Fiction

Douglas Stewart is one of the great all-rounders, perhaps the greatest, of our literature; one recalls that Nancy Keesing once described him as probably t

Foremost as a poet, the subject matter of his poetry is astonishingly wide-ranging from ballads and narrative poems to the most delicate and delightful of nature and love lyrics. He has been a notable and inspiring literary editor; in a period that has now passed into history he so exploited the creative potentialities of radio to communicate culturally that he achieved an international reputation as a verse playwright; and his literary criticism down the years has been consistently respected by his peers.

In Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin Johnson presents the invasion of Australia by white men, referred to as ‘nums’ or ‘ghosts’, through the eyes of the Aborigines, ‘humans’. With the central character Wooreddy and his wife Trugernanna, (Truganinni) we witness the annihilation of a race of people, the breakdown of their culture.

Nigel Krauth’s first novel is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction – or rather, a reworking of a little known set of factual events. As the novel explains, in 1895 the famous Australian poet ‘Banjo’ Paterson travelled to Queensland to visit his fiancée. Two events of importance occurred during that short period: Paterson’s engagement was broken off, and while there he wrote what was to become his and the nation’s most famous song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Paterson always refused to speak of the period in later life so that what exactly happened between himself and Sarah Riley remains unknown and Nigel Krauth feels free to speculate. There are ethical problems, I feel, in the fictional reconstruction of an historical personage and Krauth’s portrait of Paterson, while by no means wholly unsympathetic, is that of a man in many ways vain and narcissistic; certainly, it enraged the poet’s descendants to the point where they refused Krauth permission to quote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in his novel. Copyright does not run out until 1991 when, presumably, if the novel is still in print Krauth will fill in the blank spaces he has left.

We have to thank Julian Croft for this selection of Slessor’s light verse first published in Smith's Weekly between February 1928 and November 1933. Here is a worthy successor to Slessor’s Darlinghurst Nights, until now the only selection of frivolous Slessor available to the general reader. The verses here are no less charming than those of the earlier selection and their omission from Darlinghurst Nights, first published in 1933, seems merely to be based on the fact that they do not fit easily into the theme of that volume. They are certainly no less delightfully capricious in their rhyme schemes and no less artfully artless.

Greek and English, the Greek father and Australian mother, the child in the middle who looks at one object and sees different creatures – no catch-phrase like ‘culture conflict’ says much about what is happening in Ismini’s life at this moment. The story does, however, in the strong, unblinkered prose of Beverley Farmer as she writes with unfaltering sensitivity about Greece, about Australians in Greece and Greeks in Australia, and, painfully, about couples and the families who mix their cultures with their love and hate.

Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page introduction makes clear, heard of his ‘illustrious ancestor Henry’: of Gide, Montaigne, Sterne, Peacock, Firbank, Trollope, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.

In an authorial note Fay Zwicky describes her collection of stories as thematic rather than chronological.

They are all concerned more or less ironically, with the growth of a writer’s consciousness which may help to account for the varying degrees of stylistic density and the shifts in personae.

The first seven stories, the Helen Freeman sequence, offer a retrospective view of Helen’s struggle to establish a female identity in a world dominated by men and by masculine edicts and rituals. Taking a hint from the introductory note, these stories reflect, in essence, the stages in the author’s personal development from her youthful recollections of her family during and after the Second World War to her marriage and separation. It is arguable whether these stories should be treated as the discontinuous narrative of one life, though they can be read that way. They are not, however, an autobiography. 

The time is always four o’clock in the morning when Night Sister M. Shady (unregistered) is on duty at The Hospital of St Christopher and St Jude. The punctual milkman is swearing as he falls on the broken step, the elderly patients are having a water fight or an altercation or a game of cards. Whatever may or may not be going on, Mrs Shady will record with confidence ‘nothing abnormal to report’.

Brian McFarlane’s small book on Martin Boyd’s Langton novels is a particularly measured and useful study. He makes no grand claims for Boyd but sees and appreciates him for the writer that he is when he is at his best, and the Langton novels – The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love, and When Blackbirds Sing – certainly see Boyd at his best.