Non-fiction

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.

It is a quandary of the currently abounding place-literature that by bringing such softening frames to so-called ‘wild’ places, and by writing so charmingly about them, authors are in fact robbing these places of the ‘wildness’ and the psychogeographical freedom they purport to love. Or are they?

Much of Globes is concerned with questions of scale. Human societies are not static in size. What changes or deformations, Sloterdijk asks, must occur in a society when it grows from one of the smallest units – the tribe or clan in which everyone knows each other – into much a bigger grouping: a city, nation or empire?

If Howe’s primary target in ‘This Age of Conformity’ was the incipient neoconservative milieu, by the mid 1960s he had turned his attention to, and trained his guns on, the embryonic New Left. In his 1965 essay ‘New Styles in “Leftism”’, he isolates and analyses some emergent trends on the progressive side of politics, and finds little cause for celebration.

Dobell remains an enigma. Bevan says that nobody knew who he was, not even Dobell himself, but I doubt this. I think he knew himself exactly and chose not to communicate that knowledge to others, except parsimoniously in the paintings, and sometimes in life. Paradoxically, Dobell’s lifelong reticence is what makes Bill: The Life of William Dobell, although it has its faults, a valuable book.

Beaumont refers to the expectation that if Britain declared war ‘Australia and the other dominions would follow’. She says, wrongly, that ‘the Cook government accepted the British decision without question’ and uses the term ‘consensus’ to describe the political foundations on which the troops went to war. This misconception is characteristic of the imperial romance that still influences the writing of Australia’s Great War history.

As the authors of Inside Australia’s Anti-Terrorism Laws and Trials note, it is relatively common for those accused of terrorism to plead guilty, partly to obtain a reduction on the huge sentences that such charges carry, but also because a guilty plea will lead to an improvement of the conditions they are already enduring, in the context of a trial that could stretch out for years.

‘In his work,’ Dworkin writes of Abe, ‘sexual intercourse is a metaphor for the human condition.’ In The Frontier Within, we catch a glimpse of the condition as Abe sees it, without the metaphor. Just as in the sex lives of Abe’s protagonists the ultimate goal of dissolution eludes them, so too in Abe’s non-fiction there is a plangent note of frustration.