Archive

It is hard to avoid the assessment that the most visible product to date of the war on terrorism has been nothing much more, or less, than more war and more terror. The unhappy reality since September 11 seems to be that all our major cities, and concentrations of Westerners anywhere, are as vulnerable as ever; the capacity of terrorist actors to do harm is as great as ever; their motivations are as great as ever; their identity is as elusive as ever; international cooperation is as fragile as ever; and international policy priorities are as misplaced as ever.

In Iraq, where the terrorist connection was the least plausible of all the reasons for going to war, terrorist violence has now become the most harrowing of all its consequences. The significance of Richard Clarke’s evidence to the September 11 Commission is not what the former anti-terrorism chief had to say, with all the wisdom that hindsight confers, about the failure of either Republican or Democrat administrations to take more effective action before September 11; rather, it is about the decision after September 11 to attack Iraq, a country that had about as much to do with it as Mexico, creating in the process the most expensive recruitment campaign for Islamist extremism ever launched.

Bruce Beaver died peacefully in his sleep on February 17, a few days after his seventy-sixth birthday. He had been under dialysis for a dozen years, so the news was not unexpected. But it is always a shock and a sadness when a commanding poet dies.

Bruce Beaver (born in 1928) published his first collection of poems, Under the Bridge, in 1961, a time when Australian poetry was paddling through something of a lull. The generation of poets who had come to maturity during World War II (Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Douglas Stewart, John Blight, David Campbell et al.) had by the end of the 1950s become, in a sense, predictable. The newer generation was spearheaded by Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s remarkable and zesty first collection, The Music of Division (1959): urbane, a bit Audenesque and very Melbourne. Beaver immediately announced himself as a regional poet – Manly, indeed – and he sustained that capacity to give Manly a soiled, solid, sordid and singing quality, with the whiff of ozone and salt, and an old resilience that would not be smothered by the superficial changes of the subsequent decades.

ABR goes to London

Hot on the heels of our inaugural ABR Forum in Canberra on March 28, when a capacity audience attended the session on life-writing at the National Library, ABR will host its first event in London on Tuesday, June 8. Peter Rose and Morag Fraser will present an evening of readings and ideas, with special appearances by Clive James and Peter Porter. We’re delighted to be able to present this special event in association with the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College London. The event will run from 6 to 8 p.m. Bookings are essential: please direct them to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. ABR has many subscribers and supporters in the UK; we look forward to meeting them – and to reaching new ones.

When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

Whether it is the television, computer, Personal Digital Assistant or mobile phone, many of us spend a considerable proportion of our lives engaging with images presented on screens. Digital images are integral to television, film, photography, animation, video games and the Internet, and are used increasingly as the main medium through which we interact and communicate with each other.

Although we may be aware of the increasing cultural presence of images, less apparent are the changes in how we might think about them. In the new media landscape, images are no longer just representations or interpretations of our actions; they have become central to every activity that connects us to each other and to technology. Understanding the nature of the complex relationship we have with the images that surround us is the principal concern of Ron Burnett’s new book, How Images Think.

Frank Coaldrake was a significant figure in the history of the Anglican Church in Australia: a founding member of the National Union of Australian University Students; active in the Student Christian Movement; a member of the Bush Brotherhood, which ministered to indigenous Australians in outback Queensland; active in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence in Depression-era Melbourne; President of the Federal Pacifist Council of Australia; a missionary to Japan in the early post-World War II years; Chair of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) from 1956; and elected as Archbishop of Brisbane in 1970, but tragically passing away before effectively taking up this office.

Scholarship and stylishness

Dear Editor,

On the subject of my poem (ABR, March 2004) about William Dobell’s Cypriot, Judith Pugh is no doubt correct about the scholarly facts (ABR, April 2004). At the moment, I am searching the poem for a single fact I got right. The only possible benefit of my blunder is that it might help draw even more attention to one of the greatest paintings in the Australian heritage – a painting which really did, after all, focus on the stylishness of a European male at a time when the stylishness of the Australian male was not yet even a concept. That was my subject: but I agree that scholarship should always set the limits before imagination gets to work.

Clive James, London, UK

Levin’s God is a two-part epic. The first half is a take on the Australian rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Singer-guitarist Levin Hoffman, on the strength of what people say are ‘great songs’, rapidly takes his band the Barking Dogs to the top of the charts. Levin – believe it or not – finds that success is hollow and that not even his devoted Indian-Australian girlfriend, Shelley, or his long-time friend-cum-manager, Lawrence, can rescue him from his indefinable angst. The second half of the book sees Levin in Thailand, where, lying low at a monastery after witnessing a horrific murder, he becomes a devotee of meditation.

As Roger Hart, Roger Wells was the male lead in the group Little Heroes (not to be confused with their contemporaries, Little Murders), a Melbourne band that spent the first half of the 1980s making interesting rock records. They had a top ten hit, ‘One Perfect Day’, in 1982, which complemented the ‘new wave’ without alienating fans of more established music. Wells now works as a counsellor and has written a book on meditation, so one assumes that Levin’s God is built on a skeleton of experience, though much of the experience seems casually remembered. Tellingly, it is the travail of meditation and Levin’s struggle to purge his own desire and pain through meditative enlightenment that are most credible.

In 1984 British feminist Rosalind Coward published a collections of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, which had considerable impact because of its explanatory power, and because it made available a particular interpretation of feminist approaches to everyday cultural forms, from food porn to astrology, fashion to romance novels. At that time, media representations and popular understandings of feminism were distorted and often stereotypical. They had not caught up on the more nuanced and diverse critical thinking filtering through the activist networks and academy. Coward’s book charted new directions in thinking through feminism and thinking about feminism.

The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.