Contemporary Australian literature was among the less obscure topics discussed at the recent Modern Language Association convention held in New York. About 15,000 delegates came to the bazaar, some looking for jobs or friends, others attending a boggling array of literary discussions on bat fantasy in Dickens, the future of East European nature poetry and the shape of language in Thea Astley’s work. This last one was a fine lecture given by Robert Ross, tireless president of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies, which will hold its own conference in March at Penn State University. Marcia Allentuck gave a lively talk about Australian Yiddish literature – in particular Herz Bergner’s Light and Shadows, which portrayed the bitter angst of the immigrant almost thirty years before the current wave of immigrant writing.

A group of actors from Pirra Arts Centre near Geelong will tour California, Kansas and Minnesota later this year to present a program called ‘Australian Sounds and Images’. Organizer of the trip is playwright Keith Harrison, now at Carleton College in Minnesota. Harrison hopes the program will go beyond the image of Australia which is presented in Crocodile Dundee. Talking of which People magazine chose Paul Hogan as one of its people of the year. Among its other choices was Sarah Ferguson…

Richard Allen is a young Australian poet currently living in New York. He recently returned to Sydney for the launching of his book, The Way Out At Last & Other Poems (Hale and Iremonger), and now has a busy schedule of performances of his mixed-media  poetry/dance/video works in New York and around the country. Enthusiastic reviewers have praised Allen’s ‘bold physicality’ and Twyla Tharp-style post-modernism.

More than in any other way, Australian humour has evolved and found its greatest expression not through the nation’s writers, entertainers, or film makers, but by the means of cartoonists drawing for the Australian press. This humour had two significant periods of development - the first beginning with the founding of the Bulletin a little over a century ago when the editors of this illustrated publication, notably J.F. Archibald, encouraged and fostered native talent, especially those artists of the day with comic graphic skills.

As could be expected and as we now acknowledge as part of our lore, the favoured subjects for comic ridicule (apart from the politicians, Queen Victoria, and Asians) were based on our rural origins and economy, on some aspect of ‘outback’ or bush life as it affected drovers, shearers, bullock-team drivers, bush parsons, cocky farmers – and Aborigines.

As Meena Blesing explained in an interview on Sixty Minutes, writing an autobiographical account of her life during the Combe-Ivanov Royal Commission was something she needed to do. Writing the book allowed her to discuss the events of 1983 and their consequences in a way that gave expression to and ordered her anger. For the reader, Blesing’s very personal story provides a perspective on the Combe Affair which has not been canvassed in the other published material: media reports, the Hope Report, David Marr’s The Ivanov Trail. That the book concludes on a note of somewhat ironic hope is but one indication of the emotional complexity of the material story she covers. For, in telling her own story, Blesing also presents us with what can be read as a rare discussion of the impact on private, family life of state actions and policies.

Occasionally, there are books of literary criticism which stay in the mind’s eye, so to speak; they endure beyond the point of short-term recall: the central argument, the general impress of thought, the singular, illuminating ideas and catchments of insight. As with Dorothy Green’s massive and intense scrutiny of Henry Handel Richardson, these books have the authority of a kind of passionate clarity, even when they seem paradoxical, or odd.

First published under the title Ulysses Bound, this new 1986 edition takes the earlier subtitle: Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction. The book will be well-known to many readers, not least for its scrupulous and pioneering research and trenchant discussion. Although the main text remains unchanged – barring minor corrections – the inclusion of a lengthy afterword, thirty photographs, and the new title, mark this edition’s strategic differences from the earlier volume.