Review

It is interesting to recall the number of times, in book titles alone, that Max Dupain’s name has been linked to ‘Australia’. Joining Dupain’s own Max Dupain’s Australia (1986) and Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes (1988), this new book is the third in a series by his former printer and assistant Jill White. Dupain’s Australians joins the similarly all-inclusive titles of Dupain’s Sydney (1999) and Dupain’s Beaches (2000). The pairing of Dupain with aspects of Australia says much about how we position this photographer as quintessentially ‘local’. Despite his evident contributions to modernism and, I would argue, classical modernism, it is Dupain’s apparent ability to capture a ‘national essence’ that still dominates accounts of his work.

From 1768 until 1779–80, in a series of remarkable voyages of circumnavigation, Captain James Cook ‘fixed the bounds of the habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern hemisphere’. During these voyages, Cook sailed further, and further out of sight of land, than anyone had previously done. He discovered – or rediscovered – numerous islands. He demonstrated how the new ‘time keeper’ (chronometer) might be used to determine longitude much more accurately than ever before. He showed how scurvy might be controlled. He encountered and left detailed descriptions of peoples about whom Europeans had little or no knowledge. The scientists who sailed with him made very extensive collections of birds, animals, fish and plants, and obtained a wealth of information about the atmosphere and the oceans, all of which contributed significantly to the emergent modern scientific disciplines. In short, as one of his companions observed after his death, ‘no one knew the value of a fleeting moment better and no one used it so scrupulously as [Cook]. In the same period of time no one has ever extended the bounds of our knowledge to such a degree.’

Assuming the Chair of a business regulatory authority might not be thought of as an ideal path to media stardom, but Allan Fels showed otherwise. Fels is easily Australia’s best-known cartel buster and the scourge of price-fixing business and anti-competitive behaviour generally. For years he was regularly on the nightly news. In a savage sea of rapacious price-gougers, Fels was the consumer’s friend.

I first met a refugee from Laos, a teacher in her former life, while working part-time in a miserable egg-packing factory in the early 1980s. I had only a hazy notion of what had brought Ping to this country. Christopher Kremmer’s Bamboo Palace has now clarified those circumstances, and what a sad and painfully human story it is: of a 600-year-old socially iniquitous, politically benign kingdom destroyed and replaced by a totalitarian state.

The Currency Press’s series ‘Australian Screen Classics’ is off to a good start. With playwright Louis Nowra’s Walkabout, thorough in its production, analysis and reception mode, novelist Christos Tsiolkas’s The Devil’s Playground, a study in personal enchantment, an Age film reviewer Adrian Martin’s The Mad Max Movies, an action fan’s impassioned response to the trilogy, the series makes clear that it will not be settling for a predictable template.

For anyone who has not seen Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) for some years, Nowra’s study will evoke it with clarity and, because the book is also at times provocative, make another viewing essential. Nowra makes his intentions clear from the outset: he plans to trace ‘the process from the novel, to the preparation, to the filming and then, reception of the film’, and the structure of the book follows this blueprint. His admiration for the film is palpable, though this doesn’t stop him from criticising effects he finds too obvious.

As one who has lived in Western Australia for the greater part of her life and currently works in the arts,  my interest was piqued by the claim of the editors of his collection that Western Australia may bid farewell to the defensive term ‘Cinderella State’, once adopted in relation to its arts and culture. Traditionally perceived in the cultural imagination as ‘behind’ its east coast counterparts, Western Australia has struggled with the entrenched perceptions of many in eastern cultural centres: an edenic state with its beach culture, sun and outdoor lifestyle, somehow not quite in step with the rest of the country, and possessing a slight but discernible cultural ineptitude. As one contributor to this collection states, Western Australia has been viewed as ‘an isolated enclave sitting on the edge of a void’; insularity and parochialism have regularly been invoked when describing the most remote city in the world.

These two new textbooks on welfare and in-equality admirably reflect the strengths of the Australian teaching and research tradition in these areas. Inequality in Australia bristles with discussions of evidence and empirical data, key points for discussion, boxes with further elaborations, and lists of suggested readings. It takes note of the most important debates about how people actually experience inequality, and emphasises the importance of theory without abandoning a commitment to describing lived experience in concrete terms. Like all compelling sociologies, it connects the incidents and commonplaces of everyday life to concepts such as power, privilege and domination without demeaning the capacities of human actors and without suggesting that we may as well surrender ourselves to ‘hegemonic forces’.

What should you expect from a companion? Resolute reliability? Occasional inspiration? Whimsical, even capricious distraction? I decided to start with my own pet subject, ethology, one that has a solid presence in the scientific discourse of the second half of the twentieth century, with contributions from Franz de Waal, Jane Goodall, Desmond Morris and Steven Rose, as well as from the three Nobel laureates recognised in 1973.

I lifted the hefty Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science and found no section headed ‘ethology’. So I went to the front of the book seeking the less technical ‘animal behaviour’. No luck there, either. So to the index. Nothing. What about under ‘psychology’? But there is no such heading! Can psychology be too recent a discipline to qualify? Or insufficiently scientific? Only behaviourism and phenomenology sneak into this category.

During his lengthy career as editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen visited Rhyl, one of those grim towns that passes for a seaside resort in the English north. Strolling along the promenade with his wife, he was fascinated by the people: ‘Their flat, sallow northern faces, their Sunday-best clothes, their curious capacity for enjoying themselves without displaying any signs of emotion, moved me – people in the mass always do.’ Returning to London, he wrote a bulletin describing ‘the composite Englishman’ whose interests and perspectives his reporters should always have in mind. Christiansen called him ‘THE MAN ON THE RHYL PROMENADE.’

Damien Kingsbury witnessed the 1999 violence in East Timor as a UN observer, and uses the experience of being confronted with the Indonesian military’s campaign of violence there to introduce what is the most frank assessment of the Indonesian military we are likely to see outside of confidential intelligence reports. The fact that Kingsbury has experienced the fear the Indonesian military instils in places like Aceh and Ambon makes this analysis of the role of the military there so important. It is not so much the explicit writing of that experience, but the questions it makes him ask about the Indonesian military and the con-struct of the Indonesian state, that make this piece of academic writing stand out.