THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“Dawn has just broken over the rivers of Tweed Heads as volunteer marine rescue worker Martin Grove, 62, cycles home after another eight-hour night shift … As he turns into his driveway, he suddenly squeezes the brakes and stops short: his car and front yard are strewn with rotting prawn shells, smashed eggs, newspapers, empty bottles and used sanitary pads. This is not the first time he’s arrived home to see his property trashed. For the past year a gang of local youths has relentlessly taunted and threatened him – pummelling him with rocks and eggs, cutting off his power cables and accusing him publicly of paedophilia.” 

In “The Wild Frontier”, Mandy Sayer hits the streets of Tweed Heads to investigate the delinquent child gangs that terrorise the streets of this northern New South Wales border town. She discovers a community feeling helpless and threatened, an overwrought police force incapable of action, and wayward youths careering down some very destructive pathways: a potent mix that is completely at odds with the town’s setting its sunshine, sea breezes and waving palms.

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“As vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne since 2005, [Glyn] Davis has introduced changes that will, over time, transform the way Australians are educated. Other universities are changing as a result. Some are moving in the opposite direction, seeking to gain ground at Melbourne’s expense. But the locus of change – the excitement and the distress, the risks and the opportunities, the fear and the hope – is here in Parkville, in this hotchpotch academic community on the northern edge of the city.”

In “Dangerous Precedent”, Margaret Simons analyses the radical restructure that has occurred at the University of Melbourne as a result of the implementation of the “Melbourne Model”. Two years into the university’s transition from the traditional European model with its mix of undergraduate and postgraduate courses to an American-style graduate-school model, Simons considers the role of its creator Glyn Davis, the university-wide fallout from the changes, and how the successes and failures of the program will ultimately be measured.

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“[Re-reading The Female Eunuch now,] one is immediately struck by how much the Western world has changed for women, who now run corporations and are heads of government bureaucracies, as well as being business leaders, film directors and soldiers. Few occupations are denied women. Even men’s jaundiced attitudes to their wives working, being more educated and earning more than their husbands have changed. When Greer wrote her seminal book only 4% of American wives earned more than their husbands; now this figure is verging on 20%.”

And in “The Better Self?”, Louis Nowra revisits The Female Eunuch, the legendary second-wave feminist tract by Germaine Greer. Through the prism of his own upbringing, Nowra puts the book and its creator under the microscope to see how Greer’s presumptions and projections about the liberation of society stack up against the reality of life in the twenty-first century.

THE NATION REVIEWED

“For someone working at the cutting edge of a tough discipline like climate science, scepticism, open-mindedness, is vital. For someone ignorant of that discipline, scepticism amounts to little more than folly and hubris. But this now appeared of little moment. The more it became clear that nations did not possess the will to break the fossil fuel habit despite the increasingly alarming findings of the climate scientists, the more attractive did the anti-climate science message of the climate-change deniers become.”

Following the failure of the Copenhagen Conference to reach a consensus on the realities of climate change, the current crop of commentators hold starkly different views on our ability to grapple with our own potential extinction. In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne weighs up the current predictions for the survival of the planet, contrasting the outlooks of Al Gore and Clive Hamilton.

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“I refused to consider the slow lane, which seemed to be full of people as large as me, only not pregnant. There was another with a “Lane Closed” sign on it, but some youths were larking about in it with snorkels. Clearly, they belonged in the recreation lane. Then the bell curve of justice would be served: there could be two medium lanes.”

In “Water Gods” Anna Funder heads to a pool to swim a couple of laps. An effort to ensure that aquatic etiquette is maintained leads her to ponder the physical – and possibly transcendental – betterment that is on offer at the local pool.

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Plus, in “Ghost Writers” Gail Bell considers the ethics of her urge to scrutinise the dwellings of dead writers; and in “Close at Hand” Kate Rossmanith takes a forensic look at how we perceive – and inadvertently spread – germs.

ARTS & LETTERS

“It’s still true to say that catwalk trends aren’t born in Australia. And I think we should forget that, anyway, and stick to what we know. We make some of the best swimwear and surfwear in the world, because it goes deep. What encapsulates Australian fashion? It’s boardies and a box of mangoes at Christmas. It takes a long time to change from Vegemite, darling, and I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.”

– Jenny Kee

In “Australian Style” Clare Press evaluates the current state of Australian fashion design, pondering the frequent claim that our fashion identity is a derivative of our European counterparts and questioning whether any Australian fashion designer, from hot-selling Sass & Bide to street-smart Ksubi, encapsulates what it means to be Australian right now?

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“Humphries may hope, as he says in his autobiography More Please (1992), for ‘the forgiveness of laughter’, but his own laughter is unforgiving. Edna, characteristically muddling up high-mindedness and smut, once described art as ‘a massage parlour for the human spirit’. Or is it a torture chamber for that same spirit, an experiment in violently dehumanising us? Listen to the laughing chorus in Edna’s Song of Australia, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1981. What you hear is the wild, mirthless cackling of a hundred kookaburras or the lethal fusillade spat out by a line of machine guns. Even if you’re doing the laughing yourself, it can be excruciating.”

In “Divine Comedy” Peter Conrad studies the longevity of Barry Humphries’ most successful creation, Dame Edna Everage. Conrad provides insight into the aspects of Edna that express her creator, as well as those that demonstrate she has truly become a life force all her own. He then charts the changing relationship of both Australian and British audiences to the beloved lavender lady, and ponders her interactions with another of Humphries’ persona: the slobbering Les Patterson. 

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“In making the slow conversion from a villain of the Dismissal to a figure of progressive respectability, Fraser has become increasingly alienated from the political party he once led. The estrangement has been deeply ideological, as the Liberal Party fell under the control of ‘dries’ committed to free-market economics and, later, under the spell of imported neo-conservatism and the extreme cultural politics of John Howard.”

In “Progressively Liberal”, Tim Soutphommasane examines the personal and political contradictions that shaped the career of former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser in light of the publication of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, which he co-authored with investigative journalist Margaret Simons.

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Plus, there’s Sebastian Smee on Don DeLillo’s Point Omega; and Michelle de Kretser on Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry.