Archive
Dog Fox Field by Les Murray & Blocks and Tackles by Les Murray
Simon Patton reviews 'The Earthquake Lands' by Hal Colebatch, 'The Winter Baby' by Jennifer Maiden, and 'To the Ocean & Scheherazade' by Richard Allen
One of the challenges confronting the writer of poetry is the balancing of public and private modes in an engaging and satisfactory whole. In these three collections the precarious possibilities of balance, of confiding and confronting, are attempted in very different ways.
... (read more)Children’s Games by Geoffrey Lehmann & The House of Vitriol by Peter Rose
The Australian Bicentennial Arts Program has been documented in a collection of review articles recently published by Mead and Beckett. It is a record not only of the wide range of arts activities throughout the year but also of some of the issues which confronted the artists involved.
No, it is not an Aborigine on the front of the Australian Bicentennial Authority’s 1988 Reviews (edited by Sarah Overton). It is Mamadou Dioume as Bhima in Brook’s Mahabharata. And don’t be misled by the Aboriginal colours in a contemporary-primitive motif that hovers in the foreground about the title. The essential problem is, evidently, to appear respectable while affirming a vanquished culture (is there a preferable word?) within an imperial medium.
... (read more)Hero, Allan Baillie’s sixth novel for young readers, shows this seasoned storyteller at his best. Succinct yet incisive, it is a highly disciplined display of how tight technique can turn a single incident into an exciting story. Right from the first line, ‘A single drop of water exploded on Pamela Browning’s open exercise book’, we know we are on the precipice of an event towards which every mumble on the earth and rumble in the sky lead.
... (read more)Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience.
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