London seen through a haze of smoke and fire in J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, is the evocative cover image for Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel. The Great Fire comes twenty-three years after Hazzard’s brilliantly composed, witty, and ultimately tragic work The Transit of Venus. Like the earlier novel, The Great Fire is ambitious in theme and intricately structured. It explores the human response to war and destruction, with the great fire of Hiroshima the immediate cause of the novel’s journeys among maimed people and damaged places in 1947.

Aldred Leith, a thirty-two-year-old British officer with a heroic war record, is sent to Japan to write his impressions of war’s aftermath in the area devastated by the atom bomb. Restless, estranged from his parents, divorced and uncertain of his future in civilian life, he welcomes an assignment that will deepen his knowledge of Asia. Having lived in Hong Kong as a child and later travelled widely in China, Leith has broader sympathies than most of his colleagues. He observes with growing distaste the psychological distortions that follow the Allied victory. At their best, the victors are patronising about anything Asian; at their worst, they take self -aggrandising pleasure in humiliating the vanquished.

Images of death confront Leith from the moment he arrives in Japan. A frail prison camp survivor, Gardiner, offers a ‘bone china claw’ to shake hands. The two men talk about the disruptions war has brought to private life and the near-impossibility of renewing love. Gardiner, due for repatriation to Britain, dies that same night. The next day, Leith, so recent an acquaintance, is his only mourner.

Billeted in a military compound, Leith reports to Brigadier Barry Driscoll, a belligerent Australian, and his wife, Melba, who has her own style of ferocity. This appalling couple, whose satiric presentation Patrick White could not have surpassed, relish their newly grasped power. They do not distinguish between authority and cruelty in their dealings with the Japanese. Leith’s wish to learn about the survivors of Hiroshima brings instant hostility:

Mrs Driscoll was of middling height only, an illusory tallness being created by her large forcible head and martial shoulders, and by fluffed white hair that, upswept, made its contribution. Behind spectacles, at the centre of a thick lens, the eye shone, small, animate, and marble. To Leith, who went forward putting out his hand, she said: ‘I’m sorry for you.’ A piping voice, active with hostility. ‘Arriving on such a humid day. We’re just going to table. We put in a proper table, we don’t eat off the floor. But I suppose you like things to be Japanese.’

Hostility deepens when Leith overhears Driscoll, out of control with rage, abusing a young Japanese interpreter, who subsequently kills himself because of the humiliation. Counterpointing the antagonism between Leith and Driscoll is Leith’s friendship with Driscoll’s young son and daughter. The son, Benedict, is an invalid, dying from some rare disease. Neglected by his parents, who felt entitled to healthy children, Benedict is sustained by the care and companionship of his sister, Helen. And it is with seventeen-year-old Helen that Leith falls in love.

The central situation thus becomes the predicament of the lovers. There are formidable barriers: Helen’s age; her parents’ hatred of Leith; and the duties that soon take him from Japan to Hong Kong, and home to England. During their separation, Helen is removed to New Zealand where, like a captive in her tower, she awaits her rescuer.

The characterisation of Helen is a weakness in an otherwise assured and resonant novel. It’s not just the improbability of such intelligence, beauty, and gentleness emerging from the brutal and vulgar Driscoll ménage. Perhaps it’s unfair to invoke Tolstoy, but the obvious comparison for this story of love and war is War and Peace and Prince Andrei’s first sight of the enchanting young Natasha. In a novel replete with literary allusions, Aldred Leith’s unusual first name may be intended to echo Andrei’s. But, unlike Natasha, Helen is pure spirit and intelligence, without a distinctive voice or physical reality. Describing her as a changeling or a mermaid does not help. There is a finicky concentration on Helen’s hands. One hand is glimpsed by Leith at the dinner table, lying at rest among the ceramic cups and red lacquer dishes. Before he can see Helen’s face or form, he waits, alert as a birdwatcher, for the other hand to come into view. In later scenes, her hands tremble, or are ‘turned by nervousness into starfish’. This small imperfection only underlines Helen’s idealisation as the only being untainted by war or disease.

Fortunately, the love story of Leith and Helen is by no means all the novel has to offer. It provides formal unity: it gives Leith a purpose, but it matters less than the people and places seen during his odyssey. His friend and alter ego, the Australian Peter Exley, a former art historian who serves on a War Crimes Tribunal, is a sadder and more complex figure than the rather wooden Leith. The Hong Kong scenes, in which Exley struggles against depression and self-doubt, are haunting and wonderfully observed. On his solitary walks, Exley contemplates poverty, dirt, and disease, as well as the natural beauty of harbour and hillside. He dines at Government House, where colonial power dwindles without knowing its own absurdity. He shares quarters with fellow Australian Rystrom, whose assignment is the War Graves Commission. In Rystrom, the author hits the familiar target of the Australian male’s crass humour:

Rystrom said it was funny they should both be Australians, he and Exley, and on loan to the British Army. He said ‘You War Crimes lot’, and hooted like the siren. Rystrom could introduce disbelief into anything: unmasking was his vocation. With suspicion he turned over Exley’s Chinese and Japanese textbooks, his volumes on international law: ‘A beaut racket.’

Rystrom jokes about the fact that the War Graves job has given him ‘a new lease of life’. Yet he suffers from nightmares in which he relives memories of dismembered men and sheets of flame. Hazzard does not give her cultured heroes a monopoly on psychological war damage.

Reading this novel in 2004, Australians (and New Zealanders, too) may feel that Hazzard’ s satiric glances at antipodean provincialism are outdated, forgetting that the Sydney of Exley’s boyhood, from which he escaped to pre­war Italy, was the 1930s. Hazzard, now in her early seventies, left Australia when she was sixteen and has spent most of her life in New York. This is an historical novel, as well as a novel about history, and its version of Australia’s past has the authority of Hazzard’s own experience.

What lingers in the memory from this quiet, yet powerful, novel are the scenes in which Leith and Exley take their solitary walks among the ruins in Hong Kong and London. These and other scenes could stand alone as short stories; they are a reminder of Hazzard’s mastery of that form. Economy, wit, gravity, and grace make The Great Fire an outstanding work, in which the fuzziness of the love story is more than compensated for by the richness of the contingent life.

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Throughout Fact or Fission? it is clear that it is not possible to study Australian nuclear history in isolation from the US. Australia ultimately renounced nuclear weapons and signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970 because of US pressure. Gorton was aware, as he flirted with the construction of a reactor that could build fissile material for bombs, that ANZUS itself might be sacrificed. Later, Washington would be indirectly responsible for undermining Australian non-proliferation credentials by stressing that ANZUS was defended by nuclear weapons. In this sense, the book reinforces what many writers have long concluded: Australia is a dependent power that seldom stands up to its ‘great and powerful’ English-speaking friends. John Howard has more in common with John Curtin then many would suspect.

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Throughout Fact or Fission? it is clear that it is not possible to study Australian nuclear history in isolation from the US. Australia ultimately renounced nuclear weapons and signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970 because of US pressure. Gorton was aware, as he flirted with the construction of a reactor that could build fissile material for bombs, that ANZUS itself might be sacrificed. Later, Washington would be indirectly responsible for undermining Australian non-proliferation credentials by stressing that ANZUS was defended by nuclear weapons. In this sense, the book reinforces what many writers have long concluded: Australia is a dependent power that seldom stands up to its ‘great and powerful’ English-speaking friends. John Howard has more in common with John Curtin then many would suspect.

Set in a seaside town whose name changes with the vagaries of its fortunes (Salvation, Ruination, Ridicule), Andrew Lindsay’s Slapping Man is a simpleton called Ernie who discovers a remarkable use for his gargantuan jaw. Determined to transform this facial liability into a money-making asset, he positions himself at the local market next to The Human Pincushion and The Man That Never Laughs and transforms himself into The Slapping Man. As the rhyme on the cover explains, Ernie’s spruiking patter relies on the desire for cathartic violence: ‘Feeling poorly, sick or weak? Just come down and crack my check! Don’t be sad, Don’t need to Frown, The Slapping Man has come to town!’ Owing to the circumstances of his conception and the size of his jaw, Ernie seems to have been destined for a career as a human punching bag, an easy and willing target for malcontents to vent their anger upon. And there are plenty of candidates, considering Salvation’s disaster-riddled history.

Late in in the thirteenth century, Alfonso X (‘The Wise’), king of Castille, declared: ‘If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.’ He raised a storm. That wickedness, natural disaster and the inexorable corruption of things filled the world with suffering had hardly gone unnoticed, of course. Theologians had long sought to reconcile the existence of evil with God’s omnipotence and benevolence. But Alfonso reanimated a worm in the heart of reason: the suspicion that, really, God could have done better.

Leibniz wrote a theodicy, a defence of God. If only we knew all, all that had been and was to be, then we would see that this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire replied that, if this was the best, he wanted to know what the others were like. But Alexander Pope agreed, in indurate lines:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, Direction, which thou canst see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear. WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

Like several other publishers, UNSW Press and Text Publishing have produced responses to the recent war against Iraq. The intention appears to be to engage critically with popular perceptions of the war before these harden into accepted historical ‘memory’. The potential benefits of quickly produced, historically aware and politically critical books, which collate and deal comprehensively with the existing evidence and arguments raised by the mass media on a particular issue, are obvious. The two main dangers with publications of this type are that editing and production standards may slip and that the desire to compete with mass-media forms may lead to a replication of, rather than an alternative to, standard journalistic commentary.

Raimond Gaita’s edited collection succumbs to the first of these dangers; indeed, both texts would have benefited from a further proofing. It is Geoffrey Barker’s text, however, that is open to the more serious charge of being insufficiently differentiated from reportage.

For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy‘s Road: Life Stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

More a homage than a warts-and-all tale, Keeffe’s tome contains numerous feel-good and funny moments. For example, we learn that Dodson, the so-called ‘father of reconciliation’, was born in a laundry toilet, ‘nearly drowning in the Phenyl used for cleaning the ... pans’; and that Patrick’s grandfather, Paddy Djiagween, claimed his citizenship rights in person. As Patrick explains:

The city of Aveiro is compact yet important, with wealthy foundations in the industries of fisheries and salt. The bright white cobblestones of the town’s historical centre evoke its economic history: rock salt crystals with darker cobbled nautical motifs (anchors, rope, fishes). Tiled walls in blue (azulejos) are both practical in the salty air and signal sea. Broad salt pans nearby bless the air with a refreshing sea breeze, the Portuguese equivalent of the ‘Fremantle doctor’. The bright, white light is almost Western Australian in quality.

Aveiro has a spacious modern university built on flat land reclaimed from the salt pans, an easy walk from medieval downtown. Its library complex is the work of Portugal’s famous contemporary architect Alvaro Siza Vieira, and its buildings are framed by elegant avenues of Canary Island Palms (Phoenix canariensis). What brought us to this gracious campus?

Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

This double status of poetry (as a way of resisting and as a form of resistance in itself) suggests other problems. How, for instance, can a poet be true to both the experience that engenders a poem and to poetry? Stevens reminds us that post-Romantic lyric poetry deals with meanings that pro­foundly resist expression. Made from the network of language, poetry is a kind of net, something made up of a series of gaps. Poets are particularly attuned to this condition, a condition that (since poetry relies on language) is paradoxical. Poetry is a kind of negativity. Its silences and gaps shadow the words we have for those things that resist words, resist imaging: experience, presence, love, death.

It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.

On top of this, claims made about ‘youth’ – even if the youths in question are participants in clearly defined subcultures or ethnic groups – are hard to maintain and analyse, because youth itself is such an awkward pigeonhole. Naturally, the slipperiness of the cohort doesn’t stop the researchers and analysts from trying to advocate on youth’s behalf in the ongoing (apparently adversarial and antipathetic, actually complex and interdependent) battle between young people and their parents, or the newspapers, or the government.

The lowdown from those who would tell their story is that the ‘kids’ are, well, alright, even if they are having it off in hot cars whilst listening to sexist, violent hip hop, doing E and getting tats on their necks. The claims made on behalf of the young can be risible: the edited collection Indigenous states in its acknowledgments that ‘young people are active, inventive cultural creators and skilled cultural mediators’, as ludicrous a generalisation as ‘young people are lazy, thieving. incoherent’.

In 1985 Howard Taylor was the first artist to be awarded the Australia Council’s Emeritus Award for senior artists. The same year, he was honoured with a retrospective by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Gary Dufour, who is also responsible for the current exhibition, Howard Taylor: Phenomena. Recognised for his very successful career in Perth, Taylor has nonetheless remained a local hero, virtually unknown in the eastern states.

Many people’s introduction to Taylor’s work came during the exhibition Phenomena: New Painting in Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Melbourne’s Ian Potter Gallery in 2001, the year of Taylor’s death, aged eighty-three. There, curator Michael Wardell placed Taylor’s works as the altarpiece in a chapel of painting that reified an abstracted art sensitive to natural forces. With this major retrospective exhibition – formerly at the Museum of Contemporary Art, now at the Art Gallery of Western Australia -Taylor is finally getting his due. Taylor’s exhibition surveys a lifetime of making drawings, paintings and sculptures, and is accompanied by a major catalogue, with a biographical essay by the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Gary Dufour and the MCA’s Russell Storer, who analyses the enigmatic beauty of Taylor’s late works.

At one point in A War for Gentlemen, a school-teacher is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to her class in rural New South Wales in 1872. Seven-year-old Annie Fitzhenry excitedly announces that her father had fought for the North during the US Civil War. When the teacher subsequently visits Annie’s home, both she and the child are abruptly undeceived. Charles Fitzhenry is indeed a veteran of that war, but had served in the Confederate army.

Harriet Beecher Slowe forcefully argued that the disintegration of the families of slaves was perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slavery. In French’s novel, it is racial prejudice that separates parents, children and siblings – tragically, because entirely unnecessarily.

Annie’s mistake is not the only fiction-inspired error in A War for Gentlemen. At eighteen, Charles Fitzhenry. son of a prosperous land-owner. already has a firm idea of what battle will be like. based on his reading of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, regimental histories and newspapers. Believing in the right of the Southern states to secede, and wanting to be a hero, he travels from Sydney to the estate of his great-uncle in Carolina.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans have been asking why the world hates them. Now it’s Australia’s tum. Why do Asians applaud when Dr Mahathir mocks us? Why docs the Indonesian prime minister snub Australian leaders? Why, despite progress with bilateral trade agreements, do we seem to be permanently locked out of organisations such as ASEAN and ASEM?

Australia’s Ambivalence towards Asia, a thoughtful and wide-ranging book, tackles these questions. It is a jeremiad which examines the racism underlying Australian attitudes towards Asia, as conveyed through political statements, media representations and Blanche D’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach ( 1981) – one of the best-selling Australian novels about Asia. The central argument is simple:

If white Australians have not first learnt to relate with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, it is unlikely that they will be equipped to adequately relate to peoples who arc the Asian ‘others’ within Australia, leave alone those ‘others’ in the wider Asia-Pacific region.

There is a wonderful sense of liberation in the title of this short novel: a sense of being able to gaze at a distant blue horizon and sniff salty sea air. It provides an exhilarating contrast with the atmosphere of claustrophobia suggested in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s work of similar length and loosely comparable themes. But whereas the Underground Man rarely ventures into the street and never strays far from St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the nameless protagonist of lgor Gelbach’s tale moves constantly between Leningrad, Moscow and Sukhumi. Sukhumi is a Georgian resort town on the Black Sea, where Rubin, a theatre director and friend of the dilettante narrator, owns a little-used apartment. Rubin prods our narrator to stay in it and enjoy the sun, the palm trees, the esplanade and the coffee, but also to write a novel about a certain theoretical physicist called Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest was one of the circle surrounding Albert Einstein in the early years of the twentieth century when Einstein spent five years in St Petersburg. The narrator is not averse to the project, but even when he occupies the Sukhumi apartment, the muse remains elusive.

At last year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Notes from the Esplanade was one of the works I introduced in a session called Absolutely Fabulous, or Writing the Fable’. The title and subtitle gave me pause, because the fabulous and the fable seemed to suggest diametrically opposite meanings, as in Sigmund Freud’s essay on the canny/ uncanny. A fable is, after all, a short tale or poem in which everyday beasts, such as hares and tortoises, engage in contests or trials whose outcome points to some universal human truth. A fabulous beast, on the other hand, is more likely to be a half-eagle, half-lion such as the gryphon, or perhaps a Cerberus, a three-headed dog.

Rupert Murdoch founded The Australian in 1964 as a bold statement or his belief that this country needed a quality national daily newspaper. His action was based on a nation-building vision that he shared with the leader or the Country Party, John McEwen, who deeply influenced him at that time.

For twenty years, The Australian lost money, a strange anomaly in the life of its ruthlessly commercial owner. In a 1994 address to the free-market thinktank, the Centre for Independent Studies, Murdoch mentioned these losses but argued that some things were more important than short-term profits – ideas in society. He went on to quote John Maynard Keynes’s famous lines about the significance of political and philosophical ideas to men who regarded themselves as supremely practical. In the media business, ‘we are all ruled by ideas’, Murdoch added.

Most Murdoch critics see him as a man of crude power interested largely in profits. This significantly underestimates him. He is a man of ideas, and his tenacity with The Australian meant that throughout the 1970s and 1980s it had a major ideological impact on the national agenda. It became the most consistent populariser of hardline free-market economics. Today it is the most important outlet for the culture war being waged by the intellectual right.

No chick non-fic lit

Dear Editor,

Aviva Tuffield’s review of my book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge (ABR, December 2003/January 2004), sends disturbing mixed messages that. I believe, require further dialogue. Tuffield acknowledges that the book is ‘a fine scholarly work’ and an ‘important contribution to Australian history’ by a writer with ‘evident skills’. She grants that the work ‘adds complexity’ to both the historical record and certain theoretical paradigms. Yet Tuffield is evidently perplexed that this ‘thesis-turned-book’ should be ‘brilliantly promoted’ and ‘engulfed in a haze of marketing’.

My apologies if Tuffield expected to snuggle up with a ripping good yarn on a sexy topic only to find herself trawling through an argument-driven work of scholarship, complete with notes and manifest historiography. No one is more aware than I that BLL is not a page-turner. Given Tuffield’s concern that BLL ‘feels like a missed opportunity’, she might be interested to know that I did in fact have ample interest from commercial publishers to produce a ‘narrative history’ in keeping with the ‘current vogue’ that Tuffield identifies. Though tempted. I decided to reject these advances (and, no doubt, far flashier marketing campaigns than a university press can offer) in favour of publishing a ‘harder’, more analytical book. My instinct was that the iconic status of the subject matter (pubs) and the ground-breaking nature of the research (women mostly ran them) required the legitimacy of scholarship in order to be taken seriously by academic and popular audiences alike. The sort of anecdotal, biographical, interview-based book about women and pubs that Tuffield would have preferred could too easily have been dismissed as ‘chick non-fic lit’. My aim was to produce a book that had crossover appeal; a detailed laying out of the historical evidence, written in a direct and accessible style.

The new edition of Henry Reynolds’s acclaimed The Law of The Land is described on its front cover as ‘the ground-breaking book about land rights in Australia’, but ‘the heart-breaking book’ would be more apt. Reynolds has updated his classic text by documenting the progress (or otherwise) of native title since the 1992 Mabo High Court decision. It is not a happy story.

In the book’s first edition, published in 1987, Reynolds advanced the argument that native title rights were recognised – but not properly protected –under British common law in the early nineteenth century. On the frontier, where violence ruled, those legal rights were generally disregarded, but, as Reynolds argued, not necessarily explicitly extinguished. The thesis outlined in The Law of the Land is popularly believed to have been influential in the 1992 Mabo judgement, a perception fuelled in part by Reynolds himself. In the postscript to the book’s second edition, published in 1992, soon after the Mabo decision was handed down, he wrote:

[T]he court had clearly absorbed the lessons about Australian history embodied in the new historiography of European-Aboriginal relations that had been written over the previous twenty years. Law and history now coincided in the view that the Aborigines were not dispossessed in an apocalyptic moment in 1788 but in piecemeal fashion over a long period of time.

Dark River is John Jenkins’s fourteenth collection of poetry (including the six volumes he has produced with Ken Bolton) and a welcome addition to his oeuvre. This new solo collection contains the wit, language play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins, as well as emotional depth and an infectious delight in language. Demonstrating this are the touching love poem ‘Why I Like You’ and three key elegies, or ‘dedicatory’ poems. The first of these, ‘Long Black’, dedicated to John Anderson, opens the book. This fine poem captures Anderson’s philosophy and his way with light and landscape. Anderson, a shy poet who died at the age of forty-nine without troubling The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, left behind three books whose cadences and unique way of writing about nature and its interconnectedness are still held in great esteem by those who are aware of his work, mainly other Australian poets. In ‘Long Black’, Jenkins (who accompanied Anderson on bushwalks) speaks to his departed companion, reiterating and questioning some of Anderson’s philosophy:

I watch the long black drink
turn in my hands. You say that
where you come from is where
you go to. You say the nothing in
everything is just nothing again.
Air fills the winter trees, but their
cold leaves can’t bring you back.

The National Library holds a vast array of items relating to Australian childhood. Within the general collection there is the literature itself, ranging from the first children’s book published in Australia (Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, 1841) through sundry omnibuses, to the latest work by Ursula Dubosarksy or Andy Griffiths – not to mention the glories of the John Ryan Comic Book Collection. This material is supplemented by biographies and autobiographies, and by a wide range of non-fiction publications documenting childhood in Australia. The Newspaper and Microform Collection is also a major resource in this area.

This vast amount of material is hugely amplified by holdings in the Library’s special collections. Among Oral History recordings are a great number of interviewees from all walks of life, who have given accounts of their childhood experiences. These range from Mary Gilmore’s recollections of the 1870s, through to the experiences of street kids in the 1990s. Likewise, the Library’s Folklore Collection incorporates children’s play songs and nursery rhymes. And the Oral History Collection includes Professor Fiona Stanley’s recent National Library Kenneth Myer Lecture on the subject of children’s rights and welfare.

Oh, happy days indeed. These are good times for readers and perhaps not so bad for writers either, as Griffith Review joins Meanjin and Heat in publishing work that might otherwise struggle to reach us. That such thoughtful and sometimes excellent writing should often be rewarded with risible rates of pay is less satisfactory, but it was ever thus, apart from the pennies from heaven offered so briefly, and controversially, by the conjunction of the Australia Council for the Arts and The Australian. The Council helps keep Meanjin and Heat afloat, and for this we should all be grateful. Griffith Review, however, is the result of a collaboration between the university and ABC Books, which is perhaps why, unlike the other two, it includes a subscription offer with the usual earnest blandishments of so-called highbrow journals (‘celebrates good writing and promotes public debate’). Still, judging by its second issue, Dreams of Land, no one could dispute the former claim, and, with the latter building up steam. the Griffith Review looks set to brighten our days for the foreseeable.

In the late 1960s the English film scholar Alan Lovell presented a paper on British cinema to the British Film Institute. His paper’s title, ‘The British Cinema: An Unknown Cinema’, seemed a reasonable assessment of the situation at that time. Film studies was establishing itself as a legitimate area of intellectual and academic research in Britain; film courses were being set up in universities, with some lecturing positions funded by the British Film Institute; and academic and trade presses had embarked on a vigorous programme devoted to books on cinema. Even so, the initial flurry of film books favoured American genres (the western, the gangster film) and American and European directors.

Surely, here at the heart of things,
Here is the ideal place for the attempt,
Here where the Christmas sales dispose
Their day-late offerings
(From which, it seems, scarcely a soul’s exempt):
Whitegoods and videos,
The manchester, the saucepans and CDs,
The swimwear, lingerie that sings
The body and its moistening promises.

The Blue Mountains glimmer on many horizons. For Sydney-siders, they are a blue haze that promises a weekend away among the gums and spooky grand hotels. For visitors from further afield, they offer wilderness supported by tourist kitsch: statues made from chicken wire; bogus Aboriginal legends; 3-D movies; and, best of all, the scenic railway, a sardine can on a high wire that sways across the valley beneath Echo Point.

The mountains are a place of beginnings and endings. In 1813 three white men made what they called, in their blindness and arrogance, The First Crossing of the mountains. Convicts tried to cross them, too, searching for China or for colonies of whites who were free and happy. A century later, the mountains were becoming a place for final steps and breaths. People leapt to their deaths from beauty spots. Descendants of the first inhabitants of this breathtaking place, including the Darug and Gundungurra people, still live there, although in public discourse the Aboriginality of the mountains is more often inscribed in inanimate objects such as The Three Sisters or the Orphan Rock.

Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the disintegration and demise of the Soviet Empire a decade later, and the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 have all heightened interest in ‘understanding’ Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution was very much a revolution of the ‘countryside’ against the glitter, domination and corrupt politics of the ‘metropolis’. Its success created an enormous interest in Islam. For the West, the demise of the USSR was more than the demise of what Ronald Reagan had dubbed an ‘Evil Empire’; it removed the ‘enemy’ whose containment had dominated the politics of the Cold War in the US and its European allies. Its historical significance was described by the American political scientist Francis Fukayama in his influential essay ‘The End of History’. The search was on for the enemies of international capitalism and liberal democracy. A few years later, in an equally influential and widely read work, The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington identified Islam as one of the potential enemies of Western civilisation.

Does Australia need new laws against terrorism? In 1979 Mr Justice Windeyer of the NSW Supreme Court argued that all the forms of violent wrongdoing that are called terrorism are already punishable as crimes under Commonwealth or state law. The best safeguard against new terrors and apprehensions, he told the Hope Royal Commission on Australia’s Intelligence Agencies, lay in the rigorous enforcement of existing criminal law rather than in making new laws expressly about ‘terrorism’.

His words were heeded then, but they have since been increasingly ignored by Australian lawmakers. Indeed, Prime Minister John Howard’s uncritical acceptance of President George W. Bush’s ‘war against terror’ has led to the formulation of more and more draconian laws in Australia, as well as the fusion of police and military forces and functions that should remain separate. Ministers seek to justify these measures in what Jenny Hocking, in Terror Laws, describes as a debasement of language: a banal, simplistic, cartoon-like dichotomy of good and bad, of ‘evil’ versus ‘freedom-loving’ people. Specific instances of political violence are abstracted from their political and social context. ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, ‘rogue states’ and ‘axis of evil’, indeed the very notion of a ‘war on terror’ depend on a rejection of complexity and a denial of reason. They are dangerous forms of US, and now Australian, baby talk.

Lawrence Bourke’s A Cold Touch begins with a poem called ‘Advice to a Failure’. Expressed with such force as to render grammar a secondary consideration, its argument is hard to grasp al first, but the poem is only technically meaningless: it contains, I think, an important truth:

The committee can stick
their mate with medals until the man’s all brass
but his brilliant chest will never help him frame
a line to shine like those of poets who came
to nothing but writing well writing for themselves
and us the simple truths some call fiction.

The line that shines, in other words, is a prize that outshines the brass and medals. Few, I suspect, would disagree with Bourke on this specific point. But why is something so uncontroversial expressed with such conspicuous force? Is Bourke, I wonder, as baffled as I am as to why certain books get medals at all?

An author who calls his book Wonderful is asking for trouble. He is either very confident or unusually foolhardy. Andrew Humphreys’ second novel has some ‘wonderful’ things in it, but it is ultimately too much of a good thing: it is too long, and tries to cover too much ground. I know nothing of his first novel (The Weight of the Sun, 2001), but one thing that strikes this reader is that few Australian novels betray as little of their author’s country of origin as this does. Wonderful could as easily have been written in California or Hungary, to choose two of the novel’s locations. This seems to me to be a matter for praise; there is no reason why Australian novelists should be doggedly bent on explaining their country to their readers. In a grown-up country, authors, like filmmakers and artists, should locate their work and their themes wherever inclination leads them. Nationalism is one of art’s corsets.

Chandani Lokugé’s second novel touches on a theme common to such varied texts as Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2002) and Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997): the Western fascination with, and exploitation of, the communities of beautiful Asian beaches.

Turtle Nest takes the postcard-perfect idyll of a Sri Lankan beach as the setting for a far from idyllic tale about exploitation and family tragedy. Aruni journeys to this beach from Australia in order to find out more about the history of her mother, Mala, but her pilgrimage does not give her peace.

In the bitter federal election of 1917, Labor’s member for the marginal seat of Corio fell victim to dirty tricks. As a quartermaster sergeant in the AIF’s 3rd Division, A.T. Ozanne shouldn’t have been opposed. But Prime Minister Billy Hughes became electorally desperate, and he published a cable from General Monash, the division’s commander, which portrayed Ozanne as a deserter. Ozanne was indeed not in France with the AIF volunteers, but it was because he had been given medical leave, quite authentically. Monash was careless with the facts, and perhaps misled by officers who disliked Ozanne. Hughes’s ruthless use of the cable destroyed Ozanne’s political career.

Some extenuation applies to Monash. The general neither knew why Hughes wanted a report on Ozanne, nor anticipated its publication. The man who procured the cable knew exactly what he was doing. This was Keith Murdoch, head of the Melbourne Herald’s London bureau: ostensibly an independent reporter but acting in fact as Hughes’s political fixer. One assignment was gathering material to damage Ozanne: Murdoch’s real standing was known to the AIF generals, so, once the false desertion charge was unearthed, Murdoch could quickly persuade Monash that the cable was a legitimate prime ministerial request.

For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy’s Road: Life stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

More a homage than a warts-and-all tale, Keeffe’s tome contains numerous feel-good and funny moments. For example, we learn that Dodson, the so-called ‘father of reconciliation’, was born in a laundry toilet, ‘nearly drowning in the Phenyl used for cleaning the... pans’; and that Patrick’s grandfather, Paddy Djiagween, claimed his citizenship rights in person. As Patrick explains:

[When the queen visited in 1963] he shook the white-gloved hand and said to her ‘why can’t we have the same rights as the white man?’ The queen promptly agreed and indicated her wish that he be given full rights. My Grandfather went across to the Continental Hotel and demanded a beer. The barmaid was startled and refused, as the consumption of alcohol was forbidden to those without a dog tag of citizenship rights. An aide of the queen was summoned and confirmed the citizenship rights of the old man. He sipped his beer with a sense of gratitude – due more to the achievement than thirst I feel.

My mother loved to read essays. I suppose it was pretty clear what an essay meant to her. Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Murdoch were among its practitioners. Fine writing was part of its trademark; that, and a kind of shapeliness. It was not much like the journalism that my father practised, and not at all like the scholarly essays – now called papers – which nobody in this country wrote back then, except in the sciences. And then, in another region altogether, there were those essays that we had to write at school: scrannel exercises written in a hurry, laying a bit of logic on enough empirical information to pass. Those in History were an utter mystery to me, since my work could range from failure to stardom, for no apparent set of reasons. In English, I could more or less see the point.

The essay has fallen upon complicated times, as this new, variegated anthology goes out of its way to demonstrate. Peter Craven’s Best Australian Essays 2003 is a fat book; an assembly of a great many pieces of writing. In the past, Craven’s reputation was that of a rigorous discriminator, something of an aesthete, unfavourably disposed toward the merely academic and the journalistic. Perhaps this was something of a caricature, but it appeared to fit him in the high old days of Scripsi. But the editor who is flagged by this anthology is an easy-going populist, a hatcher of the curate’s emu’s egg.

For a man who was supposed to have a shot memory, Alan Bond has a remarkable power of recall. In the mid­1990s, facing fraud charges concerning his dealings in Manet’s painting La Promenade, he – or rather, his barristers – successfully argued in court that a series of minor strokes had left him with brain damage and a memory so defective he couldn’t possibly be expected to answer prosecution questions. Those Australians who reckoned all along that he faked the forgetfulness, the shuffling gait, and the vacant stare at the television cameras outside court will doubtless be confirmed in their view that he’s a shameless liar.

The healing passage of time, and plenty of R and R at his posh London penthouse or swanky English country estate, have, it appears, miraculously restored his faculties to full capacity. Enough, anyhow, to allow him to pursue a business career as a corporate consultant and strategist in the United Kingdom and Europe. Enough to write an autobiography wherein he recalls, in forensic detail, the deals that made him a billionaire. And enough to make a spirited and highly readable contribution to that venal genre of business writing we’ll label ‘penny-porn’.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

Yet while I have tended to view life, indolently and opportunistically, from the passenger seat, I have also felt the full repercussions of the automotive age. My brother died in a car accident; so, three years ago, did one of my closest friends; when I was a child, my mother’s Hillman Imp was monstered by a bus, and she escaped luckily with her life. I can, then, in my own way, grimly corroborate Davison’s view that our ‘most valued tool and most powerful status symbol’ has impacted greatly and gravely on the urban landscape. Even a refusenik like myself has had his life reshaped and rerouted by automobilism; to live in a conurbation of any sort during the last century, in fact, is to have been implicated in the car’s evolution from novelty to necessity.

To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

Yet while I have tended to view life, indolently and opportunistically, from the passenger seat, I have also felt the full repercussions of the automotive age. My brother died in a car accident; so, three years ago, did one of my closest friends; when I was a child, my mother’s Hillman Imp was monstered by a bus, and she escaped luckily with her life. I can, then, in my own way, grimly corroborate Davison’s view that our ‘most valued tool and most powerful status symbol’ has impacted greatly and gravely on the urban landscape. Even a refusenik like myself has had his life reshaped and rerouted by automobilism; to live in a conurbation of any sort during the last century, in fact, is to have been implicated in the car’s evolution from novelty to necessity.

Mai Ho and her two baby daughters huddled together in a crowded Vietnamese refugee boat. In the dark hull, they could sec equally frightened strangers. The nineteen-year-old mother thought of the husband she had left behind and of her future in a foreign land:

Her two dishevelled little girls lay across her bosom and the taint of their urine blended with the sour odour of her dress. ‘They would like to go to the toilet but they would have to crawl across too many people and that would make noise so I said to them that they can just pass water on me. So my clothes from the waist down [were] very itchy, lots of rash.’

When Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in English, there was an outbreak of what the late Angela Carter called ‘extravagant silliness’. Márquez’s novel was given a rapturous reception that focused on its wondrous exoticism, with scant regard for its grounding in the social and political reality of his native Colombia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Carter was prominent amongst English writers who, influenced by South American fiction, began to take an interest in folklore and fairy tales, and to incorporate elements of fantasy into their work. But she recognised that the apparently strange dreams Márquez describes ‘are not holidays from reality but encounters with it.’

Magic realism is by now a well-established literary mode, with its own motifs and narrative strategies, the most fundamental being a deliberate mixing of the credible with the incredible. At its best, it can be a supple and potent technique, but the freedom it grants (undoubtedly one reason so many writers find it attractive) also makes it a difficult style to master. As the conventions of magic realism have become more formalised, they have also tended to become more unsatisfying, largely because they lend themselves to the fudging of serious questions. Often they are treated as if they grant unlimited licence with no responsibilities. The ever-present temptations are to mistake a glittering surface for narrative substance, to overdose on vacuous symbolism, and to treat flagrant implausibility as a mark of profundity. At its worst, magic realism treats the reader like a credulous rube, easily awed by a bloom of florid imagery. If the narrative finds itself in a tight spot, there is always the escape hatch of dodgy mysticism or supernatural happenings; and if anyone should have the temerity to raise the issue of plausibility, it washes its hands of the matter by chalking everything up to the sacred, unquestionable power of ‘the story’.

When the Picador Nature Reader was published several years ago, it included only one contribution by an Australian: an excerpt from David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but it is not set in Australia. It struck me at the time that for a culture so deeply embedded in, and concerned with, the land we have little in the way of nature writing.

Writing this review in the post-Christmas swelter of my mother’s sitting room in central Queensland, I am propelled to the stacked bookshelves in search of one of the first coffee table books my parents purchased, shortly after it was published in 1966. It is called The Australians, and the text is by George Johnston. It opens with the sentence: ‘It was never really intended as a place for people.’ The excerpt on the dust jacket continues:

behind these is always the brooding presence of the brown land. It is at the heart of all other things – on the palette of the aborigine, terracotta and umbers and ochre, touches of black and clay-white, of khaki and olive drab; and in the red west wind that blows on Sydney, hot and drying, bearing a dust that mocks the complacency of middle-class housewives.

Haunted Earth is Peter Read’s third book in his series on Australian attachments to place. This work began with Returning to Nothing (1996), which explored how Australians feel about ‘lost’ places. Belonging (2000) investigated how non-indigenous Australians claim to belong and how they negotiate issues of cultural difference. It was overtly concerned with the ramifications that the establishment of Aboriginal history has had on national identity.

Haunted Earth is both an individual journey and an account of aspects of Australian culture. This series is at once personal and more broadly orientated. Read, an historian, draws upon both the historical and the autobiographical when considering contemporary Australian experiences of place.

Haunted Earth is focused on the experience of inspirited places. He defines this as a place where there is the ‘presence of a spirit’. This does not depend on sensory perception or conscious belief; places are inspirited whether or not we know it. Yet if we are aware of it, they can offer the possibility of transcendence: ‘through the site, and often with the aid of ritual, the visitor or that site is transformed.’

It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.

A point well taken; how could that resonance have been lost? One macabre element in the present situation is a large-scale dimming-out of history, as though a huge shadow had fallen over the landscape, and the minatory shapes and forms of fascism, totalitarianism, the camps and the gulags had somehow receded from the common memory.

Nyima Drakpa, a twenty-nine-year-old Tibetan monk, died on 1 October 2003. PEN believes that his death was caused by beatings he received at the Tawu County Public Security Detention Centre, in the Kardze region of Tibet. Following his arrest in May 2000, authorities severely beat Nyima Drakpa in order to extract a confession for his alleged crimes. The head of the police team that recorded the confession was reportedly rewarded with a car for his ‘exemplary deed’. Nyima Drakpa was later sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in a closed trial: his crimes were listed as ‘endangering state security’ and ‘incitement against the masses’.