Word: outbacker
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...Australian father takes his two children for a picnic in the country. Minutes later he commits a lurid and unmotivated suicide. The teen-age girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (Lucien John) abruptly find themselves at the mercy of the outback, their only companion a sputtering portable radio. Ironies thereupon crowd the air like static: the instrument crackles with irrelevant news of the world while the two urbanized refugees fight elemental dread...
...Dutiful Daughter, Keneally creates a presumably commonplace family-the Glovers-plunks them down on an isolated outback farm, and pronounces the scene his ninth circle. The story begins with deceptive ordinariness. At holidays, Damian Glover returns home from college to his older sister Barbara and the mysteriously ailing parents to whom she is devoting her life. Keneally's passions, however, are too intense for mere realism. Observing that "absolutely millions of people" are mad with "family pride," he concludes that "the only way for them to get humility is through learning they're-you know-beasts." Accordingly, like...
...does a martyr escape from family, from original sin, even from Australia? Like Joyce & Co., Keneally is better at seeing the trap than seeing a way out. "We're cemented, you, me, them," Barbara cries. In the end, Keneally looses a Jehovah-like flood on the outback and the Glovers, washing himself clean of his creation. But in the meantime, writing like an angel, he has forcefully raised an ancient question: What is the demon in man that so often makes him a monster to those condemned to love him-including himself...
Australian literature once consisted of bush ballads about drovers and sundowners, poems to the shearers and squatters, the track and the outback. Today the setting of Australian writing is city and suburb. Patrick White, the country's leading novelist, achieved fame with Voss, his novel about an explorer; today, in a style reminiscent of John Cheever and John Updike, he dissects the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla, probably modeled after Sydney's leafy Castle Hill area. Barry Humphries, Australia's foremost humorist, savagely satirizes what he calls "the pseuds"-the self-consciously trendy Australians caught...
...Congregational minister from the outback hamlet of Bordertown, Hawke is a Rhodes scholar who, while at Oxford, set a world beer-drinking record (according to the 1957 Guinness Book of Records, he downed 2½ pints in twelve seconds). Hawke spent twelve years as the A.C.T.U.'s brilliant, abrasive chief lawyer. When he succeeded to the union's leadership last year, he be gan tackling everyone and everything. He described the national steel monopoly, Broken Hill Proprietary, as rapacious. He called Cabinet Member Billy Snedden, who is considered McMahon's heir apparent, "an intellectual cripple." He blasted...