Australian literature

Open House is part of the continued resurgence of David Brooks as a poet. Although he has now published four collections of poetry since 2005, the first of these, Walking to Point Clear, was his first in 22 years. He is also the author of novels, short fiction, essays and non-fiction: Open House is part of a much larger field of language-making.

Daniel Mannix is the greatest churchman in Australian history, but he was far too much of a turbulent priest for the College of Cardinals. This was the man who opposed Billy Hughes’ referendum on conscription and won. This is the man who split the Labor Party down the middle in 1956 and did everything in his considerable power to keep it out of office.

The use of individual cases throughout Across the Seas throws the issues into relief. As Neumann comments, the strategy of rendering refugees anonymous has done much to distance these issues from everyday Australians. It has allowed governments to control the agenda.

There have been many attempts to come to terms in print with the Nolan phenomenon, but only one full length biography … Now we have a second biography by art historian and curator Nancy Underhill.

At the time of her death in 2004, Thea Astley was rightly remembered as a ‘creative force until the end’ and ‘a literary trailblazer’. A decade later, as is so often the case with writers, Astley’s work has all but disappeared from the public consciousness and now needs reintroducing to the world of readers and writers.

Battarbee and Namatjira remain, in their separate ways, like their beloved ghost gums, isolated in their landscapes. Their appeal is partly due to their political quietism. Their expressiveness is, in a way, like the treatment of the trees, deliberately enigmatic.

Philip Hodgins’ poetry is alive with strange images, jolts of perception, sudden beautiful cadences. And his poetry is frightening. I mean not supernatural fear but the intimate animal fear we have for our own bodies, the fear of pain and the fear of death.

Devadatta’s Poems is written from the perspective of Devadatta, a lesser known figure in Buddhism, who seeks to displace Siddhattha without success. Beveridge takes him from the margins, placing him at the centre of her volume. Moreover, she gives him possession in the title: the collection is his.

At the centre of each of these narratives – nine short stories and three novels – is a woman or a girl. Some are empathetic, others cruelly selfish; some are extroverts and others aloof; some are acerbically witty and others dangerously naive. Despite their diversity and their different locations in history, place and time of life, most of them are far more resilient than they perceive themselves to be.

Riddles are at the heart of Les Murray’s poetry: that language-gift of his, which shows words to be sounds that strangely hold for us those meanings that we attribute to the world. As he remarks in his poem ‘The Meaning of Existence’: ‘Everything except language knows / the meaning of existence’.