‘I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

Born out of the controversy over an unsuccessful bill to liberalise the abortion laws in the Australian Capital Territory, the Commission was set up in 1973 after a motion had been passed in Federal Parliament to establish an inquiry into all aspects of social, sexual and family life. Its terms of reference were extraordinarily wide, but the main task of the Commissioners – Elizabeth Evatt, Felix Arnott and Anne Deveson – was to look into the range of matters ‘relating to the roles and responsibilities of men and women as individuals, as members of society and in their relationships with each other.’

Their report is a stunning documentation of social dysfunction. Running to five volumes, with no less than 511 recommendations, it caused quite a stir, if for all the wrong reasons, when it was leaked in the middle of the 1977 Federal election campaign. Now that the dust has settled, we can take a more dispassionate look. The report still makes much better reading than the general run of official publications, but it is an official publication. In an effort to make the material more readily accessible and assimilable, Anne Deveson has compiled an ‘edited selection’ of the evidence gathered by the Commission. The result of her labors, Australians at Risk, is a lively, informative and devastating record of the inability of Australian society to meet the basic human requirements of its members.

Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote:

About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

We can be very glad that they weren’t put away, nor used by her husband in the way suggested, and that, despite the innate and characteristic modesty of their writer, they have at last been published. They are part of the Tennyson Papers, held on loan by the National Library of Australia since 1956, and it was a happy inspiration that those concerned chose Alexandra Hasluck to edit them. These letters, written by Lady Tennyson during the term of office of her husband (Hallam, Lord Tennyson) as Governor of South Australia and then as Governor General do indeed constitute, as Lady Hasluck so appropriately writes in her Introduction, ‘a unique picture of Australia and Australian society as seen from Government House by a charming, tolerant and interested Englishwoman’.

At one stage Lady Tennyson wrote, ‘… we certainly have been quite extraordinarily fortunate in having just been here during these last two years, by far the most interesting of any in the history of Australasia.’ It was true. There were the great social and political events of Federation (including the national celebration of Commonwealth Day on New Year’s day 1901); the Boer War; the Royal Visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary) in 1901, and other events of the period, not least the cricket test matches against McLaren’s English XI – ‘We were wildly excited at England’s victory ... isn’t it splendid? We are so glad …’ (but alas Australia won the next four tests).

But cricket is part of the story too, and of coming events casting their shadows before them. Lady Tennyson, when she wrote of her son Lionel’s cricketing prowess as a schoolboy – ‘ … it is astonishing how Lionel has come on and he really plays extremely well and in excellent style’ – could not know that in years to come the Hon. Lionel would become a cricket international and captain England against Australia.

The handsome reissue in one volume, by Collins, of Australian Legendary Tales with illustrations by Rex Backhaus-Smith, is a most welcome addition to current publications for Australian enthusiasts and certainly well overdue.

This collection of Aboriginal myths, legends and fables was originally published in two volumes, Australian Legendary Tales in 1897 and More Australian Legendary Tales in 1898. Both’ contained illustrations by an unnamed Aboriginal artist which, for eloquence of line and poetry of balanced movement, are not surpassed by the evocatively appropriate illustrations provided by Backhaus-Smith in this new volume. However, for readers possessing both publications the contrast in artistic styles provides much food for thought.

Most praiseworthy in this new publication is the fact that the publishers have resisted the temptation to ‘edit’ the text. So often, when Europeans enter the arena of pre-literate myths, fables and legends, they cannot resist the temptation to meddle with symbols and structures and, in so doing, effectively destroy the subtle symbolism, the life-blood of the tales and the ethos informing those who originally told them.

The whole area of the nature, structure, function and relationship of myth to the sociocultural concepts expressed in any society is, particularly in westernised cultures, currently either totally ignored or woefully misunderstood.

Sibnarayan Ray is the Chairman of the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Melbourne; predictably, therefore, those essays in this collection that deal with Indian literature do provoke one’s interest. Mr Ray is especially enlightening about the problems facing the contemporary Indian writer. In a revealing essay devoted to this subject he explains that, apart from English, there are at least a dozen major languages in India each with a well-developed literature of its own. Add to this eight distinct scripts in use, each cast in type, and that translations between the languages are few.

Then, there is a pronounced gulf between the creative writer and the majority of the population. Furthermore the cultural impact of the West has affected only a small proportion of the population. So it is, as Mr Ray explains, that the principal concern of almost all conscientious Indian writers during this century and the last has been that of communicating with their people without putting at risk their newly acquired individuality and cultural values. With such pressures on the writer as the contrasting ideologies of nationalism and communism and the increasing power of the State, you have a position most perceptively summed up by the author:

The position of the modern writer in India today is thus rather unenviable. Caught between an increasingly powerful State and a community which does not share his values, pressed on the one side by a revivalist nationalism and on the other by militant communism, handicapped by languages which are stratified and which are hardly adequate to express his thoughts and experiences, living on the border of starvation and assailed by the promise of benefits for those who conform, he is struggling to maintain his creative integrity. All that is finest in modern Indian writing is the expression of this struggle.