The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 47

The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, August 21, 1993 47 BOOKS Bringing out the best in the Banjo The stuff that drones are made of an etching. He could have written invaluable work about Australia out west, and the Australians who lived there, but he was left languishing in Sydney from 1919 until his death in 1941. He might even have made some money. Despite Paterson's familiarity with the Australian Club and the members' stand at the races, he never owned a house or flat and left exactly 303 3s Id. In his selections from the poetry, Hall also, and very usefully, gives the full text of Paterson's and Lawson's poetic slanging-match about the bush, with Paterson's later account of how they organised it between themselves, after the initial suggestion from Lawson.

Even if it was a put-up job, it remains a good, hearty ding-dong which reveals in the end how much they both loved the bush and the hard life that was lived there. Any reader wanting to sample the full range of Paterson's verse, which amazingly enough has not been available in a cheap edition, can now find it in the Penguin edition of Clement Semmler's large hardback of Paterson's collected verse, first published in 1992. For some inexplicable reason, the paperback reproduces the absurd contradiction of the hardback's title page: The Collected Verse of Banjo Paterson: Selected and Introduced by Clement Semmler. How can a "collected verse" also be As Hall says, "all anthologies are and every reader would like to add a few favourites to every collection. In Hall's selection, I would wish for some of the children's poems, such as Old Man Platypus or Weary Will the Wombat But that is niggling.

In his quiet, humorous and generous way, Hall is just the right person to be let loose on the Banjo's verse and prose. His selection is thoroughly likable and erninently usefuL Geoffrey Dutton. a writer, grew upon a South Australian sheep station. Campbell or Les Murray who would not let him go. Oddly enough, there has never been any argument over the quality of his non-narrative prose (his novels are best forgotten).

Paterson was a first-rate journalist and towards the end of his life he wrote an excellent memoir, which Hall reproduces in his selection. Hall's introduction fronts up to touchy subjects, like the probable suicide of Paterson's father, and disposes of the false picture of Paterson as the champion of the squatters. In his poems, Paterson mocks British imperialism in the Sudan, gives an heroic quality to the bushranger Gilbert, and puts the boot into the shearing shed scabs and autocratic landlords; and then, of course, there is Waltzing Matilda, still too subversive to be what it should be our national anthem. In this vein of anti-orthodoxy, Hall includes some fine prose pieces, such as the interview with Olive Schreiner and her forthright comments on the Boer War. It is a pity there was not room for some extracts from Paterson's first prose pamphlet Australian for the Australians, about unlocking the land.

But in his introduction, Hall tellingly connects it with the vicissitudes and death of the Banjo's father, who had suffered long on the land. Hall, rather kindly, does not dwell on the replacement of Paterson's early radicalism by a comfortable conservatism. Hall has a clear eye for the waste of Paterson's talents in what he pungently describes as the "cramped and ungenerous society of between-wars Despite the Banjo's fame, editors and publishers did not give opportunities for his talents. Three years before his death, he was "honoured" by a paltry CBE. As Hall observes, knighthoods were reserved for politicians and industrialists.

Paterson was a fine reporter and from those lean years Hall gives a sample in The Dog-Poisoner, which is dry and clear as heroism and patriotism? Some had no business, home, friends, mummy or daddy, or gun, to get out of a real rut Others than McCalman's interviewees had no overheads to worry about They just suffered, unartistically. McCalman makes the elementary error that neat and clean, decent middle-class families are the heartbeat, the nub of hope. Decent MLC girls. Decent Scotch men. So worthy Decent property values.

They even speak to Jews, some of them. Why shouldn't they? Jews are the biggest snobs of the lot, and just as worthy, dreary and unfunny as all the good and faithful bores, dullards and dills recorded here for us to snore through. Those on Government salaries had to cope with a 10 per cent drop in their income as part of Victoria's Depression economics. That's not quite the way The Great Depression ended. Old farmers kicked off their properties will tell you the real way the The truth is that Camberwellis nowhere near London.

graph. Now they are worthy. Janet McCalman also says that lots of the middle-class folk interviewed here got upset on seeing their memories typeset Of course they got upset The memories are no more important than anybody knocking up a home, going to school, backing a car for the first time, having a feed of rissoles or getting shot. Middle-class Australians, brainwashed by the class system, may have worshipped Graham Greene, but my family preferred Lennie Lower, whose acidic, disrespectful columns made Sydney taxi drivers laugh so much they went up the wrong street, went up Riley Street and round The Cross the wrong way. Lower was loved by workers in Melbourne, too.

They never heard of him at Scotch, old boy! The truth is that Camberwell is nowhere near London: it really isn't, no matter what blazers the boys wear, how much they look like the young Rupert Brooke, or how un-working-class they sound in their classrooms. How Higgin-sesque. I was born in Reservoir. I've always felt crook in Hawthorn. I don't find it leafy or fascinating or especially sensitive.

It's just a drag. Elite and elongated blonde-haired schoolchildren stepping like gazelles on to the 69 tram are not especially poetic, nor are they very bright; their teachers were drongos, just like my teachers were drongos. Is Kew really "everlastingly or just rich and dead? I wonder if Oscar Wilde, in Paradise, will know how to speak to a true poet like Janet McCalman, once she arrives with 15 more tram stories and numbing descriptions of Hawthorn driveways and dewy-eyed little creeps who end up Premier. This book is a biography of that generation of college boys and girls on their way to school in 1934. It is the story of their making as individuals, as middle-class men and women, as believers and doubters, as Australians.

Just when our best real authors and historians are really getting going, heroes like Tim Winton and the late Bob Harris, whose elegant and hurtful poems about the mystery of the sinking of the Sydney are so brilliant they change words, change everything, JOURNEYINGS The Biography Of A Middle Class Generation: 1 920-1 990 By Janet McCalman $39.95 ISBN 0522 84569 Reviewed by BARRY DICKINS Legge, used to smile, crook her head slightly and whisper to me, her lips hardly moving; the words still live in me: "How worthy Sometimes she would murmur: "How interesting" Once, when we were discussing an abominable drama we had been bludgeoned into enduring, Margaret said: "She will write!" Margaret Legge was memory and wit, a raconteur who always sang for her supper. When I got a word in, I could make her laugh, and the effect of that was gaseous, infectious, delicious and seemed to overcome class distinction, that old monster of Melbourne. Class distinction tireless old bitch she is; she comes unbidden, especially now, wrapped between these frightful recollections and burdensome backpats. I have yet to encounter a deader book. It is the equal of sitting inside Con-nell's Bar in Flinders Lane, staring at faded portraits of superphosphate trains sliding through Nhill and not getting drunk.

Janet McCalman will write; there will probably be more worthy reminiscences, detailing dead tram rides from St Kilda to who-cares-where. An unvarying, anaesthetising gazetting of privileges written by those who had them for those who wish they hadn't, or don't know if they did or they didn't, the whole effect is like listening to money count itself, in the wind, and get it wrong. McCalman writes of the Depression: Some in business have cut their workforce, trimmed their overheads, put their cars up on wooden blocks for the duration, and asked the womenfolk to darn their stockings and make do with less. Is this the stuff of denial, XX7 WW 'fjr jtertv It IS of an obsessive BANJO PATERSON His Poetry and Prose Selected and introduced by Richard Hall Allen Unwin, 288pp, $14.95 ISBN 01 86373 369 8 THE COLLECTED VERSE OF BANJO PATERSON Selected and Introduced by Clement Semmler Penguin, 290pp, $14.95 ISBN 0140146210 Reviewed by GEOFFREY DUTTON RICHARD Hall's excellent selection of Pater-son's verse and prose, with its spirited introduction, puts up a good case for Paterson's survival. The Banjo is certainly not unseated by Roy Campbell's immortal epigram On Some South African Novelists: You praise the firm restraint with which they write I'm with you there, of course; They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse? The horse is there alright with the Banjo, both literally and metaphorically.

Sometimes one might ask whether Paterson cared for anything or anybody as much as bloody horses, but Pegasus is still a goer, as that "small and weedy beast with a touch of Timor pony still happily shows. In many of Paterson's poems the energy and the zest are enduring, as is the sweep of the landscape and the dry humour that fits it so well. But the nagging question remains, first answered by Paterson himself, is he a poet or just a versifier? The latter, said Patersoa Judith Wright and Kenneth Slessor agreed and did not include him in their 1950s anthologies of Australian poetry; he is on another planet from most contemporary Australian versifiers. But there are true poets like John Manifold or David Odyssey THE PASSION OF MICHEL FOUCAULT By James Miller HarperCollins, 49 1 pp, $45 ISBN 000 2552671 THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT By David Macey Hutchinson, 599pp, $49.95 ISBN 009 1753449 Reviewed by RENEE BITTOUN IN FRANCE today, philosophy is as serious, respected and pragmatic an occupation as ever it was. Contemporary French philosophers with mega-star status are daily called upon to comment on social and cultural events.

From Descartes to Rousseau to Camus, there has always been a philosopher king and many have sought the crown. After World War II, Sartre wore it A man of intense intellectual capacities and a man of action, Sartre, even at the end of his life, would still demonstrate for this or that social reform on the streets of Paris or in the courts or in the press. Enormously popular, he was the prototype French intellectual and a hard act to follow. Among those vying for his throne was Michel Foucault and he said as much. Determined to replace Sartre, Foucault knew achieving it would take some radical manoeuvres.

He never quite made it Extraordinarily gifted and particularly ugly as a child, Foucault was pushed to do well at school to impress others, particularly younger boys. He passed into an elite system of education which brought him to the Ecole Normale Superieure, the most prestigious high school in France with the cream of French intellectuals among its students and faculty. In 20 YEARS IN 1993 Incantations in dream landscapes this senile paper-chase comes along, to reinforce the Cultural Cringe, to dull and deaden honest history, to prove absolutely that England is still boss. At Melbourne Grammar 13 per cent were in the Navy and 65 per cent were officers. Of course they were.

They served because ordinary poor schools either closed or told the kids to chase cows. It was not possible to be an officer on a choice of jam or dripping. What I would like to know is how many Old Grammarians got on the frog and lived the life of a swagman? If Weary Dunlop had been a swagman, we'd never have heard of him. Privileged schools produce heroes as working-class pubs produce comedians. Because suffering is relevant, it can be interesting, but why write this account of who won first-class honours, who played the violin stares at her nipples; Meta speaks to him of fertilisers.

Then: She climbs up the tree, takes her silk underwear off and shits on her husband's head: hard shit with little rocks and pips in it Because of its spiralling structure, the book's cohesion is loose (if that's possible), and at once pleasurable and disconcerting. The surrounding marshland, reclaimed by the League of Good Men and turned into fields, reverts to marsh; Yiorgos the Apeface is killed by Agape's pet boar; and the myth of St Vaia's honour is exploded. Such things have the appearance of endings, but in the ongoing life of the vjllage, they are outcomes which lead to more stories, enriching those that came earlier, and those which follow. Margaret Simons's novel is set in the South Australian Murray town of Newera, a name which lends itself to a mock-Aboriginal sound, or to Utopia. To its credit, there is a lot of story in this book.

It alternates between accounts of the invasion of the Nga wait's river land by white settlers, with a sometimes witty account of New- perfectly beautifully, who married a Myer, who paved a shit-hot drive, who spoke freely to Jews? One good bit was a memory by an "old gel" about rich boys not knowing about erections. Yet, somehow, they all got into building. The bit that got me running to the gully trap is: and we were canoodling away and he said: 'I'd like to sleep with you. Isnt it a pity we're so well brought up 7. Now, all of Melbourne's rich private schools are full of heroin-addicts; some of the pupils are into it, too.

I go to these places all the time, to give them a hand to write an essay, or blow dope with them, and the old snobbery has been substantially replaced with drink. There's hope for the bastards yet Barry Dickins is a playwright era life, and the town's bastard attempt to deal with the river and land salination by creating a lake. The novel is mostly told from the point of view of fat, young, confused and angry Athena Masters. She shacks up on a failing farm with Sam. He's only a little less articulate than she, and all the other characters in the novel Here's a problem: how to write interestingly about dull, inarticulate people.

The problem is not solved. Athena has none of the charisma of, for instance, Elizabeth Jolley's misfits. Exposition predominates, so one is, in a way, always waiting for real time to begin. The history of the Ngawait people maintains a relationship to the novel similar to the contemporary Ngawaits of Newera. Their story is marginalised and remains on the outskirts of the novel.

My last gripe is about language (offered with the proviso that narration of the river land and the ruthless gardener is good evocative and textured). The prose is competent Jane Messer is a Sydney writer, recently returned from Baltimore. Depression ended was when men started knocking off sheep all over Australia. They had to. So many aspects of this stupid book annoy me and offend me, it's hard, actually, to know where to begin.

In her zombified preface, an introduction to the first good sleep I've had in a week, Janet McCalman states that some of the women interviewed real good old middle-class 'gels "they are insisted on using only their maiden names. Why? If this book is important, and it really isn't, why not tell the truth? Grammar boys sneer at Scotch as "that high Uneducated men all over Australia have wept standing upright for 17 hours outside The Shrine in Hyde Park wept that they never went to a school; they were factory and cannon fodder; they could hardly make out the funny pictures in The Daily Tele prize occurred only very recently. Simons cannot have been given time for editorial advice and revision so much the worse for her. (Stuff publisher's deadlines!) The Mule's Foal begins with a framing tale, introducing the Greek village. The once talkative village now has amnesia: not an amnesia that is a disease though disasters on the scale of Marquez's village of insomniacs do occur but of mundanity.

The people are weary and old. How the change has come to pass will be found in the stories of the houses; of Stefanos's and Meta's son, Theodosios, Stella's daughter, Vaia, and her hairy faced son, Yiorgos the Apeface; of Mirella, Meta and Agape of the Glowing Face, the local Turks, and many others. Only later do we learn that Mirella, who runs the whorehouse and sells devastating potions, is the storyteller. When her gentle voice addresses the reader, still anonymously, it has a commonplace naivety that doesn't quite set with her profession and age. She is one of the few villagers who is From the early 1950s, Foucault stood out from his fellow students at once.

He was homosexual, morose, suicidal and universally disliked. Both his physical features (he shaved his head intentionally) and his sexuality were to be the dominating influences on Foucault's philosophical development Macey and Miller have poured immense research into their books on the development of Foucault's work indeed, the books' similarity made me wonder if they crossed paths during their research. Miller's text, exhaustively referenced and with hundreds of quotations, is heavy going. Macey, though he is often an apologist for Foucault's extraordinary behaviour, has produced the more readable book but what is it for which Macey is apologising? The young Foucault may be forgiven his Communist Party mistakes; he has not he may never be forgiven for his open support of the Khomeni regime in Iran, of pedophilia and, tacitly, of rape. Foucault's extreme viewpoints sprang from his obsession with Neitszche, de Sade and the philosophy of personal power.

There should be no constraints on human behaviour; it is what it is. To this end he published Madness and Civilisation, an historical account of man's treatment of the insane, and Discipline and Punish, on the treatment of society's wrongdoers. Both works ended with a criticism of modern, "governmentally" over-human behaviour. The power that others have over human beings concerned Foucault a great deal. He believed that "humanism is everything in Western Civilisation that restricts desire for For Foucault there was a fine line between guilt and innocence, the normal and the pathological.

Miller describes well the murky morass of French intellectual jostling that occurred between other thinkers: "For as different as Dumezil, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan obviously were, each from the other, and Foucault from each of them in turn, they all had at least one thing in common: a wish to destroy the intellectual negemony ot Jean-Paul Sartre." Foucault was appointed to the enormously prestigious College de France and, though keeping aloof and relatively unapproachable, managed to gather a "coterie" of brilliant young men around him. In an interview with Bernard-Henri Levi, today's flamboyant philosopher king, women were rarely mentioned in any conversa- tion with Foucault, Levi noted; nor was his sexuality. Death and suicide were Foucault's unrelenting obsessions and Miller describes them well. Rumours. abounded about Foucault's sexual behaviour and his penchant-for sado-masochistic eroticism.

His last major study was a monumental work, the History of Sexuality. Towards the end of his life in California, he frequented gay bars and haunts; he knew he was infected with the AIDS virus yet told no-one. Here his biographers are at odds. Miller doubts Foucault was fully aware of bis illness and its repercussions; Macey, pointirijgto Foucault's past "dances with finds innocence incredible and points to The Friend That Didn't Save My Life, a book by a. Foucault intimate, Herve Guibert, written as he, too, was dying of AIDS.

The irony is that Guibert is writing about a man who, all his life, abhorred the repression of human behaviour and who in the end publicly repressed his own. Rente Bittouns Addictions will be published next month by Random House Australia. literate: her parenthetical comments are contemporary, and like Epanomitis, with her return to her family's Greek village, Mirella is listener, oral storyteller and writer. When story-telling, the narrator's language retains that same simplicity, yet is also very lyrical and visualised. Chapters open with resonant, mysterious statements, and the book design is such that first sentences are repeated.

The openings read like incantations. As with other magic realism, the work moves between the ordinary and terrible within moments: Before Meta comes to me she sits in the kafeneio drinking raki. Out of her pocket she takes a box and places it on the table with a loud thump. She opens the box and it is a set of flashing white teeth her gaze stops on Meriklis the Gravedigger. Stories offer themselves up with an apparent innocence and I wondered at the young author's wit (Epanomitis is 24 years old).

The once powerful Meta returns from prison, where she was raped, to her faithless family. She arrives in the form of a beautiful woman, and the oedipal triad is realigned. Her son now until August 31. 1 rea THE MULE'S FOAL Bv Fotini Epanomitis Allen Unwin, 150pp, $12.95 ISBN 1 86373 4546 THE RUTHLESS GARDEN By Margaret Simons Bookworld, 21 lpp, $24.95 ISBN 1 875628061 Reviewed by JANE MESSER THE symmetry of these award-winning novels isn't serendipitous because the one shows how the other might have been. Fotini Epanomitis and Margaret Simons set their books in small towns, people them with voracious women, gossips and outcasts, and give each place a figure of modernity with the artificial flooding and drainage of land.

There the similarity ends. Epanomitis's The Mule's Foal has entered my dreams. Simons's The Ruthless Garden lacks finish, though not promise, perhaps due to the rush with which it was published. The announcement of the inaugural A Bookworld 'true nr. wAta a feme cniifmb zDa Study Modern Greek at home Travel and work in Greece, improved professional opportunities and a desire to leam the fascinating language of one of the largest groups in multicultural Australia these are some of the reasons why people choose to study Modern Greek, the modern version of the language spoken by Homer, Plato and Sophocles.

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These Masters courses offered by UNE-Northern Rivers provide you with: research and coursework options programs linked to industry and the professions a range of study areas relevant to the Faculty's research activities niU-time, part-time and external study modes. Applications close on October 29, 1993. Further information is available by phoning the Faculty hotline (066) 20 3083, faxing (066) 22 1833, or by mail from: The Director, Student Services: The Friends of The Australian Opera in association with Sotheby's invite you to an appraisal day. Sydney Opera House (Reception Hall) Wednesday, 25 August: 10am-2pm. Bring along your treasures and Sotheby's team of experts will provide a current auction value (Limit three items per person).

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