Commentary

The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians, journalists and politicians are concerned to levy blame for terrible acts of European greed and brutality and to bestow praise for acts of Aboriginal resistance; while rightists emphasise the white settlers’ and authorities’ normally good intentions and the small amount of blood shed by comparison with the histories of North and South America, and of Africa. The leading protagonists in both camps have generally been formed by Marxism and retain that absolutist faith that nothing happens by accident, thereby permitting simple assignments of good and evil.

‘I can’t believe that you look back and say “I was unkind to people” … you’re not an envious person, you’re not a hateful person, you’ve got – one assumes – plenty of money. So why do you sit there and beat yourself up thinking that you’ve hurt people?’

Poor John Mangos. There he was on Sky News Australia presenting the interview programme Viewpoint last November. His interviewee was the great John Laws, who had a new book to promote and yet another spectacular controversy (this one involving his comments about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Carson Kressley) to defend.

How do dance and music fit together in a choreographic work? Even the briefest look at Australian collaborations across the arts suggests that endeavours vary widely. The National Library of Australia’s collections, which are particularly strong in the areas of music and dance, provide some interesting examples of the synergies that exist between these two art forms and that make cross-art form collaboration a richly rewarding area of study.

At certain moments in Australia’s cultural history, dance has been the prime artistic force of the day. At those times, dance and its makers have inspired and enthused a whole generation of people. Dance has changed lives, has allowed careers to blossom in unexpected ways, and has created fanatical audiences. Dance had this power over Australians between 1936 and 1940, when three Russian ballet companies – Ballets Russes companies – toured Australia.

This year for the third year in a row, Black Inc. is reprinting writing from HEAT in one of its ‘Best Australian’ anthologies, without seeking my permission as the magazine’s editor and publisher. They can do this because there is a legal loophole in Australia’s literary culture – literary magazines in this country do not normally have contracts with their authors. It is conventional to ask magazine editors for their permission before reprinting work that has appeared in their pages; but the fact is, if the author’s permission can be won it is entirely irrelevant, from a legal point of view what the magazine editor thinks.

Manning Clark married Dymphna Lodewycks in 1939. In the following years they lived in Oxford, Tiverton, Geelong and Melbourne, before moving to Canberra in 1949. On 29 October 1953 they took up residence in a new house, designed by their friend Robin Boyd, in Tasmania Circle, Forrest. It was to be their home for the rest of their lives. It was not a particularly large house, and the Clarks and their six children must have found it cramped at times. The only upstairs room was Manning’s study, reached by a ladder from the entrance hall. It was in this room, with its view of Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, that he wrote the six volumes of A History of Australia, several other books, and countless articles, reviews, lectures and speeches.

Defamation is easy. Australia has any number of good defamation lawyers who will ‘legal’ a manuscript if you pay them enough. But if your manuscript threatens to transgress the National Secrets Act, you are on much shakier ground. Axis of Deceit, Andrew Wilkie’s ‘story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq’, was always going to be hot. Our investigations didn’t turn up a single Melbourne lawyer who could advise us if we had crossed the line, so we asked David Wright-Neville, a Monash academic and ex-spook (like Wilkie, he had been an analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency), to check the manuscript. He read it thoughtfully and suggested chopping a dozen or so offending passages, which was acceptable to both Wilkie and Black Inc.

Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.