Melbourne University Press

The Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

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.

In 1888, Melbourne hosted a grand Centennial International Exhibition to mark a century of British occupation of the continent. There, a six-year-old girl called Ethel Punshon was excited to see that she had won a prize of two guineas for her needle-work – an embroidered red felt newspaper holder. Almost one hundred years later, as Brisbane prepared to mark the bicentennial with a modern ‘Expo 88’, Ethel – now known as Monte Punshon – was invited to become Expo’s roving ambassador, as perhaps the only person alive who remembered its predecessor.

Bernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics. He breaks out of the parliamentary corridors to lumber across an Australia he barely recognises, becoming ever more gigantic and spectral – pursued all the way by a writer trying to wrestle him onto the page.

At the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians. 

Twenty years after the publication of their ‘inclusive Australian literary history’, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have returned with a ‘sequel’, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. One leaden title succeeds another, although the tone of the second book is angrier. More of that later. As the authors note in their preface, The New Diversity was published by McPhee Gribble, an independent outfit that would largely be subsumed by Penguin in 1989, the year in which that book appeared. This observation prepares for the consistently impressive aspect of After the Celebration: its detailed, incisive, intelligently informed account of the changes in the circumstances of publishing, and especially fiction publishing, in Australia during the last two decades. One might take counsels of hope or despair from their analysis (particularly if one were a novelist), but still be grateful for it.

Journalist Peter Rees’s biography of Tim Fischer was originally published by Allen & Unwin in 2001 with the title The Boy from Boree Creek. Reviewing the volume in this magazine, fellow journalist Shaun Carney had many kind words for Fischer, but said that the book was ‘either a lesson in the wonders of our democracy or a cautionary tale demonstrating the mediocrity of our public figures’ (ABR, June 2001). The subject was a ‘decent, determined, and hardworking person’, Carney wrote, but one who left the National Party in ‘a seemingly permanent existential crisis’.

The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and women, prompting the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar to argue, in War and Punishment, that this ‘imperialist’ history is ‘inherently addictive’ and ‘our disease’. But this is not a vice unique to Russians: the Australian historian Mark Edele points out, in Russia’s War Against Ukraine, that Ukrainian governments have also indulged in a ‘clumsy politics of memory’ by celebrating anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian nationalists.

If the Australian government had banned books about Indonesia, it could hardly have been more successful in removing them from bookshops and library shelves than is presently the case. Even when such books appear in catalogues, retailers seem convinced that the public is not interested.

Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.