On Hydra last year an old grocer wound up his reminiscences of George Johnston and Charmian Clift with a tolerant grin. ‘They both drank a lot,’ he told me. ‘They had to – yia na katevei i skepsi.’ For the thought to be let down: he used the same verb as for a cow letting her milk flow. ‘They drank a lot; they wrote a lot of books.’ He shrugged.

The old hands are used to Australian pilgrims. Twenty-five years ago, the Johnstons’ life on Hydra was already ‘intriguing and disturbing’ Australian tourists off the ferries, eager to stare at them, as David Meredith comments sourly in Clean Straw for Nothing, in ‘this brightly-tinted rotogravure world we inhabit’. It’s twenty years since the family returned to Australia. Clift died in 1969, Johnston in 1970, with his Meredith trilogy unfinished. The legend, though, far from dying with them, keeps growing, independently of what Meredith reveals of their despair; as legends do, I suppose, taking the form our dreams require them to. The dream of escape, in this case: escape at any cost. (‘I fly with Icarus, not with Daedalus, ‘Meredith’s artist friend said. So did Meredith – and Johnston, and Clift – and sank with Icarus.)

It is 116 years since Charles Harpur, Australia’s first poet of real eminence, died with his own collection of his works unpublished. Except for a couple of small selections – the most recent of which, made by Adrian Mitchell in 1973 and containing only about 120 pages of the poetry, was the most comprehensive – and the infamously corrupt 1883 ‘collection’, it has remained so. This has been a blot on the reputation of Australian critical and academic workers and a loss not only to Australian literature but to Australian history. Now Elizabeth Perkins, of the English Department of James Cook University, has handsomely remedied a long injustice.

The task was a difficult and long one – as Mitchell saw it would be in making his own selection. Though Perkins lays little emphasis on the difficulties of collating, editing and preparing from the Mitchell Library manuscript collection the 977 pages of verse the book contains, a task from which Mitchell recoiled as ‘enormously demanding’, the book stands as a critical and scholarly achievement for which we ought to be properly grateful.

I sometimes wonder whether David Combe’s detractors have ever read the legend of his sins – the transcript (even as officially bowdlerised) – of his conversation with Ivanov on 4 March 1983. It is upon the fact of this event (but certainly not upon the record of its substance) that Combe is widely charged, not with treachery, but with greed, intolerable ambition, and amazing indiscretion.

Who charges him thus? Certainly, not ASIO. They valued these very civilised, Australian, bourgeois qualities if such were present in our man precisely because they were a sure lure for their quarry Ivanov – their solitary KGB catch in two decades.

This high public endeavour would have been frustrated if Combe had been a lesser human being, that perfect nonentity subsequently insinuated to abound in our culture by those upon whom we depend for our understanding of the news. The government’s propagandists spooned this vilification of Combe’s character into the mouths of the fledglings – journalists who never flutter far to get their facts but rest content to wait from dark to dawn for handouts about great events – handouts always couched in the third person, one sentence to a paragraph, in the active voice, no second clause, no punctuation permitted lest the import of a pronouncement be confused by the copytakers or mangled in the telex by its vehicle.

Peter Howson’s diaries are the most interesting insider’s view of politics since Alfred Deakin supplemented his income by writing anonymously for the Morning Post. Howson did not rise to the same heights as Deakin, so the interest of his diaries remains in political practice rather than policy. Accordingly, Graham Freudenberg, speechwriter and confidant to Gough Whitlam for much of the period covered by the diaries, finds the book fascinating, while, Lynne Duncan, Melbourne writer and political activist, finds its revelations of the mental processes of the establishment intriguing.

‘S
unday 26 October 1969 ... This evening I went to evensong at Christ Church to give thanks for the election result.’

For the men born to rule – and Peter Howson was a finely preserved specimen of the tribe in his generation – God was not only a Liberal, but a highly discriminating one at that. After all, the 1969 election for which Howson gave thanks at South Yarra slashed the Liberal Government’s majority by seventeen, to seven, and made John Gorton’s replacement as Prime Minister virtually inevitable.

In the very next line in the diary, Howson writes:

By this evening I had no doubts at all that we should initiate moves to challenge the leadership as Gorton has obviously failed us over the last 18 months, and the true image of the Prime Minister is now getting through to the electorate, rather than the phoney image that was portrayed during the leadership struggle in January 1968.