Non Fiction

Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done so ever since. Whether he or Graham Richardson has done more damage to the party that nurtured them is a question I leave to the blogosphere. Before Latham became leader in 2003, he published considerably more about his vision for Labor than most parliamentarians have done, though none of his publications was as readable as his post-retirement diaries (2005), in which he displayed a lack of judgement and such scant goodwill to his colleagues that it leaves one astounded that they ever elected him leader. (When Latham ran against Kim Beazley for the leadership, two of the wiser members of caucus, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, counselled me against becoming too enthusiastic. They were clearly correct.)

Geoff Page’s 1953 is set in the town of Eurandangee, which, we learn, is about 650 kilometres north-west of Sydney ...

In Speaking Secrets, academic and journalist Sue Joseph looks at what happens when sex becomes ‘public property’, and interviews a range of Australians who have had often traumatic sex and sexuality-related experiences aired to a wide audience through the media. Some of her interviewees are well known, others are not. Several discuss their experience of sexual abuse, either as a victim or as the relative of a victim. There is an interview with David Cunningham, the Greens candidate who has argued that ‘disabled people need sex lives’. Cunningham (who has cerebral palsy) has stated that people with disabilities should have access to sex workers. There are interviews with the transgender lawyer Rachael Wallbank and the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, a Uniting Church minister who came out as a lesbian in 1997. In one amusing moment, McRae-McMahon finds herself discussing anal sex during her conversation with Joseph in a Sydney café.Speaking Secrets is situated in the field of literary journalism. Reading Joseph’s evocative prose, the reader almost feels as if he is eavesdropping on the interviews. Still, the author leaves much to the imagination (I will discuss one instance of this). There is not a cliché or a superfluous word in the book.

I have beliefs about what you believe. I also have beliefs about what I myself believe. The big difference between the two cases is how I come by these beliefs. By and large, my beliefs about what you believe come from observations of your behaviour (understood in a wide sense, which includes the environment in which your behaviour is located). Here are two illustrations. You sell all your shares and buy gold. I infer that you believe that gold will outperform shares. You write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election. I infer that you believe that the Coalition will win the next election. However, my beliefs about what I myself believe don’t usually come from observations by me of my own behaviour. My belief that gold will outperform shares may explain why I sell all my shares and buy gold, but it doesn’t reveal to me that I have this belief. Likewise, I don’t need to write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election in order to discover that I have this belief. There is, to borrow some jargon, a first person–third person asymmetry in how we arrive at beliefs about beliefs.

Lime Green Chair, which is Chris Andrews’s second book, won in manuscript form the Anthony Hecht 2011 Poetry Prize. Andrews is also a prize-winning translator from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and others. Lime Green Chair translates and transforms everyday moments into auguries of time disappearing. Each of these mostly 21-line poems is finely patterned with unexpected rhyme and vowels that ring into a following line, as if directed by some hidden constraint: ‘Sounds that came into the world in my lifetime / already sound old-fangled: dial-up modems, / the implosion of a television tube / in a set dropped from a high window ...’ (‘Sonic Age’). 

In Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero Robert Jordan, an American fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, receives some advice from Karkov, a Russian ‘journalist’ at the unofficial Soviet headquarters in Madrid.