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Dear Elizabeth,

Well, it seems our long correspondence is over. Actually it ended some years ago, didn’t it? Your last letter to me is dated Christmas Eve 2001. I continued writing to you into the following year, not immediately realising you were unable to reply, even though your later letters spoke of confusion and of unaccountably getting lost in familiar streets.

In the clear light of a cloudy summer morning
The idiot boy, holding his father’s hand,
Comes by me on the Quay where I sit writing.
His father spots me looking up, and I don’t want
To look as if I wished I hadn’t, so
Instead of turning straight back to my books
I look around, thus making it a general thing
That I do every so often –
To watch the ferries, to check out the crowd.

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of Christianity. One of the latter’s faultlines ‘racked / sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist / and tigerchrist’. Other stress fractures are ‘the dark arcades / where losers piss themselves / off the edge of memory’. My travelling companion had an immediate sense of Kelly’s fine metaphysics, which, as the back-page blurb glosses, finds ‘the numinous in the undeniably secular’.

A young Kenyan-born white man called Jason Conway has a revolutionary idea: he will save the African elephant from extinction by transporting the animal to the sparsely inhabited Kimberley region in Australia. Sounds far-fetched? In fact this idea, which forms the basis of Ivory to Australia, is less implausible than some of the action that surrounds Jason’s attempt to fulfil his wild scheme. Early in the novel, Jason foils an attempted robbery in a Nairobi restaurant by disarming and shooting one of the gunmen, only to go home to bed wondering if he should sneak in next door and conquer his one-time girlfriend, Jane. The action doesn’t stop there, as Jason, full of idealism, battles against Somali Shifta poachers and sceptical politicians in order to get his beloved elephants safely onto Australian shores.

Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance.

So there he was in the library, crouched above the floor
      like a mousetrap, squinting into his rickety parallel edition
of the Satires. The paperback was from the late fifties;

An Australian Republic presents itself as the book to reopen the republic debate – a defibrillator for our body politic. It turns out, however, to be another example of the lazy argument that marks much of Australia’s progressive discourse. It answers to nothing but its own echo chamber. Meaningless sentences such as ‘Australia is a nation of multiple and changing identities; a moving kaleidoscope of diverse and colourful images’ abound; baseless statements – such as ‘for many of those immigrants … a constitutional system that identified both structurally and symbolically with Australia’s British origins was incompatible, unfamiliar, and indeed alien’ – are supported with the barest of evidence (the quote’s footnote refers readers to an article in Feminist Review entitled ‘The Republic is a Feminist Issue’). Inconsistencies stick out like bookmarks: John Howard’s narrowly economic definition of Australianness ‘promotes a distinctive and exclusively white, male-orientated, Brito-centric identity’. True, perhaps, but this could equally be said about other conceptions of Australian identity presented, without censure, on the preceding page.

An earlier version of this history of Victoria first appeared in 1984 as Our Side of the Country. Though for the past sixteen years Sydney-born politicians Paul Keating and John Howard have usurped Victoria’s former almost constant ‘top position’ in Canberra, the possessive pride reflected in that early title still runs through this modern version ...

Given V.S. Naipaul’s status in the literary world, and the prolific commentary on him and his writing, you might ask what is different about Gillian Dooley’s book, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Dooley’s sympathetic attitude liberates both Naipaul and his writing from critical analyses and from critics with explicit post-colonial and political agendas. She is more than aware of how ‘the reductions of political analysis’ have negatively stereotyped Naipaul’s writing. Rather, she focuses on Naipaul’s genius as a writer, which is not separate from the high standard of ethics, courage, fastidiousness, insecurities and prejudices of the man. For it is these very attributes that Naipaul has inherited from his colonial background that make his writing so rich, remarkable and controversial.