Brian Matthews

John McLaren (1932–2015) by Brian Matthews

January-February 2016, no. 378 • 23 December 2015

John McLaren, who died peacefully in St Vincent's Private Hospital on 4 December 2015, was a man of many fine attributes and talents, not the least of which was his capacity for friendship. John had many close friends towards whom he showed great loyalty, affection, and generosity. They, in their turn, recognised the strength and quality of the quite precious bond his character and personality mad ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Frank Lowy' by Jill Margo

December 2015, no. 377 • 30 November 2015

'Let us now praise famous men / ... men renowned for their power ... / Leaders of the people by their counsels ... wise and eloquent / ... Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations ...' These aspirations, from Apocrypha: Sirach 44, pose some problems for a biographer. The famous, the powerful, the leaders, the wise and eloquent, the rich and able would all seem to be ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Island Home' by Tim Winton

November 2015, no. 376 • 26 October 2015

Tim Winton's island home seethes and rings, whispers and beckons with sheer life. It tantalises through shreds of memories and phantom histories turned to stone or engraved in ocean-scored rocks and remote caves. Like William Blake's 'green and pleasant land', it is compromised but offers 'a World in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wild flower'. His isle, like Prospero's, is 'full of noises / ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Archipelago of Souls' by Gregory Day

August 2015, no. 373 • 29 July 2015

An official account of a naval battle off the coast of Crete on 22 May 1941 includes reference to a ‘friendly fire’ incident when ‘HMS Orion was … repeatedly hit by 40mm shots from HMS Dido, which, in the maelstrom, ended up shooting at her comrade’. A few days later, during the evacuation from Heraklion, the crippled HMS Imperial had to be scuttled and, according to one version, some Au ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'For the Term of His Natural Life' by Marcus Clarke

Reading Australia • 28 May 2015

In his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), Frederick Sinnett conducts an inquiry ‘into the feasibility of writing Australian novels; or, to use other words, into the suitability of Australian life and scenery for the novel writers’ purpose and, secondly, into the right manner of their treatment’.The problem, as Sinnett identifies it – and he was not the first and certainly ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Jovial Harbinger of Doom: short stories of Laurie Clancy' edited by Richard Freadman

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

A story called ‘The Burden’, which appears at about the halfway mark of this collection, begins like this: ‘Graham was finding the burden of freedom a little too much for him …’ He is working alone in his room above a Chinese restaurant near the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where he is a visiting Australian Fellow, writing a novel about, it seems, academic life. But t ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'The Critic in the Modern World: Public criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood' by James Ley

October 2014, no. 365 • 24 September 2014

Aproaching Thomas Wyatt’s great but notoriously resistant poem ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek / With naked foot stalking in my chamber’, poet and critic Vincent Buckley wrote, ‘The sense of purposive yet mysterious activity created in this opening stanza is also a matter of its sensuousness … The critical problem is to define this … sensuousness … [I]t is not to identif ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'The Claimant' by Janette Turner Hospital

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 26 May 2014

‘You acquired the habit of disguise and now you can’t shed it.’ This observation, made by a nameless old man to Lilith Goldberg, one of the three main protagonists of The Claimant, lies at the heart of the novel, though it shares that vibrantly beating heart with much else: the implications and intricacies of privilege; the iron grip of lineage; the complexities of naming and identity; the r ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 18', edited by Melanie Nolan

February 2014, no. 358 • 17 January 2014

In his brief preface to Volume 1 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography 1788–1850 A–H (1966), Douglas Pike describes the ‘all-Australian, Commonwealth-wide … consultation and co-operation’ underpinning the volume and notes that the breadth and complexity of its intellectual network meant the Dictionary could ‘truly be called a national project’. Five decades later, in an informati ... (read more)

Brian Matthews is Critic of the Month

February 2014, no. 358 • 17 January 2014

When did you first write for ABR? 1981, during John McLaren’s incumbency as editor. What prompted you to take up book reviewing? Well, it took me up, really. It hadn’t occurred to me to review books until I was invited to write a piece for a journal called Prospect at Melbourne University. A long hiatus ensued during my school teaching years, but when I moved to Flinders University I began ... (read more)