Review

William Willshire was Officer in Charge of the Native Police in Central Australia from 1884 to 1891, when he was charged with the murder of two Aborigines. He was acquitted, but was regarded by his superiors from then on as something of a liability, ending his career in an uneventful posting in Cowell on the Yorke Peninsula. He wrote three books about his life as an outback hero, glorifying himself as an anthropologist and sentimental champion of the people he had policed with ignorant brutality.

Of the many damning revelations contained in this book, the fact that Allan Dulles, the CIA’s longest serving director (1953–61), would assess the merits of intelligence briefings by their weight is among the most startling. Coming in at 700 pages, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is sufficiently hefty to have commanded Dulles’s attention. Were he alive today to read this searing indictment of the institution he did so much to construct, however, it is doubtful that Dulles would find much cause for cheer.

Zygmunt Bauman has a talent for metaphors. When, in the late 1980s, he entered the fray of the modernity/postmodernity debates, he suggested that, while premodernity had been presided over by ‘gamekeepers’ managing a disorderly nature and society, modernity was presided over by ‘gardeners’ obsessed with creating order out of messy reality. In his most recent work, beginning with Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman uses the metaphor ‘liquidity’ to depict modernity’s contemporary phase, in the process leaving behind his previous flirtation with the concept of postmodernity.

This marvellous first novel may be historical fiction, but its themes and concerns are by no means limited to the past. Sara Knox interweaves questions of gender and identity, sexuality, class and the overarching issue of morality in times of war.

Bob Burton is not one to pull punches: early in Inside Spin he describes the public relations (PR) industry as one dominated by a ‘culture of secrecy’ with its practitioners operating ‘on the basis that they are most successful when they are nowhere to be seen’. That the industry is largely unregulated adds to the sense of unease that many Australians feel about its activities.

Attempting to theorise or intellectualise rock‘n’roll, one could argue, is to miss the point. As Almost Famous’s egomaniac Stillwater vocalist Jeff Bebe put it, ‘I don’t think anyone can really explain rock‘n’roll – [except] maybe Pete Townsend’. In which case, Bebe would probably get a kick out of editor Theo Cateforis’s lovingly composed The Rock History Reader, which, unlike other publications in a similar vein, allows the theorising and intellectualising – the explaining – to nestle alongside autobiographical passages and personal anecdotes, providing a complex view of rock’s annals. If you didn’t already know who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp, you’ll probably find more than a few clues in this volume.

Satire is more than just biting animosity or moral denunciation, though in those shapes it has made its greatest contribution to world literature – from Aristophanes and Juvenal to the first Samuel Butler and Swift. The convention only works in relatively permissive societies. During the worst excesses of censorship in the Cold War, the authorities were seldom worried by satires cleverly concealed as fables or dystopian extravaganzas. Let the cognoscenti exchange winks, their rulers knew that the mob was not interested and the state hardly threatened. The censors themselves may well have enjoyed the ingenuity of their indignant critics – so Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Andrey Voznesensky prospered without having to defect to the West. Meanwhile, satire turned into cabaret in our part of the world.

Bruce Beresford has left a greater imprint on the national sensibility than most people might think. From The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) through The Getting of Wisdom (1977) and Breaker Morant (1980), he has demonstrated a virtuoso ability to dramatise Australianness, classic and modern. His films Don’s Party (1976) and The Club (1980) mean that we are never likely to forget the idiom in which David Williamson first represented us, because Beresford has made it part of the cinematic argot of the country; a new production of a play is automatically measured by how much the actors stand up to the classic performances of Graeme Kennedy or Ray Barrett or John Hargreaves in Beresford’s vision of the plays.

Contemporary biography presents many challenges, even more so when the subject is a politician who is still in office. It is, at best, a progress report: necessarily provisional both in its analysis and its attempt to anticipate the weightier judgment of history. By its very nature, it inclines more towards journalism than towards scholarly assessment.