UNSW Press

Reflecting on the sixty-year history of the United Nations, it seems obvious that this is an organisation created through the slow and tortured process of natural evolution rather than the product of careful, intelligent design.

Years ago, back when the UN had barely escaped its adolescence, the Nobel laureate and eminent diplomat Ralph Bunche observed that ‘the United Nations is a young organisation in the process of developing in response to challenges of all kinds’. He referred to institutional enlargement that typically continued as the global agenda grew. Agencies soon developed to coordinate the work of other agencies. Consequently, the modern UN became a haphazard creature, made up of a bewildering mix of political organs. Each part is intended to serve a different purpose, whether maintaining international security, advancing respect for fundamental human rights, or promoting economic development. And each component comes labelled with an almost impossible array of scientific-sounding designations (EcoSoc, for instance, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF and plenty more to make up page after page of abbreviation lists).

Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Quite who is to blame for this occupies much of the first half of Timms’s book. Artists hell-bent on having careers rather than seeking vocations are part of the problem, and so are curators of contemporary art who nourish the artist’s every need. Art schools are next, where cultural theory has replaced the teaching of art history. The superficialities and the susceptibility to trendiness in the Australia Council are further contributors.

The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.

The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British assisted emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, putting their personal accounts into historical and statistical context, or rather, fleshing out the statistics with the human stories from which they are extrapolated. These emigrants are working-class people for the most part, ambitious and, of course, self-selected by their literacy, with social networks strong enough to encourage them to write their shipboard letters or diaries to keep in touch with those they had left behind in Britain. They are also, as Haines points out, self-selected for success in the new colonies, since the successful were the most likely to have descendants who would preserve the diaries and letters of their fortunate ancestors.

It all seems so obvious. So why is the practice of non-violence, peaceful negotiation and conflict resolution so hard? ‘To realise a vision of peace with justice requires inspiration and commitment,’ writes Stuart Rees, in an affirmation that shapes his inspirational new book, Passion for Peace. Rees explores the complexities and possibilities of peacemaking from varied perspectives: political, sociological, legal, biographical and, not least, literary. Rees’s text is studded with quotations from poets: the great Romantics, Wordsworth and Shelley; Denise Levertov; war poet Wilfred Owen; Australian poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson – more than fifty all told.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Australia is suffering a litigation explosion. Newspapers have been full of reports of supposedly undeserving plaintiffs receiving million-dollar damages awards; governments have introduced legislation to limit pay-outs; local authorities and volunteer organisations have cancelled events due to concerns over public liability; and insurers have blamed rising premiums on unsustainable damages awards. Even the courts have joined the chorus: several leading judges recently declared the justice system to be in crisis due to increasing litigiousness, lawyers who stir up claims and a judiciary that has, according to one recently retired judge, ‘enjoyed playing Santa Claus’.

Whether it’s fate or mere coincidence, the life stories of the two most celebrated writers of the Pacific – Robert Louis Stevenson and Albert Wendt – dovetail together on the small tropical island of Upolu in Western Samoa. In 1889, when Stevenson concluded his third Pacific cruise on the Janet Nichol, he told his readers in Europe and America that: ‘Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm trees and trade-wind fan them till they die.’ In hindsight, this reads as a premonition, but, after years of ill-health Stevenson was seduced and invigorated by sweet air and unexpected interests, describing his time during the Pacific voyages as ‘passing like days in fairyland’.

When the Picador Nature Reader was published several years ago, it included only one contribution by an Australian: an excerpt from David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but it is not set in Australia. It struck me at the time that for a culture so deeply embedded in, and concerned with, the land we have little in the way of nature writing.

Michael Pusey coined the term ‘economic rationalism’ in 1991 to refer to the narrow economic focus of many senior public servants in Canberra. These influential advisers were mostly classically trained economists who saw their task as being to assist in creating a more efficient and productive society by privatising publicly owned utilities and services, giving greater rein to market forces, increasing competition, deregulating the labour market, and so on. But like every major political programme, economic rationalism has had, and continues to have, great social costs. John Wright’s book is primarily a moral evaluation of this programme.

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.

This beautiful book showcases the botanical orchid illustrations of John Riley, a retired shearer whom some regard as Australia’s finest living botanical illustrator. Riley started drawing Australian orchids in the 1970s, and this volume includes subjects that date back to 1992. It lists 150 works. Those who take book titles literally will assume that this volume contains illustrations of all our native orchids. This is not the case. We have a rich flora of about 1,200 species. This, therefore, is the first in a planned series intended to describe and illustrate all our orchidaceous flora.