Review

Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.

From the first paragraph, Terri Janke’s Butterfly Song makes its intentions clear: this is a novel about the love of the land and the palpable connection to the ancestral home. ‘They say if you live on an island for too long, you merge with it. Your bones become the sands, your blood the ocean. Your flesh is the fertile ground. Your heart becomes the stories, dances, songs. The island is part of your makeup …’ This is why Tarena Shaw feels an odd sense of belonging when she first steps foot on Thursday Island, her grandparents’ birthplace. Though she has never been there before, the memories and myths that have been passed down the family tree have guaranteed a spiritual bond between the black-suited city slicker and the tropical island with water like a ‘living gemstone’.

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.’

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.

The elephant is now a rare beast in China, where the ox and pig reign supreme among quadrupeds. Precisely because elephants are scarce, The Retreat of the Elephants presents readers with an unforgettable metaphor for the environmental history of China. As Chapter Two of the book shows, that history featured a 3000-year struggle for habitat between elephants and humans. The victory of the humans involved a transformation of the landscape through extensive deforestation, which denuded first the vast plains of north China and then the valleys and hills of the south. The elephants were burnt by the sun.

Henry Kissinger is one of the most fascinating, enigmatic, brilliant, paradoxical, and infuriating figures in recent US history. Born in Germany in 1923, he emigrated to the US with his family in 1938 and was naturalised in 1943. After army service and picking up a Harvard PhD, he became an academic there and an adviser to various think-tanks on global strategy and defence. He owed his introduction to government work, surprisingly, to Nelson Rockefeller, leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, but attained superstar status working for Rockefeller’s bête noire, Richard Milhous Nixon. He was Nixon’s Assistant for National Security Affairs 1969–75 and Secretary of State 1973–77, continuing under Gerald Ford after Nixon’s forced resignation over Watergate, in August 1974. He shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho, who refused it for his efforts, premature as it turned out, to end the Vietnam War.

For nearly 100 years before any public art gallery entered the field, the main institutional collectors of Australian photography were state libraries. Primarily, they bought photographs for their informational value; the maker of the image was of relatively little concern to them. What mattered was the subject: what the photograph told the interested viewer about the people, places, and events of an evolving nation.

Victoria’s coastal borough of Queenscliff is fortunate indeed to have esteemed poet and scholar Barry Hill (a local resident since 1975) as its official historian. He combines an eye for events that will resonate as part of the ‘big picture’ of Australian history with a local’s affection and instinct for the telling details that pinpoint the intrinsic character of the place.

This book was partially written in the Queenscliff Historical Museum: at a mess table recovered from a shipwreck, surrounded by vintage diving equipment, a skull recovered from the sea, music boxes and silver teapots. It is an apt metaphor for the character of the town: on one hand, a sedate seaside resort known in its heyday for its boarding houses, grand hotels and ‘solid respectability’; on the other, a notorious shipwreck site and home to both a military barracks and, more recently, an Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) training ground for spies.