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Alison Broinowski

To hear that Pamela Burton was writing about the deaths of Nick Waterlow, the prominent gallery director and exhibition curator, and his daughter Chloe, came as a surprise. Anthony Waterlow, Nick’s son and Chloe’s older brother, killed them both in Chloe’s Clovelly house, where he had been invited for dinner, and then, with the same knife, attacked her two-year-old daughter. Sydney was transfixed by the event for the weeks after 9 November 2009, while police hunted for Anthony. Everyone knew the awful facts from the media coverage: what was there to add? After her well-received book on Mary Gaudron (2010), for Burton to take on another unauthorised biography might seem like masochism. The Waterlows wanted to protect their privacy, and friends murmured about exposing unhealed wounds to prurience and sensationalism. Others worried about the effect the book might have when Anthony is eventually released from the Forensic Hospital at Malabar. Others again expected a dry legal narrative from Burton, a former barrister in Canberra, who could bring neither the expertise of a psychiatrist to Anthony’s case, nor that of an art historian to Nick Waterlow’s colourful career.

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Every migrant has a story. The past two decades have given us accounts of migration to Australia from so many Asian countries, and from so many viewpoints – sad, painful, funny, cynical, mystical – that little more seems left to tell. But now, out of Africa, comes a writer with a new and altogether more terrible tale.

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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

by
March 2012, no. 339

Admirers of Haruki Murakami who waited for two years while successive parts of his twelfth novel sold millions in Japanese, are now rewarded for their patience with a big nugget of a book in English, which is already an international bestseller. The elegant cover shows an enigmatic night sky with two moons, which reappear on the endpapers and between the three parts. Rather than clutter one single page with publication details and Murakami’s numerous other fiction and non-fiction titles, the book’s designers run these in tiny print across the top and bottom margins of the eight endpapers. In the side margins of the text, ‘1Q84’appears halfway down every page, arranged as a cube, above and below which the page numbers move up and down. On the opposite pages, the page numbers also move, but both they and the title are in mirror reverse. What’s more, this idiosyncratic pattern switches over at various, apparently random intervals, from odd to even pages. Q is ku, nine in Japanese, and the letter is said to look like ‘a world that bears a question’, although the answer escapes me. Nothing in 1Q84 will be as it seems.

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Many of us would find it as hard as Shaw’s Ladvenu does to think of any good reason for torture. It seems medieval, it is abhorrent, it is internationally illegal, and it doesn’t work. Statements made under torture are legally useless, and their value as intelligence is not much better ...

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As people around the world watch events in the United States, many will agree that it is indeed an exceptional, if conflicted, nation. The sole superpower, with the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military ever known, is hugely in debt, and struggles agonisingly just to produce a federal budget ...

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Within little more than a decade, between the 1850s and the 1860s, seven centuries of Japanese feudalism and more than two hundred years of seclusion came to an end ...

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Not for forty years have Australians had real arguments with their governments about international relations. Many marched in 2003 against the Iraq invasion, but were ignored. Now, if the national obesity rate is any guide, Australians spend more time eating, partying and sleeping than having the earnest pre-breakfast discussions about foreign relations that Fukuzawa recommended.

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A sarcastic little slogan on a wall in Australia’s arts funding organisation in the mid-1990s read ‘Il y a trop d’art’. All right, it was meant in jest, but it seemed to hint broadly at shared bureaucratic resentment of importunate artists, even though they were the Council’s clients and the reason, indeed, for its very existence. Remember the national health hospital in Yes Minister that ran perfectly until it had to take patients?

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The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

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Figurehead by Patrick Allington

by
October 2009, no. 315

What we might call ‘ordinary Australians’ produced a stream of novels about Asian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, but this is now a mere trickle. Some of the flow may have been dammed by the effect of market forces on publishers; some of it may have been diverted to Middle Eastern channels; some may have drained into the pools of Asia-enthusiasm that stagnated during the Howard years; and some may have dried up in the face of Asian diaspora fiction of the 1990s. Among the few Anglo-Saxon Australians who kept writing novels about Asia, several have turned to narratives set in a historical comfort zone, where they may still have a chance of competing with Asian Australians like Brian Castro, Teo Hsu-ming and Michelle de Kretser – although they too write of the past – or with Nam Le, Alice Pung and Aravind Adiga, who concentrate on the here and now.

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