Review

To the west through the windows of my primary school in Terowie, I could see wheat fields, farmed by solid, middle-class farmers who sent their children to the local schools. To the east, if I squinted to the distant hills, I could make out the start of the station country, run by ‘squatters’ who sent their children to private schools in Adelaide. In between, the land was neither one nor the other and the strugglers who farmed it were often obliged to take work in the railways or as labourers on the lands to the east or west. It was all due to Goyder’s Line, I was told. There was always a lurking implication of guilt when Goyder’s Line was mentioned. Anyone who hadn’t the foresight to buy, or inherit, land sufficiently inside or outside the Line probably deserved to struggle.

On 15 February 2005 the Labor Opposition launched a ‘matter of public importance’ (MPI) debate on ‘truth in government’ in the House of Representatives. An MPI debate is really only an invitation to comment on a ‘matter for discussion’, with no vote taken, as would be the case in a censure motion. The parliamentary discussion is simply timed out. But it is a useful opposition tactic for getting arguments and evidence on the public record.

‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.

Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.

Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.

From the first paragraph, Terri Janke’s Butterfly Song makes its intentions clear: this is a novel about the love of the land and the palpable connection to the ancestral home. ‘They say if you live on an island for too long, you merge with it. Your bones become the sands, your blood the ocean. Your flesh is the fertile ground. Your heart becomes the stories, dances, songs. The island is part of your makeup …’ This is why Tarena Shaw feels an odd sense of belonging when she first steps foot on Thursday Island, her grandparents’ birthplace. Though she has never been there before, the memories and myths that have been passed down the family tree have guaranteed a spiritual bond between the black-suited city slicker and the tropical island with water like a ‘living gemstone’.

Martin Harrison’s poems have a fine discursive quality, which means that they often read like essays. Take ‘Midday’, from his recent volume Summer (2002), where a hand-scythe and the ABC radio news produce a meditation on time and place not dissimilar in its conclusion to that offered on several occasions in the essays included in Who Wants to Create Australia? ‘Only a little can be added to an everyday sense of life – / a singularity, a slowed-down look, faster than light, / a sense of movement out of nowhere, now, here.’

Whether you agreed with it or not – and many didn’t – Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a coming Clash of Civilisations (1993) was one of the most engrossing arguments of the late twentieth century. He not only foresaw Western civilisation confronting a joint Confucian–Islamic challenge, in 1996 he also anticipated an attack on the US by young, middle-class Muslims.