Non Fiction

The best of a newspaper should be, or used to be, news. But in the electronic age, when sheer questions of the very survival of print media are raised often enough, mere news is not enough. The press has those functions of interpretation, comment and backgrounding which electronic news gathering rarely has time for or interest in, and one of the qualities which marks a quality paper is its activities in these areas. And the quality of those activities.

The collection of 161 drawings and watercolour paintings by Augustus Earle now in the possession of the National Library of Australia consitutes the greater part of his work to have survived and is, all things considered, the most impressive single component of the Nan Kivell Collection. The son of an American painter and loyalist, James Earl, the young Augustus Earle (born 1793) studied at the Royal Academy London, and developed considerable talent as an artist in portraiture, figure, and landscape painting. At an early age he also developed a disposition for travel and by the time of his death in 1838 was one of the most widely-travelled artists of his time, having visited the Mediterranean, South America, Australia, New Zealand, the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, the Pacific Islands, South-east Asia, and India. One of the last of the travelling artists to work extensively in the days prior to the introduction of photography, Earle’s work constitutes an invaluable record of life on many of the frontiers of European expansion. Because his training was an all-round one he has left us not only a varied picture of exotic landscape but also many vivid illustrations of colonial life, and of native life and custom in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Shakespeare’s Dogberry, moving as usual beyond conventional platitude, roundly condemned all comparisons as odorous. Although this book consists entirely of essays in comparison, one need approach it with no Dogberrian apprehensions. Indeed it is one more manifestation of a recent and surely healthy tendency in the academic study of politics, namely, the willingness to take seriously political theories and ideas rather than merely engage in the ‘scientific’ study of political behaviour, itself often the excuse for an arid pursuit of near-meaningless statistics.

It is ironic and, perhaps, happy for him that the most vainglorious of Australian Labor Party leaders has so quickly become the subject of more books than any Australian Prime Minister. Your ‘1975’ library now contains many instant histories, polemics, laments, critical academic studies, eulogies, and edited highlights, but not yet a comprehensive biography of Gough Whitlam.

More serious works have been written on the life and times of W.M. Hughes than on any other Australian prime minister and, probably, any Australian at all. The little man got off to a flying start with his own books about himself and his amazing adventures, then Farmer Whyte among others came along and, to cap it off, there has emerged the very lengthy two-volume study of Hughes by L.F. Fitzhardinge, among the best and certainly the most elegant of our political biographies.

This book is a bird of most curious kidney. For the life of me I can’t see any raison d'etre for it. Not that James McAuley, with his wardrobe of fascinating hats, doesn’t cry out for a book, and not that Peter Coleman doesn’t have so many of the qualifications to write that book. But this work is not it. It’s thin, to the point of emaciation. It appears exactly four years after McAuley’s death, which, as literary biographies go, is but a day. Which puts me in mind of an Entebbe Raid or Teheran Hostages book, hitting the market while the event is still fresh. But McAuley’s career, for all its interest, lacks that brand of newsworthiness. And a book with so comprehensive a title as The Heart of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian Poet presumably aims to be more than a piece of ephemera.

The daughter of a prosperous-enough middle-class farming family in Devon, Elizabeth Veale received an upbringing and an education that stood her in good stead during her long existence in New South Wales as Mrs. John Macarthur.

Uranium is a word which has become so highly emotive in this country that it is embedded in the national psyche; but not one person in 10,000 who would react instinctively and dialectically to the word knows anything about the element itself apart from connotations of Doomsday … the world on fire or the seeping shroud of radiation sickness laying waste the entire earth in sterile despair.

The greatest area of growth in the writing profession is among the group that used to be scurrilously called ‘hobby writers’.

A recent study of British authors reveals that fifty-nine per cent will write only one book in their writing careers.

Using this figure and extrapolating from the 3500 applicants for Public Lending Right here, there are at least 2100, maybe 3000, people in Australia who have written one book and either have run out of the spirit to write another, or maybe have encountered such frustrations with contracts, editors, and distributors that it is not worth it to write another.