No 243 - August 2002
Browse by
'Dearest Munx': The Love Letters of Christina Stead by Margaret Harris; Neal Blewett on Bob Carr's Thoughtlines; Tony Birch on Stan Grant's The Tears of Strangers; Peter Bishop's 'Author! Author!'; John Hirst on Rosemary Neill's White Out
Copyright to all textual material owned by Australian Book Review Inc. Flinders Dspace has made every effort to contact the copyright owners of other material, and will remove items upon request.
Recent Submissions
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Twenty Years On, July Bestsellers, September Highlights.
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)This items contains miscellaneous items including July 2002 bestsellers. -
Mixed Results in the South Seas. "Quiros", by John Toohey. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)John Toohey’s "Quiros" is set during the seventeenth-century search for the Great South Land. Toohey negotiates the pitfalls of his genre with mixed success. The situation he explores is intriguing: men grouped in a confined ... -
The Importance of Being Edited. "Szabad", by Alan Duff and "Featherstone", by Kirsty Gunn. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Kirsty Gunn’s "Featherstone" is a writerly book, with a style and tone carefully attuned to letting a mystery tale unfold very differently in different lives over the course of a single weekend. It is complex and intimate ... -
Missing the Zeitgeist. "Alanna", by Alan Saunders. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)As a satire of the pretension, gullibility and downright silliness of contemporary Australian cultural politics, "Alanna" is highly diverting entertainment. But its textual ‘playfulness’ is, frankly, a bit passé. Good ... -
The Purposefulness of the Creatures. "Confessing a Murder", by Nicholas Drayson. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)"Confessing a Murder" is written in the narrator’s old age. It is the journal of a man who is now the sole inhabitant of a small island somewhere in the Java Sea. He addresses a diary to Charles Darwin, whom he calls ‘Bobby’ ... -
The Trouble with Banality. "Hardly Beach Weather", by Bernard Cohen. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Of all the talked-about new voices in Australian fiction of the early 1990s, Bernard Cohen’s is one of relatively few that has been regularly heard since. A decade after "Tourism", he’s back with his fourth book and the ... -
Tracing English. "Calques", by Javant Biarujia. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)This book collects Javant Biarujia’s ‘calques’, forty-four poems and prose pieces that copy, trace and otherwise interpret bits and pieces of Raymond Queneau’s "L’Instant Fatal", Paul Eluard’s "Capitale de la Douleur" and ... -
Modernist Embraces. "Cut Lunch", by Chris Andrews and "Collage", by Peter Lloyd and "Itinerant Blues", by Samuel Wagan Watson. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Samuel Wagan Watson and Peter Lloyd enjoy the contrast between citified sophistication and the detritus that accompanies it. There is plenty of energy in Watson’s work. Generally, the tone is more assured than in his first ... -
A Dodgy Business. "The Autonomy of Literature", by Richard Lansdown. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)At one point in "The Autonomy of Literature", Richard Lansdown remarks that he hopes his does not belong to the ‘poisonous’ genre of anti-theory books. He doesn’t justify this striking epithet, but the remark at least ... -
Where's the Chest Hair? "When the Scorpion Stings: The History of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, Vietnam, 1965-1972", by Paul Anderson and "Vietnam Shots: A Photographic Account of Australians at War", by Gary McKay and Elizabeth Stewart. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)The late Paul Anderson’s "When the Scorpion Stings" and Gary McKay and Elizabeth Stewart’s "Vietnam Shots" are disparate offerings in the terrain that they seek to cover, but each is a solid contribution to an understanding ... -
A Formidable History. "Images of Australia: A History of Australian Children's Literature" by Maurice Saxby. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Although he attributes it to Walter McVitty’s "Innocence and Experience" (1981) and Brenda Niall’s "Australia through the Looking Glass" (1984), there is no doubt that Maurice Saxby’s pioneering "A History of Australian ... -
Pompey at Half Mast. "Pompey Elliott", by Ross McMullin. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Ross McMullin argues rightly that an Australian who achieved so much ‘deserves to be better remembered’. His vivid, thorough biography is the first full account of Elliott’s life — surprising, given Pompey’s eminence, ... -
Medley and Hotchpotch. "Christina Stead: Satirist", by Anne Pender. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Pender’s is the first study to focus on Stead the satirist (though the claim that ‘critics have chosen to ignore the satire in her fiction’ overstates the case considerably). She locates Stead within a tradition that begins ... -
"Dearest Munx": The Love Letters of Christina Stead.
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Along with other manuscripts, the 284 letters exchanged between Christina Stead (1902–83) and her husband, William Blake, (141 from her, 143 from him) passed into the keeping of Ron Geering, Stead’s literary executor, at ... -
Retiring Beasts. "A Field Guide to the Mammals of Australia", by Peter Menkhorst and Frank Knight. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2007-07-31)How do you tell a kangaroo from a wallaby, a seal from a sea lion? If you know the answer to those questions, then how do you tell a mountain pygmy possum from an eastern pygmy possum, or a hairy-footed dunnart from a ... -
Old Children. [poem]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)This item is a poem by Tom Shapcott, dedicated to Ron and Pam Simpson. -
On the Volcano Trail. [poem]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)This item is a poem by Brendan Ryan. -
Changing the Order of Things. "C.Y. O'Connor: His Life and Legacy", by A.G. Evans. [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)Evans has, through painstaking research in Ireland and New Zealand, revealed — in the words of the historian Geoffrey Bolton — O’Connor’s ‘elusive and complex personality’ and enriched our understanding of this outstanding ... -
Off-Duty Darwinism. "Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender", by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (eds). [review]
(Australian Book Review, 2002-08)The tension between strict Darwinism and transformist evolutionary schemes not founded on natural selection is central to "Disseminating Darwinism". The best chapters (those by Eric Anderson, Scott Appleby, David Livingstone ...
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