its generic expectations and limitations.
Book 1 Title: Morgan’s Run
Book Author: Colleen McCullough
Book 1 Biblio: Century, $43.85 hb, 608 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/YggVrm
Display Review Rating: No

I recently took part in a forum on contemporary Australian fiction, a discussion during which the publisher on the panel talked about popular and/or ‘middlebrow’ fiction, and about her ire with reviewers who either simply trashed such novels, or else insisted on emphasising their status as ‘popular fiction’, and on discussing them within the context of its generic expectations and limitations.

The weakness in this latter point is the fact that if judged by the same criteria and standards as ‘high culture’ literary fiction, most popular or middlebrow fiction would suffer cruelly, if only for its lack of originality. The reviews that don’t take generic differences into account are precisely the ones that give populist writers the hardest time. The work of a populist writer, especially if it works within well-defined genres – the historical novel, the detective novel, the saga, the romance, the western, or whatever – deserves to be analysed in its class, by its own rules and standards.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Morgan’s Run' by Colleen McCullough

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...