Ron Baker Replies

Spoken Language Change in Children on the Autism Spectrum Receiving Community-Based Interventions

“…The number of different consonants and vowels produced by each child was assessed using the Phonetic Inventory for Singleton Consonants and Vowels from the Children’s Independent and Relational Phonological Analysis: Australian English 2 (Baker, 2017 ). This was determined by research assistants (speech pathologists) based on video recordings of children’s speech production during the ELSA-T semi-structured language sample.…”

The art in fiction: Thomas Keneally

“…The friend replies: “Painting the Yser isn’t an act of national dereliction” (585). This is an almost exact replication of a complaint by Keneally years earlier, that any novelist who departed from writing about Australia was criticized for dereliction of national duty (Baker, 1987: 132; Krausmann, 1979: 56). He was responding to what he saw as a cooling off among his reviewers once he began living abroad for periods of time and writing books set in Europe and North America (and it was the nationalistic demand for local work locally situated that governed who won Australia’s Miles Franklin Award for fiction for many years).…”

“…Keneally acknowledged that A Victim of the Aurora failed to do well, partly because readers were so focused on its murder-mystery form that they could not see the underlying theme of the civilizational collapse of empire and Europe (Baker, 1987: 136). Increasingly across his career, Keneally’s reputation has fluctuated around this “middlebrow” mix of popular genre and thematic or stylistic complexity.…”

“…Famed for his vivid word-painting and metaphysical interests in his early novels, Keneally consciously disassociated himself from modernist experiment and existential angst. From Jimmie Blacksmith onwards he concentrated on plainer writing and plot-driven stories, hoping to be appreciated as an “honest journeyman” craftsperson rather than an artistic genius (Baker, 1987: 124; Krausmann, 1979: 50; Keneally, 2015: 2). The Daughters of Mars stakes a claim that Keneally has “sketched well” throughout his career rather than “painting badly”, though it also attests to the long influence of painting and its visual effects on Keneally’s writing.…”

The Alexis Quire and the cult of saints at St. Albans*

“…59 He is also shown as providing for the poor, who are visually likened to pilgrims (folio 9r; see Figure 4). 62 The illustration for chapter thirty-eight, for example, shows Cuthbert being helped by monks to his oratory on Farne Island, making clear his close ties with the Lindisfarne monks and his reliance on them (page 108; see Figure 3). One of the miracles illustrated relates that when a band of thieves attempted to break in to the abbey, they were paralysed by the saint and later hanged by the abbey (folios 18v-19v).This episode highlights the strength of the saint, and also of the monks, who had the right to police and carry out justice in the local area.…”