THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Tasmania's remoteness, its wildness, its unique natural world - all seemed to offer the possibility of a prosperous and good future to a state that had for a century been the poorest in the Australian Commonwealth. Instead, over the past three decades Tasmania has mortgaged its future to the woodchipping industry, which is today dominated by one company: Gunns Ltd."

In "Out of Control", award-winning Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan delves into the murky relationship between the timber giant Gunns and state and federal politics. He shows how a private company has been handed control of Tasmania's most precious resource - its unique old-growth forests, of world importance - and how that company's profits from clearfelling are being returned not to the state's people, not even to forestry workers, but instead to a small group of wealthy shareholders. This is the defining statement on the tragedy of Tasmania's forests and the debasement of contemporary politics in relation to the environment.

"Gunns' shares were languishing at $1.40 when Jim Bacon's Labor government came to power. The company's subsequent growth was dizzying. Within four years, it had recorded an increase of 199% in profits. With the acquisition of two rival companies, Gunns took control of more than 85% of logging in Tasmania. Five years after Bacon won government Gunns was worth more than $1 billion, with shares trading in excess of $12."

*

"Australian Bureau of Statistics data published in 2006 forecasts that the number of people living alone will rise from 1.8 million in 2001 to between 2.8 and 3.7 million people in 2026. If the latter projection bears up, it is an increase of 105%. The reasons are manifold: relationships are more fragile, occur later, or never form at all. Cohabiting unions are on the rise, and have an even higher break-up rate than marriages."

In "Only Connect", Anne Manne examines the growing phenomenon of loneliness in the Western world. With characteristic care, she draws links to mental-health problems and to changing patterns in relationships, and finds that the increasing number of single people in our "high-separation society" is helping to create a worrying level of disconnection. "Loneliness," Manne says, "is the malady of love in the age of freedom."

"Depression, anxiety, panic attack, mood disorder: what plain, inexpressive little words they are. All are drawn from rationality and science, and are hopelessly inadequate for the task. The words of psychoanalysis are better: mourning, melancholia, hate, envy, love, despair. They capture the wild terror of madness. Loss, longing and loneliness can send you mad."

*

"‘I needed the film-makers,' Raimond Gaita shouts as the ute rattles along, ‘to understand how utterly fundamental to the story the landscape was. They saw it at all hours of the day and night - they fell in love with it. The first time Nick Drake [the British poet who wrote the screenplay] came to Baringhup, I drove him along this road. It was a bit later in the day. And when we came round this bend, the light over there was thick gold.'"

In "From Frogmore, Victoria", Helen Garner spends time with philosopher Raimond Gaita, the subject of the forthcoming film Romulus, My Father. Gaita takes Garner on a wrenchingly personal tour of the central Victorian district of Baringhup, where he grew up, visiting the shrines that shape the film's tale of "the suffering, the desperation and the decency of men".

"We climb over a gate and walk a couple of hundred metres along a straight gravel track into the low, flat, empty landscape. My God, it's bleak out here ... This is the road along which Christine Gaita trudged in her heels and waisted cotton dress, carrying her little suitcase, coming back to try again with her husband and son after each of her desperate flights to Melbourne."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"John Howard's WorkChoices legislation has always seemed to me to risk destroying his government, the equivalent of Chifley's decision to nationalise the banks, when ideology overcame good sense and tempted him to extremism."

In the Monthly Comment, Judith Brett looks back to the 1949 election, when Menzies defeated Chifley, to look forward to the 2007 election. She argues that the lessons of 1949 - the danger of political hubris; the electorate's desire to choose a party that would own the nation's future - will need to be noted by the federal Liberal party if it is to avoid defeat this year, and that well-worn attacks on Labor's economic credentials will not suffice.

"People are better informed about politics and more interested, and so fewer need a party to guide their political opinions and actions. They can find their own way through the issues, and make up their own minds about how to vote. Not only will such people have deaf ears for the party's traditional rhetoric, but they may well be offended by it as an insult to their intelligence and take it as evidence that the party has little new to offer."

*

"When Australia bravely flew in and out of Zimbabwe for their World Cup fixture in 2003 inside 24 hours - security reasons, you understand - Ricky Ponting declined to say whether he would shake Robert Mugabe's hand, on the grounds that it was a hypothetical question. Perhaps they didn't tell him how to answer those at the cricket academy."

In "Out of Africa", Gideon Haigh considers the ethical ramifications of the Australian cricket team touring Zimbabwe. How is it, he asks, that sport can be exempt from the sanctions that Australia has in place against Mugabe's regime?

"The act of touring Zimbabwe is effectively doing business with a branch of a government that is an international pariah. Even if Ponting and co. want to stick to their no-morality-please-we're-sportsmen schtick, there is an argument that Zimbabwe Cricket is no longer an administrative body with which Cricket Australia should have reciprocal relations."

*

Plus, Anna Goldsworthy visits Far North Queensland to play Beethoven with a most unusual orchestra; Ashley Hay risks lightning strikes to meet New South Wales' storm spotters; and Richard Cooke meets a survivalist preparing for an oil-starved world by learning hunter-gatherer techniques.

ARTS & LETTERS

"Halfway through, Clive James worries that the book might be ‘a folly', like one of those overgrown, impractical architectural projects designed by eighteenth-century dilettanti who built pagodas or zigurrats onto their Georgian houses. James's twinge of panic is justified: Cultural Amnesia, I am sorry to say, is incoherent, garbled and ultimately pointless, meandering through a series of endless circuits inside his crowded, voluminous head."

In "Too Big for the Bathroom Shelf", expatriate and Oxford academic Peter Conrad excoriates Clive James's latest work, Cultural Amnesia. Conrad argues that the 900-page guide to the cultural marginalia of James's lifetime - a bewildering series of entries on an assortment of twentieth-century figures - is instead a dismayingly strident, dull tome.

"James is a brilliant columnist, unbeatable if confined to a couple of thousand zippy words. But a few hundred columns do not add up to a cathedral. Digressiveness is a license permitted to an essayist, who cannot stray beyond the space allotted to him. In Cultural Amnesia, this spirit of rambling free-association ignores all limits, and goads James to crass self-indulgence."

*

"Anyone who can help me to better understand Jesus has my gratitude. I envisage John Carroll's work, then, as a high-powered, articulate sermon - assertive, passionate, listenable - on one of the greatest subjects about which it is possible for a person to speak: the meaning of Jesus. His subject is the one that has the most interest for me in all the world."

In "He Would Have Disappeared Years Ago", Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen reviews John Carroll's new work, The Existential Jesus. Jensen finds a book that actively engages with the image of Jesus as presented in the Gospels of Mark and John, providing "flashes of brilliance and insight"; but one that also, through some serious misreadings, reduces Jesus and removes him from his context.

"Whatever the Jesus story means - and in my view this is as clear as can be in Mark - it cannot be told in a way that will concur with Carroll that ‘You don't even need him ...' Christianity is Christ, or it is nothing at all."

*

There's also Robert Forster, The Monthly's rock critic, on Bryan Ferry's album of Bob Dylan covers; Candy author Luke Davies on Half Nelson, the latest in a long line of films about teachers and their students; Justin Clemens on the National Gallery of Victoria's Australian Impressionism exhibition; and Chris Womersley on Doris Lessing's new novel, The Cleft.