Archive

Chester Wilmot was killed when the Comet airliner he was flying to London crashed near Rome on 10 January 1954. The ABC and BBC radio journalist had survived six dangerous years as a war correspondent in World War II only to fall victim to an aircraft design fault. Wilmot’s untimely death was also a great loss for Australian history, as he had recently been commissioned to write the volume of the Australian official history on the vital North African battles of Tobruk and Alamein. His best-selling Tobruk 1941: Capture, Siege, Relief (1944) and The Struggle for Europe (1952) indicate that he would have written a history that was authoritative, incisive and enthralling. Neil McDonald suggests in this new book that Wilmot would also have had quite a bit to say about the senior wartime Australian army commander, General Thomas Blamey.

Camel Rider is, according to the Penguin press release, the story of a young American boy living in the Middle East. When war breaks out, the release goes on, the boy is left behind as his family flees to safety. He befriends a young Arab boy, who has been kidnapped and taken to the desert as a camel jockey. Actually, no. Camel Rider is the story of a young Australian boy, Adam, living in the Middle East. When the city is invaded, his family does not flee. His father, a pilot, is away on a four-day trip (with Adam’s passport tucked unknowingly in his flight bag); his mother is on her way to Melbourne alone simply because, without a passport, Adam is unable to travel with her. In the desert, Adam meets a young Bangladeshi boy, who has not been kidnapped but rather sold to slave traders. Should it matter that a press release has it so wrong? I think it does.

Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.

‘Since the end of the Cold War, foreign policy has become economic policy.’ It was March 1999 when I put this cliché du jour to a British bureaucrat handling policy about cultural industries and trade agreements. The World Trade Organisation was young, the New Economy was everywhere, the NASDAQ still had 3000 points to rise. But we were walking across Trafalgar Square, Nelson was watching and I should have known better. ‘That,’ she said tolerantly, ‘is what they told us in 1948.’ As we spoke, NATO forces were at war. Bill Clinton, who had won the first US election since the Cold War by reminding his predecessor about the economy, had decided that force was now required in the Balkans. He’d already apologised for not using it in Rwanda. Two-and-a-half years later, the mutual defence provisions of Australia’s military alliance with the US would be activated for the first time. The Cold War was over, but there would be plenty for diplomats to talk about besides trade deals and prosperity. Later in 1999, the collapse of the Seattle ministerial meeting of the WTO showed that even economic policy was going to be hard work.

Gardening is as old as the British settlement of Australia, but its popularity among the expanding middle classes has blossomed throughout the continent over the last forty years. The annual guide published by Australia’s Open Garden Scheme with the ABC, and Louise Earwaker and Neil Robertson’s The Open Garden (2000), attest to the variety of gardening styles practised today.

Peter Rodgers, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel from 1994-97, has produced a flimsy and flawed anti-Zionist tract that tells the reader much about his mindset but does not provide anything approaching a reliable historical or contemporary guide to Middle Eastern realities. Rodgers maintains a veneer of even-handedness, but his underlying point appears anything but balanced. Israel, apparently, was born in sin through dispossessing another people. Herzl’s ‘Zionist dream came at terrible cost to both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’, according to Rodgers, who is now firmly rooted in the ideological terrain of those diplomats and journalists who believe that Israel deserves all the pain it is suffering. Herzl’s Nightmare is nothing more than a skewed anti-Israel diatribe that builds its case by means of a selective presentation of some facts.

The Bunburyists is a reminiscence of the author’s five years’ escape from the ‘dependent worlds of politics and journalism’.

I had fled with my family to the bush … where we sought to escape the present by returning to the past and setting ourselves up in business as dealers in antiques. Or at any rate, a superior kind of junk.

Today, as the novel opens, he finds himself again perched in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – ‘I have come back to work, to all I had sought to escape. The admission of defeat is self-evident. One more among many failings.’

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.