On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy. What interest can there be in detailing that over 303 pages? The answer, of course, is that the man in question is George W. Bush – ‘the president of good and evil’, as he is described in the book’s title , because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are the terms to which he is repeatedly drawn when he moralises about national and international issues.

It comes as no surprise that Singer judges Bush’s ethics to be ‘woefully inadequate’ and the man to be the same. Even so, this book reminds those who already believed it, and it should compel those who don’t, to acknowledge that the reasons for believing it are powerful. Singer makes his case more persuasive by including, unusually for a philosopher, extensive empirical research on matters that range from Bush’s tax policies to the invasion of Iraq. When I finished the book, I was again frightened by the awful meaning of the fact that Bush is the president of the most powerful nation on earth, again anxious about those aspects of America that make that possible and overwhelmed by a sense of the complexity of that extraordinary nation. Singer’s highly qualified acknowledgment that the news is not all bad because Bush has done more about Aids in Africa than his predecessor didn’t diminish any of those responses. Nor, I think, does Singer believe that it comes to much. Disdain for Bush, for his kind of morality and religion, is evident in many passages in what would otherwise seem to be a book striking for its touchingly earnest attempt to take Bush’s beliefs seriously.

When Martin Boyd returned to Australia in 1948 after twenty-seven years in England, he set about restoring the Grange, the derelict former home of his mother’s family, the à Becketts. He had been disappointed to find how little known his novels were in Australia and he had difficulty in re-establishing himself with the Boyd family. Nevertheless he persevered with his impulsive scheme until he could draw ‘the curtains at night in the little sitting room ... [and] indulge the illusion of being in an English manor house.’ Among the à Beckett portraits and eighteenth-century furniture were his nephew Arthur’s biblical frescoes. In trying to be an English squire in the Australian countryside, surrounded by the artefacts of two continents and centuries, Boyd presents the image of a man who never quite found himself wholly at home anywhere.

It is this sense of dualism constantly at work within him, of his being ultimately rootless however devoted to any particular place, which gives a poignant coherence to Brenda Niall’s superb biography of Martin Boyd. It may also help to account for his being persistently underrated in Australia; he was almost always more highly valued in England or America. His novels were never seen as part of the mainstream of Australian fiction: he never wrote sagas of pioneering hardihood nor blistering attacks of Australia provincialism; and he was never popularly, or, for the most part, critically valued for what made his work different from the prevailing fashions in Australian fiction during the forty-odd years of his novel writing career.

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

… Let these dreams collide, as well as all those other childhood antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze frame,

but see

how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so, like an early animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the pages creating a seamless movie.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’

Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people: frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every tum: characters are usually in places they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion, Compton even writes directions straight into the verse (‘I’ll shift from my mother’s voice and just give you the gist’), an unashamed member of theatre workshops.

This intensely vivid and moving book makes a fine contribution to the burgeoning literature of Australian Jewish autobiography. There are currently about 200 such titles. They vary enormously in standard and kind – from small print run, self-published chronicles written for authors’ families, to the work of high-profile professional writers such as Lily Brett, Morris Lurie and Arnold Zable. These narratives spring from all manner of Jewish backgrounds, including ‘Anglo-Jews’, whose families had been long settled in Australia prior to the Holocaust, and central and eastern European Jews, who lived through the annihilation - in camps, in hiding, in disguise - and settled here after World War II. The majority of life writing by Australian Jews can loosely be classified as Holocaust memoir (‘loosely’ because many survivors resent being seen as merely that, and write in detail about various phases of their lives). The most sophisticated ‘literary’ examples of this sub-genre generally come from second-generation writers, who have had more sustained secular educations than their parents, closer acquaintance with the English language, and more time to write and reflect than was available to the older, refugee generation.

The cover blurb to Peter Sutton’s book announces that: ‘Native title continues to be one of the most controversial political, legal and indeed moral issues in contemporary Australia.’ The moral issue, qualified by the adverb, is perhaps the one that most strongly engages the general reader, but it is not the central concern of these books that are mainly for the specialist reader. Morality, ‘indeed’, is something that the social scientist must keep at bay, in order to do the work that, as a native title expert, he or she is qualified to do. The expert, usually an anthropologist, provides evidence within the terms of the various native title acts, translating the knowledge of indigenous informants so that it can count in the courts.

Peter Sutton’s ethnographic perspective on the issue must be the most lucid introduction in the field, coming well after the more excited legal discussions immediately following the Mabo case in 1992. An elder of the anthropological tribe, Sutton provides that leadership appropriate to seniority by showing how to write a thorough, useful and wise account of what he has learnt over years of consultation and research. Anthropology is in fact the key in the encounter of the two sets of laws and cultures because it has the means, the knowledge and the methodology to understand the complexities of differing social systems. As Sutton says, to those who may be impatient ‘certainty-seekers’ in this domain: ‘There is no certainty in false simplicity. It is usually the complexity of claims over country, not some allegedly vague indeterminacy or inherent rubberiness of the claimant situation, that prevents their reduction to fixed formulae.’

Novel, autobiography, memoir? I imagine poet and editor Manfred Jurgensen dealing impatiently with the question – does categorisation matter? Aren’t books to be judged by intrinsic worth rather than labels? Up to a point, but in Book One especially (of two) there is enough equivocation to be annoying.

The central figure, a boy called Mark, reads like a gossamer-veiled recreation of his author, an impression that is emphasised by the switch from third to first person in alternate chapters, so that the detail of outer appearances gives way to the minutiae of inner thoughts, and vice versa. A picture is built up of an only child living with a mother who is slowly becoming demented, her spirit ever more hopelessly away with the husband and father who went to war and never returned. Mark becomes the carer rather than the child, doing all the shopping and bringing his mother home when she wanders off. He is a pleasant, thoughtful lad experiencing the normal curiosities of childhood and satisfying them without salacity or obsession. He maintains a secret diary and yearns to inscribe it with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. Hanna, who sits next to him, has a Mont Blanc, which is one reason, though not the only one, for the attraction Mark feels towards her.

For some reason, I have always been mildly resistant to the poetry of Andrew Sant. It is hard to know why. At its best, it is thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent. You get a sense of the poet poised with antennae aquiver for the vibrations of an invisible world. A poem from The Flower Industry (1985) describes a radio receiver ‘selecting a loose vibration from the taut air / and threading it through the wired network’ and concludes with an image of the poet travelling ‘in a car at high speed where the mind / is a curious receiver, exposed, intent / on that which is always about to be revealed’. As a poet, he is sensitive to what is often just out of sight or out of consciousness. His best book, Brushing the Dark (1989), contains a poem about the work of an early Hobart photographer but moves on, characteristically, to speculate on ‘what he missed or narrowly missed’: a man with his back to the camera, almost out of the frame. Here the camera, another black box, acts as a receiver. Another poem, also about a photograph, speaks of wanting ‘the energy behind the shimmering gleam of appearances’.

In an era when so many young people seem to be cosseted and protected from anything harsh or dangerous, there are still good books to show them the darkness and complexity of real life. These three new titles are all emotionally and intellectually confronting, and none pulls any punches. In James Roy’s Ichabod Hart and the Lighthouse Mystery, convicts are deliberately mutilated to make them more efficient in the mines; in Peter Jean’s Stoker’s Bay, one character is flogged almost to death as a punishment for rape, and another is drowned with his hands bound; and in Jackie French’s Tom Appleby, Convict Boy, an otherwise light-hearted offering, there is a graphic hanging scene.

The most impressive of the novels is Ichabod Hart and the Lighthouse Mystery, with its skilful and entertaining mixture of colonial history, fantasy and science fiction, and with a crackling good mystery thrown in. It deals with technology and its grip on us all; and with greed and how it distorts the human character.

In True Pleasures, Lucinda Holdforth gives an account of her own life refracted through vignettes of the lives of famous women that have lived in Paris. Some of her subjects are writers, some courtesans and some ‘salonnières’. Holdforth went to Paris on holiday to recover from a sense of stalemate in her life. She candidly admits to abject disasters in her love life and to a failure to feel at ease in her work, first as an assistant to the deputy prime minister in a former Labor government, then as a highly paid management consultant in the corporate world. She is discreet about her experience as a political adviser, but it is clear that she found the masculine ethos of Australian political life alienating:

I would like to say that working for the Deputy Prime Minister was the most intellectually fascinating time of my life. It was amazing in many ways. But as a rule, stimulating and equal conversation between men and women is not a Labor Party strong point, maaaaate. And as for the management consultants … but that, of course, is why I am here.

Fourteen Nobel Literature Laureates – along with Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright, and Jiri Grusa, acclaimed Czech writer and President of International PEN – have urged Senior General Than Shwe of the Burmese Military Junta to release Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other imprisoned Burmese writers. These include 74-year-old editor U Win Tin, who is serving twenty years’ hard labour, and poet and journalist U Aung Myint, who was condemned to twenty-one years’ imprisonment. In a letter delivered to Burmese embassies in Bangkok, Berlin, London, New Delhi, Tokyo, Washington DC and other cities on April 13, Havel and the Laureates wrote:

How do you bury a poet?

Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.

It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.

Straight roads, built for driving fast.
You get out of winter in a day.
These paddocks so like thoughts you travel past,
strung out beside your asphalt purpose.

You get out of winter in a day.
Cattle fat as history watch you pass,
strung out and beside your asphalt purpose
in these vast effects of corroded light.

‘I spiritualogic grin, in’

Bad Brains

Roadkill shock rocks the pink and grey’s
galah world, this is not wordplay, or deathpuns,
until the sun goes down, shocker, blood-letter,
hit and run make-over, splatterfest and gore show,
a ‘laugh-a minute’ partner wandering about in a daze,

It's as though the Continental Shelf
with its east-facing rifts and cliffs
were visible; as though the full-bodied waves
that blow over it, freighted with kelp,
tidewood, and the bloated bodies
of dead seals were thermals,
sideways tracking and printed with spirals
that mark a slow convergence
of warm and nutrient-rich, cold water.

What rides this marriage of elements
does so with a wingspan
hammered from great distances,
its feathers containing worn emblems
and fading lines, such as might be found
within the pages of a passport
from a time when travel was slow,
when destinations involved
a leaving of smoke and waterlines
while crossing the world’s oceans.

Breeding and exhaustion
are this wanderer's only reasons,
in all weathers and seasons, for flight.
Coming in from the South, it angles away
and down, almost wetting the tip of its leeward wing
before raking a dimpled current line
for upwellings of cuttlefish, chrome-
plated splinters of schooling sauri,
or a sampling from its own reflection,
which it swallows, saltwater being
an elixir for this long-range survivor.
And when, after days of gliding,
its hollow bones take on the ache
of being all at sea, it will follow a ship,
inspecting it for mast wires,
an unpeopled railing, for anything
upon which to perch.

To find a mate, the females gather
on barren outcrops
surrounded by suitors, each one
expectant and competitive
in the sleek, wind-tailored plumage of their kind.
Having found each other, they remain
at the centre of the cycles
of company and separation
for up to eighty years,
despite long absences, despite their differences.

See them coming in –
white gliders with landing gear
that paddles for purchase
on the stones of sub-Antarctic islands
where their mates are waiting, alike
and yet unique, their singular scents and calls
dividing a raucous field with welcome.
One partner. One life, together.
And for every egg that grows
and breaks under terrible weather,
a fledgling will emerge
to test its wings and stand its ground
for nine months, and then leave
to circle the globe, solitary
in its preparations for love,
the sensory avatars of sea and air
made manifest in the compass glass of its eyes.

In his opening essay in this book, Hal Wootten, former judge and law dean, asserts that lawyers and historians are ‘natural allies’. It is certainly true that the common law system builds on reports of the resolution of cases decided long ago and far away. In that sense, legal history lies at the heart of the technique of Australia’s legal system.

Nevertheless, this book indicates that all is not well in the relationship between professional historians and the courts. The historians are puzzled and hurt by the law’s methods of receiving their testimony. Lawyers are cautious about polemical historians who take on the causes of a client. They demand stringent proof of the witnesses’ qualifications and the factual premises for their opinions.

This book, published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, reproduces papers prepared for a forum held in 2003. What began as an examination of the experience of expert historical witnesses, mostly in Aboriginal claims, becomes broadened into an examination of the topic more generally. Indeed, much of what is written in the book would be relevant to specialist disciplines other than history. Law serves a complex and highly technological society. Somehow, where there are disputes, the complexity has to be reduced in order to render possible an authoritative decision by non-experts.

The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.

That government, led by Chilean-born John Christian Watson (1867-1941), lasted four months. Born Johan Cristian Tanck, the son of ‘a Chilean-German father and a New Zealand-Irish mother’, Watson might not have been entitled to sit in parliament, since it is likely that he wasn’t a British subject; the adoption of a stepfather’s surname conveniently obscured his origins. Watson’s ministry was pilloried in the press (with few exceptions), and Labor couldn’t achieve much as a minority government in such a short period. It fell victim to the unscrupulous political conniving of its opponents. The government had nevertheless performed well, departed with dignity, and established Labor’s right to govern by demonstrating its ability to do so. It was ‘the world’s first national labour government’.

Jay Verney’s voice is not unlike Gillian Mears’s – rich, confident and brimming with adroit asides. Verney frequently stops to smell the roses, and dig around the compost. She observes the variations of a landscape, the behaviour of her characters, the nature of an institution. Here she is on a McDonald’s restaurant in Palm Springs: ‘It was America in metaphor, though without the crazed gunman to add that final touch of piquant authenticity.’

While the family in Mears’s The Mint Lawn owes much of its identity to the New South Wales river town that is home, the family in Percussion is very much a creature of Pinier Bay, commonly known as Pineapple Bay, a small coastal town in Queensland. Brian Maher, the patriarch, is in the deliriously happy position of being an alcoholic in charge of a pub. The evidence of Brian’s alcoholism is mesmerising. The port and brandy starter for breakfast, the beer with his toast and eggs, the constant top-ups that only occasionally spill over into rage and misery. Although the portrait of Brian is a genial one – the family is clearly impressed by his ability to put it away – we are allowed no illusions about drunks, particularly when Brian turns nasty and verbally attacks his grandson.

Commissioned by the Liberal Party thinktank, the Menzies Research Centre, this book has as its subject the ‘crisis’ in education. It opens with an endorsement by Malcolm Turnbull and closes with a Glossary of Edubabble, the entries of which include: progressive education, fuzzy maths, political correctness, black armband, whole language and phonics. If Turnbull’s enthusiastic foreword and the title of the glossary are not enough to suggest the conservative politics of the book, the cover is a dead give-away. The words Why Our Schools Are Failing are written as if in chalk on a blackboard, wistfully signifying a time in the past when teachers stood at the front of the class and transmitted knowledge in a neat cursive script using a dependable technology.

Donnelly knows there is a crisis in the school system. Low staff morale, student absenteeism, the exodus of parents to the private sector, falling standards and the politically correct nature of the curriculum tell him so. Even excellent schools and teachers, says Donnelly, are undermined by unresponsive bureaucracies, left-wing academics and teacher unions more concerned with ideology than with what happens in the classroom. Instead of a rigorous system based on high standards, Australian education has been overwhelmed by a series of fads: process and outcomes-based approaches to curriculum; undue emphasis on student-centred learning; and a commitment by educators to change society and turn students into ‘politically correct, new-age warriors’.

All too often, so-called manuals for screenwriters, novelists and poets begin by letting the reader know how unlikely it is that they will ever get published, let alone make a living. Fortunately, journalist and RMIT journalism lecturer Matthew Ricketson avoids this private-club view of the journalism profession. He points out that there are about 370 newspapers, ranging from dailies and suburban weeklies to regional and multicultural newspapers. There are also more than 3000 magazines in the Australian market.

If someone is good enough and understands the audience that he or she is writing for, the work is there. If ever a writer is to make a living, there are thousands of opportunities to be mined in the broadly defined field of feature writing. Will a reading of Writing Feature Stories alone get the writer there? If the reader wishes to use the book as a kind of Journalism 101, the answer is no. If the reader has a requisite understanding of journalistic principles, an ability to write and a desire to apply those skills to feature writing, then Ricketson’s book will be a brilliant guide and companion.

When faced with a new dictionary of quotations, I always test drive the section on heaven first.

This is despite the fact that the section on hell is generally longer and more engaging. My habit is a bit like reading travel porn about the ultimate destination. It’s also a good way to acquire wisdom without much effort as I wait for some kind soul to come to my rescue and publish Wisdom for Dummies, the next volume in that useful series which is still marred by some notable gaps. Parents will look in vain for Soothers for Dummies, and shopfitters won’t find Mannequins for Dummies.

It’s good that Nicholas Hope has written this amusing, light-footed entertainment. Should he give up his day job as an unemployed actor, in Brushing the Tip of Fame (his first book) he has a highly readable example of his scribbling to convince editors that he could go far as a journalist, whether as a travel writer, celebrity profiler or feature writer – someone who would more than hold his own amid the ephemera in the news and magazine stands.

Leo Tolstoy and Georgia Blain share an understanding: ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ In each of her four novels, Blain has written about families in various states of unhappiness. Her first novel, Closed for Winter (1998), was the story of Elise, an ‘unobtrusive and unnoticeable’ twenty-eight-year-old, struggling to come to terms with the unresolved disappearance of her sister twenty years earlier, hindered by her pompous partner and her deranged mother. Candelo (1999) was the tale of the more outgoing, but no less unhappy, Ursula, whose story is heavy with the connections between a recent suicide, memories of her dead sister and the ongoing depression of her brother. The Blind Eye (2001) was narrated by Daniel, a morose healer, who is haunted by the consequences of his own deceptions and the memory of a tortured patient from a wealthy, detached family. And Blain’s new novel, Names for Nothingness, is the story of Sharn, Liam and Caitlin, an unhappy family battling with issues that are both everyday and overwhelming.

It has long been claimed that women were the backbone of the pre-World War II Australian Liberal Parties and a crucial strengthening agent for the new Liberal Party that Robert Menzies formed in 1945. Labor supporters said this was because women were conservative, easily led by their husbands, and didn’t understand much of the world outside the home. Liberals argued that it was just because they did understand the importance of domestic life that they supported the party best able to protect it. Margaret Fitzherbert has written the story of these Liberal women and, in so doing, has added to our knowledge both of the history of the Liberal party and of Australian women’s political activism.

The story starts with Federation, and women’s gaining the federal franchise. These new voters needed educating and canvassing, and there were politically experienced women on hand to do it. Some had gained political experience in the Federation movement, and others in the campaigns for and against the suffrage. Women’s electoral leagues were formed in all states except South Australia. Electoral leagues were different from modern parties: their prime purpose was electoral work to support parliamentary candidates, and. although they might be able to influence preselection, they remained organisationally distinct from the parliamentary parties. The most important and enduring of these was the Australian Women’s National League (AWNL), formed in Victoria in 1904. It inspired Sir John Forrest and his wife, Margaret, to form a similar league in Western Australia, and was still in existence in 1944, when it finally dissolved itself into the new Liberal Party. Some founding members had opposed the women’s vote, and until the 1920s it did not support women parliamentary candidates, seeing itself as an organisation to help put ‘good men’ into parliament. It was, however, fiercely committed to its independence and fought any suggestion that it should become the women’s section of the main party. For a while, Alfred Deakin was its bête noire, as he encouraged the women’s section of the Commonwealth Liberal party under the leadership of his wife, Pattie Deakin, and daughter, Ivy Brookes. By the 1920s the AWNL had come to support the idea of women parliamentary candidates. Translating this into reality, though, proved very hard and the women fought the party men in vain for winnable seats. The Nationalist Party, and after it the United Australia Party, missed out on the talents of outstanding women such as Elizabeth Coachman, and stuck with some very mediocre men.

Jessie Street’s autobiography should be compulsory reading for anyone who seeks political change. In the dedication to her mother’s book, Belinda Mackay writes that she hopes ‘the women of today will be inspired by the spirit of Jessie Street and her visions’. To describe this autobiography as inspiring is an understatement. It is an extraordinary record of a remarkable life. Indeed, it is difficult to know how to explain Street’s immense contribution to women’s right welfare economics, social justice and peace studies.

Jessie Street worked tirelessly over the course of her fifty-year career to better the lives of people everywhere. She served with Pablo Picasso on the World Peace Council, and met and worked with Nancy Astor, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jawaharlal Nehru. This new edition of her autobiography (first published in 1966) documents Street’s relentless social work meticulously, clearly and, at times, quite humorously.

The official account of James Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour (1768-71) was published in 1773. The account, being an edited version of Cook’s journal, occupies the second and third volumes of John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. The first volume includes voyages by Byron, Wallis and Carteret – all seminal voyages in the history of the British Empire. We need to remember that Cook represents the culmination of the scientific discovery in the southern hemisphere, beginning with William Dampier in the late seventeenth century.

There has never been a shortage of material on Cook and his first voyage. The first account, attributed to James Magra, precedes Hawkesworth’s and was published only two months after their return in 1771. It was published in defiance of the Admiralty’s ruling that no unofficial accounts pre-empt the official one. This was the first of many ‘surreptitious’ accounts to appear in the Endeavour’s wake, and it was the beginning of a separate industry.

For those of us at the centre of the storm, Sharleen – the demonised HIV-positive Sydney prostitute, the tragic Eve Van Grafhorst – and ACT UP and its often surreal activities are all familiar memories from the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in Australia. All feature in this first book-length account of Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic. National histories of the epidemic have already appeared in Britain, the Netherlands and the US, and Paul Sendziuk’s work bears comparison with them. Indeed, in the breadth of its sympathies, the sophistication of its conceptual approach and its focus on the working out of policies on the ground, it is the best national study I have read. For a book that originated in a PhD thesis, it is well written, with challenging illustrations, mostly drawn from AIDS campaign material. I should, of course, confess an interest, since this book provides an eloquent defence of the policies I pursued on AIDS during my period as the Commonwealth minister for health.

The book is subtle both in its structure and approach. Rather than a straight chronological narrative, it is built around a series of themes, reflecting the sequential development of the national responses to AIDS. Thus Sendziuk begins in the early 1980s with the construction of the disease as ‘the gay plague’, an accidental characterisation due to the fact that the epidemiology of the disease was originally charted in the First World and not in sub-Saharan Africa. If Africa and not the US had been the identified epicentre of the epidemic, the emphasis might have been different. The book ends in the early 1990s with the appearance of a new pressure group: People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA).

Douglas Mawson died in 1958. Unlike Ernest Shackleton, Mawson was not charismatic, and his descriptions of the Antarctic lack Shackleton’s poetry; unlike Roald Amundsen, he did not reach the South Pole; unlike Robert Scott, he did not perish tragically; but it is no exaggeration to say that the scale and achievements of his Antarctic expeditions dwarf those of his three famous contemporaries.

Mawson was two years old when he arrived in Sydney with his family from England in 1884. As a young man, he studied mining engineering and geology at the University of Sydney. His interest in the glacial geology of South Australia led to his investigation of the highly mineralised Precambrian rocks of the Barrier Range, extending from the northern Flinders Ranges through Broken Hill, work for which Mawson obtained his doctorate from the University of Adelaide in 1909.

In his introduction to this collection of academic essays about different aspects and types of contemporary Australian masculinity – or, as the authors prefer, masculinities – R.W. Connell notes that: ‘It is now a familiar observation that notions of Australian identity have been entirely constructed around images of men.’ This is a familiar observation. Another old chestnut that better sums up recent discussions of masculinity and men, including this book, is that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, and that, at least in part, the solution lies in ‘problematising’, ‘deconstructing’, ‘destabilising’, and then collapsing’ it. It’s all, as such language makes clear, terribly sociological and cultural studies in approach. Which is not beyond interest, once one swims beneath the dense disciplinary jargon to the ideas below.

But I must be honest and say, as someone who has spent the last few months reading everything l can get my hands on about masculinity, that I have begun to feel somewhat downtrodden by the relentless negativity about all things male that seems to be the sine qua non of such research and ‘discourse’. Men, this collection argues, continue to ‘construct’ their masculinity through the degradation of the female and homosexual; men pursue submissive wives using Internet sites that traffic poor women from the developing world; men murder other men who insult their masculinity through homosexual advance in order to preserve their honour and self-respect; the ‘hyper-masculine’ male sporting body continues to dominate sports coverage, while the sexual objectification of the female sporting body continues unabated. And on it goes. I can only imagine the impact such a relentless list of ‘male troubles’ has on readers of the opposite sex.

A decade ago, former Prime Minister Paul Keating made a telling comment on the treatment of speeches in modern politics. ‘If Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1992,’ he said, ‘the chances are the journalists wouldn’t report the speech but the “doorstop” that followed it. And the first question they’d ask is, “How come you’re talking about democracy and freedom when there’s a war going on?” And there’d be learned articles at the weekend about whether it had been a lapse of political judgment for Mr Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg instead of Philadelphia.’

Keating was right. The speech is losing the battle for attention with the doorstop, the media grab and the press release, and in no country more so than in Australia. Being a laconic and rather vernacular people – ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, as Russel Ward put it – we were never overly disposed to big set-piece speeches anyway. Australian kids could easily grow up thinking that great speeches are delivered in a Churchillian growl or a Kennedyesque brogue, but never with an Aussie twang.

The turning point in the life so far of Australian actor and writer Kate Fitzpatrick seems to have been the moment, sometime around the end of 1989, when she saw her unborn baby son on the ultrasound screen. ‘And that’, a friend observed, ‘was the end of the glamour years.’ Fitzpatrick herself defines it rather differently: it was, she says, ‘the moment I realised I was no longer alone.’

Pregnant by accident and for the first time at the age of forty-two, she somehow found herself staying with Germaine Greer in the latter’s Cambridge house. They apparently drove each other berserk for three days before Fitzpatrick turned and fled. On the second night of her stay, she recalls, she had a nightmare ‘about germs’. When she reported this dream to her friend Mike Brearley, ex-captain of the English cricket team and now a psychoanalyst, Brearley replied, ‘I love your subconscious, Kate. It’s like a hot knife through butter.’

Cole Porter’s jazz-age musical Fifty Million Frenchmen features a song addressed to a woman with mysterious allure:

Your fetching physique is hardly unique,

You’re mentally not so hot.

You’ll never win laurels because of your morals,

But I’ll tell you what you’ve got ...

You’ve got that thing.

The ‘certain thing’ that according to Porter ‘makes birds forget to sing’ is broadly the subject of The Secret Power of Beauty. Of course, beauty is not just sexual, and indeed the definition could be expanded to include all things under the sun. To quote another popular song from a different era, everything is beautiful in its own way.

If we knew precisely what beauty was, would it, at the moment of discovery, cease to exist? Beauty is an answer in search of a question – we all think we know it when we see it, but we find it impossible to define. John Armstrong frames this question as persuasively as the readers of his previous books The Intimate Philosophy of Art (2000) and Conditions of Love (2002) could have anticipated. Here again, he explores thoughts that arise from what ordinarily we are moved by.

The Secret Power of Beauty begins with an examination of the anatomy of beauty, at least as far as the eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth was concerned. Hogarth proposed an aesthetic experiment based on curving lines, presenting a series of comparisons to be made from illustrations of women’s corsets. To the human eye, some lines, and some shapes, are more pleasing than others, and Hogarth thought he could determine precisely which ones worked best. Hogarth’s formalist approach to beauty may sound superficial, and indeed the corset itself is an obvious anachronism with negative associations, but the serpentine line continues to inform much graphic and industrial design (where would sports car designers be without it?). Notions of symmetry and proportion come into discussions of beauty based on evolutionary psychology as well as art and architecture. Some of the most beautiful buildings and objects, Armstrong notes, consist of nothing but straight lines. The corset test was rejected in Hogarth’s time by his friend David Garrick, who ‘pointed out that as he got fatter his stomach approached that, according to Hogarth, which was supremely beautiful’. But the physical signs of obesity in Garrick were not pleasing to the man himself, or anyone else. A theory of beauty based on shape, or any other single index, is therefore never going to do more than describe one aspect of beauty, if that.

Armstrong’s discussion of Hogarth’s contention and Garrick’s objection may be worth considering in light of the fact that the models for the female nudes painted by the great Western artists, as Germaine Greer reminds us in The Boy, were until the nineteenth century exclusively based on male models, since women did not pose. What is known as the ‘Rubenesque’ female figure is derived from a male prototype with certain anatomical modifications. Historical complications of this sort may undermine any attempt to establish a universal aesthetic or evolutionary definition of beauty. Armstrong also examines some of the innumerable forces – among them historical, social, cultural, economic – at work. One of the most thought-provoking chapters in this wonderful book concerns the idea that there is the sociology of taste famously identified by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s, which he thought was class-based.

While there ‘will of necessity be some pattern of social distribution’ in the appreciation of beauty based on education and wealth, this pattern ‘does not explain the nature of beauty’, which transcends such things. Appreciation does not necessarily flow from knowledge, nor does familiarity always lead to intimacy, and quite often the reverse is true.

Like that of his colleague Alain de Botton, Armstrong’s approach is rooted in the philosophical problems that arise from everyday life, but his illustrations are not derived from currently fashionable popular culture. You will not find him invoking The Simpsons or The Matrix (or, for that matter, the lyrics of popular songs) to make his point, but, rather, painters such as Chardin and writers such as Melville and Baudelaire. His is a philosophy not of the gym but of the drawing room.

Armstrong is respectful towards the Western canon without being overly deferential, as indicated by this comment on one especially long-winded German philosopher: ‘Schiller apologizes quite often to his readers for the more arid stretches of prose. But like many people who can make an elegant apology he did not bother to remedy the source of the offence.’ Elsewhere, Armstrong laments that ‘in the history of ideas, some of the most thrilling and important thoughts have been secreted within massively inaccessible texts and formulated in terms which tend to obscure rather than illuminate their significance’.

Some ideas are found to be just too easy to take on board. Wildean aestheticism, which promotes the love of beauty for its own sake, is given short shrift, since beauty, like everything else, has limitations such that it cannot ‘make truth from a falsehood or depth of character from the elegant line of a nose’.

Beauty may appear fleeting in humans and permanent in art, but Armstrong suggests a deeper consanguinity: ‘If an object is of real beauty it will be a continual source of satisfaction and delight; like the nicest people it will invite and repay long attention.’

‘The health of a culture,’ writes Armstrong, ‘is perhaps best gauged by the questions it keeps asking, rather than by the answers it keeps giving.’ ln its unadorned style, its honest ambivalence, its moral scrupulousness and purity of thought, this book itself is a thing of beauty.

This is the third volume in this US reference series that is dedicated to Australian writers. It includes writers who produced their first important book between 1950 and 1975. The Dictionary, which is held by all the major reference and research libraries around the world provides a welcome opportunity to display Australian writing in an international setting.

Forty writers are represented, from Robert Adamson to Patricia Wrightson. Each entry consists of a critical essay, a comprehensive bibliography of the author’s works, a select listing of the secondary literature and a note on the location of the author’s papers. There is also a portrait of each writer. The entries are written by Australians, many of whom have previously published on their subjects.

Classics, like policemen, are getting younger. Pastures of the Blue Crane (1964) and By the Sandhills of Yamboorah (1965), the first two books reissued by the University of Queensland Press in their welcome ‘Children’s Classics’ series, are not those Australian children’s books (strangely supposed by many of my age cohort not to exist) that I read as a child, but the next generation, published in the mid-1960s when I was a young adult.

Thurley Fowler’s books were first published even more recently, in 1985 and 1991 respectively, but, like those of Reginald Ottley and Hesba Brinsmead, they are classics in that they breathe wonderful, idiosyncratic life into the people, times and legends that have helped to form today’s Australia.

Major events in histories of public institutions – museums, galleries, libraries and universities – lend themselves to publications that acknowledge and celebrate openings, building extension projects and anniversaries. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the State Library of Victoria (SLV), which, with the completion of its massive building extension project in 2003, is now able to present a souvenir book on the collections. While this is in no manner a catalogue of the library’s collection, it does serve as a guide and as a useful primary source for seeking the more unusual items – the treasures.

For many, it may appear strange that the larger proportion of works illustrated as SLV ‘treasures’ are not books but works of art, history and documentary photographs. Indeed, it is these normally hidden riches that enhance one’s enjoyment of the book. The treasures are separated into ten categories: two on books, and the remaining eight on Victoria, gold, Ned Kelly, photographs, Melbourne style, the arts, botany and sport. Predictably, Ned Kelly features with illustrations of his armour, the Jerilderie letter and his death mask. Other Melbourne obsessions – football, horse racing, theatre, shopping, eating and fashion - are neatly covered, if sometimes too briefly. The compilers have clearly had fun selecting the images and demonstrating the wide range of the holdings with a combination of seriousness and wit. Wolfgang Sievers’s 1965 lacquered glamour and smoking chic of the denizens of the Menzies Hotel cocktail lounge is every bit as fascinating a document as Robert Hoddle’s surveying chain for Melbourne from the 1830s. The cultural diversity of the collection is demonstrated in a double spread in which Marc Chagall’s Dessins pour la Bible must compete with a facing page of eight comic covers. Fortunately, most of the juxtapositions of images are less jarring.

At times like these, we would be churlish to forget how much we have to thank Americans for. Apart from anything else, they have enriched the language with the enviable expressions and patentable phrases that other English speakers, even when they are irritated, still imitate. American English is usually empowered by both oral and moral certitude, even more so in wartime. ‘History,’ says President George W. Bush portentously, ‘has called us into action.’ ‘The good guys are us,’ General Tommy Franks memorably declares just before the invasion of Iraq, warning President Bush: ‘We’re going to be suboptimised.’ Donald Rumsfeld says his bombers aren’t running out of targets, Afghanistan is. He doesn’t want diplomacy to divert the US from the coming war, so his plan is ‘to dribble this out slowly’. Vice-President Cheney assures the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar: ‘Once we start, Saddam is toast.’ Then, as the troops go in, ‘Just keep praying’, Condoleeza Rice urges her colleagues. ‘Mission accomplished’, the banner reads on 1 May 2003, on board the Abraham Lincoln. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’im,’ Paul Bremer hubristically tells the press after the capture of Saddam Hussein. But what CIA Director George Tenet calls ‘the price of being wrong’ is rising.

Often, the words these key figures use reveal the mindset of the movies and the patois of the prairies. ‘Bring it on’, Bush taunts those resisting the occupation of Iraq. ‘Stuff happens’, Rumsfeld asserts, having for months had reports of torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, yet not saying what he had done with them. In wartime, the linguistic culture of the US force-feeds us on exceptionalism, ignorance and ostentatious piety. The president, when asked by Bob Woodward if he had consulted his father, George Bush senior, about the war, said no, he relied upon a higher father. In his new book, The President of Good and Evil (reviewed by Raimond Gaita on page 14), philosopher Peter Singer finds that Bush, who poses as America’s moral leader, is ethically naive. This capacity for crusading religiosity, violent nicety, perfidious innocence, deceitful openness and brutal idealism would be uniquely American if it did not so resemble the efforts of the Islamist jihadists.

It is Colin Powell, the White House pariah, who swore not to repeat the Vietnam lies, and who has pointed to the analogy between the atrocities committed at My Lai and Abu Ghraib. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, the invaders claimed they could win hearts and minds by getting rid of tyranny. In both countries, they behaved little better than the tyrants, and they failed to set up showcases of democracy. They made one country the battlefield for their war against communism, and the other the front for their war against terrorism. Official opinion abhors talk of a quagmire in Iraq, but some writers are now calling it a precipice. This time, the consequences for all involved may be worse.

Year 12 has become a year of vastly out-of-proportion significance and, according to Michael Carr-Gregg, the media, parents and, to a lesser extent, schools are to blame for the pressure on young students to achieve that all-important, life-determining ENTER score. Bunkum to those last two sentiments says Carr-Gregg, and so do I, having been through it twice with my children, and having taught first-year undergraduates for years, many of whom change courses or life trajectories when they are exposed to what tertiary education or the workforce can offer. In a book filled with research, anecdotes and practical information, Carr­Gregg provides students with sensible strategies for ignoring the hype and for getting on with managing a busy year in their lives. He addresses diet, relationships, drugs, exercise, managing stress, ‘smart’ studying tactics and approaches to exams in a manner that treats young people as capable and intelligent. A lively, conversational style, plus Tandberg’s witty cartoons, avert any preachy tone. Carr-Gregg advises parents to be supportive but to ‘bite their tongues’.

While this book is full of sensible information, it implies a certain demographic in its recommendation for students who are uncertain about doing Year 12 to take a year off and travel overseas, for parents to take out a gym membership for their children, and in the importance of having a quiet, well-equipped study space. Perhaps this is recognition of where pressure and its consequences come from in the main, but one can’t help thinking of students for whom these would be unavailable in their school, family and work lives.

Made ghosts in all their country’s wars
they come, the young men in my dreams
with shattered skulls, intestines trailing
in the sand, the mud, the stuff the TV doesn’t
show unless it’s Africa. Or someplace else where
colour doesn’t count, democracy a word
 they carted like a talisman, a passport
to the candles, bells of sainthood.

Changes at ABR

At our recent AGM we farewelled Vicki Nicholson our longest-serving board member, and welcomed two new members. Bridget Griffen-Foley and Paul Hetherington (from Sydney and Canberra, respectively) have both served on the editorial advisory board. Paul Hetherington reviews both poetry and fiction in our pages. Dr Griffen-Foley’s bimonthly media columns appear in alternate issues. Her subject this month is the grotesque row between John Laws and Alan Jones.

‘The public are starting to say why don’t they just leave Laws and Jones alone? Why are they highlighting these two?’ said John Laws on 3 August 2000, at the height of ‘cash for comment 1’. He hasn’t been complaining about too much publicity in the current cash for comment controversy. Indeed, Laws has been courting it since 28 April 2004, two days after Media Watch revealed a glowing letter Professor David Flint had written to Alan Jones on Australian Broadcasting Authority letterhead shortly before Flint was to chair an inquiry into Jones’s sponsorship arrangements, and the morning after Flint, during an interview on the 7.30 Report, had acknowledged exchanging several letters with Jones.

The key players in this controversy centring on payments for favourable editorial comment, which first broke in 1999, are unchanged: Flint, Jones, Laws and his agent, John Fordham. The commentators are largely the same, too: Richard Ackland, the former host of Media Watch, who is now a Sydney Morning Herald columnist; Paul Barry, Ackland’s successor as Media Watch host and now a reporter for A Current Affair; David Marr, who covered the ABA inquiry for the SMH before taking over Media Watch; Kerry O’Brien, still at the helm of the 7.30 Report; and Errol Simper and Mark Day, who remain media correspondents for The Australian.

In November 2003, while giving a speech at the new Bibliotecha Alexandrina, Umberto Eco considered the role of libraries. ‘Libraries, over the centuries,’ he said, ‘have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know.’

The idea of the library both as a storehouse and as a living organism, a ‘brain’, holds particular relevance for the National Library of Australia. Here, we store Australia’s collective wisdom – the documentary heritage of Australia and its people – recording the things we have forgotten, the things perhaps most of us never knew, the slivers of information that help us to understand who we are, who we once were and who we would like to become. But, as our current exhibition Future Memory: National Library Recent Acquisitions demonstrates, the National Library’s Collection continues to grow and change.

Never mind the students

Dear editor,

Andrew Norton (ABR, May 2004) is right to argue that the legislation governing the Nelson market in Australian universities gives the government too much power. The education minister refused to guarantee academic liberty, imposed a one-size-fits-all template for the structure of the university councils, and can now dictate the mix of courses that are taught. The research funding system, which forces universities to focus on work with direct commercial potential at the expense of free enquiry, is another and more damaging instance of overregulation.

But Norton is wrong to argue that the new funding and fee system, which creates full-fee places for up to thirty-five per cent of undergraduate students, and kick-starts this market with low-cost government-underwritten student loans (FEE-HELP), is ‘a long way from being a functioning market system’ of the kind that he (Norton) wants. Norton focuses on the fact that a shadow of the HECS has survived Nelson, and that there are still caps on the cost of HECS charges, but deftly ignores the full-fee market that is the transformative clement in Nelson. And Norton is absurdly wrong to state that the government’s Thatcher-style centralised market reform ‘resembles old-fashioned socialist planning’. Really? Polemic has got the better of him. Dumbing down the debate is in no one’s interests.

This tension between government power and market power is typical of Hayekian social systems, in which both elements are always active: Hayekian mechanisms are grounded not in laissez-faire but in an economic market engineered by government from above. (I discussed the underlying dynamics in the La Trobe University Essay in the April 2004 issue of ABR.) The Thatcher slogan of ‘free market and strong state’ perfectly captures the recurring Hayekian paradox. The result is that in a Hayekian policy environment, such as Australia today, there are only ever two kinds of official debate about education:

1. between market reform schemes that emphasise the state actions that create and control the market; and market reform schemes that, while using government as the market-creator, place more emphasis on the market mechanism itself;
2. between market reform schemes that go halfway to the Hayekian market; and market-reform schemes that go all the way, with full fees and user pays for all, and not a price cap or a product spec in sight.

With this kind of mainstream agenda, no wonder the debate about the universitites is so barren. (What about culture, personal formation, research quality, equity of access, global futures etc. etc.?) Obviously, we need to talk about something else. Unfortunately, Norton can’t.

It is true that his 1999 proposals for reform, prepared for the then education minister, David Kemp, were less authoritarian than the Nelson package, and took the market-reform process further than Nelson has done. But, far from being polar opposites (Stalin versus Friedman), as he is telling us, the two market-reform schemes are close cousins, and one is transitional to the other. Once the Nelson scheme is in place from 2005 onwards, it is a simple matter for a future government to move from Nelson market to Norton market. Lift the twenty-five per cent ceiling on HECS increases, drop the $50,000 limit on FEE-HELP loans, drop the $2000 extra surcharge paid by full-fee students, and of course drop the thirty-five per cent ceiling on the number of places in a course that can be full-fee places, and there will be no cost difference between a subsidised HECS place and a full-fee place. Hey presto, the full-blown market has arrived, all government subsidies can be shifted from teaching and research grants to the student loans scheme (which becomes the exact Friedman voucher), and, finally, Norton and Treasury will be happy.

Never mind the students. For there are other freedoms at stake than the freedom of sandstone universities to levy high prices on the petite bourgeoisie, such as the freedom of students to study without having to work thirty hours or more a week, freedom to enrol in courses with mind-expanding powers but no immediate market utility- – not to mention the freedom of world-class scholars to research at the cutting edge without waiting for a commercial company (or a govern­ment committee as hypothetical company) to pay for it.

But with policy ever-obsessed with creating a Hayekian market, students and scholars are losing those freedoms and gaining nothing in return. We have had full fees for international and postgraduate students, increasing HECS charges, and vociferous competition between universities for more than a decade. Market and part-market reforms have had a good test run. The outcome? There are record numbers of full-time students working to pay these costs, student-staff ratios have almost doubled, it is harder than ever for poor, bright students to access the top universities, and students are shifting to generic business courses in ever greater numbers because these courses – lightweight though they often are – have vocational cachet. Most emphatically, students are paying more and getting less, in both material and intellectual terms. The Nortons and Nelsons ignore it, but the evidence is sitting there right in front of them. It could not be plainer.

Meanwhile, research is driven downwards by performance indicators and commercialisation, creating a nasty quantity/quality trade-off, and basic research programmes (especially outside the sandstone group) are being displaced, while universities chase commercialisation chimeras. Vice­Chancellors know that strong research applications rest on a platform of strong basic research – and in the long run, weaker basic research means less, not more, economically valuable commercialisation – but the quasi-market research system forces them to forget it.

The private goods have lost value, and the public goods may not survive. These are the glorious legacies of the Treasury’s long love affair with Hayek and markets in education. It has captured the universities, and it has captured Norton. There are none so unfree as those who cannot even see their chains.

Simon Marginson, Clayton, VIC

In Australia, Edwardian architecture has a permanent presence in our consciousness, for it has survived here better than elsewhere. It is a constant reminder of the luxurious elegance of those years, and so it comes as no surprise that such a novel exhibition has been conceived. The first survey exhibition on Edwardian art, at the National Gallery of Australia, curated by Anna Gray, is a revelation. She has chosen a remarkable selection of works, from Australian and international collections.

From room to room, formidable and flamboyant artists from the years of Edward VII’s reign, from 1901 to 1910, engage in lively debates with one another, their subjects and their collectors. Unlike survey shows which have mini monographs of a succession of individual artists, The Edwardians demonstrates the complex interrelationships between artists by a series of thoughtful juxtapositions, of paintings, small bronze sculptures, clothes (whether Roger Fry’s pyjamas or Dame Nellie Melba’s Wagnerian cloak) and cinematic extracts from early newsreels, all in dialogue with one another. The dialogue is subtle, constant and refined. It occurs between different countries, but principally between Australia and England, as artists question whether they are British or Australian, depending on their parentage, identity and location. The portraits by Tom Roberts done in England look very different, indeed Edwardian, from those he produced during his Australian years. Ann Galbally’s contribution to the catalogue is a subtle exploration of ‘expatriatism’ in art.