ABC Books

In recent times, Queensland has developed a reputation as ‘an engine of national growth and innovation’. This reputation was boosted by the 2007 election of Queenslander Kevin Rudd as prime minister. In this edition of Griffith Review, subtitled ‘Hidden Queensland’, a range of contributors explore the evolution of the Australian state once best known ‘for its extremes of weather and politics’.

When journalist Helene Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1960s, there were fewer than one hundred Chinese living there, and her complicated family seemed to include almost all of them. Her great-grandfather came to Australia for gold, but succumbed to opium. He was rescued by her grandfather, who worked in the Tasmanian tin mines, founding a small dynasty as brothers and cousins arrived with their multiple wives, and married more in Australia. It sounds like a familiar story, but as it unfolds the author’s intelligence and determination create an idiosyncratic portrait of what first- and second-generation migrants endure, and how they triumph.

A startling début novel by Melbourne-based author Caroline Hamilton, Consumed is a truly macabre story that will disturb and alienate some of its readers. The (at times patchy) prose revels in its gratuitous descriptions of the preparation of food, especially meat, but this may be a deliberate choice in the face of sanitised offerings available at your local supermarket.

Almost thirty years on, in a post-Samaranch age, when the wealthy Olympic movement mimics the United Nations in world affairs, the 1980 Moscow Games resemble prehistory, especially for Australian athletes, officials and spectators still revering 2000 Sydney successes. Yet as Lisa Forrest recounts, the Moscow boycott shredded the traditional views of Australian sports people, ensured national sport would become more politicised, and produced shameful behaviour all round.

This is a timely book. Alan Parkinson argues that the Howard government, which is on the verge of committing Australia to a future in which nuclear power will play a major role, cannot be trusted with the implementation of such an undertaking. A key part of a nuclear programme will be the disposal of nuclear waste, including high-level toxic wastes which will have to be encased in safe storage for thousands of years. Yet the government, which advocates this future, has proved to be singularly unsuccessful in cleaning up the more modest problems from the past – the ongoing saga of the clean-up of the Maralinga test site.

Canberra’s week of the two presidents – October 2003 – brought the unprecedented spectacle of George W. Bush and China’s President Hu Jintau speaking just a day apart to joint sittings of the Australian parliament. The coincidence elegantly dramatised the central questions for Australian foreign policy: how we manage our relationships with our superpower ally, how we live with our neighbours in Asia, and how we get the balance right between them. This has been the essential challenge for every Australian government since World War II. In his important new book, The Howard Paradox, Michael Wesley focuses on one side of that balance – relations with Asia – and on the Howard government.

To state the case bluntly, is there in fact any place for opera in the twenty-first century? What is the use of opera? Many would say that it is a moribund art form, traditional and arthritic, class-ridden, a minority and élitist pursuit of an arcane society harbouring secret rituals in the mode of cabbalists with their adherence to vision and the genealogy of seers. My questions suggest some kind of crisis. Yet they are unanswerable because, like all art at a profound level, opera is useless.

Bill Leak’s first novel, Heart Cancer, is a quasi-picaresque larrikin’s progress that unexpectedly turns into a tale about addiction and self-destruction. It is an enterprising book, but Leak has the difficulty any novelist might in getting the two tones – the comic and the serious – properly balanced.

We’re all interested in people; misanthropy is not trendy. Contemporary interest in people may be manifested by the success of reality television, the media coverage given to celebrities, and books such as these, which set out to investigate people and what makes them tick.