Non Fiction

Gideon Haigh reviews a major new study of the failure of investigative journalism during the 2008 GFC. He argues that journalists became invested in the economic boom, to their cost.

David Malouf turns eighty this month, improbably. To mark his birthday, UQP has published a new poetry collection by Malouf. ABR Poetry Editor reviews Earth Hour in this issue.

I have often thought that a large part of achievement is just fronting up; having an idea and acting on it, however unlikely success might seem. What you need is a resolution (or the disposition) not to be discouraged by failure and to be pleasantly surprised by success. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. You make the most of any opportunity. You should also jettison a conventional sense of the social niceties. You’re going to Boston for your honeymoon. Hey, why not ask Noam Chomsky for an interview?

The author of this impressive book had his ninetieth birthday this January. Born to a Jewish mother and Catholic father, he was fortunate to escape death in his native Hungary in World War II and to live another existence in the United States as an intellectual and historian throughout the Cold War. The label he sometimes claims is ‘reactionary’, but this is too simple for such a thoughtful spectator of the tempestuous, topsy-turvy twentieth century.

In his brief preface to Volume 1 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography 1788–1850 A–H (1966), Douglas Pike describes the ‘all-Australian, Commonwealth-wide … consultation and co-operation’ underpinning the volume and notes that the breadth and complexity of its intellectual network meant the Dictionary could ‘truly be called a national project’. Five decades later, in an informative, elegant introduction to Volume 18, the present general editor, Melanie Nolan, endorses Pike’s pioneering claim for the ADB, describing it as ‘a national collaborative project, the largest and longest running of its kind in the social sciences and humanities in Australia’. As such – ‘a reference work for many purposes’ – it is familiar territory to historians, researchers, biographers, film-makers, novelists, and any number of browsing general readers.

If the London Australian expatriate community has an aristocracy of sorts – as it clearly does – then Geoffrey Robertson QC and the novelist Kathy Lette, his wife since 1990, would be among its leading nobility. Robertson and Lette mix with royalty, both real and literary (‘our daughters had been flower girls at Salman’s wedding – I can’t remember which one’). I would love to have been present when Robertson advised Diana, during her affair with James Hewitt, that the Treason Act of 1361 laid down the death penalty for any party to adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne. Did she blush or blanch?

John Thompson examines Germaine Greer’s sober, meditative, deeply moving account of her efforts to regenerate sixty hectares of degraded rainforest in the Gold Coast hinterland.

If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

With resource shortages looming and climate change a topic of intense discussion, it is becoming increasingly important for people to find ways to reduce their day-to-day consumption and carbon footprint. Greg Foyster’s Changing Gears seeks to explore the question of how to do so through the author’s own interesting, and no doubt exhausting, cross-country journey toward a greener way of living. Setting out to cycle from Melbourne to Cairns via Tasmania, which makes more sense in context, Foyster and his partner used the journey to force themselves into the sparse life of bicycle travellers, while visiting and interviewing a number of prominent experts and practitioners of conservation, green living, and social dynamics.

Writing a memoir at the age of thirty may seem like an exercise in self-indulgence: what wisdom could one possibly impart amid the universal tumultuousness of the Saturn Return? Seemingly aware of the predicament, the author of Banana Girl doesn’t pretend to deliver any answers, her memoir instead giving a more immediate snapshot into the life of a twenty-something; specifically, the life of Michele Lee, an Asian-Australian playwright on the cusp of thirty, living in Melbourne’s inner north.