THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"To my surprise I became the author of the official history of Australia, the one that the Howard government distributed to migrants so that they could prepare for the new citizenship test. The draft I wrote disappeared into the offices of the immigration minister and the prime minister. At some stages it looked like it would not survive or that a few sentences would be incorporated into an altogether different version. But finally it emerged more or less as I had written it - with some additions and deletions ... Its survival is surprising because in its organisation it defied the policy of the government that commissioned it - for it is arranged thematically and not as a continuous narrative. John Howard made narrative the touchstone of good history. He called a History Summit to get a commitment to narrative from the history professionals; he ended his TV election debate with Kevin Rudd with a promise that if he were re-elected, a narrative history of Australia would be part of the school curriculum. But a continuous narrative is not what migrants get to read - and I believe their understanding of their new homeland will be the better for it." 

In "Australia: The Official History", John Hirst tells the inside story of how the federal government interfered with the history of the nation he was commissioned, in the wake of the History Summit, to write for prospective citizens.

"Like publishers, government departments want things in a hurry and then you hear nothing for weeks or months. I was worried that my history was being chopped around and becoming part of a work that I could not endorse. If the government's history came under attack, my words would be traced back to me and I would be in the firing line. I was particularly worried that my stark account of European-Aboriginal relations would be dropped or rendered anodyne ..."

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"I know Christine Milne to be a quietly effective networker across a broad spectrum of community groups, a Green who resists any tendency to political ghettoisation. Whereas it's hard to imagine some Greens belonging to any other party, Milne could easily have become a Labor politician and, had things gone otherwise, a state premier. Instead, she is Bob Brown's heir apparent as the Greens' national leader ... The charge that Greens are urban latte-drinking armchair progressives irks her. ‘It confounds me,' she says, ‘when people say, ‘What have the Greens got to do with rural Australia?' Primary industry is all about sustainability issues. Biosecurity, quarantine, trade: all of those things are part of the Greens' agenda.'"

In "Green Christine", Amanda Lohrey profiles Tasmanian Senator Christine Milne, tracking her journey from farm kid to atypical activist and, eventually, state and federal politics. "She has never been on the organised Left," Lohrey writes, "nor has she ever seemed a stereotypical Wilderness Society person. ‘Well, yes,' Milne says, laughing. ‘I'm more your CWA. I still like a good passionfruit sponge.'" All the same, Milne is renowned for her negotiation skills: Graham Richardson describes her as "one tough lady", and her many achievements in Tasmanian politics during the '90s bear this out.

"Milne is impatient with the conventional wisdom in Australia that minority governments are something akin to an unnatural disaster. Many European governments, she points out, are minority governments. ‘The thing about balance-of-power politics is that it allows space for politicians to change their mind, to support things that they know are right and want to achieve but that their own constituency won't allow.'"

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"To be unforgiven is no great shame. A cramp of nausea your bowels can't clear. Sweat itches your hairline, stains your pillow.

Take heart - you're not going to wither in your bed. Your eyes soon open on a blue, breathing day. Your taste for food returns. Music offers its melodies.

You iron a shirt. You shave and there's your face again, clean, even a glaze of week-old tan. You've had a bad night, but no demons carved their initials in your soul.

That said, there is remembering to do. It's what unforgiveness believes is your burden. It's what unforgiveness has the bitter power to do."

In "Unforgiven", memoirist, poet and journalist Craig Sherborne offers a harrowing and gripping account of adult life, following his two acclaimed tales of childhood, Hoi Polloi and the recently published Muck.

"She says if I embrace her every hour on the hour, she might believe that I care for her. It too becomes a ritual. I begin to dread the touch of her. Her complaining voice sets my teeth grating. I feel a cold crawling sensation along my limbs. Sometimes she smiles when the embrace is done. Sometimes she screams that I am faking it for the sake of duty."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"[In his writings of 2006] Kevin Rudd put his finger on the central contradiction of the contemporary Western Right: simultaneous support for the revolutionary dynamic of an unbridled capitalist economy, and the ambition for the restoration, through the preaching of a doctrine of moral conservatism, of an earlier social order based on religion, family and community. Rudd saw in Howard's new workplace-relations legislation a concretisation of this contradiction, in which a government committed to family values and family stability was simultaneously encouraging its members to see themselves as factors of production ... Under contemporary conditions, Rudd argued, the neo-liberal Right had only three foundational values: liberty, security and prosperity. Rudd proposed the need to add to them three additional values derived from the Christian socialist and social-democratic traditions: equity, community and sustainability. Rudd spoke about asylum seekers, the challenge of global poverty and of our generation's moral obligation to ensuring the wellbeing of the planet with a moral directness that we had not heard from a senior Labor figure since the fall of Keating." 

In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne looks at the two biggest questions raised by the ascension of Rudd Labor: Why did the Howard government lose office? And what does the Rudd victory mean? He describes his "modest" anticipation of change during the next three years, renewing his call for "cautious optimism" and reiterating his hope for a government in possession of a "generous moral vision". 

"I must admit I would have voted for Labor in 2007 if it had been led by the drover's dog (or even by Bill Hayden). But in fact I voted Labor with enthusiasm and as a convinced Ruddite because of the two articles he published in October and November 2006. What these articles revealed was that, almost alone among the members of the Beazley front bench, Rudd saw the need to distinguish social-democratic Labor from the twin neo-liberal and neo-conservative philosophies of the Howard government."

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"The skirmish between Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds owed nothing to the spur of the moment or the heat of the contest. Harbhajan knew he had a way of irking Symonds; they had even discussed it off the field. The Australians knew Harbhajan to be a provocateur; the Australians entered willingly into the confrontation, aware of exactly what was acceptable boorishness under Paragraph 3.3 of the International Cricket Council Code of Conduct and what was not. Thus did a relatively small objective, a short-term tactical edge on an opponent, masquerade as a very big issue."

In "Monkey Business", Gideon Haigh laments the way sledging has become a rote-learned aspect of contemporary cricket, encouraged - even expected - at the game's lowest levels and perfected in the uniform verbal intimidation prevalent in the international arena. Why, he wonders after speaking with a disillusioned young cricketer, can't a game so varied in its skills, and in the cultures that play it, be equally varied in its behaviours?

"As it usually does, the charge of racism immediately deprived everyone of rational thought, entailing the inevitable he-said-she-said claim and counterclaim. And if Australia's cricketers are the world's biggest bullies on the field, India's administrators are easily their match off it. At once there were threats that the Indians would take their bat, their ball and, most importantly, their money home."

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Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Ashley Hay meets zookeeper Sally Padey and the Mogo Zoo's rare white lions; Clive James reveals and dissects the perfectly bad sentence; and Kate Rossmanith investigates the weeds that have invaded our borders, from the prickly pear to the latest crop of pests.

ARTS & LETTERS

"The strength and beauty of Carey's novel lies in the perspective of his very young protagonist. [Seven-year-old] Che is bewildered, frightened, vulnerable, wise, completely loveable. His grandmother, protectively, had banned both TV and newspapers from his universe, so Che has had to assemble his history and his identity from overheard fragments and from furtively collected newspaper clippings ..."

In "Fugitive Days", novelist Janette Turner Hospital places Peter Carey's latest book, His Illegal Self, within the tradition of writing that critiques the politics of the present by exploring the politics of the past: Arthur Miller's The Crucible, EL Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. Based loosely on the most infamous American underground group of the '70s, The Weathermen, Carey's novel is a study in the contradictions of revolutionary movements, not least their "perverse habit of erecting, with disturbing rapidity, systems as rigidly repressive as those which they have sworn to overthrow".

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"Jean-Dominique Bauby was 41, good-looking, the debonair editor of French Elle, when, as a result of a massive stroke, he suffered the rare condition known as locked-in syndrome, in which the brain stem is compromised and the brain cannot give instructions to the rest of the body. In Bauby's case, only his left eyelid was functional. His brain worked perfectly: he could see, hear, understand, remember."

In "Eye Witness", Monthly film critic Luke Davies is captivated by Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, based on the memoir by, and shot largely from the perspective of, the paralysed Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric). The film's beauty is the result of Schnabel's use of this perspective, which tenderly reveals Bauby's inestimable frustration - and his determination to tell his story, semaphored letter by letter at geologic speed.

"The Diving Bell is worth seeing simply for the serene formality of its experimentation. Yet there are many more reasons to see it. It's airy and light and exquisite to look at, yet tenderly haunting. ‘I wanted this film to be a tool, like his book, a self-help device that can help you handle your own death,' said Schnabel. ‘It is his last window on the world.'"

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In "Before Little England", Nicholas Shakespeare reviews James Boyce's new history, Van Diemen's Land, a "valuable reappraisal of the first 50 years of Australia's second-oldest state". Van Diemen's Land dispels the myth of Tasmania as a hostile wilderness - the myth perpetuated by Marcus Clarke in For the Term of His Natural Life, for example - and reveals it to be one of the most inviting environments for European settlers and convicts. The book also delves into the raw, traumatic history of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

"Boyce's achievement is to rescue his island's narrative from the small middle-class elite who sought to recreate a ‘Britain of the south' - and whose Georgian mansions survive to tell their tale - and to put it in the hands of the overwhelming majority: the convicts and ex-convict stock-keepers, shepherds and bushrangers who were able to forge a close, very un-English identity with the land, but whose bark huts have rotted away."

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There's also Deyan Sudjic on the new Manchester Civil Justice Centre, built by Melbourne-based architects Denton Corker Marshall; Robert Forster on the sunshiny pop of The Monkees, a band up there with the likes of The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground and The Byrds, but derided by keepers of the rock canon; Greg McLaren on leading American poet Robert Hass's long-awaited collection Time and Materials, which recently won the American National Book Award; and Shane Maloney on the time the Wild One, Johnny O'Keefe, met American comic Jack Benny.