May Advances

ADVANCES

The latest literary news and musings from the Editor's desk ...

Vale John Button (1932–2008)
Australian Book Review has been in a sombre mood since April 8, having lost one of its great friends and contributors. It had been clear for some time that John Button’s condition was grave (he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer late last year). Just four days before his death, he resigned from the ABR board with customary punctiliousness.

John had served on the board since early 2007. For much of this time he was very ill and undergoing debilitating forms of therapy, but he attended board meetings and proffered advice with his usual wisdom, directness and inimitable dry humour.

But John Button’s contribution to the magazine commenced long before his term on the board. In recent years he reviewed many books for us. When we conducted our reader survey in 2006 we asked respondents to nominate their favourite contributors. John was a clear winner – in a pretty good field, even if we say so ourselves. Last year he reviewed for us in three separate issues, most recently in November, when he was underwhelmed by Gordon Brown’s Courage: Eight Portraits. Earlier, he reviewed a book titled The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006. This was not a commission that gave him unalloyed pleasure, as he winkingly indicated on filing the story, but he discharged it with the diligence and deep knowledge of Australian politics that had made him such an invaluable contributor.

Last month, in our 300th issue, I spoke of the privilege and pleasures of working with good writers and those who are committed to the preservation of literary values. John Button was one of the authors I had in mind. I wish now it had been a longer association.

A state funeral was held in Melbourne on April 15. There were six speakers, including Morag Fraser, Chairperson of ABR. We publish an edited version of her tribute on page 8. Bill Hayden spoke before her, adding, in passing, a dry coda to the already rich lore surrounding the change of leadership of the federal Labor Party in early 1983, which John Button helped to orchestrate. Mr Hayden wishes now that he had said to his old friend, ‘But do you really think Bob Hawke would want the job?’ Humour was a feature of John’s funeral, but so was a profound sense of loss. Bill Hayden said at the outset that he felt ‘dreadfully diminished’ by John Button’s death.
It is a sense of impoverishment that ripples through many sectors of our society. – Peter Rose

Miles Franklin
This year the judges have shortlisted five titles, one more than last year. Gail Jones, again, is among them: last year it was for Dreams of Speaking; this year, appropriately, for Sorry (Harvill Secker). The other novels are Rodney Hall’s Love without Hope (Picador), Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken (Fourth Estate), Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin) and David Brooks’s The Fern Tattoo: A Novel (UQP). Of these novel-ists, Hall and Miller have each won the Award twice. Could David Brooks, the sole debutant on the shortlist, be the dark horse? He has published in several genres, including a num-ber of poetry collections, the most recent of which is Urban Elegies (which John Kinsella reviewed in the September 2007 issue). Dr Brooks reviews a new book on A.D. Hope in this issue.

Ian Gibbins
Ian Gibbins, the 2007 ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecturer, is a neuroscientist – among many other things – so he knows a thing or two about imaging. This month we publish a revised version of his absorbing and largely extemporised Annual Lecture, which he delivered to a packed audience in the Grainger Studio in Adelaide last year. The title of the essay is ‘Body, Brain and the New Science of Communication’. The video of Professor Gibbins’s lecture is available on the Flinders University website: go to: http://www.flinders.edu.au/news/2007-abr-lecture.cfm. Two different versions of the lecture are available; this address provides access to both. You will need Apple’s QuickTime software to watch it. The essay itself appears on page 54 of the magazine. Meanwhile, details of the 2008 ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecture will be announced in coming issues.

Past and Present
ABR, now in its fifth decade, boasts a deep archive, quite a resource for scholars and serious readers. Some of this is available online at our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au. It is always fascinating to go back and find out who reviewed a particular author and what they wrote about his or her previous title, especially if they go on to review the author’s latest book. This month, to complement James Ley’s review of Tim Winton’s new novel, Breath, we print, in a new column called ‘Past and Present’, an extract from his rather more severe review of Winton’s The Turning (October 2004). The full review is posted on our website. Each month we will delve into the archive in this way.

Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson, author of such books as Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and (earlier this year) The Fall of Baghdad, and staff writer for the New Yorker who lives in England, is visiting Australia this month as a guest of La Trobe University and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. On Monday, May 26 (at 5.50 p.m.) he will be in
conversation with Associate Professor Nick Bisley (La Trobe University) at the State Library of Victoria. The following day he will speak at La Trobe’s Bundoora campus at 1 p.m.. Precise details are being finalised and will be available from La Trobe University’s Politics Department (03 9479 1111).