\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

OPINIONS AND NOTESviews of the Utopianists, the Evangelical aspirers,and the erotic novelists who made ofPolynesia a militant playground for prurientdomination, Jan Morris's Journeys (Oxford,$'5-95) collects essays on Miami, Australia,and a dozen other places, demonstrating bythe liveliness of phrasing, the pertinence ofdetail, the personality of connection, just whyshe is one of the finest travel writers today.Clement Semmler writes an extended biographyof the life and times of Australia's"Robert Service," A. B. Paterson, in TheBanjo of the Bush (Univ. of Queensland,$25.00) ; Geoffrey Dutton, in Snow on theSaltbush (Penguin, $9.95) —a book thatCanadian literary people ought to read andabsorb —· reflects on the significance of literaryexperience to the character of Australianculture: "life and times" for Dutton refers notonly to politics and persons, but also to thequarrels and coincidences that connect popularpresumptions with academic pursuits. Duttonreflects on the roles of editors, quarterlies,the popular press, little magazines, schoolreaders, patrons, bookshops, and all. It's aremarkable achievement.Shamsul Islam's Chronicles of the Raj(Gage, £15.00) is a brief account of Forsterand Masters and others who observed thedecline of the Imperial Notion. A. W. Baker'sDeath Is A Good Solution (Univ. of Queensland,$37.50) surveys the field of convictliterature, and is particularly valuable for itsappendices, schematically coding various elementsin factual and fictional British criminalbiographies from the 1790's to the 1860's.And Janet Davidson's well illustrated ThePrehistory of New Zealand (Longman Paul,$39.95) is an act of scholarly memory, usinggeological and archaeological evidence to presentwhat is currently known about Maori lifeand culture before the arrival of Europeans.There is data here on origins, language, settlement,lineage, conflict, disease, cultivation,and design, all articulated with cool clarity.Like the indigenous peoples of Canada, theMaori were a people with a substantive history,about which Davidson writes both withcause and with interest.As we have noted before, Virago Press hasbeen admirably championing another kind ofhistorical redress, by reprinting and reassessingliterary works by women. One of the mostrecent reprints is that engaging work of fashionablewhimsy from the 1890's, Elizabeth andHer German Garden, by Elizabeth von Arnim,the Countess Russell, cousin of KatherineMansfield — but as the reprint makes clear,some of what appears to be Contrived Attitudein the book is a covert cry against therituals of domesticity. Such works become,then, not merely texts made newly available,nor are they solely valuable for their documentarysociology; they are also challenges tocritical methodology, and to the very presumptionswe bring to the conventions ofreading. The ongoing rediscovery of RobinHyde (Iris Wilkinson) in New Zealand isserved by a press comparable to Virago in itscommitment, The New Women's Press ofAuckland, which has just released DragonRampant, Hyde's observant 1939 account ofher travels in China during the Sino-Japanesewar. As her editor, Linda Hardy, notes, thebook can be read for its reportorial coverage,but also for its implicit account of a womanin search of the freedom to move unencumberedby irrelevant preconceptions. Hyde'sSelected Poems, ed. Lydia Wevers (Oxford,$!б.95), gathers a body of poetry long unavailableand worth reconsideration; familiarimages of Persephone-in-winter are here, togetherwith a trained diction: "I am sorry Iplanted the memory tree / In the cool of thegarden shade. / . . . / I would be more than aghost / To your memory yet. ..." Most presentin the volume, however, is the author's ownvoice, wrestling with images of cage and tide,doors and rain, struggling to articulate thereal nature of defeat in words that declarefragmented but active resistance. A thirdbook, A Home in This World, is an autobiographicalaccount of the early 1930's, publishedfor the first time (Longman Paul,$19.95). I* te ll s °f tne depression that doggedHyde's life, and of the conformist pressuresthat invaded and shaped her world even whileshe claimed freedom; a volunteer mentalpatient at the beginning of the decade, Hydefled from "treatment" to the "home" her titlespeaks of. It is a place of accommodation butnot exactly of peace; her metaphors speak ofbelonging and of intrusion, together. "Wordsare daggers." And what she values, finally, shelocks away.There's one more kind of memory; it's thesort represented by the Festschrift and TheCelebratory Issue. In 1985, Poetry Australiaturned 21. For many of those years the preserveof Grace Perry (poet, doctor, individualist,rural dynamo, literary renegade), thejournal has been home to talent of manydifferent poetic persuasions, and to poets fromanyplace as well as from Australia. In heropenness to talent, to the commands of poeticvoice rather than to the dictates of received205