Granny’s Good Reads
with Sonia Lee
The name Robyn Ravlich is well known to all lovers of ABC radio as a creative broadcaster for such productions as The Listening Room, Into the Music, Earshot, and her award-winning documentary on asylum seekers On the Raft, All at Sea. Now retired after 35 years with the ABC, she has written a delightful memoir which is part autobiographical, but mainly a description of the glory days of radio from the 70s to the present more straitened times. Her father Nick was a migrant from Dalmatia who married an Australian and settled in a Croatian enclave in Broken Hill where he worked as a miner. With a loving extended family and supportive teachers, Robyn did well at school and won a scholarship to Sydney University, where she flourished, writing poetry and giving poetry readings. It was then a natural progression to the ABC, where she was mentored by Allan Ashbolt and produced many innovative radio features and documentaries. I enjoyed her nostalgia trip through years of brilliant programs such as John Hinde’s The Week in Film, the early Boyer Lectures, and Chatwinesque, RN’s classic doco about Bruce Chatwin. There’s also a marvellous chapter on the making of her program on Halley’s Comet and Van Gogh’s Starry Night. With husband Mark Aarons she now lives on the NSW South Coast. Since retiring she’s produced for Earshot the touching 2018 program Robert Manne’s Voice. Her book is Skywriting: Making Radio Waves, a neat paperback with a good index, many photographs and audio links to selected programs. It’s a valuable resource and will surely become a classic. My second good read this month is Judith Brett’s From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage. Brett thinks we have a good electoral system, better in some respects than those of many other democracies. We have compulsory, preferential voting and independent electoral authorities administering it. This tends to make parties seek the middle ground, which seems better than having a bunch of crazies at either end of the spectrum playing to minority ‘bases’ (though some might doubt this post-2019). We’ve inherited paper ballots and pencils to write on them because pens and inkwells slowed things down, as well as divided booths to speed the process up a bit. In 1894 women in South Australia won the right to stand for parliament as well as the right to vote, a world first. The 1902 Electoral Act extended the vote to all Australian women, but denied it to Aboriginals. (It would take another 60 years before Aboriginal people had their vote restored.) In 1924 voting was made compulsory. Brett pays tribute to all the men and women who worked to bring about our exemplary voting system and her book is a must read. Tikka Molloy is 11 when her friends Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth Van Apfel vanish from a school concert one hot night in 1992. Tikka is still haunted by their disappearance when she returns from Baltimore twenty years later, after her sister Laura phones to say she has just been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Felicity McClean’s novel The Van Apfel Girls are Gone has been described as Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation. It’s full of suspense and some genuinely creepy moments as McClean skilfully depicts the rituals of adolescent girls at school and at play. Young Tikka’s voice is completely authentic as she observes situations and overhears conversations that make more sense to the reader than to her, smart and precocious though she is. This novel is part thriller and part coming-of-age story and I greatly enjoyed it. Now for some hearty metaphysics, first with Scott G. Bruce’s The Penguin Book of Hell. Bruce, a professor at Fordham, was once a gravedigger, so comes to his task not wholly unprepared. The good old-fashioned hell was a place of punishment in the afterlife. Bruce begins with the Greek underworld, whose jailers were Tartarus (for baddies) and Hades (for mums and dads), which extra-special humans like Odysseus and Aeneas could visit in order to make small talk with the spectral dead. The Jews had their own version in Sheol, which Christ was said to have ‘harrowed’ after the Crucifixion. Hades and Sheol had been, at best, boring, but the Christians livened them up with fire, of which harrowing (no pun) accounts are given in the Gospel of Nicodemus, Dante’s Inferno and other graphic medieval narratives. But why obsess about the afterlife when we have hells right here in our Treblinkas, Guantanamos, death rows and even, as Sartre says, other people? A somewhat jollier read is God: A Human History by Reza Aslan, whose topics are old-time monotheism and polytheism. The God of Israel, says Aslan, is a by-product of El, the gentle Canaanite god, and Yahweh, the martial god of the Midianites. He goes on to illuminate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and ends with Allah, the stern but merciful desert god of Islam. Aslan’s book is an international bestseller and deservedly so. Sonia
14
Australian Studies
The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian resource by David Pollock ($35, PB)
Through retelling the struggle of his family amid droughts, financial ruin, depression & death, David Pollock exposes the modernday realities of managing a remote outback station. Forced by a sense of moral responsibility, he set out on an uncharted course to restore the 153,000 hectares of degraded leasehold land that he felt he was obliged to manage on behalf of the Australian people. Then, just at the point when that course seemed certain to fail, the project was saved by the generosity & faith of everyday Australians. This is an urgent story of political irresponsibility, bureaucratic obstinacy, industrial monopolisation, and, above all, ecological illiteracy in a vast segment of the Australian continent. Yet it is also a story of the extraordinary ability of the natural environment to repair itself, given the chance.
Changing Fortunes: A History of the Australian Treasury by Paul Tilley ($45, PB)
Treasury has been at the centre of every major economic policy issue the Australian Government has faced, its role evolving from the government’s bookkeeper at Federation in 1901 to the economic policy advising agency it is today. Throughout its history Treasury has been a robust & stable institution with a consistent marketoriented economic framework—but its policy influence has waxed & waned. It has supported reformist Treasurers such as Keating & Costello, and been a voice of caution when political imperatives have pushed governments down economically damaging paths. Amidst the political chaos of recent times, Treasury has been dragged closer to government & become a less effective policy adviser. The consequent lack of a consistent government economic reform narrative over the last decade is plain for all to see. Paul Tilley tracks Treasury’s history since Federation, with a focus on the modern era since its 1976 split with Finance.
Songspirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines by Laklak Burarrwaŋa et al
Aboriginal Australian cultures are the oldest living cultures on earth and at the heart of Aboriginal cultures is song. These ancient narratives of landscape have often been described as a means of navigating across vast distances without a map, but they are much, much more than this. Songspirals are sung by Aboriginal people to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place. Songspirals are radically different ways of understanding the relationship people can have with the landscape. For Yolngu people from North East Arnhem Land, women and men play different roles in bringing songlines to life, yet the vast majority of what has been published is about men’s place in songlines. Songspirals is a rare opportunity for outsiders to experience Aboriginal women’s role in crying the songlines in a very authentic and direct form. ($35, PB)
Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia by Angela Woollacott ($33, PB) As Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan blazed a trail of reform—his influence reaching far beyond his home state. Angela Woollacott recounts how he battled Adelaide’s conservative establishment to win office for Labor, and then pioneered Aboriginal land rights, abolished the death penalty, supported women’s rights, relaxed censorship & drinking laws & decriminalised homosexuality. He worked against the White Australia Policy, and was an ardent supporter of the arts & food. Although he was much loved by the public, Dunstan’s career was marked by controversy & vilification—his life story illustrates just what a watershed era the 1960s & 70s were in Australia, and to see how one small state could, for a time, lead a nation.
That Was My Home: Voices from the Noongar Camps in Fremantle and the Western Suburbs by Denise Cook ($30, PB)
This book explores the hidden histories of the Noongar camps around Fremantle, Swanbourne & Shenton Park in the suburbs of Perth along the Swan River. The focus is the 1930s, 1940s & 1950s, a time when many Noongar people lived with their families in camps. The voices of Noongar people, juxtaposed with information from the archives, photographs & stories from others in the community, tell of life in the camps, work, cross-cultural tensions & friendships. Together they give a greater understanding of the shared histories of our suburbs. Denise Cook followed Aboriginal cultural protocols in obtaining permission to include stories, photos & other information.
James Hardy Vaux’s 1819 Dictionary of Criminal Slang (ill) Simon Barnard ($30, PB) In the early 1800s magistrates in the Australian colonies were often frustrated by the language used by reoffending convicts to disguise their criminal activities and intensions. Convict clerk James Hardy Vaux came up with a useful idea- a dictionary of slang and other terms used by convicts. And so, in 1819, he compiled what was to be Australia’s first published dictionary. Boost your vocab with colourful terms like: flesh-bag (a shirt), knuckle (to pickpocket), ruffles (handcuffs), wrinkle (a lie) and many more.
