Review

In the 1930s the notorious art critic and gallery director J.S. MacDonald felt it was his patriotic duty to protect Australia from the morally suspect culture of Europe, where, he exclaimed, ‘the pictorial symptoms of the degeneracy of France [is] enfeebled by the rule of functionaries, and … Mittel Europe [is] crushed and torn between Nazi, Bolshevist and Fascist megalomaniacs’. Not a man to mince words, MacDonald also expressed his horror of what was arguably Australia’s first blockbuster exhibition, the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, suggesting that it was the work of ‘degenerates and perverts’. As the then Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, MacDonald was a man of influence, and his outspoken views were transmitted widely.

Why is the Middle East anti-American? That is the core question in Barry Rubin’s flowing account of contemporary politics in that turbulent region of the world. As the director of Global Research in International Affairs in Israel, with a long history of research and publication on the Middle East and US foreign policy towards the region, Rubin is confident of his assessment. He is a prolific writer with some forty books to his name. The present one, The Tragedy of the Middle East, appears to comprise reflections based partly on the collection of media-excerpts and publications by Islamic groups in the wake of the September 11 attacks, published separately as an edited volume, Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East (2002), although there is no acknowledgment in this book of such a link. The theme of anti-Americanism has also provided the material for a more recent book by Rubin titled Hating America: A History (2004).

This book contains two discrete memoirs: the first by Clifford Norman Button, a Presbyterian minister; the second by his daughter, Muriel Mathers. Despite immense social changes in the period they cover (1888 to the present), there are many similarities between the two personalities and their work in the world.

Dr Button, the first memoirist, was obviously a driven character. His manuscript, entitled The Unknown Londoner, was completed just before his death in 1950 and remained in his daughter’s possession until she included it here, edited and abridged, under the title ‘Murmurings’. As well as a chronological account of his life, ‘Murmurings’ includes enough of Button’s reflections on his interests and beliefs to, in her words, ‘round out the man’.

Here is a kind of social experiment in fiction. Take the lowest, most abject starting point for a human life. Give the child no advantages, home or family; provide it with no regular food or care; subject it to the privations of a society with no welfare system; deprive it of any educational, emotional or spiritual training; and then, when it finally finds an occupation, make it the lowest, most socially disadvantaged and despised. And then see what kind of person it turns out to be. Oh, and set the whole thing in the Middle Ages, which, as everyone knows, was the most brutal, depraved, disease- and poverty-ridden era in Western history.

Sally Neighbour wrote this book as a direct response to the Bali bombing in October 2002. She was convinced, by that event and its aftermath, that fundamentalist Muslims’ hatred of Westerners was creating an unfamiliar world whose rules she and most Australians did not understand. We are in her debt. In clean prose, informed by meticulous research into a wide range of sources, Neighbour stitches together countless loose strands until they cohere persuasively into a dismaying pattern. Her courage, dispassion and skill present us with conclusions as unpleasant as they are inescapable. Journalism is a term frequently used pejoratively, but this is a thoroughly journalistic book in the best possible sense: it presents evidence, shapes arguments and distils information – a vast amount of information – intelligently and responsibly. Neighbour’s disturbing claims are founded on hard evidence and sober analysis.

Rene Baker File #28/E.D.P. is written by two women, Rene Powell and Bernadette Kennedy. Powell is an Aboriginal woman who was taken from her mother at the age of four. Kennedy, an ex-nun who is descended from Irish, English and Scottish migrants, has ‘worked with the homeless and disadvantaged in Western Australia’ for more than twenty-five years. The two women met through Kennedy’s religious work and because of Rene’s drinking problem: Rene was the first resident in a homeless women’s shelter that Kennedy helped to run.

The Stone Ship is Peter Raftos’s first book, and one of the first three books released by Sullivan’s Creek, an imprint of Pandanus Books. The Sullivan’s Creek Series ‘seeks to explore Australia through the work of new writers, with a particular encouragement to authors from Canberra and the region’ and ‘aims to make a lively contribution to scholarship and cultural knowledge’. Raftos, ‘a web developer, an academic-in-training and a journalist’, lives in Canberra and works at the Australian National University. His novel, set in an imagined time and place, doesn’t so much explore Australian universities as the absurdity of all universities. As for ‘a lively contribution to cultural knowledge’, I’m not sure what that looks like, but The Stone Ship reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Brazil (1985). Both are set in a ‘retro-future’ ruled by huge, incomprehensible bureaucracies, whose only work seems to be perpetuating their systems and inflicting arbitrary cruelties on unsuspecting and trusting citizens.

Anti-Americanism is one of those nonsense words, like anti-globalisation, that has become shorthand for a more complex and contradictory set of arguments and grievances. What is called ‘anti-Americanism’ generally refers to a particular set of criticisms made about aspects of the politics, economics and culture of the US. Few people have what it takes to be truly anti-American (to hate all that emanates from the US); thus anti-Americanism is more of a tendency than an actuality. However, the tendency is undeniably on the rise, with increasing numbers of people in recent times voicing their concerns around the world about US foreign policy and about Americanisation.

John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in several reworkings of his mental illness.

These two new collections are both by, and maybe for, believers. They contain passionate and interrogative poems that argue for and celebrate their respective views of the world. Both poets are, to quote Rosemary Sorensen’s term for Goodfellow on the cover blurb, ‘evangelists’ who wear their respective hearts on their sleeves and who urge or invite assent.

Fontanelle, Andrew Lansdown’s seventh collection, is concerned with the almost ineffable immanent design and intricacy of the natural and experienced world, especially of birds, insects and a young family. The role of the poet here is to explore, describe and celebrate the (almost) sacred in the mundane: ‘The words I’ve been working with / are like running water. All afternoon / I’ve been trying to scoop out / a place for them to settle …’ (‘Home’). Lansdown’s voice is earnest, reverent, wonderstruck. These are Romantic imagist poems in which the poetry defers to the empirical and ontological world: ‘Cicadas have left their cuticles / clinging to the daisy stems: / brown shells, burst at the back / of the thorax’ (‘Emergence’).