Nancy Keesing

Douglas Stewart has pointed out that James Joyce and Henry Lawson, opposites in art, and living at opposite ends of the earth, once wrote the same story and, each in his own way, made a masterpiece of it. The funeral of Dignam in Ulysses is the same story as Lawson’s ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In ‘Dublin and the Bush’ (The Flesh and the Spirit) he persuasively developed this argument.

I think it was Judith Wright who once remarked that Lawson as a poet wasn’t important; that he seems, usually to have turned to verse as a journalistic medium or as a weapon for propaganda, and that the few of his better poems were such rather because of the intensity of feeling than through any technical or poetic gift.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.