Review

In his ‘Letter to Menoecus’, the Stoic philosopher Epicurus famously argued that the notion of euthanasia is an oxymoron – death can be neither good nor bad for who dies. How could a complete void be rationally welcomed or feared? In her study of the ethical, legal and political issues raised by suicide and euthanasia, Miriam Cosic reveals how, to many, the concept of a good death is far from incoherent. Many people feel that the question of whether death can ever be a good thing is for them alone to answer.

The 1990s will be remembered as the time when Australia slid into that morbid state of ‘new inequality’ that Will Hutton, writing about the British experience under Margaret Thatcher, called the ‘30/30/40 society’. In July 2003 the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that income inequality had increased substantially during the 1990s. Whether a preoccupation with the ‘shrinking middle’, as Michael Pusey has recently argued, is therefore all that important is questionable. In Australia, one in four jobs are now part-time, and many are precarious. Persistent and long-term unemployment has contributed to the fact that one in three Australians are now relying substantially on government benefits. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that what Mark Peel in this new book calls ‘poverty news’ is back on the front page. By poverty news, Peel means the way Australia’s media has increasingly reported the problems occasioned by ‘welfare cheats’ since the late 1980s. Peel’s book challenges us to ask how we should think about poverty.

The heart of this book is an account of one year in the life of its author. In 1963, at the age of fifteen, Robert Hillman left his hometown of Eildon, in Victoria, and took a position as a junior in the ladies’ shoe department of the Myer Emporium in Melbourne. He didn’t last long. Before he knew it, he had booked a passage on a ship to Ceylon. He had a dream, not a plan. The dream was of a soft landing on an idyllic island of perfect women who would tend to his every need and desire. It was a dream of Eden, of a world before the Flood. In this case, the image is apposite. In 1954 Eildon had been submerged by the waters of a new dam. This project had brought Americans and money to the town; once they departed, the new Eildon was a shiny but emotionally threadbare place. The world after the flood was a punishing place for young Robert. He wanted to return to paradise.

In the aftermath of the Iraq War, any book on the history of public relations and politics seems almost quaint. That’s not a criticism, because the events and ideas Bridget Griffen-Foley analyses in Party Games: Australian politicians and the media from war to dismissal highlight just how quickly and utterly PR has insinuated itself into the life of politics. Still, it is hard to resist a cynical smile as you read of the then Liberal Party president, R.G. Casey, noting in 1947 that ‘he had learned from an American friend of a new profession called “Public Relations”’. Showing the sort of political prescience that underpinned Robert Menzies’ success, Casey became convinced of the ‘need to create a “favourable atmosphere” to advance one’s causes or interests’. Fast forward to the likes of Alastair Campbell, the head of strategic communications for the Blair government, or even our own Peter Reith, and the naïveté of the immediate post-World War II period seems positively disarming.

Early in the 2003 AFL season, Peter Rohde, the new coach of the Western Bulldogs, announced as one his initiatives that players should either find parttime work or some similar engagement consistent with their club commitments, or embark on a TAFE, university, VCE or other study programme. This mildly sensational proposition was designed to reduce the aimless hours spent by many players, especially the young and unencumbered, loitering in malls, coffee joints and other haunts.

Perhaps Rohde, whose fairly disastrous first coaching year belies his articulate and intelligent approach to the game, had in mind a problem more serious, less graspable, than simple time wasting. Perhaps he was observing that modern professional footballers risk becoming more and more disjoined from the people who come to see them play; that the upper echelon members of a homegrown and still highly parochial sport can easily become exotic, rarefied, a different breed; and that, worst of all, they might come to believe in their own fancied difference, a condition known at ground level as ‘believing your own bullshit’.

Zoltan Torey’s Out of Darkness begins dramatically in Sydney. On a winter’s night in 1951, Torey, a refugee from Hungary studying dentistry, is on night shift at the battery factory in which he works to support his studies. When he moves a drum of acid, the plug blows off, ‘sending a massive jet of corrosive liquid at my face’. The acid eats into Torey’s eyes, blinding him for life. In addition, he swallows some acid, damaging his vocal cords. Torey describes this event twice: the second time, he emphasises how the event was experienced. ‘The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face … It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away.’ As this suggests, Torey’s prose has moments of extraordinary power.

James Stirling’s naval career was helped by having an uncle who was a Rear Admiral. The other side of his family was involved in trade, and some have argued that his proposal for the Swan River colony was based on personal ambition and family influence. This is true to some extent. However, in a deeper sense, he was shaped by his family’s involvement in two of the mainsprings of nineteenth-century British imperialism: naval dominance and worldwide trade.

Stirling was the founding governor of Western Australia for ten years, but the major part of his career was with the Royal Navy. A strength of this biography is that it is the first full account of that career. There is too little space in this review to deal fully with this part of his life, and Australian readers will be more concerned with his governorship. Like most colonial Australian governors (and post-colonial ones), Stirling has had his admirers and detractors. The author, obviously an admirer, argues persuasively in his favour.

With the world apparently going to hell in a handbasket, the flood of contributions to ideas of global governance shows no sign of abating. There is something dizzying about immersing oneself in such far-reaching and ultimately – necessarily – optimistic works about the possibility of a just global civil order at a time when the most basic liberal democratic rights and freedoms are being traded away willy-nilly at the national and local level. From national security laws to nightclub curfews, nothing seems easier to knock over than liberty, and nothing more difficult to resist than cultures of fear and repression.

Nevertheless, there is no reason not to project into a future that may offer scope for a reversal of this process. John Keane is an Adelaide-born heavy-hitter in the area of studies of civil society and democracy, and also a political biographer – most recently of Vaclav Havel. He is thus ideally placed to write a book that is both accessible to the general, well-informed reader, while sacrificing little in the way of academic smarts. He goes a long way towards succeeding, but that is in part because the political questions to which the answer is ‘global civil society’ by their very nature exclude certain dimensions of human beings whose character would complicate the picture.