THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Shelby Steele is convinced that Barack Obama (unconsciously, but consistently) has made life choices solely on the basis of race, such as leaving a woman whom he was close to marrying because she was white. Steele asks, ‘How can Obama sit every week in a church preaching blackness and not object - not stand and proclaim that he was raised quite well, thank you, by three white Middle Westerners? More important, how can he not let his actual experience inform his ideas and his politics?'"

In "Obama!", Noel Pearson looks at what the leading Democratic contender for the American presidency must do to win office. Through the lens of black conservative Shelby Steele's critique, Pearson discusses Obama's lack of a true self; his status as a "bargainer", offering white Americans absolution from their racist past; and the challenge he faces in reconciling the inflammatory opinions of his mentor, Jeremiah Wright, with the expectations of his wider support base, white liberals. Pearson then moves to an analysis of Barack Obama's "flawed thinking" about racial inequality in America and black educational underachievement. Obama, he maintains, needs to speak as much to black responsibility as to government-led opportunity if he is to create a "more perfect union".

"In his Philadelphia speech, Obama said, ‘A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.' (The emphasis is mine.) Despite the long debate on welfare reform and the clear benefits of America's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996, Barack Obama hesitates to accept a social-policy truth that sticks out like canine testes. Responsibility and choice should never be subsumed by a focus on structural solutions; when this happens, you end up with the kind of shallow determinism that Obama ultimately falls victim to. He would be truly radical if he was equally vehement about equipping citizens to seize opportunities and convert them into capabilities."

"If you think Australia and New Zealand are peas in a pod, you are mistaken. In social justice, New Zealand has, for most of its modern history, been advancing the lantern into the future's blank mist, where Australia has been hesitant to venture. In indigenous land rights, most obviously. For 33 years, reconciliation has officially been underway. Tribes and the Crown are hammering out reparation deals, one long legal battle after another."

In "Not All Black & White", Craig Sherborne travels across the ditch to New Zealand's "social laboratory", and speaks with its prime minister and would-be prime minister, and with Maori historians and gang leaders and community representatives.

"‘Sorry' is such a puny word, more verbal tic than meaningful offering given the frequency with which a person may use it in a day ... Surely sorry doesn't have much resonance for long for the truly aggrieved. Hone Te Rire says it does for his iwi: ‘Sorry from the Crown was very important. It was said face-to-face. That's important to Maori. To me, money wasn't the issue. There had to be a sorry, face-to-face.' There had to be solemn ritual and theatrical deference. ‘The Crown came on to our marae at dawn. There was a haka from our men. Boy, did the Crown know they were coming on to our land, ours. The minister for treaty negotiations, Margaret Wilson, stood there in front of us, and for her to do that and say, I'm sorry for the wrongs done to you people, was a momentous occasion.'"

"In a world as virtual as it is real, where choice seems almost infinite and valued above all things and gratification is never more than a few keystrokes away, the words ‘life' and ‘lifestyle' have become all but interchangeable ... In the midst of lifestyle we are, nonetheless, still in death. We love our fallen with unbending devotion. Bookshops devote whole stands to new books on Australians in the Great War and others since. Thousands of young Australians gather every year at Gallipoli to observe the Anzac rituals with the solemnity of an age much more dutiful than their own. While some trek to the Dardenelles, thousands more attend Anzac Day services at home. Our leaders, who have never fired a shot or had one fired at them, fashion platitudes to suit the task of tying sacrifice and slaughter to a prescriptive set of contemporary Australian values."

And in "Digging", Don Watson makes the case for a more honest relationship with the Anzacs, and proposes a moral equivalent to Anzac Day: civil service.

"If we want to keep the pathos free of politics, the bravery unconfused with acts performed in a swimming pool or on a football field, the sacrifice kept sacred and not submerged in the narcissistic puddle of modern lifestyle, we need to take the Anzacs not for idealised images of ourselves, but for what they were. Which is to say, soldiers: colonial soldiers, educated to believe in the cause of the British Empire and trained to do their duty at any cost. They were not some pre-conscious version of us, and if they fought on behalf of our modern lifestyle or our national identity, it was only incidental. Study them and they will disappoint our vanity. Search for the heart of Anzac and we might not recognise it."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"What are we to make of the 2020 Summit? On balance, it seems to me and to most of those I talked with to have been a Good Thing. During the Howard years a strong message was delivered to public intellectuals and to policy experts that unless they agreed with the neo-liberal and the neo-conservative vision of the government, their ideas were not merely unwelcome but also somehow illegitimate. With the summit, this atmosphere vanished."

In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne looks back with 2020 hindsight at Kevin Rudd's much-publicised ideas-fest.

"In the final report of the Governance Group, written at heroic speed over the lunch break on the second day, the wording of our stream's republic idea, by far the most popular at the summit, was botched. From the point of view of the small group I had been in, the detailed proposals for making government accountable to parliament, which had been granted the status of a Priority, had once more transmogrified into something resembling their earlier motherhood form. It was as if the dot points in our proposal, which alone provided it with meaning, had been written in a kind of disappearing ink. I wondered how far experience in other groups had been similar. There is a lot of work for the summit secretariat still to do."

"From without, the 40-year-old National Library building is an impressive sight; within, it is all about function, human comfort subordinated to the interests of the 9 million items in its collection, to the extent that the air-conditioning is set way down for preservation purposes ... The workstations and furniture are 1980s public-service surplus; the internal pillars are unsightly, but without them the building would crash from the weight of a collection growing by five semitrailer loads of material a year. The dowdiness, however, is deceptive. In expertise, esprit de corps and standards of service, the NLA excels virtually every comparable institution around the world. The curator of the library's dance collection, Michelle Potter, recently returned after 18 months at the New York Public Library. ‘Quite honestly,' she says, ‘I felt I had taken a huge step backwards in New York.'"

In "Razor-Gang Blues", Gideon Haigh visits the National Library, an institution that is, despite perceptions, at the cutting edge of digital technology - and the serial victim of reductions in federal funding.

"In fact, budget cuts at the NLA suggest, disturbingly, a government that simply doesn't grasp the agencies it is meant to be managing, preferring to indulge in gesture politics like throwing laptops at schoolchildren while imposing arbitrary austerities on intellectual institutions that have been plaiting shoestring budgets for decades."

"I was angry. In the Federal Court case, Optus had alleged that Telstra was pushing its less-informed customers to sign up to deals such as the $40 Phone Plan. I had dismissed these arguments as the rantings of a crazed foreign company - as Telstra points out on its "grass-roots campaign" website www.nowwearetalking.com.au, Optus is foreign-owned. And not just foreign-owned, but Asian-owned. By the Singaporean government. Which is Asian. And foreign."

And in "Lies, Damned Lies", Charles Firth goes undercover to find out if Telstra has been ripping off his mother ... or his mother has been brazenly deceiving him.

"The idea was absurd. The corporation that sponsors the Paralympics would not deceive a confused retiree by placing her on the worst-value plan in Australia. What would be its motivation? Money? I find it hard to believe that a company with Sol Trujillo in charge would put profit ahead of decency. Sure, according to the latest OECD figures Australia has the third-most expensive mobile-phone service in the world. But Telstra only has a 45% share of the market; it's not as if it exercises huge and anti-competitive power. I've seen the ads: Telstra's just in it for rustic farmers and bronzed surf lifesavers."

Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Robyn Davidson investigates the organ-transplant industry and the grey area between life and death; and Toni Jordan visits the last Welsh church in Melbourne, which offers the only Welsh-language service in Australia.

ARTS & LETTERS

"Dad brought the heady outside world into our house. The phone was always ringing; visitors were knocking on the door and being ushered into Dad's study, which was the classic smoke-filled room. And plots were being hatched - plots to reform the Hawthorn branch of the ALP or to transform Australia; it was the same job ... In our living room Nick, aged ten, took the liberty of asking Gough Whitlam if he hated John Kerr. ‘Well, Nick,' said Gough, ‘as a good Christian, one shouldn't hate anyone.' But, Nick replied, ‘What about as a bad Christian?'"

"John Button, 1933-2008" is Walkley-winning journalist James Button's moving eulogy to his father, as delivered at the state funeral of 15 April.

"Though he had wanted to live longer, he didn't want any ‘bullshit' - one of his favourite words - about his condition. He knew what was happening to him. In the last weeks he was terribly sick and reduced, but he never lost his dignity, his curiosity about the world or his nerve ... There was a job to be done, the job of dying, and he just wordlessly got on with it. He still liked to banter, though ... a young nurse came in with a name tag saying Chelsea. Dad said, ‘Hello, Chelsea. Are you related to Bill Clinton?' No, she replied. Lucky for you, he said."

"‘I can never remember my best waves,' said Mick Fanning when he became the world surfing champion last year. ‘You ride it without even really knowing what you're doing. And you get to the end and you're thinking, What did I just do?' The most articulate surfer would say exactly the same thing. The experience of standing on, through, and inside a wave is too mercurial for memory, too slippery for words. This is why surfing invites obsession and repetition, as if one faint wave-memory after another can accrete into a permanent idea."

In "In the Giant Green Cathedral", Malcolm Knox looks at Tim Winton's long-awaited new novel in the context of surf writing.

"Breath is best read in the way that we might read a historical novel. The framing device gives the surf sequences the sepia tint that brings them alive. Surfers are keenly attuned to history, if in a self-creating way. If a surfer is legendary, it is because of feats achieved in an ‘epic' past. It is no coincidence that great days are described as ‘epic'. Even a day ago can be historicised instantly: ‘You should have been here yesterday.' ... By situating this story so deeply inside the fictional, Winton is making the most of that truth that every surf storyteller knows: bullshit is better, and truer, than photorealism."

"The best description of Hunters and Collectors' music in their first incarnation comes from their percussionist, Greg Perano, who when asked by a suspicious English customs officer to describe the band's sound replied, ‘Reggae-funk fusion with rock roots and a tinge of New York underground in the guitars' ... The music got more commercial as the group shifted its focus to the suburban-pub circuit and the record company called for hits. But from the start Hunters and Collectors had the talent and ambition to live up to these deftly stated influences, and although their inspiration may have thinned over the years, in the process a successful 18-year career was built - one that is now etched deep in Australian rock history."

And in "The Uncorking", Robert Forster returns with an assessment of Thirteen Tonne Theory, singer Mark Seymour's rock memoir.

"Australia was the level playing field for the band, where triumphs could be built on road miles, an impressive PA and production, and the desire to kick arse live ... So the second half of the book is the tale of two lands, the constant knocking on success's door with Midnight Oil leading the way through Europe and America, and then the return to the wild shores of Australian rock 'n' roll - a place where audience members are known as punters, and the legendary Hunters and Collectors rider provokes a stunned Peter Garrett to exclaim, ‘They'll never drink that.'"

Plus, Julian Cribb looks at A Reef in Time, marine scientist JEN Veron's alarming assessment of the Great Barrier Reef; and Luke Davies is charmed by Laurent Tirard's new film, Moliere, a French Shakespeare in Love. There's also Chris Womersley on Miracles of Life, JG Ballard's final book; Zora Simic on young novelist Stefan Merrill Block's The Story of Forgetting; and Shane Maloney on the meeting of Sir Henry Parkes and Henry Lawson.