Scribe

Shadowboxing is a collection of discrete short stories charting the arduous journey of the narrator, Michael Byrne, from childhood to fatherhood. Living in the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Carlton, Richmond, and Fitzroy in the 1960s was for many a tough proposition – and the Byrne family is no exception. Their household is headed by an embittered alcoholic whose violent tendencies are a source of constant dread. Money is always tight, and the family’s grip on any sort of security or comfort is invariably tenuous. Yet when the stories have been told, what we are left with is not a litany of woe but rather powerful examples of resilience and resourcefulness provided by the inhabitants of these impoverished communities.

There is no minimal safe exposure to free asbestos fibre. It is the most lethal industrial material of the twentieth century. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are the common diseases arising from exposure to it. Mesothelioma, a cancer, is distinctively brutal in the way it causes its victims to die. Typically, there are no symptoms for as many as forty years; when the disease appears, death follows after a few excruciatingly painful months. James Hardie, a conservative icon of Australian industry, was established in 1888 and its core business was fibro-cement manufacture, the fibre being asbestos. Gideon Haigh traces the postwar success of the company and its turning away from the gathering evidence of asbestos’s toxicity. Asbestos, it dissembled, was dangerous (like many industrial materials) rather than lethal. Hardie comforted itself in the belief that the incidence of disease reflected past periods of exposure and not the current changed practices. At the same time it failed even to meet these inadequate dust standards in its workplaces.

‘Little more than a hundred years ago,’ Alfred Deakin wrote in 1901, ‘Australia was a Dark Continent [without] a white man within its borders. Its sparse native population was black as ebony. There are now some sixty thousand of their descendants remaining and about eighty thousand coloured aliens added. In another century,’ he confidently predicted, ‘Australia will be a White Continent with not a black or even dark skin among its inhabitants.’ Deakin was, of course, celebrating the White Australia Policy, not only as embodied in the Immigration Restriction and Pacific Island Labourers Acts (designed, respectively, to prohibit Asian immigration and to expel the Melanesians indentured to work in tropical agriculture) but also as expressed in widespread complacence with the disappearance of the indigenous Australians.

Fresh from celebrating one glorious misadventure in Australia’s radical history, the labour movement now confronts a more awkward anniversary. The recent 150th year celebration of the Eureka Stockade brought with it a certain self-congratulatory afterglow. Less sanguine recollections will no doubt colour the fiftieth anniversary of the great ALP Split of 1955. This catastrophe had its origins in a decade-long struggle between right-wingers combined in Industrial Groups, and communists, over union power. The legacy of this Split ran from mass expulsions in the ALP, to collapse of state governments, disaffiliation of a union bloc and, finally, to a new political party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), whose preferences ensured that the ALP could not win a federal election for two decades. Whatever malaise debilitates contemporary Labor, the Split remains the party’s greatest tragedy.

Reflecting on the sixty-year history of the United Nations, it seems obvious that this is an organisation created through the slow and tortured process of natural evolution rather than the product of careful, intelligent design.

Years ago, back when the UN had barely escaped its adolescence, the Nobel laureate and eminent diplomat Ralph Bunche observed that ‘the United Nations is a young organisation in the process of developing in response to challenges of all kinds’. He referred to institutional enlargement that typically continued as the global agenda grew. Agencies soon developed to coordinate the work of other agencies. Consequently, the modern UN became a haphazard creature, made up of a bewildering mix of political organs. Each part is intended to serve a different purpose, whether maintaining international security, advancing respect for fundamental human rights, or promoting economic development. And each component comes labelled with an almost impossible array of scientific-sounding designations (EcoSoc, for instance, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF and plenty more to make up page after page of abbreviation lists).

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.

The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.

Should the recent turbulent history of one university in one state of Australia matter to us? Some of the critics of Cain and Hewitt’s Off Course think not. Australian higher education has ‘moved on’, they claim. There is no question that the right ‘On Course’ for one-time public entities – from gas companies to universities – is to graduate from public ownership and statutory obligation to marketplace and deregulated freedom. Cain and Hewitt have simply missed the boat.

But have they? In the helter-skelter of change since the Dawkins ‘reforms’ of the late 1980s (which saw the abolition of the binary divide between universities and colleges, and a vast increase in the numbers of students undertaking tertiary education), there has been much movement at the top but not an equivalent acceleration of public enlightenment. There is a residual, stubborn, Robert Menzies-inspired public conception of what a university means and what nation-building role it should play in a democracy.

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.

George Orwell must be spinning in his grave. Aghast at the use of his name to inspire any political crusade or bandwagon, the ardent advocate against the use of language to spin an alternative reality is forever being used to bolster the armory of political activists around the world.

Should Orwell be allowed to rest? Simon Crean’s speechwriter, the cerebral Dennis Glover, evidently thinks not. One hundred years after Orwell’s birth, Glover has recruited the socialist contrarian, novelist and essayist to his cause. In Orwell’s Australia: From Cold War to Culture Wars, Glover invokes Orwell’s legacy to rail not against the decline of the English language and the use of words to say one thing while meaning another, as is often the case, but rather to lament the state of modern Australia and the lost dream of a ‘social democracy without ideology’. Just like Orwell in the first half of the twentieth century, Glover sees a bleak future characterised by ‘the disappearance, under the pressure of coming wars, of a whole way of life, and its replacement with something shallower, nastier, prefabricated, more ideological and more politically and socially divided’ – in other words, John Howard and conservative hegemony enveloping the Australian way of life.