Griffith Review 30 ed by Julianne Schultz
Griffith University, $32
This second annual Griffith fiction collection focuses on contributors and topics from the Pacific in a generously interpreted sense - Australia, New Zealand, China, Cambodia, Japan (a dramatic, sometimes brutal account of Sumo wrestling), France (once a Pacific power), Polynesia and the Americas.
It acknowledges and affirms Australia's engagement with a widening world. It also makes a claim for good fiction as a cohesive narrative in a time of fragmentary and fractious media overload.
There's an abundance of good fiction in this latest, substantial publication from the Brisbane university. It includes one of New Zealander Alice Tawhai's battered, battling women, facing and fleeing guilt.
Marion Halligan and Janette Turner Hospital contribute. Danielle Wood has a poignant portrait of a dusty old man in a matching shack.
Eva Hornung follows a woman as she rides through a brooding, increasingly threatening forest. Mark Welker's story of two men adrift on a flimsy raft combines flat-out plot with disturbing metaphor.
Patrick Allington provides a futuristic fable of civil war in Australia, the storming of Parliament House, and the inexorable commercialisation of idealism.
Longest and most engaging is Peter Temple's sly narrative of the timid English school-teacher geographically and culturally wrenched on to a tough outback station.
Poetry in small doses features with C.K. Stead's compact, crafted evocations of meeting, confrontation, death; Anna Krien linking Uluru and dandruff; Jillian Pattinson moving among wadi and tamarisks.
Memoirs and essays look at Shanghai, muttonbirds, North Bondi. A quite splendid colour section presents James Morrison's fantastical, allegorical paintings of the Tasmanian Wars.
Another accessible and unpretentious selection. Style and substance sit easily together. Readers will sit equally easily with No 30.
