George Orwell’s Elephant

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Theodore Ell for alerting readers to two factual errors in the essay ‘George Orwell’s Elephant’ in the book of the same name that he reviewed (ABR, August 2024). I regret the errors and my failure to correct them. The editorial team at Gazebo Books and I worked closely together on the manuscript, and to blame solely the editorial team for errors would be unjust and ungracious. I am the author and I take full responsibility.

I sincerely hope that the readers aren’t put off by the errors and can still enjoy what the book has to offer. Gazebo Books is in the process of correcting the eBook version, and the manuscript is also being edited for its possible second print.

Subhash Jaireth

I did know my father

Dear Editor,

Difficult as it is for some historians to separate the present from the past in their thinking, that skill is central to their profession. The other is to write with due respect to the likely audience. Joan Beaumont seems to have set aside these two essentials in her article ‘“I never knew my uncle”: The Phenomenon of Pilgrimages and Postmemory’ (ABR, July 2024).

I did know my father – for almost half a century. Not yet born, I was lucky that he survived internment, massacres, and the atrocities visited upon Gull Force 2/21st Battalion on Ambon during World War II. The horrifying statistics that Beaumont relates in her ‘Commentary’ are accurate, but her words do nothing to convey the human reality of those who were there. Nor do they offer a pathway to remembering.

My father, along with six other captives, escaped from the POW camp on Tan Tui early during the internment. His personal anguish in agreeing to attempt escape was because he was leaving mates behind, one from his own hometown, who later perished. The seven men reached Darwin on cobbled-together boats, surviving on bananas and fish. They were the first to notify the authorities of the Ambon situation.

I came to know these men over the years. I have also interviewed another man who was interned for the duration. All returned to live full lives and had families. Mine was taught to abhor war – yes, to remember, but not to idolise, and later to recognise that Japanese people are, of course, not all war criminals.

A terrible aspect of this mission was the fact that Australian military commanders in Melbourne knew they were sending these young men from Darwin into a foray with Singapore gone and the Japanese navy already heading south to Indonesia. Beaumont presents this as a ‘sacrifice of the soldiers themselves’, not of military failure. Not true. She has failed to capture the past, failed to understand that observing places and memorials does not necessarily respect emotions that are still alive in many families touched by war.

No doubt those on the ‘pilgrimage’ who had direct family connections with the past were deeply moved throughout the journey, but, as an observer, Beaumont’s tourist-like remarks verge on the offensive, to both local Indonesians and to those who fought on these sites. ‘Ambon is not easy to get to,’ she says. ‘We stopped at a tired resort for lunch and a swim’, she comments and the bar ‘sometimes struggled to provide enough cold beer’.

I have been an Australian publisher for decades, and a doctoral historian who has researched the history of the people of Gull Force and the people of Ambon. It seems to me that an attempt to apply a newly minted academic label ‘postmemory’, by way of explanation of current generational feelings, is far short of the truth. Joan Beaumont may be researching for a revised chapter of her 1988 book, but please, can it not yet consign living memory to cemeteries and academic terminology?

Sandra McComb

Sybaritic lefties

Dear Editor,

Further to Marilyn Lake’s review of Andrew Fowler’s book Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australian sovereignty (ABR, August 2024), it is a matter of considerable shame that the substantive opposition to the nuclear subs proposal has taken the form of letters to the editor by Paul Keating in the Australian Financial Review. Too many on the left have had their passion diminished by the pleasures and indulgences of middle-class affluence.

Patrick Hockey

Gatekeepers

Dear Editor,

What a great and needed article Robyn Arianrhod has written (‘Beyond the Mundane: Popular Science Writing in Our Literary Landscape, ABR, August 2024). The gatekeepers have always underestimated the breadth of Australian readers’ interests, intellectual capacity, curiosity, and willingness to delve into unfamiliar territory. I fear this condescension is getting worse, with so much economic anxiety in the publishing sector.

J.M. Green