THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"A series of major national and international financial crises over the past decade should have begun to give pause for reflection, intervention and action. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 caused large-scale economic and social devastation and led to a flurry of calls for a ‘new international financial architecture'. But these calls were always smugly discounted by the advanced economies as being primarily for the benefit of the Asian and other developing economies that had been caught up in the crisis. It was easier to blame ‘crony capitalism' than to look at the fundamentals of the neo-liberal orthodoxy (including unrestrained hedge-fund assaults on national currencies) that continued to govern global financial markets." 

In "The Global Financial Crisis", Kevin Rudd offers a comprehensive and lucid analysis of the current economic situation. In mid January, while on annual leave, the prime minister wrote this 7700-word essay that brings historical perspective to bear on the causes, precedents and ramifications of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Sheeting home much of the blame to the neo-liberal agenda that has prevailed in Western economies over the past 30 years, he outlines a series of broad reforms - many of which, he argues, must be undertaken on an unprecedented, global scale. This major essay on the most pressing issue of our time is a unique contribution from a sitting prime minister.

"The magnitude of the crisis and its impact across the world means that minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do. Two unassailable truths have already been established: that financial markets are not always self-correcting or self-regulating, and that government (nationally and internationally) can never abdicate responsibility for maintaining economic stability. These two truths in themselves destroy neo-liberalism's claims to any continuing ideological legitimacy, because they remove the foundations on which the entire neo-liberal system is constructed."

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"A paragraph of introductory piffle in Australia defines the outback as a place where ‘adventure and romance were a way of life'. Nothing could be less true. Hardship, privation and dying remain a way of life on our unromantic frontier, where adventures are as scarce as trees on the Nullarbor Plain. We know that the land we only marginally occupy will always be indifferent to human incursions; we also ruefully acknowledge our lack of moral right to possess it, since earlier settlers evicted its traditional owners."

In "Gone with the Wind", Peter Conrad turns his celebrated critical gaze to Baz Luhrmann's much-hyped, massive-budget epic Australia. In inimitable style, Conrad gives a no-holds-barred assessment of the film's excesses and disappointments, not least of which is Luhrmann's failure to envisage a credible, genuinely Australian narrative.

"Wanting his characters to be mythical embodiments of the land, Luhrmann organises a continental orgasm when Kidman and Jackman make love. Hot monsoonal rains drench them. The sky splits open, the earth heaves, and the camera giddily skims across Australia as rivers overflow and waterfalls froth. Back at the desert station it is suddenly Christmas, with wild flowers blooming from the fertilised earth. I wouldn't dream of impugning Jackman's virility, but I can't quite imagine that one man has the capacity to irrigate and inseminate the whole drought-parched nation."

"The ring has red, white and blue ropes; the Australian flag flies in each corner. This is family entertainment, Townsville-style. Barefoot toddlers roam around, following bigger kids who play on the fight's margins, while their parents watch on, hungry for a knockout. The dingy hall's alive with bloodlust and camaraderie. Waiting for the rains, everyone is covered in sweat. It's like we're all together in a fever, and as the delirium kicks in two mismatched women, one black and the other white, enter the ring."

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And in "Boxing for Palm Island", Chloe Hooper attends an amateur boxing match in North Queensland, where a group of young Palm Islanders, under the guidance of trainer and former champion boxer "Uncle" Ray Dennis, have given up "drugs and grog and street fights" for the ring. Complemented by a stunning series of photographs by Hamish Cairns, this beautifully crafted essay captures a very different kind of fight.

"The women look like wind-up toys, and as Noby Clay loses energy her movements become slower, jerkier; she's running out of power, while Rebecca Miller just keeps pounding. At last the bell sounds. The referee separates the women. Noby immediately moves in to hug Rebecca who, surprised, instinctually jabs her in the ribs, under those breasts swollen with milk. Then she recognises the embrace and returns it, smiling, baring her big white mouthguard."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Ian Harper's free-market friends rib him about his job: what's a liberal economist doing setting a minimum wage? Better a liberal economist, he replies, than anyone else. But he is rather bemused by how little Australian employers of the low-paid believe in the market. They rely on him to set and alter their wages. They are mostly happy to pay a decent wage but they want to be told what that is and they don't want to be undercut by a rogue employer; nor do they want to be ahead of the pack in the wages they pay."

In the Monthly Comment, John Hirst meets Professor Ian Harper, the first head of John Howard's Fair Pay Commission and a man of unexpected enthusiasms; a free-marketeer with a passion for public goods, and pipe organs.

"Harper is a good talker and performer; he tells of his work in public policy as drama, playing himself and all others verbatim, with full inflexion and gesture. He calls himself an academic economist but the skills he most enjoys using are political. He likes settling conflict, hearing both sides sympathetically, prodding antagonists to see a common purpose, finding a route beyond an impasse. He is an economist but not a labour economist, yet he was charged with fixing a minimum wage where he could use his skill in reconciling employers and employees. His work on the Melbourne Town Hall organ was in the same way political ..."

"Every year about half a million cars are removed from Australia's roads. The vast majority, about four in five, are crushed, shredded and recycled, but the ratio swings the other way on the dry side of the Divide. Somewhere en route to Wedderburn, beyond but not quite distinct from the tree-change line, it seemed I'd crossed another lifestyle contour: the scrap line. On one side there were no car carcasses. On the other they teemed like Tasmanian roadkill."

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In "Backyard Blitz", John van Tiggelen takes a tour of country Victoria with Big Tone and Little Tone, shire-employed Unsightly Properties Officers who must convince the locals to improve the sightliness of their towns.

"Initially, around four years ago, the shire's efforts to keep things tidy met with resistance. The Tones found people were attached to their debris for a tangle of reasons supplementary to slovenliness, such as sentimentality, shelter (for pets), defiance, family tradition - hard-up types have been hoarding scrap here since the days of the diggings - and even aesthetics. One property owner agreed to have his Holden bodies carted off on the condition his neighbour's Fords went as well. Others would co-operate, only to amass fresh piles within months ..."

And in "Open Market", Cate Kennedy offers a contemporary bush Christmas tale. It's Christmas Day at a small rural supermarket, and intriguing buying patterns emerge - intriguing to Kennedy, but less so the seasoned staff.

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"The first customer walked in at 6.03. It was a bloke, and he bought a newspaper. The second customer, a few minutes later, did the same. Until 7.30 they were all blokes, all buying newspapers, ice, cigarettes or milk. After 9 am, when the bottle shop opened, they would add beer to their purchases, Leanne declared confidently. The first woman to enter, at 7.35, raced distractedly through the aisles and headed to the register, before remembering something else and hurrying back. This happened again, and then again ... ‘If I were to sum it up,' Leanne said, ‘I'd say the women are here buying cooking accessories, and the blokes are here buying reading and calming accessories.' She gave another peal of laughter. ‘Except the bloke who came in mid-morning and bought a pack of condoms off me. I thought, well, he's having a merry Christmas!'" There's also Jo Lennan, in "Representing", offering a delightful personal portrait of the recently retired High Court Judge Michael Kirby, for whom she worked as an associate (and photographer); and Alice Pung, in "Looking Sheepish", feeling decidedly uncomfortable as she searches for the perfect gifts to take overseas, following her father's advice that "sheep's placenta for the face is all the rage among Chinese women."

ARTS & LETTERS

"Faulting the factual fidelity of Shane Warne: The Musical is pointless: you might as well bring an elephant to a production of Oklahoma! to see if the corn reaches eye-high. Because Eddie Perfect has gotten something brilliantly, uncannily right: he has made his musical a love story. On the face of it, Warne is a man of sex rather than of love; but he is also an incurable romantic. As his mother, Brigitte, is reported to have said: 'Shane's a good boy. He just can't keep his dick in his pants.'"

In "The Comeback Kid", Gideon Haigh applauds comedian Eddie Perfect's song-and-dance rendition of Shane Warne's brilliant career: from the record-breaking highs to the tabloid-news lows, the stuff of cricketing legend makes for cracking musical theatre.

"There's an expansive generosity about the two-and-three-quarter hours that is quite Warnesque; songs are tossed up as gamely as leg breaks, then as cunningly as flippers and zooters. It is Warne's past, and all our pasts. The year 2000, once the very definition of the future, now savours of nostalgia: before September 11, economic pessimism and climate catastrophism, when a sportsman's peccadilloes still had the power to shock. These days, that's entertainment - as Warnie always sort of said it was."

"If we didn't have childhoods we'd be much better people. We'd start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn't have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone our skill for these. If by age 14 we haven't learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we're backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others."

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In "Unhappy Families", Craig Sherborne enters the bleak world of Sonya Hartnett's new novel, Butterfly, in which the "spotty, fatty, self-hating 14-year-old" Plum struggles with the everyday banalities of family life. Rejecting the labelling of Hartnett as a "young adult" author, Sherborne argues that her body of work resonates well beyond any such categorisation.

"I don't know if Butterfly is better than other books by Sonya Hartnett. At this stage in the post-reading process I don't even view it as another book by this author, but another chapter in the one great book she is writing: the recurring themes, mood and tone, the same character types ... Butterfly doesn't have the obvious savagery of some of Hartnett's earlier books, but that's not the layer of her vision being explored here. Seething banality has its own savagery - it is a quiet dissembler. Such is the quality of Hartnett's prose, it wouldn't surprise me if in six months or six years a paragraph from Butterfly pops in to my head to chime with an element of real-life experience."

And in "Nature Boy", Robert Forster finds himself once again enchanted and transported away by an extraordinary voice as he listens to Antony and the Johnson's The Crying Light, the much-anticipated follow up to their 2004 breakthrough record.

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"This is a beautiful album, and those coming to Antony and the Johnsons for the first time will find it glittering and arresting and it will appear like nothing else on the horizon. Antony's song-poems will beguile, and his voice will melt you. But for those who know and love I Am a Bird Now, The Crying Light will be elusive. It is far more an art-based album: the strings winding off after the end of songs, the absence of bass and drums, the bizarreness and strong poetry of the lyrics all attest to that. And in a way, it's a burning-off of ambition, too, or perhaps that is what it will seem to those with a more rock or pop orientation."

Plus, in "Life Inside", Luke Davies remembers "the boredom, insolence, anger and delight" of adolescence while watching The Class, Laurent Cantet's impressive documentary-style drama set in a racially diverse Parisian middle school; and, in "Mind/Body", Daniel Thomas explores the many layers of the renowned Australian artist Mike Parr's most recent, physically gruelling work, Cartesian Corpse.

There's also poetry by John Bryson and Clive James; Zora Simic on the latest bestseller from Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success; Chris Middendorp on Peter Singer's call to action on world poverty, The Life You Can Save; and Shane Maloney on the time a young Helena Rubinstein spent in rural Victoria, and the merino sheep that helped found a global beauty empire.