Review

From this post-September 11 vantage point, the great debate about which Australian political party could claim to have done more to develop the country’s relations with Asia already seems bathed in a gentle glow of nostalgia. Back in the late 1990s, when issues of Australia’s identity with Asia had greater salience than they now do, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade decided to commission, as its contribution to the celebration of the centenary of Federation, a history of Australia’s engagement with Asia. The initiative was designed, in part at least, to show that no one side of Australian politics could claim the Asia project as its own.

I will say straightaway what I most admire about this book. It’s the way the author is present in it, the way his voice informs the content and is informed by it. Although With Intent to Destroy is a personal book, the self does not intrude in the many bad ways it often can. It’s personal in the way real conversation is personal, made so by the presence in it of people who speak authoritatively from their experiences because, as Kierkegaard put it, they have lived their own life and no one else’s.

All young persons contemplating ‘a life in the law’ as a career should read this book, ideally when they are about sixteen, to allow adequate time to switch to dentistry, say, or engineering. But whatever your age, Chester Porter’s huge experience, wisdom and humanity will enlighten you about the true inwardness of those sometimes compatible concepts, justice and law.

It is one of the paradoxes of our history that the battle for New Guinea between 1942 and 1945 – so much harder but so much more successful than Gallipoli – is so little studied or understood. It has made such a relatively shallow impression on our national consciousness, compared with Australia’s 1915 expedition to Turkey. The New Guinea campaign was, if not unique, certainly one of the most extraordinary conducted by any belligerents during World War II because, as Alan Powell notes, it ‘relied upon the muscle and sinew and bushcraft of the local people for success’.

In some ways, Sue Woolfe’s new novel, The Secret Cure, deals with similar themes to her last novel, the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity (1996). The central character of the novel is a young laboratory technician, Eva, unqualified but desperate to be a scientist. She nurses an obsessive love for a professor of immunology who has a professionally disadvantageous but compelling desire to find a cure for autism. Like the mother and daughter amateur mathematicians in Leaning Towards Infinity, the passion for research is transmitted unwittingly by the parent figure (in this case the professor and lover) to the younger. Eva takes up the professor’s genetic research into autism long after he has given up, defeated by academic and professional enmities. Each has a deeply personal reason for wishing to find a cure: the professor has the disease himself, and so does the daughter Eva has from their affair.

In 1519 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés marched into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), heart of the Aztec Empire. Thus began the often tragic history of European colonialism in the Americas. Anna Lanyon’s previous book, Malinche’s Conquest (1999), retraced and recovered the extraordinary life of Cortés’s translator and lover, the native American woman Malinche. The present book does the same for their child, Martín Cortés.

Not one word is wasted in Sir Nicholas Shehadie’s memoir, A Life Worth Living. Almost all the words are. This book is a triumph of lack of style over lack of substance. It’s a pity to attach such a proud word as ‘book’ to a publication like this, as it is to attach ‘music’ to two-fingered renditions of Chopsticks. Shehadie is no writer, nor does he pretend to be, which is a shame. A little pretence might have tricked up the work from being a tedious CV to a worthy member of Australia’s naïve school of sports memoirs, the current champion of which is Dawn Fraser’s energetic Dawn: One Hell of a Life (2001), with its patches of vivid, detailed recollection and clean, functional prose.

Political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s exposed many of the inbuilt biases of the English language. In the tricky matter of ensuring a fair go for all, we have been made aware of the hidden warps and imbalances that exist in our everyday expressions – now dubbed sexist, racist, ageist and so on. J.M. Arthur’s book exposes a different kind of ‘ist’ language. It is about English in Australia and the tensions and maladjustments that arise when this migrant language is used in this non-European place. So many ordinary expressions used to describe Australia today are in fact the linguistic enactments of a colonial construction of the country – and the words just don’t fit.

Am I alone in becoming suspicious when a writer’s previous profession is the focus of a publicist’s blurb? To me, it smacks of desperation. ‘I can’t think of anything to say about this writing,’ such an approach confesses, ‘but let me tell you about the writer’s stellar career as a motor mechanic, or their prowess in tae kwon do, or their interest in growing orchids.’ Call me an old New Critic, but I prefer to read the work and to let the author lurk darkly in the background.

Writing history combines empiricism, theoretical scaffolding and historical imagination. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, historians are simultaneously concerned with ‘facts’ – their definition, selection and analysis – and captivated by Steven Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’. Historians, drawing on psychoanalysis, have attempted to expose relationships between the inner and outer worlds of individuals and groups in order to write the history of emotions. Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians (1985) clarified that psychoanalysis provided historians not with a ‘handbook of recipes’ but rather with ‘a style of seeing the past’. It allowed historians not only to explore and analyse those aspects of the past the individual and/or nation chose to remember and celebrate, but to interrogate the inner world by examining those aspects of the past they chose to rewrite, amend, reconfigure, deny or forget. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) has been revered and reviled, and some might consider it brave to tackle the evolution of psychoanalytic applications in an historical context in the light of much debunking by feminist historians among many other ‘others’.