Essays

‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.

Nick Cave, against the odds, is one of the great survivors of Australian music. Cave, who made his first recording in 1978 and established his international reputation after moving to London in 1982, has experienced critical and popular success with a variety of musical ventures including The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Grinderman and, most notably, The Bad Seeds. It is a measure of Cave’s durability that it is difficult to think of any other Australian rock act, with the exception of AC/DC, that has maintained an international profile for such an extended period. It is also salutary to consider how few of the international acts that emerged from the punk and post-punk moment of the late 1970s are still making high-profile and critically acclaimed music.

            Cave’s ambitions have not been limited to music. As the dust jacket to Cultural Seeds proclaims, he is ‘now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer’. With the years, Cave has won a larger audience as the range and scope of his talent have been manifest in various forms of cultural production. His oeuvre includes works of fiction (And the Ass Saw the Angel, 1989; The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009) and a film script (The Proposition, 2005).

Eighty-four is a good age. To die then is not a tragedy, or at least no more than that the knowledge we must all die is the great human tragedy (some might think the alternative, to live forever, would be an even greater one). Donald Horne does not consider his death a tragedy, in this account of his dying. What pervades this thoughtful book, written by Donald Horne and his wife, Myfanwy Horne, is the sadness that comes from the endings of things; in this case, the ending of the life they shared. They both know the end is inevitable, but it is no less sad for that.

When I was still a jot at uni, a medical student friend stumbled late out of her latest lecture and reassured me. And then she assured me, ‘It was horrible! We had slide after slide of some dead smoker’s lungs. And they were disgusting! I’m gonna be sick! Give me a cigarette!’ That’s when I first understood that ‘smoking’ was not ever going to be a straightforward subject.

What do the fab four of this book have in common? Not simply that they are Australian and expatriate, that they are writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity and performers who have made skilful use of television.

The ‘place in the city’ of Fr Edmund Campion’s latest pilgrimage into Australian Catholic life and history is St Mary’s cathedral, Sydney. Campion spent six years here as a young-priest working in the shadow of both the cathedral and the august Normal Cardinal Gilroy.

Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.

In a world which has lost its faith and its standards, the situation of the creative artist is both central and precarious. As Wallace­-Crabbe sees it, he must stand inside and outside society at once, be both totally involved with himself and totally responsive to his society. While doing this, he must create not only his own audience but even his own language.

In this series of essays, Wallace-Crabbe explores this dilemma in the work of contemporary English-language poets ranging from Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop, and from W. H. Auden – ‘the good Christian practices light verse’ – to Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. The essays both illuminate the work of the writers he discusses and contribute to our understanding of the crucial problem of contemporary culture.