THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Next morning Dave McGahy urged a detective investigating Strathewen deaths to place a cloth over the body of a man he had known for 40 years, who had been lying on the oval since the afternoon before. 'No mate, not my job.' 'So my son and myself, we went up to the middle of the oval and we cut the end off the cricket matting and we dragged it behind the command car and covered his body because it was just the respectful thing to do, I thought at any rate.'"

In "Why We Weren't Warned", Robert Manne gives a powerful forensic account of the events of Black Saturday, the day Victorian bushfires claimed 173 lives. Drawing on detailed testimonies given before the royal commission, Manne compellingly argues that the scale of the tragedy was exacerbated by a failure of those in power to communicate the information at their disposal. Indeed, the absence of sufficient warning on 7 February was the result of a deadly combination: the unprecedented ferocity of the bushfires, a disturbing culture of institutionalised timidity before authority, and bureaucratisation run wild.  

"In the face of the uncontrollable fires of 7 February, there was nothing more important than to warn citizens about the looming danger. Yet even if someone at the centre had grasped this, it is not clear that they would have acted. From the evidence collected at the royal commission, the cumbersome new bureaucratic machine, the IECC, seems to have operated like an army without a general, where no one thought it their responsibility to take the lead."

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"Watching the movie Wake in Fright nearly 40 years after its release brought back one good memory for me of life in the Bush. Canvas water bags. One hangs on the back of a door in the shambles of a mining shack occupied by Doc Tydon, the movie's supposed villain. Not that anyone in the movie drinks water. Heaven forbid. Instead they neck beer and, in the case of Doc Tydon, glug down whiskey in the legendary quantities typical of men on a weekend bender in the Outback."

In "Home Truths", Kate Jennings revisits Wake in Fright, a film set in outback Australia and directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff. Originally released in 1971, it affronted many critics with its negative portrayal of Australian culture and masculinity. In this stylish essay, Jennings offers a comprehensive analysis of this recently rediscovered and restored movie; she sees it as a classic, if confrontational, piece of Australian filmmaking, as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. 

"Australians are intensely uncomfortable with being served themselves straight up, neat, on the rocks. When Wake In Fright was released, Colin Bennett in the Age feared for its box-office fate for that very reason: 'Is it an Australian trait, a blind spot in our character, to refuse more than most peoples to see ourselves as others see us ... unless it be blatantly satirical?'  We're comfortable with Dame Edna but not with unblinking and entirely fair portrayals like the director Ted Kotcheff's in Wake in Fright."

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THE NATION REVIEWED

In the Monthly Comment, Noel Pearson provides a unique perspective on the global financial crisis as he interrogates the "anthropomorphic fallacy" –  "the fallacy of ascribing human traits to a non-human entity, including that most fundamental of human drives, self-interest" – as it relates to modern corporations.

"In fact, the artificial creature called the corporation only superficially exhibits a collective self-interest. The collective interest apparently represented by a corporation may be aligned with the self-interests of the individuals who make it up, or it may not ... Today the manager-oligarchs' self-interest is short-term. And so we have a long list of venerable institutions that have fallen over (or should have fallen over, had they not been heavily transfused with the blood of taxpayers) like so many ten-pins."

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In Comment II, Greg Barton surveys the political scene in Indonesia on the eve of the country's second-ever presidential election. The good news for Australia, he says, is that Indonesian democracy is in the ascent.

"Only a decade ago, the Indonesia of today would have represented a best-case scenario that few dared to believe possible. Certainly, no one could have predicted that in 2009 Southeast Asia would have one successful democratic nation marked by political openness, social stability and steady economic growth – and that that nation would be Indonesia."

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And in "A Gay Old Time", Benjamin Law attends a seminar for gays and lesbians on retirement and discovers that changes in federal laws relating to same-sex couples, while "on paper, a cause for celebration", are not all they may seem, particularly for those reliant on the old-age pension.

"Although Paul has superannuation, Don receives a Centrelink pension which, after July, will change from a single's to a couple's rate: a cut of $2500 a year. Paul says he fully understands that equality comes at a price: in his case, literally. Now they plan to pool their money. A cut to Don's finances, Paul reasons, should also be a cut to his."

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Plus, in "Botanical Curiosities", Gay Bilson ponders the  nature of collection and display after a visit to Adelaide's recently refurbished Museum of Economic Botany; and in "Soiled Goods", John Birmingham talks with the organisers of a Brisbane food co-op, a "heroically non-hierarchical outfit" dedicated to reducing the distance between the farm and the fridge door.

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ARTS & LETTERS

In "A Matter of Taste", Sebastian Smee reflects on the art of curating large-scale exhibitions as he offers a rundown of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Viewing this year's show in the light of past biennales, Smee finds himself impressed and reassured by its new director, Daniel Birnbaum. 

"How a director feels about the times we live in – and how he or she might want to present those feelings to the world – is as much a question of taste, even of tact, as a test of his or her readings in aesthetics or political economy ... I found myself instinctively trusting Birnbaum's sense of art's relation to life and to politics, and this in turn left me free to get on and respond to the individual artists in his show. Some were disappointing, many were slight, but there was more than enough to make me feel emboldened in my love for art – and that, in the end, is all you can ask an exhibition to do."

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In "Revolving Doors", Guy Pearse considers the big business of political lobbying and its detrimental effect on governments, as exposed in Robert G Kaiser's So Damn Much Money. The situation in the US – where "lobbying money has broken Washington" – is, according to Pearse, not without its analogies in Australia.

"Canberra's revolving door spins freely ... As observers of Australia's lamentable climate-change response will know, you can lobby for the coal or oil industry one day, sit on the parliamentary front bench the next; be Ambassador for the Environment one day, lobby for the coal and aluminium industries the next; or run the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry one day, and the federal industry department the next – all without signing up to the Register of Lobbyists or breaching any law or code."

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In "The Pretendies", Paul Kelly discusses the history of the spoken interlude in popular music and its relationship to the dreaded Pretendies, "the scourge of all performing artists".

"The spoken interlude takes a fair bit of nerve to pull off. The singer must step out from behind melody's curtain and act. Elvis's famous talking bit in 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' stretches Shakespeare's actor-on-the-stage-of-life metaphor to breaking point. In later years even Elvis lost his nerve when reciting these bombastic lines. You can hear him on a live recording falter halfway through, giggle, then lapse into gibberish in a classic example of The Pretendies."

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And in "Chinese Whispers", Alice Pung detects more than a hint of youthful romanticism in the American writer Zachary Mexico's tales from the Chinese underworld, China Underground.

"Mexico finds Chinese girls charming. But these naked girls don't really do anything – they lie about flaccidly sandwiched between Black Society men in dodgy karaoke bars and when one of the men is shot, 'The girls were too fucked up to even scream.' You can't help but start to take stock of the other Oriental women mentioned: a dumb waitress ridiculed by a corpulent business owner. A pretty wife. The seven different kinds of hookers you can find in the modern-day Middle Kingdom."

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Plus, in "Brought to Booker", Delia Falconer judges the merits of the Man Booker International and the work of the prize's most recent winner, Alice Munro; in "Tudor Style", Peter Craven delves into the cut-throat world of sixteenth-century politics with Hilary Mantel's latest historical novel, Wolf Hall; and in "Dirty Work", Luke Davies finds himself charmed by an indie crime-scene movie containing more mops than guns, Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning.

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There's also Michael Williams on MJ Hyland's dark new novel, This Is How; Alexandra Coghlan on Figurehead, the first book from the young Adelaide writer Patrick Allington; and Shane Maloney on the time Faith Bandler spent with her childhood hero, Paul Robeson.