Angus and Robertson

In the 1970s and 1980s many Australian children’s picture books had a distinctly Australian look. The local landscape, flora, and fauna predominated, and unique Australian characters abounded. Today, it is much harder to pick an Australian picture book. Globalisation and market imperatives have led authors to broaden their subject matter, and illustrators have adapted their styles so that a more universal sensibility imbues their work. 

As HarperCollins continues to release this welcome series of Australian reissues, it’s especially pleasing to see them including less well-known, even long-forgotten, titles. While I had read none of these latest offerings, I did at least know something about three of the authors. Les Robinson, however, was almost a complete mystery. ‘Almost’ because I had a vague memory of one of his stories being included in an anthology I once lectured on. Obviously, it did not impress me enough to seek out more of his work. Nor would it have been easy to find, since, unlike the other three titles, The Giraffe’s Uncle had never been reissued since its first printing, in 1933, by the Macquarie Head Press, a firm now as forgotten as the books it published.

The dilemma for confessedly nationalist intellectuals has always been what to do about their strange bed-fellows, the scoundrels who have sought a last refuge under the same patriotic blanket. Generally they have distanced themselves with glib distinctions between good and bad nationalisms, left and right nationalisms, radical and conservative and larrikin and respectable nationalisms. Often, too, they looked back – radicals to the 1890s, conservatives to the Great War – and contrasted an idealised past nationalism with contemporary selfishness. How often does discussion of Australian nationalism not get past the 1890s?

Telling one’s own story comes naturally: we are all in some sense autobiographers. There is nothing new in the urge to seek a pattern in a life while living it, to advertise an ego, to explain, confess, justify, understand – or simply to say ‘I was there’. What is new is the comparative ease with which the urge can be accommodated and the ‘self-life’ made into text.

The current interest in the narratives of ‘ordinary people’ is attested by the extraordinary success of Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life. It may also be seen in some recent and important scholarly enterprises such as the nineteenth century Australian women’s diaries published by Lucy Frost in No Place for a Nervous Lady or the oral histories from which Janet McCalman constructed inner urban Richmond in the depression years as Struggletown.

This is such a good book, written in the best military fashion, with all points assembled in proper order but written with the wit and irony usually missing from military historians, that it is a pity it is not better designed. The title page really lacks finesse. But the illustrations and notes are very well-chosen and easy on the eye. It deals equally with civilian surveillance as with military surveillance over, and the reduction of, the rights of others.

This sixth work of fiction by Frank Moorhouse consists of four groups of related stories. The first and by far the best group, ‘Pacific City’, contains six stories centred around the figure of Irving Bow, proprietor of a cinema located near an unbuilt town named Pacific City during the late nineteen-twenties (not the nineteen-thirties as the back cover claims).

In an increasingly secular age, The Lines of the Hand is an unusual book. Almost half of the poems it contains are direct communications with an evident and accessible God, while others are celebrations of Creation.

‘This internment of ours is but a sideshow of the war’, says a former Dunera internee in this book. Yet this footnote to Britain’s war on the home front has acquired considerable importance for Australia.

Success may not always have come easy to Robert James Lee Hawke, but it has come often. In 1969 he became President of the ACTU without ever having been a shop steward or a union organiser or secretary; he had never taken part in or led a strike. His experience at grass roots or branch level in the ALP had not been extensive when he was elected Federal President of the party in 1973. Now, untested in parliament and government, his jaw is firmly pointed towards achieving what has always been his ultimate ambition – the prime ministership.