Review

Omar Nassif and Enzo Cugliari are fringe-dwellers, beyond ‘white trash’. That harshest of middle-class put-downs fairly locates their distance from the outsider types who claim our interest. Omar and Enzo are anti-charismatic, their physical selves undescribed. In contrast, Ari, the angry child of migrants in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) wants drugs, sex and dancing, and inevitably his character now conjures up the sex god in the film role, Alex Dimitriades. On the top shelf there is Lord Lucan, incognito and surgically disenhanced, slumming on Tasmania’s coastal glory in Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man (2005); attractively guilt-wracked and evolved, Lucan trails glamour and enigmatic women. The actor would be Jeremy Irons.

Helen Hughes was a professional development economist who worked at the World Bank from 1968 to 1983 and then, as an academic, headed the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University from 1983 to 1993. Since then, she has been a senior fellow at a conservative think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, where she initially focused on issues of development in the Pacific and, since 2004, in remote indigenous Australia.

This book’s launch was timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. Hughes sets out to assess and address the ‘Aboriginal problem’ for 90,000 indigenous people who live in some 1200 ‘homeland’ settlements established in remote Australia from the 1970s, according to Hughes. Her book focuses on the ‘homelands’, because, in her view, their occupants’ deprivation is the greatest.

Perhaps the most enduring memory of the Australian Wheat Board’s Iraq misadventures is the picture of its paunchy former chairman, Trevor Flugge, stripped to the waist and pointing a gun at the camera. Flugge was in Iraq, to all intents and purposes representing Australia. Selected by the Australian government with a tax-free salary package of just under a million dollars, he was there because, in the prime minister’s words ‘our principal concern at the time was to stop American wheat from getting our markets’.

The official published accounts of Captain Cook’s three great voyages (1768-79) were immense popular successes in Britain. That for the third voyage sold out within three days of publication in 1784. When the Frenchman La Pérouse sailed from Botany Bay in March 1788 into the Pacific – and into oblivion – he remarked that Cook had done so much that he had left him nothing to do but admire his work. In the previous year, the German, Georg Forster, had published in Berlin his eulogy of Cook, Cook der Entdecker (Cook the Discoverer). Cook was the first international superstar, and time has only increased his celebrity status. Major scholarly biographies continue to be published, and seminars which feature Cook in their titles are sell-outs. The name is box-office magic.

The eponymous poem in Caroline Caddy’s latest collection Esperance captures a breathtaking glimpse of a bay on the Western Australian coast. Immediacy epitomises Caddy’s poetic gift. In deft strokes, she provides a vivid land/seascape, compressing an astute reflection on history, geography, and humanity’s irrepressible need to explore beyond known boundaries. The language is physical and sensuous: ‘the snowy beaches / lapped by the cold clear bracelet / that’s there then not there / around our ankles.’ There is also a metaphysical dimension, ‘with everything falling away behind / with everything falling away ahead’ mirroring ‘esperance’: a quality of hope and faith in the future.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book, Romancing Opiates, slams societal and professional attitudes to heroin addiction. Dalrymple argues that heroin users are not blameless patients, as the medical fraternity would have us believe. ln fact, he tells us, heroin users have to work quite hard to get addicted; withdrawal is about as difficult as the flu; and the support industry, which he calls the ‘addiction bureaucracy’, is ineffective and self-serving. Dalrymple contends that the heroin epidemic cannot be dealt with until it is recognised as a moral and spiritual problem rather than solely as a medical one.

The history of Cobb & Co. belongs as much in the territory of folklore as it does in the annals of business. Within forty years of its inception, the company had become synonymous with coach travel in Australia, and later became the subject of a nostalgic tribute in verse by Henry Lawson. There is much ground to cover, and this book blazes new trails as it travels between the commercial and the iconic aspects of Cobb & Co.’s operations.

Our lives are awash with opinion polls. The daily newspapers, television, radio, and internet poll people on just about every subject. The survey of public opinion has become, since the 1940s, a pervasive feature of everyday life, and is now central to the political process. Sophisticated, large-scale polling of attitudes at the national level – such as the National Social Science Survey, the Australian Election Study, Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and the World Values Survey – is increasingly reported on in the newspapers, with the more complex analyses of these findings left to academic journal articles and books. Alongside regular national polling on issues and leaders by AGBMcNair, Irving Saulwick and Associates, ACNeilson, Roy Morgan Research and Newspoll, political parties commission their own secret internal polling and focus group studies in order to tailor their message to their audience. In this federal election year, we hear clear echoes of this as the ALP leadership repeatedly drops in the key words ‘clever’ and ‘even cunning’ whenever they mention John Howard.

The title poem of Michael Sharkey’s The Sweeping Plain – his first book of poetry since the retrospective History: Selected Poems 1978–2000 (2002) – is a polemic against politically conservative suburbia. The poem portrays a desert-like ‘sweeping plain’ of insularity, never-ending and utterly homogenous: ‘They look at others like themselves / in their home entertainment centres, / knowing answers to such questions as the names / of others living in that world.’ It is a pacey and rhythmic poem, with some surprising turns of imagery. The tone is measured rather than overly rhetorical, but it’s certainly not a new idea.

Ecopoetics is tricky terrain which, in these poems of ‘forest and water’, Louise Crisp encounters sometimes with agility, sometimes faltering. Perhaps that’s intended.

The cumulative effect of this collection is one of an overland trek, gradually ascending from ‘poisonous lowlands’ to the harsher, restorative air of ‘uplands’.