4 comments about A View from the Ridge.

1. I started reading this slim volume quite a few months ago and I put it down, never intending to finish it. Some of the early parts of the book rubbed me the wrong way, to the point where I wondered just how much of a true Christian Mr. West really was. Recently, I picked it up and basically started where I left off, and my previous judgementalism gave way to a certain admiration. Morris West has not only the wisdom of a man of advanced years but the worldly experience that gives him a valuable perspective to share on such issues as evil, violence, dissent, and death. He has seen things most of us with never see, and this book is all the more enlightening because of that fact. Although not a Catholic like Mr. West is, I share his experience of a life that is centered around the institution of the church, and can appreciate the love/hate relationship one can have with the Body of Christ. Like many, he cries out for a church that values the person above laws and regulations. I look forward in the future to reading some of his fiction (although much of it is out of print and rather hard to get at this time).



2. I've long admired West's ability to move me with words. His papal trilogy in particular ranks as one of my favorite in literary fiction. To read this delightfully honest and heartfelt memoir is to gain even greater insight to the wisdom and insights of his fictional work.

   West, long a respectful rebel of sorts, has managed to approach subjects and questions many wish to avoid. In doing so, rather than turning these into platforms for personal grievances, he elevates their importance in community discussion.

   Despite his literary prowess, West manages to come across as an everyday man, a man you'd like to converse with over coffee. No, don't remind me that the most likely place for conversation would be at his deathbed. He may be getting older, nearer to unknown that he says he welcomes willingly, but his words will remain as a part of our culture. His thoughts and ideas will remain to challenge future generations.

   Mr Morris West, thank you for that gift.




3. With sales of his books having exceeded sixty million copies, Morris West is not only Australia's best-selling writer, but also one of our best-known storytellers. With his so-called `Vatican Trilogy' - `The Shoes of the Fisherman', `The Clowns of God' and `Lazarus' - he virtually invented a genre, the papal novel.

   In the past, West has resisted calls for an autobiography, holding that the `chronicles of my works and days have already been presented under the decent draperies of fiction'. However, having turned eighty, West has put aside fiction to give an account of his twentieth-century pilgrimage.

   The book is not an autobiography as such, but rather part memoir, part philosophical meditation, part spiritual testament. We learn of his early family life before becoming a trainee with the Christian Brothers, of the trials of religious life, and of life as a writer on the international stage. West reflects on the nature of evil, on violence, and on the roles of dissent and prophecy in the Church. He also writes movingly of his encounters with Brother Death.

   West has, over the years, defiantly retained his rightful place as a son of the Church, and in doing so has encouraged countless others troubled by rigid orthodoxies. Changes in the Church in recent decades, and in West's own life and attitudes, are well captured by two pieces of his journalism that are reproduced in full in the book, both about recent popes. The first is a glowing obituary of John XXIII, `The Good Pastor', written in 1963. The second is a very critical reflection on the current pontiff, written on the occasion of the papal visit to Australia for the nation's first beatification (of Mary MacKillop).

   Late in his life, West has given us an uplifting account of his experience of being a Christian in these troubled times. It is written with grace, intelligence and wisdom. [A Selection of the John Garratt Catholic Book Club.]




4. Morris West has written a truly challenging testimony as he nears the end of a fine career and eventful life. For me, he summed up how I feel as a Catholic facing the challenges of the Church at the end of the millenium. His candidness and honesty are refreshing. His ideas worth consideration. And his words often inspiring. I am grateful he took the time to tell me so intimately about his own faith journey

5 comments about A Portrait of the Artist As Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre De Barry Humphries.

1. The inside back dustjacket flap of this book notes that Paul Matthew St. Pierre is a Dada artist. I suspect (duh!) that he has written his Barry Humphries study precisely in his capacity as a Dadaist, as a tribute to Humphries (himself a Dada artist) but also as, what he calls in the book, a "dadact", an act of subversion in the spirit of Dada. What is he subverting? Well, I think he's deconstructing the whole idea of academic criticism, the very thing that Humphries himself deplores, being taken seriously. If you accept this premise, A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries becomes a very complicated book, at once subverting the whole idea of the academic study and undertaking a daunting research project into just about everything Humphries has ever done as a writer and a performer. Did I like the book? Yes, I think it's amazing. It's certainly unlike any other book I have read about Humphries, by John Lahr, Peter Coleman, Ian Britain, and Stephen Alomes. A singular performer, Humphries certainly deserved this kind of singular treatment. Kudos to St. Pierre for having the pluck (Humphries would say the spunk) to write it!



2. In his well researched and provocatively written book, Paul Matthew St. Pierre has made a sound case for Barry Humphries as a writer of literature. Certainly, I had not known that Humphries has been writing books throughout his career on the stage. St. Pierre addresses all of Humphries' writing and much of his stage and television work, and comes up with some original interpretations. As an academic, St. Pierre draws on some pretty infamous critics like Derrida and Barthes, but he also mentions some really interesting writers such as Es'kia Mphahlele and my late countrywoman Janet Frame, and somehow makes the mix work. In addition, he seems to be trying something nonacademic by writing a new kind of criticism. I am not sure what kind it is, but Dada criticism comes to mind, the subversion of conventional criticism. This aspect of the book offered a real challenge to me as a reader, because I realized the author was trying to change the rules of the critical game precisely as I was reading his book, which put some of the responsibility on me to play along. I see this as St. Pierre's intellectual challenge to the most avid readers.



3. I have just finished reading A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries, which I found an engaging and informative book. Having been familiar with Barry Humphries mainly as Dame Edna Everage, from television and The Royal Tour, I evidently had a lot to learn about him. I hadn't known he was a writer, for example, the author of 29 books. Nor had I known that he draws on music hall and dada in his stage performances as Edna and Sir Les Patterson. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is a chart in which St. Pierre compares some of Dame Edna's and Les Patterson's lines with the conventional spiel of the music hall chairman, who presided over stage shows a century ago: that Humphries might be invigorating some of these old formulas I found quite fascinating. St. Pierre claims that "Sandy Agonistes", which is a Sandy Stone monoloque, is the greatest Australian poem of the 20th-century. I wouldn't know. I haven't had a chance to find a copy of the poem yet, and, I must confess, I am not always sure whether I can take all of St. Pierre's claims seriously, but he has made me very very curious. I know I have to read this poem. So now I have started looking to purchase Humphries' books, records, and CDs (St. Pierre lists hundreds of them in his bibliography), because St. Pierre has intrigued me about the man beneath the make-up, who, I am convinced, must be a great artist. I realize that I knew NOTHING about Barry Humphries before reading this book. Now I think I know quite a bit. But, more important, St. Pierre has made me want to learn EVERYTHING about Humphries. He has created an interest in me.



4. I think the joke is on the reader only if one doesn't recognize this satire of a satirist. And Les Patterson, well, I think with his rave review he hopes we won't be aware of his close relationship to Barry Humphries. We all know that rave reviews are often the product of a reciprocal arrangement where you rave about my book and I rave about yours. Come to think of it, though, Mr. Patterson HAS written a book. But I doubt that Mr. Humphries had anything nice to say about it.
   
   Every page satirizes what the author must feel is Mr. Humphries' pompous writing style (or should I say sesquipedalian?) A writing style like this is so distinctive, so exaggerated and bizarre, how can anyone doubt the real author? Barry's memoirs and other books are wonderfully written and hard to put down, whereas I can't imagine anyone plowing through this balderdash. Excuse I for asking, but how did the author ever have the time or inclination to write book like this? More Sir Les and Dame Edna, please!
   
   Reading Barry Humphries' books requires a dictionary close at hand. But here the author has helped us out. All the big stumblers are footnoted, and we are spared having to haul a big heavy dictionary into our beds, or onto the train. But do we really care?
   
   Barry Humphries is a genius. I'm positively in love with Dame Edna and have a real soft spot for the Australian Attaché to the Court of St. James, but--and I mean this with respect--I learned a lot more about Barry Humphries from Women in the Background (not autobiographical!!) This book is Barry on speed or something, and I'd rather have another volume of his autobiography, something that will keep me up until 2 a.m. All I can say in favor of this book is the cover is great.



5. Paul St. Pierre's A Portrait of the Artist as Australian (2004)
   
   Paul St. Pierre's thoroughly researched text is a scholarly portrait of Barry Humphries' (the flamboyant character of Dame Edna Everage) entire career as a comic artiste extraordinaire. Humphries is a master of "grotesqueries and bizarreries," whose reputation as an actor, performer, writer, music hall artiste and Dada prankster situate him as the darling of Australian, British, and international artistic communities. The reader is invited to travel through satirical, comedic, entertaining and witty literary work with St. Pierre leading the way as a true pathfinder. Humphries' oeuvre includes dramatic monologues, comic books, (auto)biographies, film scripts, poetry, novels, and sketches. St. Pierre acknowledges Humphries' unique talents:
   
   By playing up and sending up cultural stereotypes, Humphries has encouraged Australians, and others, to laugh not only at him and his characters but also at themselves, at the negation of themselves on stage, and to come up on stage and join in the subversion of their images in the mirror. ... Thus, Humphries
   invites audiences to find pleasure in subversive things such as Dada, music hall, parody, theatre, kitsch, class, race, gender, and Australiana, as they play in the one-man show, and also to find the act of subverting pleasurable, even laughable. (133)
   
   We owe our gratitude to St. Pierre for introducing to us the world of Humphries' laughter and for his delight in researching and writing this text "not out of opportunism but out of community service, as a note of thanks to Barry Humphries and as an offering to his squillions of fans" (224). If you wish to partake in lively amusement and introspection, then sample Humphries' genius for "putting out bush fires of ignorance, pomposity, seriousness, complacency, provincialism, and political correctness around the world" and pick up a copy of St. Pierre's A Portrait of the Artist as Australian (251). In these troubled times we all need to feel the miraculous properties of laughter to heal our spirits.

4 comments about The Diggers of Colditz: The Classic Australian Pow Escape Story Now Completely Revised and Expanded.

1. This is a great story of what determined men can achieve with severely limited resources. Much has been written on Colditz Castle, the men who were imprisoned there and the few who escaped. I visited the castle in 1999, and what I saw confirms the stories in the book. This book is great reading for those who prefer real adventures and exploits to fiction.



2. On June 23 1943 the author, Jack Champ, was marched into the German prisoner-of-war camp designated Oflag IVC, these days better known as Colditz Castle. Colditz was Germany's seemingly escape-proof castle prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful prisoners of World War II tirelessly carried out an unending campaign to achieve the seemingly impossible - freedom. By the end of the war, twenty Australians had spent time in Colditz, and this book looks at life in the ancient castle specifically from their point of view. Colditz was a very special camp - the guards outnumbered the prisoners, and the castle was floodlit at night. Initially the Germans boasted that Colditz Castle was escape-proof, but they were wrong. By the end of the war, there had been more escapes from Colditz than any prison of comparable size during both world wars. Jack Champ was a reluctant prisoner who took part in two of the most spectacular mass escapes of the war. This book describes in vivid detail how these indomitable and resourceful Australian servicemen tried, and at times succeeded, in turning dreams of escape into reality. Colin Burgess has interviewed many of the survivors and carried out extensive research to create this gripping account of the full story - from tense days in the care of the French Underground through to the only recently resolved fight for proper compensation.



3. On June 23 1943 the author, Jack Champ, was marched into the German prisoner-of-war camp designated Oflag IVC, these days better known as Colditz Castle. Colditz was Germany's seemingly escape-proof castle prison where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful prisoners of World War II tirelessly carried out an unending campaign to achieve the seemingly impossible - freedom. By the end of the war twenty Australians had spent time in Colditz, and this book looks at life in the ancient castle specifically from their point of view. Colditz was a very special camp - the guards outnumbered the prisoners, and the castle was floodlit at night. Initially the Germans boasted that Colditz Castle was escape-proof, but they were wrong. By the end of the war there had been more escapes from Colditz than any prison of comparable size during both world wars. Jack Champ was a reluctant prisoner who took part in two of the most spectacular mass escapes of the war. This book describes in vivid detail how these indomitable and resourceful Australian servicemen tried, and at times succeeded, in turning dreams of escape into reality. Colin Burgess has interviewed many of the survivors and carried out extensive research to create this gripping account of the full story - from tense days in the care of the French Underground through to the only recently resolved fight for proper compensation.



4. Great story of what determined men can achieve with severely limited resources. Lots has been written on Colditz Castle and the men who were imprisoned there and the few who escaped.

   I visited the castle in 1999, and what I saw confirms the stories in the book.

   Great reading for those who prefer real adventures and exploints to fiction.

2 comments about Les Murray: A Life in Progress.

1. Peter Alexander has written a biography that does come close to doing justice to perhaps the greatest living poet in English. It is not only a well crafted account of the details of Murray's hard early life; it is, more tellingly, a compelling yarn about the pain, struggle and triumph of a troubled, stubborn and divine genius.
   
   It can also serve as a useful primer. And not just to some of Murray's more diffcult poems, but to poetry itself. You are put closer to the poet's seemingly impossible aspirations for his words, and thereby participate more keenly in the truth of his poetic gifts in revealing the spirituality of the ordinary.
   
   It is hoped too that this biography is as premature as its title suggests, as I, for one, want to hear a lot more of Murray's poetry in years to come.



2. Les Murray is the leading poet in the English-speaking world today. This account of his often strange life and work is scholarly, well researched and lifts the lid on some of the dirty tricks of Murray's rivals and enemies in the Australian literary scene (there were unsuccessful attempts to ban it). Sheds light on many aspects of poetry, culture in general, and the human condition.

No comments about Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre.

1 comments about Skidboot: The Amazing Dog.

1. Skidboot started out like a little rascal, but ended up a diamond in the rough. It is a sweet story. I enjoyed reading it.

1 comments about OLD MAN FOG (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry).

1. Haviland's book is an interesting if not entirely successful experiment in ethnographic literature. Or perhaps we should say, Haviland's and Roger Hart's, since he goes further than most anthropologists in crediting the person who provided him with the information. It is well to remember that we anthropologists do not so much write books as craft accounts of the experiences that people allow us to have into books.
   Haviland weaves together three strands in his work: Hart's life story as an elder from the Barrow Point region, the myths of the Barrow Point people (as reconstructed by Hart), and documentary data from the modern history of northern Queensland. He finally accompanies Hart on a journey back to his homeland. Haviland is more aware and more clear than most that an ethnography of a contemporary Aboriginal or any other native group cannot be straightforward reportage but must always been pieced back together from the fractured memories of the survivors of the modernization process. The resultant book, he warns, will always seem more integrated and unified than the experiences that went into it. His book cannot help but suffer from the same defect. He presents a refraction of his disjointed experience of Hart's disjointed memories, but a book that really presented the experience as it felt in the first place would be impossible to read. The whole project is worthwhile not only for what we learn about Aboriginal culture but about anthropological knowledge and the construction of one kind of account and literature out of another.

No comments about While in Darkness There is Light: Idealism and Tragedy on an Australian Commune.

4 comments about Eclipse.

1. Moorehead brings the risk and result of WWII's European Theatre warfare into clear and concise presentation. This work must be one of the most effective accounts of the fight, as it proves both accessible and deep. The author maintains an unbiased and wide-ranging perspective upon events while capturing the horror and heroism inherent to battle. While a fan of Stephen Ambrose's works, I must say that Moorehead -- as a first-hand witness -- provides landscapes and portraits of WWII unrivaled by any historical author.



2. Moorehead was first and foremost a supremely talented writer. This book is chiefly an account of his experiences following the Allied advance, as much memoir as reportage. The most vivid passages are set in Italy. No other book gives such an immediate feeling for the time and place.



3. I enjoyed this book immensely. Moorehead writes of his wartime experiences in a vivid and personal way. He has the ability to tell what is happening, his reaction to the events, and what he thinks the future holds. Fascinating reporting and reflectons. His prose flows and I was swept along by it.



4. One of WWII's leading correspondents here describes the Allied push onto mainland Europe and the subsequent drive for Berlin. The book is not a blow-by-blow account of the military maneuvers, but rather a series of anecdotal impressions of the soldiers, the people, and the ebb and flow of war covering Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and finally Germany. Published in 1945, it's fairly interesting if only because Moorehead doesn't write from the armchair long after the fact. For anyone interested in the war, it's a worthwhile read, although it begs for more maps (which the new Soho edition may have).

5 comments about My Place.

1. There are some one- to three-star reviews for this book which suggest that it (a) is boring, (b) a lie (no one could remember as much of her childhood as Sally Morgan does), (c) raises her family to sainthood
   
   I'm not an Australian and don't have any interest in the reconciliation issues that one reviewer says are the "only reason" for publishing this book. Yet I couldn't put the book down.
   
   Certainly, if you're looking for a harrowing story of a aboriginal oppression, you won't find it here (for the first half of the book, Sally Morgan believes what her mother tells her: the family is from India). Primarily what you get is the story of a lower class Australian family dealing with adversity.
   
   To suggest that Ms. Morgan creates heroes out of her family also misses the mark--much of the book describes the inability of her father to deal with life after the war and the frustration that she faces dealing with her mother and grandmother.
   
   What you do get in this book is a story of a terrifically interesting family. I found myself pulled through the book, eager to see what these people would do next. It's possible that if I were Australian I wouldn't have found the book so interesting (it's possible that much of what I found interesting would be commonplace to someone from Australia). But for a Canadian, it was a eye opening book about life in Australia.
   
   Another review comments that some aboriginals feel that Sally Morgan should not claim an aboriginal identity because she didn't grow up in an aboriginal community. In the book she talks about how her schoolmates tell her she isn't a "real Australian" because her skin is the wrong color. Apparently, some feel she isn't "dark enough" for others. This tells us more about the reviewers desire to reject her experience than the value of the book. Anyone who reads the book can decide for themselves how much of an aboriginal identity the author is claiming and/or should be allowed to claim.
   
   As for remembering so much of her childhood: Many other autobiographies spend far more time (and detail) on their youth. The first third of Gorky's autobiography ("Youth"), for instance, is almost 400 pages long. The 100 or so pages that take Ms. Morgan to the end of high school doesn't seem excessive.



2. One of Fremantle Presses literary triumphs, the other being Faceys, Fortunate Life. There are similarities between them also. Whatever, we gave this another burl around the fire in Easter Sicily this Easter, to introduce our 7 yr old to the facts of Australian indigenous dispossession. It is rambling in parts, but the figure of the old granny is a humourous and sad pivot to the tales. Morgans book was in the forefront of the move to have the stolen generation recognised, and whatever the literary shortcomings of the book, it does have a heart and a deserved place in mainstream considerations of continuing indigenous plight in the country.



3. I find My Place to be a powerful story about a passionate person trying to find more about their past. The book gripped me and gave an amazing feeling; It was like being suffocated but breathing air fresher than you have ever breathed. I have grown an admiration for Sally Morgan. She had courage, curiousity and she managed to explain feelings never explained before and to introduce new ones.
   When I read this book I feel overwhelmed that it has at last been written. For it is original and really showed me My Place.



4. Reading the other reviews on here, I find it interesting to note that just about everyone gives it either 5 stars or 1 star, but there's almost nothing in between. It's quite true that it is a poorly written book - the writing is dull and prosaic, and there's little to recommend it from a literary point of view. Had I not had to read it for a class, I doubt I would have bothered finishing it. The narrative of searching and redemption which runs throughout is so predictable and cliché that I have the feeling that if this had been an American story it would have been snatched up by Oprah's Book Club long ago. Having said that, however, I think there are some important things about this book that probably need consideration.

   More than the book itself, what I find interesting is that this was a huge bestseller in Australia. And I mean HUGE. She may well be the highest grossing Indigenous author in the country, although I'd be guessing. The fact that so many people read the book says something about the mood of White Australia over the last twenty years, with this country trying to come to grips with its shameful past. I've inclined to believe that most of this is an attempt to ease collective white guilt than actually taking steps to reconcile and compensate for over two centuries of oppression. Sally Morgan's book is popular, I think, because she doesn't actually challenge her audience to move much beyond their comfort zone, and the construction of Aboriginality that she presents is quite problematic, stereotypical, and firmly entrenched in the past.

   The book has attracted quite a lot of controversy in Australia, mostly in academic circles, but occasionally this rears its head in the mainstream media (for example, the issue of the Drake-Brockmans demanding DNA testing to prove Morgan is not descended from their ancestors). The idea of the 'truthfulness' of the book is largely a question of genre more than anything else: is it an autobiography or a non-fiction novel? 'My Place' raises a lot of questions about how we define these categories, and about the nature of history and memory work.

   People might be interested to know that the book also attracted a considerable amount of backlash from the Aboriginal community itself: she is often criticised for asserting an Aboriginal identity that, by her own admission, she did not grow up with. Unaware of her Indigenous origins for most of her youth, she claims her Aboriginality without ever having lived with what it really meant to be Aboriginal in the 1950s-70s. Because she has fairer skin than the stereotypical Aboriginal person, she had the luxury of pretending to be of a different nationality - an option simply not available to many Indigenous Australians - and was thus not subjected to the same level of prejudice which she might otherwise have been.

   If you're interested in Australian history and Aboriginal issues you should probably read Sally Morgan's 'My Place', not because it's good writing, but because it has certainly been a landmark in the recent history of Australian literature. However, I also suggest trying to lay your hands on some of the material which critiques Morgan's work in order to gain a more balanced perspective of Indigenous Australia. Alternatively, for an all-round better account of what is now known as the Stolen Generation, try Doris Pilkington's 'Rabbit Proof Fence', or the film by the same name. If read with a critical mind, 'My Place' is worthy of a look, but it is highly problematic taken at face value.




5. Stories about the historical oppression and continual discrimination against Aborigines should be told, but it is unfortunate that Morgan is one of those to do it. The book fails as literature simply because it is boring and very poorly written. As such, it does nothing to advance the Aboriginal cause here in Australia, and unfortunately, plays right into the hands of the redneck Hansonites and their views of white racial superiority.