Open Page
Open Page with Anne Manne
Anne Manne is an Australian writer, essayist, and social philosopher.
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On 19 November 2021, a delegation of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community leaders and prominent local non-Indigenous representatives presented a letter to Moreland City Council, in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne, asking that the Council be renamed. As the petitioners pointed out, Moreland – a name given to parts of the area in 1839 by Scottish settler Farquhar McCrae and then adopted by the local Council in 1994 – was the name of a Jamaican slave plantation to which McCrae’s family had a connection.
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From its mix of fiction and criticism to the format of its contents page, this collection is clearly a follow-up to Helen Merrick and Tess Williams’s feminist science fiction anthology, Women of Other Worlds (1999). There are, however, major differences. Women emerged from a unique and unrepeatable event, a meeting of live minds at the twentieth WisCon Feminist SF Convention. It is wildly eclectic, often irreverent, ranging from recipes and e-mail debates on gender to full-blown critical articles on female fan culture, united only by the feminist perspective and the contributor’s presence at WisCon. Its reprints go back no further than 1986. The reader is encouraged to dip. In contrast, Earth is united by its ostensible theme, ‘far futures’, with reprints from as far back as the 1930s, but only ‘proper’ fiction – stories, excerpts from novels – and ‘proper’ critical pieces. The overall tone is sober if not solemn, and the single-minded thematic focus produces a strong similarity to Vegemite. Small dips are quite enough.
‘A large part of the beauty of a picture,’ Matisse famously decreed, ‘arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium.’ Struggle is the dominant motif in Murray Bail’s study of Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather, first essayed in 1981, now refashioned, updated, and handsomely repackaged.
The danger in writing about unfolding dramas is that they keep unfolding, potentially stranding both writer and reader. Not so with these two fine books, whose authors have long experience of the Middle East. Quite different in scope – a sweep of the Arab world contrasting with the ascent and decay of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal régime – they deal with past, present, and possible future events in a lucid, compelling way. Anyone with an interest in what is at stake in the Middle East would be well advised to read them.