Josh Wilson

So Clean and So Unsuffering

February 2005, no. 268

Day I – new suitors

The mountain thinks: Wilson, eh? Finally he comes. About time. The trucks stop on the north side where the Rongai route begins and Kilimanjaro’s powdered skirt tumbles out of Tanzania into Kenya. Her lower folds are less sensitive, but she still feels us among the thousands. In her stones she weighs our upward love and thinks: How much do you really want me? We start late and pad steadily from 1900 metres on the trail’s seamy musk with no perspective on the summit. Above us, only a shrug of fat hills and cloud. Kilimanjaro’s broad, high face (all ice-lashes and airless hauteur) is a vast four kilometres further up. Emmanuel tells us to walk polepole (slowly, gently). ‘Like walking your girlfriend home,’ he says.

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Night Thoughts in Time of War by Bob Ellis

by Josh Wilson •

October 2004, no. 265

Josh Wilson reviews ‘Night Thoughts in Time of War’ by Bob Ellis

What the hell is Bob Ellis? Discuss. Ellis might put it like this himself. Chances are he’s asked the question of a street window once or twice in wonderment and mock self-mockery. He’s earned it. From the back-cover blurbs down the years, one has got, by way of label, ‘l’enfant terrible of Australian culture’ (The Inessential Ellis, 1992), ‘a kind of dusty national icon’ (Goodbye Babylon, 2002) and now, in a disappointing regression to understatement, ‘a political backroomer’. We can assume, I think, that these are self-descriptions. Another, from the text of Goodbye Babylon, puts it this way:

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Shockwave by Peter Haran & Flashback by Peter Haran and Robert Kearney

by Josh Wilson •

August 2004, no. 263

War stories are never extrinsic to war. The us-and-them plots, domino theories and governing metaphors, the operational jargon and vast naming schemes, even the post-hoc synopses (we won, we should have won, another win like that and we’re finished): these are not patterns laid over something real; they stream from the enabling code.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Australian Task Force Vietnam administered its own war in Phuoc Tuy, a province south-east of Saigon. The Australians had their own allocation of enemy (D445 local guerrilla battalion and elements of the NVA 5th Division), their own style (US gear and fire-support, Vietnamese patrol tactics) and, of course, their own story. They were the latest Anzacs. Right?

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