Non Fiction

After departing as minister for finance from the Hawke government in 1988, Peter Walsh began a weekly column for the Australian Financial Review under the byline ‘Cassandra’, named after the Trojan princess who was condemned by Apollo to be a teller of truths but fated not to be believed. Eventually, the bile became too much for Fairfax. Happily, Christopher Pearson offered Walsh a spot at his comely home for curmudgeonly old men, the Adelaide Review, for several more years. Walsh was marvellous. His articles were renowned for skewering the platitudes of the mushy left. He hollered like a Baptist at Country Party types aiming to get their gnarled hands into Treasury coffers.

The first official postage stamps of a British colony were produced on the small island of Mauritius. In 1847, seven years after Rowland Hill’s ‘Penny Black’, the Mauritian postmaster issued 500 orange-red one penny stamps and 500 blue twopence stamps. In size, shape and design, they are utterly conventional. Depicting Queen Victoria in profile, they lack the charm of the 1850 ‘Sydney Views’ stamps of New South Wales or the peculiarity of the 1854 ‘Inverted Swan’ of Western Australia. They are, however, inscribed ‘Post Office’, whereas all later stamps are inscribed ‘Post Paid’. They are instantly recognisable and ever since the 1860s, when philately first became respectable, they have been sought and prized by kings, schoolboys and other collectors.

Over the past four years, we Australians have had considerable experience of the conflicted, and sometimes agonising, politics of war. In this study, Michael A. McDonnell, a historian at the University of Sydney, examines the unanticipated social and political contestations aroused by the demands of another war. In the late eighteenth century, Virginia endured a six-year struggle against the imperial rule of Britain. A settled class of wealthy gentlemen planters who had previously assumed the right to leadership came to find that role questioned in a wholly new politics of war. Middle- and lower-class Virginians began to ask them: how will you distribute the burden of the war equitably across society? Should the wealthy planters be exempt because of their property holdings? Who is to fight and die in this war? Who is to control recruitment? 

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.

In an essay for Australian Literary Studies (ALS) exploring the modernist networks of Judith Wright and Frank Scott, Anouk Lang argues that ‘participation in modernist little magazines … was crucial to their development as writers. Publication in these journals validated their tentative efforts and imbued them with confidence to move on to further ventures.’ It is a terrific recommendation for the important role that literary journals continue to serve for writers – both emerging and established, creative and academic. ALS and Antipodes provide vigorous examples of two such journals which support the fostering and fortification of literary culture in Australia.

At the close of the twentieth century, in the tradition of countless Westerners before him, British travel writer Julian Evans travelled around the Pacific. At the Kwajalein atoll in the independent republic of the Marshall Islands, he found the resident US missile testing base to be efficient, clean and ‘tidy, quiet, ordinary: suburban trailer-park America at its best’. No Marshallese lived at Kwajalein, but 10,000 of them huddled on the small neighbouring island of Ebeye, whence they commuted to provide labour for the base. At Ebeye, nothing was ‘real nice’, as Evans described:

At the centre of this book is the story of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York on 9/11. Terry Smith’s focus is architectural: what does it mean for buildings that are supposed to shelter and sustain our lives so spectacularly to collapse? The WTC’s destruction raises this question so singularly, not only for those who immediately suffered – traumatised by the obliteration of family members or their own escape from death – but for contemporary Everyman and Everywoman, who encountered the WTC not first-hand but as an image, what Smith calls an ‘iconotype’ in an ‘iconomy’ of architectural images.

Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance.

Given V.S. Naipaul’s status in the literary world, and the prolific commentary on him and his writing, you might ask what is different about Gillian Dooley’s book, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Dooley’s sympathetic attitude liberates both Naipaul and his writing from critical analyses and from critics with explicit post-colonial and political agendas. She is more than aware of how ‘the reductions of political analysis’ have negatively stereotyped Naipaul’s writing. Rather, she focuses on Naipaul’s genius as a writer, which is not separate from the high standard of ethics, courage, fastidiousness, insecurities and prejudices of the man. For it is these very attributes that Naipaul has inherited from his colonial background that make his writing so rich, remarkable and controversial.