Australian literature

If the Companion does not aspire to be an integrated history of the media, what is its raison d’être? In some ways, it is easier to note what the book is not. It is not a contemporary guide to media practitioners or media outlets. It is not a list of contacts or available products. Nor is it an analysis of media product or producers. It does not set out to critique the media. But it does set out to be comprehensive.

It is widely agreed in the journalistic accounts, the emerging academic studies, and the various politicians’ memoirs that the Rudd and Gillard governments had serious flaws and that their disunity killed any momentum and obscured their achievements. It is also well recognised that the media in general, and the News Limited outlets in particular, played a role in the Labor governments’ demise. You get barely an inkling of that from reading Triumph and Demise.

No one believes that most Australian poetry volumes are a couple of edits or a tempered excess away from being a perfect version of themselves, but this is what, en masse, the reviews tell us. A biddable reader will have the impression that all debutants are ones to watch; that, three volumes in, all poets have consolidated their style; and that after five or more volumes they are accomplished and take their place in the nation’s poetic story. The quantum of praise does not add up.

Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and the status of that subjective fact. In this sense, they might be read as essays that question the concept of rationality.

Exhibits of the Sun is well-named; the poems are all sunflowers of a kind, drenched in light, or seeking it. For a Metaphysical Poet, Edgar has a surprisingly painterly eye. He especially loves the way light rebuilds the world – or the consciousness that perceives it – in the light of morning.

In 1950, ASIO’s Canberra office could record only two telephone lines from the Soviet embassy at any time. By contrast, in a single month in 2013, according to Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency acquired data from more than 3 billion calls and emails. Perversely, the staggering gulf between then and now makes ASIO’s history more relevant than ever. We do not (and cannot) know what the secret organisation does today, but its record allows us to extrapolate.

This is a book every Australian should read. The kind of people we are, the kind of nation this is, the big myths and the way they have been forged – these are the stones with which Watson’s builds his book.

Reading across Noel Pearson’s work, from his 1986 honours thesis on the ‘mission culture’ of his hometown of Hope Vale to this newest essay, A Rightful Place, there are notable consistencies. He is ultimately a romantic thinker, in the sense that he always aims to trace a course from disaster towards redemption, rather than mere remediation.

It is important to note that despite its setting, The Golden Age is not a misery novel. It does not tell a story of abuse, and although it gives us a candid and painful account of Frank’s suffering, both as a small boy hidden from Nazis in 1940s Budapest and a few years later as a polio patient, it does not ask us to be either voyeur or fellow-sufferer. The Golden Age is a story about Frank’s dawning and intensely vivid realisation of self.

Geoffrey Lehmann’s Poems 1957–2013 is a great opportunity to do two things: enjoy a lot of memorable Australian poems ranging across more than half a century and to examine the trajectory of a long and now completed career.