Robert Manne replies to John Dawson

Dear Editor,

Might I respond briefly to John Dawson’s letter (ABR, June– July 2005) concerning my review of his book, Washout (ABR, May 2005)?

1. In my review, I argued that, in his Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windschuttle’s case about the intensity of the conflict in the 1820s between the Aborigines and the British settlers in Tasmania was absurd. Windschuttle does not believe that the conflict occurred because of the threat to Aboriginal existence posed by the very rapid increase, during that decade, in the numbers of British settlers and their flocks on the fertile central plain, but because Aborigines were by nature murderers and robbers. In part he believes this because he is so ignorant of early Tasmanian history that he is unaware of the difference between land ownership and land occupancy and thinks the British settlers stopped hunting for the game on which the Aborigines relied in 1811. And in part he believes it because he fails to see that if indeed it were true that settlers were killed by Aborigines ‘simply because they could be’, it would make no sense that relations between Aborigines and settlers were more peaceful in the early days of colonisation, when the small settler population was extremely vulnerable, and far bloodier when the larger settler population was much more capable of defending itself. In Washout, Dawson failed to answer these very basic points. In his letter, he fails yet again. By implication, he acknowledges that he has no answers. These are not minor matters. They go to the very heart of Windschuttle’s case.

2. In my review, I disputed Windschuttle’s ‘crazed positivist’ argument that it was possible to know exactly how many Tasmanian Aborigines the British settlers killed. Concerning this fundamental issue, in his letter, Dawson says not one word. By implication, he concedes the point. Again, this is no minor matter. Windschuttle’s pseudo-precise claims about the size of the indigenous death toll in Tasmania are at the very centre of his book and of its enthusiastic reception by the right.

3. In my review, I pointed to the methodological inconsistency in Windschuttle’s account of the extinction of the Tasmanian ‘full blood’ indigenous population. Windschuttle requires documentary proof for every Aboriginal killing. He requires no documentary proof at all for death by disease. On this issue, in his letter, Dawson maintains yet another silence. Once again, he implicitly concedes the point.

4. In my review, I pointed out that, although one of Windschuttle’s big themes is the supposed genocide accusation of the so-called ‘orthodox school’, in reality, of his two major ‘orthodox’ scholars, Henry Reynolds has explicitly argued against the genocide idea in Tasmania, while Lyndall Ryan, in The Aboriginal Tasmanians, wrote of genocide, in a different context, only once. Dawson is mute on the Reynolds question. Again, he concedes the point. He claims, however, that in fact Ryan uses the word not once but ‘three times’ (!) and that the accusation is ‘implicit’ throughout. I’m happy to take his word on the former issue. On the latter, I have no idea what he means.

5. Another big theme of Washout is the supposed sin of postmodernism committed collectively by the authors I assembled in Whitewash. As I pointed out in my review, only one of these authors (Greg Lehman) could even remotely be seen as a postmodernist. Dawson again accepts the point, but on this occasion pretends that he never claimed anything else. ‘I repeatedly acknowledge that the authors Manne mentions are not postmodernists …’ Here are a couple of typical passages from Washout’s anti-postmodernist rant: ‘Within academia the postmodernists will not consider it necessary to show Windschuttle’s work is untrue, because truth is not their standard’, or again: ‘Now the heart and mind of Western civilization are under attack once again – from without by the pre-modern mystics, and from within by the postmodern subjectivists and skeptics.’ If Dawson excluded every one of Whitewash’s authors, except Greg Lehman, from these savage accusations, what are they doing in a book whose sole purpose is to offer a critique of Whitewash?

6. In Washout, Dawson implied that I had doctored the words of an Aboriginal woman, Peggy Patrick, whose evidence concerning the slaughter of her family Windschuttle had ridiculed. On this issue, Dawson is also now silent. I will accept that as an apology of sorts.

7. Concerning his response to the review – except for the complaint that, in a review of 1600 words, I did not deal with everything in his book of 260 pages – nothing of substance now remains.

Robert Manne, Bundoora, Vic.

Raw nerves

Dear Editor,

Craig Sherborne suggested that I should be indignant at Hannie Rayson’s play Two Brothers, as the author of one of the reference works cited in her programme notes (‘Theatre Notes’, ABR, June–July 2005). I have not yet seen the play, which I understand to be a free-ranging fictional melodrama, but I look forward to seeing it soon in Canberra. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such a melodrama, but it had enormous impact in raising public consciousness of the cruelties of slavery as practised in the US in the first half of the nineteenth century. Is Two Brothers badly written? I will judge that when I see it. Does it misrepresent the cruelties and indifference to human life of the Operation Relex border-protection régime in late 2001? I don’t think so. Many lives were lost in that period, and the causes have yet to be explained.

Fact: Palapa, the disabled adrift boat rescued by Tampa, nearly sank in a fierce storm the night before, with over 400 people on board. It had been twice spotted on the previous day by an Australian Coastwatch aircraft. The pilot reported the passengers waved clothing to indicate their distress, but no rescue boat was sent out from Christmas Island just sixty miles away on that day – a clear violation of Australia’s legal and ethical rescue-at-sea obligations.

Fact: two people died when an impounded SIEV boat under ADF guard in Ashmore Lagoon caught fire and sank.

Fact: under direct orders from Canberra, over 200 people were left on board a crippled, unseaworthy SIEV 4 (Olong) during a 22-hour circular holding tow by HMAS Adelaide, just outside Christmas Island’s Australian territorial seas. When the boat suddenly began to founder, the people were instructed to jump into the water. They were then left up to fifty-one minutes in the water or in Adelaide’s rubber dinghies before Adelaide received permission to allow them on-board. It is a miracle none drowned during this extended process of violation of rescue-at-sea obligations.

Fact: SIEV X, on which 353 persons drowned, sank in the Operation Relex border-protection zone, sixty miles south of Indonesia (a fact not yet admitted by Australian authorities, but easily demonstrable from official Australian and Indonesian data sources). The ADF did not conduct any aerial safety-of-life-at-sea search for the boat, assuming that the boat had either gone back to Indonesia or had not set out.

Fact: maps based on RAAF routine air-surveillance flight data supplied to the Senate investigating committee appear to have removed data pertaining to the presence of SIEV X and of Indonesian rescuing boats that picked up forty-five survivors the next day in the Operation Relex zone.

Fact: Australian Federal Police Commissioner Keelty declined to give evidence to the Senate committee on ‘what information the AFP held about the departure, seaworthiness and ultimate fate of SIEV X; the manner in which the AFP came into possession of that information; and the specific actions taken by the AFP with that information, including whom we told and when’.

Fact: the AFP still, after four years, refuses to make public the list of names of the 421 persons who sailed on SIEV X – information that it has admitted it has in its possession, from an undisclosed source.

Given such facts, which still remain protected from proper public judicial inquiry as to possible criminality, despite three motions passed over three years by the Senate, I can only applaud Rayson’s courage in writing a fictional melodrama inspired by such a disturbing public record.

The unusually energetic efforts by some reviewers and commentators to discredit the play are predictable. The play has clearly touched raw nerves in government circles. That may be a measure of its effectiveness.

Tony Kevin, Forrest, ACT

Dry as dust

Dear Editor,

As a reader, I expect a book reviewer to give me information (without retelling the story) and to offer constructive criticism based on a clear engagement with what the author has set out to do. Too often that engagement is lacking and a book is critiqued more on the basis that the author did not write the book the reviewer would have liked them to write.

A case in point is Paul de Serville’s review of Sara Hardy’s biography, The Unusual Life of Edna Walling (ABR, June–July 2005). Hardy sets out her intentions clearly in the introduction, acknowledging the ground-breaking books published in recent years about Walling’s garden designs and stating that, unlike those books, her purpose is ‘to explore the woman behind the work’. This she does. With skill and highly imaginative writing, Hardy takes us into the world of this independent, unconventional and creative woman working in the field of Australian horticulture in the 1920s and 1930s. The text is subtly layered: for those who want them, there are detailed endnotes; for those who wish to be caught up in the immediacy of Walling’s life, the narrative is more than sufficient.

Yet de Serville trivialises Hardy’s approach and berates her for not providing a more conventional biography, with factual information about influences on her subject’s work, the range of her clients, and so on. This information is actually there, just not in the style the reviewer expects or feels comfortable with. It is there in abundance in the specific section that he chooses as an example of the author’s ‘limitations’ – a series of snapshots written in the present tense in which Walling is, among other things, seen interacting with those clients. The reviewer also claims that ‘Hardy suggests that Walling was a lonely woman whose main passion was poured into her work’. This is his interpretation rather than the author’s suggestion, based, I would suggest, on the fact that Walling did not marry and that the only hints of passion belong to what he calls ‘Radclyffe Hall country’. He rightly remarks that the book is a study ‘in the variety of friendship’. Why then must this talented woman have been ‘lonely’?

None of the book’s liveliness and originality is captured in de Serville’s dry-as-dust review, and his failure to engage with the author’s approach is demonstrated at the outset by the two errors in the opening paragraph. He has apparently misunderstood the background of Hardy’s interest in her subject, which derives in part from a play about Walling in which she performed the central character. She describes her personal involvement, connecting writer and subject in a manner consistent with feminist critiques of the biographer’s traditional stance of objectivity The reviewer simply states that Hardy has ‘a play on Walling to her credit (1987)’, implying that she wrote Suzanne Spunner’s play, Edna for the Garden. This is careless and lazy reviewing. The book is a delight.

Sylvia Martin, Armidale, NSW

Sara Hardy plays Edna Walling

Dear Editor,

Just a note to correct a couple of errors in your review of my biography The Unusual Life of Edna Walling (ABR, June– July 2005). Paul de Serville’s opening paragraph states that I wrote a play about Edna Walling in 1987. This is not the case. I have indeed written a handful of plays, but, as my introduction to the book clearly states, I performed the role of Edna Walling in an outdoor play written by Suzanne Spunner, which was produced in 1989.

Sara Hardy, Kensington, Vic.

Partisan Kingsbury

Dear Editor,

We risk getting bogged down in detail, but briefly, on the specific points raised by Damien Kingsbury in his response (ABR, June–July 2005) to my review of Anthony Reid’s An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (ABR, May 2005): yes, no doubt Reid does qualify these days as the most authoritative historian on Aceh, as Kingsbury says; I wasn’t really addressing that. But the book was about Sumatra as a whole, and not only Aceh; and a book on Sumatra (and – I would argue – on Aceh, too!) requires the kind of understanding of Indonesian history which Reid has demonstrated over the years. Yes, since 1998 Indonesianists have been more doubtful than before about the ‘Indonesia project’; but my point was the way Reid summed this up. A related point occurs later in the review, in reference to the incomprehension of many Indonesians that Indonesia was or could be a contestable ‘project’. On the third (and perhaps most substantive) point, the key here is that, for whatever reasons, Acehnese demands have not been consistently for independence, but have varied over the years. Acehnese supporters will emphasise those times when the demand was independence; others will not.

This leads to the focus of the real debate, which is not about these relatively minor points; I suspect Kingsbury’s actual beef with me is that I may not seem sympathetic enough to Aceh’s cause. Rather, the substantive issues relate to Aceh’s future – what should happen there, and what will happen there. On these points, as an adviser to the Aceh delegation, Kingsbury is openly partisan; he seems to believe that Aceh should be independent, and indeed that Indonesia should break up. It is a small step from this to believe that Indonesia will break up (if in fact Kingsbury goes that far). On the first issue, like Reid in the book under discussion, I am impressed by the now strong evidence that many Acehnese no longer believe they are Indonesians, and the poor record of the Indonesian army in Aceh encourages these sentiments, spurred on by the East Timor example. A respectable but not unchallengeable case can be made that Aceh would be better off without Indonesia.

But in terms of what will happen, we might recall the glaring differences between Aceh and East Timor. The latter’s incorporation in Indonesia in 1975 was contested internationally for the whole period, not forgetting the unique role of the Catholic Church; by contrast, the international situation is much gloomier for Aceh. For more than sixty years, Indonesia has been internationally recognised as sovereign in Aceh, and not a single country challenges this. International intervention is thus much more difficult to generate than in East Timor, although events within Aceh itself – and within Indonesia – will probably turn out to be the prime determinants.

This is essentially speculative, but we can perhaps construct a number of scenarios for a possible Acehnese independence. To mention just one, Robert Cribb has put forward his ‘freedom for Java’ proposition: the idea that political will in Jakarta will suddenly or gradually weaken, leading to independence for Aceh, Papua and perhaps other islands (analogies with Yugoslavia and the USSR arise here). Again, I don’t think this can be entirely ruled out for Aceh, especially if the overall economic and security problems get too much for Yudhoyono or his successors; but there is little sign of it as yet. The best hope, as always, is for a negotiated settlement, giving Aceh a genuine modicum of autonomy, but falling short of independence. This is much more easily imagined than achieved, given the vested interests involved. We can only hope for the success of the current series of negotiations.

John Monfries, Pearce, ACT

Just a birdwatcher

Dear Editor,

Janet Grevillea (Letters, ABR, June–July 2005) flatters me by suggesting that I am an academic, albeit a nitpicking one, but I am not and never have been an academic of any description: I’m just a birdwatcher. In fact, the only academic involved in the matter under discussion, so far as I know, is the author of Australian Magpie, Professor Gisela Kaplan herself. Don’t misunderstand me, I think academics are very useful: they know stuff. I am acquainted with an actual academic, a botanist, and if called upon I’m sure she could explain to me the difference between the Proteaceae and the Pseudonymaceae, for example.

I think that we are all let down when a book that we should be able to rely on for accuracy – especially because it is written by a senior academic – is published containing errors of fact, even ones that Ms Grevillea categorises as ‘minor’. Possibly, Ms Grevillea and her friends and neighbours, along with their chums Martha, Mitch and Sore-eye, wouldn’t recognise some of the errors anyway, and they obviously don’t care, but they would be unwise to rely too much on this book for answers to their questions about magpies. It wouldn’t be as pointless as getting your information about elephant biology by reading Babar, but caution should be exercised.

Ms Grevillea sees as a highlight of the book some ‘joyful’ photos illustrating the ‘gentle and loving nature of magpies’ (try selling that one to the postie). By extrapolation, other highlights could be the ‘great tenderness’ shown by the magpie illustrated on page 107, the ‘mutual respect’ that magpies and sulphur-crested cockatoos have for each other described on page 80, the ‘life of relative misery’ led by some subordinate magpies mentioned on page 87; I could go on. This is neither science nor the ‘fruits of scientific research’ that Ms Grevillea sees in the book. It’s just silly.

Andrew Ley, Armidale, NSW

Listening to the original

Dear Editor,

Thank you for Keith Harrison’s marvellous La Trobe University Essay on translation (ABR, June–July 2005). Harrison so precisely exemplifies the difference between a translation which, to use his apt metaphor, has truly listened to the original poem (McAuley’s ‘Autumn’) and one which hasn’t heard its heart’s song (Stephen Mitchell’s version).

What I would add are just a few observations which further increased my admiration for McAuley’s poem. McAuley was a master of metrical variation. His discussion of scansion in A Primer of English Versification (1967) is a must-read for any young poet wanting to understand how and why the music of metre is meaningful. McAuley’s mastery is beautifully exemplified in this poem. His disciplined use of metrical substitutions against a background of iambic pentameter lends the poem both its elegant slowness and highlights moments of intensity. Take the way in which the simple substitution of a trochee in the first foot of lines one, four and five gives an emotional warmth and energy to the address to the ‘Heart’ in the first, and to the exhortations in the fourth and fifth lines. The repetition of the substitution in each of these three instances quietly serves to reinforce its emotive effect. See how the even and slow pacing of the second and third lines derives in contrast from the pure iambic pentameter of these lines, a metrical parallelism that echoes the parallelism of their content. In my scansion, I would mark a spondee (a double strong stress) on three feet in the poem: ‘fruits swell’, ‘not build’ and the first two syllables of ‘long letters’: the effect, in each case, is the creation of a small emotional peak, a sense of the music of the line itself ‘swelling’ at that point. Finally, Harrison notes the slowing of tempo that McAuley achieves by adding a few small words not in the original, the ‘and’s and ‘home’ in line ten. In fact, McAuley’s genius here is both to meet the requirements of the pentameter and to fill out the metrical music in such a way as to enrich the emotional tenor of the line. The extra, stressed syllable of the resonant word ‘home’ is necessary to complete the final iamb, while the ‘and’s add the unstressed syllables needed to create the preceding iambs, without which the line would be a jarring series of unmitigated strong stresses.

My thanks to Harrison for bringing to my attention a wonderful poem I might not otherwise have read.

Judith Bishop, Sydney, NSW

A statistical objection

Dear Editor,

In ‘Little women’ (‘Advances’, ABR, April 2005), you ponder ‘the sorry dearth of female correspondents in ABR’. While women constitute a ‘clear majority of our subscribers and readers’, women do not appear to constitute a clear majority of anything else, not just the letters to the editor writers (one-fifth are female by your account) but also board members (three out of eight are women), editorial advisers (five out of thirteen are female) or reviewers. In the issue in which you bemoaned the lack of ‘learned, forthright, opinionated, confident’ women, twenty-three men and nine women were chosen to review books and journals. They reviewed publications written or edited by nineteen women and seventeen men. If April is not an unrepresentative month, women dominate at the front and back end of the magazine’s activities. However, the producers of critical commentary are largely men. Little wonder women feel marginalised from the pages of ABR.

Select females for the board and as editorial assistants, and through their networks they will suggest more females to be the reviewers of your books. This may even shift the tenor of the letters to the editor page from defensive trashing and counter-trashing to something more akin to a constructive conversation. Your women readers may then feel more included in the wider dialogue that could be ABR.

Chilla Bulbeck, Adelaide, SA

Queenscliff or Queenscliffe

Dear Editor,

In a letter published in your May edition on the spelling of Queenscliff(e) in Barry Hill’s The Enduring Rip (reviewed by Jo Case, ABR, March 2005), John Bugg, the Mayor of Queenscliffe, suggested that the ‘e’ on the Borough ‘probably relates to a grand flourish that many a council officer exhibited during the Victorian era’, but that is not so. The municipality has been named ‘Queenscliffe’ from its inception.

The residents of the township of Queenscliff resolved at a public meeting on 16 January 1863 to seek the formation of a municipality to avoid annexation to the adjoining Roads Board. On 19 February 1863 the Hon. Thomas Howard Fellows sent a handwritten petition to the governor of Victoria. The petition concluded: ‘Your petitioners therefore pray that your Excellency with the advice of the Executive Council will declare by proclamation the locality before mentioned a Municipal District by the name of “The Municipal District of Queenscliffe”.’

The spelling ‘Queenscliffe’ is quite clear in the petition, and other correspondence shows that Fellows regularly referred to the town as ‘Queenscliffe’. Fellows’s spelling was adopted, and the Municipal District of Queenscliffe was proclaimed in the Government Gazette of 12 May 1863. It became the Borough of Queenscliffe in October 1863 under the Municipal Consolidation Act.

Over the years, the township of Queenscliff has often been wrongly referred to as ‘Queenscliffe’, and it is occasionally seen today, but Council officers cannot be blamed for the ‘e’, as the name originated before the first officers were appointed.

Ray Raison, Point Lonsdale, Vic.