Pluto Press

The list of texts exploring ‘identity politics’ is as long as it is politically promiscuous. From the case against (Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment, 2018), by Francis Fukuyama) to the case for (literally: The Case for Identity Politics, 2020, by Christopher T. Stout), whether conservative or liberal, if there is a take on identity politics a book has been written about it. The challenge is to pin down a sense of the term on which all the authors could agree.

Jane Austen’s latest biographer, Jon Spence, observes that by deciding to support herself by writing rather than live on a husband’s income, Austen was spared the likelihood of annual pregnancies, exhaustion, infection and early death, fates that confronted many married women of her day. Another means of avoidance was travel abroad. That was not the only motive, of course, of the many European women who, from the early eighteenth century, attracted admiration, censure and curiosity by combining writing and travel. Nor did it always work.

Scheherazade, you have much to answer for! 1001 nights were fine for you, but by now there might well be that number of volumes offering that much advice about books, films and paintings, not to mention screen savers and blogs. So this bulky new book should be seen first, even primarily, as a marketing opportunity.

Literature is full of unexpected coincidences. After a long silence, two books appear within a matter of months that present both a detailed, personal and a deeply investigative account of those unique political partners, Joseph and Enid Lyons.

There has been a concerted effort in the academy over three decades to argue that Aboriginal women were not oppressed by their men. How many times have I read of the autonomy women secured by being the chief food-gatherers, both for themselves and the men? On this basis the peasants in medieval Europe were the equal of their lords. Louis Nowra’s essay on the violence of Aboriginal men to their women is not the first to break the taboo over this subject; it may be, however, that his gruesome accounts will send the taboo into its death throes. He begins with an Aboriginal man boasting of rape, and proceeds through gang rape to sticks being used to enlarge vaginas.

Of late there has been a good deal of agitated conversation about the political attitudes of ordinary Australians. As Judith Brett and Anthony Moran point out in this compelling new book, this has often taken the form of a ‘war of words within the political élites’, with the right using its supposed empathy for everyday people as a weapon against intellectuals, and the left blaming the deficiencies of John Howard’s Australia on the narrow-minded selfishness of ordinary voters. As it is, those of us who live in ordinary outer suburbs can hardly open Melbourne’s Age newspaper without finding ourselves accused of something, from a new Australian ugliness and the death of manners to the decline of civilisation. Mind you, the thought of being spoken for by anything-but-ordinary people like Janet Albrechtsen is even more distasteful.

Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, it is impossible to buy an airline ticket online in the United States with a credit card issued abroad. When I needed a ticket from Boston to Washington last year, and after numerous unsuccessful arguments with airline websites and 1800 numbers, I dropped into the local Harvard travel agency. There was a welcome familiarity in discovering that it was a branch of STA, one of more than 400 branches operated around the world by the Australian-based company.

Books on globalisation abound, to the point that it has become difficult to say anything new about the issues at stake. But despite this challenge, Tom Nairn and Paul James manage to add substance to the debate. They do so by rethinking the relationship between nationalism and globalisation. The defining feature of this engagement is the authors’ attempt to circumvent what they believe is a very polarised debate.

One of the contestants on television’s Australian Princess last year was a stripper, the oscillation in whose carriage was queried by the judges. ‘Of course I wiggle when I walk,’ the young woman protested, ‘I’ve got booty.’ Another competitor found that the going got tough when she was called upon to make a cup of tea. ‘I’m more of a bourbon girl,’ she shrugged. We were meant to laugh and cringe, and we did, but the show, for which nearly 3000 hopefuls had auditioned, was also a ratings success, reinforcing the widespread belief that anyone can become a princess. After all, it seemed as though anyone had.

This is a fascinating, inspiring and disquieting book. It is fascinating because it succeeds so well in its comprehensive overview of policy making and policy intentions during the Hawke government (1983–91). That success derives from the unparalleled mix of insiders (former ministers, public servants, leaders of unions and NGOs), journalists and academic analysts, though the voice that is notably absent is that of business. Inspiration comes when one can see, beyond the obsession with pragmatism and economic reform, glimpses of a genuine ‘third way’ in the development of social capital. Disquiet arises because so many of the contributors fail to see how they created the social malaise that dogged the final years of the Labor government, and how, in abandoning the ‘old’ ideologies, they prepared the ground for the profoundly ideological and destructive government that would follow.