Non Fiction

There was a time in Australia when right-wing citizens of this country were passionate and organised enough to bring the left-led state of New South Wales to the brink of civil war on political grounds. This violent opposition was led by rebel elements among ‘as many as 30,000 members’ of a conservative and ‘formally constituted civilian reserve’ known as the Old Guard. Impatient with the staid organisation, they had forged a more militant collective under the guise of the New Guard. One of the major players in this evolution was Captain Francis Edward De Groot, an antique-dealer and reproduction furniture manufacturer from Ireland, whose ambition and taste for adventure had led him to Australia. De Groot went on to star in the most famous scene of this political drama and to carve his name into Australian popular myth by usurping Premier Jack Lang as the ribbon-slasher at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

This book opens in Papeete one evening in 1935. Two American film-makers are in Tahiti to take location shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, and director Frank Lloyd laments his failure to find Captain Bligh’s log books. A small white-haired person of indeterminate appearance at the next table leans over: ‘I know where they are,’ she says. Of course she did. The logbooks were in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and the speaker was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946. The Mitchell Library, located in the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales, is based on the priceless collection of Australiana and south-west Pacific materials donated in 1907 by the reclusive bibliophile David Scott Mitchell. Leeson, its second chief custodian, not only knew the vast collection backwards but added significantly to it. She also used it herself, a key to effective librarianship.

In the week that Voting for Jesus landed in my letterbox, the Howard government announced that it was considering dollar-for-dollar support for state school chaplaincies, while, in New South Wales, fresh allegations surfaced of branch stacking by the state Liberals’ ‘religious right’ faction. Those perplexed by such developments in secular Australia will find novelist Amanda Lohrey a helpful, warm-hearted guide. Her colourful, impressionistic and approachable account of Australia’s religious right welcomes readers into a debate that some might previously have been inclined to dismiss as too confusing, or as marginal to secular concerns. Chats with academics, theologians and commentators offer a variety of angles. Far from adopting a didactic tone, the text beguiles with numerous questions that sound rhetorical but often remain unanswered.

Ken Inglis is now as much a part of the history of the ABC as any of the charismatic broadcasters, mercurial managers or audiences – devoted and indignant – that his two monumental histories chronicle. He has become the repository, the source, the critical race memory of the ABC, ‘just three years older’ than the phenomenon he examines.

The list of corrigenda at the end of the new edition of This Is the ABC (first published by Melbourne University Press in 1983) underscores the point: insiders, listeners, viewers and politicians have inundated him with corrections and information to refine and expand his already minutely detailed volume one of the history. Listeners plead with him to include the story of the newsreader who announced that a lady had been bitten on the funnel by a finger-webbed spider. Other responses are less benign. Solicitors for Sir Charles Moses, for thirty years the ABC’s general manager, write to Inglis in 1983 listing ‘imputations’ in his book which they claim are grossly defamatory of Sir Charles’s good name and reputation. Sir Charles himself, at the Broadcast House launch of the first volume in 1983, greeted the disconcerted author with the news that he would be hearing from his solicitors. ‘I did my best to look and sound at ease when Dame Leonie called me to the dais’, recalls Inglis. The case was not pursued, and the relevant documents are now deposited in the National Library. But it is characteristic of the man and the historian that Inglis should ‘remain sad that although my admiration for the ABC’s principal maker was evidently clear to reviewers and other readers, the subject himself could not see it’.

When I introduce undergraduates to the work of Maurice Blanchot, I begin with three simple stories. In the first, a philosopher refuses to allow himself to be photographed. Foucault tells of engaging in vig-orous conversation at a May 1968 demonstration with a man he learned only later was the elusive Blanchot. He was the unrecognised colleague, invisible and self-effacing, but also enormously productive (Leslie Hill tells us that his works, if collected, would run to three dozen volumes). The second story is told in Blanchot’s TheWriting of the Disaster (1980), in which a small boy awakens at night, looks out into the blackness and sees no stars, no presence, ‘nothing beyond’. It is a remembered scene, riveting in its clarity, of originary loss and intimations of mortality. The third story is without doubt the most well known. In 1944, Blanchot faced execution by a Nazi firing squad but somehow, mysteriously, ‘escaped his own death’. This bizarre impossibility, the sense of death’s untimeliness and capricious propinquity, marks all Blanchot’s work, his essays, journalism, fiction and philosophy, and infuses it with a pervasively melancholic tone.

The problem with many ‘big occasion’ publications is that they are written for the occasion rather than for an audience. This collection – the first reference work to cover all the premiers of New South Wales from 1856 until July 2005 – has been published to coincide with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of responsible government in New South Wales. Happily, however, The Premiers of New South Wales displays none of the failings typical of other ‘landmark’ volumes. On the contrary, this is a valuable and relevant work that merits the interest of non-specialist readers. The authors have profiled the premiers in their social and personal contexts, as well as in their political environments. This extends the appeal of the collection and adds considerable interest. Together, the two volumes provide valuable insights into the evolution of New South Wales from a colony to a state.

Foreign travellers in India face four inevitable questions. ‘What is your good name?’ is usually followed in rapid succession by ‘Where are you coming from?’(meaning from which country), ‘Are you married?’ and, finally, ‘What is your religion?’. Backpacking through India twenty years ago, the first three questions presented few problems. My name was easy, Australia was recognised as a cricket-playing country, and I was young enough for my lack of a wife to be passed over as a matter of only mild embarrassment. The fourth question however, proved tricky. Usually, I gave the technically correct answer that I had been baptised into the Anglican Church – a reply that generally satisfied my interlocutors and not infrequently led into rambling, good-natured discussions about the similarities between the world’s great faiths. Once, I ventured a more honest response. ‘I am an atheist,’ I told a couple of friendly young Indian men on a long train journey. ‘I do not believe in any God.’ Their shock was palpable. It was not so much my spiritual deficit that appalled them as my arrogance. How could anyone have the audacity to declare that God did not exist? Our conversation never recovered. In response to all future interrogations, I retreated to my dissembling line about Christianity. The experience did not shake my disbelief, but it did serve to engender a greater respect for the question. Religion, I belatedly realised, is an important matter.

The provenance of The Howard Factor – a collection of essays by senior writers from The Australian newspaper – is not promising. The Australian is after all part of Mark Latham’s ‘Evil Empire’, cheerleader rather than critic of the Howard government. Yet its sympathy for the régime stems not from partisanship but from the newspaper’s philosophy: neo-liberal in domestic matters, neo-conservative in foreign policy. Populist desertion of elements of the neo-liberal agenda has aroused the wrath of the newspaper: witness its condemnation of the government’s policy funk in early 2001, and of its recent surrender to Snowy River romanticism. Discord has been less in foreign policy, where both government and newspaper have been willing recruits to the ‘war on terror’. So slavish has become the newspaper’s adherence to America’s contemporary wars that it has even repudiated its quite heroic stance on the Vietnam War a generation ago.

‘The very rich are different from you and me’, F. Scott Fitzgerald thought; and so he told Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, who came back with a deflating reply, ‘Yes, they have more money’, boasted that he had won that little exchange. Yet Fitzgerald was right; and he proved it in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. In the American novel more generally, money creates and defines character; as it does in Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan or Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Destructive though it may be in these novels, the making of a fortune is an expression of power and a source of drama.

This significant anthology consists of thirty-three articles by Jewish Australian scholars, lawyers, writers, educators, rabbis, journalists and other high achievers, prefaced by a thoughtful and wide-ranging introduction by the editors. Many of the contributors are distinguished in their fields and prominent in public life. The editors have cast the volume from a ‘perspective of commitment and belonging’, with the conviction that ‘challenge and critique when offered by committed members rather than hostile outsiders is often the most useful form of reckoning with ourselves’. The disjunction is troubling (I think I may be a hostile insider), but its effect does not diminish the interest of the collection. The book’s focus is narrower than its subtitle suggests: these are not just passing reflections by some Jewish Australians: each contribution is centrally about some aspect of the religion, politics and culture of Jewish Australians. As such, it provides a useful and authoritative synopsis of the progress, state and thoughts of many Australian Jews today. No single essay sparkles brilliantly, and a few are alarmingly deficient in serious thought; nevertheless, this is a big, rich, diverse collection deserving of wide public attention.