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The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

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Simon Haines shot to prominence for an Op-Ed piece in The Australian (9 June 2006) that seemed to enter the lists on the conservative side of the debate about what they teach in English classes these days. If you read carefully, you could tell that the prominence was only going to be momentary, because Haines’s argument was far too nuanced to provoke and maintain the level of polarised hysteria the media appears to expect.

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School Days edited by John Kinsella

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November 2006, no. 286

Hands up those who know where Upper Ulam is. In what Melbourne convent school was Veronica Brady’s spiritual and aesthetic education nourished? Can anyone name Eva Sallis’s latest work of fiction or identify the school, somewhere outside Adelaide, where Sallis practised the violin and took her turn at milking the cow?

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Mark Bowling was the ABC’s man in Indonesia from 1998 until 2002, and this book is an excellent account of the period of his posting. It covers a turbulent time in Indonesian life from May 1998, the end of the thirty-year Suharto regime, until May 2002, when the newly fledged nation of East Timor spread its wings. An epilogue adds his involvement in reporting on the most significant event in Indonesian affairs for Australians, the Bali bombing on 13 October 2002.

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The Battle of Crete began on the morning of 20 May 1941 with a new kind of warfare. German paratrooper battalions either parachuted or rode gliders down onto a defending force of British, ANZAC and Greek troops. The invasion took two weeks of bloody fighting to achieve its objectives. It was not, as Greek-Australian writer, Angelo Loukakis has his Australian soldier, Vic Stockton describe it: ‘For the Germans Crete had proved no more than an exercise.’ In fact, airborne invasion was not attempted again. Hitler’s thrust into the Soviet Union on June 22 was almost destabilised, and when the battle was over, 5000 Allied troops were abandoned to certain captivity on the southern coast near the town of Xora Sfakion.

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An exhibition with considerable radical chic, Cook’s Pacific Encounters, currently at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, has stimulated a series of cross-cultural debates at an international conference on the collections made by Captain James Cook and his fellow voyagers (arranged by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Canberra, on July 28). Although there were several centuries of European exploration of the Pacific before the British, the importance of Cook’s voyages was unparalleled before or after. The collection on display in Canberra, primarily assembled by two German scientists, Johann Forster and his son Georg, who accompanied Cook on his second Pacific voyage, is on loan from the University of Göttingen. Like many university collections, it is well conserved and published, but rarely seen. Other parts of the Forster collection are distributed around the globe, the principal holding being at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

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Agamemnon’s Kiss by Inga Clendinnen & Quarterly Essay 23 by Inga Clendinnen

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November 2006, no. 286

Inga Clendinnen came rather late to Michel de Montaigne, the man she acknowledges as ‘the Father of the Essay’. When the professional historian began reading the great amateur, she did so, Clendinnen admits, ‘in that luxurious mood of piety lace-edged with boredom with which we read the lesser classics’. The boredom quickly dissipated as the writer in Clendinnen met a master: ‘It is hard to explain what makes his essays so enchanting, but I think it is the lithe, athletic movement of a naturally intrepid mind.’

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David Campbell published a dozen volumes of poetry between 1949 and his death in 1979, as well as joint selections of Russian translations, collections of short stories and anthologies. Perhaps the purest lyricist of his time, he remained faithful to the few literary forms – the ballad, the song, the sonnet – that first engaged his attention, and never tried to force his range beyond its limits. There was no verse novel, no historical narrative, no extended satires or epistles. But he was not unresponsive to the debates that enlivened Australian literary discussion during his lifetime: A.D. Hope’s advocacy of the discursive mode finds its influence on one phase of his work, as does a highly individual use of neoclassical references. His short poems explore the whole range of Australian history from a variety of angles and, for all their brief and fragmentary forms, build up a narrative that is just as impressive as some of the more popular sequences of the 1940s. In the 300 pages of his Collected Poems (1989), not many go over the page. His poems might seem small in scale, but his collected work has a greater impact than that of many of his more ambitious, heavyweight contemporaries.

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When does an explorer become an adventurer, an adventurer a traveller, a traveller a tourist? This third volume of Raymond Howgego’s monumental Encyclopedia of Exploration moves into a period when the lines become increasingly blurred.

Volume One (2003) covered all of human history up to 1800. In that period, any traveller who left a written account of his or her journey could be counted as an ‘explorer’, and Howgego’s sheer stamina in seeking them all out made this one of the extraordinary books of our time. Most reference works of this scale are assembled by small armies of writers, researchers and editors, funded by major international publishers. The Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 was the work of one man, supported by the comparatively modest resources of Sydney antiquarian bookseller and boutique publisher, Hordern House.

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Photography has always had a close relationship with death, indeed one of the more poignant catch cries of early portrait photography exhorted clients to ‘secure the shadow, before the substance fade’. An intriguing part of this emotionally charged territory is spirit photography – a sub-culture of photographs from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that purport to show ectoplasms, ghosts and auras of the dearly departed.

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