Australian Scholarly Publishing

The heroes and villains in Nick Dyrenfurth’s account of the early Labor Party are the cartoon figures in the labour press that he uses to explore its political rhetoric. The heroes are sturdy working men, sometimes in bush garb, sometimes industrial labourers. The villains take various forms: serpents, harpies, bloodsucking insects, menacing aliens, but above all the Fat Man, the swollen, grotesque embodiment of capitalist greed. Dyrenfurth observes that Mr Fat is a far more ubiquitous device in Australian radical iconography than its counterparts elsewhere. British cartoons used a variety of villains: aristocratic loafers, rapacious landlords, ruthless sweaters, mendacious press barons. Those in the United States were less likely to personify capitalism with a generic capitalist villain than to depict combines and trusts.

This is the first major biography of Australia’s greatest book collector, David Scott Mitchell, whose peerless Australian and Pacific collection established the Mitchell Library. Mitchell was born in 1836, in Sydney. He rarely left the city and never ventured beyond New South Wales. Living on inherited wealth, he devoted his life to collecting 40,000 printed works, as well as manuscripts, maps, and pictures. On his death in 1907, Mitchell bequeathed his collection to the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales with a £70,000 endowment to fund additions. It was arguably Australia’s greatest cultural bequest. Mitchell himself has always been an enigma. Although he collected the documentary history of our nation, he preserved very little to illuminate his own life, beliefs, and motivation.

Percy Lindsay was the eldest and least well-known of the remarkable Lindsay brothers (the others were Norman, Lionel, and Darryl). He was born at Creswick, Victoria, in 1870, where he received his initial artistic training before moving to Melbourne in 1895. It was there that year that he first exhibited paintings, in a group show that included such luminaries as David Davies, E. Phillips Fox, and Walter Withers (the latter also taught him). Lindsay continued exhibiting his paintings until 1951: he had seven solo exhibitions between 1926 and 1935. In 1901 he took up illustrative work, which he produced for the remainder of his career. Lindsay married in 1907 and moved to Sydney in 1918, where he lived until his death in 1952.

John Joseph Cahill (1891–1959) rose from humble beginnings as a railway worker to become the premier of New South Wales during the 1950s. Although more interested in listening to band music on the wireless than in anything approaching High Culture, he was nonetheless instrumental in championing the cause of the Sydney Opera House. Ordinary working people, he believed, were entitled to more than just the essentials of life. Peter Golding’s intriguing biography will introduce many people to the life and career of this rough, politically hardened but fundamentally decent Labor politician.

Timely and accurate intelligence remains crucial to providing early warning of preparations for a terrorist attack. In this sense, high-grade intelligence represents the ‘front end’ of counter-terrorist strategy. This has certainly been reflected in the streamlining of Australia’s intelligence agencies since 9/11 and in the unprecedented resources that have been diverted to those agencies, particularly ASIO. The latter remains the agency responsible for preparing and distributing threat assessments and specific warnings on terrorist threats to Australia. This decade it has been granted substantially increased legislative powers to monitor, detain and question terrorist suspects. Due to the changes to Australia’s anti-terror laws since 9/11, ASIO’s internal security profile has become more prominent along with its increasingly close cooperation with state and federal police agencies.

Amnesia about writers of the past, even the not too distant past, is one of the besetting ills of our culture. How many readers of poetry under forty have more than a nodding acquaintance with the work of A.D. Hope, Francis Webb, Douglas Stewart or Vincent Buckley? All are fine poets, remembered now (if at all) through a handful of anthology pieces, partly because their published volumes usually disappear from print within a few years. Poets are particularly susceptible to the culture of forgetting, but the malaise extends to novelists and others who have made major contributions to our cultural, political and social life.

Literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, perhaps only to be hoped for under an imprint such as Australian Scholarly Publishing. Yet a search of its recent publications shows that among nineteen titles this is the only instance – and one facilitated by a Melbourne University publishing grant. Rightly so, for Cassandra L. Atherton’s is academic writing in the best sense of that abused adjective: argumentative, lucid, grounded in extensive research, sustained by a lively intelligence and harnessed to a bright idea. None of which means that I agree with everything she says, but then one function of good theoretical discourse is to provoke disagreement.