So there he was in the library, crouched above the floor
       like a mousetrap, squinting into his rickety parallel edition
of the Satires. The paperback was from the late fifties;

its cover had long detached, released its burden, demoted itself
       to a floating flapless jacket, and some of the pages
were beginning to tip out – in short, the book required two hands

to be consulted, so his grip was intense but worshipful.
       He never journeyed anywhere without it, and he relished
the odd quotation over an ale: ‘Why is it, Maecenas,’

he would mutter, ‘that no one is ever quite happy …?’
       And there he was again, on the Persian rug, a prayermat mouse
Latining into his cups, mumbling mantras that he alone

could hear. We hated it when the demons repossessed him –
       the medicos would dismiss him as eccentric,
at best melancholic, in those days when the Sadness was just a ‘cloak’.

The house tonight shook to eluctable musics, the clustered roomfuls
       jangled and rowdied onward,
distressing damsels (spilt and semiclad) drifted the liquid corridors

strumming their thighs; but he had settled himself on the magical
carpet,
       Horace in hand, deaf to all temptation. A prism
of the Black Label sat beside him, the mystic flask an orange glow

on the mantel, yet his love of the elixir never placated him –
       it only made him vocal, and further classical.
Surely enough, as we broached his shadowy island he shouted: ‘Nemo!’

Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken is the latest in his trilogy – with The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a northern suburb of Melbourne. Referred to only as ‘the suburb’, this anonymity serves to make it a universal place on the fringes of any Australian city.

Known to the reader of the two earlier novels, first as a child and then as an adolescent, the main character Michael is now a university student and first-year teacher at his old school. This maintains his day-to-day connection with the suburb, although he has now made a partial escape by living in a communal house in the inner city. A student of literature, he habitually reads the classics of the English canon until a teaching colleague loans him a book that he thinks Michael should read:

He stares at the cover, the title My Brother Jack (not a good title), the author’s name, George Johnston (he has never heard of him), then opens the book where he left off. He has only just begun to read it, but he already knows that he is doing more than just reading another book. There is something about the reading of this that feels like what he can only call an event. He is not simply reading another book, it is, he knows, much, much more than that. For when he reads this book, he sees, for the first time in his reading life, the world from which he comes. And, when he looks up from reading, and takes in this world from which he came and through which he now moves, he sees it differently.

In September 1943, seventeen commandos of Z Special Force, led by Lieutenant Commander Ivan Lyon, attacked and sank with limpet mines seven ships in the Singapore harbour. A year later, in October 1944, when the Pacific War had only months to run, a repeat performance failed and all those involved were either killed in action or executed by the Japanese. Though these events provide the basis for Tom Keneally’s latest novel, The Widow and Her Hero, he insists that it is ‘not meant to be a roman-à-clef of those times and characters’. Rather, he is concerned with the motives and the ‘inner souls’ of the people whom he has invented.

They are set against Keneally’s favourite fictional background: the battlefields and homefronts of World War II, the conflict that shadowed his childhood. This was the temporal setting of his second novel, The Fear (1965), of Season in Purgatory (1976) and An Angel in Australia (2002) among others. And that is not to count the two novels that Keneally published pseudonymously, as ‘William Coyle’. In this latest work he investigates, as he has before, how domestic society is transformed by its accommodations to war. He depicts the lives of anxious wives and of those who became war widows (‘a whole sub-class of women in the world, invisible except to each other’), of bureaucrats, of servicemen waiting their next call to duty.

An earlier version of this history of Victoria first appeared in 1984 as Our Side of the Country. Though for the past sixteen years Sydney-born politicians Paul Keating and John Howard have usurped Victoria’s former almost constant ‘top position’ in Canberra, the possessive pride reflected in that early title still runs through this modern version. Wondering how such a small state could exert such influence for so long, Blainey concludes that ‘mental power, energy and ingenuity’ have probably always been more important than ‘gold, soil and grasslands’. There has been some pruning of the original and some subtle rewriting, a couple of chapter headings have been changed more accurately to reflect their contents, and the three-part structure has been replaced by two – one nineteenth century, the other mainly twentieth. Three major chapters covering the changes wrought during the years of John Cain, Joan Kirner, Jeff Kennett, and Steve Bracks have been added.

Blainey’s characteristic delight in the significance of everyday objects and activities is still evident: the change from sail to steam, the role of horses in the workforce, his acute observation of memorials and ceremonies. Though much of this may not seem particular to Victoria, a valuable theme from the original book that is maintained and pursued further in this edition is the historic rivalry of New South Wales and Victoria, along with comparisons with the other states, where appropriate.

The weakness of the labour movement in Victoria, for example, seems both a puzzle and a reproach to Blainey. New South Wales has often elected Labor governments, but, until recently, Victoria hardly ever. Blainey suggests that an explanation may be found in the independence and enterprise of Victoria’s migrants from the gold rushes on. Without heavy mining and manufacturing industries, Victoria needed a skilled workforce, new technologies and innovation for economic development. Victorian liberals, beginning with Alfred Deakin, understood well the need to protect skilled employees against the naked demands of capital. As well, Victoria, during the Depression of the 1890s, lost labour and political talent to other states. Blainey’s reproach, however, may be unnecessary if it is remembered that, in New South Wales, liberalism never developed beyond its free trade origins. It forced the rise of a hard labour movement in self-defence.

Among countless unused fragments of information from my convent schooldays, I remember the correct forms of address for churchmen of all ranks. For the pope, it was Your Holiness; for a cardinal, Your Eminence. Next came Your Grace and My Lord, for archbishops and bishops. Then the cumbersome Right Reverend and Dear Monsignor, followed by Dear Reverend Father, which sufficed for a priest.

Few of us had occasion to use the higher forms. At various stages of his long public life, B.A. Santamaria (1915–98) used them all. He signed his letters to the higher clergy with the same correctness: Your most obedient servant. Those words, which form the subtitle of Patrick Morgan’s substantial selection of letters, have an edge of humour. They point to the paradox of Santamaria’s life and personality. The title acknowledges his unfailing courtesy, and a formality which guarded a very private self. It also prompts the question: to what extent was he ‘an obedient servant’, and to whom?

The Santamaria letters do much to illuminate the ideas and personality of someone who has been demonised and idealised to a degree which obscures his individuality. They record sixty years of ceaseless thinking and striving. There are no family letters, although here and there a reference to his quietly perceptive wife, Helen, and to his eight lively, talented children shows their central importance.

These letters begin in 1938, with the young Santamaria starting work in Catholic Action, and move swiftly on to the anti-communist trade union ‘Movement’ of the early 1940s, the ALP split in 1954–55, and Santamaria’s sudden notoriety as the presumed architect of the ALP’s defeat in the federal election of 1954.

Reading the early letters has been a disconcerting experience for me. They take me back to my twenty-three-year-old self, and to the evening early in 1954 when I first met Bob and Helen Santamaria at the home of Melbourne University law lecturer Frank Maher and his wife Molly, whose wit and warmth made the Maher ‘evenings’ one of the pleasures of Kew, our shared neighborhood. Maher had preceded Santamaria as director of Catholic Action in Australia, and they remained close friends. Over the teacups that evening, Santamaria asked me what I was doing. Nothing much, I had to admit; nothing at all, really. After an unhappy finals year in arts at Melbourne University, shadowed by my father’s illness and by his death a few days after my graduation, I had given up plans to go to Oxford. Subsequently, I dropped my MA thesis at Melbourne, having written nothing. Our family structure fell apart, with four more deaths in less than two years. Lacking guidance and motivation, barely coping with the sequence of bereavements, I knew I had to do something, but opportunities for young women in the early 1950s were limited.

After a few minutes’ talk in casual and friendly style, Santamaria offered me a job. As director of the National Catholic Rural Movement, he published a monthly journal, Rural Life. Would I like to be its editor? The offer was as impulsive as my acceptance. Looking back, I find comic irony in my one reservation. I thought that Catholic Action – in effect, working for the Australian bishops – might be dull. Yet Santamaria had an engaging joie de vivre, and I liked his wife’s quiet charm. The idea of being an editor was appealing, so I thought I would give it a try.

My new job included research assistance for the annual Social Justice Statements, which Santamaria wrote on behalf of the bishops. In these and other writings, long before the Whitlam government adopted multiculturalism, with Al Grassby its eloquent spokesman, Santamaria was advocating ‘cultural pluralism’ and the beginnings of Asian immigration, which must have been a hard sell for some of his Rural Movement members.

I enjoyed learning the elements of journalism for Rural Life, and began to find my way round the office, which was unexpectedly complicated. Almost wholly ignorant of politics and trade unionism, I had never heard of the ‘Movement’, which Santamaria directed alongside his official Catholic Action work. Thus, in October 1954, when the ALP leader Dr Evatt launched his famous attack on a ‘disloyal element’ in his party, I was almost as surprised as Evatt was pretending to be. Having grown up in Studley Park Road, Kew, with Archbishop Mannix, John Wren and Robert Menzies as neighbours, I should have had some awareness of political and religious power. But it was all very polite and peaceful in Studley Park, and I never encountered sectarian feeling until the Evatt–Santamaria crisis blew up. My reaction then was a new sense of tribal loyalty: to Mannix, the indomitable old man who was a familiar figure from my childhood; and to Santamaria, whose courage and serenity under pressure I admired, especially when the sectarian attacks took on an unpleasantly racist tone, exemplified in a pamphlet ‘The Black Hand of Santamaria’.

If I had known more, I would never have wandered into the maelstrom of the Labor Split. Not because I would have thought the Movement wrong or mistaken: I would then have assumed that the Australian bishops knew what they were doing. But by nature I avoided conflict, took a cautious ‘yes, but ...’ position on most things, and had no political interests. No one asked me to join anything, so I didn’t know there was anything to join. As I later learned, there was secrecy at the edges, but it was part of the paradox of Santamaria that his central office was open and informal, with no security at all.

For many years, I was too embarrassed to admit my naïveté. More than half a century on, I see it as a 1950s woman’s story, and by no means unique to a Catholic institution. The office meetings, chaired by Santamaria, were only for the men. There were separate lunch rooms, and no communal morning or afternoon teas. The divide between the men who made policies and the women who typed and carried tea trays was absolute. In my quiet corner – writing about decentralisation, rural communes, irrigation, migration, venturing an opinion on country kitchens, tidying up reports of country branch meetings, marking copy for the printer – it was a long way from the gathering political storms of the time.

Now, as I read the Santamaria letters, I can see that the Evatt attack was not really unexpected. The Movement was set up in response to the anxieties of certain ALP men who sought Catholic help in organising an opposition vote against communist trade union candidates. The Catholic bishops, afraid of sectarian attacks, wanted their financial and moral support to be kept secret.

A series of letters shows Santamaria’s attempts to revise the bishops’ thinking on secrecy. Surprisingly, in view of their close friendship, it was Mannix who blocked Santamaria’s last attempt, in May 1954, to separate Catholic Action from the Movement. ‘I want to get out,’ Santamaria wrote. ‘I disagreed with [Mannix] more violently than I have ever had the guts to disagree with him in the past.’ There is high comedy in the account of a meeting of the Australian bishops, which closed with their admonition to ‘act prudently’ and ‘not to bring the names of the chiefs [bishops] into the picture’. It was already too late. Meanwhile, from quite another quarter, Santamaria was warned that ‘Bert [Evatt] might jump for a bandwagon’.

The special interest of Patrick Morgan’s splendid edition of Santamaria’s letters, and of his balanced, informative commentary, is that for the first time we hear Santamaria’s voice in a variety of modes and moods. The solemn, urgent, peremptory note is there, but so is his mischievous humour at the expense of some bishops whose obedient servant he continued to sign himself. His rueful acceptance of failure (‘I was a bit of a fool not to watch my rear’) goes with an extraordinary resilience.

The first letter, boyishly awkward, is a reminder that when Santamaria was singled out by Mannix for his post in Catholic Action he was only twenty-two. Leaving Mannix’s house, Raheen, in 1938, he was ‘jumping for joy’ at the prospect ahead. In 1944, aged twenty-nine, he was lecturing Arthur Calwell as if he and the seasoned political leader were on equal terms: ‘Well, Arthur, those are our principles.’ In later letters, especially those to Eric D’Arcy (later archbishop) and to poet James McAuley, his warmth shows through. The last letter movingly accepts the ending of life and work ‘as the shades of night close in’.

Santamaria’s causes did not begin, nor end, with the anti-communist organisation of the 1940s and 1950s. He had close contacts with the Liberal Party leaders, Menzies, R.G. Casey, and Malcolm Fraser among others, and towards the end of his life was amused and pleased to find himself in accord on globalisation and big business economics with old adversaries such as Phillip Adams and Clyde Cameron, from whom he had friendly letters.

The Split brought huge damage, personal and political. But it is simplistic to see Santamaria as the single-handed wrecker. Other factors included a long history of sectarianism in Australia and the frantic ambition of an increasingly unstable Dr Evatt. ALP supporters who rightly mourned their fragmented party, and chafed at the extension of the Menzies years, might not have been so happy with a dementing Evatt as prime minister, nor with Arthur Calwell, his presumed successor, a rigid believer in a White Australia. As immigration minister in the 1940s, Calwell had excluded and deported the Asian spouses of Australian citizens in a series of inhumane decisions which have their deplorable echoes in today’s government policy.

Santamaria’s liberal immigration policy, challenging ALP orthodoxy, may have contributed to Calwell’s recalcitrance in 1956, when there was a chance of reuniting the party. Most likely, the personal and the political were intertwined. Calwell, a traditional Irish-Australian Catholic, treasured his friendship with Mannix. Long before the Split, he would have resented Santamaria’s ascendancy. Poignantly, when Mannix was dying, the seemingly rejected older son, Calwell, came to his bedside, as did Santamaria, the chosen heir to a fast-vanishing kingdom.

Within the Catholic Church, the ALP Split brought bitterness and division. Families were divided, friendships lost. Political directions from certain priests were a throwback to nineteenth-century Ireland. In Melbourne, Bishop Fox tried to direct the Catholic vote from the pulpit, while Mannix, more subtly, used his immense personal authority. The mutual dislike between Mannix and Sydney’s Cardinal Gilroy increased the tensions.

Could any good come of this clerical infighting? Eventually, I think it did, though the main players would not have seen it that way. Gilroy defeated Mannix, Santamaria and the Movement by a direct appeal for loyalty and obedience from his flock. As historian Patrick O’Farrell has said, Gilroy’s victory marked the last, crude, anachronistic exercise of political authority by the Irish clerical church in Australia. As a tactic, it could never be used again. A crucial, though unintended, benefit was the end of a unified and deliverable Catholic vote.

Santamaria was probably better off without his fractious conclaves of bishops. With the 1957 decision from the Vatican that formally ended the Movement, he reinvented his organisation as the National Civic Council. He created his own spheres of influence in public affairs, through his writing, his broadcasting and his wide-ranging personal contacts, national and international. Yet his relative independence had a cost. As Morgan remarks, distance could mean inflexibility. This was true of Santamaria’s view of the Australian universities, which was badly skewed. His thinking on the women’s movement was perfunctory: he was so sure he was right. Spending too much time with like-minded people, he tended to stereotype his adversaries – though never returning the rancour with which he had been treated.

One aspect of his life, which fits perfectly with my memory of him, is what Morgan describes as his ‘extensive private welfare bureau’. People in trouble, bewildered migrants, the homeless and unemployed, the lonely and the obsessed, were given an attentive hearing and practical help from his extraordinary network. As Morgan discovered in perusing the Santamaria papers, ‘the scope of this activity was staggering and genuinely altruistic’.

My final task for Santamaria was a series of interviews with Archbishop Mannix, then in his nineties, for a biography that Santamaria would later write. When I think of my 1950s self at Raheen, with my little notebook, asking halting questions about an 1860s Irish childhood, I am not surprised that I failed. Mannix, a veteran of thousands of interviews, was perfectly willing to tell me things I already knew from published sources, but he wasn’t interested in revisiting his past. It was time for me to pick up my academic career again, learn independence, discover the world for myself. The Mannix biography was probably the deciding factor. Santamaria was too close to his much-revered subject; and even my cautious leaning towards psychobiography would have horrified him. The intuitive response to people which made him a thoughtful host and a generous friend went with a deep mistrust of introspection.

Why did such a talented man, a brilliant organiser, a charismatic personality, choose to express his ideas through others, nearly all of them his intellectual inferiors? One factor may be his early experience in Depression Melbourne, as the exceptionally gifted eldest son of a Brunswick greengrocer. Quickly surpassing his Italian migrant parents in education and worldly knowledge, he must have been the leader at home from an early age. An Italian in an Irish-Australian Christian Brothers’ school, he never quite belonged. He was only fifteen when he won a university scholarship, a year too young to start his course. Such precocious success might bring confidence in the power of the self. But in the small, privileged, class-conscious world of Melbourne University in the 1930s, a working-class Italian Catholic was an outsider on three counts.

Having graduated in arts and law, Santamaria was almost ready for legal practice when Archbishop Mannix’s job offer gave him immediate authority. Within the Movement and the NCC, he never had an intellectual equal to challenge him, though there were rumblings of discontent and huffy departures from time to time. Thus he lacked real companionship, based on equality, in his working life. He dealt with patrons and protégés: he directed, explained, persuaded. His charmingly diffident manner disguised the fact that he was always in charge.

After I had left his office and was happily absorbed in my academic career at Monash, I told Santamaria that I couldn’t give any more help with his Mannix biography, as he had hoped I might. He said: ‘Oh, well, the university apostolate is important too.’ Then, seeing my look of dismay, he added quickly: ‘But of course, you’re not an activist.’ He accepted my unspoken declaration of independence and we remained friends. That moment marked my sudden, sharp awareness that I never wanted to express any ideas but my own, never to represent anyone but myself. Within the university, as one of a close-knit group of friends and colleagues, I was at home as I had never been before.

Being part of a community of equals, men and women, was an experience denied to Santamaria. He created his own structures; and when one failed, he built another. For all his charm and social ease, was Santamaria fated always to be on the outside, never taking a place in any group? With his happy family life, many friends and an overflowing measure of admiration from his supporters, one could hardly say that he was deprived in human terms. Yet he had no successors of comparable ability, and the institutions he created have fractured and dwindled in influence.

Perhaps the final paradox, which the letters reveal, is the vein of pessimism which co-existed with strong religious faith and a seemingly limitless capacity for hope. Much of Santamaria’s work failed, and he knew it – even expected it. Yet he never stopped trying. Patrick Morgan’s selection, in its variety of mood, period and occasion, opens the way to a better understanding of a complex man whom history has greatly oversimplified.

‘The nearest thing on earth to a Black Australian is a White Australian, and vice versa,’ observed novelist and poet Randolph Stow some years ago. Nicolas Rothwell might have pondered the idea on his more recent wanderings as northern correspondent for the Australian. His north is not simply geographical. It fans south and west from Darwin, and east as far as Arnhem Land. Its core is in the Centre, in the Aboriginal realms of the Western Deserts: not only another country, but also, in the book’s closing phrase, ‘another time’, another dimension to the Australia we think we know. In a tribute to Darwin’s fabled Foreign Correspondents’ Association (whose members are forbidden to file the crocodile stories that southern editors want), Rothwell quotes a Latin motto, ‘Austrem Servamus’ (‘We serve the South’). It’s a droll reminder of how far the correspondent’s words must travel, through a dirty and imperfect lens, to reach from one place to the other. The mediation of numinous, heavy-laden revelations from this remote other country for mainstream consumption elsewhere is the high-wire walk of this book.

That quintessential Australian–American, Rupert Murdoch, recently counselled Australians against ‘the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe’. While I confess to a certain Schadenfreude when the chief propagandist for the second Iraqi war, which has contributed mightily to that European alienation, seeks to come to grips with the war’s consequences, I think it unlikely that Australia will go down the European path. For Australians, the American relationship looms much larger than it does for Europeans. As Dennis Altman shows in his elegant and argumentative essay 51^st State?, the relationship is deep-rooted in our history, psyche, and culture. We were, after all, one by-product of the American War of Independence. For him, the danger is not so much anti-Americanism but that, in ‘a world dominated by the American imaginary’, we, like Rupert’s News Corporation, might lose our national identity.

Beyond American failure in Iraq lies a second, deeper failure. America’s Iraq project was always intended by its proponents not just to fix Iraq and transform the Middle East, but also to demonstrate a new grand policy concept for the twenty-first century. This was the Bush Doctrine, enshrining the now-familiar ideas of the neo-conservatives: America’s power, especially its military power, is omnipotent; its values and institutions are universally desired and universally applicable; hence America’s destiny – and after 9/11 even its very survival – requires it to use this immense power, pre-emptively and unilaterally if necessary, to reshape the world in America’s image. The neo-cons themselves called it a vision for a New American Century.

For a time, to many people, this radical new vision seemed right. Not anymore. When things first went wrong in Iraq, its supporters said that the Bush Doctrine’s good ideas had been let down by bad implementation. Now it is clear that the problems in Iraq are not ones of implementation but of conception. The Bush Doctrine has failed its test, and only those whose careers require it still cling to the wreckage. The rest, including much of America’s formidable foreign policy intelligentsia, is already hurrying back to their drawing boards to design a replacement. The race is on to create the next grand plan for America’s role in the World.

'Memory is actually anxious to be heard.'

                                                A.F. Davies

What a year, and how lucky we are that our country can only play a timid, cringing, subservient role in Iraq – which is not at all to disparage the soldiers we send there. It must be a bastard of a job for those young men, at the accursed interface.

February 6: We fly to Hobart for our Coles Bay holiday, pick up a car and gradually find Sarah and Gordon’s evasive house on its steep hill. The following morning he starts me off with a long stiff walk over the mountain slopes: easier at his age. But I could eat a horse afterwards, were that required.

The title of Richard J. Lane’s guidebook contains a small allusion to the changes that have occurred in literary studies over the past half-century. There was a time when universities trained critics; these days, everyone is a theorist.

The distinction might be regarded as minor, academic even. A critic is already a kind of theorist. He or she inevitably deals with ideas that have social, political and ethical implications. Well before the rise of theory, influential humanist critics such as F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling were explicitly concerned with the question of literature’s cultural function. But the change in designation does reflect a genuine change in emphasis, the reasons for which are many and complex. Taken as a whole, Lane’s fifty introductory essays could be read as a disjointed intellectual history, outlining quarrels between versions of formalism and historicism, between competing social visions and political ideologies. It is also a history of cross-disciplinary influence, as the study of literature has responded to new ideas in philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis, and to the historical and technological changes that have led to feminism, post-colonialism, and the globalised, postmodern world – all of which have demanded a sometimes radical reassessment of a host of cultural and aesthetic assumptions. At least part of the story is a welcome opening up of a discipline that, in certain manifestations, could be absurdly rarefied. In 1948, Leavis published a book called The Great Tradition, which boiled down the great wealth of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. From the sticky residue, he extracted precisely three authors deemed worthy of scrutiny. As Christopher Hitchens once quipped, you could always tell a Leavisite by his bare shelves.

In October 2006, the Australian Literary Review published a list of the forty most influential Australian intellectuals, the results of a peer survey undertaken by the Australian Public Intellectual Network. Meaghan Morris ranked seventh, sharing her berth with Tim Costello and Inga Clendinnen. Leaving aside the problems, exclusions, and biases that attend the compilation of such lists, I was heartened to see Morris’s name in the top ten. Theory and cultural studies have long been demonised outside the academy, and their position within the university system remains subject to sniping. As a writer, critic and editor, Morris’s work over the last two decades has defined Australian cultural studies – indeed, she co-edited Australian Cultural Studies (1993) – and the results of this survey suggest at the very least a reluctant recognition of her contribution to Australian intellectual life. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture is neither a defence of cultural studies nor an overview of Morris’s prodigious career. Rather, it is an eclectic collection of essays, written between 1998 and 1999, which are all more or less obliquely concerned with questions of Australian culture and history. It offers a virtuosic demonstration of the capacities of theoretically informed cultural and historical criticism.

Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Some translations are playful – ‘Sleep embraced their weary limbs … and I looked up the word for patefactus’ (‘Aeneid II’) – while others superimpose order, as in ‘Mr Ruddock’s speechwriter (Philippic 1)’: ‘The asylum in the desert swallows the phrase, a throat / a drain with birds circling, a gate.’

Divas and scholars is the work of a scholar who is no stranger to the world of divas. Philip Gossett is a music professor at the University of Chicago and is principally in the business of preparing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century operas by Italian composers. We might think of the academic institution and the opera house as antithetical spaces, but Gossett is frequently called upon to advise and assist with the staging of works that belong to his area of expertise. In other words, not only does he know the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi as historical artefacts and texts that take all manner of forms –fragments, drafts, complete manuscripts, variant manuscripts – but as phenomena that take shape on stage and in the orchestra pit in contemporary realisations that, as he argues, owe a responsibility to the fruits of scholarship. Divas and Scholars, then, is part personal and professional history, part history of nineteenth-century Italian opera (and operas in French by Italian composers), part manifesto, treatise on the transmission of opera and handbook for present-day singers, conductors and opera producers. In a happy coincidence, the author’s surname is a near-homonym for gossip, and this excellent book is leavened with timely and beautifully judged accounts of vanity, ignorance and arrogance: three vices which, while not indigenous to the opera house, are often depressingly at home within its gilded ambience.

France’s hypersensitivity about its culture is not infrequently derided, but it produces a salutary vigilance for which we can all be grateful. Such has been the case with the French-led defence of cultural specificities in the various ‘free trade’ meetings (GATT and WTO) of the past two decades. And such is this book by Jean-Noël Jeanneney. Deceptively slight in size – Jeanneney himself refers to it modestly as his ‘little book’ – it is a work that not only addresses a critical issue but articulates practical proposals that can, and should, command the attention of cultural policy-makers and decision-makers everywhere. It is also essential reading for the wider public. The issue is about which principles, in the already strongly globalised world of the Internet, should guide the processes of digitising the world’s literary heritage. Keenly critical of the plan launched by Google in late 2004 to create a universal online library, Jeanneney proposes a pluralist alternative posited on a quite different philosophy from that of the profit-based ideology underpinning the Google initiative.

The writer Meg Stewart remembers, with affection and an abiding sense of privilege, growing up as witness to the friendship that flourished between two passionate Australian poets. One of these was her father, the New Zealand-born Douglas Stewart, for many years literary editor of the Bulletin. The other was the glamorous David Campbell, who served with distinction in the wartime RAAF and wrote his poetry while grazing his country acres on holdings around the Canberra region of New South Wales. Their friendship was sustained over thirty-five years, from just before the end of World War II until Campbell’s premature death in 1979. From the outset, Stewart especially had warmed to the Campbell charisma, always widely admired amongst both men and women, and amongst the young. In a letter to Norman Lindsay describing their first meeting, Stewart described Campbell as a ‘[m]ost likeable, vigorous bloke who believes that the artist & man-of-action are kinsmen’.

Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance.

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

Public debate in Australia about the United Nations is remarkably thin, and it is dominated by two familiar tribes of pundits: UN groupies and UN bashers. The groupies defend the international organisation come what may: they are suspicious about the motives of nation-states – especially the United States – and they get an attack of the vapours every time Kofi Annan appears at a lectern. UN bashers, on the other hand, never saw a Security Council resolution they liked. They scoff at the time it takes states to argue their differences, bristle at the idea of dealing with non-democracies, and propose American power as an alternative organising principle for the world. Neither group, in other words, takes a balanced or realistic view of the world body. They are so busy praising the UN or burying it that they don’t have the time (or, rather, the column inches) to analyse it.

At the dinner to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Quadrant magazine in October 2006, John Howard gave one of the most revealing speeches of his prime ministership. Celebrating with the magazine the victory of democracy over communism, he went on to denounce a whole range of left-wing sins. He attacked the New Left counterculture, where it had become the ‘height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship’. Moreover, ‘it had become de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare’. Fortunately, a ‘few brave individuals’ took a ‘stand against the orthodoxies of the day’; Howard congratulated Quadrant for defending both Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle ‘against the posses of political correctness’. Nowhere were ‘the fangs of the left’ so visible as in the character assassination of Geoffrey Blainey. Despite some progress, the ‘soft left’ still ‘holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia’s universities by virtue of its long march through the institutions’. Howard then likened the current struggle against Islamic terrorism to the Cold War, and criticised opponents of the war in Iraq ‘who now talk as if Iraq was some island of Islamic tranquillity before 2003’. Although there was some criticism of the speech in the media, the most notable aspect was the chorus of compliments that amplified its main themes. Greg Sheridan applauded the way the prime minister had ‘rightly bemoaned the continuing dominance of the soft Left’ (Australian, 7 October 2006). Michael Duffy thought it was ‘probably the most ideologically impressive [speech] ever made by the Prime Minister’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2006). Piers Akerman approved the way ‘Howard is not going to let those who lacked his and Quadrant’s commitments to those ideals [i.e. intellectual freedom and liberal democracy] forget where they stood … To peals of laughter, he quoted George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool”’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2006). Miranda Devine thought this address, recalling ‘50 years of the left’s worst excesses’, ‘was a speech to cement the “real” John Howard’s place in history and his role in the culture wars, through which he has steered Australia resolutely and irrevocably in his ten years in office, much to the chagrin of his detractors’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 2006). Janet Albrechtsen rejoiced that, ‘[o]nce again, Howard seems to be embracing an electorate willing to confront old orthodoxies. And the remarkable thing is that after 10 long years in power, Howard the conservative is still a front-foot reformer, challenging the status quo. As with his previous battles in the culture wars, education reform will demand a marked shift in the way Howard is ultimately judged by history: not as merely an economic steward but as a crusader in the ideas war’ (Australian, 25 October 2006).

Given V.S. Naipaul’s status in the literary world, and the prolific commentary on him and his writing, you might ask what is different about Gillian Dooley’s book, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Dooley’s sympathetic attitude liberates both Naipaul and his writing from critical analyses and from critics with explicit post-colonial and political agendas. She is more than aware of how ‘the reductions of political analysis’ have negatively stereotyped Naipaul’s writing. Rather, she focuses on Naipaul’s genius as a writer, which is not separate from the high standard of ethics, courage, fastidiousness, insecurities and prejudices of the man. For it is these very attributes that Naipaul has inherited from his colonial background that make his writing so rich, remarkable and controversial.

Full-Bucket Moon
by Ross Clark

for Ted Kooser

Dawn and dusk I milk
my herd of nine cows
by hand, the best part of
an hour and a half taken
squirting warm milk
into the bucket straddled
between my knees, while
each beast chews grass
and ignores my husbandry,

In a scholarly study just published by MIT Press (Art as Existence, 2006), Gabriele Guercio considers whether the artist’s monograph is still a viable form, given various recent challenges to artistic and art-historical theory and practice. He concludes that although the monographic model does have a future, it must be reshaped inventively. Freud at Work – devoted to the English painter Lucian Freud – represents one possible approach, combining an illuminating interview with an extensive series of studio photographs taken between 1983 and 2006. The resulting volume may seem rather slight, but when consulted in conjunction with the major books on Freud, especially the 2002 Tate exhibition catalogue, it offers many insights and pleasures. I enjoyed particularly David Dawson’s 2005 photos of the artist in action, stripped to the waist, looking for all the world like Caravaggio’s St Jerome – a suitable alter ego.

A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of cosmopolitanism. You might discern it in the call by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, for a new kind of European justice, replete with regional police force (Europol) and magistracy (Eurojust). You might glean it from the global spread of human rights movements, protesting the suffering of children and civilians in, say, Iraq, Africa, Israel or Palestine. You might infer it from the cultural ties of, say, Chinese or Korean migrants living in Sydney, whose working lives embed them in global networks. All are expressions of a vital new cosmopolitan outlook, the global refashioning of a centuries-old tradition that rejects nationalism in favour of the wider embrace of humanity. One could argue that modernity was ever thus. Certainly, since thinkers such as Goethe, Kant, Humboldt and Marx, the challenges of international politics have been associated with a transformation from narrow nationalism to universal governance. In this connection, the achievements of multilateralism – since World War II particularly – have been notable, from the founding of the United Nations system to the development of the European Union. From this angle, ‘cosmopolitanism’ might simply be a new word for what used to be called ‘internationalism’. In these bold political statements, The Cosmopolitan Vision and Power in the Global Age, Ulrich Beck argues that the influence of today’s cosmopolitanism is reconstructing the world order afresh, replacing provincialism and nationalism with a mature moral outlook capable of responding to contemporary global crises. Beck, one of Germany’s most subtle social analysts, has been writing for some years of a new European consciousness and, beyond that, of global cosmopolitanism. Now he has provocatively pushed cosmopolitan theory into a polemical engagement with neo-liberalism throughout the consumerist, post-imperialist West.

Literature aspires to be read twice; journalism demands to be read once, Cyril Connolly declared. Between the book and the newspaper lies the journal, juggler of both, simply wanting to be read. In its quest for a readership over the past three hundred years – diligent or dilettantish, it hasn’t been fussy – the journal has banked on the perenniality of the literary and the urgency of the journalistic, according to fashion. The best measure of a journal’s contemporary allegiance is the type of essay it prints. The essay is the journal’s raison d’être, a chameleon form that can turn its attention to everything from the sorrows of war to the pleasures of whist. The latest issues of Griffith Review, Overland and Island make one thing clear – this is no time for fun and games. When even the newspapers are easing us into supine postures with their summer supplements, these journals have chosen to shake us from our slumber. Roused by the banning of two books – Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan – last July, Julianne Schultz’s Griffith Review sets itself the task of interrogating the West’s easy claims to freedom. The issue’s theme is ‘The Trouble with Paradise’, and three of the issue’s eight essays – by Allan Gyngell, John Kane and Chalmers Johnson – attempt to make sense of America’s paradoxical status as ‘New World’ and ‘New World Empire.’ There are also essays on failed Edens: Paul Hetherington looks at Donald Friend’s pursuit of sensual and sexual satisfaction in Bali, and Will Robb offers us a rare photo-essay from the streets of the world’s newest democracy, Iraq. But the emphasis is clearly on the two lead essays by Frank Moorhouse and Martin Amis, which, together, take up more than a third of the issue.

Scheherazade, you have much to answer for! 1001 nights were fine for you, but by now there might well be that number of volumes offering that much advice about books, films and paintings, not to mention screen savers and blogs. So this bulky new book should be seen first, even primarily, as a marketing opportunity.

Cynical? Well, even crass mercantilism can have benefits. The value which the reader puts on them will influence the answer to that question. But why 1001? I daresay there needs to be a limit. Here, that is 694 pages of variably informative ‘content’, though I suspect imitation (or, that Australian trait, following overseas fashion) is the principal influence.

Last year, the Tamworth Regional Council voted not to accept five Sudanese refugee families into their township. The decision was reversed in January 2007, albeit with qualifications and overtly racist reactions from some locals. In our post-Tampa society, such seemingly xenophobic reactions have become frighteningly normal, especially at the government level. We will ultimately be a much poorer country if such attitudes become entrenched. Luckily, a number of Australian children’s authors and illustrators have been doing their best to ensure that this does not happen, and some of them are examined here. Author–illustrator Bob Graham prefaces his picture book Jethro Byrde Fairy Child (2002) with an apt quote from The Bible: ‘Let Brotherly Love Continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: For thereby some have entertained angels unawares’ (Hebrew 13: 1, 2). Jethro Byrde is a beguiling tale in which a small child treats strangers with kindness, and thus brings wonder into her own life.

‘Who has not heard of “Yabba”, Sydney’s greatest barracker?’, asked the Listener In in February 1937. The Listener In was not the only radio magazine intrigued by a new Australian cricketing identity. Two identities, in fact: Myra Dempsey, who was covering the 1936–37 Ashes series for 3BO Bendigo; and Dempsey’s discovery, ‘Gabba’, a female counterpart to ‘Yabba’. A fixture at the Sydney Cricket Ground for a generation, ‘Yabba’ (Stephen Gascoigne) scored an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and remains a fixture in Australian cricket histories. But Dempsey, a minor celebrity in her day as the first female cricket broadcaster in Australia (and probably the world), remains unknown to broadcasting and cricket historians alike.

Neal Blewett replies to Barry Jones

Dear Editor,

I welcomed Barry Jones’s feisty response (February 2007) to my review of his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (December 2006–January 2007). Such autobiographies, the reviews and the commentaries on them are the first drafts of history, and such debates will be valuable to later and more dispassionate historians. Apart from some sardonic barbs, which I may well deserve, he seems to have only one substantive quarrel with the review and that is with my critical assessment of his performance as science minister in the Hawke government.

He constructs three lines of defence. First, he suggests that my assessment is contradicted by other elements in the review, and, in a single paragraph, quotes tellingly to that effect. But what he has done here is to conflate two quite separate aspects of the review and two quite distinct chapters of the book. I did praise his ‘succinct and balanced’, if somewhat detached, general account of the Hawke government. This was to praise him as an historian. On the other hand, I was severe on his highly personalised account in a separate chapter on his ‘Ministering to Science’. This was to be critical of him as a practitioner. There are no contradictory propositions here.

A new prize for Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin turns fifty this year. Well, 128, to be strictly biographical. Three years after the death of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award was inaugurated. This year, the judges have rather more money to present ($42,000) than they did in 1957, when Patrick White’s Voss won the Award.

The judging panel hasn’t changed this year, though there is a new State Librarian and Chief Executive of the State Library of New South Wales: Regina Sutton (the State Librarian always serves as a judge). The other four judges are Eve Abbey, Robert Dixon, Morag Fraser and Ian Hicks. Petrea Salter, of Cauzgroup, has told Advances that next year, and each year after that, one judge will retire, making way for a new one.

Some would say that the judges deserve danger money. Controversy often dogs the Miles Franklin Award – much of it facile and predictable, as Advances has been known to grumble. It’s like one of those tired annual media stories (the heat during the Australian Open, the Boxing Day sales). With the Miles Franklin longlist due to be announced on the Ides of March (the shortlist follows on April 19, the winner on June 21), it won’t be long before people start complaining about the terms of Miles’s will or the sadistic exclusion of works without any Australian characters, settings, or references.

ABR is fond of prizes (witness our Poetry Prize, whose shortlist we publish in this issue), so we are pleased to announce the creation of a new one: the Miles Franklin Beat-up Award. This will be awarded to the first reader who alerts us to a grumpy news story about the perfidy of Miles. Sadly, we can’t offer our sleuth $42,000, but she or he will receive a good bottle of red.

Vale Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007) As we were going to print, we learned of the death of Elizabeth Jolley, who published her first novel when she was in her fifties, and whose many novels included The Well, winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1986. Elizabeth Jolley, aged eighty-three, died in Perth on February 13. We will publish a tribute in the April issue.

Letters from the future

It’s on for young and old in our Letters pages this month, including a lively exchange between Anthony Elliott and Sean Scalmer, following Dr Scalmer’s review in the February issue of The New Individualism, co-authored by Professor Elliott and Charles Lemert, the Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. Professor Lemert, who has been described as the pre-eminent social theorist working in the United States, will spend part of this month at Flinders University. On Wednesday, March 14, he will deliver a public lecture entitled ‘The Future of the World’. This lecture is free and open to the public. It will start at 6.30 p.m., and the venue is the Adelaide Hilton’s Balcony Room. To register, visit www.flinders.edu.au/lectures.

A wardrobe of hats

ABR is pleased to be taking part in this year’s series of ‘Fridays at the Library’, at Flinders University, where our second office is located. On Friday, March 30, Peter Rose will be in conversation with Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of ABR and a regular contributor. Their topic is ‘A Wardrobe of Hats: Reading, Writing and Criticism in the Public Sphere’. This is a free event, with light refreshments, and everyone is welcome to attend (please notify Gillian Dooley on 08 8201 5238 if you wish to do so). The venue is the Noel Stockdale Room, Central Library, Flinders University. Short-term pay parking is available in Carpark 6, Registry Road.

Changes at ABR

We have four new board members: John Button, the author and former politician; Anne Edwards, the vice-chancellor of Flinders University; Craig Sherborne, poet, memoirist and journalist; and David de Vaus, the Dean of Humanities at La Trobe University. Bridget Griffen-Foley has resigned from the board because of her many other commitments, but has joined the editorial advisory board and will continue to write a bimonthly media column for us (see page 35).

New editorial position

ABR is seeking a junior editorial assistant. This is a one-year, part-time (0.8) position, ideal for someone intending to work in the publishing industry. The successful applicant will work closely with the editors. A serious interest in literary culture is a prerequisite. But be quick: applications close on March 12.

Breaking news!

ABR is in the process of formalising arrangements with its first corporate sponsor. We will publish details in the April issue.

CORRECTIONS

Part of the pleasure of graffiti (that largely debased art) is its anonymity, but we took this too far in the February issue when we failed to name Lisa Gorton as the author of the splendid poem ‘Graffiti’. HEAT is published by the Giramondo Publishing Group for the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, not at the University of Sydney, as Lyn McCredden wrote in her review of HEAT 12 in the February issue.

If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity.
President John F. Kennedy, Address to the American University, Washington DC, 10 June 1963

In March 1966 the first students arrived at Flinders University. They were typical of their time. Men outnumbered women two to one. Most lived at home with their parents, their background overwhelmingly middle class. A survey in the first years of the new institution confirmed that Flinders students were not politically radical. A slim majority indicated support for the government of Harold Holt. Only a handful opposed American and Australian involvement in Vietnam. If conservative about political change, Flinders students did not forgo commencement day pranks, with a mock Russian submarine being pushed into the university lake. Four decades ago, most students starting at Flinders were destined for teaching or the public service.

Though Flinders students were much like Australian tertiary students elsewhere, their new university was anything but typical. As founding vice-chancellor Peter Karmel told a meeting at the Adelaide Town Hall, ‘we want to experiment and experiment bravely’. Out went faculties and departments, replaced by Schools of Social Science, Biological Science, Physical Science, and Language and Literature. Students, it was hoped, would cross disciplines, in a university committed to a coherent intellectual and social experience. Even when the university began to teach medicine in 1975, the course was designed so that students would take majors in other faculties. Many chose the humanities and social sciences.

Innovation extended from subject matter to teaching method. The School of Language and Literature introduced the then novel practice of continuous assessment, with teaching delivered through now unimaginable tutorials of just three or four students. Flinders students could take Australia’s first undergraduate course in Spanish, along with other subjects not offered at the University of Adelaide.