Primo Levi, in two interviews given almost twenty years ago*, set a standard of critical sympathy that is not only exemplary, but peculiarly apt to the fraught debate about the post-September 11 world and the USA’s place and reputation within it.

Levi was talking about Israel. The interviews were published in the aftermath of the Phalangist attacks on Sabra and Shatila. The horror of the killings in those Palestinian camps was the spur for Levi’s (rare) remarks on Israel, but not their full substance, not the heart of them. Levi, more than most human beings, had seen too much horror to be jolted into revisions of his considered judgment by yet one more instance of it. That does not mean that he was, as a man and as a Jew, unmoved; the depth of his reaction registers in that habitually precise, plain speech of his as clearly as in anyone else’s anguished scream. But it was the state of Israel that was his central concern. And his terse opinion of the then Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, was not reactive, not merely a response to Sharon’s role in allowing the Phalangist militia into the camps (his judgment on Yasser Arafat was correspondingly incisive). Levi’s views had been long pondered, and were broadly, not just specifically, critical of Israeli policy. What is remarkable about them is the way in which, in giving them expression, Levi manages to do two things at once. He can utter the most stringent criticism of particular Israeli politicians and régimes while at the same time demonstrating his unwavering commitment and loyalty to Israel. ‘Affectionate and polemical rapport’ he calls it, a sympathy that ‘runs very deep’. That sympathy – a bond, as he says, almost ruefully – is so strong as to be involuntary. And absolutely convincing.

Critical, unblinkered sympathy, or ‘polemical rapport’, shouldn’t be remarkable. But we know it is, and all the more so during war – ‘truth the first casualty’ etc. Certainly, in the post-September 11 world, and throughout the ‘war on terrorism’, with its undefined limits, critical rapport has been straining to find a public, let alone a popular or political, forum. George W. Bush’s dictum – ‘Either you are with us, or you’re with the terrorists’ – hasn’t left much room for critical loyalty. In Australia, a related and engineered polarisation of opinion has slapped a muzzle on debate. For instance Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s recent, and indecent, haste in consigning Simon Crean to Saddam Hussein’s camp the moment the Labor leader made his decidedly pragmatic criticism (but what about the wheat?) of Australia’s eagerness to line up with the USA in any pre-emptive strike against Iraq.

Post-September 11, in Australia, as in the USA, the ad hominem tactic has had a thorough workout, and the patriotism card is the most thumbed in the deck. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly difficult, even in our two democracies, to debate crucial matters – ones that have potential life or death decisions written into them – and even harder to make the debate count. Spin rules. Public servants are formed into ‘task forces’ to keep its wheels turning. Propaganda thrives. Misinformation becomes a ministerial tool, and denigration replaces argument. Draconian laws that once would have been rejected by a public outraged at the infringement of their civil and political rights are passed into law in an atmosphere of contrived panic. There are plenty of journalists and commentators who have now had a rapid education in the consequences of dissent: abuse, threats, dismissal. And this in vaunted democracies. What kind of example, or hope, one has to ask, does this provide to people in other parts of the globe who live without even the presumption of democracy and freedom? What is lost, in this overheated atmosphere, is understanding, a readiness to reflect, and the analytical capacity to link cause, particularly historically complex cause, with effect. And so we blunder on in a politics of confusion, confabulation and vested interest.

In July this year I spent a lot of time talking to Americans about America. We happened to be in California, but they came from all over – New York, Ohio, Boston, Colorado. It was unsurprising, and characteristic, that the prompt to talk politics came from me. Never underestimate the genuine politeness of Americans, or the ritual formalities of their hospitality. But, once the rude and divisive subject was broached, there was no stopping them.

Their conversations were different from ones I’d had with other Americans last year, in the weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. Understandably so. At that time, shock and terrible personal loss, compounded by fear, made speculation about causes of the attacks too painful, too difficult. Criticism, even analysis, sounded like betrayal.

Ten months on, however, this group was vocal. They’d had time to distil their reactions, sift the mass of information and counter-information. Other events had impinged and expanded the context of their considerations. They had watched, night after night, as their television sets brought news of the serial defaulting of US corporate giants such as Enron and WorldCom, and the complicit derelictions of the supposed scrutineers (Arthur Andersen et al.). They had watched, in October 2001, as their Senate voted to approve, without debate, the expenditure of US$60 billion on the as yet unproved missile-defence system. They saw their own and foreign nationals caged in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay in circumstances that could only be described as legal limbo (and a bizarre parody of civil rights abuse Fidel Castro style). They saw their president sign the USA PATRIOT Act, and they understood its ramifications – surveillance, wiretaps, a legalised invasion of the privacy of financial and medical records – all in the name of national security. They saw the freedoms enshrined in their Constitution eroded and their liberties and civil rights treated with cavalier disregard. And they were obliged to consider the liberties and civil rights of foreign nationals who, after another presidential signing, could be remanded to a military tribunal simply on suspicion of having been associated with a terrorist organisation or linked with subversive individuals or ideas.

They saw the stock market buck and plunge. They watched as some of the highest officers in the land, Vice President Dick Cheney among them, were involved in serious questioning of their financial dealings. They also heard, in every press statement, presidential utterance, in speech after speech, and on the nightly television news, a loop of rhetoric that was mind-numbing in its repetitive banality – a signal for patriotic suspension of the critical faculty. ‘We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.’ Don’t ask how. Wrong question. They heard, repeated ad nauseam, the same disingenuous evasion – ‘régime change’ – used to presage war. And, if they did not already know, they learned from their own experienced and wary US military veterans (such as Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf of Gulf War fame) that the projected régime change could mean a war against another state that, like any number of states including Saudi Arabia, harbours terrorists but that also boasts 400,000 troops, many of them well-equipped and battle-hardened, particularly on the ground. ‘war on terror’, or war on Iraq? They understood that the two are different and that the latter could lead their country into drawn-out strife, and entail American casualties and international isolation precisely at a time when its previous isolationism had ended. It ended in the worst possible way on September 11, but it ended nonetheless.

None of these people wants to live anywhere but in the USA. They are disturbed by the unilateralism of the Bush camp, but they are not about to start a revolution. They want, instead, to see a reassertion of the values and liberties that they, as Americans, cherish. They certainly want to see that at home, and they demonstrated a fair notion of how close is the connection between a revival of liberty and democracy at home and the promotion of liberty and democracy abroad.

Another odd thing: they didn’t resent my asking questions, or voicing criticism. ‘Please write about this,’ they said. They didn’t think of themselves willingly as part of an imperial power, but they were ready enough – their initiative, not mine – to look at the history of US involvement in South America, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, the Middle East. They were also ready to look at their ally and former imperial power, Great Britain, and its history of political and economic involvement in the Arab regions that so preoccupy us all, post-September 11. And some of us (not all: this was America) were boning up, as fast as possible, on whatever was being written about Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, oil, weapons trade, Islam and Christianity – fundamentalist or not.

In Australia, my interrogatory bent, or indeed that of any commentator who doesn’t salute and fall in with the Bush line, risks being traduced as agonised, leftist and anti-American. (See, for example, Salusinszky and Melluish’s Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.) My American conversationalists didn’t see it like that. Together we were neither agonised nor self-flagellating. Concerned? Yes. Critical? Certainly. Un-American? What I heard from them was in the finest tradition of American reflection on the state of their nation, the kind of summation that you’d hope for in an ideal State of the Union address. They weren’t a statistically significant sample of US opinion (though their views are repeated and amplified now in much of the press). They were just a bunch of regular, educated Americans, willing to talk. They were too busy, all of them, to be political activists, and any left–right taxonomy would not have made much sense; their views and allegiances – Democrat, Republican, uncommitted – ranged too widely. What they did have in common, and with me, was a conviction that, in the post-September 11 world, it has become increasingly difficult to voice opposition to the status quo and to have the integrity of that opposition accepted, let alone acted upon. More broadly, it seemed clear to us that, in the world in which the USA has become the dominant power, there is no elbow room for countervailing critique. Oppositions are no longer allowed to be loyal oppositions. That model of civilised, substantive argument in a common cause, for a common good (Levi’s ‘polemical rapport’), disregarded or downright condemned in practice.

In that sense, there has been a change, or at least an acceleration towards intolerance and an erosion of the liberal ethos that we all treasure. Still, you can’t say we hadn’t been warned. Forty years ago, another old soldier (and Republican president) had something to say about powerful influences on the nature of American democracy:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
       In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
       We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
                                                                                                                                                               Dwight D. Eisenhower (17 January 1961)

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s concluding emphasis, on the symbiotic prospering of security and liberty, is what makes his January 1961 presidential farewell so resonant today. Since September 11, security and liberty in America, and to a lesser extent in Australia, have been in an accelerated process of uncoupling. And our leaders have done much to ensure that the citizenry do not become the alert and knowledgeable guardians that Eisenhower nominated as indispensable for maintaining the balance of power in a democracy. Ignorance is now cultivated. In our politicians it is faux ignorance (only a happy few rejoice in the genuine article). ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I didn’t know’ is not a becoming political modesty; it’s the stock legalist formula for evading political and moral responsibility. See the records of the Australian Senate inquiry into the children overboard incident for evidence of the technique, polished and honed. The ignorance in the citizenry is, however, harder to manage. The pesky desire to know, and a few venerable conventions keep getting in the way. Remember the English political apparatchik who tried to bury some bad news about British transport by suggesting it be released on the afternoon of September 11? She came unstuck. We can be sure that many other similar attempts have been successful. The point of political information management is to ensure that we don’t hear the bad news, or, if we do, that we don’t notice too much. There is now a battery of sanctioned techniques (commercial-in-confidence requirements for example) to keep us from knowing. And, if all else fails, invoke national security.

So has the world changed since September 11? No. In large part it is as it was, lopsidedly wealthy, indefensibly poor, and caught up in cycles of poverty, war and ideological strife that keep children out of school, or thrust them in fundamentalist training houses for more war. People still die in their millions from treatable diseases like malaria. War is a potent distraction from the difficult business of breaking cycles of oppression, hunger, disease and misery. And not much education goes on while war is alienating the best energies of nations and peoples.

There have been régime changes. Afghanistan has a new set of rulers, and the Taliban have been scattered. About Al Qaeda we know about as much and as little as we ever did. But we have become much more nervous. India and Pakistan have slightly different grounds for warlike (and nuclear) posturing than before. While the USA has winked, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has exploded.

The USA has not so much changed as been shaken into a new period of self-scrutiny, and perhaps a greater awareness of context, of connectedness. Meanwhile, reactive or opportunistic US unilateralism runs ahead of national self-knowledge. That may change, too. But there is no guarantee, even with the current emergence of American pragmatists and wise-heads cautioning against a war with Iraq that has no escape clause and few allies.

September 11 has been the catalyst, or the excuse, for policy initiatives that are extensions of what was happening before. Certainly, in Australia, what we have seen since September 11 is a strengthening of impulses that were already running in our political culture. It is easy to conflate the Tampa incident with the cataclysm of September 11 (as Peter Reith so artfully did), but the MV Tampa was heading into Australian territorial waters some weeks before the USA was attacked. Relations with our Muslim neighbours, Indonesia in particular, were strained well before we had such shocking warrant to link militant Islam and terrorism.

The logic of imperialism does not often lead to enlightenment, let alone universal prosperity. But the USA is a very unusual empire. In its own examination of the nature of its democracy and connection with the rest of the world may lie the fitting memorial to those who died in the furnace of September 11.

*‘Io, Primo Levi, chiedo le dimissioni di Begin’, ‘Primo Levi: Begin should go’, interview with Giampaolo Pansa, La Repubblica, 24 September 1982, and ‘Se questo è uno Stato’, ‘If This Is a State’, interview with Gad Lerner, L’Espresso, 30 September 1984, republished in The Voice of Memory, Primo Levi, Interviews, 1961–1987, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, translated by Robert Gordon, The New Press, New York, 2001. 

Never far from one’s mind these days, the events of September 11, 2001, and their direct aftermath in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had to be prominent in this month’s issue of ABR, such is their complex resonance and ubiquitous iconography. To complement Morag Fraser’s essay in this issue on the consequences of ‘September 11’ for civic rights and democratic processes – in Australia as well as the USA – we invited a range of writers, scholars and public figures to reflect on how that ironically sunny, egregious morning affected Australian attitudes towards the last ‘superpower’, the unfolding foreign policies of both nations, and the supposedly new world order. Some, still undecided as to what it all meant, declined. We are grateful to those who agreed to essay brief overviews of this changed international reality. Our list of contributors is deliberately multifarious. It is also as subjective as any symposium should be. We hope it suggests new perspectives, and stimulates letters, comment and debate.  

‘He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.’ Thus Donna Merwick invites us into this sad and instructive tale about the colonial Dutch world of North America.

On one level, this is the story of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, a Dutch schoolmaster and notary based in the small settlement of Beverwijck, later known as Albany, who hanged himself on 12 March 1686, seventeen days after meeting with his last clients. Janse was sixty-eight years old. He left no suicide note, and we know nothing of the circumstances of his hanging. His death occurred a few years after the English had taken New Netherland from the Dutch and begun its transformation into New York. As warring powers swept up and down the Hudson River valley, Janse did his best to accommodate himself to whoever occupied Beverwijck, or ‘Albanij’, as he wrote it. He tried to learn English but, as a notary – a legal official trained in the recording and witnessing of personal and property transactions – it may be that Janse was a colonial Dutchman for whom the new English legal structures were ultimately impenetrable.

This summer, browsers will probably find these chronicles of Eddie Gilbert and Mark Waugh snuggled close together in bookshops. Both, after all, are biographies of Australian cricketers, written by journalists, and published by firms with strong sporting backlists. But their proximity will be misleading. Cricket contains few less similar careers, and has generated few more different narrative styles. Indeed, reading them consecutively is to appreciate how stealthily our understanding of ‘biography’ has been elasticised.

Eddie Gilbert should be far better known. An Aborigine, he was raised on a controlled settlement at Barambah in Queensland. Seventy years ago, his speed as a fast bowler unsettled and unseated the mighty Bradman in a celebrated over at the Gabba. Having run the racist gauntlet of the time, Gilbert was tripped up by alcoholism and womanising, and prostrated by dementia, which confined him to an institution for the last twenty years of his life. It is a story rich in narrative potential – the inspiration, in fact, behind David Forrest’s enchanting short story ‘That Barambah Mob’ (1965). What Gilbert has needed for many years has been a version of his story shorn of drama, ornament and effect, assembling the known facts and blending them with new material. This collaboration between Mike Colman and Ken Edwards fills this need admirably.

It is snatching some kind of victory out of defeat, I suppose, to write a Ph.D. thesis about the rise and fall of a theatre company, and Julian Meyrick has successfully transformed thesis into book. This has been achieved mainly through very good writing; lively, intelligent and uncluttered by jargon. The formal paraphernalia of the thesis – notes, appendices, statistics, bibliography and index – are not only useful in themselves, but crucial evidence for the argument. 

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Inga Clendinnen responds to John Hirst

Dear Editor,

I want to respond to John Hirst’s rather avuncular dismissal of Rosemary Neill’s White Out (ABR, August 2002). John is an old friend, and I have often relied on his goodwill and good sense, but I disagreed with just about every sentence of his evaluation of O’Neill’s excellent book. In fact, I think his review exemplifies the kind of predetermined politicised response that Neill and other engaged analysts of the Aboriginal condition are up against. Some Aborigines and whites have been ‘speaking the truth’ about the devastating disintegration of some Aboriginal communities for years. What is ‘new’ is that more of us are beginning to turn from our absorbing in-house squabbles to listen to what they are saying. We are being made to hear that the earnest diagnoses and recommendations we have been making over the last three decades appear to be mistaken. It is not only that Aborigines are dying earlier. Now they are suffering more before they die. 

If Cheryl Kernot writes another book – and if Speaking for Myself Again is anything to go by, you had better hope she doesn’t – her publishers should at the very least make sure the punctuation police do their job. It appears they didn’t even show up to the scene of the accident this time. Exclamation marks are strewn throughout the work. Each time Kernot wants to bitterly labour a point, up pops an exclamation mark, as if she’s hitting the keyboard and cursing, ‘Take that you bastards’. Thus we get: ‘And some people can be so rude!’; ‘Women have sustained me!’; ‘I could write a whole book on my experiences with the media. Perhaps I will!’; and ‘Opinion rules!’ In a teen diary, that’s fine, but not in a book by a former senior federal parliamentarian.

The current legal regime for the regulation – I use the term advisedly – of drugs has many unintended consequences. One of its minor tragedies is the number of thinkers and activists whose valuable energies are thus diverted to the Sisyphean labour of undoing it. So many words have now been written on the failure of prohibition that there is surely little more to be added. More than a decade ago, former Senator Peter Baume expressed it well: ‘Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of substances, and fail to do so.’ Instead, our laws and policies make all these activities that much more dangerous, more corrupt, more poisonous and more destructive.

Welcome to our many new subscribers who have joined us in the past couple of months, including a large number in NSW and the ACT, further evidence (if we needed it) of the value of our new partnership with the National Library of Australia. We hope you enjoy the September issue.

ABR subscribers receive, among other things, advance notice of ABR Forums and events. (If you haven’t already given us your e-mail address, please do so.) Those in Sydney and elsewhere in NSW may like to join us at 7.30 p.m. on Friday, 13 September when Neal Blewett will launch the September issue. The launch is part of Songlines, the Blue Mountains World Heritage Arts and Environment Festival, based in the Wentworth Falls School of Arts, and held over the first three weekends in September (enquiries to (02) 4782 7664 or www.songlinesfestival.com.au). The festival will include a series of conversations co-organised by Peter Bishop (a regular contributor to the ‘Author! Author!’ column, and ABR’s newest editorial adviser). The ABR launch will be followed by a conversation with historian Anna Haebich.

The Italian historian Giambattista Vico once observed that historical knowledge is less like knowing the facts of things and more like knowing what it is to experience them. Good social history fits Vico’s description. Its power lies in the detail. The paradox of social history is that the apparently prosaic details of the everyday lives of a group of people can become vivid and tantalising, and provide an imaginative experience of those lives.

Martha Augoustinos and Katherine J. Reynolds have edited an intellectually substantial collection of essays on a timely topic. The ease with which the perception of group difference can be cultivated and transformed into the perception of a threat, as seen in the rise of One Nation and, more recently, in the Australian community’s response to asylum seekers, sharpens the need for such a collection. It is not enough for those of us concerned by the inherent racism of the government’s policies, and the public approval of them, to point out either its irrational character or its inhumanity. If our opposition is to be effective, we need to understand the mechanics of racism. This book so thoroughly explores and elucidates those mechanisms, from the level of individual personality to politics, that I began to suspect the government front bench of using it as a guidebook. More seriously, I marvelled at its effective use of the interplay between social and political structures, policies and individual psychology in order to secure political advantage. John Duckitt’s ‘Reducing Prejudice: An Historical and Multi-Level Approach’ presents an overview of strategies and policies found to be effective in countering racism so precisely opposed to the policies and practices now in place in Australia that those policies and practices take on the appearance of a photographic negative.

The reissue by Magabala of the late David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic’s Yorro Yorro coincided with the publication of Andrew McMillan’s An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land. These radically different books address cultural exchange between Aboriginal and settler cultures. On one level a banal travelogue, Yorro Yorro is transfigured by the language and stories of Mowaljarlai, and fits, to an extent, into romantic discourses about indigenous people. It is no surprise that it is published in the USA by Inner Traditions International, a leading publisher of books on indigenous cultures and self-development. An Intruder’s Guide is a more sober piece of writing: McMillan combines textured descriptions of Yolgnu politics and life with dry but lucid historical narrative.

Since 1990 Australian science fiction (SF) has undergone an extraordinary renaissance. Previously, only a small number of writers, notably Damien Broderick, George Turner and A. Bertram Chandler, had achieved regular success in the major overseas markets of the UK and USA. Local publication of SF was largely restricted to small presses, such as Norstrilia and Cory & Collins, with sporadic support from mainstream and genre magazines.

The pastoral frontier continues to be a site for stories of nation-building. In Mary Anne Jebb’s and Bill Bunbury’s books, the stories are not so much ‘how we got the country started, boots and all and not half-hearted’, but about the limits of liberalism and questions of indigenous rights. Having worked for many years with eighteen Aboriginal ‘storytellers and key characters’, Jebb returns to the region evoked by Ion Idriess in Over the Range: Sunshine and Shadows in the Kimberley. In 1937 that travelogue–history sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. No apologist for colonisation, Jebb shows us its difficulties.

In primary school, we were shown a video warning children not to get into strangers’ cars. We were told to note the places with Safety House stickers on the way home. I remember wondering if, on being pursued, I’d be able to run all the way to the nearest one. Every so often, we heard about a kidnapping on the news, so we took these warnings seriously.

When the appointment of Archbishop Hollingworth as governor-general was announced last year, some critics argued that the separation of church and state was placed at risk. This objection was not heard when Pastor Doug Nicholls was appointed governor of South Australia in 1976, nor when Davis McCaughey, a Uniting Church minister, became governor of Victoria in 1986. Was the governor-generalship of Australia seen as being in a league of its own, or did the title ‘Archbishop’ ring alarm bells? And when the new governor-general became embroiled in the controversy over the church’s response to cases of child abuse, this secularist undercurrent bubbled to the surface again. I was struck by the strain of virulent anti-clericalism that ran through much of the talk-back commentary. Somehow the Anglican Church seemed easily identified in the popular imagination as part of the Establishment – remote, authoritarian and out of date.

Rabbi Emeritus John Levi, the author of this revised edition, is one of the notable Australians of his generation. The first Australian to be ordained a rabbi, he served Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne from 1960 to 1997. He was founder and past-president of the Council of Christians and Jews, a member of the governing body of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, President of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, an acclaimed scholar, holder of advanced degrees, including a Doctor of Divinity from Hebrew Union College, and is a Member of the Order of Australia. Levi also has a passion for history – for documenting in the most meticulous detail the first Jewish communities of Australia. It comes as no surprise that he has deep roots in this land. His great-great-grandfather helped to arrange the first Jewish services in Melbourne in 1839; his great-grandfather, Nathaniel Levi, was the first Jew to be elected to the Victorian parliament, in 1860.

The account of the events surrounding East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia by News Limited journalists Don Greenlees and Robert Garran is subtitled ‘The inside story of East Timor’s fight for freedom’. Dealing as it does primarily with the diplomatic machinations of the Indonesian and Australian governments in that period, it would be fair to say the subtitle should read ‘The inside story of those who worked against East Timor’s fight for freedom’. By detailing the story of East Timor’s transition to independence from the perspective of Jakarta and Canberra, the two reporters run dangerously close to echoing the perceptions of these two governments. The book reads in some parts like press releases from, alternately, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Indonesian state newsagency, Antara. A well-placed former Australian army officer remarked to me that, after reading the book, he came away ‘almost feeling sorry for the TNI [Indonesian Army]’.

Moral philosophy is often disappointing to those who, unaware of the nature of the subject, look there for insight into the human condition. One reason for this is that, ever since Aristotle rejected Socrates’ strange identification of knowledge and virtue, and insisted that the moral consists of doing rather than knowing (or, in the language of the profession, of practical rather than pure reason), astonishingly few philosophers have reconsidered the extent to which moral questions may be questions of understanding. But, without some such notion, morality will not have depth and nor, therefore, will the moral philosophy that purports to elucidate it.

This book is a study of Muslims’ perceptions of religion and society. Among the related aspects it explores are self-image and gender relations in Islam. The study is a survey-type questionnaire, carried out in four Muslim countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Kazakhstan. The book comprises nine chapters, including a comprehensive Introduction that relates the aims of the study to a variety of literature on Islam, ranging from the fourteenth-century work al-Muqaddima, of Ibn Khaldun, to contemporary writings by influential Islamologists such as Fazlur Rahman and Muhammad Arkoun. The author is clearly well-versed in a wide-ranging literature on Islam. In this respect, the book is impressive in its intellectual scope.

James Cowan has a gift for writing about shadowy figures. His previous book, Francis: A Saint’s Way (which I reviewed in ABR, August 2001), probed the many myths that have gathered over the centuries around the figure of Francis of Assisi. It returned to the relatively small number of facts that are known about Francis, and worked with them to distil something of the essence of a character who has had a profound influence not just on the Christian tradition, but well beyond. It also revisited the places where Francis lived to ask questions about the relationship between environment and character, especially spiritual character.

Explanation in social theory or social science must come down to the choices, decisions and actions of individual human beings and their reasons for acting. Obviously, this does not rule out earthquakes, floods and meteor storms as powerful causes of historical and social change; but they only change the human world via the agency of human beings. Seumas Miller’s book does not mention ‘methodological individualism’, and it is a gloss to relate it to that debate in philosophy of social science. Miller argues against the existence of any entities other than human beings (and some other animals) who have beliefs, intentions and ends. There are no irreducibly collective or corporate beliefs and intentions. What underlies the appearance of collective belief or intention are ‘joint actions’ and ‘collective ends’. A collective end is an end that a person has and cannot realise or bring about without engaging in joint action with beings who also have that end.

In 1941 the allied Western Desert Forces captured 130,000 Italian soldiers in Libya, the majority of whom were evacuated to Australia, India, South Africa and Ceylon. In 1943 Australia held 4668 Italian POWs. To increase agricultural production and relieve the shortage of manpower, the Australian government shipped a further 14,000 Italian soldiers from India during the course of the war, to be employed on farms throughout Australia. Britain was already employing over 40,000 Italian prisoners, housed in central camps and working under supervision. With greater distances and fewer resources, the Australian government decentralised their operation, placing Italian prisoners on private farms, unguarded, under the authority of local Control Centres.

Companions may be in short supply in the world of the flesh, but in the print media there are many on offer. Cambridge University Press has just released its seventh ‘Companion to Religion’, and another nine are waiting in line. If none of these appeals, there are a host of companions from other publishing houses offering their services. Companions, it seems, are now adjudged to be the suitable mode for bringing the latest in religious scholarship to a wider readership. ‘Handbooks’ are perhaps too simple; ‘Essays’ too boutique: both have attempted to package information in theology, religion and biblical studies.

In the late 1950s, Honours students at Melbourne University could take Geoffrey Serle’s Australian History course only after completing John La Nauze’s full-year subject on Hanoverian and Victorian Britain (aka England). Those who questioned this restriction were informed that, since Australia was a small, derivative society, understanding its history required some knowledge of the culture, ideas and institutions exported here from Britain. While we may have discounted this rationalisation, with all the withering cynicism of late adolescence, at the time it hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.

In this ‘memoir about going home’, home is where the heart is. The book’s principal locale is the Tasmania of Martin Flanagan’s Irish Catholic small-town childhood. But ‘home’, in this narrative, isn’t just a place: it’s a state of the self. It’s what one gets back to when life’s useless accretions, confusions and hesitations are peeled away, leaving a self that is pristine – attuned to its true origins, its deepest intimations about the world, and to the values that the unadulterated self lives by, Flanagan’s journey is a quest for the authentic self. A ‘romantic’, he wants to embrace the ‘wild green joy of living’ – a phrase that typifies the passionate intensity of his search.

According to the back cover of Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska’s latest collection of essays represents an attempt to follow the ‘paper trail’ of her own life, after ‘nearly thirty years of nosing in other people’s archives’. Readers who have enjoyed Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2000) will find much to intrigue them in Part 1 of this collection, which is largely a series of intimate glimpses into her development as a writer. Like Helen Garner, writing and living for Modjeska are clearly two sides of the same coin, and both enterprises imply struggle, danger and passion. Poppy was arguably one of the most exciting books to appear in Australia in the 1990s. Modjeska’s descriptions of her efforts to find the right voice or voices for the book’s complex mix of biography, autobiography and fiction are especially fascinating. While her first book, Exiles at Home (1981), was ground-breaking, the gulf between its well-conducted research and the sophisticated self-conscious memoir that is Poppy is immense. How many graduate students must have the same experience of travelling ‘on forged papers’ in their academic work, of assuming a supposedly disinterested voice that ignores the personal ‘terra incognita’.

Ian Crawford’s title announces his book’s challenge: to provide a view of Kimberley history that builds on the foundations of Aboriginal oral tradition. The title is taken from Aboriginal storyteller Sam Woolagoodjah’s account of the first pastoral settlement of the Kimberley in the early 1860s.

Eugenia Williams’s appealing memoir of a Czech–Hungarian family spans many defining moments of twentieth-century European history. In the final days of World War II, the author and her family were part of the civilian population trapped between retreating and advancing armies. The memoir concludes more than two decades later. In 1969, one year after the Czechoslovakian democracy movement was crushed by the Russians, the family joined a refugee exodus to Austria, and eventually received immigrant permits to Australia. Williams appears to have been cushioned from trauma by her nurturing family and community. The bright surface of the narrative also reflects her buoyant temperament.

John Foulcher’s The Learning Curve (Brandl & Schlesinger, $22.95 pb, 82 pp) is a sequence of poems set in a fictional school called Saint Joseph’s. The ancient chestnut in which a mother’s attempts to get her son off to school are met with a lot of sulking about the pointlessness of the work and the nastiness of the children – to which she responds that as the school’s headmaster he really has to go – feels peculiarly appropriate: neither the students nor the teachers particularly want to be there. Using mainly dramatic monologues, Foulcher paints a depressing picture of a school where professional disappointments, an inept and religion-infested staff, and a general air of mutual loathing combine to produce what amounts to a psychological tragedy (with some physical tragedies thrown in for good measure). Sometimes it’s as if Joyce Grenfell’s scripts tenderly mocking English schoolmistresses have been violently revised by a Writer in Residence at the proverbial School of Hard Knocks.

When people complain about ‘postmodernism’ in poetry, they are usually, for all their talk of form and technique, strangely indifferent to its intense aestheticism. The disruptions of syntax, use of indeterminacy, tonal disjunctions, obtruse formalism, and intertextuality are types of decorativeness, instruments of ornamentation. For all that Language poets and others press their political case, pleasure is the guilty secret of postmodern poetry.

I have resigned from my dream job. When I leave in October, I will have worked on the ‘new’ Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) for all of its five years, a lustrum in which I have met some extraordinary people and forged many fruitful relationships. I truly doubt that, despite the odd scandal and beat-up, many industries are as friendly and collaborative (not in THAT way, Allan Fels) as the book industry. We are all a little evangelical in our desire to share our favourite writers and books and thoughts with others, and our belief that reading brings enlightenment.