So theoretically, an enterprising Aussie at Fromelles in WW1 could have shot Hitler and prevented the Holocaust!

“It was no light work getting in with a heavy weight on you back, especially if he had a broken leg or arm and no stretcher bearer was handy. You had to lie down and get him on your back; then rise and duck for your life with the chance of getting a bullet in you before you were safe.

Fraser recalled finding a group of wounded near the German line and, after bringing them in safely, hearing another call for help. He went again and eventually found this man too. He was a big strapping man wounded in the thigh – too heavy for Fraser to carry on his back – so he helped him into a sheltering shell hole and promised to return with a stretcher. As he moved off, he heard another wounded Digger near by call: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’. Fraser was able to return with stretchers and bring them both in safely.

The cry, ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’ has come to symbolise the selfless devotion of those who risked, and often lost, their lives to bring in their wounded mates…. And it prompted the wonderful sculpture by Peter Corlett that today stands in the Australian Memorial Park at Fromelles. This statue immortalises Simon Fraser’s heroism and stands as a superb symbol of the sacrifice and devotion that characterised the battle and its aftermath. Fraser survived Fromelles and was promoted to Lieutenant in April 1917. Sadly, he fell at the battle of Bullecourt and, ironically, his body was never found.

“What do you and your friends want me to do? To lead a movement to upset the Constitution, oust the jurisdiction of Parliament, and usurp the governmental power? If so, I have no ambition to embark on High Treason, which any such action would amount to.

What would you say if a similar proposal were made by the Communists and Socialists to seize political power for the benefit of the proletariat and the extinction of the bourgeoisie, as they have done in Russia? Would you not call that Revolution and Treason to the Crown and Constitution?

Depend upon it, the only hope for Australia is the ballot-box, and an educated electorate. You and your people should get busy and form an organisation as efficient, as widespread, and as powerful as that of the Labor Party…
If it be true that many people in Sydney are prepared to trust my leadership, they should be prepared to trust my judgement.

Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.

Algernon: About my what?

Cecily: Your emigrating. He has gone up to buy your outfit.

Algernon: I certainly wouldn’t let Jack buy my outfit. He has no taste in neckties at all.

Cecily: I don’t think you will require neckties. Uncle Jack is sending you to Australia.

Algernon: Australia! I’d sooner die.

Cecily: Well, he said at dinner on Wednesday night, that you would have to choose between this world, the next world, and Australia.

‘Algernon: Oh, well! The accounts I have received of Australia and the next world, are not particularly encouraging.

“I used to have some hopes for Democracy,” commented Mitchell, “but I’ve got none now. How can you expect Liberty, Equality or Fraternity—how can you expect Freedom and Universal Brotherhood and Equal Rights in a country where Sons of Light get three months’ hard for breaking windows and bashing a Chinaman? It almost makes me long to sail away in a gallant barque.”

“Enthusiastic Reformers”…. gold.

Summary:

A loosely linked series of auto-biographical essays by Brisbane based (yes Brisbane!) gay, Chinese Australian, Benjamin Law. David Sedaris light with an Australian aspect.

My Take:

Given that identity humour is such a focus of “The Family Law”, it’s difficult to avoid applying a stereotypical overlay onto Benjamin Law’s writing. In fact, “The Family Law” isn’t a single literary stereotype, but manages to position itself within three distinct auto-biographical cannons; Growing up in Qld, Growing up Gay and Growing Up Asian. This isn’t a necessarily problem to my mind, I’m a strong believer that most clichés became clichéd because there was something at their core that worked.

That being said, if you’re working in an area that’s been well covered in the past, you either need to have a slightly new angle or to execute extremely well. Sadly, I think this is where “The Family Law” falls down. It’s not that it’s a bad book, in fact I quite enjoyed it, but I just couldn’t avoid the reoccurring feeling that “This has been done better before”. A humorous autobiographical account of growing up in Brisbane was done better by Hugh Lunn’s, “Over the Top With Jim”. Alice Pung’s, “Unpolished Gem” did growing up Asian in Australia both more amusingly and more movingly. And David Sedaris (“Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim”) and Augusten Burroughs (“Magical Thinking, but “Dry” in particular) perfected the mass market Gay autobiographical essay series years ago.

I like Benjamin Law as a writer want to read more of his stuff in the future, but there are a number of books covering similar terrain that I’d recommend before “The Family Law”.

Excerpts:

“We preferred theme parks. For parents raising five children, theme parks made so much sense. They were clean and safe. There were clearly designated activities, and auditory and visual stimuli that transcended racial, language and age barriers. Also, you could buy heaps of useless shit. This is an exercise at which Asians of all backgrounds seem to naturally excel.”

“Whether it was a birthday, a wedding or a marriage, a lot of Chinese parents took the same approach to gift-giving, one shared by Mafia hitmen and pirates: just hand over thick wads of cash.”

While his brother listened to In Utero..

“I immersed myself in another seminal album that was released the same year: Mariah Carey’s Music Box, a serious and studied meditation on love (‘Dreamlover’), bravery (‘Hero’), loyalty (‘Any Time You Need a Friend’) and profound loss (‘Without You’). “

“After I was born, my parents reached an exciting turning point in their marriage: they began to fight openly and without reserve, like two cats thrown in a sack and swung around wildly…. Every marriage starts with passive aggression, but couples soon realise that being passive requires effort. It’s easier to be openly hostile.”

My Take: I have a very warm spot in my heart for David Malouf. He’s the kind of writer that I would love to be – a poet who divides his time between writing classical allegories set in the Roman Empire and stories of humid days and stormy nights spent on the decks of Queenslander houses. He’s living proof that “Queensland literary giant” is no oxymoron and as such I cling to him dearly.

“Johnno” isn’t Malouf’s best work (I’ll plump for the Miles Franklin winning The Great World in this respect), but as a fellow Queenslander, it is my favourite. No other book I’ve read quite evokes the experiences and outlook of the Great Northern State quite like Malouf’s first book, “Johnno”. While the Brisbane City Council may not usually be recognised as a noted judge of literary achievement, its recent selection of “Johnno” as the book that best represents Brisbane was spot on.

While quite short and simply written, “Johnno” is a complex and layered book. In a funny way, “Johnno” is part Hugh Lunn, part Aeschylus. At the most basic level, it is a lovingly told coming of age story of two unlikely friends in 1940s and 50s Brisbane. Thematically however, Malouf piles many layers of meaning into this work. I’m no literary expert, but to my mind the most interesting part of this book is how Malouf uses the evolving relationship between the urbane but insecure auto-biographical protagonist, ‘Dante’ and his hedonistic and superficially assured best friend Johnno as a platform for exploring Malouf’s evolving perceptions of place and family.

On the one hand, throughout his youth Dante/Malouf envies Johnno’s bravura and seemingly blissfully relaxed approach to life. While he feels like an outsider, Dante/Malouf genuinely wants to fit into the simple, happy, physical lifestyle in Brisbane that his father long enjoyed. On the other hand, Dante/Malouf is repelled by Johnno’s lack of refinement and ambition. Dante/Malouf sees himself as ultimately being apart from Brisbane, an intellectual and sophisticate with broader horizons and ambitions than other Queenslanders.

Unfortunately, as a young man, Dante/Malouf invariably failed to see that his perceptions of Johnno/his father/Brisbane were more a function of his insecurity than their shallowness. Throughout the majority of the novel Dante/Malouf views Johnno/his father/Brisbane in black and white. As a result he feels the need to reject what he feels Johnno/his father/Brisbane stand for in order to validate his own, broader intellectual ambitions.

In this regard, Dante/Malouf’s strident complaints about Brisbane ring true to anyone who grew up there:

‘I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.’

‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’

However, the fact that these complaints are so familiar directly undermine any justification for Dante/Malouf’s sense of separateness.  Dante/Malouf was never as isolated and stifled in Brisbane as he thought as a young man. Many of those around him who he had written off as dully shallow and suburban had similar rich internal lives and ambitions. However, it is only when looking back with the benefit of age and the perspective of having lived in Paris, Italy and London that Malouf is able to realise that Johnno/his father/Brisbane were far more nuanced and complex than he had given them credit for.

Malouf has a real talent for bringing out these realisations in the most affecting ways. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Johnno’s last letter to Dante before his suicide reveals that he had always admired the intellectual qualities in Dante that he had thought Johnno had misunderstood, describing him as:

‘the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince’.

Similarly, when sorting through his father’s belongings soon after his death, Dante is forced to similarly revaluate his perceptions of his Father:

‘Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.’

In this way, I think “Johnno” is a story about what all Queenslanders go through at some point in their lives – the process of revaluating the black and white judgements of their youth about the place in which they grew up. “Johnno” is about the process of leaning that while Queensland is far from the most cosmopolitan place in the world, neither is it a cultural backwater devoid of the human experience. Life might still seem impossibly boring there, but it’s ultimately the people that make a place what it is. If you make the effort to look below the surface, you’ll see that the people of Queensland are just as complex and nuanced participants in the human experience as anyone else. It might not make you feel as special or unique to admit it, but it opens up a world of enriching relationships that might never have realised existed.

Highlights:

‘Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.’

….

‘The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.’