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The Australian film industry got going in the 1970s perhaps just a little before the resurgence of Australian publishing and perhaps for that reason there has been less interplay between Australian film and Australian writing than there might have been. Patrick White raged and roared about the prospect of Joseph Losey and Max Von Sydow making a film of Voss, but that was the tormenting hope of a more colonial dispensation. There have been bearable films of modern Australian classics like Stead’s For Love Alone and more or less shocking films of such nearly contemporary classics as Monkey Grip (a real monster despite Noni Hazelhurst and Alice Garner as child star doing their best) and, more recently, Lilian’s Story with Ruth Cracknell badly miscast. Cases like Fred Schepisi’s lean, pungent version of Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith are rarer than they should be though it is encouraging to hear that Mel Gibson owns the rights to My Brother Jack and intends making a film of it one of these days.

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I found Don Anderson’s essay ‘Leisure’ (ABR, August 1997) interesting, but was intrigued by his photo that covers almost one third of a page. There is a lengthy biographical note which tells us that Don is ‘a member of the English Department at the University of Sydney. His monthly column, ‘Between the Lines’, appears in the Sydney Morning Herald.’ The note also informs us that he contributes a quarterly essay to 24 Hours and has been appointed to the Board of the Sydney Writer’s Festival. I also find out from the note about his most recent book.

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This is a serious tale of crime and punishment from Jean Bedford, who had been working up to it. Her Anna Southwood novels have been consistently good, their light touch obscuring not at all the author’s passion for justice, an old-fashioned sentiment which always informs the best crime novels, often most palpably present in crime fiction by women.

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Mortal Divide is an anti-oedipal odyssey, Joycean roman à clef, migrant memoir, and Orphic mini-epic. Nemerov’s self-reflexive Journal of a Fictive Life is one of its inspirations. George (Yiorgos) is a first-generation Greek translator working at the Multicultural Broadcasting Service. Victim of the media machine, he begins to hear and see things that aren’t ‘real’, including his spectral double Yiorgos Alexandroglou, and plunges videoleptically into dreams whenever he closes his eyes.

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Catherine Jinks’ new novel reminds us that humans are great pigeonholers: we like to know where everything (everyone) fits, to be able to pop them in the right slot, slap the right label on the front and relax, secure in the knowledge that our future reactions are safely prescribed by the parameters of the pigeonhole to which we have consigned them.

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‘The historical aspects of The Rocks should not be oversold’, declared a recent Sydney Cove Authority strategic plan, ‘it should be used as a background’. In this sanitised heritage precinct, tourists might thrill to the hint of a raffish past, but should be shielded from more intimate and disturbing glimpses. This is always easy in the absence of systematic research.

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From Aldi Wimmer

Dear Editor,

This is the first time I am responding to something I read in ABR, and the reason is Ivor Indyk’s outrageous review of John Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 (July ABR). Actually, it isn’t so much a review as a piece of character assassination. How Indyk, whose reviews are usually excellent, can fall into a ranting mode in which he totally loses sight of the texts that he should be evaluating, is beyond me. What can have possessed him? Envy that a younger man is an accomplished writer?

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‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’

Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t.

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The Listmaker by Robin Klein & The Apostle Bird by Garry Disher

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September 1997, no. 194

It takes a book like Robin Klein’s The Listmaker to remind adults that a children’s book which succeeds in conveying a child’s point of view may well not immediately engage more mature readers. In this instance, Klein so precisely articulates the self-absorbed voice of twelve­year-old Sarah, the eponymous listmaker, that it takes an effort of will for an adult reader to persist past the first few pages of what seem like overstated emotions and overdetermined plot. Children will have no trouble accepting Sarah’s voice and understanding that it’s like it is because it’s been distorted by her circumstances. Adults too, however, would do well to persevere with The Listmaker, for it turns out to be a heart-felt indictment of how our greedy me-first society can damage children.

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Gallienus by John Bray & A Portrait of John Bray edited by Wilfred Prest

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September 1997, no. 194

Gallienus is hardly the best known Roman Emperor. The records of his reign from 235 to 268 are so fragmentary that even the date of his assassination can only be approximated as taking place during a six-month period.

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