THE NATION REVIEWED

“‘This Sunday every F*cking Aussie in the Shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day … Bring your mates down and let’s show them this is our beach and they’re never welcome back.’” 

So ran the ‘call to arms’ text message that prompted the infamous Cronulla riots. The violence seen at Cronulla Beach on Sunday, 11 December brought Sydney’s – and indeed the nation’s – inter-racial tensions to a terrifying head. Then it all went quiet. Five years on, Malcolm Knox revisits that tumultuous summer to ask: Could it happen again?

Plus, in “Fat of the Land”, Alyssa McDonald weighs up our expanding defence force; in “Christmas Blues”, Tim Rogers scruffs up his hair and gets festive; and in “Court Order”, Anna Funder meets a netball great who’s centre court in fighting prejudice in sport. 

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“In Australia, Sheikh Chami says, 99% of [Muslim Australian] women who want a divorce get it, usually to their husbands’ dismay. ‘Men don’t understand it,’ he shrugs. ‘They still think they’re the kings of their home.’”

In “The Way to the Watering Hole”, Sally Neighbour addresses controversial calls to recognise sharia law and introduce formal arbitration sharia courts. Australia’s Muslim population – 400,000 and growing – is increasingly turning to Islamic clerics to resolve matters of marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance in accordance with sharia principles. The Gillard government has pushed to reform taxation laws to entice the lucrative Islamic banking and finance sector to Australia; has a parallel legal system earned its place?   

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“It was a very different time. Chairman Mao was only ten years dead and the reform era eight years old. Intellectuals – poets, writers, critics and philosophers – were the rock stars of the age.” ”

In “A Nobel Affair”, Linda Jaivin provides a unique perspective on Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident who has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. While living in China in the 1980s, Jaivin met Xiaobo and came to understand his politics and character, and learn of the threat he faced from Chinese authorities for his views. In the new millennium, Jaivin asks why China – an emerging superpower – still fears Xiaobo’s words.   

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“I now have the luxury of putting on my cossie, robe and flip-flops, pressing an elevator button and arriving at a heavenly pool. During workday hours, I’m often the only one there: no being a caboose in a train of lap swimmers. And, yes, I know how lucky I am.”

In “An Otter’s Life”, Kate Jennings traces a potted history of swimming, from crawl-stroking to doggie paddle, high-tech competition swimming to open-sea marathons. Reflecting on a fearless childhood riding the surf at Narrabeen and playing in the channels at Hanwood, Jennings continues to revel in the deep end.  

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“When I first stepped outside the walls of the Old City this morning, the sheer ugliness of Damascus nearly knocked me off my feet. Raucous, traffic-choked, yellowish squalor as far as the eye could see – it was like tumbling into the pit of Gehenna.”

In “Secret Worlds”, Robert Dessaix time-travels in Syria. Walking through mazes of the Old City of Damascus and dodging cars in the New, he ponders past civilisations and hallucinates in history. As a sole traveller and lover of dogs, Dessaix negotiates his differences with the people he meets to find enchantment.

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“In a fashionable cafe, five men in shirts and ties sit near me at a circular table. First I think they are having a business meeting. Then I realise they are praying.”

In “While Not Writing a Book”, Helen Garner opens her diaries to show fragments of her every day. In a series of poignant entries written over the course of a summer, Garner records moments with her grandchildren, the tears she “pops” for the election of President Obama, and the experience of the arrival of long-awaited rain, bringing beauty to daily life.  

SUMMER READING

For the first time, the Monthly makes a fiction offering for summer:

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MJ Hyland lets us fantasise about a life of luxury – 

“Trudy’s always talked about how we’re going to be millionaires, how we’ll take a journey on a luxury cruise-liner from Southampton to Sydney, how the ship will be all lit up like a private city in the middle of the ocean, a thousand people asleep in their beds.”  

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Christos Tsiolkas makes us sit up and listen to the sounds of the young Palestinian band The Gaza Strips –

“Over the words of the Prophet, the whining Anglo-Celtic snarl of Mr Johnny Rotten blasted … A thundering roll of electronic beats, pumping faster than a heart racing on pure uncut speed, and the urgent rap in broken English begins.”

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And Murray Bail transports us from the heavy streets of Vienna out onto the open sea –

“‘Have you noticed,’ she said on the third or fourth day, ‘the motion of the ship draws words out of us. Words that I, for one, wouldn’t normally say?’

He was conscious of the linen sleeve on the rail, almost touching his.”

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Plus, there’s a new poem by David Malouf.

ARTS & LETTERS

“[John Blanchfield] told me of being 20 years old and driving to a Brisbane pub to be picked up in a van and taken to a lift in the basement of one of the city department stores. The lift would deliver him to a makeshift stage near the record department where 300 to 400 girls would be waiting. He’d mime to his latest single and then be bustled back to the lift with his clothes and his composure in shreds.”

In “Scream”, Robert Forster reflects on the nature of pop stardom in Australia during the very heady ’60s and ’70s – a time when Countdown gave the people their musical fix in “glorious, eye-averting colour”, and fandom was feverish. Travelling to greatly varied parts of the country, Forster interviews five legendary figures of the music scene – four pop singers: Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe, John Paul Young and John Blanchfield; and star manager Glenn Wheatley – to celebrate the endless possibility of a time when everyone was young.

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“At the bottom of our descent is a vaulting space like a cathedral nave with walls of golden sandstone that look as if they’ve been hauled from some pharaoh’s palace but have in fact been cut from the site. ‘This will be the bar,’ [David Walsh] tells me, ‘it’s the first thing you’ll see. We’ll have functions here, rock bands, DJs, all kinds of events.’ Then he points to an area adjacent to the bar. ‘Just along here will be a little cemetery where your ashes can be interred.’”

In “High Priest”, Amanda Lohrey visits the Moorilla estate on the Derwent in Hobart’s north to see the Museum of Old and New Art in its final stages of evolution (for the time being, at least). Lohrey interviews MONA’s creator, David Walsh, to learn something of this often elusive professional gambler, and of his vision for this very unconventional museum.

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Plus, in “Man of Wood”, Robert Manne evaluates John Howard’s memoir, Lazarus Rising; in “Magical Thinking”, Aravind Adiga analyses the follies of VS Naipaul’s view of Africa as expressed in The Masque of Africa; and Luke Davies reviews Tom Hooper’s much anticipated The King’s Speech.