Flinders Academic Commons :: Browsing No 253

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Broad-brush History. "A Short History of Indonesia: The Unlikely Nation?" by Colin Brown. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Monfries, John

This is a welcome addition to the historical literature about Indonesia. Aimed at new readers with limited or no knowledge of Indonesia, and written in an informal and accessible style, it makes an interesting contrast with the other well-known history in this field, Merle Ricklefs’s "History of Modern Indonesia". When Ricklefs produced his second edition about ten years ago (he published a third expanded edition in 2001), the very existence of the Indonesian state was not as problematic as it now seems. Scholars could still talk without hesitation of a 'history of Indonesia'. These days, the future of the country as a single state is more contested than at any time since the 1950s - hence Brown’s subtitle, "The Unlikely Nation?" He explains in the foreword that, since the idea of a united archipelago is so recent, 'in a sense the book has been written backwards, using the Indonesian state and nation at the end of the twentieth century as its starting or defining point.'

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Commentary.

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Deane, Sir William

An address by Sir William Deane at the University of Queensland on 29 May 2003.

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A Grand Disrobing. "Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader" by Marilyn Dodkin. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Blewett, Neal

Over the past few years, Bob Carr has been tweaking the veils that shroud his inner self. In essays, speeches and book reviews, he has teased and titillated us with glimpses of his diary and extracts from his unpublished autobiographical novel, "Titanic Forces". Now, with Marilyn Dodkin’s "Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader", built around Carr’s personal diary, we have a grand disrobing. Although she has used Hansard reports, newspaper files and interviews, there would be no publishable work without the diary, quotations from which average two per page. But what a revelation it all is, providing an intimate insight into the personality of the diarist, something rarely provided in political autobiography and missing frequently in authorised political biographies.

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An Exclusive Club. "The Complete Book of Great Australian Women: Thirty-six Women Who Changed the Course of Australia" by Susanna de Vries. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Wright, Clare

The book works best as a sort of extended "Who's Who", introducing readers to a host of captivating female writers, artists, activists and innovators. But whether through lack of editorial guidance or resources, there has been a missed opportunity here. In bringing together two volumes and, patently, years of painstaking research, this book offered the chance to draw a bigger picture about the historical and personal circumstances that shaped the lives of certain important Australians - an occasion to draw distinctions or resonances between the women whose experiences display such extreme richness and complexity.

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Tenacious Tiger. "Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger" by David Owen and "The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine" by Robert Paddle. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Bantick, Christopher

The Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) continues to stalk the Tasmanian imagination. Miasmas resembling it figure in reports from tourists and bushwalkers, who happen upon the slinking apparition in the wilderness. Fanciful meanderings of wishful hearts and minds? Perhaps. Tantalising suspicions that the thylacine may still exist will not go away. No matter that the last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. With it died a species, but not the legend. In both these books, stringent research has brought the authors to the salient truth that the thylacine is, on available evidence, extinct. There are no contemporary photographs of the animal in the wild since 1936, when the last images of a caged and morose survivor were taken. Nor are there plaster casts of fresh paw tracks. However, the thylacine stubbornly inhabits the minds of those who want to believe.

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Apprentice. [poem]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Beveridge, Judith

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Bestsellers / Subscription.

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08)

This item contains the July 2003 Bestellers list and Subsciption page from this issue.

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Dressed for Deco. "Art Deco: 1910-1939" by Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton and Ghislaine Wood (eds). [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Weng-Ho, Chong

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is currently hosting a 'sumptuous' survey of the Art Deco period. Quoting curator Ghislaine Wood that the central themes are 'fashion, glamour, commerce', "Time" magazine’s review presses the buttons: Top Hat, ocean liners, Cartier (the scarab brooch), streamlined cocktail shakers and radios, and stepped pyramid skyscrapers … The list evokes a suspension of glittering objects in amber. The book "Art Deco: 1910-1939" accompanies the exhibition. The editors note in the introduction that 'Art Deco' was not recognised as a style label until 1966, with the publication of Bevis Hillier's "Art Deco of the 20s and 30s". Deco was born and became a craze without ever having a name. John Pile's "Art Deco Dictionary of 20th Century Design" says that 'the Modernists denigrated the style as Modernistic, putting a modern surface on things without any of Modernism's depths.' That’s a lot of protesting moderns there. The book at hand notes that as late as 1984 a critic was writing doubtfully: 'The critical re-evaluation of which Art Deco today is the object cannot deny that it consists more of a taste than a style, and this is responsible for the slippery way it resists theoretical categorization.' A taste rather than a style? Was Art Deco merely 'Modernistic'? Did it simply substitute a dress code for a program? One may as defensibly argue that it was ahead of its time - not Modernist but already Post-Modern. As "Art Deco: 1910–1939" demonstrates in its hundreds of pictures and the connecting skein of exegeses, Deco was the international face of its age. Not the faces of Dorothea Lange's WPA farmers or August Sanders’s peasants, but the shining face of grace and luxe and leisure - that is to say, one kind of the best we can be. As someone once remarked about civilisation, even a veneer is an actual thing.

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Exilic Colour. "Summer Visit: Three Novellas" and "The Island/ L’Île/ To Nisi" by Antigone Kefala. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Gauntlett, Stathis

Readers who share Helen Nickas's view that Antigone Kefala's fiction forms 'a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey' may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, "Summer Visit". The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, 'Intimacy', seem ironic. In contrast, the third, 'Conversations with Mother', contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography. However, it is the middle, title story, 'Summer Visit', that will provide most sustenance for followers of Kefala's repeated engagement with issues in her diasporic identity. The summer visit is to Greece, the briefest of Kefala's stops en route to Sydney, and it provides opportunities for laying ghosts. She revisits the Piraeus orphanage that was the whole family's cramped refuge after fleeing Romania. "The Island" depicts the New Zealand stage of Kefala's 'exilic journey' and revolves around the first love of the heroine Melina. "The Island" was reviewed on its first publication in 1984, so this review focusses on the novelty of the latest (third) edition: a juxtaposition of the original English text with two translations, one French (by Marie Gaulis), the other Greek (by Helen Nickas).

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Gallery Notes.

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Wallace-Crabbe, Chris

Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more than possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven't thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist's role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity. Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his 'Durack Range', which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses. The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the 'Dead Heart' was then to be found in Russell Drysdale's inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen's Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira's delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan's own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.

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Advances, Contents, Letters, Imprints and Contributors.

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08)

This items includes miscellaneous pieces from this issue.

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Patagonian Sojourn. "Bluestocking in Patagonia" by Anne Whitehead. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Strauss, Jennifer

In "Paradise Mislaid", Anne Whitehead captivated readers with a nicely judged blend of elements. Here was a documentary that interwove two travellers' tales, each with the resonance of quest narratives. Those 'peculiar people' who went off to Paraguay as part of William Lane's experimental Utopian settlement were seeking a just community where the labourer would not only be worthy of his hire, but actually receive it; while Whitehead was pursuing the historian’s endless quest to bring back into present memory the always receding reality of the past. "Bluestocking in Patagonia" adds a much stronger and more focused biographical element, enabling its Australian distributor, Allen & Unwin, to advertise it as 'The true story of Australian national icon, Dame Mary Gilmore’s adventures in South America'. The core of Whitehead’s narrative consists in following the steps of the Gilmore family from Paraguay southwards into Patagonia, but each step, either through location or event, allows a branching out into Argentina's past history and its present condition. At one level, Whitehead's book has the engagingly tangential quality of lively gossip (including family photographs), but its layering of material and the quality of research and observation make it something more complex and significant.

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Screen Tests and Digital Dead-ends. "Turning Off the Television: Broadcasting’s Uncertain Future" by Jock Given and "Media Mania: Why Our Fear of Modern Media is Misplaced" by Hugh Mackay. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Torney-Parlicki, Prue

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been 'modest'. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. 'A digital dead-end' and 'dismal failure' are representative of recent media commentary on the subject. Jock Given, however, is optimistic. "Turning Off the Television" discusses the technical, commercial and policy choices already made about digital broadcasting, and examines their implications. As much about the past as the future, this comprehensive study traces the technological changes that have led to the so-called digital revolution, from Marconi to the dot-com crash. Mackay's book examines in turn those aspects of the modern media around which claims about media influence have revolved: television advertising, media violence, the Internet, and the current trend towards lifestyle programs. Advertising, which appears to be the most overt form of television propaganda, is found to be greatly overestimated in its ability to influence consumers. The theoretical framework of Mackay's thesis is not new. The view that the media contribute to attitude formation rather than shaping it directly has prevailed for at least forty years. Mackay's achievement is to present it in an accessible and appealing manner. At a time of intense debate in Australia about media ownership laws, the funding of the ABC and SBS, and the transition to digital broadcasting, both of these books make a valuable and important contribution to our understanding of media practices and influences.

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Marriage of Minds. "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Grace, Damian

This book is a joy to read. It is the fruit of collaboration across disciplines and continents between a neurophysiologist and a philosopher. They have written a polemical work that is a model of clarity and directness. Distinguished neurophysiologist M.R. Bennett, of the University of Sydney, and eminent Oxford philosopher P.M.S. Hacker have produced that rarity of scholarship, a genuinely interdisciplinary work that succeeds.

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The Great Pessimist. "The Pope’s Battalions: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split" by Ross Fitzgerald (with Adam Carr and William J. Dealey). [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Nash, Heather

Ross Fitzgerald's book is timely, for two reasons. Five years having passed since the death of B.A. Santamaria, an appropriate distance stands between the immediate obituaries and a better perspective on his impact on Australian politics. As Fitzgerald's highly readable work unfolds, he sets Santamaria's career against an Australian society that changed irreversibly in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that any rapprochement between the ALP and what became the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) became impossible as the profiles of both parties' supporters changed from those that had underpinned The Split.

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Oh Dennis! "Lillee: An Autobiography" by Dennis Lillee. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Hadfield, Warwick

Oh Dennis! For four decades, we've had to forgive your indiscretions and blemishes. We’ve done so willingly, because you were not only the fast bowler of a generation, but of that generation’s milestones. For many Australians, their national cricket team of the Lillee, Chappell, Marsh era was as important a cultural statement as the Beatles to the English in the 1960s. The stovepipe creams, the body-shirts, the massive crops of hair and the noses thumbed at the old Establishment, English and local, either drove or represented significant change in Australia. Lillee, ultra-competitive and irreverent (he said gidday to the Queen and asked for her autograph), stood at the forefront of all this. So we forgave him for the aluminium bat, for betting on England, for kicking Javed Miandad, for pulling out of a tour of England to help establish World Series Cricket - for so many things. And here we are again in 2003, still having to forgive him.

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A Social Pulse. "The Secret Burial" by Penelope Sell and "The Alphabet of Light and Dark" by Danielle Wood. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Hill, Christine

The bush gothic of Barbara Baynton shapes the world of this promising first novel from Penelope Sell. "The Secret Burial" deals with the brutal coming of age of fifteen-year-old Elise. The setting is a harsh, drought-stricken rural environment where people, fauna and the environment are barely surviving. Elise is catapulted into adulthood by the accidental death of her alcoholic mother, Lizzie, who electrocutes herself when drunkenly trying to repair the washing machine. Afraid that she and her younger brother, Jeremy, will be separated, Elise asks her old neighbour, Isaac, to help her bury her mother and tell no one. Danielle Wood’s "The Alphabet of Light and Dark", a first novel and this year’s Vogel Award winner, is a multi-layered work. In the 'now' of the narrative, there are two main characters - Essie and Pete - whose points of view alternate. The story of each character remains separate until they meet at the lighthouse on Bruny Island, where each has come to live. One day, they pass each other on the path in front of the lighthouse; each recognises the other as someone they knew as a child. "The Alphabet of Light and Dark" belongs to the now well established Tasmanian genre best exemplified by Richard Flanagan's "Death of a River Guide". The light and dark imagery of the lighthouse beacon, the motif of flaxen hair and the mermaid story link the generations in a delicate poetic network. This is an impressive first novel, powerfully informed and beautifully written.

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Tensions in the Neighbourhood. "Continental Drift: Australia’s Search for a Regional Identity" by Rawdon Dalrymple and "Making Australian Foreign Policy" by Allan Gyngell and Michael Wesley. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Patience, Allan

Dalrymple’s book is an exercise in thoughtful restraint. It provides an updated overview of the evolution of Australian foreign policy. In this respect, "Continental Drift" is a worthy successor to Sir Alan Watt’s seminal and equally conservative "The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy" (1960). Dalrymple charts Australia's steady and unoriginal development as a player on the global stage. This development has seen the country forever riding on (or clinging to, or hiding beneath) the coat tails of 'great and powerful friends' — the UK until 1942, the US thereafter. It is a ride that Australians are loath, or too paranoid, to forfeit. In "Making Australian Foreign Policy", Gyngell and Wesley marry theory and practice sublimely. While it merits a much wider readership, it is destined to become 'the' text for students of foreign policy and for trainee diplomats and managers of Australia’s overseas trade, commerce and security responsibilities.

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Drab Caricatures. "The Premiers of Queensland" by Denis Murphy et al (eds). [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Crotty, Martin

Queensland's history is different in many respects from the older states, and similar only to Western Australia in features such as its vastness, its relative emptiness and its history as the last of the ‘frontier’ states. It is easy to caricature Queensland as historically and naturally conservative, even reactionary, by comparison to its more cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant counterparts in the south-eastern corner of Australia. This is the state in which, if Henry Reynolds’s estimates are accepted (as they still generally are, despite the notorious efforts of Keith Windschuttle), half of the 20,000 Aborigines killed in violent conflicts with European settlers in Australia met their deaths. This is the state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all the corruption that went with his government. And this is the state that was home to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, and that gave it twenty-three per cent of the vote and ten seats in the 1998 state election. But the distinctive features of Queensland politics are not all concerned with the forces of conservatism and reaction. Queensland saw the world's first Labor government, under Anderson Dawson, albeit one that lasted a matter of a week. It was the only state to maintain a Labor government in World War I, when Thomas Ryan's government stood alone and bravely against Billy Hughes and his Nationalists, and controversially fought Hughes’s demagogic pursuit of conscription. Labor maintained an almost continuous hold on office from 1915 to 1957, interrupted only by three years of Country Party government in the Depression, and ending only when the Labor premier was thrown out by his own party organisation. It was, moreover, the first state to dispense with its upper house when the Legislative Council, traditionally the preserve of the conservatives, was abolished in 1922.

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Touching the Sides. "Rights for Aborigines" by Bain Attwood. [review]

(Australian Book Review, 2003-08) Barta, Tony

John Howard, someone has remarked, deserves to be remembered for his shabby key to political success: he gave Australians permission to leave their consciences in the cupboard. Paul Keating, who knew what was coming with Howard, said that, if you have to pick a horse in any political race, back self-interest because at least you’ll know he’ll be trying. Bain Attwood’s important new book is about the struggle to right the nation’s greatest wrong in the hundred years before Keating and Howard began their political careers. It is an inspiring story about a tiny minority of fighters and a depressing reminder of how long self-interest and indifference kept consciences safely locked away.

No 253 - August 2003

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