Accessibility Tools

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

September 1986, no. 84

Free Article: No
Contents Category: Essay
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Self Portrait
Article Subtitle: A poignant reflection on the writing life
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

As the child of survivors of a war-battered, sorely depleted driftwood generation, I have acquired reasons in plenty to call myself lucky. Perhaps more, far more, than merely lucky.
Display Review Rating: No

As the child of survivors of a war-battered, sorely depleted driftwood generation, I have acquired reasons in plenty to call myself lucky. Perhaps more, far more, than merely lucky.

Born in Russia, the son of Polish, Jewish refugees, my life might have evolved in line with any number of scenarios, the final actual one being arguably among the least foreseeable.

We may, for instance, my parents and I, in the postwar years, have remained incarcerated in the Soviet Union, or have settled in any of the ports of transit along our journeyings – in Warsaw, my parental home, or Germany or Paris – while, had other papers become available ahead of the Australian visa, we might, at wanderings’ end, have found ourselves in Israel, the USA, South Africa, or Brazil, in each place to be potentially caught up variously in wars, confrontations or currents more dislocating, more life-menacing, terror-threatening, or officially oppressive and stifling than anything experienced in this our actual final destination, Australia – Australia, which, at the time of our arrival in 1951, was a place far from another bruited European war and known for its sheep and its fleece, though, regrettably, for little else.

Here, the relative freedom, the relative egalitarianism, and the relative mobility generally characteristic of Australian society - relative, because freedom, egalitarianism and mobility can never be either absolute or total – coupled with a sound work ethic and frugality brought as part of my parents’ otherwise very meagre baggage, permitted me within a decade-and-a-half of reaching these shores to attain to a profession – medicine – scarcely dreamed of by my forebears, subject as they were to the numerus clausus operating in educational institutions in Poland and seldom free from the poverty, crowding and limited opportunities that were their lot.

Read more: Self Portrait - Serge Liberman

Write comment (0 Comments)
James Walter reviews Malcolm Fraser on Australia edited by D.M. White and D.A. Kemp
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Politics
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

There have been two major cycles in Australian political rhetoric since the war. The first occurred during the postwar reconstruction period, from 1943 until 1949, when contest over a new social order impelled an unusually clear articulation of philosophy and policies by the contenders for influence – represented in public debate by Curtin and Chifley on one hand, and Menzies on the other. The eventual ascendance of Menzies and the dominant ideas that emerged from that debate informed our political life for the next two decades. Not until the late 1960s, when the Liberal-Country Party coalition’s grasp of events slipped, and when the new problems of the modem world economic system and Australia’s precarious place within it dislodged the assumptions engendered in the 1940s, did the debate about the nature of our policy gain a new edge.
Book 1 Title: Malcolm Fraser On Australia
Book Author: D.M. White and D.A. Kemp
Book 1 Biblio: Hill of Content, 240p., index, illus., $18.95 pb , 0 85572 1596
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Display Review Rating: No

There have been two major cycles in Australian political rhetoric since the war. The first occurred during the postwar reconstruction period, from 1943 until 1949, when contest over a new social order impelled an unusually clear articulation of philosophy and policies by the contenders for influence – represented in public debate by Curtin and Chifley on one hand, and Menzies on the other. The eventual ascendance of Menzies and the dominant ideas that emerged from that debate informed our political life for the next two decades. Not until the late 1960s, when the Liberal-Country Party coalition’s grasp of events slipped, and when the new problems of the modem world economic system and Australia’s precarious place within it dislodged the assumptions engendered in the 1940s, did the debate about the nature of our policy gain a new edge.

Read more: James Walter reviews 'Malcolm Fraser on Australia' edited by D.M. White and D.A. Kemp

Write comment (0 Comments)
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Australian Poetry
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Parallel Texts
Article Subtitle: Oz poets, turning Japanese
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.
Book 1 Title: Twentieth Century Australian Poetry
Book Author: Yasuko Claremont
Book 1 Biblio: Tamagawa University Press, 188 pp, $15.00
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Display Review Rating: No

Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.

Read more: Hiroshi Ito reviews 'Twentieth Century Australian Poetry' by Yasuko Claremont

Write comment (0 Comments)
Mary Lord reviews A History of Australian Literature by Ken Goodwin
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Literary Studies
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Ken Goodwin must have found this a brute of a book to write. Not that difficulties are apparent in the writing. Far from it. It is simply that, in looking at it from a reviewer’s point of view, I am increasingly aware of the constraints under that the author must have suffered while managing to produce a book which the general reader and the interested undergraduate will find both interesting and useful.
Book 1 Title: A History of Australian Literature
Book Author: Ken Goodwin
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan Aust., 322p., index, $19.95 pb, $39.95 hb, 0 333 36405 8 (hb), 0 333 36406 6 (pb)
Display Review Rating: No

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Ken Goodwin must have found this a brute of a book to write. Not that difficulties are apparent in the writing. Far from it. It is simply that, in looking at it from a reviewer’s point of view, I am increasingly aware of the constraints under that the author must have suffered while managing to produce a book which the general reader and the interested undergraduate will find both interesting and useful.

Read more: Mary Lord reviews 'A History of Australian Literature' by Ken Goodwin

Write comment (0 Comments)
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Society
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: What Yuppie Invasion?
Article Subtitle: The demography of inner Melbourne
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Inner city residential areas of large Australian cities have, it is said, been transformed by a marauding band of the professional middle class. These people bought dwellings with ‘potential’, took up residence, and refurbished their houses back to their original state or into some dainty contemporary form. Such has been the demand placed upon this housing that a sharp escalation in house prices has resulted. Increasing costs associated with this rise have forced many old, long-term, working class residents – the traditional inner city occupants – out into distant suburbs. Thus, inner city residential areas are now dominated by the middle class.
Book 1 Title: The Gentrification of Inner Melbourne
Book 1 Subtitle: A political geography of inner city housing
Book Author: William Stewart Logan
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, 328 pp, $54.20
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No

Inner city residential areas of large Australian cities have, it is said, been transformed by a marauding band of the professional middle class. These people bought dwellings with ‘potential’, took up residence, and refurbished their houses back to their original state or into some dainty contemporary form. Such has been the demand placed upon this housing that a sharp escalation in house prices has resulted. Increasing costs associated with this rise have forced many old, long-term, working class residents – the traditional inner city occupants – out into distant suburbs. Thus, inner city residential areas are now dominated by the middle class.

Read more: Patrick Mullins reviews 'The Gentrification of Inner Melbourne: A political geography of inner...

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...