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Review

James Stirling’s naval career was helped by having an uncle who was a Rear Admiral. The other side of his family was involved in trade, and some have argued that his proposal for the Swan River colony was based on personal ambition and family influence. This is true to some extent. However, in a deeper sense, he was shaped by his family’s involvement in two of the mainsprings of nineteenth-century British imperialism: naval dominance and worldwide trade.

Stirling was the founding governor of Western Australia for ten years, but the major part of his career was with the Royal Navy. A strength of this biography is that it is the first full account of that career. There is too little space in this review to deal fully with this part of his life, and Australian readers will be more concerned with his governorship. Like most colonial Australian governors (and post-colonial ones), Stirling has had his admirers and detractors. The author, obviously an admirer, argues persuasively in his favour.

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With the world apparently going to hell in a handbasket, the flood of contributions to ideas of global governance shows no sign of abating. There is something dizzying about immersing oneself in such far-reaching and ultimately – necessarily – optimistic works about the possibility of a just global civil order at a time when the most basic liberal democratic rights and freedoms are being traded away willy-nilly at the national and local level. From national security laws to nightclub curfews, nothing seems easier to knock over than liberty, and nothing more difficult to resist than cultures of fear and repression.

Nevertheless, there is no reason not to project into a future that may offer scope for a reversal of this process. John Keane is an Adelaide-born heavy-hitter in the area of studies of civil society and democracy, and also a political biographer – most recently of Vaclav Havel. He is thus ideally placed to write a book that is both accessible to the general, well-informed reader, while sacrificing little in the way of academic smarts. He goes a long way towards succeeding, but that is in part because the political questions to which the answer is ‘global civil society’ by their very nature exclude certain dimensions of human beings whose character would complicate the picture.

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This book is dedicated to Judith Brett’s grandparents, ‘none of whom ever voted Labor’, and their grandchildren, ‘most of whom do’; and concludes with the observation that ‘the relationship between … emerging social formations and nationally based political parties is not yet clear – or at least not to me’. The dedication suggests even-handedness, and the concluding words imply a commitment to evidence as the basis for argument. These qualities characterise this major study of Australian Liberalism – an impressive personal achievement and a significant event in Australian intellectual life – though Brett sometimes appears to believe that they are one and the same thing, and that, in order to understand human relations, one must first accept the equal validity of ideologically opposed views.

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Australian historians of World War II are fast running out of time. Although printed and photographic records are more accessible than ever, the number of eyewitnesses to the war’s events is dwindling. Rescuing veterans’ insights and memories from oblivion is a matter of ‘now or never’. The subject of this book, the late Major General Ken Eather, will not be forgotten. His name will always be associated with the fighting for Bardia, Lae and Kokoda. More fragile are the invaluable recollections that living veterans have of his career and personality.

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One of Australia’s most significant Modernist artists, Margaret Preston (1875–1963) is often remembered for her relentless self-promotion and her forthright opinions: in particular, for her call to develop an art for Australia, untainted by past and irrelevant foreign art. Although frequently quoted (the wonderfully titled autobiographical article ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’ being one of her best-known pieces), her writings have not previously been gathered together. Selected and introduced by Elizabeth Butel, who has written before on Preston, this book presents twenty-nine articles and one extract. These appeared in a number of publications – art journals, women’s magazines, exhibition catalogues and the like – between 1923 and 1949.

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Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia edited by John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell

by
September 2003, no. 254

This hefty volume begins with an article on a cappella singing (ensembles with names like Café of the Gate of Salvation and Voices from the Vacant Lot) and ends with the zither, which instrument, the editors assure us, ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the present-day cultural diversity of music in Australia’. We have no lack of companions today: indeed, over the last decade they have been coming thick and fast. However the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia seems to have had a particularly troubled genesis, though the editors, John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, make no reference to it.

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What interesting times we live in. Indeed, they are likely to become more interesting. One of the major issues for the new century is China’s emergence as a great power. How will China deal with the rest of the world? Should China be contained, confronted? How will its enhanced power be shown? How will governments wrestle with that power?

Martin Stuart-Fox outlines this problem from the multiple viewpoints of China and of South-East Asia, and adopts a long historical perspective. His tightly organised book covers around 2000 years of relationships between China and the many kingdoms and countries of South-East Asia. He argues, as a good historian should, that the past will powerfully shape the future: ‘a new pattern of power relations is emerging, one that harks back in significant ways to earlier times.’

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This, the first major study of Xavier Herbert’s literary journey, is a superb work of scholarship. It is written with passion, good humour and a clear acknowledgment of the faults, both personal and literary, of its subject. Sean Monahan is an enthusiastic admirer of Poor Fellow My Country (1975). According to Monahan, it is not only the quintessential Australian novel, but also ‘one of the great novels of world literature’ – an enthralling yarn as well as a symbolic vision of the difficult path to racial reconciliation. Above all, he says, it is an illuminating picture of a whole culture.

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Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination. Football, then, was more intrinsically theatrical – a physical and metaphorical war – and, in that sense, magical. In the late 1960s and 1970s players needed little ingenuity to acquire nicknames such as ‘Bull’ Richardson, ‘Whale’ Roberts and ‘Gasometer’ Nolan. How the modern game cries out for a player resembling a gas tank.

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Like a series of attenuated conversation poems, Drumming on Water is a narrative in forty-five riffs. The individual poems are like extended song lyrics – spoken jazz: ‘ad lib, of course / but also well thought out.’ The words are notes to sound and repeat, scoring the brief and unmemorable career of a jazz drummer with the Lizzie Rivers’ All-Girl Band of 1938 and regular gigs on Sydney Harbour ferries, until the mysterious death of its lead singer who disappears overboard – the fulcrum of the poem.

It’s hard to overstate the sophistication of the poetry in this new verse novel (though verse narrative or novella would be more accurate). Drumming on Water sets a new benchmark in Australian poetry: smooth, elegant, vernacular and deceptively complex. It is an engaging read.

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