No 250 - April 2003
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Peter Bishops' La Trobe Essay: The Language of a Private World
John Monfires on Patrick Weller's Don't Tell the Prime Minister
John Connor on Frontier Conflict
Two poems from Clive James
Ceridwen Spark reviews June Dally-Watkins' The Secrets Behind My Smile, Susan Mitchell's Kerryn and Jackie and Robert Wainwright's Rose
John Martinkus reviews Paul McGeough's Manhattan to Baghdad
Warwick Hadfield reviews John Gascoigne (ed.): Over and Out and Gideon Haigh's The Vincibles
Copyright to all textual material owned by Australian Book Review Inc. Flinders Dspace has made every effort to contact the copyright owners of other material, and will remove items upon request.
Recent Submissions
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Tendering the Cup. "Collected Poems 1943-1995" by Gwen Harwood. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)W.H. Auden, following Samuel Butler, thought that 'the true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat', and plenty of people, poets and others have believed this: to recast a dictum of Christ's, if you can't be ... -
No Time to Waste. "Poems for America" by David Rowbotham. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)David Rowbotham is a Queensland poet whose first book was published nearly fifty years ago. His career has a shape that is often found in the arts: a quiet figure whose work is politely rather than rhapsodically received, ... -
Being There. "Mangroves" by Laurie Duggan. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s ... -
Coda. [poem]
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Archangels of Evolution. "All This Is So: A Future History" by John F. Roe. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Much science and fantasy fiction is written in a predominantly realist mode. This is the most economical means of signifying the internal truth of its fictional worlds, no matter how strange its aliens, or how superhuman ... -
Look, No Snipers. "Mahjar" by Eva Sallis. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)The word 'Mahjar', Eva Sallis informs us, 'refers collectively to all the lands of Arab, most often Lebanese, migration'. Her third book of fiction is a slight volume composed of fifteen stories, divided into three sections. ... -
Pastiche, Not a Homage. "The Lamplighter" by Anthony O'Neill. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)"The Lamplighter" certainly has the look and feel of a nineteenth-century novel, but could it really be read as one? In preparing this review, I reread "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (1886). What strikes the reader almost immediately ... -
Getting to the Point. "The Point" by Marion Halligan. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Marion Halligan's latest novel should be a success. It is a continuation and concentration of themes, characters and settings that have consistently engaged her in a considerable body of work. "The Point" is full of Halligan ... -
Frantic Swans. "Swan Bay" by Rod Jones. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Reading "Swan Bay", one is quickly struck by a sense of the familiar. A damaged, misanthropic man meets a damaged, unbalanced woman. He attempts to penetrate her almost mystical reserve and, in the book’s central flashback ... -
The Language of a Private World. [essay]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)This essay explores the nature of artistic achievement and the individual personalities of great artists throughout history, as well as the long life of great works of art. -
A Dark Quilt. "The Thirteenth Night: A Mother's Story of the Life and Death of her Son" by Jan McNess and "Something More Wonderful: A True Story by Sonia Orchard" by Sonia Orchard. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, "The Thirteenth Night" dwells on the ... -
Sounding-Boards of the Heart. "Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey Into the Heart of Australia" by Nicholas Rothwell. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Nicolas Rothwell's "Wings of the Kite-Hawk" is firmly in a tradition of explorer narratives with no real closure or discovery. The book retraces the steps of explorers such asLeichhardt, Sturt and Giles, and investigates ... -
Dredging It Up. "The Secrets Behind My Smile" by June Dally-Watkins, "Kerryn and Jackie: The Shared Life of Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker" by Susan Mitchell and "Rose: The Unauthorised Biography of Rose Hancock Porteous" by Robert Wainwright. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)According to Andrew O'Hagan, writing in a recent "London Review of Books": 'If you want to be somebody nowadays, you'd better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can't prove ... -
The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah: Early Years of "ABR". [essay]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of "Australian Book Review". Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived ... -
Where the Sea Meets the Desert. [poem]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04) -
In Town for the March. [poem]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04) -
Bestsellers / Subsciption.
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)This issue includes the March 2003 Bestsellers and the subscription information from this issue. -
Yugam Bungoo. "Rain May and Captain Daniel" by Catherine Bateson and "Too Flash" by Melissa Lucashenko. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)In the list of life's most stressful events, family break-ups and moving home are way up there in the top ten, and one often follows the other, compounding the trauma. This is the situation for eleven-year-old Rain in ... -
Flying to Maturity. "Baby Bear Goes to the Park" by Lorette Broekstra, "Pigs Don't Fly!" by Jackie French, illus. Matt Cosgrove, "Jump, Baby!" by Penny Matthews, illus. Dominique Falla and "The Dragon Machine" by Helen Ward, illus. Wayne Anderson. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)Pigs don't fly, but dragons and kites do, and possums can jump, which is perhaps just as scary if you're a little one. These four picture books deal with flight, their authors and illustrators using more or less imaginary ... -
Have We Got Enough? "Over and Out: Cricket Umpires and Their Stories" by John Gascoigne (ed) and "The Vincibles: A Suburban Cricket Season" by Gideon Haigh. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2003-04)When you bump into people who know Gideon Haigh - and that happens a lot in Geelong - they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail and his casualness with money. He also has a ...
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