Review

In 2003, I edited a book called Whitewash, a critique of Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist account of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). Even before Whitewash was published, Windschuttle told a journalist at The Australian, D.D. McNicoll, that he was preparing a book-length reply. Nothing came of this promise. Rather than answer his critics directly, what Windschuttle seems eventually to have decided to do was to finance, through the Press he owns, Macleay, the publication of John Dawson’s Washout. By its publication, Windschuttle hopes, presumably, to have saved face.

These days, children’s non-fiction is not as stuffy as it once was. Instead of the encyclopaedic and often boring lists of facts that used to constitute the genre, authors are now encouraged to use fictional techniques in style and voice to produce a collage of ideas; and designers are required to present them as interactively as possible. These three very different books share some of these characteristics.

With the recent Tony Abbott paternity saga unfolding in spectacular fashion, adoption is back in the news. Not that it ever really went away. Adoption was such a common practice in postwar Australia that there is a ready-made constituency for reunion stories. Many birth parents, especially birth mothers, hunger for details of successful reunions. Adoptees search out familiar patterns in the biographies of other relinquished adults. But more than that, there is something primal about separation, loss and reunion that attracts a wider audience to adoption narratives. It is not simply that almost everyone over thirty knows someone who was adopted. There is something about postwar adoption experiences that sharpens our sense of human relationships as both fragile and resilient.

In the 1930s the notorious art critic and gallery director J.S. MacDonald felt it was his patriotic duty to protect Australia from the morally suspect culture of Europe, where, he exclaimed, ‘the pictorial symptoms of the degeneracy of France [is] enfeebled by the rule of functionaries, and … Mittel Europe [is] crushed and torn between Nazi, Bolshevist and Fascist megalomaniacs’. Not a man to mince words, MacDonald also expressed his horror of what was arguably Australia’s first blockbuster exhibition, the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, suggesting that it was the work of ‘degenerates and perverts’. As the then Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, MacDonald was a man of influence, and his outspoken views were transmitted widely.

Why is the Middle East anti-American? That is the core question in Barry Rubin’s flowing account of contemporary politics in that turbulent region of the world. As the director of Global Research in International Affairs in Israel, with a long history of research and publication on the Middle East and US foreign policy towards the region, Rubin is confident of his assessment. He is a prolific writer with some forty books to his name. The present one, The Tragedy of the Middle East, appears to comprise reflections based partly on the collection of media-excerpts and publications by Islamic groups in the wake of the September 11 attacks, published separately as an edited volume, Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East (2002), although there is no acknowledgment in this book of such a link. The theme of anti-Americanism has also provided the material for a more recent book by Rubin titled Hating America: A History (2004).

This book contains two discrete memoirs: the first by Clifford Norman Button, a Presbyterian minister; the second by his daughter, Muriel Mathers. Despite immense social changes in the period they cover (1888 to the present), there are many similarities between the two personalities and their work in the world.

Dr Button, the first memoirist, was obviously a driven character. His manuscript, entitled The Unknown Londoner, was completed just before his death in 1950 and remained in his daughter’s possession until she included it here, edited and abridged, under the title ‘Murmurings’. As well as a chronological account of his life, ‘Murmurings’ includes enough of Button’s reflections on his interests and beliefs to, in her words, ‘round out the man’.

Here is a kind of social experiment in fiction. Take the lowest, most abject starting point for a human life. Give the child no advantages, home or family; provide it with no regular food or care; subject it to the privations of a society with no welfare system; deprive it of any educational, emotional or spiritual training; and then, when it finally finds an occupation, make it the lowest, most socially disadvantaged and despised. And then see what kind of person it turns out to be. Oh, and set the whole thing in the Middle Ages, which, as everyone knows, was the most brutal, depraved, disease- and poverty-ridden era in Western history.

Sally Neighbour wrote this book as a direct response to the Bali bombing in October 2002. She was convinced, by that event and its aftermath, that fundamentalist Muslims’ hatred of Westerners was creating an unfamiliar world whose rules she and most Australians did not understand. We are in her debt. In clean prose, informed by meticulous research into a wide range of sources, Neighbour stitches together countless loose strands until they cohere persuasively into a dismaying pattern. Her courage, dispassion and skill present us with conclusions as unpleasant as they are inescapable. Journalism is a term frequently used pejoratively, but this is a thoroughly journalistic book in the best possible sense: it presents evidence, shapes arguments and distils information – a vast amount of information – intelligently and responsibly. Neighbour’s disturbing claims are founded on hard evidence and sober analysis.

Rene Baker File #28/E.D.P. is written by two women, Rene Powell and Bernadette Kennedy. Powell is an Aboriginal woman who was taken from her mother at the age of four. Kennedy, an ex-nun who is descended from Irish, English and Scottish migrants, has ‘worked with the homeless and disadvantaged in Western Australia’ for more than twenty-five years. The two women met through Kennedy’s religious work and because of Rene’s drinking problem: Rene was the first resident in a homeless women’s shelter that Kennedy helped to run.