Archive

Australian conservatism, for all its political dominance, is little understood and has been studied by surprisingly few scholars. The very industrious and perceptive Peter van Onselen is almost single-handedly determined to correct this imbalance. He has brought together a timely collection of essays on the Liberal Party and its future, coinciding with yet another term in unaccustomed opposition, an experience invariably chastising for the conservatives. The immediate predecessors to the modern-day Liberal Party on the non-Labor side of politics disintegrated on losing office, and the Liberal Party’s own spells in opposition have been periods of both blood-letting and soul searching. There is a happy focus (for the Liberal Party, at least) on the latter in this necessarily mixed bag.

In his famous but tendentious 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that ‘we may be witnessing ... not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history’. A similar proposition might well have been made about Australian military history. By 1989 the great era of Australian military history seemed to have passed. The centrepieces of this era were the two world wars, which were so large, bloody and traumatic that they seemed destined to dominate the subject for many decades to come. What came before – the New Zealand Wars, Sudan, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Boer War – were seen as preliminary or preparatory episodes, or, as the title of one book on Sudan put it, ‘The Rehearsal’. The conflicts that followed World War II were postscripts. The performances and sacrifices of Australians in Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam were measured against the earlier experiences of the world wars. All of Australia’s senior commanders in Vietnam had served in World War II, while most of the younger fighters there were the sons of World War II veterans.

In December 1982, publisher Richard Walsh commissioned a ‘life and times of Miles Franklin’ from historian Jill Roe. The book ‘has been a long time coming’, says Roe, ‘due to other commitments and responsibilities, and because of the extent of previously unexamined source material.’ That source material – letters, articles, unpublished manuscripts, journals – exists in quantities that can be inferred from Roe’s comment near the end of the book, where she is describing Franklin’s final illness: that ‘from 1 January 1909 to 1 January 1954, there is some kind of record of what Miles Franklin was doing on virtually every day of her life.’

Despite the deadly title, this anthology of twenty-eight poems from the 2008 Newcastle Poetry Prize is replete with gems. Assembled from 423 entries by judges Jan Owen, Philip Salom, and Richard Tipping – effectively the anthology’s editors – it is a brilliant sampler that few anthologies can match for the legroom offered to the longer poem and poetry sequence.

Just as God created the earth in seven days, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful rebuilds the life of sixteen-year-old Riley Rose in a week spent at a Christian summer camp.

Two years after the death of her mother, Lilith (an allusion to Adam’s first wife), atheist Riley has become the quintessential bad girl – smoking, drinking and getting arrested. On the advice of her father’s new girlfriend, Riley is sentenced to a seven-day stint at the Spirit Ranch holiday camp, with nothing but a new hairstyle, a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, courtesy of her best friend, a bus ticket home.

When Graeme Base’s first picture book, My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, was published in 1983, his exuberant illustrations and rollicking text produced a frisson. However, it was the incomparable ‘alphabet’ book Animalia (1986) that really launched Base’s career as a picture-book author–illustrator, and made him a publishing phenomenon in both Australia and the United States. In celebration of twenty-five years of Graeme Base picture books, his publisher, Penguin, has produced a glossy retrospective look at his work. Written by Julie Watts, a former editor and publisher at Penguin Books, The Art of Graeme Base is lavishly illustrated and engagingly written. The first chapter documents Base’s idyllic childhood in Britain and his migration to Australia with his family. The second charts his early adult life as a struggling graphic designer, aspiring rock star and budding illustrator. These chapters introduce the many talents, enthusiasms, influences and mentors that have shaped the Graeme Base ‘brand’. The next twelve chapters are devoted to in-depth revelations about the evolution and production of each of Base’s twelve books, including his most recent title, Enigma (2008). Many chapters also have a ‘Beyond the Book’ section, which explores the other formats that the indefatigable Base has ventured into as spin-offs from his books: television series, board books, dioramas, exhibitions and stage plays.

Sir James Murray, the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, believed that the dictionary-maker’s job was to furnish each word with a biography.

Two months ago, I was in Islamabad to address an international conference on suicide terrorism. The Pakistani army was engaged in heavy fighting with the Islamic militants in the Pashtun-dominated northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. The security situation was deteriorating. Senior Pakistani intelligence officers were worried that it would lead to an escalation of suicide attacks. Their assessment was supported by the other government officials, including doctors working in the region, who told me of the widespread perception among Pashtuns that the predominantly Punjabi Pakistan army was committing genocide of the Pashtun nation and was thus turning the population against the army. The aerial bombings by Pakistani helicopter gunships and the US-NATO drones were causing many civilian casualties.

Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) – Raoul is treading safe, and commercially viable, waters.