World War II

Veterans return to Vietnam

At the Vung Tau RSL

By Mark Dapin

As soon as World War Two ended, diggers returned to the battlefields and POW camps to retrieve makeshift crosses and small memorials, lost keepsakes and buried memories. But after the fall of Saigon, in 1975, it was impossible for an Australian veteran to go back to Vietnam for the things he’d left behind. Vietnam had closed its borders to the non-communist world. The pilgrimages of for

By James Salter

‘All That Is’

By Robyn Annear

The back-cover blurb for All That Is misleadingly highlights the protagonist Philip Bowman’s experiences as a World War Two naval officer and his subsequent career in book publishing. In fact, these form but a sketchy backdrop to the novel’s real story: one man’s lifelong pursuit of love – if “pursuit” is not too energetic a term for it. Readers familiar

Why do Australians lust for heroic war stories?

Lest We Inflate

By Mark McKenna

It began in the mid to late 1990s and erupted in the wake of September 11. Walk into any bookstore and dozens of war histories jostle for attention. The array of titles includes everything from the staple diet of Nazi atrocities to the epic battles of the world wars and the story of Australia’s greatest war horse: ‘Bill the Bastard’. The surge in popularity of military history is an international phenomenon, just one by-product of

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Master’

Volatile Spirits

By Luke Davies

“You’re aberrated,” says the marvellously named, honey-voiced Lancaster Dodd, to Freddie Quell, a drifter with alcoholic tendencies, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (in national release 8 November). When Freddie says he doesn’t know what that means, Dodd tells him, like some compassionate priest, “You’ve wandered from the proper path, have

'Lore' by Cate Shortland (director)

By Fenella Souter

It’s spring 1945 and in a handsome German house deep in a forest, the Dressler family are preparing to flee. The unthinkable is on their doorstep: the Führer is losing the war; the victors are about to become the vanquished. Past and future are deftly sketc

'The Watch Tower' by Elizabeth Harrower

By Michelle de Kretser

Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction obsessively circles the workings of power within the domestic sphere. Watchfulness, cruelty and the suffering of the innocent feed her work, as her titles hint: The Long Prospect, The Catherine Wheel. Harrower’s characteristic

'HHhH' by Laurent Binet

By Catherine Ford

Not too many first novels come at you like this one. Laurent Binet’s debut, based on the true story of the British and Czech mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services, in Prague in 1942, is virtuosic, combative and impatient with fict

A father’s World War II keepsake sparks a harrowing journey

An Unknown Soldier

By Robin Barker

In April 2009, I attempted to climb Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, Borneo. Kinabalu is a stark granite freak of a mountain, 4095 metres high and topped by a crown of crazy spires wrapped in skeins of thick swirling clouds. Almost twice the height of the surrounding

'The Hanging Garden' by Patrick White

By Michelle de Kretser

The publication of an unfinished draft is the writer’s version of that nightmare in which you find yourself naked in the street. Writers donate manuscripts to libraries, of course, but there is usually a finished work to offset those drafts. Also, the toilers in archi

Forgotten People, Elites and Class Warfare

Once Were Warriors

By Nick Dyrenfurth

On 18 January 1886, a remarkable letter to the editor appeared in the pages of the conservative Argus newspaper as a bitter wharfies’ strike brought ‘marvellous Melbourne’ to a near standstill. Its author, Bruce Smith, variously president of the Victoria

'The Street Sweeper' By Elliot Perlman

By Kirsten Tranter

Elliot Perlman’s new novel, set in New York, traces the unlikely lines of connection between a set of characters from a broad social and historical spectrum. The ‘street sweeper’ of the title is Lamont Williams, an African–American man fresh out of pri

A Correspondence with Clive James

Clean As You Go

By Paola Totaro

Unfortunately my health is indecent at the moment. I’m in Addenbrooke’s being seen to but I should be back in London next week and I’ll contact you from there. You can take it for granted, though, that I think [the interview] is a good idea. All best, Clive

Anna Funder’s 'All That I Am'

The Magic of Exile

By David Marr

To those who fled the Nazis in the middle of the 1930s, the British gave only temporary protection. Their visas stipulated “no political activities of any kind”. So the German exiles in London lived in constant fear that agitating to alert a world still blind to the evils of Hitler might see them sent back to their deaths by Scotland Yard. In Anna Funder

'Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing' By Craig Collie

By Lian Hearn

Nagasaki stands at the head of a deep-water harbour on the western coast of Kyushu. It was where foreign traders came to Japan, each leaving a distinct legacy. The Chinese brought their red temples and their cuisine; the Portuguese left behind a faith and liturgy preserved for hundreds of years by the ‘hidden Christians’; the Dutch contributed western medicine, science and political ideas. Jap

Stardust Memories: In Search of Real Italian Food

By Peter Robb

Tony Bilson has done incomparable good for eating in Sydney over a long time. The gold-coated egg yolk was a Melbourne boy’s astute pitch at Sydney’s easily bored diners – he talked of “keeping them interested”. Yet you wondered whether Bilson, who h

Gough Whitlam at 95 Years

Comment

By Lindsay Tanner

Many books have been written about the political drama of the Whitlam years, particularly the government’s ultimate dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975. Yet the actual content of the government’s initiatives also warrants seriou

Robyn Davidson on Health Retreats

Tide of Improvement

By Robyn Davidson

Sometimes fortune gifts you things you did not know you needed. Tyringham Clinic was one of those. Out in the luminous green, motorway-laced flatlands behind Milton Keynes, England, it was a Palladian pile that had known better times. At the front was a gravel drive cir

Lousy Science

By Christine Kenneally

In a laboratory in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne, Vern Bowles slides a Petri dish into a microscope and centres it on two coffee-brown lice eggs: one is full and opaque, the other empty and almost entirely translucent. Suspended to their right, like a distorted astrological sign, is a big, fat louse. The microscope illuminates her segmented body, creepy-crawly le