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Absolutely Revolting

September 1997, no. 194

Welcome to the September 1997 issue of Australian Book Review. 

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Stuart Coupe reviews Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction by Stephen Knight
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Contents Category: Literary Studies
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Continent of Mystery, subtitled ‘A thematic history of Australian crime fiction’ is, in the most simplistic terms, a daunting and inspiring book. My Australian crime fiction, mystery and detective fiction magazine, Mean Streets, was launched by Knight towards the end of 1990, not long before his move to the United Kingdom. For better or worse upon Knight’s departure I assumed, or at least so I was told, the mantle of Australia’s expert on crime fiction. I always perceived that observation as a compliment but having read Continent of Mystery with a sense of awe I can only say that I’m not sure I’m even fit to sit at Knight’s feet when it comes to local fiction with criminality at its core.
Book 1 Title: Continent of Mystery
Book 1 Subtitle: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction
Book Author: Stephen Knight
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $24.95 pb, 226 pp
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Continent of Mystery, subtitled ‘A thematic history of Australian crime fiction’ is, in the most simplistic terms, a daunting and inspiring book. My Australian crime fiction, mystery and detective fiction magazine, Mean Streets, was launched by Knight towards the end of 1990, not long before his move to the United Kingdom. For better or worse upon Knight’s departure I assumed, or at least so I was told, the mantle of Australia’s expert on crime fiction. I always perceived that observation as a compliment but having read Continent of Mystery with a sense of awe I can only say that I’m not sure I’m even fit to sit at Knight’s feet when it comes to local fiction with criminality at its core.

Sure, I possibly know more than he does about American hard-boiled writing, which is my passion, but Continent of Mystery is so breathtaking in its grasp of the localised genre, so full of insight, connections and understanding that I read most pages feeling like a pretender to the crown.

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Peter Pierce reviews The Silence Calling: Australians in Antarctica 1947–97 by Tim Bowden
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Contents Category: Antarctica
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As Tim Bowden would well remember, the ties of Hobart to the Antarctic have been visible long before the transfer of the Antarctic Division from Melbourne to Kingston, south of Hobart, in 1982, and the establishment of the Institute of Antarctic and Oceanic Studies at the University of Tasmania six years later. From the 1950s, the chartered Scandinavian vessels that carried members of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, Nella, Kista, Magga and other Dans, set out from Hobart early each summer. To look south down the Derwent was to know that one was truly at the end of the inhabited world. Yet if no permanent settlement has ever been created in Antarctica, thousands of Australians have worked and wintered there. The Silence Calling is Tim Bowden’s exemplary record of their achievements in this, the golden jubilee year of the ANARE.
Book 1 Title: The Silence Calling
Book 1 Subtitle: Australians in Antarctica 1947–97
Book Author: Tim Bowden
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $59.95 hb, 593 pp
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As Tim Bowden would well remember, the ties of Hobart to the Antarctic have been visible long before the transfer of the Antarctic Division from Melbourne to Kingston, south of Hobart, in 1982, and the establishment of the Institute of Antarctic and Oceanic Studies at the University of Tasmania six years later. From the 1950s, the chartered Scandinavian vessels that carried members of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, Nella, Kista, Magga and other Dans, set out from Hobart early each summer. To look south down the Derwent was to know that one was truly at the end of the inhabited world. Yet if no permanent settlement has ever been created in Antarctica, thousands of Australians have worked and wintered there. The Silence Calling is Tim Bowden’s exemplary record of their achievements in this, the golden jubilee year of the ANARE.

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Andrew Riemer reviews The Penguin Book of the City edited by Robert Drewe
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Contents Category: Anthologies
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This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.
Book 1 Title: The Penguin Book of the City
Book Author: Robert Drewe
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $17.95 hb, 382 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.

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Barry Hill reviews Working Temple by Caroline Caddy
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Contents Category: Poetry
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This is Caroline Caddy’s sixth collection of poetry. It comes to us after her well-received Antarctica, which the publicists mention in terms of her interest in ‘hinterlands and extreme land­scapes’. Working Temple is not so much about that, it seems to me, as the sensual encounter one might have with exotic puzzles and puzzlement. It is a collection that almost advances a notion of experience as a temple within which the signs of that experience are worked and worked again.
Book 1 Title: Working Temple
Book Author: Caroline Caddy
Book 1 Biblio: FACP $16.95 pb, 94 pp
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This is Caroline Caddy’s sixth collection of poetry. It comes to us after her well-received Antarctica, which the publicists mention in terms of her interest in ‘hinterlands and extreme land­scapes’. Working Temple is not so much about that, it seems to me, as the sensual encounter one might have with exotic puzzles and puzzlement. It is a collection that almost advances a notion of experience as a temple within which the signs of that experience are worked and worked again.

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews The Chosen by David Ireland
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Like much else about this novel, its title The Chosen is not the relatively straightforward affair it may, at first, appear to be. One assumes for the first hundred pages or so that the ‘chosen’ are those citizens of the small NSW Southern Tablelands town of Lost River who have been chosen by a randomising computer program to have their lives represented in the commemorative tapestry being woven as a civic project along with two other pet Town Council proposals, a new jail and a high-temperature incinerator. It’s a mode that critic Ken Gelder has called ‘dark pastoral’.
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Like much else about this novel, its title The Chosen is not the relatively straightforward affair it may, at first, appear to be. One assumes for the first hundred pages or so that the ‘chosen’ are those citizens of the small NSW Southern Tablelands town of Lost River who have been chosen by a randomising computer program to have their lives represented in the commemorative tapestry being woven as a civic project along with two other pet Town Council proposals, a new jail and a high-temperature incinerator. It’s a mode that critic Ken Gelder has called ‘dark pastoral’.

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Chosen' by David Ireland

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