THE MONTHLY ESSAYS
"This far inland I'm way off my patch and I feel it keenly. I'm a coastal person. My home is the white-sand-and-limestone country of the central west: grass trees, tuarts, banksia and coastal heath. My abiding interest is in the littoral. Even here in the reddening interior I gravitate to rims and edges, towards a region wedged between farm and desert that has its hooks in me, for past the last big wheat town of Dalwallinu, and before the gold diggings at Paynes Find, is a swathe of country that has taught me a lot about the mistakes of our common past and given me cautious hope for the future. Out here there's a different kind of littoral, where eucalypts and mulga scrub overlap in a wash of unlikely biodiversity. Along a stretch of road where, not long ago, you'd see country so goat-infested, so beaten-down and degraded that you could cry, something new is afoot."
In "Silent Country", Tim Winton travels through a recovering Western Australian landscape, reflecting on the quiet process of repatriation being undertaken by groups of inspiring individuals who have "taken conservation into their own hands".
"From a carry cage tagged and supported like a case of impossibly rare jewels came a tiny creature snuggled within a hessian bag. I held it a minute or two while its heartbeat capered against my chest; it wouldn't have weighed a kilo. I was struck by the fineness of its limbs and I wanted to linger a while, but there were protocols to observe so I knelt in the red dirt between thorny bushes, lay the bag down gently and peeled it open so that the creature might emerge unassisted, and when it did I got my first glimpse of a boodie. When it got to its feet it twitched a moment as if to gauge the feel of its radio-tracking collar, glanced about with huge, dark eyes and bolted, zig-zagging out into the gloom of the bush, and witnessing it I found it difficult to maintain an empirical calm. One after the other, boodies and then several rare hare-wallabies shot out into the wild while I pumped my fist silently like a mad barracker on his last warning."
"Richard Hickox's appointment extricated Opera Australia from a tight spot. Says Melbourne Opera's founding director, Greg Hocking: ‘Simone Young's leaving was such an international scandal that they were lucky to get anyone.' Over time, reservations have developed. For all his surface charm, Hickox prefers the company of guest-artist friends and under pressure is apt to carp about the general rubbishness of things Australian. Professionally, his practice of arriving, simultaneously rehearsing two operas, conducting a handful of performances and then jetting off seems to leave him perennially overstretched and overtired. OA insists that Hickox collaborates in casting with the CEO and executive producer, but nobody doubts the Hickox's is the loudest voice - and that's a problem. ‘He's the person in Australia who decides whether you have a serious singing career in Australia,' says one who has worked with Hickox. ‘If he falls asleep in Act II or leaves early because he's jet-lagged, there goes your big chance.'"
In "La Travesty", Gideon Haigh investigates Opera Australia's troubles. Drawing on interviews with key players, this riveting essay exposes complaints from "one of OA's greatest performers, one of its longest-standing patrons, two current stars and a host of signed and unsigned supporters".
"Diana Heath, of Darling Point, is not just another operagoer. She has a lifetime's involvement with the company and its antecedents. She was the founding member of its friends council, 36 years ago, and has been a generous benefactor ... Impressed initially with Hickox, she had steadily lost faith ... The climax in a catalogue of disappointments was Carmen: under Hickox's baton, the orchestra was muffled, the singing poor, and the obligatory horses and donkeys smacked of deliberate distraction, while the artists who had made OA seemed to have vanished. She left at interval to compose a letter to Gordon Fell: ‘It is my belief that artistic/musical standards within the Opera Company are being compromised and the Company is languishing in a second-rate milieu ... Young singers are being thrust into roles they are not ready for.'"
And in "Coup-Coup Land", Craig Sherborne heads to Fiji to discover what life is like under Commodore Bainimarama's "interim government", which has held power since the country's latest coup, in 2006.
"In coup-coup land people live in cages.
‘How come the people live in cages, Babba?'
‘They're not cages!' Babba scoffs.
But Babba is wrong. They are cages: houses wrapped in wire grills that are sturdier-looking than the shanty homes they protect. Wire covers backyards, too, like a kennel-run for the kids, to keep menace at bay. Fences crowned with barbed wire. Padlocks as big as grapefruit. And this is a nice palm-jungle rural road, where girls wait in neatly ironed grey uniforms for the school bus to Nadi."
THE NATION REVIEWED
"What sort of prime minister is Kevin Rudd? In many ways we are still waiting to find out. At the nine-month point of his government, Rudd addressed the National Press Club. Christian Kerr said the speech lacked ‘lifeblood' and James Curran said it was more like a bureaucrat's briefing paper than an address to the nation. Such comments are becoming standard as Rudd is criticised for lacking a narrative to hold the various policy initiatives in place, or for failing to articulate the Big Ideas that will give the commentariat something to get their pens into. His style seems bland, affectless even, and his verbal mannerisms - ‘Hey, you know what?' - already grate. Disillusion has set in, as it always does when the hopes and dreams released by a change of prime minister are followed by the realisation that the new leader is only a man after all."
In the Monthly Comment, Judith Brett analyses Kevin Rudd's leadership, proposing that while many have been quick to deride Rudd's style and actions, "a little patience is warranted".
"The transition from Howard to Rudd is not about new national narratives, nor Big Ideas. It is about the hard work of solving complex policy problems which are linked by little else than that they have been neglected for too long. Each is extraordinarily complex, and has a myriad of stakeholders and potential losers ... It is impossible to disentangle causes from symptoms, and the search for the root of the problem is futile ... All a government can do is do its best, on the basis of the best information available and its judgement about the likely consequences. So Rudd has set up a series of committees and inquiries to advise the government on a host of policy problems. It means we are not quite sure what the solutions will be, and this frustrates journalists and an Opposition keen to scrutinise the government and hold it to account."
"It was Meg's small advertisement in the local paper that netted the first group of Monday nighters. Each applicant, including me, quailed at the prospect of being found inadequate. What if Shakespeare's profundities and higher-order themes whizzed straight over our heads? What if we didn't know our history, our Henrys from our Richards? Would we be laughed at or, worse, be made to suffer the fate of the kid who has to hear it twice before the rest of the class can move on? To every expression of beginner's fear, Meg has offered her simple message: that Shakespeare (and poetry) is for everybody, not just the highly educated"
In "Macbeth on Monday", Gail Bell finds that tragedy is better shared, as she recounts the adventures of a weekly reading group.
"‘What is this in compt?' asks Charlotte, our Danish speaker, who is honing her adopted language with English written not long after the accession of James I. ‘Haven't a clue,' is the usual response, and it's eyes down to the notes where, in my case, Kenneth Muir gives ‘subject to account' - and we glance at the next line, which has ‘audit', and collectively puzzle out Lady M's reply to the king until Charlotte nods, or our patient hostess, Meg, clears the fog with a quick wipe of the windscreen."
And in "Jung at Heart", Mungo MacCallum delves into the Australian psyche, spurred on by a belief that, in the reductive world of election analysis, "we are all Jungians now".
"After the electoral upheavals of 6 September, with the big swing against Labor in the Western Australian poll and the even bigger ones against the Nationals in the Lyne by-election and the Liberals in the seat of Mayo, everyone started talking about a profound change in the national mood ... The idea of an underlying collective mind - what the Hindus call the Paramatman - is not entirely new. Politicians have always talked about the will of the people as a monomorphic entity that gives them a mandate for what they (not necessarily the voters) want to do. Gough Whitlam used to appeal to the intelligence and good sense of the Australian people, as if he believed that if he could only win over the group mind, he would be successful. Bob Hawke went further, claiming to have a love affair with the Australian people; while it was the emperor Caligula who wished the Roman people had only one neck, so that he could sever it at a single stroke, Hawke was obviously thinking about another body part altogether."
There's also Alice Pung, in "24/7", "marvelling at all the things a person could own, produced en masse by people we will never meet" while being seduced by the unexpected pleasures of a 3 am shopping spree.
ARTS & LETTERS
"Put yourself in Glen Campbell's shoes. You're 72. You've sold 45 million records. You've been married four times, most recently back in 1982. You have eight children. Your time is spent primarily on the golf course. You smoke cigars. You haven't made a charting pop record for 30 years, though you play the odd gig. And of course you live in Malibu. Then this long-haired guy comes to one of your shows and tells you he's a record producer, and he not only wants to make a record with you of songs written mostly by young people you've never heard of, but he's also approached your old record label and they're enthusiastic about the idea. They want you back. As you stand in your dressing room, guitar around your neck, stage sweat on your brow, you'd have to ask yourself: Do I really want to go through this one more time?"
In "The Return of the Wichita Lineman", Robert Forster welcomes the Johnny Cash-style renaissance of Glen Campbell, the almost forgotten voice of such classics as ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix'.
"Meet Glen Campbell starts with a hit, and if there was any justice in the world, Glen Campbell belting out Travis's ‘Sing' would be coming from every radio right now. And by hit, I don't mean it's good and melodic and wouldn't it be nice. I mean, this has got muscle and hooks and fairy dust all over it, and it deserves to sit beside Madonna and The Veronicas and be programmed by the big FM-radio conglomerates ... Song selection is where this album could have fallen down, but none of the choices sounds kooky or gimmicky. Campbell and Raymond ‘get' every one. There is the tingle that comes with the realisation that Glen Campbell is actually singing ‘Jesus', by The Velvet Underground, or ‘Times Like These', by Foo Fighters, but that soon yields to relief and at times wonder that Campbell can so comfortably get under the skin of these songs."
"By insisting that the claims of climate scientists are simply untrue, the sceptics are guilty of ‘literal denial'. Like cultists, they manufacture ‘evidence' to sustain their belief. ‘Interpretive denial' reframes the facts so that they mean something different and less threatening. We think to ourselves: environmentalists always exaggerate; Australia has always had droughts; humans have solved these sorts of problems in the past. Even if we accept the facts and their true meaning, we may still engage in ‘implicatory denial', whereby we disavow the moral and political implications, a tactic used by the previous government: Australia's emissions are very small; we'd do too much damage to the economy; China is to blame. Individuals also do this, telling themselves: I'm doing my bit; it's a long way off; I should be all right."
In "Six Degrees of Apocalypse", Clive Hamilton considers how we might best respond, practically and emotionally, to the overwhelming evidence of global warming presented in several recent books on climate change.
"Although no other issue is so pressing or calamitous in its implications, I have at times shunned working on climate change because it is too unsettling to envision the sort of world in which my children and grandchildren are likely to live. For years I persuaded myself there was a good chance that the world would find an adequate response to prevent disastrous warming, despite my pessimism about the prospects for political change. I secretly hoped that the scientists were exaggerating. These excuses became untenable around two years ago ..."
And in "Pilgrimage", Alexandra Coghlan discovers that Robert Dessaix's latest book, Arabesques, reveals almost as much about its author as it does about its subject, the twentieth-century French writer André Gide.
"Dessaix's interest in Gide the writer is evident throughout but it seems to be the man who commands the real fascination. Dessaix undertakes a series of meditations that yield, and occasionally answer, their own questions: the significance of travel and the reasons we undertake it, issues of faith and religion, old age and love - all these rise successively to the surface, embellishing it with new textures and strands. Throughout these philosophical journeys Dessaix is less a guide than a fellow wanderer, and by the end we are left in little doubt of the book's function: to map, geographically and conceptually, not only the fractured figure of Gide but of Dessaix himself."
Plus, in "The Remembering", Luke Davies finds much to savour in Ari Folman's animated documentary feature, Waltz with Bashir; and in "Contempt", Adrian Martin tackles Richard Brody's Everything is Cinema, the controversial new biography of French New Wave veteran Jean-Luc Godard. There's also Amanda Lohrey on Jacinta Halloran's debut novel, Dissection; Patrick Allington on Joseph O'Neill's Booker-longlisted Netherland; and Shane Maloney on the meeting of Archbishop Daniel Mannix and BA Santamaria.
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