himself. The importance of the role which the women are granted in this basically moral recovery is probably at the core of Jurgensen's concept of non-partriarchal male literature. From a female point of view I fail to see much benefit in this. I do not want to go as far as quoting Wilhelm Busch seriously: Und was Natur und Zeit getan,

das seiht der Mensch als Bess'rung an. 2 One also does not need the experiences of a barmaid to be familiar with midlife repentance. It is quite a common feature and should not be over-rated. New male literature ought to be conceived as one of emanci- pation, not as another attempt to solve problems on other people's backs. Here I can only see old patterns revived. Who wants to be the guardian angel .

NOTES

'On its book cover jurgensen's recently published German novel Versuchsperson is described as 'neue nicht-patriarchalische Maennerliteratur'. 2 "And what nature and time have done, man regards as a [moral] achievement."

ELIZABETH PERKINS

REVIEW

Joan Priest, Scholars and Gentlemen: A Biography of the Mackerras Family. Brisbane: Boolarong, 1986. 328pp. $25.95.

Joan Priest is an experienced biographer, her three earlier books, Virtue in Flying (1975), a life of the aviator Keith Virtue, Outback Airman (1979) written in collaboration with Harry Purvis, and The Thiess Story (1981) receiving warm responses from readers. Scholars and Gentlemen is a complex and demanding biography which Priest has organized with unifying directness. It is Priest's achievement that the reader has no difficulty in tracing through the pages the story of the remarkable Mackerras family, beginning with the musician Isaac Nathan who came to New South Wales in 1841. Nathan, who had earlier written music to accompany the best known of Byron's , including the beautiful "She Walks in Beauty Like the Night", made an important contribution to the music world. He opened an academy of singing, by means of which he supported his six

109 children, and was also choirmaster of St Mary's Cathedral, composing many accompaniments to colonial themes, and becoming unofficially the colonial laureate of music. Isaac Nathan was the great-great grandfather of Catherine MacLaurin, who in 1924 married Alan Mackerras, and became the mother of two girls and five boys, including the conductor and com- poser, Sir . Alan Mackerras was the grandson of a hardworking Irish immigrant and his Dublin born wife, Louisa, who had a lively wit and "seems to have been mildly astonished to find herself married to such an august personage, whom she always addressed as Mr Creagh." Her daughter, Elizabeth, Ian's mother, had an early unhappy love affair, and then married a New Zealander, James Murray Mackerras who was about five years her junior, an unusual discrepancy in the relative ages of a married couple in those times. Ian was the first of her two children. For many readers Catherine will be the centre of Priest's study. She does not seem to be included in the title, since her career as a history scholar at Sydney University was cut short when Professor Wood awarded the University History medal to (Sir) Victor Windeyer, remark- ing to Catherine, "Your paper was as good as his, but I gave it to him because it's much more useful for a man." Indeed, none of the women who appear in these pages is really represented in the title, although the highly interesting account of the family begins and ends with Catherine, the first and last chapters concentrating on "Catherine and Alan." Nevertheless, the fourth child of Alan and Catherine Mackerras, the musician and teacherJoan, completed an original Masters Thesis on The Art of Bowing, An Enquiry into the History of Bowing Techniques in Violin Playing from c.1675 —c.1842 at Sydney University in 1966, as well as becoming a wife and mother of a talented family. Other women who have married into the family have had successful academic studies, even if they perhaps would not designate themselves scholars. Reading this book, which is definitely not interested in feminist politics, one feels it is perhaps not the right thing to note that where Charles, Alistair, Neil, Cohn and Malcolm each have a chapter to themselves, Joan and Elizabeth share a chapter with fewer pages than those given to any of the men. And yet one cannot help noting such things, for this account of a remarkable family which has contributed so much to Australian cultural, political, educational, diplomatic and legal progress, is also the account of Catherine's struggle to contain her enormous energy and ability within the domestic environment. As in all well-written and well-documented biographies, the story of generations becomes also a history of an era of sociological, cultural

110 and political development seen through a specific socio-economic and cultural milieu. The substance of Priest's research allows the reader interested in Australian intellectual and, in the widest sense, political history, to see the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present from the point of view of some of the men who directly helped to shape it. The rich substrata of family life depicted in the book add an essential but often neglected foundation to the public history. Although the Greek city states of the fifth century before Christ, which are still the paradigm of western political structures, attempted to demarcate stringently the boundaries between domestic and public life, it was never truly possible to make this separation, even for the Greeks. The appearance of demarcation was and is maintained, perhaps neces- sarily, but anyone who wishes to study the reality of a political and cultural epoch must study also the home life - or the lack of it - of the major figures of the period. The public life of the Mackerras family recorded by Priest does become more than a record, and the picture of the private life is complex and lively. Priest shows the importance of domestic life and family relationships by chronicling minor events and moments which contribute to the stability and security of men who take major public responsibilities in very different spheres. Priest's description of personalities and characters admirably cap- tures the contradictions and idiosyncracies of human nature. Obviously the contradictions of the past generation are easier to discuss than those of the present, but the author's geniality does not prevent her from occasionally making a well-observed comment about the living. She has been fortunate in obtaining the confidence of so many members of the family, who good humouredly speak honestly about themselves and their relationships with others. Nothing in the book, however, could possibly disturb any reader. Gradually there is constructed the credible picture of family life which, as well as great successes and achievements, knows its due quota of pain and disappointment. This is a benign rather than an incisive account, but it rings true. Verbatim accounts from friends and colleagues vary the authorial narrative, and as Catherine is designated as an author as well as a matriarch, it would have been interesting to see a little more of her writing. The Mackerras family has inherited privilege, position and ability, but has never neglected the opportunities and responsibilities that privi- lege and position entail. Nor has it always placed its support behind the "establishment" from which it derives. In all areas of debate and sensitivity, Priest writes of controversial public and family matters without controversy. Without idealizing her subjects, she shows their many admirable human qualities, and the narrative of Scholars and Gentlemen could well inspire many readers,

111 who were not born with any special privileges, to overcome their own disadvantages. The picture may perhaps inspire male readers rather than female, and the latter may spend some time pondering over the implica- tions of Catherine's life. Boolarong Publications has produced a fine, well-designed volume with a multiplicity of well-placed photographs, cartoons and informal family snapshots. Scholars and Gentlemen is perhaps not the title that would most accurately indicate the sweep of family and public life included in this biography, but it does represent some of the preoccupa- tions and the lifestyle of the people who emerge warmly and humanly from its pages.

Ross Clark, With Fires on Every Horizon. College Writers 1. Brisbane College of Advanced Education, 1986. 48 pp. $6.50.

This is Ross Clark's second collection, Chameleon, published by Queensland Community Press appearing in 1982. With Fires on Every Horizon, launched at the Warana Festival in 1986, was given an inter- ested reception, partly because it captures so well some aspects of Brisbane life and evokes something of the physical and intellectual climate of the sub-tropical city. Yet it is in no way a provincial collection. Clark's particular skill is in addressing the sensibility of those who think and reflect but who do not find thought and reflection a mere professional habit. These poems do not suggest that there is a moral or intellectual obligation on poets to evoke abstruse experiences or make deliberate metaphysical connections between different areas of living. Meditation seems to be a natural part of life, whether, as in "Searching for Angelo", it results in a quartet of poems on bike riders noted at traffic lights, or, as in "A Discarded World", in a series of lyrics occasioned by visiting a one-roomed school now converted into a museum. The last lines of "A Discarded World" show the speaker back at his "comforting desk" in a tertiary institution that teaches "the newest knowledge": "Remember, salvage nothing", says the final line. It is true enough that Clark's poems do not salvage material from past experience, but they are concerned with continuity and with learning from and making sense of the past in terms of the present. This means that he can deal with what would seem to be nostalgic themes, like the First World War, and find in them something more urgent than nostal- gia. In "Letter Home from the Trenches", the soldier's voice begins "This war, I am afraid, has made writers of us all", as though for these men reflection and writing were irrelevant and useless activities. At the end of the poem, however, the voice says:

112 we have begun to speak to others, and to listen. we have begun to think, and we have begun to write, and we have begun too late. The effect is like a physical blow, for the statement seems not about the past but about the present. The title, With Fires on Every Horizon not only accurately des- cribes the Brisbane landscape at certain times of the year, but images Clark's concern with a political and international landscape. He is not a polemical writer, and "Pax Mundi: a poem for voices", read at the Peace celebrations preceding the Palm Sunday Peace Rally at Kelvin Grove in March 1986, is a celebration of the fact that a Year of Peace had been declared as an ideal, in spite of the violations and cynicism which rendered it a mockery for many people. A notable trait of Clark's poetry is its concern with and accessibility for young adults, a circumstance perhaps not surprising given his work with various levels of educational centres. Nevertheless it is an achieve- ment to write accurately and seriously about younger people, as in "Late-Night Trading", "Punk with Pram" and "Bikie Funeral"; and in "The Descent of the Dragon" and "Post-Party Blues" he draws two quite different but thoughtful conclusions from suburban experiences. With Fires on Every Horizon retains some of the whimsy of Chameleon, a wryness that is natural and unforced, but there is a greater sense of ease and the writing has lost all trace of the tentativeness that sometimes was felt in the earlier poems. The strongest movement of Clark's verse at present seems to be in fluent, conversational yet shapely lines, but he does sometimes use terser rhymed lines with interesting effect. His is a distinctive voice, not concerned with shouting from rooftops or large gestures, but not easily ignored, for all its watchful reserve.

Tony Page, They're Knocking at My Door. Pariah Press, Melbourne, 1986. 57pp. $9.00 ($10.00 mail order from 101 Edgevale Rd, Kew, 3101.)

Pariah Press has several very good collections of poetry to its credit, including Joyce Lee's Abruptly from the Flatlands and Stephen J. Willi- ams's A Crowd of Voices. Tony Page, a Melbourne poet of similar age and experience to the Brisbane poet Ross Clark whose work is reviewed above, has published here an intense but disciplined selection of poems. It could be said that Page's poems are suffused with and toughened with politics, or it could be said that for Page politics and life are

113 identical and that both are suffused with and toughened by poetry. The opening piece, "Poems political as petitions" looks ironically at the poet who spends some time - but not enough perhaps? - writing petitions such as Amnesty International letters. Wavering between guilt that time is spent "charging up a poem's power" while "somewhere else men's balls/ are eloctrocuted", the poem is also shaken by the doubt that Art has ever saved lives. The collection therefore begins with a poem that throws doubt on the validity of its own place in the human world: Why then do I demand food for the soul even though there are mutilated bodies all over my library floor? The title of the collection suggests that the poet knows he is besieged by responsibilities, even while he attempts to keep something of his poetry inviolate from all but its own values. The poems record the experiences of a young Australian who has been well educated, entered the more serious phase of the genuine hippy ideal, visited India, found his guru, built his commune, and made his European tour, while also valuing aspects of sensual love. The elegance of the poems cannot be mistaken for glibness, because their economy seems to be the result of careful thought rather than careful craftsman- ship. This is true both of longer sequences like "So much for paradise" and "Now and everywhere", and for the wry and delicate final love lyric, "Sungrowth", which for some readers may evoke memories of first reading Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love." Page's laconic elegance, however, is at least a generation's remove from Auden, and the separation promises to be an advantage for the Australian poet's work. An assiduous reader of poetry, trying to accommodate all the poems that find their way into journals and collections, feels that poetry today has a respected but not over-privileged place in society. Respect may not bring pecuniary reward or daily recognition in the media —although poetry does not fare too badly there - but it involves responsibilities for poets who take their vocation seriously. It seems essential that they do not take it solemnly. Politicians are solemn, religious quacks are solemn, most educationists and much of the medi- cal profession are solemn, nearly all sports people and their backers and supporters are solemn, and millionaires and aspiring millionaires, multi- nationals and their hangers-on are very solemn. It is all the more urgent that poets and other artists should retain their faith and self-respect by refusing to descend to self-indulgent solemnity, and to keep themselves keen-edged and volatile by their wit, parody, humour, irony and love of justice.

114 All these things may be found in some form in Page's collection. There is much questioning but no cynicism. "A Possible Father" is only one example of the kind of highly individual yet intensely social poetry found in They're Knocking at My Door. The poem begins by comparing the old photographs of the many-siblinged family with the single "indi- vidual" photo of a child in today's pruned families. It sweeps back to a paternal Italian Renaissance city state at carnival, and then reflects on some of the reasons for the contemporary attitude towards families: for they know to have children requires a certainty that experience is infinite. It implies an optimism which chokes and splutters in their groins now long since deodorized, and they shut the door. These lines offer neat poetic analysis of the fear of families in the abstract. The poem ends with an image of that far from abstract drive which urges men (perhaps we are here thinking specifically of men) to have children: Now each afternoon I see Huck Finn from the window. He hollers across the sundusted street - scraping it with his echo; and then in bare feet is gone again. They're Knocking at My Door is a fine, varied collection which demonstrates how close poetry has grown to the daily life of men and women, without losing any of the intensity it has when it tries to entice the same men and women a little beyond the concerns of daily living. The regular appearance of such collections (a paperback, well designed by John van Loon) from comparatively small presses like Pariah, is one of those things that give heart to people who believe that Art, in its peculiar way, does save lives.

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