Review

Every December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas’, writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’

In her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the “weight of evidence”’ and that, based on that weight of evidence, SARS-CoV-2 ‘was made not in the laboratory of man, but in nature’. Finkel’s essay is essential reading not only for her meticulous analysis of the evidence – peer-reviewed papers and US intelligence sources – but also for her approach: ‘I do not blindly trust scientists. My lodestone is the scientific method itself.’

Joe Aston’s book persuasively outlines the reasons under-pinning the reputational downfall of Qantas, a once highly respected Australian company. In this engaging book, Aston lays bare the way in which greed and distorted loyalties influenced boardroom and top management decisions to the detriment of the travelling public. It should be compulsory reading for all boards, CEOs, politicians, and senior bureaucrats, for it helps to explain the growing lack of trust in senior business figures, politicians, public servants, and the heads of independent integrity-related agencies. The Chairman’s Lounge also details the public’s disdain for those who are paid exorbitant sums of money and extravagant bonuses to run big businesses in this country – Qantas in particular.

The satirical magazine Private Eye hit the mark with its characterisation of Tony Blair. He was the Rev. ARP Blair MA (Oxon), the pally, trendy, and earnest vicar of St Albion addressing his flock through the parish newsletter. The good vicar would frequently mangle or repurpose Scripture in service to his own agenda. It is delightful, therefore, to see glimpses of this memorable character up to his old tricks in this volume by @realtonyblair, decades after his departure from office (Blair was prime minister from 1997 to 2007). Did you know, for example, that Moses might have boosted his leadership performance by doing more to take control of the narrative of his journey?

The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.

On 26 October 2022, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

It is a cliché of the operatic world that all members of the chorus are frustrated or failed soloists. The traditional operatic pathway frequently emerges from the chance discovery of a singing voice with potential, followed by an exploration of opportunities to develop this as yet untapped ability. This usually means enrolment in a university vocal program, sometimes followed by postgraduate degrees. In the past, this was not always the case with many instances of highly renowned singers being ‘discovered’ under the most unlikely circumstances while pursuing very different occupations, often with limited or no musical training.

Britain today is no place for young people. The evidence is as familiar as it is stark. One million of the nation’s fourteen million children experienced destitution in 2022, meaning that their families could not afford to adequately feed or clothe them or keep them warm. In 2024, a record 150,000 lived in temporary accommodation in England. The long-standing decline in infant mortality has stalled. Facts like these, concerning the families struggling most, are often cited as proof of atrophy under Conservative austerity (which, while destructive in its own right, degraded Britain’s resilience against Covid-19 and the energy crisis that followed) and as indicators of the issues that Keir Starmer’s new Labour government should prioritise. But what do we miss by focusing on the worst-off?

In his seminal book I Don’t Want To Talk About It (1997), Terrence Real outlines how contemporary men, within the frameworks of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, must undergo a severing of self from self, and self from community. Real identifies how the so-called masculine power attained through this severing comes from a ‘one down’ position in which the struggle for ‘power over’, rather than ‘power with’, is a central doctrine of what he calls ‘patriarchal masculinity’. This power over, rather than power with, is similarly manifest in international governance, statehood, community and the family unit itself – and it is even manifest in the representation of male characters in Australian literature.

‘Well, I always liked Madrid!’ is my father’s verdict on the city; a verbal shrug that manages both to damn with faint praise and gesture at a powerful, unspoken criticism. There is some truth in both: Madrid often finds herself crowded out of ‘Great Cities of the World’ lists and has struggled to win top billing as a tourist attraction, even within Spain itself. The perpetual bridesmaid, despite her official capital status (hello Ottawa, Ankara, and Canberra), she has long been forced to hold the glittering train of Gaudí’s Barcelona. It has taken the zeal and outsider’s gaze of a convert – the accomplished Australian writer and honorary madrileño, Luke Stegemann – to draw her from the shadows in a self-described ‘expression of love … and act of recovery’.