Letters
ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.
Behold how low
Dear Editor,
Robert Manne’s review of my book Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (ABR, May 2005) avoids most of my criticisms of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and misrepresents the rest.
... (read more)ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.
... (read more)Last week, escaping the latest blizzard, I went to Miami Beach for some sun. But it was cold and rainy, and they were noisily replacing the carpet in my hotel, so I was reduced to checking my e-mail in an Internet café and getting an expensive facial – truly a case of closing the stable door.
South Beach, as it is known, is widely celebrated for its art deco street and beachscape. This is one of the most colossally successful con jobs of all time. Take an unpretentious tropical beach community, popularised in the 1940s by canny Jewish holidaymakers from the north-east. Throw up a couple of thousand tawdry two- or three-storey shoeboxes with basic amenities: a couple of ceiling fans and no windows. Roll out some chrome cladding and neon. Toss in a bit of applied detail, a few top knots and some frosted glass. Then paint it an improbable pale pink or green or yellow, or some other combination of pastel colours that manage to be both insipid and stubbornly vulgar.
... (read more)With wings as black as night and breast as white as cloud, the sea eagle swooped from the sky. It snatched up the baby boy in front of his mother’s very eyes. She acted quickly. She grabbed a coconut shell and hurled it towards the bird. The baby dropped to the ground and landed unhurt on soft sand. But before she could reach it, the baby was gone, swept away by the tsunami. The eagle knew, you see. Like the elephants who had already left the coast, like the dogs that ran for high ground before anyone saw anything, the eagle knew that the big wave was coming. It had been trying to save the baby, and the woman had stopped it, and now her baby is dead.
... (read more)ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.
Barry Jones on the ODNB
Dear Editor,
I read Angus Trumble’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ABR, March 2005) with close interest and some envy. It was probably inevitable that he should concentrate on entries with Australian relationships. He comments that all deceased Australian prime ministers are there, except Scullin and Page. In fact, Fadden and Forde are also missing.
... (read more)A fevered imagination
Dear Editor, in his review (ABR, December 2004–January 2005) of my recent book on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Herzl’s Nightmare: One Land, Two People, Colin Rubenstein comments that I write ‘well’. I’m intrigued by that observation as I find it near impossible to believe that he’s actually read the book. His judgements about it range from the fanciful to the preposterous.
... (read more)Who’s who
Dear Editor,
Henry Ergas’s disingenuous response (ABR, November 2004) to my review (ABR, October 2004) of Peter Saunders’s Australia’s Welfare Habit and How to Kick It deserves a reply. Ergas poses as a dissatisfied ‘customer-reader’ of ABR. From this position, he expresses outrage at my review of Saunders’s book. Come off it, Henry!
... (read more)The Equal Heart and Mind edited by Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney & Birds by Judith Wright
National wealth
Dear Editor,
Jenny Darling states in her letter of September 2004: ‘it is very difficult to place Australian writers in front of Australian readers.’ This is exactly what the Books Alive campaign has done for two years. All fourteen of the books included in our two campaigns so far are from great Australian authors: Belinda Alexandra, Duncan Ball, Geraldine Brooks, Bryce Courtenay with Roy Kyle, Robert Drewe, Anna Fienberg, Nikki Gemmell, Morris Gleitzman, Gabrielle Lord, Mary Moody, Sally Morgan, Matthew Reilly and Shane Weaver. Two of the Books Alive titles have been brand new and all of the Books Alive titles have appeared in the bestseller lists during the campaigns. More than 500,000 of these fourteen specially printed books by Australian writers have been purchased nationally as a result of the Books Alive promotion.
... (read more)
