Non Fiction

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book, Romancing Opiates, slams societal and professional attitudes to heroin addiction. Dalrymple argues that heroin users are not blameless patients, as the medical fraternity would have us believe. ln fact, he tells us, heroin users have to work quite hard to get addicted; withdrawal is about as difficult as the flu; and the support industry, which he calls the ‘addiction bureaucracy’, is ineffective and self-serving. Dalrymple contends that the heroin epidemic cannot be dealt with until it is recognised as a moral and spiritual problem rather than solely as a medical one.

The history of Cobb & Co. belongs as much in the territory of folklore as it does in the annals of business. Within forty years of its inception, the company had become synonymous with coach travel in Australia, and later became the subject of a nostalgic tribute in verse by Henry Lawson. There is much ground to cover, and this book blazes new trails as it travels between the commercial and the iconic aspects of Cobb & Co.’s operations.

Diane Coyle has a passion for economics and believes that the object of her passion should possess a soul. She fails to convince on this point, but that is of little account. She has written an absorbing book that sets out what economists do and that provides a commentary on current thinking.

Language shapes identity: everyone knows that, in theory. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that exact equivalents do not exist for every word. Translation cannot be perfect: something is always lost. So what happens when people, used to one linguistic identity, have to translate themselves into a new language? Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka have assembled twelve witnesses to give personal accounts. All are academics or writers who possess the intellectual resources to make sense of what they have encountered, while at the same time registering the dislocations they have experienced. All write English fluently: they are not concerned with the difficulties of learning English but of being themselves in Australian English. Some make the comment that they are perfectly comfortable writing academic English while still finding the small transactions of daily life a challenge.

Reading literary criticism can be like viewing a portrait: you are essentially subjected to another person’s vision of the subject. One can feel that the perspective is unduly harsh at some points, lavishly lenient at others. It is easy to project one’s own bias onto the work, and to take issue with the representation too quickly. This is particularly true of a critical monograph on a subject such as Christopher Koch, who has been both prominent and controversial throughout his career. It is difficult for any commentator on Koch not to be drawn into the ‘Australian Melodrama’ that Peter Pierce identified in Australian literary culture in 1995.

After departing as minister for finance from the Hawke government in 1988, Peter Walsh began a weekly column for the Australian Financial Review under the byline ‘Cassandra’, named after the Trojan princess who was condemned by Apollo to be a teller of truths but fated not to be believed. Eventually, the bile became too much for Fairfax. Happily, Christopher Pearson offered Walsh a spot at his comely home for curmudgeonly old men, the Adelaide Review, for several more years. Walsh was marvellous. His articles were renowned for skewering the platitudes of the mushy left. He hollered like a Baptist at Country Party types aiming to get their gnarled hands into Treasury coffers.

The first official postage stamps of a British colony were produced on the small island of Mauritius. In 1847, seven years after Rowland Hill’s ‘Penny Black’, the Mauritian postmaster issued 500 orange-red one penny stamps and 500 blue twopence stamps. In size, shape and design, they are utterly conventional. Depicting Queen Victoria in profile, they lack the charm of the 1850 ‘Sydney Views’ stamps of New South Wales or the peculiarity of the 1854 ‘Inverted Swan’ of Western Australia. They are, however, inscribed ‘Post Office’, whereas all later stamps are inscribed ‘Post Paid’. They are instantly recognisable and ever since the 1860s, when philately first became respectable, they have been sought and prized by kings, schoolboys and other collectors.

Over the past four years, we Australians have had considerable experience of the conflicted, and sometimes agonising, politics of war. In this study, Michael A. McDonnell, a historian at the University of Sydney, examines the unanticipated social and political contestations aroused by the demands of another war. In the late eighteenth century, Virginia endured a six-year struggle against the imperial rule of Britain. A settled class of wealthy gentlemen planters who had previously assumed the right to leadership came to find that role questioned in a wholly new politics of war. Middle- and lower-class Virginians began to ask them: how will you distribute the burden of the war equitably across society? Should the wealthy planters be exempt because of their property holdings? Who is to fight and die in this war? Who is to control recruitment? 

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.

In an essay for Australian Literary Studies (ALS) exploring the modernist networks of Judith Wright and Frank Scott, Anouk Lang argues that ‘participation in modernist little magazines … was crucial to their development as writers. Publication in these journals validated their tentative efforts and imbued them with confidence to move on to further ventures.’ It is a terrific recommendation for the important role that literary journals continue to serve for writers – both emerging and established, creative and academic. ALS and Antipodes provide vigorous examples of two such journals which support the fostering and fortification of literary culture in Australia.