Review

Cambodia is best known for the Angkor temple complex, and for Pol Pot. This primer incorporates the famous monuments and the Killing Fields into 2000 years of history, from pre-Angkorean Funan to the present. As John Tully suggests, it suits ‘tourists, students and general readers’. Writing a ‘short history’ presents specific challenges: the author must balance a narrative that tells a comprehensible story with the reality that history is messy and contested. While Tully cannot avoid discussing eras, issues and personalities with haste, the chapter on the Angkorean civilisation is especially crammed. In part, this reflects his obligation to acknowledge scholarly disagreement, but a more detailed and leisurely account of the Angkor era would have been welcome. In contrast, the chapter on the French protectorate (1863–1953) is assured and authoritative, which is unsurprising since Tully previously wrote the majestic France on the Mekong: A History of the Protectorate in Cambodia, 1863–1953 (2002).

Craig Emerson is a good man to have around in federal politics. He has ideas, which is what politics should be largely about. And ideas, in the barnyard of Canberra politics, are almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. Emerson has a PhD in Economics from ANU. In earlier times, as an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he had a reputation for being a bit of an environmentalist. Traditionally, the two disciplines don’t sit happily together. He managed to embrace them both.

The 120,000 expatriate Italians living in Australia, all of them newly entitled to vote in the recent election, contributed significantly to the knife-edge defeat of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in April 2006. Before the counting of all such votes in the four electoral regions into which his own government had divided the world, Berlusconi looked to have a one-seat majority. Then the votes of emigrant Italians swung the outcome the other way. For the first time, their say elected six expatriate senators and twelve deputies, including one of each from the Australia/Asia/Africa region – both of whom happen to live in Melbourne.

This crime novel is about as topical as it gets, starting with the killing of a Melbourne underworld figure. Tough yet tender Detective Rubens McCauley is framed for the hit. McCauley fights to save his life and restore his name to the former level of disrepute it once enjoyed. In the course of McCauley’s quest for the truth, he teams up with hottie Constable Cassie Withers. In the tradition of many crime stories, we wonder if they will connect in other ways. We are set up nicely for a sequel, and ‘Huzza!’ for that.

For a while it seemed that the reign of the saga novel, a form once so vital for narrating and propagandising the Australian past, was over. The pugnacious Xavier Herbert was now a wandering shade; Colleen McCullough had removed herself to Norfolk Island; Eleanor Dark and ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’ belonged to a literary history known to too few. The saga had ceded its cultural place to the television miniseries. That summation held until very recently. Billy’s Tree, Nicholas Kyriacos’s first novel (a creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts, although it appears too unguarded to have come from that treadmill), bravely seeks to reinstate not only the saga form but its language and its valuation of what ought to matter to Australians who are alert to the burdens of their history.

Deep under the streets of Paris, the tunnels, chambers and galleries of the catacombs run in all directions, some of them filled with the skeletons of the dead who were displaced in the eighteenth century from the overflowing cemeteries of Paris and moved here, their bones stacked six feet high and six feet deep along the walls. During World War II, the chambers and tunnels were used by the French Resistance and also by the Nazis. These days, tourists queue peacefully to totter down the delicate, steep, spindly steps into the underworld darkness, nervously following the guides through what feels like miles of tunnels. The mystery of the dripping noise is solved when you come back up into the sunlight to find your clothes streaked with the dissolving lime of the underworld.

By definition, chiaroscuro is Italian for lightdark; in practice, it is a technique wielded by painters and graphic artists, whereby dynamic applications of highlight and shade are contrasted for dramatic impact. Along with Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Audrey Evans proves herself to be a master of chiaroscuro in her memoir, Many Lifetimes. One can see the hand of the artist as she sketches her truths in simple, yet striking, strokes; Evans writes with a raw honesty that turns a spotlight onto chosen moments in her life, and allows others to remain enveloped in darkness.

In 1685, in São Paulo, Brazil, a boy was born called Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão. Sent north to Bahia to study with the Jesuits, who had constructed, in the steep-cliffed port of Salvador, an amazing ‘levador’ capable of hauling goods and people from ground-level to the heights above, Bartolomeu learned as much about physics as theology. Finding the fathers’ dedication to higher things, both spiritual and material, immensely attractive, Bartolomeu became a priest who dreamed of building not just a hundred-metre lift, but the first vessel capable of sailing through the heavens. The ambition stayed with him even in Portugal.

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.