Archive

The summer night is dangerous and deep.
I lie, dead still, aware of the tiniest sounds
Being so full of joy I cannot sleep.

The night is dangerous, so many lives.
I love my husband well. A sharp moon
Rubs the spine of the barn. Nothing moves.

(for David)

je ne sais quoi
but it is written in the sound of this melange
of consonants and vowels that a blind
old impressionist defeats Duchamp

The anthropologists of some future galactic civilisation, sifting through the remains of human life on earth, will find much to puzzle them, but nothing more so than the propensity of supposedly rational creatures to denigrate, hate or even murder those who are perceived to be different in race. How should we understand racism? Where does it come from, and how can it be eradicated? The editors of this book have assembled an impressive collection of philosophers and psychologists to tackle these questions. Their wide-ranging and often conflicting answers do not make racism less puzzling, but, like all good philosophical investigations, this book has the effect of making the reader puzzle more profoundly.

The editors took a lot of pains with this collection. They ensured that it would be accessible to general readers, as well as scholars. The introduction, by Tamas Pataki, is particularly helpful in providing a framework for the discussion. The editors encouraged contributors to read and comment on each other’s work. The result is a discourse in which participants with different approaches and perspectives cooperate to tackle a matter of serious concern.

Of the two groups who opened up Australia to settlement, the squatters have created about their persons a huge library, both admiring and critical. The surveyors, who followed in their footsteps, have rarely captured the imagination (with the exception of Sir Thomas Mitchell and Colonel Light) but their influence, especially in metropolitan Australia, has been incalculable. The site of Melbourne was chosen by a governor, but it was surveyors who laid out the grid plan of the square mile, imposing it on a hilly site, bounded by a narrow river to the south and swamps to the west. Principal among the Melbourne and Port Phillip surveyors was Robert Hoddle, who ended a long career as the first Surveyor-General of Victoria (1851–53).

This book, The Battle for Asia, is the most recent and ambitious contribution from the group of Australian political economists, formerly based at Murdoch University, working on East Asian political economy. This book upholds the group’s Marxian structuralist orientation and advances its critique of ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. The book’s ambition to integrate post-World War II international political economy, Asia’s development trajectories and US hegemony widens this group’s analytical lens and deepens its links with the anti-globalisation movement. For Mark T. Berger, ‘many of the organizations and individuals involved [in the movement] are asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction’.

Berger shares with this movement the belief that the US is the single hegemonic power driving the global economy. He presents capitalism as an inherently unequal system prone to crisis and monopolisation. Global corporations, leading states, mainstream intellectuals and international bureaucrats are its shapers and main beneficiaries. All others are its excluded subjects.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.

Souvenir books are just that – souvenirs of a collection, usually bought as reminders of things seen and enjoyed. They also serve as introductions to a collection or to whet the appetite for a proposed visit. For some purchasers, they are introductions to an aspect of art that has fascinated them during a museum visit, or to collections not always on display. To succeed, souvenir books must be visually glamorous and enticing, and written in an accessible yet scholarly style.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s eight new souvenir books devoted to works from the international collections are exemplary and could serve as models to most museums. They represent a high point in the design of museum publications in Australia and celebrate the pride that the NGV has in its collections. I hope that we might soon see the Australian collections similarly celebrated.

Haunted Earth is Peter Read’s third book in his series on Australian attachments to place. This work began with Returning to Nothing (1996), which explored how Australians feel about ‘lost’ places. Belonging (2000) investigated how non-indigenous Australians claim to belong and how they negotiate issues of cultural difference. It was overtly concerned with the ramifications that the establishment of Aboriginal history has had on national identity.

Jay Verney’s voice is not unlike Gillian Mears’s – rich, confident and brimming with adroit asides. Verney frequently stops to smell the roses, and dig around the compost. She observes the variations of a landscape, the behaviour of her characters, the nature of an institution. Here she is on a McDonald’s restaurant in Palm Springs: ‘It was America in metaphor, though without the crazed gunman to add that final touch of piquant authenticity.’

The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.