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Open Page with Anne Manne
Anne Manne is an Australian writer, essayist, and social philosopher.
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The servo had been upgraded since Paul last stopped in town – new apple-green paint job, new exterior lights – but inside, things were mostly the same. Paul recognised the stubby woman at the register, and she rewarded his memory with a crooked smile.
In her 1976 essay ‘The Space Crone’, Ursula K. Le Guin imagines the highly advanced aliens of Altair landing on Earth. Politely, they seek a human being to accompany them on their long journey home so that they may ‘learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race’. As a palliative care doctor, I often ponder what constitutes an exemplary life, so my choice of Space Crone may not be a conventional one.
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Brian Castro’s novel Birds of Passage is a dramatic exploration of the intriguing idea, found in Butler, Jung, and others, that an individual’s life may in some way be in touch with ancestral experience. It imagines the possibility of a previous life, its outlook on reality and rhythms of existence, flowing troublingly into the consciousness of the present. The book shared the valuable Australian Vogel Prize last year. It is of some interest, but is a distinctly uneven work. Romantic in concept in its adoption of the idea of racial memory and psychic disposition, it is sometimes sententious in tone in its reaching for poetic effect, and prone to mix its narrative modes disconcertingly. It is hard to see it as a major literary prize-winner, although some of the historical episodes in its dual narrative are nicely done and the basic idea in itself is an attractive one.
What’s on a judge’s mind? Litigants and advocates would love to know. Former judge Peter Heerey answers that question in his latest book, a compendium of writing over many years, covering a vast array of topics and in myriad forms.