NonFiction

Andrew Bacevich is a former West Point graduate, a principled man on the conservative side of politics who considered it wrong for wealthy citizens to leave the fighting of America’s wars to the poor and disadvantaged. He had fought in Vietnam, and his son, a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, had volunteered for duty in Iraq. Just before Bacevich Sr was to attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival in June 2007, he received word that his son had been killed in Iraq. He cancelled his engagement in Sydney, and sent a poignant letter explaining his absence. It is a great pity that he was unable to come. The book that Bacevich was due to speak about is one of the most trenchant accounts I have read about contemporary American military culture. It should give any thinking Australian pause about the growing influence of American doctrine, strategy, training, equipment and choice of weapons over the Australian Defence Force.

Chester Porter QC retired as a barrister in June 2000. Several weeks previous, the Bar Council appointed Porter a life member of the New South Wales Bar Association ‘for his exceptional service to the Bar Association and the profession of law’. The Council’s decision was unanimous (I know this because I wrote the minutes of that meeting). There was, and is, no dispute that Porter was one of Australia’s foremost advocates. Porter retired from the Bar, but not from passionately advocating justice for those caught up in our criminal justice system, including those members of society many of the community would be happy to have rot behind bars.

In the course of its seventy-five years, the ABC has maintained a variety of in-house live music ensembles, including symphony orchestras, radio choruses, dance bands, a show band, military band and string quartet. In its capacity as a concert agency, the national broadcaster has been responsible for touring an astonishing array of artists. Claudio Arrau, John Barbirolli, Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, Rafael Kubelík, Yehudi Menuhin, Birgit Nilsson, Eugene Ormandy, Artur Schnabel, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky all made at least one visit to our shores, thanks to the concert-giving activities of the ABC. High-end classical music traffic in and out of the country has been so intense over the years that, at one point, piano legend Arthur Rubinstein crossed paths with violin virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman in remote Daly Waters in the Northern Territory (their inbound and outbound planes were refuelling at the time). To the Polish-born classical music celebrities, outback Australia in 1937 must have seemed as strange and unlikely a meeting place as deepest, darkest Congo. Rubinstein couldn’t resist exclaiming to his startled friend, ‘Dr Huberman, I presume!

I am embarrassed by my deck. It is well designed, sturdily built and a congenial place on a balmy evening. The problem is that the deck is made with tropical hardwood, logged from a rainforest in South-East Asia. Not only have I added to Australia’s yawning trade deficit, I have also contributed to the decline of the globe’s equatorial lungs.

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

There are few times we use words related to what we throw away in any sort of positive manner; if, for example, this weren’t a nuanced, careful book, I might call it trash. Certainly, one might refer to, say, a crime novel or a Jerry Bruckheimer film as ‘trash’, but mean it with love and affection, and ‘wasted’ or ‘trashed’ are words used with affection and some pride by people when referring to drug-fuelled exploits. In general, though, we use such words – trash, junk, garbage, waste, rubbish – in a pejorative sense, and it is this sense of waste that Hawkins wants to challenge and complicate in this brief study.

The cover of Judith Godden’s biography of Lucy Osburn, the founder of modern nursing in Australia, is dominated by a ghostly white statuette of Florence Nightingale. Lucy herself appears in a bottom corner, photographed with a book in hand, an insignificant figure dressed in black silk, with a white cap over a severe hairstyle. At times, it seems as if Nightingale is going to overshadow the book, too. But despite her largely unsuccessful attempts to carry out the wishes of the ‘lady with the lamp’ in New South Wales, Osburn did succeed in creating conditions whereby scientific practices could be introduced into nursing in Australia, though she failed to convince the medical establishment that women could be trusted with medical knowledge or were capable of managing hospitals.

Tom Uren was a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway during World War II, a professional boxer in his youth and one of the dominant voices of the Australian left for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Martin Flanagan offers a wide-ranging reflection on Uren’s life, drawing on his experience growing up in the working-class Sydney suburb of Balmain to his days as minister for urban and regional development in Gough Whitlam’s government. In doing so, The Fight conveys the resilient and visionary spirit that was central to Uren’s character. But Flanagan’s stated purpose is much more than biographical; his aim is to show the need in contemporary Australian society for the passion and vision Uren displayed throughout his life.

‘The stories you will read in this book have been written primarily from memory and many years after the fact. Everything within these pages is true in essence, polished by how I experienced it and as I remember it.’

Presented in three parts on a canvas of time and distance, Pip Newling’s first work of non-fiction recounts her time as a barkeeper in two remote northern Australian communities, Halls Creek and Mataranka. Blondie, as she comes to be known, is a restless and strong-willed 23-year-old in 1990, when she sets out to find ‘the real, the experience, the education’. These towns – communal outposts where race, sex, heat, isolation and desperation collide – are well equipped to provide them. Newling relates her experiences through a series of vignettes, full of memory’s spaces and slippages, but with a definite temporal dimension, a sense of time traced. Such is their impact, the stories probably didn’t need a gifted writer to bring them to life.

In his opening sentence, Andrew Ford explains that, ‘The seventy-something pieces in this volume were written over fifteen years for a range of publications and occasions’. Indeed, in the sixty-eight titles that constitute Undue Noise, forty-four of which began life in the ABC organ 24 Hours, Ford confronts us as critical theorist, copious reviewer of music, text and film, diarist, sleeve note writer, radio commentator and university lecturer.