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Absolutely Revolting

July 1988, no. 102

Welcome to the July 1988 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Stephen Knight reviews nine crime novels
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Crime wave in Aussie publishing: Editors baffled
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Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.
Book 1 Title: Deep Gold
Book Author: Arthur Maher
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam, 298 pp, $8.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Seven Miles from Sydney
Book 2 Author: Lesley Thomson
Book 2 Biblio: Pandora, 205 pp, $9.95 pb
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
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Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.

Read more: Stephen Knight reviews nine crime novels

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Philip Salom reviews New and Selected Poems by Philip Martin, Labour Ward by Jennifer Strauss, and Selected Poems by Andrew Taylor
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Lyrical travelling
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Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.
Book 1 Title: Selected Poems
Book Author: Andrew Taylor
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, 205 pp, $14.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: New and Selected Poems
Book 2 Author: Philip Martin
Book 2 Biblio: Longman Cheshire, 76 pp, $6.95 pb
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Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.

Read more: Philip Salom reviews 'New and Selected Poems' by Philip Martin, 'Labour Ward' by Jennifer Strauss,...

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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Dear Writer by Carmel Bird
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Teaching writing with pleasure
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Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaimer and then, accordingly, confine themselves to technique. Somehow it’s as though people who take upon themselves the task of teaching other people to write feel compelled first to apologise for it and then to shy away from its less tangible demands.
Book 1 Title: Dear Writer
Book Author: Carmel Bird
Book 1 Biblio: McPhee Gribble,135 pp, $9.99 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.booktopia.com.au/dear-writer-revisited-carmel-bird/book/9780987447968.html
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Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaimer and then, accordingly, confine themselves to technique. Somehow it’s as though people who take upon themselves the task of teaching other people to write feel compelled first to apologise for it and then to shy away from its less tangible demands.

None of this applies to Carmel Bird's Dear Writer, which begins like this:

Read more: Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Dear Writer' by Carmel Bird

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Margaret Harris reviews Outlaw and Lawmaker by Rosa Praed and Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Humanism plagues feminist criticism
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I first met Rosa Praed under the blue dome of the British Museum Reading Room some twenty years ago. She was introduced as Mrs Campbell Praed, an aspiring novelist advised by George Meredith – himself a novelist and poet, and the subject of my doctoral research – in his capacity as publisher’s reader for the well-known house of Chapman & Hall. The fact of her being an Australian writer seeking to break into the London publishing scene in the 1880s was notable; but she was marginal to my concerns at that time.
Book 1 Title: Outlaw and Lawmaker
Book Author: Rosa Praed
Book 1 Biblio: Pandora Press, 307 pp, $13.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Mothers of the Novel
Book 2 Subtitle: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen
Book 2 Author: Dale Spender
Book 2 Biblio: Pandora Press, 357 pp, $14.95 pb
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I first met Rosa Praed under the blue dome of the British Museum Reading Room some twenty years ago. She was introduced as Mrs Campbell Praed, an aspiring novelist advised by George Meredith – himself a novelist and poet, and the subject of my doctoral research – in his capacity as publisher’s reader for the well-known house of Chapman & Hall. The fact of her being an Australian writer seeking to break into the London publishing scene in the 1880s was notable; but she was marginal to my concerns at that time.

Read more: Margaret Harris reviews 'Outlaw and Lawmaker' by Rosa Praed and 'Mothers of the Novel' by Dale...

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Katherine Brisbane reviews The Cherry Pickers by Kevin Gilbert
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Contents Category: Theatre
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Article Title: Black drama of white laws
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It seems a world away since 1968 when Kevin Gilbert and Brian Syron got together a group of untutored Aboriginal actors in the back garden of Judge Frank McGrath’s house in Centennial Park, Sydney, to read the first draft of The Cherry Pickers. Amy and Frank McGrath, dedicated theatre-lovers, had turned their stables into the Mews Playhouse and, in that time of extraordinary theatrical nationalism, were, for a short space, one of its most innovatory influences.
Book 1 Title: The Cherry Pickers
Book Author: Kevin Gilbert
Book 1 Biblio: Burrambinga Books, 80 pp, $12.95 pb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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It seems a world away since 1968 when Kevin Gilbert and Brian Syron got together a group of untutored Aboriginal actors in the back garden of Judge Frank McGrath’s house in Centennial Park, Sydney, to read the first draft of The Cherry Pickers. Amy and Frank McGrath, dedicated theatre-lovers, had turned their stables into the Mews Playhouse and, in that time of extraordinary theatrical nationalism, were, for a short space, one of its most innovatory influences.

The play was not complete, as I recall, but I remember with clarity the opening scene at the cherry pickers’ camp, in which an upturned tub on which a cheerful old woman sits, is discovered to contain her granddaughter, enduring a customary punishment for allegedly stealing damper and dripping. There was something so outrageous and authentic about the scene that I felt that for the first time I, as a European Australian, was being allowed to enter the private, domestic life of Black Australia.

Read more: Katherine Brisbane reviews 'The Cherry Pickers' by Kevin Gilbert

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