University of Queensland Press

The ten essays in this volume revisit the achievement of the late Cecil Hadgraft, whose Queensland and Its Writers, published nearly fifty years ago, is a masterly and non-doctrinaire exposition of a century of writing in Queensland. Hadgraft was one of the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literature at a time when academics trained in British traditions joked about what the hapless students of local literature were going to study beyond the third week of term. I will always be grateful to Cec Hadgraft for teaching me not only about the variety of Australian literature but also about the diversity and value of what had been written in my own state. So too, I imagine, is Patrick Buckridge, one of the editors of this volume.

When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.

Alasdair Duncan’s Second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Once again, the main character is a repressed homosexual: this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. The novel palls around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing, given today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it is unfortunate that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the contemporary sexual mores undermine the novel’s social commentary.

One of the most durable myths about education is that it can be separated from politics. It is a myth which has allowed people to believe that education in general and schools in particular can and should be insulated from that unpleasant world in which people disagree violently about human rights and needs and social values and just about everything else. Perhaps – but one cannot be sure – the seventies will mark the death of this myth. If Ted D’Urso and Richard Smith’s collection of readings does, as the authors believe, indicate the kind of problem which will be significant in education for some time to come, then its publication is a further recognition not merely that issues in education should be considered in a social context but rather that they are themselves political and social issues. In fact, the education system seems to provide one of the principal theatres in which the central conflicts of a society are played out.

'This is a book about friendship and storytelling’, writes Marilla North in her prologue to this artfully arranged selection of correspondence. It begins in 1928 and covers the next twenty-seven years, chronicling the large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, and Miles Franklin, three of Australia’s most vital, fluent, and committed women writers.

In the penultimate chapter, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’. 

Sophie Masson’s first novel deals with the probing of emotional wounds. It alternates from present to past as a journalist goes back to her village to write a story on a Family Court tragedy about people with whom her past is inexorably entangled. Set in northern New South Wales and Sydney, it examines the slow death of the rainforest areas and their rebirth as alternative lifestyle habitats for people fleeing the city.

The dustjacket designer Christopher McVinish has given the title of this novel an unforgettable identity, with the figure of a soldier superimposed in red on the second one of 1915, which is in black. It is a powerful image that immediately announces the subject of the novel. Most of what follows is disappointing, and apparently not due to McVinish.