NonFiction

There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

Hands up those who know where Upper Ulam is. In what Melbourne convent school was Veronica Brady’s spiritual and aesthetic education nourished? Can anyone name Eva Sallis’s latest work of fiction or identify the school, somewhere outside Adelaide, where Sallis practised the violin and took her turn at milking the cow?

Mark Bowling was the ABC’s man in Indonesia from 1998 until 2002, and this book is an excellent account of the period of his posting. It covers a turbulent time in Indonesian life from May 1998, the end of the thirty-year Suharto regime, until May 2002, when the newly fledged nation of East Timor spread its wings. An epilogue adds his involvement in reporting on the most significant event in Indonesian affairs for Australians, the Bali bombing on 13 October 2002.

Occasionally, a television series on history is accompanied by an excellent book. Jacob Bronowski, anchorman for The Ascent of Man (1973), produced a book of the same name, the more remarkable because it lucidly explained complicated topics in the history of science. John Kenneth Galbraith’s challenging and quietly amusing The Age of Uncertainty (1977) came from another BBC series. Now the history of the twentieth century – or essentially the first half of it – is told and interpreted in this fascinating book by Niall Ferguson, a talented British historian who is a professor at Harvard University.

In Alice Pung’s memoir of her childhood, Unpolished Gem, her young self is drawn into a conflict between her mother and grandmother, both Chinese-Cambodian refugees. The child becomes a double agent, informing each about the other, until her mother accuses her of ‘word-spreading’ and threatens suicide. The child frets over her breakfast: ‘I always spread my jam on toast all the way to the very edges – no millimetre of bread is left blank and uncovered. My word-spreading habits are similar.’

Phil Sparrow lived and worked as a UN aid worker in pre-9/11 Afghanistan for nearly three years. Evacuated when the country was attacked by the US, he returned to Australia and worked as an interpreter for Afghan refugees in Australia. In this book, Sparrow writes about his experiences in Afghanistan and Australia, and his reading of the Australian government’s response to refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan.

As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language. In the preface, he laments the chaotic state of the language: ‘When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules; wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated.’ He despaired at the scope and futility of his task:

This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.