The cover of Griffith Review 17 clearly proclaims this quarterly’s desire to ‘foster and inform public debate, to bridge the expertise of specialists and the curiosity of readers’. Each themed issue of Griffith Review, like the present one’s ‘Staying Alive’, wants to speak directly to current issues. ‘Staying Alive’ wants to go ‘to the heart of the human condition and the challenges of life and death’. No small desire. You can’t get more topical than that: wars, epidemics, AIDS and health policies, humanitarian work in Iraq, and personal battles with death. On the cover, two hands grip each other by the fingertips against a black background, a dramatic image of some urgency. One tension which is set up by Griffith Review’s ‘deliberately wide’ focus on ‘the human condition’ is with its local, Queensland origins. These are also taken seriously, the editorial introducing us to Sir Samuel Griffith, ‘one of Australia’s great early achievers’, after whom the university is named. He is introduced to us as an icon for the journal, and presumably for its imagined readers: ‘iconoclastic and non-partisan, with a sceptical eye and a pragmatically reforming heart.’

So the claims to currency and debate are set up differently for these two quarterlies: Meanjin clearly literary, with a prognosticatory approach to critical and literary theory, and Griffith Review seeking to be a leader in public debate. Both quarterlies are under the auspices of their universities (Melbourne and Griffith, respectively), and the search for currency and an audience is indicative of the state of university budgets and mission statements in Australia today, with a brief that necessitates a quest for general readerships (read numbers). In other words, quarterlies with this kind of university base are no longer encouraged, indeed not permitted, to speak only to specialist audiences. Australia, it seems, is not big enough, cannot bear the burden of specialism in the humanities.

Despite this situation only intensifying, Meanjin, with its fine tradition of sixty-seven years (all but five of them hosted by the University of Melbourne), maintains its status as a solid barque on the troubled seas of Australian cultural debate. This issue incorporates papers chosen from an India– Australia literary conference held in Calcutta in February 2006, convened by Monash post-colonial academic Chandani Lokuge and Delhi University’s Sanjukta Dasgupta. It also carries high-quality literature and non-fiction. The volume is arranged on the contents page in broad genres: fiction, comment, review essay, essays and memoirs, interviews, cinema and poetry. However, editorial decision (presumably) is responsible for dispersing the individual pieces in a different, more provocatively promiscuous order through the volume.

Hence, the volume begins with Peter Porter, four pieces of playful, adept melancholy, chock full of rhyme, puns, eclectic references and a deep agnosticism about the ‘big questions’. One poem closes with ‘Le silence eternal de ces espaces / Infinis m’effraie is Living’s epitaph’(‘The Apprentice’s Sorcerer’). Fear of the silence of eternal spaces is such an appropriate fear for the wordsmith. This volume closes with poetry, too: that of John Kinsella, another noted expat (or half-expat) poet, grimly lyrical against the oncoming apocalypse of drought and climate change, a world just beginning to recover from El Niño, bracing itself for the next drought or lightning strike (‘Canto 3’). Kinsella’s poem is accompanied by ‘Her fields’, Peter Coghill’s loose-limbed iambic paean to a passing world of wheat farming, ‘light grain for leaner times’; and by Jane Gibian’s lovely ‘Fleeting’, which dissolves human self-importance, your existence ‘so wispy / and incomplete’, ‘a shadowy figure some distance away’. Each poem has its discrete take on human futures – which don’t seem to be robust – though the poetry under Judith Beveridge’s editorship is strong.

The Calcutta conference yielded a range of rich essays and critical interventions. Kim Cheng Boey’s sensuous and complex Calcutta meditation ‘From the Hotel Maria’ probes experiences of home and homelessness for diasporic subjects from very different origins. In his memoir, Boey captures the awful beauty and rancidity of a crumbling mega-city ‘hanging together at the seams’, awash in smells, and illness and poverty, which ‘looks as if it could survive a good few centuries and still be standing when all first world metropolises have accelerated to common doom’. We are given complex vignettes of Calcutta. The contradictions felt by Boey and his transitory friends – Raad, a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, and Wong, a Chinese Calcuttan whose cousin runs a restaurant in Toronto – are magnified in the contradictory air of Calcutta, ‘east and west all muddled up’. Raad ‘would give his life for the western ideals of democracy and freedom but he also values the oriental values he has been brought up to respect: the strong bonds of the extended family, the values of communal living, the rituals, the reduced role of the individual. He deplores globalisation and consumerism.’

Boey’s rich memoir is one way of pondering globalisation at a personal and cultural level. Academics such as David Carter, Stephen Muecke, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Denise Cuthbert take up the theoretical and historical threads of that debate in quite different and engaging ways. Carter’s essay ‘After Post-colonialism’ is the work of a senior Australian Studies academic trying to see into the future of important humanities approaches. This is one for the specialists, not every general reader’s cup of tea, a thought-provoking and historically positioned piece which gets to the disciplinary basics of where Australian literary studies has been, where it is, and where it might be heading.

Literary post-colonialism is Carter’s particular focus, and he lays before its feet a range of acknowledgments both positive and negative. His basic argument is that ‘the literary’ focus of much ‘literary post-colonialism’ is hampered by a ‘textual politics … of a utopian sort, modelling radical cultural and political change on the literariness of the literary work. Its metaphors have been aesthetic and psychoanalytic rather than historical and institutional.’ So it is not too hard to see why Carter wants to leave behind the textual politics of the merely literary sphere, with what he sees as its current professionalised and habitual gestures at transgressiveness and counter discourses. What he wants to see instead is ‘an account of literature’s positive relation to the public and commercial spheres’, ‘engaging with a messier, worldly politics that demands a new crossdisciplinary approach that we’ve only just begun to invent’.

Whether through serendipity or chance, or a little of both, Kim Scott’s address at the Calcutta conference, ‘Covered up with Sand’ – part anecdote, part cultural meditation – is placed just after Carter’s essay. It brings some rich post-colonial and literary issues to the fore, from an indigenous writer’s point of view. Scott, author of the award-winning novel Benang (1999), is an informed and feisty presenter of his views. His piece does not spend time fretting about the borders of the literary, the historical, the political. He writes of his own novel:

The last pages of Benang suggest the importance of the revitalisation of an endangered Indigenous language, its stories and their physical settings to restoring a positive sense of community to a historically oppressed and dispossessed people.

There is still work to be done in literary post-colonialism, creatively, critically. For indigenous Australians at the moment, writing their stories – fiction, history, memoirs, poetry – and finding an audience, assisted so often by many strong literary post-colonial critics among others, is important work. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has written in an earlier Meanjin interview (Black Times: Indigenous Australia, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2006), poetry and fiction are often the best tools for writing history, the tools that most sensuously, provokingly, bring to heart and mind the palpable experiences of history, its emotional and political resonances. I know David Carter is not against the ‘experience’ of reading literature, but surely Scott’s longer view of the place of language and writing, and the transformative powers of debate – around literature and of course beyond it – is part of what makes Australian literary and cultural studies important now, and in the future.

The predominant genres of the Griffith Review are not fiction or poetry, but essays, memoirs and reportage. The immediacy of the memoirs – Virginia Lloyd’s ‘Sex and the Single Bed’, which charts the work of caring at home for a husband in his illness; Frank Brennan’s ‘doctor’s notebook’, recalling the dying moments of patients – is often startling. The essays address important issues: Bill Bowtell on the eradication of HIV; Susan Varga and Diego De Leo on suicide; as do what is called ‘reportage’, pieces dealing reflectively with health and survival in Botswana, indigenous western Sydney and Fallujah.

Peter Browne’s ‘The Best of Times, the Worst of Times’ is a factual and shocking account of the conditions amongst HIV patients and their carers in Botswana. Browne’s essay ends on a challenging word, quoting Alice Mogwe, director of the Botswanan human rights organisation Ditshwanelo: ‘“The government gives but does not empower,” she says. “Its progress is based on dependency.” The risk is that the government will push this paternalism in a more authoritarian direction, which could undermine the open discussion and local activism that is essential in fighting HIV/AIDS.’ There is a range of reflective and informative writing here.

Ironic then – or oddly appropriate in a contradictory sort of way – that this issue of Griffith Review, with its desire to intervene in current public debates (something it does very well) should close with ‘Hanging On’, the blackly funny fiction piece by Michael Wilding. Here we have a group of retired ‘old boy’ academics contemplating what they feel is their useless old age and life after the university. They consider ‘hanging on’ by seeking adjunct professorships, shared rooms in their old departments, lamenting their expired used-by dates as ‘Dead white males’, showing each other their medications and bruised bodies. It is a funny, depressing read, and it places a large question mark over the scrabble for ‘currency’ in academic, writing and public debates. Currency for how long? To what end? Or does it have the effect of making the readers of this piece run helter-skelter back into their purposeful lives? This volume of Griffith Review positions its readers in the ring with such life and death questions.