The first book of fiction is a little sub-genre with a number of readily recognisable features. It’s loosely structured and tends to be episodic, without much of a plot. It’s at least partly about love and sex, preferably of an obsessive or otherwise significant kind. And it’s at least partly autobiographical. If it’s already a bad book, then these things do tend to make it worse, but if it isn’t, then they don’t necessarily detract; it’s not a value judgement, just an observation.

There is a species of Victorian mystery story that is as pure an expression of nineteenth-century rationalism as you are likely to find. A strange event occurs which, at first glance, appears to admit no rational explanation; by the end of the story, it is revealed to have a logical explanation after all. Thus foolish superstition is banished by the pure light of reason. But there is another side to late-Victorian fiction of the unexpected, represented by Henry James’s ghost tale The Turn of the Screw (1898): a darker, slipperier, and far more unsettling narrative in which the supernatural elements are never satisfactorily explained and are charged with menacing psychological overtones.

Melburnians are rightly proud of the great painting by Giambattista Tiepolo in the National Gallery of Victoria, The Banquet of Cleopatra. Now restored to its prominent position in the gallery, it will continue to attract admiration from generations of visitors, though we should hope that its neighbouring masterpiece, Sebastiano Ricci’s The Finding of Moses, is not overlooked when connoisseurs gather beside the Tiepolo. Jaynie Anderson’s handsome book is a whole-hearted and scholarly homage to Tiepolo in general, and to this picture in particular.

One chapter of her disquisition that the NGV can take pride in is a partly heroic and partly comic account of how the painting came to Melbourne in the early 1930s. Anderson holds up to ridicule experts in London’s National Gallery who had first choice when the Tiepolo arrived in the West, on offer from Soviet sources. With various degrees of snobbery and poor judgement, they turned their back on it, though, if Kenneth Clark had been in charge, Melbourne might have been thwarted. Several authorities in Australia didn’t think much of its acquisition, including, alas, Arthur Streeton. But the Felton Bequest enabled the NGV to pursue a policy, more characteristic of the US, of attempting to buy excellent works of European art as they came on the market. In new societies, the debate is always between acquiring masterpieces of the past and supporting emerging local talent. Judgement is everywhere a disputatious matter; Anderson points out that, in either hemisphere, taste is subject to moral concerns (let’s have a tenebrous Rembrandt, rather than a hedonistic Tiepolo). Yet, if one reason for displaying great pictures in our galleries is to inspire, and perhaps train our own artists, then Tiepolo, with his light-hearted and phantasmagoric virtuosity, could hardly be a better inspiration. Australia has always needed sprezzatura, and Tiepolo has it in abundance, something the late John Forbes applauded in his ekphrastic poem ‘On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra’:

[ ... ] flash Euro­
trash surveys a sulky, round faced überBabe who’s got the lot – [ ... ]
What’s that pearl without price she’s
dropping in her glass? A mirror of
their self-regard, replaced by each
other’s glances. Still, it glows, blue
& blank at the centre like their hearts, [ ... ]
But if they suggest Eros
what role does Agape play in this –
downstairs & screaming, being shown The
lnstruments? You wish, voyeur, you wish.

Not quite how Jaynie Anderson would describe things, but a true encomium in its own right. Many observers, myself included, would assert that there is a moral innocence in Tiepolo, as there is in Veronese, but Forbes has seen how ambiguous European opulence can be.

Tiepolo’s practice, like Schubert’s, was to compose variations on his own works. Anderson undertakes a thorough survey of the two significant dramatic encounters of Cleopatra and Antony: their Meeting, either at Tarsus (the first time, immortalised by Shakespeare in Enobarbus’s celebrated speech, ‘the barge she sat in, like a burnish’ d throne / Burnt on the water ...’), or later, when Antony returned to Alexandria with the captive king Attavasdes. The second is one of their renowned Banquets: the one with the challenge of dissolving the pearl in wine and drinking it, or perhaps that which occurred defiantly after the Battle of Actium, and which also involved the gesture with the pearl. From the start of the fourth decade of the eighteenth century till its end, when the previous paintings achieved an apotheosis in the frescoes of the Palazzo Labia on the Canareggio Canal in Venice, Tiepolo produced elaborate masterpieces on these two themes. Anderson’s assumption that the picture in Melbourne – if not exactly the ‘onlie begetter’ of the series – is the supreme masterpiece of them all, is surely correct. lt is also among Tiepolo’s earlier treatments, having been created via the interest of Consul Smith, on behalf of Augustus the Third of Saxony’s private gallery in Dresden.

One problem the reader of an art book of this inclusiveness faces is judging the proportions of the works illustrated, even if their measurements are given. The other Meetings and Banquets in London, Milan, Edinburgh, New York, Paris, and outside St Petersburg, for all the fascination surrounding the way in which they differ from the Melbourne version (there is, unfortunately, no Melbourne Meeting – only Banquet), can be confusing. What does the ordinary reader understand by the art historian’s term ‘modello’, employed by Anderson to categorise most of Melbourne’s rivals? Such modelli certainly seem – and are exhibited by their custodians as – complete pictures in themselves, however preliminary they were to any other paintings. Hung on the procrustean grid of an art book’s pagination, they impress as real alternatives to the subject of the book, though in situ they might well be less impressive. All – if occasionally ragged by his standards – exhibit Tiepolo’s transcendent technique. I doubt that seeing them in reality would be as disconcerting as a visit to London’s National Gallery to examine Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in His Cell. In reproduction, this masterpiece seems as overwhelming as the cosmos: on the gallery wall, it shocks with its minuscule dimensions. In general, Anderson’s comparisons are both accurate and fair-minded.

The hero of the historical and analytical sections of the book is Count Algarotti, a remarkably enlightened go-between who obtained commissions for Tiepolo. This extraordinary man promoted Newtonian physics and English poetry in the Italy of his day. His description of the Melbourne picture – as set down for the Saxon king – is finer than any modern critical art document I have read. Anderson quotes copiously from literature (there is a witty, poetic moment in Barnabe Bames’s The Divils Charter on another theme covered in the book: Cleopatra’s suicide from the bite of an asp), as well as conducting a thorough trawl through the dozens of pictorial treatments of the Antony-Cleopatra scene, as one might denote it.

Lastly, to introduce a personal obsession, I found myself absorbed all over again by the theme of banqueting as a metaphor for painting. Anderson points out that there is a frugality in the food actually on offer in Cleopatra’s Banquet. The opulence is in the mise en scène, powerfully emphasised by the clothes worn by the dramatis personae – including the numerous servitors. This magnificence is paraded without irony, whatever moral overview is intended. Both Veronese and Tiepolo, in their various feasting pictures, invite beholders’ eyes to play the voluptuary. Their scenes are exemplary banquets and the gallery visitor is enjoined to take part in the feast.

Encouraged by the sense of satisfaction produced by looking at Tiepolo, I end my review by quoting myself – passages from a poem entitled ‘The Painters’ Banquet’:

They came with their gifts of the senses
And of the groves planted for them by God
In the retina [ ... ]
This is the sumptuous gallery of those
Who have eaten the world [ ... ]
The dead artificers’ creations bum
All sophistry from pilgrims’ eyes.

I’m booking for the Palazzo Labia as soon as I can afford it.

When the Australian government urged older workers to delay retirement, some observers saw this as ‘wedge’ politics. One ageing media personality joked about younger women refusing to have babies sufficient to care for him in his dotage. For electors, the falling birth rate may be a controversial economic issue, but for some couples, and especially women, decisions about procreation are not theoretical exercises but painful personal dilemmas.

Take the example of Kirsten and Lindsay. Kirsten, in her mid-thirties, knows that time is running out on what newspaper columnists might call her ‘biological clock’. Her decision about whether she should try to conceive is complicated by the reluctance of her partner, and by two decades of automatic resort to the pill and abortions. Such characters could deteriorate into two-dimensional caricatures, but, in The Philosopher’s Doll, Amanda Lohrey gives them lives of depth, richness, and complexity.

Some time before the sun set on the British empire, ‘British justice’ took on an ironic meaning. In the colonies, we knew it was a charade, like that doled out to ‘Breaker’ Morant during the Boer War. The dice are loaded in favour of a prosecution that nevertheless insists on carrying out its cold-blooded retribution in an apparently value-free legalese, thus preserving the self-righteousness of the empire and tormenting the condemned. Yet, as Robert Manne and David Corlett make clear in this latest Quarterly Essay, the larrikin land of Australia can now, through its treatment of asylum seekers, fairly be said to lead the world in the practice of traditional British justice.

Donald Thomson’s stature as a great Australian and a champion of Aboriginal rights is confirmed by this engaging compilation. Thomson was also a world leader in ethnographic field photography. Published first in 1983, this revised edition contains a gallery of eighty additional evocative, annotated images of vibrant people and their ways of living. Today’s evaluation contrasts with that around the time of Thomson’s death in 1970, when his reputation reached its nadir. Most anthropologists then disparaged his work, few appreciated the richness and complexity of his collections, while only one academic book testified to his credentials.

What’s a nice girl called Anastasia doing in the Whangpoa River? Maybe she’s the daughter of the last tsar who everyone thought was dead, or maybe it’s just a girl who looks like a Russian princess and happens to have the same name. If the proposition sounds familiar, be assured by Colin Falconer that Anastasia Romanovs were thick on the streets of Shanghai after the White Russian diaspora of 1917–18.

Of course, this beautiful blonde waif, who remembers little more than her name (though wouldn’t she have said Romanova, as in Anna Karenina?), can’t really be the Anastasia. Recent DNA tests have put paid to that. But the point is that, back in 1921, she might have been. This youngest daughter could conceivably not have died at Ekaterinburg along with her parents, three sisters, the haemophiliac heir to the throne of all the Russias, and four of the family’s retinue. The rumours of Anastasia’s continuing existence were in fact many, fed by glittering dreams of countless roubles. The fabled millions stashed away before the family was murdered would flow into the hands of any minder of an authentic, resurrected princess. Or so thought the greedy. Only American Michael Sheridan, rebellious and handsome with his winsome cowlick and dark blue eyes, who jumps into the river to rescue the girl from her watery grave, is above materialism. Michael has already thrown off a wealthy heritage to hack out a career as a foreign journalist.

Just cast your eyes over my domicile, will you? … Note the sticky patches on the kitchen floor, the fingermarks at knee level, the biscuit crumbs, the cockroach traps, the soggy fragment of chewed Cruskit on top of the video player, the doll’s house furniture and plush animals and frayed silk scarves and capless marking pens and bits of ribbon and Tonka trucks and broken Fisher-Price activity centres scattered all over every available surface. Note the big, nasty stain on the couch (blackcurrant juice), and the scribble on the wall.

If that reads like non-fiction, then this could be a book for you. Spinning Around, Catherine Jinks’s seventh novel, explores, exposes, and ultimately celebrates a woman’s transformation from well-groomed single to maternal mess. It is part domestic farce, part journey to greater contentment, which, Jinks suggests, is achieved by graciously riding the ‘swings and roundabouts’ of marriage and being less of a ‘miserable, long-faced party pooper’ and ‘more glass-half-fullish’.

Spinning Around is reminiscent of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), the story of Kate Reddy, a full-time fund manager who also juggles a husband, a nanny, and two young children. The voice of both novels is confessional and conversational. Both use existing brand names as descriptors, employ time as a structural device – Jinks uses days, Pearson, hours – and end with a quick summary of a brighter future illuminated by enlightening experiences. They also open with very similar sentences and sentiments (Jinks: ‘How did I ever get into this mess?’ Pearson: ‘How did I get here?’), and in each novel there is a daughter named Emily, a younger son and a helpful, slightly hopeless husband with less earning power than his wife. It’s hard to tell if this is evidence of the genre’s inherent features, the ineluctable truth of the situations, or a happy coincidence.

In her searing novel, The Colour of Walls, Janet Kelly writes about child abuse and incest with clarity and understanding. The subject matter alone is disturbing, and the sense of cyclical hopelessness is both enduring and arresting. Still, Kelly brings us to a faintly optimistic resolution. This somewhat redeems an otherwise bleakly realistic story.

The narrative begins with a deceptive lyricism. We meet Erica Williams, who, with chatty innocence, describes her Melbourne-based, dysfunctional family. Erica is an astute observer, and her child’s voice carries with it the simple diffidence that naïveté affords. Her mother and father are in the process of separating. We soon realise that her godparents, Auntie Jill and Uncle Bob Harris, Erica’s neighbours, live in a cauldron of domestic violence. Kelly shows considerable skill in changing the emotional tone of a scene in a line. Avuncular Uncle Bob throws Auntie Jill’s salad against a wall. Worse is to come.

In 1927 the London firm Chatto & Windus published a book titled A Chinaman’s Opinion of Us and of His Own People. Supposedly the translated letters of a young Chinese man, Hwuy-Ung, sent home during his years spent in Melbourne, the writing suggested itself to its European and Australian readership as a delightful take on their society as witnessed by an innocent outsider; an enchanting, amusing and unwittingly insightful journal of a sensitive and bewildered Oriental gentleman. Written by an Australian called Theodore John Tourrier, the book was eventually exposed as a hoax, a cheeky, vaudeville-style tease hamming up the image of the courteous and comical Chinaman.

There’s a risk of this reoccurring every time an author attempts to write a character from a cultural background other than his or her own. Whether or not the deception is deliberate, writing that attempts this kind of recreation is in danger of being disingenuous, in bad taste and of reiterating timeworn clichés inherited from work of a similar style. Unable to interrogate its characters’ contradictions with any sense of authority or genuine innovation, it almost inevitably reverts to the formulaic scripting of character and twee sentimental portrayals. For this reason, creating characters from cultures other than one’s own demands not only sensitivity but also critical awareness – a highly developed consciousness of the way one’s own projections of that culture contribute to that culture’s portrayal. It’s not even a matter of moral or political correctness but, simply, one of good writing.

It’s not racism that makes my mother – once a poor girl from the Welsh valleys – side with the Howard government on the refugee issue: it’s an instinctive territorial defensiveness that can be easily exploited by emotive phrases: illegals, queue jumpers, people smugglers. She’s not alone, if her friends, other relatively prosperous, tax-paying senior Australian citizens, are anything to go by; but it’s not a hardline position. All it might take to soften their attitude is a copy of The Haha Man by Sandy McCutcheon, a rollicking good read that highlights the refugee plight without a whiff of the lecture hall.

McCutcheon, no doubt familiar to many readers as an ABC radio journalist, has a remarkable number of other strings to his bow. He has written twenty-two plays and six novels, lived and travelled abroad a good deal, dabbled in various jobs, and been a Buddhist for twenty-five years. Judging from the awards he has collected along the way, he brings to his interests a well-informed flair. He joins a list of high-profile Australian writers who have, in very different ways, questioned this country’s response to asylum seekers, by and large with one purpose in mind: to change public opinion. (I can’t think of a single book that endorses the government’s stance.) With this in mind, it’s a fair bet that The Haha Man, a paperback emblazoned with the typography of the thriller, has the edge over its most obvious predecessor, Tom Keneally’s The Tyrant’s Novel.

Should the recent turbulent history of one university in one state of Australia matter to us? Some of the critics of Cain and Hewitt’s Off Course think not. Australian higher education has ‘moved on’, they claim. There is no question that the right ‘On Course’ for one-time public entities – from gas companies to universities – is to graduate from public ownership and statutory obligation to marketplace and deregulated freedom. Cain and Hewitt have simply missed the boat.

But have they? In the helter-skelter of change since the Dawkins ‘reforms’ of the late 1980s (which saw the abolition of the binary divide between universities and colleges, and a vast increase in the numbers of students undertaking tertiary education), there has been much movement at the top but not an equivalent acceleration of public enlightenment. There is a residual, stubborn, Robert Menzies-inspired public conception of what a university means and what nation-building role it should play in a democracy.

Note especially the last word in the subtitle – ‘travel’. This book is not, or not chiefly, about strategy and battles. It is about getting to the war, or passing through an operational area and (with luck) getting home again; it is about visiting war cemeteries, battlefields and memorials, or revisiting them, sometimes decades later.

You may think this a wispy and slender thread upon which to string 350 pages of book. I thought so myself when I picked it up, and the misgiving recurred several times during the perusal. (Since a peacetime visit to Auschwitz is neither military nor Australian, Lily Brett’s piece seemed to have strayed in by mistake.) But the thread held – just – and I am grateful to the editors for teaching me much that I didn’t know, or had not understood.

In earlier books and articles, Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce have reconnoitred this territory already. They have a good mental map of Australia’s martial landscape, from the Sudan (1885) to East Timor and Afghanistan the day before yesterday. Their own commentary, for my taste, is too tinged by present-day political correctness. This is more implicit than stated, but it weakens their authority. There is, for example, a certain underlying readiness to characterise Australian soldiers as loudmouths and racists.

Clive James’s Cypriot

Dear Editor,

It was irritating to read Clive James’s poem ‘William Dobell’s Cypriot’ in the Spectator, but surprising in ABR (March 2004). Doesn’t anyone there know that Dobell’s painting The Cypriot was worked up, after Dobell had returned to Sydney in 1940, from sketches made in London? James Gleeson’s William Dobell (Thames & Hudson, 1964) names The Cypriot as Aegus Gabriell Ides, a waiter in a restaurant in Bayswater Road.

Why does James assume that personal, rather than intellectual, engagement motivates the work? The Sleeping Greek, another painting of Ides to which the poem refers, is fully clothed: a friend rather than lover perhaps, if indeed it matters. The fashionable assumption of sexual engagement here translates into condescension. It tells us no more about the painting, yet the poem is claiming The Cypriot as ‘the greatest early text / Of the immigration’, using the work to argue, not as the start of an imaginative journey. In this situation, the facts matter. A ‘reading’ of a work of art should allow it its place in the oeuvre of the artist, not reinvent it.

Judith Pugh, Mount Macedon, Victoria

So who did murder Juanita Nielsen? Years of corrupt police inquiries and coronial and parliamentary investigations have failed to identify her killers, but this excellent history of Sydney’s most famous unsolved disappearance provides most of the answers. However, while it may fill many of the gaps in the record, the question of justice for Juanita is quite another matter. A number of key identities, such as Jim Anderson and Frank Theeman, are now dead. Others have had their testimony tainted by a lifetime of drug addiction and turmoil. Like the ultimate fate of Victoria Street, Kings Cross, the battle for which ultimately cost Nielsen her life, there is no neat ending to this story.

On-air banter. It’s a staple of radio and television shows seeking to project a friendly, accessible image. Think of the chats between Steve and Tracy on Today, and Mel and Kochie (and, increasingly, their viewers) on Sunrise. Chats between news, sports and weather presenters are routine. It helps if the weather presenter is gorgeous, zany or eccentric, such as Tim Bailey on Channel Ten’s 5 p.m. news in Sydney or the semi-retired Willard Scott on the NBC Today show. (There was never any evident warmth or banter between Channel Nine’s Brian Henderson and Alan Wilkie, one of the few actual meteorologists on air.) The presenters are meant to seem ‘just like us’ as they yarn about their weekends, their birthdays and their children. Some of the chats, particularly between radio hosts, are designed to personalise and promote interest in what’s coming up on the next programme.

Some years ago, at a busy intersection in Chicago, Popeye’s Fried Chicken sported a notice saying, ‘Now Hiring Smiling Faces’. It seemed to cry out for a poem, or at least a memory. If Angus Trumble’s A Brief History of the Smile does not allude to it, this is not for want of curiosity or vivacity on his part.

Trumble’s book comes out of the same stable as Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner (1986) and John McPhee’s books on oranges or on the Swiss army. Each of these is marked by skill in apprehending a wide array of information, by a confidence that nothing is intrinsically boring, and by a style that is, variously, calm or spirited. It is as if Robert Burton had been commissioned to write The Anatomy of Melancholy for a couple of issues of The New Yorker and to outpace the cartoons.

Socrates was executed in 399 BC, charged with refusing to recognise the state gods, introducing new divinities and corrupting the youth. The indictment was probably politically motivated. The philosopher was closely associated with the recently deposed oligarchy led by the murderous Critias, and he had taught Alcibiades, who betrayed the state. Later, Aeschines rebuked the Athenians: ‘You put Socrates the Sophist to death because he was shown to have educated Critias.’

At his trial, Socrates rebutted the charges of impiety and the prosecution’s attempt to link him with sophists and natural philosophers. The natural philosophers (or scientists) had a reputation for atheism. The teaching of many of the sophists was morally subversive, and most were, in today’s idiom, moral relativists and anti-realists. They taught that morality was a matter of convention or artifice, and that the world we experience is conditioned in one way or another by our own nature. The greatest of them, Protagoras, said: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Socrates, who was pious and not a relativist, distanced himself from both groups, but his perseverant questioning of moral foundations and his insistence that what passes for knowledge requires rational justification may have obliterated the distinction for many of his contemporaries. His love affair with argument was partly the expression of the powerful idea that intellectual convictions demand rational support. This idea has become the genius of most subsequent science and philosophy. It is what makes philosophy and science ultimately so utterly different from faith-based religions.

Japanese troops landed and occupied Lae and Salamaua in north-eastern Papua on 8 March 1942. In an elaborate operation scheduled for early May, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby to safeguard their positions in New Guinea and in the Rabaul area, to provide a base that would bring northern Australia within range of their warships and bombers, and to secure the flank of their projected advance towards New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.

The centenary of the first sitting of the High Court of Australia was celebrated in the same courtroom in Melbourne in October 2003. There followed a conference in Canberra reviewing the decisions of the Court over the course of a century. The papers of that conference will shortly be published for a legal audience.

On the Hiryu, Hajime Toyoshima

Starred in the group photos like Andy Hardy,

He was so small and cute.

His face, as friendly as his first name

(In Japanese you say hajime at first meeting),

Could have been chirping: ‘Hey, why don’t we

Put the show on right here in the barn?’

After Pearl Harbor he was one of the great ship’s heroes

And the attack on Darwin promised him yet more glory,

But his engine conked out over Melville Island

From one lousy rifle bullet in the oil system.

Caught by natives, he should have done it then,

If not beforehand when the prop stopped turning.

Instead of hitting the silk

He could have nosed over and dived into the ground

But he didn’t. When the natives closed in

He could have shot himself with his .32

But he didn’t do that either.

Under interrogation he was offered chocolate

Which he ate instead of turning down.

What was he thinking?

He didn’t get it done

Until a full two and a half years later –

After the Cowra breakout, which he helped

To lead, madly blowing a stolen bugle,

Psyched up to guide his party of frantic runners

All the way to Japan. Upon recapture

He finally did it with a carving knife,

Sawing at his own throat as if to cancel

That sweet, rich taste of surrender,

The swallowed chocolate. His ruined Zero

Is on display in Darwin. The empty bulkhead

Is torn like silver paper where the engine raged

That once propelled him through the startled sky

At a rate of roll unknown to Kittyhawks.

Paint, cables, webbing, instruments and guns:

Much else is also missing,

But the real absence is his,

And always was.

Hajime is short for

‘Our acquaintanceship begins:

Until now, we did not know each other.

From this day forth, we will.’

Well, could be,

Though it mightn’t be quite that easy.

Buried at Cowra,

He probably never knew

That the Hiryu went down at Midway,

Where the last of his friends died fighting –

Still missing the cheery voice

Of their mascot, named always to say hello,

Who never said goodbye.

Aptly, John Ashberry has described Robert Adamson as ‘one of Australia’s national treasures’. Since the late 1960s Adamson has been a vital presence in the renaissance of Australian poetry, both in his own work and as an editor and publisher. The immense command of his writing, its trajectory from the early postmodernist explorations of the poet’s voice and the possibilities of Orphic vision to the clear lyricism of his Hawkesbury poems, has made Adamson one of the reasons why Australian poetry, as Clive James often points out, is as good as any being written in English at the present time. And there is an extraordinary story behind the writing, which comes through in the poetry, and which Adamson now relates in Inside Out: An Autobiography.

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.

KEYNES AND PUBLIC POLICY

In a much-quoted passage at the end of the General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes remarked, with some whimsy, on the power of policy intellectuals like himself:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.

There is something uncommonly beguiling about a business writer who can insouciantly intersperse his argument with references to Eugene O’Neill and T.S. Eliot. Gideon Haigh is such a man, and the tale he has to tell is wonderfully seasoned by his intelligence and literacy. But that does not make its logic compelling.

Bad Company displays an almost tabloid preoccupation with the excesses of certain charismatic CEOs: particularly, in the local context, Ray Williams of HIH and the Wizards of One. Tel. But to suggest that these fallen idols are typical Australian CEOs is like describing Helen Darville as one of our typical novelists, or Ern Malley as a typical poet.

‘Anyone who’s not a misanthrope by the time he’s forty has never felt the slightest affection for the human race.’ It was apparently at this time of life that Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1740–94) began jotting down his thoughts, reflections and anecdotes. As the above sample indicates, Chamfort’s life of excess and disappointment had equipped him with a heightened sensitivity to paradox, folly and absurdity. His massive, albeit fragmentary, literary output was only discovered after his death, and until now has not been available in any substance to readers outside the French-speaking world.

The rediscovery of a past master of the aphorism may not seem propitious, for ours is not an age that values such candour and depth of insight. As George Orwell foresaw, and as contemporary commentators such as Don Watson and Christopher Hitchens labour to point out, such pith as there is in public speech nowadays rarely amounts to more than a sound bite, catchphrase or whatever the current fashion in bureaucratic and management jargon happens to be.

In her recently published collection of critical writing by indigenous Australians, Michele Grossman notes that ‘[s]ince the early 1980s, the burgeoning interest in and publication of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing …has become increasingly well-established’. This is particularly true when we consider the success of life-writing by Aboriginal women in the last twenty years. Sally Morgan is practically a household name, and even the once-maligned work of Ruby Langford Ginibi has taken its place on school reading lists around the country.

The travails of Australian universities have increased in recent years, for well-aired reasons. These considerable difficulties followed unsettling and much criticised structural transformation initiated during the Dawkins era. They have been accompanied by pressures for international benchmarking of performance, the rapid growth of information technology, and an added impetus to form international networking alliances. 

Whether it’s fate or mere coincidence, the life stories of the two most celebrated writers of the Pacific – Robert Louis Stevenson and Albert Wendt – dovetail together on the small tropical island of Upolu in Western Samoa. In 1889, when Stevenson concluded his third Pacific cruise on the Janet Nichol, he told his readers in Europe and America that: ‘Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm trees and trade-wind fan them till they die.’ In hindsight, this reads as a premonition, but, after years of ill-health Stevenson was seduced and invigorated by sweet air and unexpected interests, describing his time during the Pacific voyages as ‘passing like days in fairyland’. 

On the Hiryu, Hajime Toyoshima
Starred in the group photos like Andy Hardy,
He was so small and cute. 

Vale Bruce Beaver

The poet Bruce Beaver died on February 17, something we couldn’t note in the March issue of ABR, as we had just gone to print. Since then, the tributes have been many, and utterly deserved. We publish Beaver’s poem ‘October 1999’ in this issue, along with a tribute from Tom Shapcott. UQP informs us that it will release the poet’s posthumous collection, The Long Game and Other Poems, on 17 February 2005. 

Asiye Guzel Zeybek – a Turkish journalist, editor and author of Rape under Torture (1999) and Our Cakir: The Life of a Revolutionary (2001) – was arrested on 27 February 1997, together with nineteen other colleagues. Zeybek, now thirty-three years old, is an executive board member of the Istanbul Branch of the Progressive Journalists’ Association, and also editor-in-chief of Atilin. She was specifically accused under Article 168 of the Turkish Penal Code, and subsequently convicted for her association with the now banned Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. Zeybek’s legal counsel staunchly rebutted the prosecutor’s allegations of her involvement in any violence.