Letters to the editor

Guy Pearse's July Comment and John Birmingham's essay, "In the Dark", are most informative, but fail to consider another possible option for power generation: natural gas. The long-term planning must be for a renewable source of energy, but in the interim gas is cleaner than coal.

Australia is fortunate to possess vast quantities of natural gas off the north-west and Kimberley coast. We ship millions, if not billions, of litres of gas and billions of tonnes of iron ore to Asia - and buy it back in the form of manufactured goods. I can hear Rex Connor saying from the grave, "I told you so." Despite boom exports of coal, gas and iron ore, Australia is still running a current-account deficit. The eventual reduction of commodity sales will increase the deficit.

Motor vehicles can also be operated on compressed natural gas, so why is the government paying a subsidy on LPG conversions instead of encouraging LNG conversions? Perhaps one of your contributors could enlighten us in a future issue.

Ashley Hay has done a fine job sorting through the myriad conflicting claims relating to the discovery of Homo floresiensis, AKA the Hobbit. One point of clarification, though: while she correctly states that I have been involved in the production of a documentary film on the Flores find, I am only part of a team. The initial research, and the earlier films that led to five international broadcasters backing the project, was entirely the work of Annamaria Talas. Annamaria and I will soon complete what is very much a joint effort, which will be seen by Australian viewers on the ABC sometime later this year. All we can say is that the little creature turns out to be more fascinating than anyone might have imagined.

I do not understand why Don Watson described Sir John Monash as a "German-Jewish general" (May). John Monash was born in Melbourne, educated in Melbourne (Scotch College, University of Melbourne) and lived in Melbourne both before and after World War I. If Watson wanted to identify Monash's nationality and religion, surely a more correct description would be "Australian-Jewish general".

I have a lively respect for Robert Manne, for his intelligence, his erudition and for his heroic service in the history wars. However, having read his essay "Agent of Influence" (June), I am moved to protest: "Sir, your underpants are showing."

First, there is Manne's tendency to conflate communism with various communist regimes, as in "the human catastrophe of communism". I assume that Manne would not speak of "the human catastrophe of democracy" - and yet a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of democracy.

Secondly, there is the issue of whether Burchett was a party member. Very likely, of course, but it is hardly surprising that he didn't say so, or even lied about it, in the context of the times.

Thirdly, there is Manne's chief witness for the prosecution, Tibor Méray. It may be quite unfair, but I have reservations about accepting the word of a defector (defecting in any direction) quite as wholeheartedly as does Manne. (I had the same problem with Manne's attitude to Petrov.) There is always the question of which master the witness is trying to serve. Isn't this exactly the problem with the POWs who made confessions relating to germ warfare? Not that they were voluntary defectors, but nor were they in a position to put the truth first.

Fourthly, there is the language which Manne uses about Méray, compared with the language he uses about Burchett. Burchett is erratic. He "changed his mind ... flew into action with a series of ferocious articles". He "drifted back to support for the ... Soviet Union". The possible evidence for his party membership is a "smoking gun". Méray, on the other hand, is reasonable and eager to do the right thing, "most convincing"; he "points out that the Chinese controlled every word that Burchett wrote". Manne states, "even so honest a communist as Tibor Méray at the time believed that the Americans were dropping biological warfare bombs on innocent Korean civilians. The difference was that Meray later recognised that the claim was false and was ashamed about the propaganda he had written." Would that have been after he defected, by any chance?

I felt hard done by to be anonymously tagged a "student Leftist" for my "stridently pro-Burchett thesis" in Robert Manne's essay "Agent of Influence" (June). Manne once labelled a Burchett historian whose views he disagreed with a "neo-Stalinist"; "student Leftist" seems decidedly tame in comparison.  

It was not unexpected that Manne would employ throwaway epithets that fuse adherence to historical conclusions with subscription to ideological ones, thereby politicising and paralysing the history on Wilfred Burchett's life in the exact manner I had criticised in my thesis. After all, it is what Burchett represents ideologically - "the human catastrophe of communism" - rather than the historical facts, which has always concerned him.

Manne has written about Burchett on a number of occasions since his groundbreaking "The Fortunes of Wilfred Burchett: A New Assessment", published in Quadrant in 1985 (it is worth noting that the subtitle of the 2008 essay is "Reassessing Wilfred Burchett"). Back then, he constructed a robust case attacking Burchett's communist past and defending the Menzies government's denial to him of a passport. Readers learned of Burchett's "Don Juan sexual adventures" and that he had once worked as a used-car dealer. Such ad-hominem attacks were accompanied by equally dubious methodology. Manne relied heavily on an article by Denis Warner which Gavan McCormack had identified as containing falsified evidence. Manne even defended inconsistencies on the part of court witnesses on the grounds that they had deluded themselves because of their hostility towards Burchett, and continued to use them extensively as reliable historical sources. The essay as a whole conflated Burchett's communist sympathies and his alleged treasonous activity in Korea seamlessly. The preordained conclusion? That "Burchett was in the deepest sense of the word a traitor."

I allowed myself to be discouraged from reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room after Robert Dessaix's review in April. His apparently rational assessment led me to join in his distaste for Garner's apparently clinical detachment from her dying friend's terrors.

However, Sandra Hogan's provocative counter-assessment of Garner's novel in Correspondence (also in April), pushed me into finding my own response to it which is simply this: only a person who loves fearlessly could write such a book as The Spare Room. It is an extended letter of a grieving friend's self-reproach written from the front-line of love in all its battles, flawed but dauntless.

The truism that "the dignity of the dying comes second to the needs of the clearly living" is very clear in Robyn Davidson's piece "Organic Matter" (May). Let's hope Monthly readers will reconsider their own plans for disposal, and make the necessary changes to their wills now. The recent talk of selling one's organs for transplant is abhorrent, but it has raised awareness of the dreadful daily waste of body parts through the ecologically costly choice of cremation. And, as the ABC reported, by 2050 the full-house sign will go up in cemeteries. We should make alternate arrangements for ourselves, so that we can give the great gift of life to someone who will otherwise die.

Sadly, I am allergic to human serum, which makes my body good for no one. This, then, is my plan: I have told my family that I will donate my brain for research, as I believe it will be used to investigate whether the regular playing of duplicate bridge prevents Alzheimer's (I play for self-protection a couple of times a week) - so that will get rid of the head. The rest is to go to the zoo: preferably to be fed to the lions, but not in front of the children, of course; just as a late-night delicacy, perhaps? My bones will be crunched up by the lions and will become part of the bagged zoo poo which is available in nurseries. I like to fantasise that my remains will spurt the growth of some wonderful new food and be eaten, and thus I will come full circle into the next life.