THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“Christmas Island is not a sunny atoll but a gloomy mountain sticking out of the Indian Ocean … It’s tiny and a long way away. The sea is everywhere. It sets the moods of the place, brings the cloud and nights of thundering rain … It’s an island for waiting: waiting for something to come along, waiting for the supply ship, waiting for friends to visit, waiting for the weather to clear, waiting to get away.”

“The Indian Ocean Solution” is David Marr’s investigative report from Christmas Island on the state of Australia’s most far-flung immigration detention facility. In his in-depth analysis of this island of incarceration, Marr discusses the inherent problems of Labor’s attempt to institute more humane policies, while retaining the structures and facilities of Howard’s fortress. Marr draws on the diverse perspectives of his impressive range of interviewees – detainees of the North West Point facility, the smattering of asylum seekers being ‘integrated’ into the wider island community, support staff to the whole operation, and Chris Evans, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship – as well as the knowledge he has accumulated from 10 years of “asking people why we’re so afraid of refugees in boats”.

“Labor has … mounted this extraordinary performance out in the India Ocean: doing at a distance what might be done at home in order to comfort Australians with the idea that we alone decide who comes to this country, and until they prove themselves out on this rock, these strangers won’t be let loose in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney. No other country goes through such an elaborate rigmarole.”

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In “This Year’s Model”, Clare Press reflects upon our contemporary preoccupation with fashion and beauty, and highlights the limits of our obsession with youth. With keen wit, she discusses our deification of beauty in its most bland incarnations and points out that true style actually get better with age.

“In 1963, the sexy pin-up girl was just that; today … she is the role model for a generation. No longer just a pretty face in the crowd, she is today accorded star status, ruling over that crowd. She follows us whenever we roam: on giant billboards, on an abundance of live action screens, on our iPhones and in the lead story on the evening news … Such is the power of the fashion model’s media image that many other ideas of beauty and female worth have been eclipsed.”

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And in “Only Itself to Blame”, Malcolm Knox investigates the secretive yet publicity-conscious world of the Church of Scientology. He undergoes personality testing, attends a Sunday service and is granted an interview with three of most senior members the Australian wing of Scientology. Knox gives us an insight into the origins, teaching principles, recruitment practices and public battles – legal and otherwise – of the church.

“Soon a young woman named Wendy emerged with my test results. Wendy, pimpled and pregnant in a floral dress, resembled one of the wives in Big Love … Sitting me at a desk, Wendy was sympathetic towards what soon emerged as my needs.

‘The first thing you should know,’ she opened, ‘is that you’re not a bad person.’”

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Plus, in “The Death of the Good Father”, Drusilla Modjeska contemplates the figure of the father and his legacy, which often loom like shadows over our lives. She wends her way through the reflections of various writers on fatherhood, incorporating Granta’s anthology, Fathers, as well as works by Philip Roth, Mario Sabino and Barack Obama. In discussing Obama’s complex grappling with the image of his own father, Modjeska explores the shift in the collective dream of ‘the good father’ that comes with each new generation.

“I hear the toll of longing. The good father might be a lonely or endangered figure in the contemporary literary landscape, but the dream – the shadow of the lost father – leaves a powerful trace.”

THE NATION REVIEWED

“The current stoush between the PM’s office and what is arguably the most forceful and influential constituent of the fourth estate is not a good sign. Rudd began … by referring specifically to three of the Murdoch tabloids, but later widened his attack to include ‘the Murdoch press’ generally, perhaps implying that the campaign was being led by the man himself.”

In the Monthly Comment, Mungo MacCallum analyses the Rudd government’s volatile relationship with the Murdoch press. He considers the fallout of the Utegate affair, discussing Rudd’s reaction to News Limited’s embrace of the controversy and the to-and-fro that succeeded it in the media. MacCallum argues that despite these tensions, Rudd is unlikely to incite the wrath of Murdoch in the manner of his predecessor, Gough Whitlam, given that Murdoch is now based a safe distance from our shores.

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In “Harvest”, Gay Bilson describes an early morning spent foraging mushrooms with a senior doctor in the Adelaide hills. Over breakfast they discuss his work of the night before: the extraction of the organs of a registered donor. Drawing these seemingly unrelated ‘harvests’ together, Bilson offers a thought-provoking perspective on the realities of organ donation.

“I asked Nick why he had been so moved by his first experience of organ collection. This had surprised me. Wouldn’t doctors, even young ones, at work in a surgical unit take it in their stride? They were, as he had said earlier, doing their job.

‘It was the heart,’ he said.”

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In “Sleepers, Awake”, Benjamin Law profiles the work of sleep specialists at the Queensland Sleep Disorders Unit and reveals sleep loss to be a growing problem in Australia. The social costs of sleep loss are increasingly being identified, but the specialists admit there is still much we don’t understand about sleep itself.

“In Australia, lost work productivity from sleep disorders and associated illnesses is estimated to be worth $1.7 billion every year. Sleep deprivation has become a way of life. On the internet, my friends’ status updates read like odes to warped sleeping patterns, modern-day haikus of despair and insomnia.”  

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Plus, in “Small-time Big Top”, Cate Kennedy reflects upon the charm and wonder of one of Australia’s oldest family circuses; and in “Ningaloo Sharks”, James Bradley describes his encounter with whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef.

ARTS & LETTERS

In “The Cambodian Genocide”, Simon Leys discusses the monstrous reign of the Khmer Rouge in light of the new work by French author and journalist Francis Deron. The Trial of the Khmer Rouge tackles 30 years of the Cambodian tragedy and is the first work to also take in the approaching punishment of the regime, “as justice is finally catching up with a handful of still-surviving, semi-senile criminals”.

“One mistake must be avoided. Descriptions of the Cambodian genocide strike our imaginations and shock our feelings – the horror is unbearable, and precisely because it is unbearable, we instinctively attempt to dismiss it from consciousness by supposing that these events, in their exotic remoteness, are so foreign to us that they might as well belong to another planet.”

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In “Prepared”, Anna Goldsworthy transports us to the piano festival held in August by the Australian National Academy of Music. Goldsworthy describes how the institution that Peter Garrett controversially attempted to withdraw funding from has shed its staid and elitist persona for an innovative and experimental one, capable of engaging with far more than simply standard classical repertoire.

“Our social gathering took place around five ruined pianos, sourced from around Australia, and felt like a cross between a séance and a campside yarn … There was something post-apocalyptic about being in darkness, surrounded by these beautiful wrecks … Why was it so beautiful?”

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And in “A Federer Game”, Inga Clendinnen explores JM Coetzee’s penchant for revealing himself under the cover of fiction. She reviews Coetzee’s most recent work, Summertime – perhaps the final incarnation of Coetzee in the pages of his books – and considers other times in his career when the ‘authorial self’ has emerged. 

“Now we have Summertime, another slice of heavily stage-managed Coetzee memoir. It will also be the last because now poor John Coetzee is dead, or so he claims.”

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Plus, in “Unbelievers”, Ian Lowe discusses Richard Dawkins’ arguments for evolution as they appear in The Greatest Show on Earth; and in “Amoral Tale”, Luke Davies reviews Steven Soderbergh’s new film about a high-end New York call girl, The Girlfriend Experience.

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There’s also Lisa Gorton on Dorothy Porter’s posthumous collection of poems, The Bee Hut; Justin Clemens on Thomas Pynchon’s foray into the pulp-crime genre, Inherent Vice; and Shane Maloney on Miles Franklin’s one-off gallery visit with the author of Such Is Life, Joseph Furphy.