Non Fiction

In a country where property and real estate are central to the national psyche, it is fair to say that, even by Australian standards, we are having a moment. From the Great Australian Dream to the widespread recreational pursuit of watching The Block, real estate has become the nation’s article of faith. Meanwhile, a confluence of factors has seen housing become the hottest political issue in the country. Far from the dream, we have seemingly arrived at the worst of all possible worlds, where housing is too expensive to buy, too expensive to rent, and too expensive to build. Those without a leveraged portfolio of their own are rightly asking how we got into this mess.

Belgium’s history with what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of brutality and exploitation. In 1885, Leopold II, King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, became the sole owner of what was then called the Congo Free State. The story of how one of Africa’s largest countries, roughly the size of Western Europe, became privately owned – that is, not owned by the Belgian state but by its people’s king – is one of complex deceit, subterfuge, greed and mania. Leopold was responsible for the killing and mutilation of millions of people – some estimate up to ten million – in Central Africa. Animals were victims too. ‘At the start of the nineteenth century there were up to twenty-six million elephants in Africa. That number currently sits between four and five hundred thousand.’ In nine years, the tusks of 94,000 elephants were shipped into Antwerp alone. Eventually, forced to relinquish to Belgium his so-called Congo Free State, Leopold destroyed all incriminating documents, writing to an aide, ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.’ The Palace furnaces were said to burn for eight days.

The Coalition was keen to spruik a nuclear future in Australia’s most recent federal election campaign. Conspicuous in its absence was a reckoning with Australia’s nuclear past. In Contaminated Country: Nuclear colonialism and Aboriginal resistance in Australia, environmental historian Jessica Urwin rightly puts that ugly legacy back in our minds.

Many Australians are unaware of the extent and severity of formalised racial segregation in the country prior to the 1967 referendum. In this meticulously researched study, Roland See examines the evolution of segregation and assimilation practices in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of York between 1924 – when the town’s Aboriginal reserve was first gazetted – and 1974, the year it was formally disestablished. Unlike in South Africa, where apartheid policies were highly centralised, in Western Australia racial segregation was often initiated and enforced at the municipal level. The state’s Aborigines Act, first enacted in 1905 and amended several times in the following decades, provided local governments with broad authority to create ‘native reserves’ and whites-only areas, enforce curfews, and regulate Indigenous people’s access to public amenities and services. Consequently, municipal councillors were particularly sensitive to the prejudices of their white electors. As See points out, although it was state legislation that enabled racial segregation and persecution of Aboriginal communities, ‘the local position was often the deciding factor in the implementation of such provisions and inhumane injustices’.

By 1967, the United States was deeply mired in the war in Vietnam. In the immediate aftermath of World War II and until 1954, the Americans had supported French attempts to hold on to their colonial possessions in Indochina. When that failed, they opposed the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the nationalist and communist Ho Chi Minh in the north of the country, and supported the brutal corrupt regimes of Ngo Dinh Diem and subsequent leaders in the south. The United States subscribed to the so-called domino theory that allowing communism to flourish in one Southeast Asian country would inevitably lead adjacent nations to ‘fall over’ into communism.

While reading Notes to John I wondered about the words commonly associated with Joan Didion’s style – verve, discipline, precision, breathtaking diction (she is described as capturing the American 1960s and 1970s like no other writer). Notes to John, a posthumous publication of 150 pages made up of notes Didion made following a series of therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, contains clarity and acerbic wit in places, but in general is made up of writing that is dull, repetitive, and achingly private. Didion, who died in 2021, appears to acquiesce to her psychiatrist, Roger McKinnon. His interpretations of her life are often presented as clichéd banalities and Didion tussles linguistically with him without her usual cutting analysis and humour. It is as if in these notes she has given herself over to the supposedly greater power of psychiatric knowledge and in the process become less sagacious. The sessions cover grief, confusion, the indominable wish to understand more about oneself, and how to manage family traumas. But does the writing add anything to Didion’s body of work? I think not.

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

With more than two decades of experience in interviewing at SBS and the ABC, Kumi Taguchi knows how to craft a person’s story and build a reader’s sympathy. The Good Daughter, her first book, is a memoir. Here she looks inward, transferring these interviewing skills to herself as the subject.

New Zealand/Aotearoa is a small country, with a population of roughly five million people, but as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enthuses in her memoir A Different Kind of Power, it regularly punches above its weight. Not that she is one to toot her own horn, at least in an obvious fashion, but let’s take her prime ministership as a vivid case in point.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.