Pillars to the Temple
A collection of lauded writer Peter Temple’s fiction and journalism is a fitting tribute.
In 1982, seeking escape from the miseries of school teaching, I enrolled in a journalism course at an obscure Australian university. The writing teacher was a newly arrived South African with a dust-dry wit and a gruff indifference to the self-esteem of his students that would, these days, earn him a personal grievance case.
His name was Peter Temple and the protocols of journalism require the disclosure that this review seeks to repay the considerable debt I owe him.
Having excused me the 101 class (I knew grammar and how apostrophes work), he taught me, one on one, how to write.
The early classes consisted mainly of his putting his head in his hands and moaning, “No, no, no”, but something must have sunk in, because I won a national student news-writing competition (and its thenhandsome $200 prize) at the year’s end.
Temple soon left teaching to establish the short-lived, left-wing social-issues magazine Australian Society, and we lost touch. He then became famous as a crime writer, with five of his nine novels, including three of the four featuring his lawyer-turned-troubleshooter Jack Irish, winning a Ned Kelly Award, Australia’s crime-writing Oscar. The same year he withdrew himself from contention – 2010
– to give younger talents a chance, he won the country’s top literary award, the Miles Franklin.
Picking up his latest, a collection of journalism, short stories and miscellanea, I was saddened to see he had died, last year, after what the obits call “a short illness”, typically a coy shorthand for the horror of sudden, aggressive cancer. He left behind the unfinished manuscript of a fifth Jack Irish novel.
That substantial fragment, High Art, occupies almost half of Red Hand, but there is much more beside. In an entertaining foreword, publisher Michael Heyward gives an unvarnished portrait – largely by quoting his tart emails – of a man he accurately calls “a charismatic curmudgeon”, and his selection provides a comprehensive overview of Temple’s versatility as a writer.
His spirited defence of books may not be slam-dunk persuasive, but it’s deliciously lyrical; a wry piece about the Melbourne Cup, a portrait of
AFL club fever and a piece about the “fair go” show how deeply he came to know and love his adopted country. There is a funny, faux-scholarly piece about how badly Australian dictionaries deal with Australian English and a glossary of Australian slang that has a touch of Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce.
In the latter cases, we can see how Temple brought both an outsider’s clear-sightedness and an enthusiastic immigrant’s love to his observations. His dialogue, in the crime novels and in the short fiction here, shows a masterly control of the clipped, laconic, often verbless sentences, which he credits to reading playwrights, but must also be attributable to a great ear.
It all adds up to a fitting memorial to –and, for me, a treasured memento of – a man who will be missed from the Australian literary landscape. THE RED HAND: Stories, Reflections and the Last Appearance of Jack Irish, by Peter Temple (Text, $38)