THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"In a crude sort of way, politically speaking, as Zanesville goes so goes the country. Like Ohio itself, roughly equal numbers reside either side of the political divide. Mayor Butch Zwelling is a Democrat, and in New Concord, a few miles east, the ace pilot, astronaut and 1984 Democratic presidential candidate and former senator John Glenn has lived most of his life. Drive the suburban streets and the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin signs populate lawns in about equal proportion, sharing the turf as they must with prospective senators, sheriffs, judges and the like, and various ‘propositions', all to be determined on the same day as the vote for president takes place."

In "Once Upon a Time in America", Don Watson reports on the last days of the American election campaign from Zanesville, a swing city in the all-important swing state of Ohio. Talking with locals and attending rallies, he captures the heightened mood of a country on the brink of change, and offers an eloquent analysis of Obama's success and McCain's struggle to engage the populace.

"‘I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,' Obama wrote. Not entirely blank, surely: change; hope; belief; cool, single-minded resolve - for his followers, Obama projects half a dozen qualities that add up to ‘Yes, we can.' But the big message is unity, binding a divided nation with a sense of common purpose. A blank screen he may wish to be, but there is no denying that he is also a saviour, not a preacher; a figure to believe in and around whom the sad and angry can congregate. People talk about how his campaign has revitalised not only democracy in America, but communities as well. You also get the feeling that, for the duration of the campaign at least, he is revitalising lives, souls." 

In "Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow", Galarrwuy Yunupingu looks back on decades of involvement in the struggle for Aboriginal land rights. Covering his days as chairman of the Northern Land Council; meetings with prime ministers Fraser, Hawke and Rudd; and the recent Northern Territory intervention, this is both a profound and powerful statement about the resilience of a people and an indictment of the failed promises of successive federal governments.

"I am seeing now that too much of the past is for nothing. I have walked the corridors of power; I have negotiated and cajoled and praised and begged prime ministers and ministers, travelled the world and been feted; I have opened the doors to men of power and prestige; I have had a place at the table of the best and the brightest in the Australian nation - and at times success has seemed so close, yet it always slips away. And behind me, in the world of my father, the Yolngu world is always under threat, being swallowed up by whitefellas."

"What seems peculiar about the economic straits into which we have strayed is the relative benignity of conditions: low interest rates, low inflation, electoral continuity, a general sense of prosperity and unexampled degrees of financial literacy in members of the public. Not a lot needed to go wrong, it seems, for everything to go wrong. What happened to our sense of risk?"

In "Feeling Lucky", Gideon Haigh examines how our relationship to money has evolved over the past century and asks: what drives economic optimism?

"It seems not improbable that people have brought their gambling habits to investing, concluding that gains made there are best ploughed back into the pursuit of further riches, and also to borrowing, behaving more casually with money that was not in the strict sense theirs. A disastrous step, for while gambling and investing are often lazily elided, the two activities are readily distinguishable. Dice, cards, wheels: these involve risk, but not uncertainty; the outcomes may surprise, but the odds are computable. Events beyond the casino and racetrack: these are far less predictable."

"I loved writing Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005). Never have I written a book with such white-heat intensity; never have I taken more pleasure in writing a book. The problems began when I finished it. The book met with censorship - from quarters where you would not normally expect to encounter censorship. The book met with reviews that trotted out the standard prejudices about Beauvoir and Sartre. I came to feel as if I had produced a wayward teenager who in no way reflected my aspirations as a parent."

Plus, in "Going Private", acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley recounts the cross-continental legal wrangling over her book on Sartre and Beauvoir, and the deep conservatism and shallowness - a mix of prudishness and prurience - of contemporary culture that the publication brought to light.

"As public intellectuals, Sartre and Beauvoir told the truth more often than most of us care to do, or dare to do. They spoke out, they debunked myths and they exposed the ideologies that deprive people of their freedom. They wrote books that said things no one had dared to say before. They were hated for their brilliance, their non-conformity, their questioning of social conventions and resistance to taboos. Sartre was hated because he turned down the Nobel Prize, which he felt would compromise his independence. Beauvoir was hated because she refused to conform to the bourgeois stereotype of femininity. Today it is not just conservatives who despise and belittle them. Even people who like to think they are progressive judge them with condescending mockery."

THE NATION REVIEWED

In the Monthly Comment, Judith Brett argues that so long as we look to the Rudd government to protect us from economic recession, Labor will fail to manage a far greater risk and protect us from the threat of global climate change. Herein lies an opportunity for an Opposition desperate to reconnect with the electorate.

"Here is some advice for the Liberals, whose best chance of regaining political power soon is in the states. Fight the Labor governments on infrastructure, and on alternative water and energy provision; and rediscover the home as a place of production, not just of consumption. Encourage large water tanks and do whatever it takes to get solar panels onto our sunny rooftops. It may well not take a lot, as rainless day after rainless day panics more of the population into wanting to do something. The Liberal Party prides itself on being a practical party that has faith in people's capacity to make the best choices for themselves and their families. So give them a bit of a hand to make the best choices. This would be a public-private partnership with a difference."

In "Panic & Censor", David Marr looks at the government's response to the Bill Henson controversy, and its recently proposed internet censorship and restrictions on artists, and finds yet another collective panic getting out of hand.

"Art is being boxed in. Pictures newspapers wouldn't hesitate putting on their websites will be locked away forever because the artist or gallery or website can't get the permission of every parent of every child appearing in the image. Ask officers of the council what protection such rules offer real children from real harm, and their rather forlorn reply is that publication on the internet is by definition exploitation. They don't sound convinced. No wonder. This is being imposed on them by a government toying with the impossible dream of cleaning up the internet."

And in "The Ant & the Butterfly", John van Tiggelen is unexpectedly moved when he joins a tiny group of volunteers looking after a colony of the very rare Eltham Copper Butterfly.

"One day soon the caterpillars would spin themselves into pupae, then wrest themselves free as butterflies. What would the ants do then? Geoff didn't know. He wasn't much into musing. ‘I'm really carrying this on to honour Anne,' he said, without looking up, as he jotted down another caterpillar's particulars. ‘We did it together, but she was the conservationist, the one who loved nature so much that I couldn't help but be taken along. This was always her thing.'"

Plus, in "The Black Polo", Charles Firth takes on the mysterious case of a parked car in inner Sydney. Why is the vehicle still there, and where are its two occupants now? Why can't the authorities do anything? And what are the links between the case and a major publishing house, the prime minister and possible terrorist activity? Australia's answer to Truman Capote investigates.  

"By the time I visited the scene, the car was covered in bird excrement. Its roof and bonnet were plastered with a sticky residue. Perhaps that was because it had been sitting under a eucalyptus for weeks, but I couldn't be sure. I took a swab and bagged it. I'm pretty sure Chris Masters would have done the same thing. It might be a useful clue. It might even bring down the Queensland government. Then I noted that gumnuts lay across the roof of the car in an asymmetrical yet hauntingly beautiful arrangement that could only be the work of a great abstract artist, or chance. I scribbled a note on my pad. It might not have anything to do with the missing women, but it would be an elegant detail in my novelisation of the case."

There's also Alice Pung, in "Ally of the Dolls", enjoying the "familial feminine kinship" to be found in a rural doll's museum. "Dolls are mostly made in the image of women, children and babies. Ken is never as popular as Barbie ..."

ARTS & LETTERS

In "Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque", Luke Davies casts his vote on the new Oliver Stone film, W, the much-anticipated biopic about Dubya. Stone presents the outgoing president as an unreconstructed, unreflective good ol' boy - which may well be accurate, but which can also make for frustrating viewing.

"The narrative is framed by Bush's need to both break free from his father and win his father's approval, and the director knocks this into us with a mallet. In Stone's Freudian power struggle, Bush the Younger is cowed into seething, defiant resentment by Bush the Elder. For much of the film, George W is an ordinary redneck with a drinking problem and anger-management issues. But Stone's back-story is so overt that it seems cartoonish and simplistic. If that's really all there is to Bush's psychological drive, then what happened in the past eight years might indeed be all the more frightening. But it doesn't make the film an ounce more dramatically engaging."

In "Between a Muddle and a Mystery", Drusilla Modjeska examines Brian Dibble's biography of Elizabeth Jolley, Doing Life, and discovers that not even years of meticulous research are enough to demystify the inner life of an enigmatic writer. Jolley, one of the nation's most acclaimed authors, presented deliberately muddled versions of her past in a series of autobiographical novels; Dibble has focused on tracing the factual details of Jolley's life, first in England and later in Western Australia.  

"The explanation Dibble gives for Elizabeth's commitment to Leonard through a long and punishing marriage rests on a shared intellectual regard and understanding. I'm not convinced that this regard cut both ways - why, for instance, did Leonard not pay for her typing? - but I take the point that it was in a sense Leonard who made Elizabeth Jolley, the writer. It was he who suggested the use of her middle name; more importantly, she shadowed his university study of the English modernists, learning to read with a sophistication that would bear fruit in the late trilogy of novels, her modernist masterpiece published at the height of postmodernism. It might be a tribute to his education of her, but it is also a savage portrayal of a marriage. Good writing, they say, is the best revenge."

And in "Southern Discomfort", Juliana Engberg visits Hobart's forthcoming Museum of Old and New Art, the new Detached art space and the soon-to-be-revamped Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She uncovers the inspiring mix of individual enterprise and institutional collaboration that is propelling a burgeoning, and often confronting, island-state art scene.

"In Hobart's outer north, on a craggy jut of land on the Derwent River, entrepreneur David Walsh and his team are excavating sandstone to create a subterranean experience. Part Dr No lair, part Getty, this remarkable engineering feat will become the Museum of Old and New Art: a three-sub-storeyed structure to display Walsh's growing collection, and rotating exhibitions of contemporary art. There will be approximately 5800 square metres of gallery space for international art, including 1300 square metres for touring shows; a library; and a pavilion devoted to the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Not small by any measure ... Perhaps it's something in the water or the pinot, but Tasmania, once renowned principally for woodcraft and hobbity eco-business, has got cultural tourism in a big way."

Plus, in "Slippin'", Robert Forster wonders if Angus Young and the boys will ever act their middle age as he checks out the latest AC/DC album, the patchy Black Ice; and in "A Stockingful", Peter Craven offers eclectic summer-reading recommendations in his round-up of the 60-odd best books of 2008.

In this bumper issue of the magazine, there's also Meg Mundell on Amanda Lohrey's sea-change novella, Vertigo; Chris Womersley on Toni Morrison's first novel in five years, A Mercy; Mungo MacCallum on the new book From Little Things Big Things Grow; and Shane Maloney on the unlikely meeting, in the late nineteenth century, of Alfred Deakin and John Bunyan, who had been dead for 200 years.