Byline: JUDITH ARMSTRONG

JUDITH ARMSTRONG defends the Miles Franklin winner. WHEN Helen Demidenko's The Hand That Signed The Paper won this year's Miles Franklin Award, there was mild controversy over whether it met the award's condition of portraying "the Australian life in any of its phases." But it is the novel's alleged anti-Semitism that has aroused much angrier outbursts. Although Pamela Bone (The Age, 9 June) adds new whines to last year's (not just why didn't Elizabeth Jolley, but now why not Kate Grenville etc), she takes greater issue with the blurb on the back and with the central thesis as she heard it on a radio interview than with the book itself. It is clear that these sidelights have affected her response to the book. Since everyone should know that a unprejudiced reading of any text is impossible, another and different reaction to Demidenko's book is vital. Another view is also appropriate to a novel that comes out of a Russian literary tradition in which authors have been forced to use the novel to say the things that an oppressive censorship would not allow. The literary tradition of the 19th century used "Aesopian language" to fox the hounds: that of the 20th resorted to "writing for the drawer". In Australia, I hope, we are...