The title of Ken Inglis’s book is a poignant irony, reflecting the transience of history itself. For its publication coincided exactly with the death of the Commission, and the birth of the Corporation, and with hindsight one can say that it should have been called That was the ABC, thus creating a pleasant symmetry with That Was the Week That Was. But Inglis did his best to defeat time by bringing the history up to the federal election of 5 March 1983, edging his way as near as possible to the date he would like to have reached.

Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page introduction makes clear, heard of his ‘illustrious ancestor Henry’: of Gide, Montaigne, Sterne, Peacock, Firbank, Trollope, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.

During the 1970s, when Nation Review was a newspaper and the Labor Party was fair dinkum, this country spawned cartoonists like mushrooms in a paddock where cows have been defecating in a grand manner. The Vietnam war was on, but that didn’t stop the Melbourne Cup or the Grand Final, and it didn’t improve the economy as expected either.

We found lovely ways to get rid of some frightening chemical wastes, i.e., we tipped them on Asian forests: all the better to see you with.

Elizabeth Jolley has been around as a writer for some time. Her work dates back to the late 1950s (she came to Australia from England in 1959) and her stories began appearing in anthologies and journals in the mid­1960s, but it was not until 1976 that her first collection, Five Acre Virgin and other stories, was published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Since then, her rate of publication has been phenomenal, and it is perhaps no accident that it coincided with the rise of an indigenous Western Australian Press: three of her first four books were published by the FACP, which, in its few years of existence, has been responsible for the discovery of a remarkable amount of talent.

Jolley has now published seven books (including three this year), with another one in press. From being an obscure writer who had won the admiration of the few readers in Australia who regularly keep pace with journals, one who had steadily accumulated prizes, Jolley has suddenly become recognisable as one of Australia’s leading contemporary writers of fiction.

Five Acre Virgin and other stories

Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1976, 91 pp, 0909144052The stories in Five Acre Virgin were written mostly in the sixteen years prior to the publication of that book; they show her peculiar combination of unsentimental realism and original humour. The title suggests the preoccupation in Elizabeth Jolley’s work that has been most noted by reviewers. ‘There’s nothing like having a piece of land,’ the central character in several of the stories says. ‘It makes a man feel better to clear the scrub and have a good burning off.’

‘Having a piece of land’ is crucial to the characters in these books. Many of them are dispossessed or migrants, or both. They have come from Vienna, where the author’s mother grew up, or the Black Country of England where she herself lived, or Holland, from which the recurring figure of Uncle Bernard migrated. They struggle all their lives to buy the talismanic five acres, only to find out that they can’t live off them. They lie and blackmail in order to stay on other people’s land. Adam, in ‘Adam’s Wife’, one of the most powerful and sombre stories that Jolley has written, even marries a retarded woman in order to gain possession of her miserable shack and few acres. In an interview in The National Times (13–19 March 1983), Jolley spoke with feeling about the quality of the West Australian landscape: ‘You cannot imagine how wonderful it felt to me to go round without shoes all the time, to feel the leaves and grass underfoot. A brand new sensation – quite remarkable. You could never experience it in England, too cold there to go barefoot.’