Archive

Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Some translations are playful – ‘Sleep embraced their weary limbs … and I looked up the word for patefactus’ (‘Aeneid II’) – while others superimpose order, as in ‘Mr Ruddock’s speechwriter (Philippic 1)’: ‘The asylum in the desert swallows the phrase, a throat / a drain with birds circling, a gate.’

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In October 2006, the Australian Literary Review published a list of the forty most influential Australian intellectuals, the results of a peer survey undertaken by the Australian Public Intellectual Network. Meaghan Morris ranked seventh, sharing her berth with Tim Costello and Inga Clendinnen. Leaving aside the problems, exclusions, and biases that attend the compilation of such lists, I was heartened to see Morris’s name in the top ten. Theory and cultural studies have long been demonised outside the academy, and their position within the university system remains subject to sniping. As a writer, critic and editor, Morris’s work over the last two decades has defined Australian cultural studies – indeed, she co-edited Australian Cultural Studies (1993) – and the results of this survey suggest at the very least a reluctant recognition of her contribution to Australian intellectual life. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture is neither a defence of cultural studies nor an overview of Morris’s prodigious career. Rather, it is an eclectic collection of essays, written between 1998 and 1999, which are all more or less obliquely concerned with questions of Australian culture and history. It offers a virtuosic demonstration of the capacities of theoretically informed cultural and historical criticism.

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In September 1943, seventeen commandos of Z Special Force, led by Lieutenant Commander Ivan Lyon, attacked and sank with limpet mines seven ships in the Singapore harbour. A year later, in October 1944, when the Pacific War had only months to run, a repeat performance failed and all those involved were ...

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At the dinner to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Quadrant magazine in October 2006, John Howard gave one of the most revealing speeches of his prime ministership. Celebrating with the magazine the victory of democracy over communism, he went on to denounce a whole range of left-wing sins. He attacked the New Left counterculture, where it had become the ‘height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship’. Moreover, ‘it had become de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare’. Fortunately, a ‘few brave individuals’ took a ‘stand against the orthodoxies of the day’; Howard congratulated Quadrant for defending both Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle ‘against the posses of political correctness’. Nowhere were ‘the fangs of the left’ so visible as in the character assassination of Geoffrey Blainey. Despite some progress, the ‘soft left’ still ‘holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia’s universities by virtue of its long march through the institutions’. Howard then likened the current struggle against Islamic terrorism to the Cold War, and criticised opponents of the war in Iraq ‘who now talk as if Iraq was some island of Islamic tranquillity before 2003’. Although there was some criticism of the speech in the media, the most notable aspect was the chorus of compliments that amplified its main themes. Greg Sheridan applauded the way the prime minister had ‘rightly bemoaned the continuing dominance of the soft Left’ (Australian, 7 October 2006). Michael Duffy thought it was ‘probably the most ideologically impressive [speech] ever made by the Prime Minister’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2006). Piers Akerman approved the way ‘Howard is not going to let those who lacked his and Quadrant’s commitments to those ideals [i.e. intellectual freedom and liberal democracy] forget where they stood … To peals of laughter, he quoted George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool”’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2006). Miranda Devine thought this address, recalling ‘50 years of the left’s worst excesses’, ‘was a speech to cement the “real” John Howard’s place in history and his role in the culture wars, through which he has steered Australia resolutely and irrevocably in his ten years in office, much to the chagrin of his detractors’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 2006). Janet Albrechtsen rejoiced that, ‘[o]nce again, Howard seems to be embracing an electorate willing to confront old orthodoxies. And the remarkable thing is that after 10 long years in power, Howard the conservative is still a front-foot reformer, challenging the status quo. As with his previous battles in the culture wars, education reform will demand a marked shift in the way Howard is ultimately judged by history: not as merely an economic steward but as a crusader in the ideas war’ (Australian, 25 October 2006).

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Public debate in Australia about the United Nations is remarkably thin, and it is dominated by two familiar tribes of pundits: UN groupies and UN bashers. The groupies defend the international organisation come what may: they are suspicious about the motives of nation-states – especially the United States – and they get an attack of the vapours every time Kofi Annan appears at a lectern. UN bashers, on the other hand, never saw a Security Council resolution they liked. They scoff at the time it takes states to argue their differences, bristle at the idea of dealing with non-democracies, and propose American power as an alternative organising principle for the world. Neither group, in other words, takes a balanced or realistic view of the world body. They are so busy praising the UN or burying it that they don’t have the time (or, rather, the column inches) to analyse it.

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In a scholarly study just published by MIT Press (Art as Existence, 2006), Gabriele Guercio considers whether the artist’s monograph is still a viable form, given various recent challenges to artistic and art-historical theory and practice. He concludes that although the monographic model does have a future, it must be reshaped inventively. Freud at Work – devoted to the English painter Lucian Freud – represents one possible approach, combining an illuminating interview with an extensive series of studio photographs taken between 1983 and 2006. The resulting volume may seem rather slight, but when consulted in conjunction with the major books on Freud, especially the 2002 Tate exhibition catalogue, it offers many insights and pleasures. I enjoyed particularly David Dawson’s 2005 photos of the artist in action, stripped to the waist, looking for all the world like Caravaggio’s St Jerome – a suitable alter ego.

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Beyond American failure in Iraq lies a second, deeper failure. America’s Iraq project was always intended by its proponents not just to fix Iraq and transform the Middle East, but also to demonstrate a new grand policy concept for the twenty-first century. This was the Bush Doctrine, enshrining the now-familiar ideas of the neo-conservatives: America’s power, especially its military power, is omnipotent; its values and institutions are universally desired and universally applicable; hence America’s destiny – and after 9/11 even its very survival – requires it to use this immense power, pre-emptively and unilaterally if necessary, to reshape the world in America’s image. The neo-cons themselves called it a vision for a New American Century.

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A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of cosmopolitanism. You might discern it in the call by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, for a new kind of European justice, replete with regional police force (Europol) and magistracy (Eurojust). You might glean it from the global spread of human rights movements, protesting the suffering of children and civilians in, say, Iraq, Africa, Israel or Palestine. You might infer it from the cultural ties of, say, Chinese or Korean migrants living in Sydney, whose working lives embed them in global networks. ... (read more)

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

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That quintessential Australian–American, Rupert Murdoch, recently counselled Australians against ‘the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe’. While I confess to a certain Schadenfreude when the chief propagandist for the second Iraqi war, which has contributed mightily to that European alienation, seeks to come to grips with the war’s consequences, I think it unlikely that Australia will go down the European path. For Australians, the American relationship looms much larger than it does for Europeans. As Dennis Altman shows in his elegant and argumentative essay 51^st State?, the relationship is deep-rooted in our history, psyche, and culture. We were, after all, one by-product of the American War of Independence. For him, the danger is not so much anti-Americanism but that, in ‘a world dominated by the American imaginary’, we, like Rupert’s News Corporation, might lose our national identity.

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