Quarterly Essay
Nathan Hollier reviews 'Sending Them Home: Refugees and the new politics of indifference' (Quarterly Essay 13) by Robert Manne (with David Corlett)
Some time before the sun set on the British empire, ‘British justice’ took on an ironic meaning. In the colonies, we knew it was a charade, like that doled out to ‘Breaker’ Morant during the Boer War. The dice are loaded in favour of a prosecution that nevertheless insists on carrying out its cold-blooded retribution in an apparently value-free legalese, thus preserving the self-righteousness of the empire and tormenting the condemned. Yet, as Robert Manne and David Corlett make clear in this latest Quarterly Essay, the larrikin land of Australia can now, through its treatment of asylum seekers, fairly be said to lead the world in the practice of traditional British justice.
... (read more)Morag Fraser reviews 'Whitefella Jump Up: The shortest way to nationhood (Quarterly Essay 11) by Germaine Greer and ‘Made In England: Australia’s British inheritance (Quarterly Essay 12)’ by David Malouf
Peter Craven calls up an echo of W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ at the conclusion of his introduction to Germaine Greer’s highly charged and instantly controversial essay Whitefella Jump Up. ‘It is an essay about sitting down and thinking where all the politics start,’ he writes.
... (read more)Don Aitkin reviews 'Groundswell: The rise of the Greens' by Amanda Lohrey
First, a small tribute to Peter Craven and his colleagues for the establishment of Quarterly Essay (of which the above is the eighth issue). It is such a good idea that one wonders why it is such a recent innovation. A 20,000-word essay on an important contemporary issue, followed, in later issues, by responses to that essay, enable one to get one’s teeth into a matter of moment while it is still topical. The production is nicely done, too.
... (read more)Morag Fraser reviews 'In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right' (Quarterly Essay 1) by Robert Manne
Much current debate on crucial issues facing Australia – the economy, race relations, foreign affairs, for example – is conducted in the opinion pages of metropolitan daily newspapers. And ‘opinion’ pages they now are – with a vengeance. It is a symptom of the times that opinion-page editors have less and less recourse to disinterested authorities ...
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