It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.

A point well taken; how could that resonance have been lost? One macabre element in the present situation is a large-scale dimming-out of history, as though a huge shadow had fallen over the landscape, and the minatory shapes and forms of fascism, totalitarianism, the camps and the gulags had somehow receded from the common memory.