Bangalow resident, author Robert Drewe, who is also, we are proud to say, one of  Verandah Magazine’s regular columinsts, has a nifty turn of phrase – and he’s put his way with words to good use over the years.  Not only is Drewe the author of such classic masterpieces as The Bodysurfers, The Drowner, Shark Net (which won the Premier’s prize for fiction in every state) and Our Sunshine - on which the Ned Kelly film was based – but he’s also the winner of numerous awards for his journalism, including two Walkley awards.

The Bowlo in Bangalow is hosting a special afternoon to celebrate Drewe’s latest books, Swimming to the Moon and The Local Wildlife, both of which are collections of pieces – columns, essays and even ‘thoughts’.  Wry, sardonic, funny – and sometimes sad – these books are classic Robert Drewe.  Spend Sunday afternoon in the company of a masterful wordsmith – with music by Ross Nobel, and high tea provided.

Books will be on sale at the event courtesy of the Bangalow Newsagency.

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The 2/7th Infantry Battalion, including Sgt Reg Saunders, wait at a troop train in QLD, 1943. (Credit: Australian War Memorial)

Flappers to Vietnam, The third book in Thomas Keneally’s series Australians is a fascinating look at a broad sweep of history covering two wars, the beginning of a third, and the seeds of decades of cold war, writes Digby Hildreth.

Aboriginal soldier Reg Saunders, from Framlingham, Victoria, hid in the White Mountains of Crete for months after the German army invaded the island in 1941. He was later secreted aboard a fishing trawler named the Hedgehog and taken to Egypt.

Saunders got back home and served as a platoon commander in New Guinea until 1944 – the first Aborigine to be commissioned as an officer. He also fought in Korea, where he was a commanded a company. His brother Harry was killed in New Guinea in 1942 while attacking enemy positions at Gona.

The headline title of Thomas Keneally’s magisterial history is Australians: in other words, the story of us. The subtitle of the third volume, Flappers to Vietnam, defines the start and finish of the half-century examined here: the euphoria at the conclusion of the war to end all wars and the beginning of the deadly quagmire of war in south-east Asia. One of the intriguing aspects of the book is that Keneally is more interested in the lives of rank and file characters such as Saunders than he is in the higher echelons. Harry Saunders appears about a quarter of the way through this dense and detailed tome, fighting in the Desert War, and reappears much later in the Pacific theatre.

It’s a typical Keneally technique: to relate as much of the experience of as many ordinary men and women as he can pack in, breathing life into the political principles, aesthetic theories, moral beliefs and ideas of nationhood that were challenged by the upheavals of the age.

The indefatigable Keneally was explicit about his approach earlier this year: “I’m fascinated by obscure figures who show the whole sweep of an event … although I mention generals, I’m interested in lieutenants and downwards,” he said.

As a result, these pages teem with life, with characters good, bad and ugly – but never indifferent, illustrating the turbulence and fractures of the era and how ‘obscure’ Aussie men and women dealt with them.

No history, however, could be comprehensive without a detailed look at the pollies and the top brass, but even here Keneally’s interest is primarily in the human being behind the public persona.

So we see wartime PM John Curtin, whose fighting of (and winning) the war cost him his health and his life. Hyper-sensitive, tormented by the suffering of others, idealistic, driven, he would lose himself on long night-time walks around Canberra in attempts to shore up his failing psychology.

John Curtin and US General Douglas MacArthur meet at Parliament House on 26 March 1942.

Keneally clearly has a soft spot for the doomed Curtin, but is less sympathetic towards some of those the poor man had to stand up to on behalf of Australia, especially the ‘narcissist’ Douglas MacArthur, and Churchill, with whom he grappled frequently over the question of bringing Australian troops back from the Middle East and Europe to defend their own country from the advancing Japanese.

World War II was at the chronological heart of the century, and with the fall of Singapore, the war, with its dramas of life and death, suffering and heroism, provides the beating heart of this volume. The threat was very near but, despite our era’s obsession with ‘terror”’ it takes some imaginative effort to comprehend how truly terrifying it must have been for Australians to learn about the Japanese bombing of Darwin, Broome and half a dozen other towns in 1942, with the loss of hundreds of lives.

Keneally’s skill is to evoke that fear, which was perfectly reasonable, after all, given that everyone who went to the ‘flicks’ had seen how the sons of Nippon treated their enemies, civilian as well as military, and that the bombing raids were seen, understandably, as a prelude to invasion.

The Neptuna exploding at Darwin Wharf on February 19, 1942

There is plenty to learn and enjoy here about the social, cultural and political changes of the Twenties – the theatre, the struggle to create ‘an Australian art’, the rise of fascism and communism, the increasing demands for recognition by women and Aborigines – but it is the inexorable movement of events towards the carnage of World War II that engages and bewilders. The White Australia Policy and Billy Hughes’ obstruction of a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles are apportioned a chunk of blame for this. Keneally even risks asking a ‘necessary but almost blasphemous question’: could the barbarism of the Japanese soldiers have been because they were ‘specifically indoctrinated’ about the policy? Perhaps such questions are merely a function of Keneally’s desire to see the whole picture of history, to understand and rescue the human from the bestial.

Racism generally led to all sorts of absurd restrictions and outrageous injustices, and must have hampered Australia’s fighting capacity. Despite the experience of the Saunders brothers, Aborigines were initially excluded from combat forces, and were even feared as possible collaborators; black American troops were ghettoised in Brisbane, beaten by military police and even shot dead. Understandably, they rioted.

Keneally charts the shifting fortunes of the darker ideologies of the day – communism and fascism – including after the war, and the emergence of less violent but more meaningful ruptures and rifts in the nation: the demands of women and Aborigines for equality and autonomy, the breaking up of the colonial subservience to Britain and the emergence of a new buddy/master in the United States, an equally problematic alliance summed up rather childishly by Harold Holt with his ‘all the way with LBJ’ line. Holt’s drowning concludes this chapter of our history.

Keneally reports on these cataclysms in the geopolitical life of the adolescent nation as it strove for identity and a global voice through the men and women at its centre and on its edges, and he does so with a journalist’s eye for detail and a humanitarian concern for the individual lives, saved, restored but too often wasted in the process.

His history is a magnificent read but does show some signs of too much haste. Some sentences jar: ‘The Papuan bearers collapsed on the track, sick, and some deserted, escaping that muscle-splitting, breath-sapping and health-depleting track.’ He never fails to mention if someone is of Irish descent and some of the personae seem wheeled out for no good reason other than to show that the researchers could put a name to them.

When Gough Whitlam enters the narrative the epithet ‘young’ attaches itself to him and won’t let go. In two pages he is described as the young lawyer, the young aviator, the young flyer, the young navigator.

And 420 nautical miles does not convert into 780 metres.

But these are minor quibbles in what is a major work, a broad sweep of history covering two wars and the beginning of a third, and the seeds of decades of cold war.

Finally it is the social and cultural wars that provide the web and woof of this story, and the people driving them, which make this an indispensable book.

AUSTRALIANS: Flappers to Vietnam By Thomas Keneally

Allen & Unwin, hard cover, 640 pp, rrp: $49.99

Thomas Keneally ‘In Conversation’ with Bob Carr

Where: Lennox Cultural and Community Centre, Mackney Lane, Lennox Head.

When: Saturday 29^th November, 5.00 pm.

How: Book Tickets at: https://bobcarrandthomaskeneally.eventbrite.com.au

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This admission will make me seem a boring pedant, unable and unwilling to see the tide has turned and the numbers are against me. The enemy has scaled the castle walls. Yet I still pronounce the letter H as ‘aitch’.

Battle-scarred though I am, when my youngest daughter entered Byron Bay high school last year I knew I’d have to face the old problem again: new teachers and their pronunciation of that rebellious eighth letter of the alphabet. Worse, of needing to correct my daughter’s pronunciation.

I foresaw all those parent-teacher meetings looming ahead, discussions chock-full of the initials HSC (standing for Higher School Certificate: the final-year exams in NSW). Five years of earnest conversations about “HSC this, and HSC that”. Except the teachers – all aged about 23 — would be saying ‘Haitch SC’ every time, and my brain would fog up with every uttered ‘haitch’.

If I believe Wikipedia, admitting this will probably make me many enemies. “In Australia,” it says boldly, ‘haitch’ has been attributed to Catholic school teaching and is estimated to be in use by 60 per cent of the population.” In which case, the preferred pronunciation of Catholics (25 per cent of the population) has a commanding power.

I’m more confused than ever. My mother’s family was Catholic, and my father’s was Protestant, and every one of them said ‘aitch’. Yet I came out in favour of ‘aitch’ to a well-known playwright, a Catholic-raised atheist, five years ago, and he hasn’t spoken to me since.

According to Sue Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, “In Australia the ‘haitch’ pronunciation has been linked with Irish Catholics, the Marist Brothers in particular, although no real research has been done into this and it may well be hearsay or at best circumstantial.”

Even those arbiters of English speech, the BBC, the ABC and the British Library, have a quid each way nowadays. Jo Kim, head of the BBC Pronunciation Unit, says, “English dictionaries give ‘aitch’ as the standard pronunciation for the letter H. However, the pronunciation ‘haitch’ is also a legitimate variant.

“We don’t ask broadcasters who naturally say ‘haitch’ to change their pronunciation, but if they ask us we tell them that ‘aitch’ is regarded as the standard pronunciation. People can feel very strongly about this and the ‘aitch’ pronunciation is less likely to attract audience complaints.”

Jo Kim adds that‘haitch’is a standard pronunciation in Irish English “and is increasingly used by native English-speaking people all across the country, irrespective of geographical provenance or social standing. Polls have shown that the uptake of ‘haitch’ by younger native speakers is on the rise.”

The British Library agrees that for people under 35 it’s becoming the favoured pronunciation. According to Jon Herring, the library’s chief linguist, “Language change happens through innovation. Each generation talks slightly differently from the one before. So we hear a ‘pronunciation divide’ between the young and the old with forms like ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch’.

“Children’s first exposure to English is usually through their parents, but once at school, the words and pronunciations they adopt are more influenced by other children they spend all day with. It’s a human thing to adapt to the group in this way.“

Writing for the ABC’s Australian Word Map online, the Macquarie Dictionary’s Sue Butler comes out as a ‘haitch’ defender. “It’s remarkable that we fix on some idiosyncrasies of language as markers of the decline of Western civilisation, while others we are prepared to tolerate as acceptable variations.

“People have fought wars because they felt superior to others. No one has done it yet on the basis of ‘haitch’ but it still remains an unnecessary social divider. You say to-ma-to, I say to-may-to. You say ‘haitch’, I say ‘aitch. Let’s be tolerant of our little differences in language as in everything else.”

Of course, I couldn’t agree more, very sensible. But when I met my daughter’s new English teacher I was on tenterhooks? She was a pleasant young woman but I was ready to sink into the depths of despond. Come on, out with it.

“Even in Year Seven,” she said finally, “we’re looking ahead to the HSC.”

“’Aitch SC,” she’d said. I could have hugged her.

Incidentally, when I was writing this column, every time I typed ‘haitch’ the computer slapped my wrist and underlined it in red. So there.

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Jeanette Winterson: keynote speaker at this year’s 2014 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. (Photo: David Levene, The Guardian.)

Never one to shy from controversy, Jeanette Winterson’s appearances at this year’s 2014 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival are likely to be feisty affairs, writes Digby Hildreth of the Festival’s keynote speaker.

British author Jeanette Winterson’s contribution to this weekend’s Byron Bay Writers Festival is guaranteed to be thought-provoking – and possibly provocative in other ways.
Most recently, the festival’s keynote speaker was engaged in a Twitter scrap for killing and eating a rabbit that was chomping on her parsley and roses.
She started the row by posting grisly photographs of the deceased bunny as she prepared it for the oven – anathema to some of her more politically correct admirers.
One tweeted: “You make me sick. I will never again read a word you write. Rest in peace, little rabbit.”
The heated Aga saga may have lost her a few readers but it also revealed Winterson in her true, and best, light: brave, funny, ruthlessly honest, challenging cant and wimpishness.
“Why is farmed meat fine but personally trapped disgusting? Think about it,” she retorted to the squeamish former fans.
Food and the politics around it are high up on Winterson’s list of concerns: she has even opened an outlet for organic products in East London. But she is better known for her consistently profound and insightful studies of queer and gender politics, body image, adoption and, most recently, witchcraft.
Her first novel, 1985’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit daringly told her own story in fictional form – how she survived an appalling adoptive childhood, marked by deprivation, abuse and extremist Christianity to emerge in her early teens as a lesbian.
Resisting the label autobiography she noted that when male authors pulled the same trick it was hailed as “meta-fiction”. The novel contained a passionate personal manifesto: “I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”
Winterson was born in Manchester and grew up in nearby Accrington, in the North “the dark place”, “untamed” – qualities which could be attributed to the writer and much of her work.
Her most recent fiction, The Daylight Gate, is a study of the horrors of 17th century witch trials in Lancashire – really a convenient excuse to persecute Catholics. It spills over with blood, torture, cruelty … every type of human vileness, redeemed somewhat by courageous characters who know that, once again, “love is as strong as death”.
There is a nine-year-old girl in it, starved, raped, half wild and half mad, who could be an echo of Winterson herself, as revealed in her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (the title is a quote from her mother, responding to Winterson’s coming out as a lesbian). Forced to sleep outside at night, or in the coal cellar, Winterson grew up tough, resilient, and damaged.

Adoption, she writes, made it “impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself”.
She survived it through literature, reading and memorizing poetry: “A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is.”
When her mother burns her books, it marks a breakthrough.
Standing amid the smouldering paper, she thinks: “Fuck it, I can write my own.”
Winterson is giving the Keynote speech at 11.00am on Friday August 1, and she will discuss ‘Creativity and Craziness’ with Susie Orback at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival on Sunday August 3 at 2pm.

Digby Hildreth

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