American authors and publishers like to choose sides. The adversaries are seldom strictly Authors v Publishers – some best-selling novelists often join the publishers’ team, and publishers of new fiction like Farrar, Straus & Giroux line up on the authors’ side. Last May the battleground was drawn again in the national Book Awards (that’s not the old capital-N National Book Awards, or the NEA, but the new capital-T The American Book Awards, or TABA).

In the New York Times, novelist John Irving (The World According to Garp) wondered whether the advantages of book prizes ever compensate for the ill will they generate. I imagine that the ill will exists anyway, but it is made more obvious by the ostentation of the awards.

Sir,

Further to Michele Field’s discussion of the defamation problem for the publisher in your last issue, may I amplify, and correct one or two points, her account of Currency’s brush with Mr Lloyd Davies, the former husband of Dorothy Hewett, over our publication of The Chapel Perilous and The Tatry Hollow Story.

While I make no question of Mr Davies’ sincerity in taking action, I am firmly of the opinion that nothing in either play could damage him (even if, as I strongly question, it could be taken to refer to him) in the eyes of any reasonable person. At the same time, the law concerning literary defamation is so unsatisfactory in its application to creative fiction (as opposed to purported factual reporting) that there was strong sympathetic support for the idea of a test case.

The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’

Writing a biography of any practising politician is a difficult task: you are more or less beholden to your subject, and the book can end up an exercise in diplomacy instead of perception. Writing a book about Bill Hayden, who has been called an enigma, a Hamlet, and a Cassandra, is double difficult. Writing about Hayden without Hayden’s help (he ‘was able to squeeze in only limited interviews’) is almost impossible.

So, Denis Murphy’s Hayden – a political biography is a useful, dull, and finally unrevealing book. Useful, because it does give a straightforward account of Hayden’s life and political career from 1933, when he was born into a poor working-class Catholic family in Brisbane, to his current election campaign for the Prime Ministership. Dull, because it isn’t more than that (much of the book relies on Hayden’s past speeches). And unrevealing because Murphy, who is a Reader in History at the University of Queensland, an accomplished academic historian, never seems to get close to Hayden’s character or understanding what the real wellsprings of his political actions are.