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Book Reviews Book reviews doi 10.1017/qre.2017.40 Sylvia Martin, Ink in her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer, Perth: UWA Publishing, 2016, 327 pp., ISBN 9 7817 4258 8254, A$29.99. This book takes its title from the ambivalent hopes and fears of the young, preg- nant Nettie Palmer for her first-born, Aileen (1915–88). After graduating from the University of Melbourne with first-class honours in French, Aileen accompanied her parents on a trip to England in 1935. In her later years at university, she was caught up as a young communist in protest causes. Activism and writing were to become ‘the two great passions of her life’. She did not go abroad to escape the cultural aridity of Australia, as with later expatriates, but rather to please her parents, since for her ‘there was plenty going on in Australia’. While abroad (1935–45), she used her outstanding language skills to work as a translator with the British Medical Unit in the Spanish Civil War, meeting a number of fellow writers. Martin’s account of these experiences, pieced together from manuscript fragments, is particularly interesting. She discovered that one of Aileen’s poems has found new life in recent years, ‘appearing in a recent book of Robert Capa’s photographs, in a volume of International Brigadiers’ poems and featuring in a stirring reading in Spanish on YouTube’. Aileen’s reasons for returning to Australia were ambivalent, like her reasons for leaving: ‘I feel this is a foreign country,’ she wrote. ‘I’ll always be a foreigner . I’ve got to start all over again.’ Martin comments: ‘Having spent years determined to free herself from the all-pervasive parental shadow she took her sister’s [Helen’s] place as resident daughter.’ Again, she was influenced by her parents’ expectations. Her life back in Australia became plagued by a series of mental breakdowns involving hospitalisations, sadly limiting the rest of her life. She found no occupation except for casual jobs. Even though writing poetry was for her a ‘lifeline’, she published little, writing in fragments and producing only a slender book published by her friend Stephen Murray Smith of Overland. It shows that she possessed the poetic spark but, rather than marking a significant achievement it confirms her potential — although one may marvel at how much she did achieve against such odds. Martin makes no inflated claims for its importance, but to be properly appreciated her poetry must be seen as an important part of the tradition of political protest verse, neglected in the study of Australian literature, as with Henry Lawson’s for instance. His poetry is totally overshadowed by attention to his more ‘literary’ short stories. Martin’s book illuminates social contexts: aspects of the lives of the notable Palmer duo. And in these days when we are constantly encouraged to openly discuss the problems of mental health, so long passed over, this book illuminates the ways in which family, friends and society at large coped. We not only learn Queensland Review 319 Volume 24 | Issue 2 | 2017 | pp. 319–329 | c The Author(s) 2017 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UQ Library, on 10 May 2018 at 23:21:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.40 Book reviews about the troubled life of Aileen Palmer, but also the underlying family tensions and the burden on herself and her parents; the responses of others, including friends; and her social isolation. These aspects are treated sensitively, without any reductive ‘psychologising’. We gain valuable glimpses of what treatment for her illness was available. It was a time when psychoanalysis and other approaches — some helpful, others counter-productive, even harmful — were being introduced to Australia. Nettie Palmer was a friend of Dr Clara Geroe, one of the leading proponents of psy- choanalysis in Melbourne — some of them refugees from Central Europe — who helped to pioneer mental health treatment in Australia. She treated Aileen. Most of those individuals who tried to help were leftist friends of the family (includ- ing Katharine Susannah Prichard, David Martin and Flora Eldershaw). The book shows how Aileen’s struggles to reach out from her isolation through her writing were unsuccessful. Today, when there is over-emphasis in literary commentary on popular success and the latest celebrity author, it is refreshing to read this measured, well-researched study of a writer who by the usual standards was not successful and is consequently relegated to the margins. Some books about so-called minor or ‘failed’ writers, like this one, do more to illuminate certain aspects of a literary milieu, or to extend knowledge of its range, than do studies of ‘major’ authors. Martin’s book avoids special pleading. It engages the reader’s sympathetic interest and makes a valuable contribution to our literary history. Laurie Hergenhan University of Queensland [email protected] doi 10.1017/qre.2017.41 Craig Munro, Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing, Melbourne: Scribe, 2015, 256 pp., ISBN 9 7819 2510 6756, A$29.99. Craig Munro joined University of Queensland Press in 1971, as Frank Thompson was taking the press from an in-house publisher of scholarly manuscripts to a hot- house of Australian literary publishing. The university provided offices adjacent to its bookshop, and supplied a handsome table for the boardroom. This table might be seen to represent the distance between the university’s idea of how publishing works and the realities. Munro remembers the struggle to carry it up the narrow central stairwell of the modest brick building, but it plays no further part in his story of UQP, until decades later when the accountants arrive with their spread- sheets. By this time, the vision of Thompson and his successor, Laurie Muller, was overshadowed by the rise of the corporate university. Munro’s adventures ‘under cover’ begin and end with Peter Carey, whose career was launched at UQP. While his list included authors critical to the flourishing of Australian fiction in the last decades of the twentieth century — Carey, David Malouf, Barbara Hanrahan, Olga Masters — as well as the curmudgeonly Xavier Herbert and the endearing Hugh Lunn, this book is less about the ‘art of editing’ 320 Queensland Review Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UQ Library, on 10 May 2018 at 23:21:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.40.
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