Everything I Knew
by Peter Goldsworthy
Hamish Hamilton/Penguin

Universe, Milky Way, Solar System, Earth, Australia, South Australia, Penola, Church Street, 26, December 63.” These are the opening lines of Everything I Knew, Peter Goldsworthy’s excellent new book set in the South East in the mid 1960s. His narrator begins with a kind of GPS mantra – spiraling from the universal to the locally, prosaically particular. The lines nicely echo Stephen Dedalus in that other bildungsroman, or novel of …

Playing Friends
by Marilyn Duckworth
Vintage, $27.99.
ISBN 9781869418694

Trendy But Casual
by Paula Morris
Penguin, $28.00.
ISBN 9780143006398

It’s that time in later middle age when school reunions have become like a dawn (or twilight) parade of veterans and survivors. Those wraiths from our childish past, conjured up on the OldFriends website, or actually manifest in front of us with glass in hand – just subtract forty five years of subcutaneous sag and add colour to the grey.

In …

2006

Dante’s Heaven by Jan Kemp, Puriri Press, $30.00, ISBN 090894330X

Beauty Sleep by Kate Camp, Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864735111

The Gas Leak by Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, $21.99, ISBN 1869403568

In the fragile world of poetry publishing it is always interesting to see what’s in a name. The title of any art work is important but in the verbal economy of poetry it is doubly so. The title has to intrigue and, literally, divert us. It …

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
by Thomas Lynch
Jonathan Cape

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The first I heard of Thomas Lynch was an essay in The London Review of Books entitled Embalming Father. A friend passed it on to me- on an A3 photocopy. Then he found more, and before long I had a file of Lynch works; wise, lugubrious essays written by a poet who also happened to be a funeral director. Essays, among other things, …

1994

Strip Tease

by Carl Hiaasen

Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

If you were to browse the shelves for Carl Hiaasen’s five novels you might tend to pass them by. Double Whammy has on its cover a buggy-eyed bass munching a hundred dollars US.  Tourist Season has a crocodile with an I-love-Florida cap hanging off its premolars and Skin Tight proclaims a close-up of an oiled navel with not enough bikini to write the price of the book on it. …

Brought to Book; Censorship
and School Libraries in Australia

by Claire Williams and Ken Dillon
Australian Library and Information Association
with D.W.Thorpe
174.pp RRP. $30

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

As the authors of this book drily enquire on their first page – “What the **** is Censorship ?” Well we know that it is a topic which seems to become more vexed as time goes on. It used to be the instrument with which only conservative groups sought to protect …

1992

A Bunch of Poesy

Michael Leunig

Angus and Robertson

Everyday Devils and Angels

Michael Leunig

Penguin

One Big Happy Family

Mary Leunig

Penguin

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Mary Leunig’s drawings are truly terrible. Look at any page of One Big Happy Family or her earlier works – There’s No Place Like Home and A Piece of Cake – and you’ll see. The images are domestic usually- wretched women, anxious children, absent fathers, images of gore, despair and death. They’re …

1992

More Please

Barry Humphries

Viking

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In More Please, Barry Humphries’ fifteenth book, Australia’s most gifted theatre artiste drops his fourteenth veil. Those who thought that Humphries would Tell All and Name Names have him mixed up with that flaws in the glass bloke. These thoughts recollected in  tranquillity are anything but misanthropic. Instead they’re brim with the mellow fruitfulness of Camberwell in the 1930s. Even when his cosy childhood is overtaken by fractious maturity …

1992

Dead Elvis

Greil Marcus

Viking

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Greil Marcus has a lot to say about Elvis Presley. That was clear when he quit as a reviewer for Rolling Stone to write Mystery Train, a micro-history of American popular music based on portraits of Robert Johnson, Robbie Robertson, Sly Stone – and most impressively, Elvis Presley. Mystery Train, published in 1975, took its title from the eeriest of the recordings Presley ever made for Sam Phillips in the …

1991

Oval Dreams

Brian Matthews

McPhee Gribble

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Brian Matthews has written a fair swag of occasional pieces but I have two particular favourites. One is a conference paper on Australian poetry, which began with a droll account of his childhood in St Kilda, the other an essay, published in these very columns , on the subject of Channel Nine cricket. The former, written fifteen years ago, for me signalled new possibilities for academic writing. Yes, Virginia, …