Review

These novels fulfil the brief of ANU’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, where Pandanus Press was founded in 2001, by viewing Australia and Australians from the perspectives of China and a distant island. In The Tao of Shepherding, set in the 1850s, two young Chinese men are kidnapped and sold as labourers to a Riverina sheep property, where they lose all hope of returning to civilisation. The Lost Tribe is mellower, in that the Pacific is crossed in both directions in its counter-pointed narratives, one set in the present and the other in the 1860s. These second novels, by promising Australian authors with direct knowledge of the countries depicted in them, offer insights into cross-cultural interactions, myths and religion.

‘There is no pleasure in travelling,’ Albert Camus jotted in his notebook while in the Balearic Isles one summer. ‘It is more an occasion for spiritual testing.’ Pleasure, he argued, leads us away from ourselves; travel, which he considered part of the eternal search for ‘culture’, always brings us back to ourselves.

The Grave at Thu Le explores a young French woman’s visit to Vietnam to research her ancestry, and to locate the cemetery in which members of her family were interred. Catherine D’anyers’s great-great-grandfather Claude was an engineer who lived in the colonial community in Hanoi at the turn of the last century. Past and present strands of the novel interweave as old, childhood stories of yester-year are overlaid with contemporary realities of Vietnam.

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) was a national organisation that existed, in one form or another, from 1958 to 1978. For the main part, it drew its members from a network of both black and white groups, from active citizens and from those who wanted to be counted as such.

Two recent books examine the impact and legacy of this organisation. Black and White Together, by Sue Taffe, provides a detailed overview of the organisation from an historian’s perspective, while Seeking Racial Justice is an ‘insider’s memoir’, written by one of its non-indigenous members, Jack Horner. Both books tell this story in the context of the political shift from segregation to assimilation policies (1938–61), from assimilation to integration (1959–67), and from integration to self-determination (1968–78).

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’.