So, my lad, you’ve got yourself born. It happens to all of us, and say what they will, those Deep-South Born-Again Americans, it is a-once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. One birth, one life, one death. You are fortunate; you have a good, a very good pair of parents, you have a strong body, and a questing mind. I had the same, a firm base from which to start out. I had a good spell of breastfeeding, and later, the richness of stew. Three penn’orth, sometimes six penn’orth, of beef and mutton pieces, with potatoes and onions, carrots, celery, whatever vegetables were available, the final touch a measure of rice or pearl barley for thickening. Poverty food, by some standards, but it was strong and strengthening. Father was strong, even after the timber mill accident that left him with a right leg that swung half paralyzed and a totally paralyzed right arm. Mother was strong; in hindsight I marvel at her strength, her fortitude. Radicals, both of them, rebels, who were not to be tricked by the forked tongues of politicians or parsons. Readers, and writers, and they handed on the heritage. Butter was scarce on our table; there was always plenty of beef dripping. Sauce and jam and soft drink were non-existent; we lived and throve on stew and bread, fruit, and milk. There were books, in place of butter; we came to know quite a deal about the many worlds beyond our own horizons. ‘You’ll write, sooner or later,’ my mother said. I remember still the lift of my heart when I first finished Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm. I’ve read it, in whole or in part, a dozen times since, and it does not pall. You shall have a copy from me, in time; I hope you’ll read it, hope you’ll get something of what I got from it.

In 1968, at the time of the Field Exhibition, Regionalism in painting was not a respectable concept. Not one painting in that exhibition related in any way to place. Internationalism was paramount. Now fifteen years later, even such localised phenomena as the highly stylised spray-can graffiti of the New York subways has infiltrated easel painting and the art galleries of that city, once the capital of Internationalism.

In Australia, as styles flourished and died with rapidity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of important painters continued to work, not only with ‘recognisable shape’ as advocated by the Antipodeans, but with one particular form of it, the landscape.

Timothy Hall has written a brief readable account of the lamentable Malayan campaign. but over the past forty years the story has been told more accurately and more dramatically by a succession of authors, many of whom were participants in that tragic debacle.

This obviously swiftly researched book is flawed by a number of omissions and exaggerations.

Penguin’s publication of Helen Daniel’s critical book on the fiction of David Ireland is their first venture into Australian criticism, and one which I hope will be the beginning of a series on Australian writers.

David Ireland is an obvious choice for the launching of such a venture. As Daniel points out, he does not have the international reputation or readership of White or Keneally; she seems to suggest that this is because he is a far more ‘adventurous’ and ‘elusive’ writer. He has always been a controversial author in Australia, winner of many major awards, placed on some school/university reading lists, while barred as ‘obscene’ by other institutions.