Commentary
‘Dear God. Save us from those who would believe in you.’ Not long after the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 last year, those words were sprayed on a wall in New York. Knowing what provoked them, I sense fear of religion in them. Their wit does not dilute the fear, nor does it render its expression less unsettling. To the contrary, it makes the fear more poignant and its justification more evident.
Enough people have been murdered and tortured over the centuries in the name of religion for anyone to have good reason to fear it. Is it, therefore, yet another example of the hyperbole that overwhelmed common sense and sober judgment after September 11 to sense something new in the fear expressed in that graffiti? In part, I think it is. But the thought that makes the fear seem relatively (rather than absolutely) novel is this: perhaps the horrors of religion are not corruptions of religion, but inseparable from it. To put it less strongly, but strongly enough: though there is much in religion that condemns evils committed in its name, none of it has the authority to show that fanatics who murder and torture and dispossess people of their lands necessarily practise false religion or that they believe in false gods. At best (this thought continues), religion is a mixed bag of treasures and horrors.
... (read more)When Arthur Phillips conjured up the cultural cringe fifty-two years ago – he was Arthur then, only later becoming the more formal A.A. Phillips – he had little idea how that phrase would come to haunt us. When interviewed by Jim Davidson in 1977, Phillips was rather dismissive about his original 1950 Meanjin article, although he noted that it was ‘twice nearly strangled in infancy’, first by editor Clem Christesen who hadn’t liked it, and then by a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund Board who urged him not to include it in his collection The Australian Tradition (1958). But he attributed the popularity of the phrase to its being ‘catchily alliterative – and alliteration is the most facile stylistic trick there is’.
... (read more)September 8. Feeling like I have been away too long, I visit Warsaw to meet up with Zygmunt Bauman’s people; Budapest to catch up with Agnes Heller and her son, Yuri; Prague, just before the deluge; Leeds, to work further with Bauman; Chicago, for the American Sociological Association convention; New Haven; and Boston, where my sanity is restored, my daughter having arrived to stay with me in Cambridge. Today we are upstate New York, on the Hudson; yesterday we were in downtown Manhattan, where the aura of September 11 is strong, and more than a bit spooky. We walked down Broadway, stayed in Greenwich Village, and decided to visit the site of Ground Zero another time, if ever. The whole of America is flagged – a weird show of strength, defiance, patriotism and anxiety. The shops, in particular, all seem to bear compulsory flags on the windows and doors. You get the sense that there is not much room to move here.
... (read more)I have resigned from my dream job. When I leave in October, I will have worked on the ‘new’ Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) for all of its five years, a lustrum in which I have met some extraordinary people and forged many fruitful relationships. I truly doubt that, despite the odd scandal and beat-up, many industries are as friendly and collaborative (not in THAT way, Allan Fels) as the book industry. We are all a little evangelical in our desire to share our favourite writers and books and thoughts with others, and our belief that reading brings enlightenment.
... (read more)Primo Levi, in two interviews given almost twenty years ago*, set a standard of critical sympathy that is not only exemplary, but peculiarly apt to the fraught debate about the post-September 11 world and the USA’s place and reputation within it.
... (read more)At seven o’clock on the morning of 2 February 1999, I was due at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide to relieve my older sister at my mother’s bedside, where she had been all night. The alarm was set for six. At five-thirty, I was woken by the phone; my mother had died, as we had known for a couple of days that she would, from complications following a cerebral haemorrhage.
... (read more)Paul Kane reviews ‘The Poetry of Les Murray’ edited by Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, ‘Les Murray’ by Steven Matthews, and ‘Poems the Size of Photographs’ by Les Murray
You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...
... (read more)Bad art is where the personality of the artist reveals itself most fascinatingly, according to Lord Henry Wootton, the Wildean aesthete in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is an idea that assumes an unexpected relevance as we reach the tenth anniversary of what is perhaps the strangest phenomenon in Australian publishing history.
... (read more)The visit of H.G. Wells to Australia in 1938–39 provides a spectacle of provocation under difficulties. The provocations were mostly Wells’s; the difficulties he shared with his hosts. The outcome was disappointment all round.
... (read more)The episode of the refugees on the MV Tampa raised two separate problems, one moral, the other legal. To see both issues in perspective, it is useful to recall the facts that precipitated this unlikely crisis.
The refugees, most of them claiming to be from Afghanistan, embarked on a boat in Indonesia and headed for Australia. It began to sink. The master of the Tampa, quite properly, rescued them. He was about to take them to Indonesia when some of them threatened to commit suicide if they were not taken to Australia. He considered that many were in need of urgent medical help. He sailed towards Christmas Island and radioed for help, but none was given. He was asked to turn away, but considered the risks to life too great. Thus it was that 450 refugees found themselves in Australian territorial waters.
... (read more)
