Non Fiction

Modern Afghanistan provides a nuanced understanding of developments in a country that has attracted the attention of academics and analysts for more than two decades. A number of good books have appeared dealing with politics in and around Afghanistan since the early 1980s. Amin Saikal’s recent book benefits from these accounts, but differs in one way: it is an insider’s account, with objectivity instilled by distance and academic training. As an Australian of Afghan origin, and as an expert on the politics of West and Central Asia, he draws upon a wealth of printed, oral, political and sociological research to delve into the creation and problems of Afghanistan.

The first time Mary Ellen Jordan’s name appeared in ABR (June 2001), it was followed by a brief, heated exchange. Bruce Pascoe responded to her ‘Letter from Maningrida’ mixing accusations of betrayal with a series of familiar analogies, in a stern warning that this kind of fearless journalism was not wanted. Melissa Mackey moved to Jordan’s defence. She had read courage, not fearless journalism, and, in open frustration, ended her reply by simply asking: ‘then what can we say?’ I read Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land as part answer, part re-examination of that question.

One walks a fine line between patriotism and claptrap when writing about anything to do with war. Especially when writing for young people, one tries to salute the courage of soldiers and to honour the fallen, but also to instil caution in potential young soldiers; to convey that war is hell and that it shows human beings at their worst. Of course, one wants to tell an exciting story, too, with heroes and villains and suspense – with maybe a history lesson or two thrown in. Two of the following books succeed majestically in this task; the third falls far short.

A flurry of books have been produced about the cultural aspects of John Howard’s governments: for example, Andrew Markus’s Race: John Howard and the Remaking of Australia (2001), Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark’s The History Wars (2003) and Carol Johnson’s Governing Change: From Keating to Howard (2000). Useful edited collections have also been produced on each of the elections of 1996, 1998 and 2001, and on the republic referendum. In 2004 Robert Manne published an edited collection called The Howard Years, which was wider ranging than the cultural agenda, but generally critical in its tenor. But nine years since Howard defeated Paul Keating, there is still not a great deal of analysis.

Since the early 1990s Australians have been infected with ‘affluenza’ – a virus of over-consumption that Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss characterise as ‘the bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses’, a growth fetish and an ‘epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the Australian dream’.

In this important book, Elisabeth Wynhausen seeks to ‘animate the experience of a class of people who had remained invisible even as their numbers swelled’. That class is the ‘working poor’, the people who clean, cook, wait tables and deal with everyone else’s garbage. They are the so-called ‘losers’ from economic change: the men and especially the women who do the jobs the winners don’t want to do any more, like clean their own toilets.

‘While some inventors concern themselves with creating the ultimate mousetrap,’ Philip Nitschke explains, ‘my aims are more modest. At the heart of all my efforts is a desire to fulfil the needs of Exit members.’

The members of Exit International – an organisation that has attracted 3000 members since its foundation by Nitschke in 1997, and that is now co-directed by Fiona Stewart – are mostly older and seriously ill people who ‘want a choice about when and how they die’. According to the argument of this book, the satisfaction of their needs requires easily accessible technology that will enable them to die at will, with dignity, painlessly and swiftly. ‘Dying with dignity is a growth industry,’ the authors declare. Exit hopes ‘to meet the needs of the baby boomer generation … [T]he most important of Exit’s current work is our research and development program. Focused upon a range of smart and simple technologies, this program offers some real and practical end-of-life choices for the future.’

Freud in the antipodes? Who cares? Well, I for one am very pleased that Joy Damousi, a professor of history at the University of Melbourne, cares enough to have assembled this compendium of historical information about the influence of Sigmund Freud’s ideas in Australian circles over the past one hundred years.

Professor Anthony Reid has added this volume on Sumatra, with special attention to Aceh, to his already huge corpus of publications about Indonesia. The book reveals that he remains master of the telling phrase. In this case, the phrase emerges, almost casually, when he tells us that since 1998 the ‘Indonesia project’ has been increasingly challenged. Indonesians might be startled to learn that their country was a project, but Reid presents plenty of evidence here for its incompleteness. Anyone tempted to superficial judgments about the Aceh problem and what it means for Indonesia and the region would do well to read this book.

Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason.