Archive

David Suzuki is perhaps the best-known scientist living today. After developing an international reputation as a leading geneticist, he moved into science broadcasting and environmental activism. Why did he do this, and how did he become so successful? Now aged seventy, Suzuki explores these questions in his latest book, David Suzuki:The Autobiography. Suzuki’s previous auto-biographical work, now out of print, was aptly titled Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1986). Evolving from a collection of essays, it also charted his transformation from laboratory scientist to public educator of science and environmentalist. However, much has happened in the intervening twenty years. The new book mostly focuses on his environmental work in Canada and the Amazon, leading to the establishment of the David Suzuki Foundation in 1991, and his subsequent involvement in the Rio Earth Summit (1992) and the Kyoto Agreement on climate change (1997). In his preface, Suzuki writes that his story has been ‘created by selectively dredging up bits and pieces from the detritus of seventy years of life’. It is neither a story of the inner machinations of science nor the intrigues of a public personality in the media. Rather, Suzuki takes the position of an ‘elder’ in society, with the hope that his reflections on life may stir the reader to reconsider his or her own life.

Death of a Whaler considers the grand themes of death, grief, the quest for meaning and the potential for reawakening. Just days before the Byron Bay whalers are made redundant in 1962, lopsided Flinch is involved in an accident and literally frozen. It is not only when he meets Karma, himself troubled by the past, that Flinch reluctantly begins the trial of healing.

Appalling as it sounds, many of us never out-grow our childhood personae. Although people become adept at concealing their petulance and insecurities behind adult façades, among siblings and parents they revert to type, unable to resist lifelong family roles and patterns.

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen, is a vivid dissection of a fractured family. Forty years after a young mother of four – the unexpectedly likeable Rosemarie – has abandoned her children and husband one Christmas Eve to escape Melbourne suburbia for Swinging London, the anguish of her flight still reverberates for her children, manifesting itself in different ways. Rosemarie’s eldest daughter was effectively thrust into premature motherhood at the age of thirteen, due partly to her father’s benign neglect. Deborah resents the injustices and sacrifices of her adolescence, when she was consumed with raising her siblings. She is constantly irritable with her husband, and unable to comprehend her teenage daughter Olivia’s preference for animals to humans. Her anger drives a wedge between herself and her family.

This digressive collection of essays, extracts, cartoons and poems is unified by an interest in colonial and post-colonial responses to London. It stems from a 2003 conference, ‘Writing London’, organised by Flinders University’s Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English (CRNLE). Part 1 focuses on the Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), in particular his posthumously published and wry first novel, London Does Not Belong To Me (2003), from which this book takes its name: ‘London was full of rooms. I went from one to the other. Slowly I adjusted myself and lived the life of the troglodyte, learning the tribal customs of feints and apologies.’ Part 2 comprises examples of, and critical and scholarly essays relating to, literary, journalistic, artistic and cinematic responses to London (mostly by Australians).

People outside Australia are struck when Bruce Dawe is described as Australia’s most popular poet, just as people outside Ireland are struck when Paul Durcan or Brendan Kennelly is described as Ireland’s most popular poet. What about Les Murray, or Seamus Heaney? Are not these world-class poets ‘of the people’? Even more puzzling is that Dawe, like Durcan and Kennelly, is not necessarily an easy poet. Is their domestic popularity tied to how they seem to be ‘not for export’?

Recipient of the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Nathan Shepherdson’s surrealist, free-verse début, Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror, is to be commended for its emotional bravery and its originality. At the collection’s Queensland launch, Shepherdson described what he had hoped to achieve in writing an extended elegy to his mother, Noela Mary Shepherdson. The poems were to be seen as gifts or letters – one for each of Noela’s seventy-two years – and represented a son’s attempt to honour his mother’s life.

Berggasse 19, the address at which Sigmund Freud and his family lived for almost fifty years, is now Vienna’s Freud Museum. It is the other Freud Museum, the one in London, that houses the extensive collection of antiquities which is Janine Burke’s main focus in The Gods of Freud, but the Berggasse museum contains a number of Freud’s other personal possessions, including some little bottles, pots and brushes that are the remnants of an old-fashioned gentleman’s dressing-case. Of high quality, these well-used tools of personal attention to a body now long dead are scratched and dented from use.

Dancing on Walter Benjamin’s grave, in this book, Michael Taussig is in some ways his reincarnation; born in Sydney in 1940, the same year that Benjamin, trying to escape the Nazis, died in Port Bou, on the edge of the Pyrenees. The dance that Taussig performs is of course a homage to the great intellectual: the most inspired thinker coming out of the Frankfurt school, the most uncompromising, and the most writerly and experimental. Benjamin was a broad thinker, in the best sense. He did not think and write for the benefit of a discipline, but he taught his readers to weave together understandings of contemporary culture, coupled with a Nietzschian sense of history shot through with the ‘profane illumination’ of ancient myths whose impulses always throb in human dreams.

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

Simon Haines shot to prominence for an Op-Ed piece in The Australian (9 June 2006) that seemed to enter the lists on the conservative side of the debate about what they teach in English classes these days. If you read carefully, you could tell that the prominence was only going to be momentary, because Haines’s argument was far too nuanced to provoke and maintain the level of polarised hysteria the media appears to expect.