THE MONTHLY ESSAYS
"The Bradman story is partly about fame, for the Australians about to be lionised for their Olympic accomplishments experience a limelight diffuse and fleeting by comparison with the one that shone on the cricketer. Donald Bradman spent his entire adult life yoked tightly by expectation, more broadly famous and for longer than any other Australian, while his posthumous fame will shortly be sold us again in XL value-packs of nostalgia. All the more reason to return to the story of Bradman's becoming famous, in his formative years between 1930 and 1934, when he changed the course of sport utterly, and his own life irrevocably."
August 2008 marks the centenary of Bradman's birth. In "Sir Donald Bradman at 100", one of the world's foremost writers on cricket, Gideon Haigh, reveals the intensely serious young man behind the sporting legend. Drawing on previously unpublished and unexamined Bradman material, this essay shows how the cricketer approached every aspect of his life with the same methodical earnestness he brought to the game. Expertly investigating Bradman's business contracts and disagreements with Australia's cricket board, Haigh offers an original portrait of a man often overwhelmed by the competing demands of sporting and professional careers, and ever-increasing fame.
"Perhaps Bradman's most poignant encounter was one that no biographer has noted. While the Australians were playing Hampshire at Brighton, they found themselves at the same hotel as Amy Johnson - probably the only non-royal more famous in the Empire than Bradman - not long after her 19-day Gypsy Moth flight from London to Darwin. Johnson was on an exhausting tour of England and finding public life an exquisite torture ... The 27-year-old aviatrix was one of very few who left a personal impression on Bradman. ‘Was introduced to Amy Johnson and during the course of a drink together I had quite a long chat to her,' he recorded. ‘Charming, unaffected girl.' He noted her presence again at a dinner the following night. It is tempting to wonder whether their conversation traversed the wages of fame, on which Johnson was already expert, and Bradman would become so."
"‘Is there a bin?' I asked, holding my empty plastic lunchbox. ‘Just throw it anywhere,' suggested Xiao Zhang amiably. It was my first visit to Beijing, some 28 years ago. Chairman Mao had died in 1976; two years later, the new Communist leadership under Deng Xiaoping declared itself in favour of economic reform and modernisation, an end to ideological extremism, and an open door to Western tourism, investment and exchange. I was in town to help negotiate a deal for a Hong Kong-based publisher. Our Chinese partner assigned Xiao Zhang, a young editor, to take me sightseeing on my time off. We had just had a picnic alongside the Spirit Way, a path lined with magnificent fifteenth-century statuary that led to the Ming imperial tombs in the shadow of the Jundu Mountains, north-west of Beijing. The sky was blue, the air crisp and clean. But the lawn on which we'd picnicked, I noticed, was strewn with litter."
In "Levelling with China", Linda Jaivin offers a compelling and personal insight into contemporary China, and Australia's relationship, past and present, with the Asian superpower. "China's gaping chasm between rich and poor, between coastal areas and hinterland, combined with a system of local government which is frequently corrupt, arbitrary and ineffectual, has led," she writes, "to all manner of injustice for the country's poorest, including the callous degradation of their natural environment and agricultural resources." While Australians may be justified in criticising China for its environmental-protection and human-rights failings, we must also, Jaivin argues, be clear-eyed about past failings of our own.
"‘Swamp' was the verb which Labor's Jack Lang used to incite fear and rally support for the White Australia policy ... He warned that if it was not checked, Chinese immigration had the potential to ‘obliterate every trace of British progress and civilisation'. Given the comparative achievements of Chinese and white Australian civilisation at the time, Lang's words said far more about the speaker and the sentiment to which he appealed than about China or the Chinese. Today, we should indeed be alert to the implications of Chinese ‘soft power' diplomacy or international policies which may go against our own national interest. But we need to be clear that our concerns have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with China's might and complexity."
"What do you know about Magellan? Ask this question of any educated person - a person (according to John Cowper Powys) whose culture is made of what remains after one has forgotten all one set out to learn - and you will probably receive the answer: Portuguese navigator who demonstrated that the Earth is round when he achieved the first circumnavigation of the globe, in the early sixteenth century. This answer is incomplete and partly mistaken."
And in "In the Wake of Magellan", Simon Leys chronicles the Portuguese explorer's remarkable voyage in search of an alternative passage to the Spice Islands. With an artist's eye for detail, Leys brings to life the little-known true story of an improvised and fraught expedition: one in fact undertaken on behalf of Spain, and which Magellan did not live to see completed.
"After a short stop in Guam, where fresh supplies revived the crew, the ships sailed to the Philippines. There, on the island of Cebu, Magellan established friendly relations with the local king. After one week, the king expressed his desire to become a Christian ... Magellan then suggested imposing the authority of the "Christian king" over all of his neighbours. When one of them rebuffed his interference, Magellan decided to punish him ... Taking only 40 men with him in the longboat, he landed on the island of the recalcitrants; there, ambushed by a large army, he was killed with six of his companions after a brief and desperate fight."
THE NATION REVIEWED
"During the past several weeks I have been reading, with a racing pulse, some recent literature on global warming while watching, with a sinking heart, the political skirmishes connected to the introduction of the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. The experience of moving between these parallel universes has been genuinely disconcerting."
In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne illustrates the stark disparities between recent climate science and domestic politics. "What was lacking from the global-warming domestic politics of July", he says, "was any sense of the depth and the urgency of the crisis we now face."
"As more or less everyone immediately acknowledged, the Rudd Green Paper, apart from its earlier starting date, was far closer in spirit to the advice that Peter Shergold had provided the Howard government than to that given by Ross Garnaut ... Is it not somewhat dismaying that Australia's first important response to the climate-change crisis, supposed to be designed to alter our behaviour, will begin with generous compensation payments to some of the most significant carbon polluters in the land?"
"My growing-up began with The Outsiders ... With his love of sunsets and books, his sense of honour and readiness to fight for it, his feeling of not fitting in, and his ability to put it all into words, the orphaned Ponyboy was a bookish girl's dream guy. Which isn't surprising, since SE Hinton was a bookish girl and she'd dreamt him up."
In "Ponyboy at 55", Robyn Annear revisits the book that transformed her 11-year-old existence, and started her first crush - "Ponyboy, of course." It's been 41 years since The Outsiders, a groundbreaking young-adult novel, was first published: what, Annear wonders, would have become of Hinton's protagonist?
"Ponyboy, supposing he'd been real, would be 55 now. In the '70s, newly graduated, he might have been one of those teachers lured from the US to fill the Australian shortfall ... I can just see him at Templestowe Tech, circa 1974: russet sideburns, turtleneck jumper, desert boots - intense, the kind of teacher who can get through to kids ..."
"There is a curious connection between calamities and our relationship with landscape, in particular our pursuit of a picturesque view. When people fall, we're told they were looking at the scenery or trying to take a photo. We have all felt that irresistible urge drawing us to the edge to take a look. ‘Cliff accidents happen all the time,' says Peter Yates, the chief pilot of the Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter Service - because ‘people want to see wide-open spaces. They want an uninterrupted view of the water.'"
And in "On the Edge", Kate Rossmanith traces the history of our "appreciation of the picturesque in nature", reminding us that the quest for a pleasing view can be a hazardous activity.
"Jagged cliffs became worth seeing, and seeing out from, at the same time that people began to feel relatively secure in nature. Nowadays we may still go to the precipice to witness the sublime but, unlike the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists, hikers and landscape artists who were alert to potential dangers, perhaps the perils have grown invisible to our eyes."
There's also Robyn Davidson, in "The Wanderer", on the dislocated life of the traveller, for whom "everywhere is elsewhere"; and Craig Sherborne, in "The Ring Cycle", on the truths and lies of Alzheimer's.
ARTS & LETTERS
"The cruel joke - the funny game - is that these people are doomed, no matter what they do. The film compresses, with a kind of evil glee, our collective destinies. We know we will die, and try not to think about it. What must it be like to know that it is coming, in less than a day, and with maximum terror?"
In "Horrorshow", Monthly film critic Luke Davies turns trainspotter during a journey to the dark side, comparing Austrian Michael Haneke's original Funny Games with the director's own American remake.
"The first Funny Games (1997) was shocking, and brazen, and challenged highbrow cinemagoers' dismissal of violence-as-entertainment while questioning lowbrow's embrace of it ... Given Hollywood's record of sanitising and de-fanging non-Hollywood originals, a great deal of anxiety surrounded this new version. Surely the system would not allow so dark a film to come out of the sausage grinder without a little corn starch and preservative?"
In "Children of the Revolutions", Juliana Engberg guides us through the "generations of artistic revolution" showcased in the Sixteenth Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions: Forms that Turn: a dazzling collection of major works, old and new, international and local.
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, represented by Rodchenko, art is launching into space, daring us to embrace the dawn of speed and velocity. By the end of the century, represented by Cattelan's forlorn hoisted horse, all the puff has gone out of the revolutionary enterprise. The vehicle of the revolution, once an amiable four-legged creature, is now a spinning, freewheeling thing that comes hurtling through the air to slam into tall buildings and finish the New World Order. The revolution of the twenty-first century, represented by Rodney Graham's ladder, is without destination, seemingly confused and directionless, but hoping to find an exit strategy."
Plus, Robert Forster heads back to college with two smart young bands, Melbourne's The Hampdens and New York's Vampire Weekend; and Pete Hay goes in search of essence, unearthing the philosophical underpinnings of Clive Hamilton's The Freedom Paradox.
There's also Danielle Wood on Shaun Tan's collection of beautifully illustrated stories, Tales from Outer Suburbia; Barry Jones on crime-master Barry Maitland's Bright Air; Alexandra Coghlan on the first-ever true-colour photographs, reproduced in The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn; and Shane Maloney on the time champion Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku and Sydney schoolgirl Isabel Letham caught a wave together.
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