A tax on knowledge

Dear Editor,

Many students and their families do not realise that the Educational Textbook Subsidy Scheme will finish at the end of this financial year. This means that students will pay eight per cent more for their textbooks. On top of HECS hikes, an increase in full-fee paying places, and other fees and charges for education, this will have a significant impact on students’ ability to access education. Booksellers have made changes to their software to facilitate the scheme, yet few have been informed of the government’s decision not to continue it. I have introduced legislation to the Senate to extend the scheme, but have not received government support.

A tax on books is a tax on knowledge. The removal of this subsidy will hurt students.

Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, Adelaide, SA

Room for improvement

Dear Editor,

ABR’s coverage of journals at last shows some welcome signs of change in the February 2004 issue, but there is room for improvement. Under present and previous editorships, a lack of rotation of journals reviewed means that this section does not achieve the representativeness of other sections.

At least one deserving newcomer to the magazine scene, the Griffith Review, now in its second issue, is allowed in; HEAT, the leading journal devoted to creative writing, stays in; Meanjin, on ABR’s doorstep, is always in. But what about others not granted a look-in for quite some time – say, Southerly and Overland? Both have been revitalised under new editorships, the first by David Brooks and Noel Rowe, the second by Ian Syson, who recently signed off. This is not to mention other journals. Quadrant, though widely read, seems beyond the pale.

What is going on in the magazines is of interest to ABR readers, including librarians and teachers, who rely on its coverage. Since ABR, to its credit, remains the only outlet occasionally noticing journals, all the more important that it cast its net wider.

Laurie Hergenhan, Brisbane, Qld

Love affair with Perth

Dear Editor,

David Hutchison’s review of Jenny Gregory’s City of Light (ABR, March 2004) shows the love for Perth that infected me when I arrived here as its first appointed City Planner in 1965. Please allow me to correct the general impression given in the review that the planning of Perth suffered overall from the personal differences of approach to planning by David Carr, the Regional Authority chief planner, and myself. It did not affect planning adversely. It was precisely because of our agreement and cooperation on all planning aspects, except one, that planning of the city was so inordinately successful during our years together. City of Light illustrates this. The one fundamental matter of disagreement was the Regional Plan Freeway, which cut Perth off from the foreshore, with eight lanes of tarmac. I persuaded Council to stop this. City of Light states that the people of Perth should ‘forever be grateful’ for this. It also enabled the famed East Perth Development.

Just to generalise about our relationship does justice neither to David Carr nor myself nor history, even if Carr engineered my dismissal, on the issue of the freeway, as recorded. I hope that City of Light, as the official story, will be augmented by my anecdotal history, Love Affair with Perth, the last of my trilogy on the city. For this, relevant stories from your readers would be welcome (PO Box 346, Kalamunda, WA 6076).

Paul Ritter, Kalamunda, WA

Fluid hybridity

Dear Editor,

I write in response to Hsu Ming Teo’s review (ABR, February 2004) of Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia, by J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele. Ms Teo’s review regards Ambivalence as a product of Asian nationalists, cultural essentialists and those who are doomed to inevitable disappearance in the near future. But if this is the case, I would like to suggest an alternative interpretation. I consider this book as a far-seeing, courageous and truly analytical voice for future generations, a voice that echoes into far more embracing and universal domains than the narrow interests of the presumably ‘universal Western freedom and democracy’, or of those serving such interests. And I wonder when the voices of ‘hope’, such as those of D’Cruz and Steele, will be finally recognised and acknowledged for what they are.

While her criticism of ‘alliance against compradors’ has its valid points, Teo’s position runs the risk of putting these supposed ‘oppressors’ or ‘religious fanatics’ or ‘the poor’ into a too-familiar binary category of the ‘inferior’, ‘uncultivated’ and ‘unenlightened’ to the superior West.

Speaking personally, I grew up in a conservative part of rural Japan, a traditional Mahayana Buddhist family, a petty working-class household and an environment where the mainstream Japanese establishments of schools, governments, television stars, sports and fascinations about the royal family were regarded as natural. Not only has that experience given me the opportunity to experience what Ms Teo assumes is a more ‘authentic Asia-ness’, but it has not hindered me from learning Western mathematics, sciences, histories, languages, politics, economics, philosophies, cultures, mannerisms or the Internet. After both consciously and unconsciously learning about these Western ways within Japan and in the West itself, I have come to acknowledge a preference for supposedly ‘traditional’ Eastern attitudes to life, for I personally believe that they are just as useful and practical as some aspects of ‘Western’ values that I have also come to appreciate.

Some of the values I now cherish include the acceptance of human imperfections and the world itself, interconnectedness and reciprocities of the universe, notions of accumulations of good and bad karmas, inner spirituality and recognition of the universe, non-violence, an ideal state of ‘genuine trust’ to higher authorities and ‘genuine efforts’ of the higher authorities to help their followers, recognition and acceptance of instincts and intuition as well as reason and language, the recognition of fate, and respect for all living things. Unfortunately, it would appear, these values have not been adequately discussed in a Western society such as Australia; rather, such a viewpoint is often exoticised, commercialised or dismissed as somewhat ambiguous, primitive, tribal, mysterious sets of ‘wisdom’ or just exotically un-modern or un-postmodern.

And though these values sit in some tension with some of the mainstream values of my Western learning, I am able to find commonality with some of the ‘other’, non-mainstream Western voices in Australian society, e.g. those of Aboriginal land rights activists and refugee advocates, social environmentalists and the like. My own hybridity – and the notion of hybridity is actually discussed in D’Cruz and Steele’s book, especially in relation to Asian-Australians – is fluid. I would ask for an understanding in Australia, where I do not have to be patronised out of, or be shamed into giving up, those aspects I have come to appreciate of the culture into which I was born. I would be interested to find out what aspects of the culture she was born into or grew up in that Hsu Ming Teo still regards as worth preserving?

Hideki Kizaki, Toorak, Vic.

History of a Book

Dear Editor,

Jill Jolliffe, in her review of James Dunn’s East Timor: A Rough Passage to Independence (ABR, March 2004), seems uncertain whether to give praise to Dunn for what has been an extraordinary achievement in record-keeping, to emphasise Gough Whitlam’s (and his followers’) failings, or to cast aspersions at the editors involved.

In many ways, Jolliffe has been deeply involved with the Timor tragedy; Dunn acknowledges this and thanks her in his preface. There is so much to say about Dunn (a very special figure), but space is limited. East Timor: A Rough Passage is the third edition of a book first published by Jacaranda Press as Timor: A People Betrayed in 1983. If it had not been for a chance conversation between Dunn and an ANU professor of geography on the beach at Bateman’s Bay, the manuscript would never have gone to Jacaranda. I am glad it did, even though it is Jacaranda’s editor that will have to shoulder some of Jollife’s criticism. Editors can’t exactly lighten the style!

Gough Whitlam certainly didn’t want the book published, and said so in no uncertain terms, even to the extent of giving me a lecture on Fretilin, via biro on a Windsor Hotel tablecloth, before he spoke to the Publishers’ Association Annual Dinner gathering in 1983. It will certainly be interesting to read the cabinet papers of 1974 when they are released next year.

A very few parliamentarians of the Labor variety, plus Ken Davidson from The Age and the indomitable Shirley Shackleton, came to the launch in Canberra, but, as you might guess, sales were slow, although we did our best to hawk copies around to many a meeting of sympathisers, including the Independent company, which had fought there in World War II.

Dunn retained the rights, and a new edition was published by ABC Books in 1996 (not 1986, as Jolliffe claims, compounding an error made by Longueville). With some additions, including a foreword by Xanana Gusmao and a rewritten preface, a third edition has now been published by Longueville Books. The East Timor Association regards Dunn’s words with almost biblical reverence. I suspect that Jolliffe wouldn’t go that far, but I might have expected something a little stronger than she managed in her very mixed and cautious review.

John Collins, Balaclava, Vic.