Commentary

On Saturday, 3 December 2005, the day after Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore, David Marr contributed a major article, ‘Death of compassion’, to the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review section. A year earlier, Marr had made a welcome return to the SMH following his spell as host of Media Watch. He is always worth reading: informed by broad interests in the arts, politics and religion, an ongoing commitment to investigative journalism following his years at the National Times, and sometimes by moral outrage, Marr’s writings are some of the most elegant and insightful to grace Australia’s daily press.

This particular Saturday, I finished reading his piece feeling curiously frustrated. Marr explored public reaction to the execution, from the deliberately low-key strategy of the convicted drug runner’s legal team and supporters to the public campaign they ran to save him following his failed appeal for clemency. The article was based on a central premise: ‘roughly half the nation was happy to see him [Nguyen] swing.’ The evidence for this claim? ‘Talkback.’ 

Though we have seen periods during which Australian cinema has been synonymous with period-set narratives and idealised evocations of the outback, there has always been a darker side to our cinematic imagination, a gritty, hard-edged element that is just as crucial to this country’s feature film output as are the sepia-tinged dreamscapes. Many of the pivotal films of the Australian New Wave brought a vivid, finely judged aesthetic to the bleakest of subject matter. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) conjured a harrowing tragedy of grisly murders and manhunts, while Peter Weir’s darkly comic feature début, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), presented a paranoid, murderous rural community whose raison d’être was maintaining its seclusion, even if that meant killing any outsiders who found their way into town.

Within a week of the recent release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, millions of children and adults around the world had read it. Now comes the long wait for the final tome in this cleverly designed series by the prolific J.K. Rowling. Nil desperandum. The fantasy novel for children – and especially crossover books which, like the Harry Potter series, appeal to both adults and children – has a long tradition, and there are a myriad other fantastic books to turn to, many of which have been written by Australian authors.

An Indian fast-food outlet has named itself after Mahatma Gandhi and features a caricature of his face in neon lights. Tacky? Certainly. Only in America? Only in Australia, actually, or at least that’s what a major cable television channel would like to suggest.

Just before she entered the world of Wonderland, Alice asked: what is the use of a book without pictures? A book in which an imaginative narrative is symbiotically supported and augmented by illustrations can play an important part in the development of a child’s verbal and visual literacy skills. However, a picture book is more than just a story with pictures: it is also a cultural artefact that both reflects and transmits the mores of the country in which it is produced. And a good picture book can do more than simply replicate the visual stereotypes often found in popular culture: it can stretch the imagination, excite curiosity, structure meaning and shape cultural identity.

The Sabi sands reserve borders South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park. I spent a memorable few days in one of Sabi Sands’s private game reserves in January 2002, tracking the ‘big five’ at dawn and dusk, eating fine food, and curling up under my bed’s mosquito net to read J.M. Coetzee. While I was rather discomfited by the obsequiousness of some of the black employees, I knew that tourism was the lifeblood of the community. The events of September 11 had impacted even on Africa, and the lodge was eerily quiet.

For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.