Review

In Dudley McCarthy’s volume in the Australian official history of World War II, subtitled Kokoda to Wau (1959), there is a wonderfully evocative passage that sets the fighting in Papua New Guinea in context:

In this important book, Elisabeth Wynhausen seeks to ‘animate the experience of a class of people who had remained invisible even as their numbers swelled’. That class is the ‘working poor’, the people who clean, cook, wait tables and deal with everyone else’s garbage. They are the so-called ‘losers’ from economic change: the men and especially the women who do the jobs the winners don’t want to do any more, like clean their own toilets.

‘Reading provides a temporary stay from hate and anger. From pain,’ proposes Celeste Walters’s teenage protagonist, Josh Sim. Yet, as a novel, Deception is far from escapist literature. Despite being set in an imaginary city, this is not the material of fantasy: Walters’s work reveals the world as a gritty, desolate and unjustly cruel place.

Readers of Joanne Carroll’s first publication, the novellas In the Quietness of My Aunt’s House and Bad Blood (1996), will not be disappointed with The Italian Romance; it is a novel of great style. There is none of the slick optimism that we associate with popular romance; instead, it deals with the most important human issues and, at times, approaches tragedy rather than romance. True love, it seems, is an irresistible but punishing force. The lovers Lilian and Nio have no regrets, and never consider their decision to have been the wrong one, but Lilian, in particular, will pay for it for the rest of her life.

‘While some inventors concern themselves with creating the ultimate mousetrap,’ Philip Nitschke explains, ‘my aims are more modest. At the heart of all my efforts is a desire to fulfil the needs of Exit members.’

The members of Exit International – an organisation that has attracted 3000 members since its foundation by Nitschke in 1997, and that is now co-directed by Fiona Stewart – are mostly older and seriously ill people who ‘want a choice about when and how they die’. According to the argument of this book, the satisfaction of their needs requires easily accessible technology that will enable them to die at will, with dignity, painlessly and swiftly. ‘Dying with dignity is a growth industry,’ the authors declare. Exit hopes ‘to meet the needs of the baby boomer generation … [T]he most important of Exit’s current work is our research and development program. Focused upon a range of smart and simple technologies, this program offers some real and practical end-of-life choices for the future.’

Katherine Summers’ memoir of her childhood and Kris Olsson’s biography of Debbie Kilroy have in common histories of violence and abuse against women and children. Summers writes of her early childhood of desperate poverty in London’s East End in the 1960s and of her subsequent time in private boarding schools in a way that emphasises the powerlessness of the child in an inscrutable adult world. In contrast, Olsson traces Debbie Kilroy’s journey from an angry and rebellious adolescence in Brisbane in the 1970s to becoming a battered wife and mother who was imprisoned in the infamous Boggo Road prison after being convicted of illegal drug trafficking. From these beginnings, Olsson recounts the process by which Kilroy becomes a powerful activist and leader on behalf of imprisoned women and troubled teenagers.

It’s Sydney – and Saturday night. The Great Jazz Orgy has begun … a million people are moving, turning, swaying, shuffling to the accompaniment of pianola, gramophone, or jazz band, and are beating out the barbaric time of syncopated melody. (Home magazine, 1923)

Historian Jill Julius Matthews takes us back to Sydney between the 1890s and the late 1920s, when cinema and the phonograph were exciting new imports, their impact on the local culture at once exhilarating and threatening. Matthews examines the way modernity – in the form of popular music, dance and film – was brought to and embraced by Sydneysiders. Her focus is on the ‘mediators’ of the new: entrepreneurs who imported the products and the technique of making them indispensable to people’s lives; the traditionalists who hoped to protect audiences from ‘corruption’ by seductive popular culture; and the government officials who negotiated these voices, seeking to regulate content.

Kerrie Davies’s Delta is touted as ‘the first ever biography on Delta Goodrem’. This is not entirely surprising, given that the singer–songwriter is only twenty years old. But Davies makes no secret of the mythical terms in which she views her subject: ‘[Delta] has raged against failure and exulted in the euphoria of success. Delta has felt the power of youth and the fear of death. And she has fallen in love, had her heart broken, and been betrayed. For Delta, this is just the beginning.’

To the outsider, the Anglican Church may well seem one of the more liberal of the Christian denominations. While the Roman Catholic Church refuses even to debate the issues, Anglicans have gone ahead and ordained both women and homosexuals to the priesthood. In Canada, one Anglican diocese has gone so far as to bless same-sex marriages. Theologically, the best-selling books of retired US bishop John Shelby Spong represent progressive Anglicanism at its extreme. Not only does Spong argue that the world view of the Bible is incompatible with contemporary scientific knowledge, but he also suggests that St Paul was gay and that Christians need not believe in god.

There are at least three reasons why we left-leaning, right-thinking, middle-class readers value Robert Manne’s essays. Over the last twenty years, he has – in books, as editor of Quadrant from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist – been writing with an uncommon intellectual lucidity. He is that rare combination of good scholar and good journalist. His style is transparently reasonable: his essays shine as models of speaking rationally.