Archive

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn has mocked modern progressives for having no enemies, just friends whose grievances are yet to be accommodated. The decision as to whether grievances are best accommodated or confronted is one safely made only if informed by a deep understanding of the particular discontent. Brendon O’Connor (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University) and Martin Griffiths (Associate Professor of International Relations at the same institution) have edited a collection of thoughtful and lively essays aimed at increasing our understanding of the assortment of grievances, anxieties and criticisms known as anti-Americanism. This timely volume, comprising a dozen contributions by respected scholars from the US, Britain and Australia, largely succeeds in this aim.

Berlin, 1948; the Iron Curtain has slammed shut, bisecting a city still pitted and scarred from the calamities of World War II; the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the subsequent Allied airlift are imminent. Around these tectonic moments in history and politics, first-time novelist Greg Flynn sets his thriller, The Berlin Cross.

A magnet on my fridge has a cartoon image of a Tasmanian Devil and reads: ‘Send Tassie more Tourists – the last ones were delicious!’ David Owen and David Pemberton’s book shows how flawed the stereotype of the Devil as an insatiable, aggressive animal is. They reveal the Devil’s complex nature in this well-researched and detailed work, which is the first on the Devil to be published.

This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences where the relationship of the speaker’s paper to the theme is the same as that between the ugly sisters’ feet and Cinderella’s dancing slipper – a great deal of stretching and contorting to make the text fit the theme, and vice versa. This is why conference proceedings rarely make good books.

Tracing both the frisson between city and outback realities and the impact of politics on the music scene, Singing Australian is not only about the intersections between folk and country music and their appropriations from a raft of other genres; it is also an insightful chronicle of Australia’s struggle for identity as a post-colonial society, the search for nationhood through song and an expansive panorama of this country’s social history.

The annual series of lectures held at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography are a lively tradition on the city’s cultural calendar, and are noted for both their critical currency and diversity of voices. This collection of essays and images, selected from lectures and exhibitions held at CCP from 2000–4, continues the allied tradition of publications that record selected papers from the series. Its time-frame also marks Daniel Palmer’s energetic tenure as coordinator of the lectures, during which time the Centre played host to a wide range of critics, practitioners, curators and academics.

These writer’s scribblings, handsomely reproduced, cover two distinct periods in Murray Bail’s life: London from 1970 to 1974; and Sydney from 1988 to 2003. The notebooks from the London period, which represent roughly two-thirds of this book, were previously published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989). While readers may find some interest in comparing the formative and the mature writer, the older Bail’s reflections on ageing and death represent the most consistently penetrating writing in Notebooks.

John Hirst is a throwback. I don’t mean in his political views, but in his sense of his duty as an historian. He belongs to a tradition which, in this country, goes back to the 1870s and 1880s, when the Australian colonies began to feel the influence of German ideas about the right relationship between the humanities and the state. Today it is a tradition increasingly hard to maintain. Under this rubric, both historians and public servants are meant to offer critical and constructive argument about present events and the destiny of the nation. Henry Parkes was an historian of sorts, and he was happy to spend government money on the underpinnings of historical scholarship in Australia. The Historical Records of New South Wales was one obvious result, and that effort, in itself, involved close cooperation between bureaucrats and scholars. Alfred Deakin was likewise a man of considerable scholarship (and more sophisticated than Parkes), whose reading shaped his ideas about national destiny, and who nourished a similar outlook at the bureaucratic level.