Letters

Last week, escaping the latest blizzard, I went to Miami Beach for some sun. But it was cold and rainy, and they were noisily replacing the carpet in my hotel, so I was reduced to checking my e-mail in an Internet café and getting an expensive facial – truly a case of closing the stable door.

South Beach, as it is known, is widely celebrated for its art deco street and beachscape. This is one of the most colossally successful con jobs of all time. Take an unpretentious tropical beach community, popularised in the 1940s by canny Jewish holidaymakers from the north-east. Throw up a couple of thousand tawdry two- or three-storey shoeboxes with basic amenities: a couple of ceiling fans and no windows. Roll out some chrome cladding and neon. Toss in a bit of applied detail, a few top knots and some frosted glass. Then paint it an improbable pale pink or green or yellow, or some other combination of pastel colours that manage to be both insipid and stubbornly vulgar.

With wings as black as night and breast as white as cloud, the sea eagle swooped from the sky. It snatched up the baby boy in front of his mother’s very eyes. She acted quickly. She grabbed a coconut shell and hurled it towards the bird. The baby dropped to the ground and landed unhurt on soft sand. But before she could reach it, the baby was gone, swept away by the tsunami. The eagle knew, you see. Like the elephants who had already left the coast, like the dogs that ran for high ground before anyone saw anything, the eagle knew that the big wave was coming. It had been trying to save the baby, and the woman had stopped it, and now her baby is dead.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Barry Jones on the ODNB

Dear Editor,

I read Angus Trumble’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ABR, March 2005) with close interest and some envy. It was probably inevitable that he should concentrate on entries with Australian relationships. He comments that all deceased Australian prime ministers are there, except Scullin and Page. In fact, Fadden and Forde are also missing.

A fevered imagination

Dear Editor, in his review (ABR, December 2004–January 2005) of my recent book on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Herzl’s Nightmare: One Land, Two People, Colin Rubenstein comments that I write ‘well’. I’m intrigued by that observation as I find it near impossible to believe that he’s actually read the book. His judgements about it range from the fanciful to the preposterous.

Who’s who

Dear Editor,

Henry Ergas’s disingenuous response (ABR, November 2004) to my review (ABR, October 2004) of Peter Saunders’s Australia’s Welfare Habit and How to Kick It deserves a reply. Ergas poses as a dissatisfied ‘customer-reader’ of ABR. From this position, he expresses outrage at my review of Saunders’s book. Come off it, Henry!

National wealth

Dear Editor,

Jenny Darling states in her letter of September 2004: ‘it is very difficult to place Australian writers in front of Australian readers.’ This is exactly what the Books Alive campaign has done for two years. All fourteen of the books included in our two campaigns so far are from great Australian authors: Belinda Alexandra, Duncan Ball, Geraldine Brooks, Bryce Courtenay with Roy Kyle, Robert Drewe, Anna Fienberg, Nikki Gemmell, Morris Gleitzman, Gabrielle Lord, Mary Moody, Sally Morgan, Matthew Reilly and Shane Weaver. Two of the Books Alive titles have been brand new and all of the Books Alive titles have appeared in the bestseller lists during the campaigns. More than 500,000 of these fourteen specially printed books by Australian writers have been purchased nationally as a result of the Books Alive promotion.

Different attitudes

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.

Never mind the students

Dear editor,

Andrew Norton (ABR, May 2004) is right to argue that the legislation governing the Nelson market in Australian universities gives the government too much power. The education minister refused to guarantee academic liberty, imposed a one-size-fits-all template for the structure of the university councils, and can now dictate the mix of courses that are taught. The research funding system, which forces universities to focus on work with direct commercial potential at the expense of free enquiry, is another and more damaging instance of overregulation.

But Norton is wrong to argue that the new funding and fee system, which creates full-fee places for up to thirty-five per cent of undergraduate students, and kick-starts this market with low-cost government-underwritten student loans (FEE-HELP), is ‘a long way from being a functioning market system’ of the kind that he (Norton) wants. Norton focuses on the fact that a shadow of the HECS has survived Nelson, and that there are still caps on the cost of HECS charges, but deftly ignores the full-fee market that is the transformative clement in Nelson. And Norton is absurdly wrong to state that the government’s Thatcher-style centralised market reform ‘resembles old-fashioned socialist planning’. Really? Polemic has got the better of him. Dumbing down the debate is in no one’s interests.