Unlike Ivor lndyk, whose views of the novel I certainly endorse, I believe that judges of literary prizes are entitled to stick to their guns – though surely they should be prepared to defend their decision in detail, and I have seen no such defence on literary grounds from the ALS Gold Medal judges. Therefore, as a member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, I simply want to go on record as deploring the award itself (and my reservations stem from a period well before revelations about Demidenko’s identity were current) and underlining that the judges’ decision in that particular case doesn’t represent the views of the members of ASAL as a whole.

Paul Salzman

School of English, La Trobe Uni.

From Helen Nickas

Dear Editor,

The Darville/Demidenko case has raised some very serious moral issues including the ethical responsibilities of writers. This is why we are still debating the case and why it has stirred so many passions. To begin with a writer’s identity, most of us would consider it perfectly acceptable for writers to use pseudonyms. Women writers have done so in the past in order to keep their identity secret from their families, or to get published by using male names. And many more writers, male or female, do so, often because their real names are not euphonic or glamorous enough.

But the times of the Brontes or George Eliot are long gone. Writers now, if successful, become instant celebrities, idolised by the public and scrutinised by the media about their private life. Under such circumstances, a false identity cannot be sustained for long. Incredible as it may seem, Helen Darville/Demidenko tried it and succeeded for a while. She fooled us with her tale and she fooled us as the teller of it, by writing a ‘nasty’ story and pretending that this was her family’s true history.

And this is precisely the whole point: she fooled us in order to tell a ‘nasty’ tale, but the Miles Franklin judges admired the ‘courage’ of this migrant daughter for daring to speak of the ‘unspeakable’. Here was a writer, who was not telling the boring ‘good’ migrant stories from the point of view of the victim – now considered a very trite and stereotypical view of migrants – but a daring young writer who was bold enough to push the boundaries of what is acceptable subject matter for ‘Australian’ literature.

Had Darville written a ‘good’ tale, however, we would not have objected to the deception. At least, not as vehemently, for it seems that most readers of fiction want to read moral, not immoral, or amoral tales. Especially middle-aged and older readers for whom the memories of War have not faded. Any writing about war crimes which shows even a hint of sympathy for the perpetrators is not going to engage the sympathy of, or identification with the reader, no matter how well the book is written.

Darville is of the younger generation growing up, not with the memories of real violence but with the glamorisation of it in the mass media. Appropriating the horrific war history of another people totally unrelated to her and then trying to make it more palatable by pretending to be their descendant, is the objectionable point which has stirred so many readers, so deeply.

Helen Nickas

European Studies, La Trobe Uni

From Ian McFarlane

Dear Editor,

Unlike John Hanrahan (ABR 174), I considered Helen Garner’s book, The First Stone, to be both calm and balanced. It’s also a work of clarity and compassion in the often tangled and mean-spirited world of contemporary feminism. John Hanrahan doesn’t trust men who call themselves feminist. I believe feminism is – or should be – essentially all about genderless justice. Does that make me a feminist? I’m glad if it does. John Hanrahan says that Helen Garner makes judgments she couldn’t know were right. How does anyone know? Some time ago, in these pages, John Hanrahan made the sweeping judgment that all men were sexist (how could he possibly know this, unless he was claiming omniscience?). When I suggested that he might not have been serious, he bristled. Apparently he was being very serious, and there’s the rub. Helen Garner’s far-reaching book implies the possibility – however remote – of a world where sexism is irrelevant because men and women co-exist equally, not only in word and deed, but in thought as well, and in such a world it would never occur to anyone to be sexist. People would see no point in calling themselves feminist either.

Ian McFarlane

Beauty Point, NSW

From Margaret Coffey

Dear Editor,

I was disappointed in Deborah Zion’s review of Peter Cameron’s Fundamentalism and Freedom (September issue) not because I have read the book and thought her account of it unjust but rather because I haven’t read it and there is nothing in the review to persuade me that I should. After all, why bother reading a book which deals with irrelevance and ridiculousness and silliness? A book which engages with ‘organised Christianity’, a phenomenon that we are told confidently has achieved ‘demise.’ Moreover a book which is substantially concerned with jettisoning what we know already to be ‘mumbo-jumbo’, ‘irrelevant or unnecessary’, ‘childish and magical’.

To begin with, it is nonsense that ‘works of popular theology are generally the province of cranks and fundamentalists’. ‘Popular theology’ is thriving in Australian publishing and it is nothing of the kind Deborah Zion imagines. It got to grappling with difficult questions with the aid of literary texts, never mind all sorts of other texts including contemporary culture, long before Peter Cameron did. It also happens to be read by a lot of people. Indeed, some Australian popular theology sells well in other countries.

Then there’s the remark about Cameron’s theology being ‘reminiscent of a vigorous enlightenment text, in which reason and compassion are seen as difficult but necessary virtues’. While it’s pleasant to see the Enlightenment proffered in the way of a recommendation, from the very beginning reason has been yoked to Christian theology, from Justin Martyr, not to mention Irenaeus, and later Aquinas.

I could go on – about, for example, the easy extrapolations (‘fundamentalists’ somehow becomes ‘the churches’) – but the key problem is the preposterous way ideas, beliefs, and meanings of fundamental relevance to huge numbers of people including a large percentage of Australians are shifted to the fringe and observed as outside mainstream culture. Not only that, in Cameron’s little comer of Australian Christianity there was an engagement with exactly the same kinds of questions that arrest the literati: questions about truth, meaning, language, symbol, and fact. Whether they arise within the minority Presbyterian Church or within broad mainstream Christianity, both questions and answers have resonances for the wider culture. Theologians understand this; it would be refreshingly open-minded if ARR reviewers did too.

Margaret Coffey

Radio National, Melbourne

From Tony Barrell and Rick Tanaka

Dear Editor,

In his review of Higher than Heaven: Japan war and everything (ABR/August), Jeffrey Grey allowed his intense dislike of our style to get in the way of his scholarship.

He claims we rely too heavily on the Gar Alperovitz thesis which, without either identifying or disproving, he declares to have been ‘discredited for a long time’. By whom? The ‘thesis’ was deemed credible enough by the BBC in 1989 to make a fifty minute documentary based on it, screened here by SBS on August sixth; for the Australian to give Alperovitz 3000 words worth of space in its Hiroshima supplement of August fifth; and for the Knopf publishing house to issue a new book by Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Bomb, also in August this year.

Another historian we do ‘rely’ on is not mentioned at all by Grey. John Ray Skates, who, like Grey, is a military historian supported by the defence establishment, made an exhaustive study of the official records and other archives for The Invasion of Japan (University of Southern Carolina, 1994), in which he concludes that there is ‘no evidence’ anywhere to suggest that casualty projections for the November invasion came anywhere near the hugely inflated figures of 500,000 to a million. The figure Grey mentions of 394,859, says Skates, was supplied to MacArthur by his surgeon and was an ambit claim based on the need for field hospitals for the treatment of every kind of ailment, including non­battle complaints such as earache and tinea.

We make no ‘counterclaims’ about casualties in Higher than Heaven, so don’t see how they can be dismissed by Grey as ‘specious’. Like many of the defenders of the bomb he prefers to argue with the phantoms in his head.

Grey’s remark that our approach to the war is ‘jokey’ implies an intent to belittle the death and suffering that would have ensued had the bombs not been used. As if, somehow, we are being offensive to the memory of people who may have died had they not been used!

Grey also overlooks another reliable reference in Higher than Heaven – the historiographical survey by J. Samuel Walker in Diplomatic History of 1990, titled ‘The Decision to Use the Bomb’, which analyses the major works written since the Alperovitz thesis was first published. Walker concludes there is now a ‘consensus’ amongst historians – including Barton Bernstein – that the use of the bombs as deterrents to potential Soviet expansion was an important element of the decision-making process.

For readers who are interested in what we really say in Higher than Heaven about the use of the bombs and the mindset of their defenders, it goes like this:

Once the Manhattan Project was given an open budget and unrestricted go ahead by President Roosevelt in 1942 the imperative to use its outcomes in a real life demonstration was irresistible but not justifiable. The post facto logic, the true ‘revision’ that’s been used to try and make that outcome acceptable relies on an interpretation which has assumed the characteristics of a faith: that there was no alternative. This belief cannot be challenged. It relies for its certitude on denial. 

Any suggestion that by early August 1945 the destruction of Japan’s military, industrial, social and psychological capacity to resist had been terminally damaged cannot be tolerated. Based on the terrible experiences of Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Philippines it claims American forces would have been faced with a fanatical nation of kamikaze warriors, professional and civilian, both subsumed by a magical state of immovable and irreversible superhuman will, which, without the trauma of the atomic bombs would have given them enough motivation and strength to fight until they were all dead. This nationalist zeal was sourced from a hysterical unquestioning and/or regimented devotion to the Emperor.

Anyone who puts forward a case for believing the Japanese people might have harboured a genuine desire to surrender, a reluctance to fight or even an aversion for killing themselves for the sake of the Emperor is dealt with by ridicule, derision and spite.

We wrote and published Higher than Heaven because we knew ‘this year of remembrance’ would be used to reinstate the military rather than the geo­political motivation as the standard explanation for the use of nuclear weapons on people. We also knew that those who still support the use of atomic bombs on civilians in 1945 would not fight fair. After all, if they can justify mass incineration they aren’t going to pull their punches against literary objectors. So, we will live with Grey’s cheap sneer that we are purveyors of ‘undigested vulgar Marxism’ and we can even thank him for describing us as ‘tabloid comedians’. As we see it, being ‘discredited’ in this way has to be some kind of compliment.

Tony Barrell & Rick Tanaka

Sydney, NSW

And Jeffrey Grey’s reply ...

Time and space permit only a brief response to Barrell’s and Tanaka’s objections to my review. There are three points I want to pick up.

The first is that there is no consensus in the historiography surrounding the decision to drop the bombs, despite what Alperovitz, for example, frequently claims in his writings. The fact that the latter’s work has been picked up by several media outlets in recent years does not, of itself, invest it with any greater authority, especially given the generally very shallow grounding in historical subjects possessed by most (though not all) journalists.

The second relates to casualties. I do not know how many Allied servicemen would have been killed or wounded in the invasion of the home islands, and neither do Barrell and Tanaka. No one knows for sure. But one of the problems with their self-professed desire to downplay the military motivations in favour of geopolitical theorising is that the operational considerations surrounding the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands were first and foremost military ones. In planning for Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, the American military knew through the use of signals intelligence that they would face at least 455,000 Japanese troops, a figure which by the seventh of August had in fact increased to well over half a million. Imperial General Headquarters had concentrated between ten and fourteen divisions directly on the designated invasion beaches. Through similar intercepts, senior planners knew that the Japanese plan to resist invasion incorporated extensive use of suicide weapons. Over the home islands as a whole, on the day Japan surrendered, Japanese forces numbered over 4,300,000. Based on what they knew of all this, and on what they had experienced on Okinawa, the arithmetic suggested a concerted resistance and consequent heavy casualties on all sides. Of course there were Japanese who wanted an end to the war, but many of those still making the decisions were not among their number.

The third point relates to style and attitude. As ‘a military historian supported by the defence establishment’, I can indeed justify the use of atomic weapons on Japanese targets – and please, let’s not trot out the hoary old chestnut about ‘civilian targets’; Barrell and Tanaka know (or ought to know) as well as I do that Hiroshima was the headquarters of the second General Army, with two armies under command, all designated a major role in the operations to repel the Allied invasion of Honshu in Operation Coronet. I would equally justify their use against the German targets they were originally designed for. What I disliked most about their book, and about much of the ‘victim literature’ on this issue, is the way in which Japanese casualties are to be deplored, while Allied ones are dismissed (that throw-away line, boys, about ‘only a few thousand deaths’). You’re just as dead whatever uniform you wear and whichever side you are on, and someone, somewhere mourns you.

In short, the decision-making process which led to dropping the bomb was a complex one. There were, of course, political factors involved in it, both considerations of foreign policy and domestic pressures. But wars are waged by military means, and our understanding of this one will improve if we resist the urge to caricature those who were charged with its successful termination, whatever we might think of the results half a century later.

            Jeffrey Grey

From Ross Fitzgerald

Dear Editor,

I write in response to John Hanrahan’s review of Laurie Hergenhan’s No Casual Traveller: Hartley Grattan and Australia-US connections (ABR/August). While Hanrahan recognises Hergenhan’s ‘formidable scholarship’, it is a shame that he damns the biography with faint praise by describing Hergenhan’s writing as ‘stolid’ and concluding that the book is ‘rather dull’. Dullness is often in the eye and ear of the listener-observer. Unlike Hanrahan, I found Hergenhan’s biography of the remarkable American author-journalist, Clinton Hartley Grattan, who first visited Australia in 1927, to be quite fascinating.

More than any other foreign observer, it was Grattan who introduced Australia to Americans and, in the process, helped Australians become interested in ourselves; in our past, present, and future. This is why his biography, No Casual Traveller, is such an important book. As Hergenhan reveals, Grattan’s close friends in this country included Miles Franklin, Vance and Nettie Palmer, the radical nationalist historian Brian Fitzpatrick, and Dr H.V. Evatt to whose 1938 historical classic, Rum Rebellion, he wrote an astute and sympathetic foreword. Grattan firmly believed that history should be connected with contemporary events. In clear and vigorous prose he also fought a lifelong battle against narrow academic specialisation and what he termed the ‘fatigued bookishness’ that categorised universities here and in America.

To my mind, Hergenhan’s biography gives plenty of space for the reader to use his/her imagination when thinking about Grattan, who was both a generalist and a gadfly, an outsider and a dissident. Grattan loved and was fascinated by Australia and Australians. While his manner was often blunt and challenging, Grattan paid us the high compliment of taking our nation and its people seriously. Grattan’s great hope was that we would create our own national identity, separate from both Britain and America, and these days he would add, from Japan. Yet despite his stress on Australian independence, one favourable American review of Introducing Australia was entitled with unnerving predictive accuracy, ‘Our Newest Frontier’!

Grattan had a major influence on Australia’s most important radical nationalist historians. Apart from Brian Fitzpatrick and Vance and Nettie Palmer, Introducing Australia had a huge impact on Stephen Murray-Smith, Ian Turner, and Geoffrey Serle, all twenty year-olds when the book was published in 1942.

The life and work of C. Hartley Grattan has much to teach us today. This is not just in terms of forging an independent national identity, free of the constraints of the British Crown and of American and Japanese economic imperialism, but also in terms of the conduct of our cultural and intellectual life. Before he died, in 1980, Grattan acutely warned: ‘Australia is being chewed up into those bits which are digestible by the academic specialists, and the task of seeing Australia whole is left to a few reluctant generalists’. Unfortunately in 1995 there are fewer and fewer generalists left in this country, and almost none in our universities.

It is unfair to claim that Laurie Hergenhan’s biography is ‘dull’ and that his writing style is ‘stolid’. Read, for example, Hergenhan’s evocative description of C. Hartley Grattan’s choice of a final resting place:

‘His wish was that his ashes be scattered in Sydney Harbour. After consulting with Sir John Crawford about a public ceremony and deciding against it, an Australian friend, Harold Bell, ‘distributed them privately on a fine evening roughly between the Opera House and Admiralty House’ ... the one a national and international icon representing Australia’s cosmopolitanism, the other a symbol of specifically Australian politics and history. As Grattan knew, the harbour was also the setting of Australia’s greatest poetic elegy, Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, which uses the life of a forgotten journalist to ponder what significance lies in individual effort, and how much, or how little, of it is remembered.’

If that is dull, then I am a banana!

To my mind, No Casual Traveller is a fine and generous book indeed.

Ross Fitzgerald

Griffith University, Queensland

And John Hanrahan’s reply ...

Dear Ross Banana,

Humbled and chastened, I promise never again to call the prose of any of your fellow Queenslanders ‘stolid’ or ‘dull’, on condition that you give up writing long, boring letters that don’t address the issue, but restate the known and the bloody obvious. Slipping from ‘dull’ to ‘generous’ (a description which I clearly endorsed in my review) is a neat banana-in-pyjamas act. Given the passage quoted, I am surprised that you don’t know that the Sydney Harbour and ‘Five Bells’ have been drowned more often and more thoroughly than Atlantis.

Abjectly yours,

John Hanrahan

From Jill Jones ...

Dear Editor,

As one of the editors of a parachute of blue: first choice of australian poets, I was surprised by the general tone of negativity in Beate Josephi’s review of our book in the August ABR. Still, she’s entitled to her opinion. I would like, however, to correct some erroneous assumptions she has made.

The first is a small issue. Ms Josephi is delighted to find some ‘new’ poets in the book. And there are! But two of the three she names, Nora Krouk and Kerry Leves, are well-established poets with books to their names and appearances in many major publications over a number of years. I’m sure they’d be surprised to be so labelled.

The chief error Ms Josephi falls into, however, is the trap of purporting to know what went on in the minds of the editors when making their selection. She implies, without quite coming out and saying it, that we either deliberately discriminated against poets who came from certain states or poets not born here or we were a bit thick in overlooking the apparently ‘very interesting poets’ whose work we should have sought (assuming we didn’t), instead of some work in the book she obliquely refers to as poor but never names.

She argues the book is not representative enough. Of what? We claimed it was a sample of twelve months of poetry. We stated clearly in our correspondence to poets and in our introduction there was a selection process. We contacted many poets but we were looking for their poems, not their representational status. Round Table is not a large organisation with funds to track down every poet in Australia. Letters were returned undelivered. Many poets did not contribute; their decision, not ours. Others who are well-known submitted work which we judged as not for us; our decision which we stick by. (We all get rejected at some time and having a ‘name’ should not always mean instant inclusion.)

We also stated we regard this as an ongoing project and would be happy to know of contacts we could follow up in the future. I believe our chief omission, which Ms Josephi did not note, was of Aboriginal work, though even there we did try to find writers.

Not all our contributors told us where they were born (probably because we didn’t ask) but I count at least seven of the forty-three who were not born in Australia and about a half dozen that I know come from non-English speaking backgrounds. However, it’s dangerous to make assumptions about people’s ethnic backgrounds from their surnames or stated birthplaces. I was faced with such dilemmas when I worked in the area of Equal Employment Opportunity. These issues are not always easy or straightforward for every single person from non-Anglo backgrounds. There are also privacy implications that those who believe in ‘outing’ or are of more free-wheeling dispositions do not always understand.

It’s also a bit tenuous to assume that if one currently lives in Brisbane one is a Queensland poet. For the record, half the Tasmanian poets who submitted (others didn’t) were accepted. But this is political correctness gone feral. Still, we obviously passed on gender parity (whew!) and weren’t asked to give an account of the sexual preferences, religion, or politics of our poets.

Ms Josephi’s last paragraph accuses us of dishonesty in not admitting our limitations. We admitted them all along and still do, as our introduction makes perfectly clear. It could be argued it’s Ms Josephi who is dishonest by assuming she knows who did or did not offer themselves for selection, and then declining to engage with work in the book which she feels not worthy of inclusion. Which work? On what grounds?

I could equally assume, if I felt like pushing it, she was discriminating against Round Table because we’re a small Sydney-based group with few resources but enough energy to put out a good quality product. I’m sure her motives are honourable, but we are well aware people tend to be a bit sniffy about small presses these days and regard Sydney as the source of all evil. However, we believe our book is lively and provocative (clearly) and our choices are defensible. And no, we never claimed at any stage to be speaking ‘for a year’s Australian poetry’ – we’re simply not that deluded.

It’s a pity Ms Josephi did not deal more fully with the poetry as I found her comments useful in this regard, but it’s a common characteristic of Aust Lit these days to play the man (and woman) and not the ball. From the half-time point of the review I believe the referee could have validly ruled off-side more than once.

Jill Jones

West Ryde, NSW

And Beate Josephi’s reply ...

Dear Editor,

I’m grateful to Jill Jones for hacking up one of my main points. She writes that poets – new to me – are in fact well-established. But well-known where? Certainly not in W.A. and probably not in the other states I mentioned as being left out of the picture – just as the poets of these states may not be well-known in Sydney. Regionalism, by no means a derogatory term, cannot be omitted from the ‘Australian’ equation any longer. Round Table Publications, understandably lacking the ‘funds to track down every poet’, need to recognise that they may be contributing to it.

Beate Josephi.