Second, the fact that many more Republican than Democrat governors and House representatives were elected cannot be dismissed as simply the result of ‘big dollars’ flowing to Republicans after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Both Obama and Romney benefited from the court’s decision, which ruled that the right to free speech outlawed restrictions on associations of citizens of all kinds, including unions and corporations, from spending on advertising. The court did not overturn the 1907 law banning direct contributions from corporations and unions to federal candidates or political parties, nor the requirement for donation disclosure. The US legal position is now substantially the same as our rules in Australia. Citizens United has not had the dire consequences for democracy that alarmists feared, and the new president has yet to sponsor a constitutional amendment to overturn it.

Third, Ms Fraser asserts numerous times that the US political system is ‘intransigent’ and ‘dysfunctional’ and requires ‘radical and immediate repair’. Curiously, she suggests that Australia offers a better model because Australia is ‘not so constitutionally tethered to states’ rights’ and because our system is more ‘central, efficient, and independent’. With respect, our constitution is every bit as federal as America’s, and arguably more so, since the US Bill of Rights overrides state laws in many areas of life not permitted to our federal parliament. Ms Fraser must be one of few who believe that our duplicative three levels of government are ‘efficient’.

Last, she asserts that superstorm Sandy has ‘changed everything’ in the American psyche. It is not at all clear what she means. Surely it does not mean that critics of Obamacare will be silenced (the New York City and New Jersey health systems coped very well with Sandy), or that Obama now has a mandate to renationalise power, transport, and water utilities. (He has yet to mention his intentions in this regard.)

In Ms Fraser’s defence, commenting coherently on the outlook for Obama’s second term is challenging because no clear agenda has been set by the president. His inaugural speech promoting action on climate is belied by years of inaction in this area. His new enthusiasm for gun control is completely reactive to Sandy Hook and was not a priority in his re-election campaign. (Let us pray that he can achieve real reforms.) My strong impression is that even Obama’s strongest supporters were sorely disappointed in his first-term leadership, and voted him back in hope that he would be stronger in a second term. Obama’s narrow majority re-election was more a vote against the Romney social agenda (but not his economic policies) than for a coherent second-term mandate.

Graham Bradley, Neutral Bay, NSW

Concepts of freedom

Dear Editor,

Morag Fraser is puzzled by the differences between the prevailing concepts of freedom in the United States and Australia. The differences are not mysterious. They are rooted in two things.

First, we gained our independence by negotiation, not armed revolt, and have never used military force for territorial aggrandisement (Mexico, the Indian wars) or to settle internal disputes (the Civil War). So, unlike an important strand of American sentiment, we are not inclined to feel that freedom and the power to defend one’s rights grow out of the barrel of a gun. For us, access to guns has no connection with political or personal freedom. Violence is an aberration, not a constant threat.

Second, we are inclined to see the state as primarily providing public goods. Our infrastructure, our opportunities, and our personal and social security have always been, in very large measure, provided by the state. The state was here before any of us and parcelled out the land. In much of the United States, people grabbed land first and the state came later. In the United States, public goods are delivered by the state only as a last resort. Politics is often seen as a scramble for undeserved power and unearned advantage. The state is the guarantor of freedom against violent outsiders, but everything it does, however necessary that may be, restricts one’s freedom, robs one of one’s money, and undermines one’s capacity to stand on one’s own feet.

John Burnheim, Camperdown, NSW

Morag Fraser replies:

I thank John Burnheim for his response, but he does not explain my ongoing puzzlement. I live part of each year within walking distance of an American battlefield, so if I needed reminding that our two nations have been differently forged, that in itself would serve. What continues to puzzle me is an internal American tension – between concepts of individual freedom and the impulse towards union – a tension that challenged Lincoln as it must Obama.

Graham Bradley I thank also, but he has not read me carefully enough. The US election result was indeed close (‘patently obvious’ are his, not my words). However, the Republicans’ astonished reaction to defeat suggested complacency and a degree of campaign incompetence. The statisticians I was following (Nate Silver in the New York Times and Princeton’s Sam Wang) were both on the public record, and both got it right.

As to the corrupting influence of money: I acknowledged that neither party is innocent. But the interest this year lay in the failure of big money to secure a Republican presidential victory.

It was the US electoral system, not the political system, that I claimed required radical and immediate repair – and for the reasons I cite in my article. By comparison, Australia’s electoral system works efficiently and fairly.

And, finally, about the effect of Hurricane Sandy, I was being in part ironical – America does have an apocalyptic bent. But natural disasters do shift people’s priorities, whether to any electoral effect this year, it is impossible to tell.

Credentialled critic

Dear Editor,

In her often critical review of The Burning Library (February 2013), Bernadette Brennan suggests that I ‘would have been best advised to talk more with academics before penning the more misinformed … aspects of this otherwise worthy book’. It may interest her to know that I was a PhD candidate in the English department at Sydney University (where Dr Brennan teaches Australian literature) until last year; that I have intermittently tutored and lectured at universities (including Sydney) here and in the United Kingdom since 2002; and that I will be teaching at Sydney’s University of Technology this coming semester. She might also avail herself of the copy of SAM, theSydney University alumni magazine, where I extensively interviewed her colleague Robert Dixon, as incoming Chair of Australian Literature, or even check the acknowledgments page of The Burning Library for the names of a number of eminent scholars. She might further note that I sit on the Dean’s Advisory Board of the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales.

Dr Brennan also remarks that I have given a flawed picture of the teaching of Australian Literature at university level through my reliance on the AustLit database. That would be the same database that Professor Ken Gelder of the University of Melbourne used to argue the ongoing strength of Australian Literary Studies in a recent piece (‘Why Australian Literature Is Alive and Well and Living in Our Universities’, The Age, 6 May 2012). If Dr Brennan can find a listing on it for David Ireland, for example, she is a better data-miner than me.

I acknowledge that The Burning Library makes some angry claims about the role of the academy with regard to the current situation of Australian literature. But the book is mainly concerned with the work of writers for whom I care and whose survival in the public imagination matters deeply to me. I would be thrilled to read more reviews of the book that address anything beyond its polemical introduction.

Geordie Williamson, Woodford, NSW

A false, pervasive binary

Dear Editor,

In his considered review of People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures, a book I co-edited with Seán Kerins, Richard J. Martin recognises that the volume proposes a very different development approach from the dominant orthodoxy of ‘the likes of Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Peter Sutton’ (February 2013). This alternative is based on arguments couched by scholars and Aboriginal ranger groups that suggest that in the twenty-first century the role of natural resource management of the country’s most biologically intact and massive Indigenous lands must be taken seriously.

Martin, perhaps too beholden to that same orthodoxy, suggests that readers might respond cynically and sceptically to this proposition. Why? Apparently because our tone is polemical – unlike that of Pearson and company? And because some authors have a distaste for ‘neo-liberalism’. Really? The latter observation, in particular, is surprising: I searched the book and found five references to neo-liberalism, four by me, with distaste expressed for the project of moral restructuring under way in the Northern Territory. Martin deploys a false but pervasive binary as a provocation; in so doing he eschews complexity and perhaps reveals his own preference. A more productive focus might have been on the book’s exploration of hybrid economy theory (mentioned fifteen times in the book) and the intractable challenge of remote Indigenous development. This alternate framing is certainly at odds with the market utopianism of Pearson and others, because it transcends any false capitalist–non-capitalist or mining–environmentalism divide and highlights productive interconnections between market, state, and customary activity.

Contra the views of some, unfettered engagement with capitalism is not the only option; arguments for natural and cultural resource management work on country deserve serious consideration. People on Country sheds light on aspirations that may well be unfashionable in the context of popular debate, but that are widely articulated across a large chunk of Australia.

Jon Altman, Canberra, ACT

The beholder

Dear Editor,

While I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Brenda Niall’s observations about ‘plain’ Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer (who ‘could have looked pretty but was too diffident to think of trying’) are not borne out by the pictures used to illustrate the piece (February 2013). If the article had been written by a male, such observations would probably be deemed sexist. As a mere male, I think the National Library picture of Richardson is a stunner.

A final thought: HHR’s spectacular view of Beachy Head might have been something of a mixed blessing. Beachy Head is one of England’s best-known suicide jumps.

Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW