Review

For Germaine Greer, the nuns at the Star of the Sea Convent in Melbourne provided ‘a terrific education’. ‘They really loved us,’ said Greer. Not so Amanda Lohrey. Her experience of a working-class convent school in Tasmania so scarred her that still today, visiting a church in Europe, she feels a ‘physical revulsion’ for ‘the naked martyrs, staked out, flayed alive, crumpled, bleeding’. For former Catholic schoolgirls, a reunion is a chance to laugh together over some of the more outrageous things taught to them by nuns. But Lohrey can look back only with bitterness, in particular on the nuns’ ‘intense but evasive’ preoccupation with sex. ‘Boys are after only one thing, girls. They’ll suck you dry like an orange,’ she was told. She cannot laugh.

The experts may prognosticate, but reality makes fools of them, too. Paul Roberts, in The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order, reviews several scenarios for the future of oil that were advanced in late 2002 by the US National Intelligence Council. The two most bleak ones had the price of oil reaching US$50 a barrel, the first sometime between 2010 and 2015, the second somewhat earlier, following convulsions in the Middle East. As we know, US$50 was reached only a few months after The End of Oil was published in the US; at the time of writing, the price is around US$60 a barrel. Reading these two books confirms the certainty, speed and completeness of change. The unknowable for oil is: when?

Rene Rivkin was one of those unorthodox characters who was irresistible to the Sydney media – and the feeling was mutual. ‘I never feel really alive unless I am in the newspapers,’ he remarked to one journalist at the peak of his fame.

Rivkin loved being rich, and he loved talking about it. His father’s generation may have regarded it as deeply improper to talk about one’s money, but to Rene it was a reason for being. Why not flaunt it. At a speech night in 1988 for his alma mater, Sydney Boys’ High, he was invited to talk about the lessons he had learned at school. Instead of taking the usual path of exhorting the boys about the merits of thrift, hard work and selflessness, Rene extolled the virtues of being rich. It was a message that endeared him to the wallets of many during his time as the nation’s most famous stockbroker. He not only loved making money, he loved spending it as well. He was generous to his friends. He had dozens of expensive cars, a sumptuous residence in London, a $10 million house in Sydney, and a luxury motor yacht. He once bought an employee a $20,000 Harley Davidson motorcycle as a reward for the man kissing his feet.

Evil empire or fellow citizen? It seems to me that the arguments and counterarguments about America’s role in the world today run parallel to the debates concerning cultural studies’ standing in the humanities. It’s a thought that would have Raymond Williams rolling in his grave, of course. As an academic discipline, cultural studies was born Marxist, and reared to champion the local, the underdog, the oppressed. But intervention of all kinds, good and bad, is a form of influence. Act on behalf of others and for every round of applause, there’ll be a competing cry of indignation. Perhaps I should declare my hand? I’ve been in and out of English departments for the last fifteen years. I feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude to cultural studies for loosening literature from New Criticism’s explication de texte. That said, I mourn the loss of a community of readers that the canon – and the existence of English departments, discrete unto themselves – ensured. I also baulk at the idea that readers are mere consumers – that catch-all term – as if curling up with a novel was experientially no different to eating, shopping or watching television.

One walks a fine line between patriotism and claptrap when writing about anything to do with war. Especially when writing for young people, one tries to salute the courage of soldiers and to honour the fallen, but also to instil caution in potential young soldiers; to convey that war is hell and that it shows human beings at their worst. Of course, one wants to tell an exciting story, too, with heroes and villains and suspense – with maybe a history lesson or two thrown in. Two of the following books succeed majestically in this task; the third falls far short.

Since the early 1990s Australians have been infected with ‘affluenza’ – a virus of over-consumption that Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss characterise as ‘the bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses’, a growth fetish and an ‘epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the Australian dream’.

To start at the beginning (that is, the dust jacket): giving the author’s name as Ingo Petzke is a misnomer. It suggests that he has written a biography of the Australian film-maker Phillip Noyce, when in fact this is neither biography nor autobiography. This indecision about its mode undermines its value. I’ll return to this.

As an eyewitness to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, Philippe Roger was sickened when the America-hating Jean Baudrillard announced his ‘prodigious jubilation’ at the event. Sickened, but not surprised. Roger understood that Baudrillard’s crassness was rooted in a long French tradition of anti-American discourse.

At first, many of these forty-eight poems from two decades struck me as almost self-indulgent and mundane: short lyrics about family life, eating, drinking, dreaming of Valparaiso, lemons, the Molonglo River; though there was often an underside of premonition, discontent, and a stillness that made me think I hadn’t really understood. In the first group, ‘One Hundred Nights’ bothered me: ‘When will it end / this waking / while others sleep, / this herding out on the ghost fields? / the flesh / whispering / its impossible desires / the bones / murmuring their Kali mantra / love, emptiness / love, emptiness.’ However, on my next reading, some of the second group struck me with autumnal clarity. From ‘Brown Pigeon’: ‘eyes / plucked out, feathers / scattered, / maggots / when I turn it over / writhing in the black mess near the heart’, where the image of the dead bird is an iconic memento mori.

There are two approaches to public affairs. The first assumes that élites ‘have and have always had the same passions’ (Machiavelli): leaders will do whatever it takes to retain power and to attain their objectives, tempered only by knowing that the popular verdict will depend on success. Success is judged by results: resort to devious or ruthless means will be excused if the people see beneficial outcomes. You can expect leaders to be driven by ambition and self-interest, but trust them to do enough to forestall a popular uprising that might bring them down. Machiavelli was not writing about democracy.