THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Despite the most fervent wishes of Bob Brown, coal isn't going anywhere. According to the Australian Coal Association, coal-fired power stations produce 84% of Australia's electricity and 38% of its greenhouse emissions, significantly higher than the global average of one-quarter. In part this is because the nation does not rely on nuclear power. Contrary to popular belief, Australia does not control the world market for coal, but it is the biggest exporter, with nearly a third of the global trade in black coal, and 60% of trade in metallurgical coal, which is used for smelting. Regardless of the Kyoto Protocol or whatever scheme succeeds it, world demand for coal is very conservatively forecast to rise 73% by 2030."

In "In the Dark?", John Birmingham investigates our dependence on fossil fuels, and the federal government's generous funding of the search for a "clean" form of coal.

"Rudd and Swan knew that spending cuts had to be made, and in the frenzy of budget preparation it seemed reasonable to expect families whose income had moved into the magic realm of six figures to pay for their own home renovations. Especially as billions of dollars had to be found for election promises like tax cuts and the clean-energy fund, with its $500-million handout to Rio Tinto and co. for clean-coal research. A fraction of that half-billion would have saved the solar-panel industry and ensured that a proven green technology continued to grow. But it would not have done anything to safeguard future income, the thousands of billions of dollars that coal will generate over the decades ahead."

In "Lovely Bones", Ashley Hay tells the story of the Flores "hobbit": its discovery and verification and the subsequent arguments over its classification, and the implications of this for our understanding of human evolution.

"The strongest influence of the convicts is not to be sought in the anti-authoritarian attitudes in a segment of the people, but in the trauma of a nation which had to come to terms with its shameful origins. How was Australia to cope with the world's bad opinion? The one thing that everyone knew about Australia was that it was founded with convicts, which continued to make it morally suspect. As an 1850 British verse had it: ‘There vice is virtue, virtue vice / And all that's vile is voted nice.'"

In "An Oddity from the Start", John Hirst looks at the influence of convicts on national character, revisiting and critiquing Russel Ward's The Australian Legend.

And in "Travels in the Northern Realm", Nicolas Rothwell sketches a vivid portrait of North Australia, and the impressions of the Western explorers of that vast and complex region.

"Most people who arrive to live in the north do not stay: they come to the Pilbara for money and resources, to Darwin in order to administer, and to Cairns for touristic money. Those who linger, and deviate from this pattern, are the rare eccentrics. From these linked phenomena we can read off the political plight of the residents of North Australia; we can also explain the incapacity of most northerners, on their brief sojourn, to register and appreciate where they find themselves. How many of those who live here today ever traverse the far corners of the country? How many know all its faces? The relentless, gloomy monotony of the sand plains round Normanton, the windings and mangrove meanders of the Mary River east of Darwin, the remote archipelagos off Arnhem Land, with their vast colonies of nesting seabirds - or, reaching further afield, westwards, the deep-red ramparts of the North Kimberley coastline, their points and islets named by the French and the British for bleak emotional states or distinguished savants - then on, to the ghost world between Broome and Pardoo, where flat, featureless dune beaches lie full of presence and cryptic potency - yet who remembers that these beaches were full of Aboriginal visitors, until the devastations and accommodations of a hundred years ago: and even now that country has a lonely, abandoned feeling to it, and little moves there beyond the breeding turtles, the passing four-wheel-drive adventurers and the posses of beach stone-curlews crying mournfully ..."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Once in power, Kevin Rudd created a new climate-change ministry, and his government's first official act was to begin Kyoto ratification. Environment ministers usually handle the annual UN climate-change conference, but Rudd wasn't going to miss an opportunity to tell the world that Australia was coming in from the cold. He got the standing ovation he deserved at the Bali meeting, and hopes - overseas, as well as at home - were high. But ratifying Kyoto was the easy part: emissions were spiralling, and all the real work lay ahead."

In the Monthly Comment, Guy Pearse addresses the Rudd government's failings on global warming: since symbolically signing Kyoto it has, he argues, followed the Howard line on greenhouse emissions.

"The federal budget, in May, provided more cause for concern. No more was allocated for climate change than John Howard spent on the Iraq war, and $2.3 billion over four years paled alongside tax breaks worth billions that would continue encouraging fossil-fuel use. The impact of the solar-rebate decision on a booming industry was sudden and severe; too many companies had based their entire business model on a government subsidy. And while households with incomes over $100,000 were considered too wealthy for a solar-panel rebate, corporate households were treated differently. Multinationals responsible for much of Australia's emissions in the mining, oil and gas, electricity-generation and motor-vehicle industries would receive large subsidies in spite of their much greater incomes."

"The architecture itself is magnificent, as is much of the furnishing; the place would work splendidly as a museum of Australian arts and crafts. But this, surely, is a far cry from its primary function. Just before the opening, the broadcaster Mike Carlton did a show from the Great Hall, in which he became positively lyrical about his surroundings. ‘The building has a spiritual quality,' he enthused. ‘It sings!' Well, perhaps; but if it does, its songs, like many spirituals, tell of oppression and captivity."

In "Old House", Mungo MacCallum reveals the hidden generational change in Australian politics: the shift from Canberra's first parliament house to the newer, more ordered one on the hill.

"The first night, when I hear the creaks, I turn on the radio and sleep with it through to morning. But then I hear footsteps during the day, too. I start to listen closely. Up and down the wooden floorboards. Small animals do not walk upside down beneath floorboards."

In "Katharine's Place", Alice Pung faces the ghost of Greenmount, Western Australia, while staying in the home of Katharine Susannah Prichard, one of Australia's first internationally acclaimed authors.

There's also Craig Sherborne, in "Trivial Pursuit", searching for the elusive genius who is likely the nation's trivia master.

ARTS & LETTERS

"From an early age Naipaul has been honest with himself: ‘I only know one thing - I am a beast and a cad and a fool and an egotist.' Some of his greatest satisfactions have therefore come from being publicly recognised, hence his thrill at his knighthood and Nobel Prize."

In "More Than Picong", Louis Nowra is won over by the frankness of The World Is What It Is, Patrick French's authorised biography of writer VS Naipaul.

"What people find difficult is that he is a loner, and a loner is never to be trusted because they do not feel bound by mob- or group-think. His innate pessimism has acted as a scalpel when empty optimism and ideological conformity would blunt any dissection of a nation's or religion's faults."

"Peter Norman was 26 years old in 1968. He grew up in a working-class suburb of Melbourne, in a strict Salvation Army household, and discovered he had the makings of a good sprinter when, as a high-jumper for the Collingwood Harriers, he was called in to replace someone on the 4x100 relay team. His Mexico City silver-medal time for the 200-metre sprint would have won him gold at the Sydney Olympics; 40 years later, it is still the fastest Australian time for the event. None of that is what makes this story. Norman was the white guy in one of the most famous images of the twentieth century."

In "Stand & Deliver", Luke Davies revisits - with the aid of Matt Norman's new documentary, Salute - a most controversial Olympic moment: the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City games, and Australian sprinter Peter Norman's involvement in that moment.

"Originally, given the incendiary climate and civil unrest back home, America's black athletes had threatened to boycott the games. (‘What would have happened if that boycott had gone ahead?' asks Norman mischievously. ‘Well, for a start, I'd have been a gold medallist.') Instead, they decided that individual competitors could express themselves any way they saw fit."

Plus, in "Seeing the Light", Robert Forster enters the weird world of enigmatic singer-songwriter Will Oldham, a man who "can sing winningly and charmingly of sex in his life while still referencing ‘the Lord'"; and, in "Pipe Dreams", Michael Cathcart looks at two new books, Blue Covenant and Thirsty Country, that address the world's water crisis.

There's also Gideon Haigh on Fall singer Mark E Smith's acerbic memoir of music and Manchester; Chris Middendorp on Murray Bail's long-awaited new novel, The Pages; and Shane Maloney on the meeting, in New Guinea during World War II, of Australia's 7th Brigade and Japan's fearsome elite marines.