The prolific David Malouf, another of our poets turned novelist, just had two short prose works published within a few months of one another. Although Child’s Play (which also includes two short stories) is set in Italy, where Malouf now resides, and Fly Away Peter in Brisbane where he grew up, the two books are thematically related, not only to each other but to the author’s earlier work.

In his previous novel An Imaginary Life (1978), Malouf had posed the situation of the poet Ovid, banished for life from the Rome he loved but coming to terms with the wilderness around him and discovering that true freedom is internal, lying within the imagination. The protagonist of Child’s Play lives on the other side of Ovid; he has in a sense dispensed with the imagination, as being a source of potential vulnerability:

‘To open to others all that lies beyond the hard surface, the doubts, fears, hesitations, anxieties of the lonely individual, all the soft dark life within ... would be to introduce an element that might entirely destroy us,’ he says of himself and the other members of the cabal.

‘Even when there’s simultaneity,’ as one of Michael Wilding’s characters says, there’s still linearity that needs to be found, and linearity is difficult to find in this group of books. So, it is better, as Wilding’s book also suggests, to let the books perform and then see the pattern they make.

Pacific Highway, in fact, is a kind of haiku novel, which coheres into a single expressive emblem, the emblem of the dance its narrator offers us at the end. It begins and ends on a beach, stretching clean and clear and its casual rhythms express the lives of the people who live carelessly and easily nearby. But it also a metaphor as well as a beach, and its people need to defend themselves from all the other competing fantasies that seek to invade and pollute it, work and wars; money and propriety, and in this sense it climaxes in the fantasy of the flying-saucer landing which leads to the CIA-Real Estate Development invasion of the beach. The beach wins, though, and the story concludes with the lighthouse standing white and beautiful with an osprey circling above it and a whale spraying ‘a peacock’s feather gauze of soft spray across the sea’. So, the plot is the pattern and the pattern the plot. Unusually for Wilding, who often seems to me to labour these things, these is an air of spontaneity about all this, as if for once he’s prepared to trust his lyrical sense, to delight in language and in the shapes it makes, to be more intent on this shaping process than on his audience.

A sympathetic reader might feel that Tim Winton, winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, is a victim of one of the unkindest tricks Fate can play on a writer, with the publication of his first novel, An Open Swimmer, at the age of twenty-one. A first novel from a writer of this age is typically seen as, a ‘young man’s book’, full of the gaucheries and immaturities of the precocious, and even if a success, it is an albatross around his neck for the rest of his career. The best one can hope for is a moderate success, substantial enough to start a career, but not either brilliant enough or bad enough to determine its direction from then on. Fortunately, Tim Winton’s first novel does not neatly fit this stereotype.

An Open Swimmer is set in the south of Western Australia. its action revolving around the sea, fishing, and the bush – and it is rich with its sense of region. It is, in some respects, about being young: it charts the quest for meaning undertaken by its main character, Jerra, as he approaches adulthood; Jerra spends much of the novel testing the waters of experience as if he has a choice about entering them; often the view of reality we receive has the clarity and simplicity of innocence. However, Winton distances himself from his character’s immaturity, viewing his introspections with detached respect, while placing the self-destructive anxieties which haunt Jerra as stages through which he must find a passage. Jerra is no Holden Caulfield, and the romanticism of the quest motif in the narrative is qualified by a realist’s sense of acceptance. Always, too, Winton is in control of his language, deftly manipulating the emotional registers without distortion or insistence.

It is the surface of Winton’s writing that is, initially, the most impressive feature of the novel. Apparently unambitious and naturalistic, the prose nevertheless provides access to a wide range of association and meaning; Winton’s close affinity with his natural context provides him with an inexhaustible facility for finding the right location for the idea, mood or reflection he wishes to release. Stylistically, his continual checking of personal experience against the indifference of nature is a distinctive feature; the sense of balance and poise in his writing derives from the continual movement from self to surrounding, from the inner to the external world. The process is tentative and suggestive, but not informal; rather, the patterns and symbols which organise the book’s thematic substance are carefully woven into a dense fabric of meaning and suggestion which is both technically impressive and rewardingly rich in implication.

The dialectic structure reflects a thematic position which explores the acceptance of limitations, of contingency, while remaining open to possibility. An argument about kinds of ‘freedom’ is ‘implied in the structuring of Jerra’s dilemmas. The novel tends to fence Jerra in, not physically but psychically, as his apparent freedom in the bush is limited by the guilt he feels for his ambiguous relationship with his Aunt Jewel, his confusion about the incompleteness of his participation in his own past, and even the sense of claustrophobia and mortality which can suddenly envelop him when he is at his most free, in the ocean. Jerra has to learn to deal with these problems without resorting to escape, denial or the fearful panic which results in his grotesque mutilation of a groper. The ‘open swimmer’ of the title is Jerra’s mandala, the antithesis of the ‘cave-fish’, and the paradigm of the novel’s recommended negotiation between freedom and limitation, withdrawal and acceptance.

An Open Swimmer allows these thematic implications to emerge, rather than imposes them on the material, and its form always seems to suggest the virtue of scepticism as it balances human pretension against the variety and scale of nature; it is impressive to see a young writer sufficiently mature in his craft to use formal strategies as a means of sophisticating and disciplining the articulation of his vision, and this ability alone would make An Open Swimmer a most interesting and promising début for Tim Winton.

Gerard Henderson takes as the subject of this important book the relations between the bishops of the Catholic Church and its lay organisation, the Catholic Social Studies Movement during the period from 1940 to the 1960s. The study is particularly welcome as neither Church nor Movement were given to public self-exposure. Henderson, by using the files of the National Civic Council and the minutes of relevant episcopal committees, has given us an insight into the conflicts within the church over its role in political activity in this period.

The key figure in the study is Mr B.A. Santamaria. As the driving force behind the CSSM and behind the postwar willingness of the church to speak out on social and political issues, Santamaria occupied a position of great influence within the church, especially in the period 1947 to 1954. Henderson characterises him as a ‘kind of quasi-bishop who ran a political machine and reported directly to the bishops’. He also says of Santamaria that he was engaged in no less than a crusade to ‘permeate’ Australian social and political organisations with the aim of imposing a Catholic social order.