Archive

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans have been asking why the world hates them. Now it’s Australia’s tum. Why do Asians applaud when Dr Mahathir mocks us? Why docs the Indonesian prime minister snub Australian leaders? Why, despite progress with bilateral trade agreements, do we seem to be permanently locked out of organisations such as ASEAN and ASEM?

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At one point in A War for Gentlemen, a school-teacher is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to her class in rural New South Wales in 1872. Seven-year-old Annie Fitzhenry excitedly announces that her father had fought for the North during the US Civil War. When the teacher subsequently visits Annie’s home, both she and the child are abruptly undeceived. Charles Fitzhenry is indeed a veteran of that war, but had served in the Confederate army.

Harriet Beecher Slowe forcefully argued that the disintegration of the families of slaves was perhaps the most pernicious aspect of slavery. In French’s novel, it is racial prejudice that separates parents, children and siblings – tragically, because entirely unnecessarily.

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It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.

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Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

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Lawrence Bourke’s A Cold Touch begins with a poem called ‘Advice to a Failure’. Expressed with such force as to render grammar a secondary consideration, its argument is hard to grasp al first, but the poem is only technically meaningless: it contains, I think, an important truth:

The committee can stick
their mate with medals until the man’s all brass
but his brilliant chest will never help him frame
a line to shine like those of poets who came
to nothing but writing well writing for themselves
and us the simple truths some call fiction.

The line that shines, in other words, is a prize that outshines the brass and medals. Few, I suspect, would disagree with Bourke on this specific point. But why is something so uncontroversial expressed with such conspicuous force? Is Bourke, I wonder, as baffled as I am as to why certain books get medals at all?

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The city of Aveiro is compact yet important, with wealthy foundations in the industries of fisheries and salt. The bright white cobblestones of the town’s historical centre evoke its economic history: rock salt crystals with darker cobbled nautical motifs (anchors, rope, fishes). Tiled walls in blue (azulejos) are both practical in the salty air and signal sea. Broad salt pans nearby bless the air with a refreshing sea breeze, the Portuguese equivalent of the ‘Fremantle doctor’. The bright, white light is almost Western Australian in quality.

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For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy‘s Road: Life Stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

More a homage than a warts-and-all tale, Keeffe’s tome contains numerous feel-good and funny moments. For example, we learn that Dodson, the so-called ‘father of reconciliation’, was born in a laundry toilet, ‘nearly drowning in the Phenyl used for cleaning the ... pans’; and that Patrick’s grandfather, Paddy Djiagween, claimed his citizenship rights in person. ... (read more)

Does Australia need new laws against terrorism? In 1979 Mr Justice Windeyer of the NSW Supreme Court argued that all the forms of violent wrongdoing that are called terrorism are already punishable as crimes under Commonwealth or state law. The best safeguard against new terrors and apprehensions, he told the Hope Royal Commission on Australia’s Intelligence Agencies, lay in the rigorous enforcement of existing criminal law rather than in making new laws expressly about ‘terrorism’.

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Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the disintegration and demise of the Soviet Empire a decade later, and the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 have all heightened interest in ‘understanding’ Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution was very much a revolution of the ‘countryside’ against the glitter, domination and corrupt politics of the ‘metropolis’. Its success created an enormous interest in Islam. For the West, the demise of the USSR was more than the demise of what Ronald Reagan had dubbed an ‘Evil Empire’; it removed the ‘enemy’ whose containment had dominated the politics of the Cold War in the US and its European allies. Its historical significance was described by the American political scientist Francis Fukayama in his influential essay ‘The End of History’. The search was on for the enemies of international capitalism and liberal democracy. A few years later, in an equally influential and widely read work, The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington identified Islam as one of the potential enemies of Western civilisation.

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