Great Australian Racing Stories
Jim Haynes. ABC Books, 2005. isbn 0 642 58962 3, rrp $29.95
In this sprightly collection of racing yarns in verse and prose, Jim Haynes does justice to the richest source of pathos and misadventure in our sporting life. Afficionado and punter, he is always ready with a poem or opinion of his own. But here too are the nearly forgotten, but remarkable racing tales of J. C. Bendrodt (one of Haynes’s childhood favourites), as well as the once known-by-heart ballads of Banjo Paterson. None of these is more affecting than ‘Only a Jockey’, Paterson’s bitter account of the death of a teenage apprentice, which concluded that ‘the horse is luckily uninjured’. There are evocative photographs in the book—of grand surges to the post, and of the grind of stable work. Haynes’s sampling is wide and generous. There are memories of champions and of bush chicanery, of the Melbourne Cup—one of the two Australian national days—and of the canny winter slog of jumps racing. The book is animated by love of horses and the people who ride and train them, and of punters too. Let one of Haynes’s contributors have the last word: ‘Betting and Beer are the basis/Of the only respectable life.’
Peter Pierce
The Story of Christianity
Peter Partner. ABC Books, 2006. isbn 0 733 31885 1, rrp $75
This is the coffee-table book of the television series. So, the spoken word preceded the written text by five years. But that matters little when the story covers 2000 years, and when it is so judiciously told and so lusciously illustrated. The difficulty of telling the story of Christianity comes out of the fact that it is a living faith. As such, it forms part of the story both of Christians and of those who react to Christianity. Each group will tell the story from its own committed perspective. But to try to tell the story from the outside also distorts the story. It is like taking a lustrous shell from the sea in order to examine it at home.
A public television series of this kind must present the story of Christianity largely from the outside. Peter Partner’s narrative does so with great respect. He focuses on what is generally agreed, and reports significant disputes about interpretation. This makes the book a very useful skeleton that can be fleshed out with further reading. This disciplined approach conveys less well