Melbourne University Press
Alex O'Brien reviews 'Mr Snack and the Lady Water' by Brendan Shanahan
Much travel is unpleasant (with over-expectations, too many tourists, and long distances from Australia), but even the sedentary or timorous persist with it in some ‘misguided duty to culture’, as Brendan Shanahan describes in his first collection of essays, Mr Snack and the Lady Water. Assembling journeys from the mid-1990s until now, Shanahan recounts stories that range from the inequities of post-Apartheid South Africa to his experience with so-called ‘dental tourism’ in the Philippines. The result of these peripatetic years has been, as the book’s subtitle suggests, largely uneventful: lost to the author and this reader alike.
... (read more)There’s no ASIO file on me, not even a mention in someone else’s file, according to my keyword search. It’s almost insulting, given that I spent several years in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and later, as a Soviet historian in the United States in the Cold War 1970s, was suspected of being soft on communism. My father, the radical Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick, had an ASIO file, of course. They even trailed him in the 1950s – or at least trailed someone they thought was him, a man of ‘repulsive appearance’ wearing a hat and an overcoat, neither of which he possessed. He would have been tickled both by the surveillance and the blunder. They had a file on my mother, Dorothy Fitzpatrick, too, although they got her middle name wrong. It wasn’t from her days of real left-wing activity in the 1930s, but from the 1950s, years that were among her most miserable and least political, when she was doing a teachers’ training course at Mercer House and then teaching at the Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. To ASIO she was an also-ran to suspected communists of more dominant personality like Gwenda Lloyd; probably they included her mainly because of her marriage to Brian. ‘Same views as her husband’, one informant reported, which hardly does justice to a natural contrarian.
... (read more)Nick Hordern reviews 'Exit Wounds: One Australian's War On Terror' by John Cantwell with Greg Bearup
To go into any bookshop, if you can still find one, is to be amazed at the space devoted to militaria: endless shelves of books not just about the two world wars and Vietnam, but all wars in all times. This vicarious fascination with war echoes another phenomenon of our time: the rise of overt public respect for soldiers.
... (read more)Jane Goodall reviews 'Tales from the Political Trenches' by Maxine McKew
By its title, Tales from the Political Trenches promises reportage from the front line, eyewitness accounts of what really happens in the hidden zones of the political battlefield. The tales told here follow a rollercoaster sequence of political events: the meteoric rise of Kevin Rudd, Maxine McKew’s triumph over ...
... (read more)Joel Deane reviews 'Speechless: A year in my father’s business' by James Button
In 2008 I was asked to write speeches for then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It was a tempting offer. The trouble was that I would be based in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), not the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and would work as a public servant, not a political staffer ...
... (read more)Peter Menkhorst reviews 'Sentinel Chickens: What Birds Tell Us about Our Health and the World' by Peter Doherty
Why would a famous virologist and immunologist (and Nobel laureate) write a book linking birds, human diseases, and ecological degradation? The answer is partly that Peter Doherty obviously has a soft spot for birds and birdwatching. He argues that anyone with an enquiring mind and a natural history ...
... (read more)Ben Eltham reviews 'Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left' edited by Antony Lowenstein and Jeff Sparrow
Few would suggest that global capitalism is in rude, unqualified, health. Greece has just voted on whether to stay in the Euro, global markets continue their rollercoaster trajectory, and millions of workers in advanced Western economies remain jobless. With much of the rich world halfway into a lost decade, capitalism is suffering another of the periodic and devastating crises that seem an ineradicable aspect of its nature.
... (read more)Judith Armstrong reviews 'Demanding the Impossible: Seven Essays on Resistance' by Sylvia Lawson
Sylvia Lawson is an award-winning and highly respected essayist and film critic. Her subject matter, though generally Australian, is also concerned with our nearer neighbours and with the culture and politics f the world beyond. The theme of this new collection is resistance to oppression in seven parts of the world.
... (read more)Joel Deane reviews 'The Sweet Spot: How Australia made its own luck – and could now throw it all away' by Peter Hartcher and 'The Fog On The Hill: How NSW Labor lost its way' by Frank Sartor
On 7 November, Paul Keating appeared on ABC TV’s 7.30 to promote his new book of speeches, After Words. Keating’s response to Leigh Sales’s first question about political leadership was instructive:
... (read more)Dean Biron reviews 'Meanjin Vol. 70, No. 3' edited by Sally Heath
As with all such collections, this issue of Meanjin mixes the inspired with the modest, the fascinating with the mediocre. That is of no consequence: in this fraught cultural age, all that matters is that journals like Meanjin survive and provide a forum for both established and aspiring writers.
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