A history charm.

MOMENTS ARRIVE WHEN, half-a-dream, we bump against a vivid thing that tantalises as it pleases. Whether it is a saintly face in a crowd, or a finely wrought work of imagination, I suggest the actual movement in the mind is the same. Attraction to the thing-as-given incites our trust that its undisclosed parts beckon us towards the good, the rich. In other words we are charmed.

Such was my experience, for instance, on the first occasion I fitted mask and snorkel, then flippered into the thoroughfares and alleys of a coral reef. Apart from the occasional oink and bubble of my suppressed breath, the experience was entirely to do with visual charm. I beheld the outlandish structures of brain-, staghorn- and pancake coral. Giant clams grinned crookedly at me, sea-moss wavered like a green shaving brush, fish flickered with ultra-colour--chevrons of yellow or lapis lazuli, embers of crimson against black, rainbows glimmering from a silver undercoat. In addition there was the fish-ballet, the subito and adagio movements. One moment a trumpet fish placed itself a few centimetres from my glass, thin as a biro with two goggle eyes, then it vanished into the curacao murk. Or I gazed at a school of damsel fish, finning as one, to the fight, to the left, up, down, as though the three-score creatures responded to the one electrical source.

Being my first time on a reef, I can say that here was a texture of life strange and vivid, yet proper and tactful. These four qualities created a most satisfying tension between the given and the not-yet-quite-disclosed that beckoned me to flipper on, if only I could dispense with the inconvenient need to breathe air.

In January this year I ducked my head into a book that provided me with a like experience. I encountered the vivid texture of a particular mind. Casually almost, I read a memoir called Tiger's Eye and by the time I finished I was impelled to seek out all the other books by its author, who is Inga Clendinnen, this year's winner of the Philip Hodgins Award.

She might be gratified to learn how, when I first enquired, all copies of all her books within the Canberra library system were out on loan. In time her titles came to me and I read them, or in two instances sampled deeply. And when I asked the librarian to renew one title I was told it had been requested elsewhere so I must surrender it. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could wish any single honour for my own books it would be, not film-rights or blockbustering, but the quiet knowledge that, while their bindings endured, they likewise scarcely touched the public library shelves, shelves where folk go intent upon a read, as opposed to the purchases they might make at book-launches which enter the bedside limbo of Wow, really looking forward to getting round to your book ... tralala.

Why did Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's Eye compel me? It should be said, the book contains daunting subject matter, telling how a woman in the middle of life is diagnosed with a degenerative illness, curable only by radical surgery, and how she determines to observe the grim progress of her condition all the grim way. And yet the story that emerges, grim in some of its parts, certainly, is a most luminous progress in the liberation of memory, imagination and human spirit. This is to say that the pleasure this memoir and her other books afforded me was that complex charm of art; it could dismay my sense of the world without disconcerting my trust in the voice. I'll take three of its qualities, allowing them to both describe Tiger's Eye and spill light across those other books.

Inga Clendinnen has a very lively and steady eye for particulars. Whether she observes her fellows in the clinic, her parents, her phantasmagoria in the hours following her transplant, her pages bring us into the presence of crisply delineated humanity. Like Breughel's tableaux, her people come in community, but each with a distinct shape and pathos. She is observant as to the individual, alive to the linkages and fractures of a society. This is true when she turns her attention, in Dancing with Strangers, to the personalities on either side of first contact at Sydney Cove. And it is true of those personnel in the fearful barracks and changing rooms of the Nazi death camps whose presence she restores in Reading the Holocaust, as it is equally applied to the Aztec and the Mayan societies that drew her original interest as a teacher of history, societies adept at their own ghastly practices.

This eye for detail has poetic finesse and resonance. I'll take one example. There comes a moment in Tiger's Eye where the author lies awake in her hospital ward. It is two in the morning, her fellow patients sleep, the traffic of nurses and trolleys has stilled in the long, glinting corridors. And yet she hears a roaring. It is persistent, perplexing. For an interval she puzzles at it, then all at once recognises its source; it is the lions in the neighbouring Melbourne Zoo clamouring into the night sky. Coming when it does in the narrative, this image has the eeriness, the eclat, the propriety and the tact of any image I have encountered in poetry over forty years. Here is the disorientation of both the lions' and the convalescent narrator's predicaments. African veldt and Melbourne metropolis, the feral and the high-tech notches in The Great Chain Of Being, come together in the one outlandish moment. The complexity of the listening convalescent's emotional state has been given an image strange and proper to it, an image of remoteness, bewilderment, grandeur that in her ensuing train of thought leads her to her title, Tiger's Eye.

THE SECOND QUALITY that exhilarated me in this book and her others is the steadiness of her nerve to confront ghastly, unwelcome or opposing substance. Whether she describes her own prognosis, or the abominations practised by Aztec and Nazi societies, there is no blurring or manipulating of the focal distance between beholder and object. Historian that she so reflexively is, she locates for her story what is valid, puzzles at what might be sufficient. When she depicts the two societies that encountered each other at Sydney Cove after 1788, each has the spectrum of its attitudes scrupulously examined. In this curious story of mismatching communities that Dancing with Strangers untangles, we witness the parallel impulses towards concord, the institutionalised cruelties in both cultures, in a psychological and social tableau that is vibrant and ingratiates no partisan interest in this fraught subject. She makes fresh, she makes real, because the evidence and the imagining are deployed with such intelligence, such tact. And again, in her unravelling of the testimonies from perpetrator and victim in Reading the Holocaust, the horror attending those human batches passing through the very calculated shower-blocks at Auschwitz are made all the more present by the necessity with which the situation of both captor and captive is portrayed.

The third quality of Inga Clendinnen's writing I'll identify is its innate justice. She will deal fairly. She will make the telling of stories an instrument of fair-dealing. Take the first of her Boyer Lectures, entitled "An Incident on a Beach". We hear how one society, versed in its history, will behave with casual barbarity and casual forgetfulness in pursuing and justifying policy--the USA in its Panama adventure. Counterbalancing this she places two societies, South Africa and Ireland which, embracing a will to accept the wholeness of evidence from their respective pasts, find in history a means of repairing the very fractures an intractable historical viewpoint originally caused.

But Inga Clendinnen's sense of the counterpoise is more scrupulous. The lecture opens by describing the encounter on a beach of a terrified Aboriginal woman and several well-disposed but intrusively curious French scientists in 1801. It is a small incident but the scrutiny the author gives her own reactions to it are searching and exact. "What I feel, to my surprise, is anger," the historian concedes. I liked that "to my surprise", because it acknowledges her response was not entirely reasonable. Nor does she use the emotion to ingratiate herself with a polemical side. The authority in the writing lies in how she will deal justly with the evidence, and justly with her feelings towards it, no matter how awkwardly the emergent history might present itself to partisan interests.

Her essay continues, and in its discussion, the historian argues incisively for the place of history in the lives of both societies and individuals. Good history is conducive to civic virtue, she reminds us in this epoch of the history wars. Civic virtue? She means by this term that expansion of an individual's power for moral comprehension and narrative imagining, those powers that might allow a society to converse rather than quarrel with itself. Her meditation on the value of history has this moral immediacy in its force and I could hug her for it.

In identifying these three qualities of Inga Clendinnen's writing, I neglect its scope, its erudition, the lateral speed with which her mind frequently moves, the humour of, say, her sly essay "The Gecko in the Machine", the unfaltering lucidity of her thought. She is a truth-seeker and a wise head.

We award this prize in memory of Philip Hodgins. Philip's poems were conspicuous for the steady eye and nerve, the will and imaginative power to deal justly with what fortune served him, those marginal farms and hospital wards. But vividness, courage, fair-dealing, tact are marks of good writing whether it is poetry, history or a comic strip. In her introduction to the essays in Agamemnon's Kiss, Inga Clendinnen commends the essays of her favourite essayist, Montaigne, as being "the athletic movement of an intrepid mind". I can think of no better phrase than this with which to commend her own books. They won my trust, made me grateful to be within the Australian culture from which they come and which they enrich.

Alan Gould delivered this address at the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal Award dinner at the Mildura Writers Festival in July. He is the current judge of the award, which has been awarded annually since 1997, and this year was won by Inga Clendinnen. Last year it was won by Stephen Edgar.