Review

In 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.

Increasingly, public understanding of issues vital to humanity’s well-being and future – climate change, health policy, international relations – is informed by debate that pits specious prejudice, masquerading as opinion, against expertise. Communicating with a lay audience, experts on complex yet politically charged subjects confront twin challenges: they must present evidence that is multifaceted and can provide no perfect or certain solution, while simultaneously dismantling arguments, founded in denialism, that endorse simple strategies and offer comforting but false hope. Experts and those who wish to construct evidence-based policy are struggling to meet these challenges.

Vladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia. Nevertheless, such a trial is essential not only to uphold international law, but to deter other international leaders who are contemplating aggression.

The world isn’t quite what it seems. We often imagine the modern world as if it were a halved orange, East clearly separated from West. For centuries, the West has claimed superiority over the Rest, despite knowing little about them, as Edward Said copiously showed in Orientalism (1978). An equally influential proposition in The Clash of Civilisations (1996) was Samuel Huntington’s. He saw the world of Islam as having ‘bloody borders’ and being pitted in conflict with the West over cultural differences. In 1984 (1949), George Orwell imagined two fictional hemispheres in conflict, Eurasia and Eastasia, leaving unresolved the problem of what to do about Oceania.

Dreaming Ecology is the posthumous third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Deborah Bird Rose’s earlier anthropological study Dingo Makes Us Human (1992) and Hidden Histories (1991), an account of the recent his-tory of Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District (VRD) region in the north-western corner of the Northern Territory. As an anthropological neophyte, I came across her briefly in 1994 during the Palm Valley Land Claim in Central Australia, in her role as anthropologist assisting the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Although by the time of her death in 2018 she had worked on nearly twenty Aboriginal land claims, her own anthropological research diverged from Australian anthropology’s preoccupation for nearly fifty years with Indigenous land tenure systems dictated by the land claim and native title claim process.

There are few places more restful than a riverbank on a fine day, few sights more enticing than a disappearing river bend, few places more intriguing to follow than the tumbled rocks of a creek line. Following the water, to its source or destination, seems hard-wired into our psyche.

The slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.

Nuked – a compelling but depressing read – is a deeply researched and strangely suspenseful account of the AUKUS agreement struck between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United States President Jo Biden and announced in September 2021; a deal that included supplying Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines at the staggering cost of $368 billion. Nuked should be compulsory reading for all Australian citizens.

After sixty years, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ has almost become a cliché. Yet, in films like Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest it is powerfully present in every mundane detail of the Auschwitz commandant’s family life. What of the banality and trauma of the lives of survivors or those murdered? There is a view that if the victims had been more aware of their fate, they would have escaped and survived. This claim is an insult, as most had no choice. The overwhelming majority of Jews, many of whom were alert to the risk of mass extermination, were unable to get exit visas, afford to flee, or obtain refuge in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Tess Scholfield-Peters’ grandfather, Hermann (Mutzi) Pollnow, was one of the lucky ones.