THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Patrick White's last bestseller appeared at the end of an amazing final run that began with the Nobel Prize in 1973, included the mighty Twyborn Affair and climaxed in 1981 with the book that sold more than any other in his career, Flaws in the Glass. Even before his death, his reputation had begun its long, slow - but not uninterrupted - slide ... Somewhere along the track, for reasons that go deeper than publishers' neglect, we stopped buying the distinguished writers of our own recent past. White was one of three Australians of his generation with big literary reputations at home and abroad. None sells strongly now. Nielsen BookScan, that pitiless surveyor of the trade, tells me that last year White's 13 titles in print sold only 2728 copies. Shirley Hazzard did better: her eight sold 4270 copies. Christina Stead's seven sold 199. That's not a misprint."

In "Patrick White: The Final Chapter", White biographer David Marr reveals the gem within the unpublished - and until recently, unread - manuscripts of Australia's most lauded fiction writer. The abandonment in 1981 of the novel "The Hanging Garden" was, Marr writes, "a watershed in White's life and a loss, a damn shame, for Australian writing". Through Marr's own diaries and revelations in personal documents purchased by the National Library, the essay also offers a new reading of White's late years, including his death and that of his partner for half a century, Manoly Lascaris.

"We had a deal that after the Life went to the publishers, White could see the text for the purpose of identifying errors ... He made me sit with him as he read the manuscript through again, slowly, page by page, complaining and laughing - always at his own jokes. He loved in particular reading what he'd written in the letters he'd begged everyone to destroy. On some of the sticky issues he finally acknowledged the truth, even admitting one morning that despite all the abuse he had heaped on his mother over the years, his life was the realisation of her ambition for him: to be a writer. I counted this a late victory in a long tussle. He identified a couple of dozen errors of fact and corrected spelling mistakes in several languages but did not ask me to cut or change a line. But Lascaris was humiliated to find a stranger in the text ..."

"In late October 2006, in time for Christmas shoppers, the second edition of The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet was released, at a launch attended by Julie Bishop, the then federal minister for science. The second edition contains a page discussing red meat and colorectal cancer, including this statement: ‘Studies have shown that fresh red meat (beef and lamb) is not a significant risk factor for colorectal cancer.' Why the clear discrepancy between what the CSIRO's researchers were telling it privately and its advice to the public? Had any new evidence emerged to alter the opinions of its researchers? Certainly the board and CEO documents don't mention any new research containing contrary findings."

In "Confounders: The CSIRO and the Total Wellbeing Diet", Geoff Russell asks why the best-selling diet from Australia's leading research organisation recommends potentially dangerous amounts of red meat, despite two major reports linking red-meat intake and bowel cancer.

"In 2007, more than 5 million meth laboratories were detected in the US. In Australia, the number is fewer than 500; but in a small population living around the rim of a large continent, that represents an enthusiastic uptake of a swiftly made, relatively cheap drug ... Roughly 90% of the pseudoephedrine used in illegal labs to make meth as powder (of 10% purity) or base (of 20% purity) comes in tablet form from retail pharmacies. Police photographs taken at lab busts show packets of Sudafed (or Demazin, Zyrtec Decongestant, Home Brand Cold & Flu, or any of a dozen or so other commercial preparations) piled up like briquettes waiting for the stoker's shovel."

And in "Running Dogs: The Legal Trade Behind the Manufacture of Methamphetamines", pharmacist and journalist Gail Bell takes us to the chemist's counter, where sales of cold and flu tablets containing pseudoephedrine are now monitored by the authorities; into the world of the "pseudo runners", the people who source the tablets for criminal gangs; and finally to the clandestine labs, where cooks turn pseudoephedrine into street drugs such as ice.

"Joe's goal is quick profit based on fast turnaround. For a competent runner working for cash, a day's work might yield ten packets of, say, Demazin, sold to a dealer for $600, yielding a healthy net profit after subtracting pharmacy costs and petrol, not to mention time and anxiety. These runners know who sells and who doesn't; which pharmacies have CCTV operating; which staff inside an otherwise straight shop will turn a blind eye. They use aliases; possess multiple IDs; spout a line about an ear, nose and throat specialist's recommendation ..."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"‘Enter poor Brendan Nelson,' John Hewson wrote in the Australian Financial Review last month. ‘He'd struggle even if he were Nelson Mandela.' This is something of an exaggeration; I am sure that had Dr Nelson spent 27 years in prison and then emerged as the saviour of his people and his country, even the Canberra press gallery would accord him a certain amount of respect. As things are, though, its members can only report what they see; and what they see is a neophyte leader floundering in the opinion polls and being treated with contempt even by his own side ... However, there is no doubt that Hewson's basic premise is right: the coverage of the current leader of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition has been uniformly unkind. But this does not mean it has been unfair."

In the Monthly Comment, Mungo MacCallum looks at the fate of Australia's Opposition leaders, particularly those who are first up after an election defeat. History provides an unpleasant lesson for Nelson, the man who as education minister wanted "a flagpole in every yard and a poster of Simpson's donkey in every classroom". "It is no more than realistic," MacCallum says, "to suggest that Nelson's chances of success in 2010 are, at best, somewhere between Buckley's and none."

"Since the end of World War II, Australia has had 17 different federal Opposition leaders, four of whom (Gough Whitlam, Andrew Peacock, John Howard and Kim Beazley) have held the position on two separate occasions. Between them they have contested 25 elections, not counting separate polls for the half-Senate. And just six of them actually won, and one of those (Malcolm Fraser) was appointed prime minister before doing so. So the odds on Nelson, or for that matter anyone else, joining that exclusive band are not good. Clearly it takes a rare combination of talent and circumstances to prevail, and at present the circumstances are not in Nelson's favour. And even if things do change, here is the killer: not a single first-up Opposition leader has ever won a federal election."

And in "If Those Trains Had Only Run ...", historian Robyn Annear revisits the infamous Sunshine rail disaster.

"God works for V/Line, the Victorian country rail service. Actually, it's God for short; full name Godfrey, he's an ex-conductor now employed on station duties. ‘Pass us that stapler, God,' you'll hear a colleague say to him. But not even having God on the payroll could, in all probability, have averted the disaster that befell the Ballarat and Bendigo ‘up' trains on Easter Monday 1908 at Sunshine, 12 kilometres from Melbourne ... Upwards of a thousand people were packed aboard two trains hurtling towards Sunshine. It being the end of a four-day holiday, extra carriages had been borrowed from the suburban lines, making the trains twice their usual length. Even so, they were stuffed beyond capacity, with 12 passengers squeezed into six-seat compartments and yet more standing in the corridors."

Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Alice Pung takes part in a Buddhist retreat and is troubled by the sounds of silence; and birdwatcher and author Sean Dooley tells the real story of the much-maligned Orange-bellied Parrot, an endangered bird unfairly accused of stopping major infrastructure projects.

ARTS & LETTERS

In "Kitchen-Table Candour", novelist and critic Robert Dessaix reviews Helen Garner's much-anticipated new book, admiring its "superbly refined" prose yet taking issue with its presentation as a novel.

"Whatever sort of writer Helen Garner is - tribal storyteller, memoirist, reporter, diarist, essayist - nobody's words on the page command attention quite like hers. To call a book a novel, though, does raise certain expectations in the reader which Helen Garner never sets out to satisfy in The Spare Room. Why should she? The Spare Room is a hard-hitting, flinty-eyed report from the front, not a novel. It's a report, in fact, from two fronts: one in a cancer quack's surgery and the other a house in Melbourne's northern suburbs where Helen (that's the character's name), riding a surge of pity, love and anger, is looking after her dying friend, Nicola, for three weeks while she undergoes a miracle cancer cure. It reads like the monologue of an angry, exhausted friend, sitting across the kitchen table from you, telling you, since you haven't asked, what looking after poor, mad Nicola was like in gritty detail. She's a woman of penetrating intelligence, this friend of yours, plain-spoken and not given to lyrical effusions ... It's a performance, of course - you know that. Shaped, rehearsed and dotted with lines she knows will cut you to the quick, such as, ‘The station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer.' And it's a performance calculated to evoke empathy for Helen, not Nicola."

And in "Embracing the Inner Bunny", novelist Linda Jaivin is back at the raunch, taking on three new Australian books about the effects of pornography and raunch culture: Princesses & Pornstars, Consuming Innocence and The Porn Report.

"Society was awash in filth. Young women chased fantasy and titillation at the expense of their mental and physical health, not to mention proper relationships. And they couldn't keep their hands off themselves. Something new had appeared on the scene, something dangerous. Respectable commentators agreed it was the source of all this trouble. It was the novel. The authors of The Porn Report cite the moral panic around fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reminder that aspects of popular culture will always get people's knickers in a twist. Today, it's the explosion of pornography, particularly on the internet, and raunch culture, through which the aesthetics and values of porn have had an unprecedented influence on fashion and mores. Here, there's considerably more twist than knickers - think Bratz, Britney, porn-star chic and 12-year-olds learning to pole dance."

There's also Gideon Haigh on how Oil!, the novel by that great American socialist and muckraker Upton Sinclair, was reduced to gas in Paul Thomas Anderson's recent Oscar hit, There Will Be Blood; and Luke Davies critiques Tamara Jenkins' The Savages and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, two films about "horrible, horrible people".

Plus, David Day wades through Blood and Soil, Ben Kiernan's account of global genocide; Meg Mundell is enthralled by Australian writer Julia Leigh's new gothic novella, Disquiet; Justin Clemens assesses Poe: A Life Cut Short, Peter Ackroyd's latest literary biography; and Shane Maloney recounts the meeting of Jackey Jackey and Cape York's Yadhaykenu people.