The one thing that scares me is that I don't believe in Fate. What if Miss Right takes a wrong turning before she gets to me? I'd rather live a "full" life and spend my old age repenting than wake up old and alone with the Ghost of Christmas Past standing over me.

(The woman in white is smoking a cigarette. Does she consider the prospect of cancer? Does it worry her to be the slave of compulsion? No, I realise, slowly, with envy. She simply smokes.)

BRUCE MERRY

SIGHTINGS ON AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

Brian Matthews, Romantics and Mavericks: The Australian Short Story. James Cook University of North Queensland: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1987. 48 pp.

Dorothy Green, The Writer, the Reader and the Critic in a Monocul-ture. James Cook University: Foundation for Australian Literary Stu-dies, 1986. 72 pp.

AA.VV., Writing in Multicultural Australia 1984: An Overview. Syd-ney: Australia Council for the Literature Board, 1985 (not for sale; ISBN 0 908024800). 172 pp.

Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 12, no. 2, Oct. 1985. Special Issue: Australian Literature and War. Brisbane: University of Queensland.

Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 13, no. 1, May 1987.

Mattoid, 22, no. 2, 1985; Mattoid, 24, no. 1, 1986; Mattoid, 27, no. 1, 1987 and 25, no. 2, 1986. Single copies $3.50, produced from School of Humanities, Deakin University.

Kenneth Cook's novel Wake in Fright (1961), one of the first attempts at an Australian Picaresque adventure, includes in an early section a comic motif that underlines one of the fundamental motifs of Australian literature, namely the heartlessness of a land without a centre: . . . the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles, east, north,

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south and west of the Dead Heart —the beer is always cold" (Penguin: 1981 reprint, p. 9). Grant Mason, Cook's schoolteacher adventurer, throws away his savings at Two-up, and then drinks and shoots kanga-roos until oblivion. With its typifying images of trees without shade, sweat drying instantly on the lip, the clumsy insults between compan-ions that "pass for repartee in the west", this novel unwittingly refur-bishes the potent sign-language of Down Under: mates, heat, distance and discomfort.

How does a representative sample of recent Australian critical and literary writing map the way for us through this ontological desert? Brian Matthews proposes a modified account of the Australian short story in Romantics and Mavericks. His reappraisal of Vance Palmer draws a lesson from the failed visit to Tolstoi in 1907, the going round in circles, the consequent lack of an introduction to the "greatest man of our time" and Palmer's getting hopelessly lost in the heart of Russia. The quest was part of a romantic dream, part of the same dream which pushed Palmer to espouse nationalist themes as a kind of felt duty to Australian culture. Palmer's life in art may have been a constant shor-tening of his theoretical aspirations, a reversal back to the acceptance of what Heseltine has called "the dream of the ordinary". The critic analyses stories like "Mathiessen's Wife", where Palmer creates in a few strokes a guileless picture of the femme fatale, of "The Foal" and "The Rainbow Bird", which posit a childish vision that moves gloriously outside the stiff world of adult behaviour. Matthews' conclusion is that Palmer, late in the 1950s, returned to a more revealing world, one of near-adoloscent dreams after living out a safe literary career, hemming himself in from the "maverick romanticism" which gave the real bite to his short stories.

A harsh, recurrent strain is noted in Hal Porter, the erstwhile head of the Shepparton Public Library, with his stories normally seen as convoluted and "Baroque", but here shown as a partial study of time's inexorably destroying force. With a powerful metaphorical insight Mat-thews talks of the "rearguard action or rescue operation admidst the depredations of time" within the peculiarly Australian ethos of these tales. Much space is given to the superimposition of time levels and exterior aspects from the bush past and the "machicolated" American-ized present of the story "Country Town", where the exegesis of the text depends on the polyvalence of the opening image of "a cocktail tasting like the inside of a coffin", for cocktails are a mixing and mixture is an ethnic reference point for growing, changing, yellowing civic outposts. Other Hal Porter stories are seen to use the trope of elenchus in order to canter through the layers of childhood and maturity: lists that evoke or disparage a flyblown, pre-mechanized and ruminant small town past,

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with Nellie Melba "hooting Home, Sweet Home through the toffee-coloured, convolvulus-shaped horn". Porter's stories adopt swiftly shifted perspectives, sinister flashes and over-charged imagery to speed sensitive characters toward disaster or a loss of innocence, which is the same thing ("At Aunt Sophia's"). Hence, the critic argues that the off-beat style and swerving momentum of Hal Porter's narrative serve to supplant the contemporary taste for what is spare, lean and honed. Porter looks more deeply into the abyss of ghastly shattered verandahs than his critics have acknowledged, creating subtle semantic echoes with virtuoso metaphors such as the "compline of blow-flies" of the "fly-besequined eye-socket".

All these essays belong to the fashion for retrieval, which Matthews defines as the process of rediscovery of marginalized or misunderstood authors from the 1890s through to 1950. They discuss the recon-structed image of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, with the "tantal-isingly elusive" fugitiveness of the real meanings of the work of Barbara Baynton and Louisa Lawson. Perhaps this study's key strength is the thematic identification of the venerable "persecuted woman" motif in My Brilliant Career and the dissection of a long series of Antipodean versions of "decayed Gothic" in the Australian short story. Rewarding too is the suggestion that it took over an inherited interest in green eyes as a sign of evil in women and the apercu that Baynton gave a significant twist to the late-romantic European legend of the wandering woman with infant (alive or dead) in a bundle in her arms, when she makes the persecuted woman (in the story "Squeaker's Mate") both barren and confronted by a female tormentor, who is pregnant. The insight gained into Thea Astley's novels constitutes perhaps the most closely argued section of the book, where Matthews provides a model schema for the canonical Astley plot: "Almost every story involves the deconstruction of a given situation which was not ideal in the first place but which disintegrates into much greater disorder in the course of the narration; and these disintegrations are especially bleak and uncompromising when they involve women". He demonstrates the deft interweaving of humour and pathos in Astley's writing, stressing the rise and fall of maverick lover in the sisterhood of her apparent ideological allies, together with the coolly emblematic explorations of what Matthews calls "the predatory egotist" and what the general reader soon picks out as Astley's portrayal of the commonsense conflicts inside a frame of grotesque. What we have here is a formalist reading, a "laying bare" of motifs in authors who are, to a curious extent, marginalized or trans-ferred to cautious lateral status in the linear descent of the mantle of the Australian great literary figure. This reading shows once again how literary art "estranges" the real, making it twice times real by picking

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out its absorbingly abnormal facets, making the bush or the verandah familiar to the reader, as Jakobson might say, by "defamiliarizing" it.

Dorothy Green's 1985 lectures in this Cohn Roderick series show at once a broader and more meditative sweep of the literary landscape, avoiding the diamond tip of exegesis which privileges a single word or image and embracing a synoptic approach typical of the literary histo-rian. In her prefatory words, Dorothy Green declares a search to open up inquiry rather than establish firm positions on the relations between Writer, Reader and Critic. And what a breath of fresh air not to have to inhale the carbon monoxide of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault at every cross-ing in the venture, for when writing/reading is under discussion by contemporary postulants at the door of creativity, a legitimating validity tends to be dragged in from France. Answering the question "Why do people go on writing?", Green quotes the negative account of Sir Tho-mas Browne, Dc Quincey and Newman, the recommendation for few and good, for the classics, for the avoidance of those "nutshell views for the breakfast table". This is the line taken by Schopenhauer in an essay from Parerga, which contains the gloomy prediction that one day more books will be written than read. Warming to her theme, Green puts the crucial distinction between writing and publishing what you write. How much writing would there be if a hypothetical dictator decreed that all publications must in future be signed by "Anon"? She quotes Rilke's advice on delving deep into the core of the self before answering the question "Will I write?" and she dismisses much of the immediacy and convenience of the word-processor and the solid replicability of the "how-to" book with the same gesture as musak. She denies (p. 10) the universality of writing as testimony, doubting the validity of prison, hospital or alcoholic carapaces round the recording pen. She insists that communication is the crux of the pen's activity and that soft talk on "creativity" avoids the issue of a required dynamic confrontation between writer and reader. While everyone is creative and a general theory of creation embraces what can be gleaned from "indifferent literature", it is better for Everyman to speak the creative word that lies in him rather than insisting on a ponderous convoy into print. The same eclecticism informs her account of the Reader, on whom it is enjoined to practise the "gentle art of skipping", to follow Francis Bacon's advice that some books be digested, others chewed in part or merely tasted. Dorothy Green returns again and again to the reserved attention, the withdrawal of curiosity, which an active modern reader must assemble against the multiple claims of the media (and the dreadful Box) for his concentration. She takes an intransigently purist position on language, claiming that everyone is now conspiring to debase the currency of words to the lowest common coin, where instead, according to hinguis-

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tics, it probably reposes at all times in any case, even where there is an illustrious tradition in the background. She pushes hard in the polemics against the loss of values, the forgetting of allusions, wrong parsing, lazy memorizing; yet one is arrested by the dark assertion (p. 43) that loss of civil liberties may be connected to the slipshod content of contemporary History and English courses. Education in Australian shcools is considered a "time-wasting deprivation", smugly decked out as "self-expression".

At times the attack is switched off and the author gives sage counsel, such as, for example, that a questing literature student would do better to read the books that a given writer is known to have read himself rather than critical essays on that writer. Perhaps Green's harshest strictures are held back, in the third section of the book, for the contemporary critic. To read much of his work is like "chewing saw-dust". The 1970s semioticians and philosophers spawn a jargon which is "arid and forbidding": overstatement, mystification, the use of in-words like "textuality" and so on are combined in order to retreat from the world in which events occur. They promote political quietism. They remove the page from history: they are another facet of the grumbling attempt to make quasi-scientific laws around the partial conimunicabil-ity of each artistic intention.

Art has revived an interest in woe and suffering; the social Utopia that cures this condition might curtail the subjects available for art. But the modern critic, writer-reader that he is, should assist the flesh and blood author in the moral development as well as the mere recording of the universe of horror and tears that we inhabit. It is a passionate outpouring from a cultivated, well-stocked mind, full of that particular brand of prejudice (in the bouts of linguistic prescriptivism) and insight (the reader must share in the author's "negative capacity", jointly operating the transmuting of the ego into a tree, a lake, a person of the other sex) and deadpan humour ("How many Australians actually see a tree?") which characterizes a liberal intellectual. The revised lecture format still consists of too little referencing and the temptation to record unsourced anecdotes (p. 57: which major act of censorship?) or such general labels as "the Mills and Boon novel", without adding a single example from the literature of Silhouette, Second Chance at Love, Rapture Romance, Harlequin, A Candlelight Romance, Finding Mr Right and Tapestry which in fact now has its own trade journals, conferences, writers' conventions and rigorously copy-edited research requirements (interestingly documented in R. Guiley, Love Lines, New York: Facts on File, 1983, 323 pp.).

The pattern of commitment alters radically in Writing in Multicul-tural Australia (1985), which is an unrefereed reprint of papers pres-

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ented at two Multicultural Writers' weekends (Sydney and Melbourne, October, 1984). The keynote address by distinguished novelist Morris West is a bubbly, unsequenced flow of encouragement to non-Anglo-Celt writers, loaded with advice about badgering publishers, producing a big "codex" of work rather than single poems or stories, understanding how their literature is still a serious "risk venture". The tape, trans-cribed by M. Jurgensen, shows precisely the kind of errors that creep in when foreign terms are bandied about (p. 11: "Sicillian; lingua tos-cani"). One is also reluctant to accept that Pino Bosi is really the only reliable translator from Italian to English (and William Weaver, Isabel Quigly?). Sneja Gunew, methodical and ideologically committed as in all her work (cf. review of R. Cappiello, Oh Lucky Country, in Mean un; edition of Framing Marginality: Migrant Writing in Australia and compiler of Displacement: Migrant Story-tellers, Deakin U.P., 1982), provides a penetrating essay on the sources and targets of non-Anglo writing in Australia: "Literature is the way in which human subjects transmute their own physical implausibility into metaphysical terms", she says, even at the cost of deciding whether to reject, or join, Nino Culotta's "grumbling, growling, cursing, profane, laughing, beer drink-ing, abusive, loyal-to-his-mates" Australian (pp. 17; 15). Janis Wilton links the confusion about Italian orthography in E. Langley's The Pea Pickers ("regazza; Piedimonte; Guiseppe") to the Australian ignorance which for decades jumbled the order of names (Raffaello Carboni) of the author of The Eureka Stockade, extending this kind of misattribution to the endemic imprecision about foreign customs and words in the Lucky Country, leading to ethnic type-casting ("tall" Germans, with "fair" moustaches as against Chinese boys with "hair as coarse as a pig bristle"). This and other contributions stress the faulty premisses of the "assimilationist", the "Nino Cullota" (sic, p. 28) image, drawing atten-tion to the threatening otherness of the "fine brick house" and the "neat front gardens". Many of the papers are as short as four pages and therefore make up a travail d'equipe, a mosaic of empassioned critiques of the Anglo- Celt monolith, rather than conducting analysis of individ-ual responses to the implications of the monolith. The latter is charac-terized by hostile glances at the traditional foregrounding of gum trees, the bush pub, the bridge, the beer, the sun-tan and jet-set tourism which all feature in traditional Australian modern art. The book constantly reminds its readers of the forces that ought to work towards multicultu-ralism, namely that Australia has 140 different community languages, or that 30% of all Australian inhabitants were born outside their country. V. Vilder notes the term CLOTEs (for Community Languages Other Than English) and proposes to extend it by analogy to ALILOTES (Australian Literatures Other Than English), insisting on keeping the term in the plural (p. 87). P. Grundy remarks (p. 108) that Australians

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cannot possibly learn 139 other languages, therefore the burden of sharing forces all Australians on to English. But this and other papers draw attention to the need for translation registers, higher fees for translation and the desirability of getting immigrant texts directly on to school, vocational college and university reading lists. W. Adamson also argues that so-called multicultural writers "will sooner or later have to write more and more in the language" of their maximal readership (p. 94). Jurgensen underlines the patronage given to writing not in English by three dedicated publishers, Dezsery (Adelaide), Hodja Educational Resources Cooperative (Richmond, Melbourne) and Phoenix (Brisbane). To this list A. Dezsery himself adds (p. 161) Pascoe Publishing, which carries many multilingual authors, some under pen-names or changed surnames.

P. Genovesi sketches the state of play in immigrant Italian writing (Lino Concas, M. Coreno, Raffaele Scappatura, Luigi Strano, Joe Abi-uso, Bosi, Cappiello, G. Andreoni, G. Cresciani, C. D'Aprano, Nino Randazzo and Osvaldo Maione), and this is followed by detailed excava-tion of the Greek situation (by G. Michelakakis), Serge Liberman on Australian Jewish fiction since the War, and an expose of Ukrainian literature here, of Latvian (where I. Bredrichs notes that there is a taboo against sex and social deviation in Latvian writing, p. 79). R. Bovington analyzes the Maltese situation, with several prolific authors such as Manuel Borg and promising successors to Phillip Camilleri such as Joe Saliba.

Vilder notes that a generous but spasmodic form of patronage surrounds the corpus of CLOTE writing. In a recent competition for bilingual books (where the English version was already available), the "Languages Galore Committee" managed to attract sixty unpublished texts, covering 23 different languages, five of them aboriginal. Maga-zines that are prepared to publish the work of writers in the grip of what R. Cappiello has called "the defeated melancholy" of the migrant expe-rience include Helix, Outrider, Scripsi, Mean jin, Tabloid Story and Melbourne Partisan. Several editors, when approached by a survey questionnaire (see Laurie Clancy, pp. 154-57), disclaimed any editorial choice either for or against immigrant by-lines. The volume makes, on the whole, for depressing reading. Since Goethe invented the term "world literature" in the 1830s, the thrust of comparativist studies has not spread very wide, and certainly not to these shores. There are some success stories: the name Dimitris Tsaloumas is mentioned several times, while David Martin, Judah Waten, Maria Lewitt and Serge Lib-erman also emerge as evidence of the Australian writer/reader's com-mitment to a whole-world view of art. Yet it is emphasized that none of these figures live by their writing full-time, and that bookshops operate

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a shelf-space stranglehold on the outsider, and that migrants tend to lack an aggressive attitude to funding bodies and to the Literature Board. Perhaps the passionate nostalgia of the voyagers, an internal anguish mentioned by several of the delegates, finds its bluntest expres-sion in To Tu's words: "I miss my country so much that, any time I think of it, I am paralysed" (p. 100).

Australian Literary Studies, in its October 1985 special issue on Australian Literature and War (Vol. 12, no. 2), presents a fascinating and exhaustive survey of the two World Wars and the Vietnam expe-rience in this nation's writing. D.A. Kent, in "From the Sudan to Saigon", offers a critical review of historical works-by Australians on war, carefully picking out the reasons for the past neglect of military history and the unchallenged pre-eminence of C.E.W. Bean in an era where the Whig view of history, with its paramount sense of a didactic purpose, has flourished more or less unchecked. The obsession with the ANZAC legend, the hero-worship of the Gallipoli reinforcements, the myth of "mateship" in the context of trench warfare, the egalitarianism that may have caused the devaluation of the tactical commander, the contortions of churchmen adjusting their categories of love and peace to war, all these are motifs which Kent traces out from both official and unofficial volumes on Australia's record at war. P. Pierce, in "Percep-tions of the Enemy in Australian War Literature", shows how the country could circumvent its lack of history by rushing to the opportun-ity of wars. Therefore it needed to invent enemies. The natural enemies, fire, flood and drought, were not sufficient any more. The Anglo-Saxons had the Vikings, Charlemagne once had the Saracens. Analogously Australia linked the experience of war to the contraction of opportune xenophobias.

A. Taylor considers war poetry and its concurrent de-and re-formation of myth (pp. 182-93), drawing attention to the genuine camaraderie, the slang, the wearing of the heart on the sleeve, the loud message and male consensus of Australian war verse. C. Semmler writes on the war correspondents in our literature, analyzing Bean, K. Slessor, "Banjo" Paterson, John Hetherington, Gavin Long and Chester Wilmot as leading reporters from the frontline, noting the relative celebrity of Australian members of this dynamic writing confraternity, the man at the lines. Shirley Walker looks back at Australians' involvement with the Boer War, singling out the canonical version by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, the jingoism of J.H. Abbott's Tommy Cornstalk (1902), the anti-interventionist poems of Christopher Brennan and the durability of the "Breaker" Morant saga. In "Preserving the White Race", Jan Bassett (pp. 223-3 3) studies the collective stance of white Australian women in literary response to war: "our boys", "the soldiers of Australia", the

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distribution of the "white feather", troopers overseas who marry "dark", the vice and bestiality of foreign billets as "plague spots", and the complexity of return from active duty in Mother Empire to the mothering, improving Bush. Rick Hosking describes Australian war fiction of the 1950s ("The Usable Past", pp. 234-47), commenting on the orgy of blood-letting, the apprenticeship of the jungle, the orientali-zation of classic struggle motifs, especially in the thinly disguised Bou-gainville of Hungerford's The Ridge and the River(1952). L. Hergenhan considers the war in post- 1960s fiction, concentrating on the work of G. Johnston, My Brother Jack, Roger McDonald's 1915 (1979), David Malouf and Les Murray. The latter three writers, together with Russell Braddon and T.A.G. Hungerford, then respond to an editor's question-naire about their own treatment of war topics. Here some of the authors stress the revelation of character gained by men at the "point of maxi-mum danger". Robin Gerster closes the issue with an interesting account of the Prisoner of War genre, the sudden popularity of the "We-were-caught-but-survived" theme, with its rampant hatred of the Jap custodian, its sombre shame at capture, its ouverture to unmitigated xenophobia (" . . . war horrors unseasoned by moral complexity"). J.T. Laird, P. Pierce, Kent and Gerster provide a select bibliography at pp. 275-98 of all aspects of Australian literature in relation to the World Wars, Vietnam, 1965-1985 documents on the Sudan, Boers, Korea and also Prisoner-of-war books.

The ALS issue on war is a rich intellectual pabulum in the best manner of the specialized scholarly journal; meanwhile, the ALS number for May 1987 (Vol. 13, no. 1) contains a more varied diet. Dorothy Jones borrows Emily Dickinson's phrase on the "vitallest expression" to analyze the Common Day and "amazing ordinariness" of Olga Masters' fictional settings. We see how in Australia home life has been a crucial determining factor in constructing a national identity, how the heating of a stove, the peeling of a peach, the seasoning of a fowl, are makers of success and survival in Olga Masters' plots. Food is

a story on its own", the writer has said. Cakes become an image of gratification. Yearning eyes are "black as treacle", or "melting toffee". Frustration is expressed by snapping scissors in the air. But candy can melt or harden, scissors can chop only what is placed between them. From these deft sightings, Jones deduces the panoply of the male domain as it forces the female to cower, throughout Masters' subtle minimalist novels.

N.B. Albinski revives the under-rated theme of Utopias, both science fiction and political fantasy, in her bibliographical and historical survey "Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction" (pp. 15-28). I. Indyk analyzes, in "A.B. Facey's Australian Autobiography", the con-

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tribution of A Fortunate Life (1981) to the myth of pioneering versatil-ity. Gallipoli, physical labour in the great Australian hinterland, rivalry in the work gang and the rough justice of bush life conform to the subject matter ideology of a Henry Lawson or Steele Rudd. But Facey adds to this the precise expressionism of the ordinary, the rendition of shillings, the understatement of domestic detail. E. Ferrier, in "From Pleasure domes to Bark Huts", investigates various architectural meta-phors in recent Australian fiction (pp.40-53), showing them in action: a bit of ground is colonized by building, the house may negatively enclose the self, the under-house area connotes a threat, and darkness. By extension the verandah, or sleep.out area, is an ambiguous no-man's land, whereas life in a tent, away from official habitation, can stand for the embodiment of an ideal. L. McCredden sets up a close reading of the Christian ethos in J. McAuley's poem Captain Quiros (1964). This is followed by an Annual Bibliography of studies in Australian literature; the survey year is 1986 and the retrieval is comprehensive (pp. 6 5-86), based on University of Queensland library resources, the Fryer Memor-ial Library card-index, newspapers at the State Library and consultation with the ALS editors. In a "Notes" section of the journal, Jennifer Strauss documents the imbalance of male/female representation in six anthologies of poetry. The critic computes that from 332 poets repres-ented in six Australian collections, 98 are women, but if one drops the Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (i.e. the "gender specific anthology"), then the number falls to 51 out of 285 (i.e. from 30% to 18%). What is more, editors show a tendency to offer shorter poems by women, and to choose, by men, poems that occupy more space. The men thus, quite literally, seem to become "larger" as poets. Archival research by Maurice French leads to a note suggesting that Steele Rudd's "real dad" was an exiled convict (pp. 95-99). The issue is closed by a lively review section, covering books by Fay Zwicky, Harry Heseltine, Laurie Hergenhan's anthology of the Australian short story (St. Lucia, 1986), Stephen Torre's bibliography The Australian Short Story 1940-1 980 (Sydney, 1984) and B. Hickey's study Lines of Implication (Venice, 1984). Also reviewed are Don Anderson, Candida Baker, Jennifer Elli-son, A.W. Baker and Geoffrey Dutton's recent Snow on the Saitbush. This issue of ALS is characterized by a careful feminist stance and the piecemeal revival of some non-mainstream authors.

Also before us are nos. 22, 24, 25 and 27 of the literary journal Mattoid. Produced by the School of Humanities at Deakin University, the magazine prints poetry, prose, graphics and interviews. From the outset it can be declared that the editorial focuses on the small or the partially shaped. Prose gleanings, fragments of work in progress, are preferred to the well-rounded plot. Thus in no. 22, Susan Hampton

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collects "Four scenes depicting love" (pp. 35-39), where the unitary message is avoided. The tantalizing idea of a person learning to "not-read" books, or graffiti, is left undeveloped. The poems, too, share in this experimental, unvarnished texture. Single images like Tony Page's "liberal marsupials scamper / Before the Sun's slave drivers . abound, and confident juxtapositions like Jan Owen's "God from the Araucaria tree looks down" suggest the verbal virtuosite of the verse chosen to appear in Mattoid. The stories in no. 22, two of them apoca-lyptic visions of a cynical post-Disaster Australian city, P. McConnell's "After the Deluge" (pp. 1-14) and Jeri Kroll's "Bedwarmers" (pp. 45-58), also propose glimpses of themes for longer works. In Kroll's story a young couple hire themselves out as human heaters in an old dying man's bed. As food declines and the temperatures in the southern hemisphere drop, they whisper in his ears and tickle his moribund body with their breath. His grateful legacy to them is - a quilt. The longer story that opens the volume shows a conservative classicist foraging in a colleague's store of food and books after the Earth has been wrenched from its orbit round the sun. As the satellites of distant planets approach Australia, he can steal his post-Structuralist enemy's salami and light his fire with his hated Critico-Praxis. The satire is crisp and closely sketched, classical scholarship versus jargon and gimmickry, paralleled by Melbourne under attack from Ganymede.

Mattoid 24 offers a wider mixture distinguished by Antoni Jach's amusing interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, Something Happened and God Knows, amongst other works. Heller here declares himself frankly grateful for the good reception of his books, recreating his delight at speaking with King David's irascible voice in God Knows and mentioning David's pique that no book in the Bible has been named after him. Heller remarks that many ordinary people come up to him to say that Something Happened changed, even "devastated", their lives. He admits that quite possibly in Catch 22 his morality was all along more orthodox than he had suspected. He is thus a mainstream writer, grateful to be able to live on the income of four novels, confident that these will help to float his next book which is to be about his experiences with a nervous illness in the early 1980s and its composition with a nursing friend, an attendant-cum-author of alternate chapters, No Laughing Matter. At the end of this issue are reviews of Austin Quigley on drama and of Canadian author Michael Rawdon's game and "para-cursionist" short fictions in Green Eyes, Dukes and Kings (Ontario, 1985). There is also Lolo Houbein's fine open letter "Dear Mr Presi-dent", in praise of a practical ecology, larded with appeals to the fer-menting beauty of Nature, the "tall dark trees in golden liquid" after dawn (whereas the President says that one tree is just the same as any

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others). Her prose-poem evokes the "manure and leaf decay rising like a fine mist and tickling the nostrils with sensations of life" (p. 23). The President, with his missiles and Star Wars, can never understand the "gargle and yodel" of birds at dawn. The lizard, unlike the U.S. Presi-dent, kills "daily without fuss", clearing its small turf of extra insects; nuclear war, in short, can never be as clean as . . . a bird snatching an insect on the wing".

Mattoid 27 is opened by Catherine Bateson's crystal poems about the daily moves of a dreaming woman. These are followed by Antigone Kefala"s short lyrics, self-centred and carnivorous like some of her lines. An uneven set of stories follows this time, capped perhaps by Mary Baartz's extraordinary evocation in "Old characters and new guests" of a bookstore, from the black top shelf of which Emma and Anna descend in the clothes devised by Flaubert and Tolstoi; they argue whether their authors trapped them before they could escape into texts by George Eliot and Emily Bronte. At any rate, it transpires that Vronsky was gay, that nobody knew that Tolstoi was sending him to visit Ivan Sonoso-vitch, and not his mother, on" . . . that day". The story is followed by Ursel Fitzgerald's review of Patrick White, Brian Edwards on Kate Grenville's "Italian" novel Dreamhouse (St. Lucia, 1986) and on the familiar narrative landscape of Elizabeth Jolley's sixth novel, The Well (Penguin 1986).

In Mattoid 25 (no. 2, 1986) there is a hallucinating story by Uyen Loewald about a couple battling with rent, cockroaches and plastic food in America (pp. 31-40) and a delicate wafer-like study of a little girl turning back on a full-blown aunt the damaging reading from her Tarot cards ("New Year's resolution"). Three feminist reviews close this issue, Hazel Rowley on Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics and Brian Edwards on the Sydney Migrant Women Writers' Group, The World is Round (Collingwood, 1985) and No Regrets 3, from the Sydney Women Wri-ters' Workshop. Powerful, both as story and the construction of an old archetype, is Margaret Macarthur's story "The wheat harvest" (at pp. 62-72), which brings us back to the "country", the wasteful scenery, the golden stubble decaying on the dry "crust earth" of Outback Australia, the disintegrating, squinting "border of the immense", which lies at the centre of the heartless continent and is harvested in its tight and enduring images: "The wind spooned little eddies of dust into wide rimmed bowls, distributing the air tornado shape along the whistle dry road" (p. 64). Here yet again is the heart of Australian literature, and the vertical and horizontal sightings on this stretch of road still constitute one of the main gambits of Australian writing.

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