Non Fiction

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics Of Reading is both a deeply scholarly response to the work of a brilliant and challenging writer, and an act of advocacy for a particular mode of reading, which Derek Attridge characterises variously as ethical, literary, ‘attentive’ and scrupulously responsive to the text. This mode draws on practices of ‘close reading’, while proposing the ethics of ...

Charles Osborne, who was born in Brisbane in 1927 and moved to London in 1953, is a prolific writer, broadcaster and opera critic. His latest offering, The Opera Lover’s Companion, sets out to guide its reader through 175 of the world’s most popular operas. Osborne correctly states that ‘the staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers – Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss’ – and certain works by other luminaries. The operas of sixty-seven composers are included, but that core quintet gives us almost a third of the operas in this volume. Interestingly, in opera’s four hundred-year history, the vast majority of the most frequently performed works fall within the period between Mozart’s first featured opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (1770) and Strauss’s last, Capriccio (1942).

As with The New Kobbé’s Opera Book (1997), the list reveals a re-evaluation of many previously neglected operas, in particular some lesser-known works of Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, and Strauss, which have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Doubtless this also reflects the dearth of modern operas and the scarcity of contemporary composers who know what their audiences want. Any opera company ignoring box office appeal does so at its peril, and a book such as this should be mandatory reading.

In the old days, it was easy. The eagle was a large bird with sharp talons for gripping and a hooked beak for tearing prey; the swallow was a fast-flying bird that left our shores each winter to seek warmer climes. But since Charles Darwin, we can’t say that anymore, because the very language of such descriptions implies purpose – either will (the swallow somehow knowing, planning, its migration) or design.

Multiculturalism has been in a state of political and theoretical decline for more than a decade. Sneja Gunew’s latest book addresses this loss of political commitment and theoretical engagement with one of the most challenging issues of contemporary society. Her effort to reposition the debate is based on the belief that it is necessary to establish new comparative studies of multiculturalism. In the past, multiculturalism was trapped within a national discourse on identity and rights. This tended to confine debate to pragmatic accounts of social policy, folkloric versions of culture and the classic liberal definition of citizenship. Gunew argues that this approach is inadequate given the global flows and transnational links of diasporic communities. Today, multiculturalism needs to be grasped as a process that is both situated in a specific setting and connected to broader forces. In the context of globalisation, the understanding of multiculturalism requires a more complex model of cultural dynamics and social agency.

Owls have captured the human imagination as much as any group of birds. Mysterious, nocturnal hunters with haunting, far-carrying calls, silent flight, and prominent, forward-facing eyes, owls evoke a range of emotions from fear and awe to delight and a deep concern for their welfare.

No Australian native son blazed brighter than Hugh D. McIntosh (1876–1942). Here is a lively biography of a Sydney boy who left school aged seven and rose to be the Squire of Broome Park in Kent, the stately seat of Lord Kitchener. McIntosh – contender though he became for a seat in the House of Commons – remained always an Australian. At Broome Park, a cricket pitch was laid down with ten tons of Australian earth, imported so that the visiting Australian Test team might practice on their native soil. The McIntosh ‘coat of arms’ came not from the College of Heralds but from the studio of his old mate Norman Lindsay. The very doctor who delivered him at birth was Charles Mackellar, father of that Dorothea who celebrated our ‘sunburnt country’.

Our age likes to think of itself as a time of constant change – leadership gurus call it ‘permanent white water’ – but how fast and fundamental were the changes around the end of the eighteenth century? In 1779, when Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii, Europeans were settled in South and Central America and the Dutch East Indies, and were nibbling at the edges of India and Africa. Jesuit missionaries had been in China for the better part of two centuries. The rebellion in Britain’s American colonies seemed to be under control, despite the instability of George III and the interference of Louis XVI – whose position, despite some economic problems, looked unassailable. No sane person would have imagined that the traders, pirates, missionaries and scientists probing remote parts of the globe were harbingers of anything more than an expansion of trade and knowledge.

Robyn Eckersley’s provocative new study  of environmental governance reinvests belief in the  democratic state as a site of ethical action and ecological responsibility. She counters a trend in recent Green thinking to see the state, in particular the liberal democratic state, as the enemy of current and future environmental well-being. Eckersley’s own background is in political science, and she largely engages with other political theorists. However, the anti-statist perspective that she questions is common across a range of environmental disciplines, and it is refreshing to see a re-visioning of the political structures we already have rather than an imagined future ‘ecotopia’ as an answer to environmental ills.

I’ve always been interested in trying new things,’ Tim Jarvis declares disarmingly in the opening  line of The Unforgiving Minute, ‘and I’m not sure I know exactly why.’ Unlike Scott or Shackleton, Jarvis has no literary aspirations but is a knockabout bloke who gives motivational talks on his adventures and who believes in a gospel of personal effort, physical challenge and – trailing these two by a long margin – the wonder of the natural world. This account of a series of polar journeys is self-consciously structured using the effective journalistic device of plunging the reader into an intense situation at the opening of each chapter, and finishing each chapter with a teaser for the next. Like most accounts of polar exploration, it is a weird blend of numbing dullness and compulsive interest. Jarvis has taken the lessons of his public speaking and turned them into a pleasing book, firmly in the self-help genre, with gripping accounts of the many crises that inevitably beset extreme adventure expeditions, not to mention the prurient details of toilet habits, tooth decay and muscle wastage.

David McKnight made the first of many field trips to Mornington Island in 1966, when the old people could still remember how it was before the white men came. The Lardil largely escaped the violence that accompanied white intrusion, and had kept possession of their land, although in time they were made to share it with survivors from the region. A mission, established in 1914, had preserved them from further predation, but at a cost: hunter-gatherers were rounded up and made to live cheek-by-jowl in a ‘supercamp’ close by the mission, and their children were taken to be raised and educated by the missionaries, with only casual contact with their parents.