Archive

For any editor, one of the attractions and challenges of shaping a magazine is the unexpected submission that arrives at the eleventh hour. When the author happens to be someone of the stature of Raimond Gaita, one is indeed fortunate. This month, we are pleased to be able to bring you Professor Gaita’s incisive, yet anguished, contribution to the debate about reconciliation and genocidal impulses in Australian history. His piece, entitled ‘Why the Impatience? Genocide, “Ideology” and Practical Reconciliation’, is our La Trobe University Essay for July. It takes up some of the issues raised by Inga Clendinnen in the Australian Review of Books, an essay that prompted much correspondence in the June issue of that publication.

Peter Timms’s Making Nature is a delight. I found it especially enjoyable because I have been reading massively for my next book, so it was a remarkable break to take six contemplative walks with Timms and the many who accompany him, not in the flesh but in the word: Rousseau, Augustine, Petrarch, Edmund Burke, Kant, and a host of others, instructing, disrupting, agreeing.

In 1897, Winston Churchill published his only novel, Savrola, a racy account of revolution and romantic intrigue in the imaginary South American republic of Laurania. The book traces the rise, fall, and rise of Savrola, a gifted politician and charismatic orator who outmanoeuvres a despotic military regime to restore democratic rule to the undeserving masses, only to fall prey to a socialist revolution before returning in triumph and instituting an age of peace and plenty.

I speak well crook. I speak better, when better. And I get bitter when my usually unstoppable health chucks it during an author tour. This happened to me the other week in Geelong, when the State Library of Victoria had Chris Beck and me as their travelling wits.

A major work in the history of Australian architecture is a rare thing, and it is the more remarkable when the author is an amateur – in the true sense, that is – an enthusiast and connoisseur rather than a professional or academic hack. For Brian Andrews, though he has developed his expertise during a full-time career in telecommunications, is certainly not an amateur in terms of expertise.

The huge changes that have occurred in Australia in the space of a century were reflected in the recent centenary of Federation celebrations in Melbourne. They were evident, for example, in the repeated acknowledgment of Aboriginal Australians and in the selection of a young female Asian-Australian to speak on behalf of the future.

I first encountered Francis Adams when various sharp or mordant observations from his The Australians kept cropping up in my reading about Henry Lawson and his times. For one thing, Adams’s widow, Edith (though there is apparently doubt about their marital status), invited Lawson and his wife, Bertha, to stay with her in the village of Harpenden while they looked for accommodation. Lawson duly rented ‘Spring Villa’ in Cowper Road, Harpenden, and thus began his disastrous English sojourn.

Wifework is a good term for the things that women have been doing in Western marriages for centuries. It evokes all those other phrases coined in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists that resonate in the consciousness of modern women (including many of those who preface any discussion of family life with the mantra ‘I’m not a feminist’). Wifework embraces the sacrifice of ‘the burnt chop syndrome’, the exhaustion of the ‘the double shift’ and the psychological burden of ‘emotional labour’. The title of this new book raises hopes for a spirited discussion examining and updating earlier complaints, showing how things have changed and suggesting what needs to be done about marriages in the new century. As a been-there-done-that reader (married in the 1970s and feeling guilty about letting down feminism by doing so, divorced in the 1980s and feeling guilty about that, cohabiting and parenting in the 1990s), I was interested at once.

There are watchdogs and there are lapdogs. Watchdogs are alert. At the slightest movement, they growl. When they bite, it hurts. Lapdogs are alert – to their master’s moods.

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.