Dear Editor,

Apropos of Joel Deane’s review of Ross Garnaut’s book Let’s Tax Carbon, for all the blame placed on a supposedly but in fact hugely diversified homogenised media, Deane ignores the role of the public (ABR, March 2025). This very magazine remains a key platform for intellectuals both to review and present thought and contribute to it, but the average reader is a non-combatant, lulled by comfort and a sort of existential hopelessness into indifference.

Biographers nearly always rejoice to find a bundle of letters. If both sides of a correspondence have survived, it doubles the pleasure. At its best, an exchange that was maintained over a long period will illuminate personality, time, and place. Love letters are probably the most highly prized. Whether or not the lovers have the gift of words, their closeness in a relationship brings a sense of reality. Readers of some self-revealing intimate letters may feel like intruders, uninvited watchers at a private theatre for which they didn’t buy a ticket.

for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’

Of  Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’

I lament hearing the late poet Dorothy Porter (1954–2008) read in public only once, having devoured her work voraciously over the years. In the National Portrait Gallery, I once came across Rick Amor’s smallish 2002 portrait of Porter, which shows candid brown eyes framed by hawkish eyebrows inherited from her renowned barrister father, Chester Porter. ‘Chester Porter walks on water’ was her father’s vainglorious self-descriptor when he wasn’t monikered as ‘The Smiling Funnel-web’ at the bar (see Chester Porter, Walking On Water: A life in the law, 2003).

Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.

Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.

Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.

In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?