Whether or not we espouse anti-whaling beliefs and activities, few of us today realise that long before this country had a sheep’s back of any consequence whaling and sealing were its most important industries; important for the whole Pacific area, indeed. Many New Zealand and Pacific Island people have surnames (‘Coffin’ is one) that mark them as likely descendants of Yankee whaling dynastic families. In this novel, the Coupar family’s Australian progenitor was a survivor from a disastrous American expedition.

Nor was this industry short-lived. Nineteenth-century households and manufacturers relied upon cheap whale oil for light and heat before fossil fuels took over. Whale bone made possible not only hour-glass figures in tight-laced corsets, but cheap folding umbrellas and many other artefacts.

From Lahaina in Hawaii to Albany in Western Australia whaling ports and treatment centres were large and prosperous places all over the Pacific. At least in the short term, conservation movements and catch cries like ‘Save the Whales’ proved disastrous to district economies and human jobs. Very disagreeable jobs, as Winton’s account of flensing operations makes plain; dangerous too. Woven into the story of this book is an admirably balanced presentation of the pros and cons of anti-whaling projects. Many of the characters display the irrationality and hysteria that such causes and arguments generate on all sides.

Winton also, and with art, keeps before the reader the mystique and mystery of The Whale. Why do whales from time to time strand themselves to die on beaches? What is their life? Our life? Their death? Our suicide?

Winton has several ways of relating symbols and symbolic concerns to tough realism. He achieves this largely (not entirely) by quoting from the diary kept by the original Nathaniel Coupar. He does not indicate whether or not he has adapted a genuine diary – on the whole, and noting of a couple of anachronisms, I think he invented it. Considerable information about whales and whaling is also supplied, always as part of the story, by means of conversation, press clippings and extracts from textbooks. I learned to my delight that the collective noun for whales and seals is a ‘pod’.

Who are the people of Angelus and its environs? They are two equivocal old wharf fishermen; a clergyman bent on charity at any price opposed to a wicked developer bent on money at any price; and his disillusioned secretary/mistress. They are a hotelkeeper – eyes and ears of the town; they are Nathaniel’s now aged grandson Daniel Coupar, Daniel’s granddaughter Queenie and her husband, Cleveland (Cleve) Cookson. This couple form the chief pivot of the story. Also there are assorted anti-whaling activists drunk and sober, silly or sensible; an Aboriginal remnant, one of whom is a first-rate but doomed footballer; and many others.

There is, and always has been, considerable violence in Angelus and not least in some of its sexual encounters, several of which happen in, one would think, exceedingly unlikely and uncomfortable locations. There is, and always has been, a lot of talk, too. Winton has an excellent ear for dialogue.

‘I mean people can't just turn up and decide for other people how they gonna live, how they’re gonna do their job, now can they? I mean if I went into Woolworths and sat on the girl's cash register and said I thought it was cruel to wrap toy kangaroos in plastic and that all plastic kangaroos should be set free, the cops’d drag me out by the balls, wouldn't they? They'd say I was crazy.’

Cleve nodded emphatically.

'Some French bastard and his girlfriend shouldn’t be able to do it either. Stupid slut.’

Cleve has to admit that the ‘stupid slut’ is his wife and is chucked out of the bar followed by a self-righteous voice saying, ‘Lettin’ ‘is wife be spoken about like that ... shoulda killed ‘im.’

Queenie and Steve, who came together unexpectedly, fly apart when she joins the anti-whaling group and he cannot share its extremism. Although they do not remain separated at the end, their future is obscure.

Shallows is a dense and interesting novel, its sombre themes lightened by considerable humour. Perhaps it packs a bit too much incident and detail for its length and shape, but generosity is a desirable trait in a first-rate young writer.

Goodbye Golidlocks is the first novel of a distinguished Australian actor who, since 1966, has lived and worked in the United Kingdom. Its time would seem to be the 1950s, or perhaps a little later.

I am assured by Catholic friends that some convents and some nuns of that period were very like those Arthy describes. An article by Mary Rose Liverani about Sancta Sophia College in Sydney University, suggests that some convents, and some nuns, remain ‘unappealing’. (Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald Magazine, Nov. 3 1984.) Liverani wrote:

Present and past students are grateful for the intellectual freedom that prevails at the college. ‘Frankly I would have lapsed if it hadn't been for Sancta.’ Sonja Lyneham told me. ‘One doesn't want to be unkind to the Irish nuns running our country schools but the ignorance and bigotry, it was ... unappealing.

I must, then, accept a good deal of what Judith Arthy says happened to her central figure in a Brisbane convent. But the parental inadequacies that severely affect the girl concerned, and her father's ‘solution’ for the problems of his plainly neurotic daughter who, as the reader and her mother know, is plainly psychotic also, are too melodramatic for me to believe as, too, is the final tragedy.

Admittedly, for all I know this is a true story. Many true stories defy belief and sound incredible. The art of the novelist is in presenting the incredibilities and exaggerations of real life in ways to which readers can relate, and that they may accept. Tim Winton can do this with skill and panache. Judith Arthy, who is now working on ‘an historical novel set in Queensland’, has much to learn.