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Archive

Meanjin edited by Ian Britain & Overland 177 edited by Nathan Hollier

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March 2005, no. 269

‘Meanjin,’ writes Ian Britain, ‘always aims for a blend of the astringent and the convivial.’ A worthy aim, and one that is well realised in its ‘Psychology’ edition. It may simply be a consequence of the theme’s depth and complexity, but On Psychology also feels weightier than previous issues. Britain shares responsibility for this edition with guest co-editor Robert Reynolds, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales. Reynolds contributes an essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing between a valid sense of sadness and full-blown depression. He also seems to have influenced the overall tone. There is a touch of academic dryness about several of the essays and slightly less emphasis on personal reflection, although cover-star M.J. Hyland’s account of her experience of depression is central.

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Letters - March 2005

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March 2005, no. 269

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

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Malinowski: Odyssey of an anthropologist 1884-1920 by Michael W. Young

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March 2005, no. 269
Malinowski: Odyssey of an anthropologist 1884-1920

Of all the social scientists ever supported by an Australian government, Bronislaw Malinowksi had the biggest impact on twentieth-century thought. His ‘functionalist’ theory of culture in the early 1920s – using evidence that he had collected in Australia’s New Guinea territories during World War I – challenged evolutionism. Instead of ranking cultures on a developmental scale from ‘primitive’ Them to ‘civilised’ Us, social science would strive to understand each culture in its own terms, as a particular set of strategies for meeting universal material needs and psychological drives. Malinowski proposed a humanism that could stare Freud in the face and accommodate the moral catastrophe of 1914–18.

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Books and Broadcasters

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March 2005, no. 269

‘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.

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The Inaugural ABR Poetry Prize

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March 2005, no. 269

Ventriloquist’s Dummy
Jennifer Harrison

I

          I can’t tell where I’m going
but shall I memorise the shape of streets
          the slope of bridges, the vertigo?
today I’m carried somewhere new –
I’m lost, in pieces, and I rattle

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Advances - March 2005

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March 2005, no. 269

2004 National Biography Award

There have been some big developments with this award, which is administered and presented by the State Library of New South Wales on behalf of its benefactor, Dr Geoffrey Cains. As we go to press, the organisers tell us that this year’s prize money has been increased from $15,000 to $20,000, because of the generosity of Michael Crouch, Director of Zip Heaters and a supporter of the Library. This makes it one of our wealthiest literary awards. The judges (Edmund Campion, Amanda Lohrey and Gerard Windsor) have compiled an interesting short list: Robert Adamson’s Inside Out (Text), Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer (Viking), Robert Hillman’s The Boy in the Green Suit (Scribe), Gaylene Perry’s Midnight Water (Picador) and Peter Skrzynecki’s Sparrow Garden (UQP). On March 2, Belinda Hutchinson will announce that Robert Hillman (not the Robert Hillman who gets stuck into Geoff Page in our ‘Letters’ this month) is the winner of this year’s award.

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Unusual Angles

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March 2005, no. 269

Four artists have taken the natural world – its wildlife, its ecology, and its geology – and produced four books with entirely different aims. Kim Michelle Toft describes The World That We Want (UQP, $26.95hb, 32 pp) as ‘one that protects, feeds and shelters everything that lives on it’. Essentially, this is a factual book, but one suffused with a sense of wonder because of Toft’s exquisite pictures. Are We There Yet? (Are We There Yet? A Journey Around Australia, Viking, $24.95hb, 32 pp) is Alison Lester’s bubbling account of a family’s ‘journey around Australia’, with cheerful pictures of boab trees, fairy penguins and everything in between. Again, it is factual; if you want to know what a quokka looks like, just find the right picture. This is not so true of Graeme Base’s Jungle Drums (Viking, $29.95hb, 38 pp); although the leopard, the elephant and the warthogs are clearly recognisable in the early pictures, by the middle of the story they all look strange.

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Who Wants to Create Australia?: Essays on poetry and ideas in contemporary Australia by Martin Harrison

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March 2005, no. 269
Who Wants to Create Australia?: Essays on poetry and ideas in contemporary Australia

Martin Harrison’s poems have a fine discursive quality, which means that they often read like essays. Take ‘Midday’, from his recent volume Summer (2002), where a hand-scythe and the ABC radio news produce a meditation on time and place not dissimilar in its conclusion to that offered on several occasions in the essays included in Who Wants to Create Australia? ‘Only a little can be added to an everyday sense of life – / a singularity, a slowed-down look, faster than light, / a sense of movement out of nowhere, now, here.’

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Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Columbian Exposition by Judith Snodgrass

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March 2005, no. 269
Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Columbian Exposition

Whether you agreed with it or not – and many didn’t – Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a coming Clash of Civilisations (1993) was one of the most engrossing arguments of the late twentieth century. He not only foresaw Western civilisation confronting a joint Confucian–Islamic challenge, in 1996 he also anticipated an attack on the US by young, middle-class Muslims.

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The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison

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March 2005, no. 269

The new, three-and-a-half shelf-metre, 62.5 million-word Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) brings to mind what Dante Gabriel Rossetti (q.v.) once wrote about Top, his pet wombat (d. 1870): it is ‘a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness’.

In sixty volumes, the ODNB covers 54,922 lives in 50,113 biographical articles ranging in length from brief notes of a few dozen words to 37,400 (the longest, on Shakespeare). It is the work of approximately 10,000 contributors and advisers (302 of them Australian), and an Oxford team of 362 associate editors. The huge task of correcting and augmenting mineral water tycoon George Smith, Leslie Stephen, and Sidney Lee’s original DNB (1885–1900); revising and incorporating the twentieth-century supplements, and collating the lists of errata, which for a century have been patiently and optimistically accumulated at the Institute for Historical Research – to say nothing of the task of writing 16,315 new lives, and replacing nearly as many old ones – all of this was achieved in just twelve years, and on schedule.

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