THE MONTHLY ESSAYS
"Before he became the Labor leader, I held in my mind three wildly contradictory images of Kevin Rudd. In the first - derived from the scurrilous portrait in The Latham Diaries - Rudd was a media-obsessed, vaultingly ambitious, duplicitous opportunist. In the second - based mainly on my observation of his near-successful attempt to prove that the foreign minister, Alexander Downer, was lying when he claimed he knew nothing about the bribes paid by the Australian Wheat Board to Saddam Hussein - Rudd was an outstanding parliamentary performer: focused, diligent, courteous but remorseless, quick-witted and intelligent. In the third - which was based on his Dietrich Bonhoeffer article - Rudd was a true believer in Christian social justice, a politician who identified not with power but with the powerless, who believed that the impending catastrophe of climate change was the overwhelming challenge of our age, who had given his life to politics to try to make the world a better place."
In "What is Rudd's Agenda?", Robert Manne takes a close look at the Rudd government as it approaches its first anniversary. What, he asks, is its relation to the "philosophic and policy disposition of its predecessor"? Has Australia "begun significantly to change" since Labor took office? What did Rudd promise, and what has he failed to deliver?
"Rudd is committed in the international sphere to ... what he invariably calls, in language borrowed from the standard Australian foreign-policy textbooks, ‘creative middle-power diplomacy'. Here Rudd is at his most ambitious or, as some might think, grandiose. It was no accident that Rudd was very keen to address the UN General Assembly; that he is keen to make Australia a player in the diplomacy leading up to the Copenhagen conference on climate change; that he has signalled for the first time an Australian interest in the international struggle to combat extreme poverty within a generation; and that he has tried to inject Australia into the current international negotiations over the financial markets' meltdown. Rudd aspires to be the architect of a new Asia-Pacific Community - a somewhat amorphous regional entity comprising all the major Asia-Pacific powers, from the US through China to Russia, where the habits of peaceful co-operation, conversation and good-neighbourliness will somehow be learnt."
"Everyone is sitting around a fire. The camels have been brought in from their browsing and are tethered to trees. Their bells let out an occasional ting. Our band consists of scientists, artists, linguists, film-makers, writers, an Aboriginal ranger - a descendant of the original owners, the Wangkangurru - a couple of paying guests and a crew to nanny us through. In the morning, we walk to the kopi caps - the cynosure of our journey. (‘Kopi' means ‘gypsum'. It's a word from south-eastern Australia that has become generic, like ‘coolamon' or ‘boomerang'.) The stockman who discovered these whitish globes thought they were dinosaur eggs and took a few ..."
In "A New Desert", Robyn Davidson returns to the Simpson Desert 30 years after the journey she wrote about in Tracks. While travelling to an important, recently discovered archaeological site, she describes the changes the Simpson has undergone - in the years since her first trek, and in those since white colonisation.
"Sometimes, I feel alienated from this secondary, cattle-scarred, orphaned place, and do not want to be here. It is a form of homesickness for a past experience, and for people who have vanished. But eventually the mood dissipates. This desert belongs to another ‘now', so why compare it? This one is worth preserving, worth our efforts to understand it. The previous one is contained in a sliver of time, along with the knowledge I had then and have since replaced with other knowledge. Just as the present owners of the Simpson, descendants of the Wangkangurru ancestors, will make of their inheritance what they can."
"The richer details of Wallace's biography have emerged in posts written since his death. They synthesise into: a bear-like and acned man who, beneath his signature props of long hair and bandana, was painfully courteous, modest, as funny and troubling in person as on the page ... Wallace was so uncomfortable among strangers that his shyness was its own defensive barrier. In one of his stories he writes of becoming so tortured by not wanting to offend people with any of the standard options for ending a conversation that he would end up blurting out, ‘I need you to go away and leave me alone now.'"
And in "Everything & More", Malcolm Knox pays tribute to the unique relationship between readers and writers - and writers and writers - as he discusses the genius and impact of the work of David Foster Wallace. An acclaimed author with a large and loyal following, Wallace recently took his own life, but, as Knox writes, he left behind a profound literary heritage.
"Developing your own voice, once you have become a lover of Wallace's work, is not so much a search for independence as a defensive measure ... Around the turn of the century I wrote a Wallacey failure of a novel, encyclopaedic and hypermanic, which never made it past its first reader and happily (for me) was never published. I have seen this happen to other novelists. You recommend Wallace, and months later they return spouting footnotes like an old potato with hairy shoots."
THE NATION REVIEWED
"The United States seems even more divided than it did two years ago: divided by race, religion, class and ideology; by ‘issues' only partly real and partly media confection. It is as if one large slice of the population does not recognise the other slice, or sees in the other, not the faces of their fellow Americans, but their most terrible enemies. That Friday night in the hotel bar, as the stock market plunged into the unknown and John McCain felt the abyss opening beneath his feet, fear and hatred were palpable and you could have been forgiven for thinking that Doris Kearns Goodwin was right to compare the recent Republican rallies to Germany in the '30s. "
In the Monthly Comment, Don Watson reports from New Orleans on the American election. In an area still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he finds the concerns of the locals do not necessarily accord with those of either presidential candidate, or the mainstream media.
"People looking for another reason why so many Americans have more use for religion than for politics might begin by listening to a good preacher, and then to the average modern politician. While they're at it, they might ask where the bullshit is deepest and truth hardest to recognise - in religion or a presidential election. And then there's the more practical reason: to quote one taxi driver, representative of the millions without health insurance, ‘As if I could afford it! God is my health insurance.'"
In "Ursa Major", Gideon Haigh examines bear markets past and present, beginning with the all-but-forgotten Western Blizzard and the Bankers' Panic of more than a century ago.
"Financial markets used to be geared mainly to moving money; they are now, through the design and application of derivatives products, overwhelmingly involved in making risk fungible. This is a highly specialised and increasingly abstruse activity, difficult to supervise, awkward even to manage, in which medium and long-term arrangements are made by individuals on impossibly lucrative short-term incentives; it is a trading rather than an investing culture ... This was always a scenario pregnant with profane possibilities; to perceive them required only a modest imaginative leap. For in the end, all it took were a few checks to the environment of low interest rates and ever-expanding credit, then for borrowers to begin defaulting as mortgages reset from their initial ‘teaser' rates: imaginations promptly ran riot. Like Lady Ashley Brett's fiancé, Michael, in The Sun Also Rises, the American financial-services sector went broke ‘gradually and then suddenly'."
And in "Hair Care", Robert Forster offers some hard-won words of wisdom on the complicated business of maintaining a stylish and healthy 'do.
"I began to gather information from whatever sources I could find. These tended to be in the back of women's magazines - here I picked up tips and stray facts that I cross-referenced with other information I'd sourced. The writers of these articles were hairdressers themselves; other knowledge came from casually questioning hairdressers, who would happily spill theory and practical advice as they cut. Over the years I used my hair as a monster on which to test products and techniques, while whittling down the knowledge and formulas to a set of guidelines that I have lived by ever since. Now is the time to pass this knowledge on. I must add one disclaimer, though. I am no professional, and what works for me may not work for others. But I have much to tell ..."
There's also John Hirst, in "Following Menzies", thrashing out the issues of the day with the New South Wales Liberal leader, Barry O'Farrell.
"He is completely at ease in the modern world, which may be explained by his geniality, or the ordinary politician's habit of not quarrelling with his electorate, or simply that he grew up during the social revolution of the '60s and '70s. When I refer to the church, he replies with ‘church, temple and mosque' ... Whereas the common sense about overcoming welfare dependency is that it requires a carrot-and-stick approach, O'Farrell is unhappy with stick - in his formulation, rewards are more effective than penalties. When I suggest that the underclass is not easily stirred from its torpor, he replies that some people do need help to ‘recalibrate their lives' but better that the help comes from private agencies than from government, which is too bureaucratic and too politically correct."
ARTS & LETTERS
"As a writer you know you've made it when you've written for Vanity Fair. Its roster of scribes past and present includes Noël Coward, DH Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, James Wolcott, PG Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Ingrid Sischy and Christopher Hitchens, to name just a few ... Vanity Fair straddles smart and serious, but above all it's gorgeous ... Its roll call of snappers is every bit as impressive as that of its writers. We're talking all the greats: Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Heune, Baron Adolf de Meyer, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, even Karl Lagerfeld."
In "Flappers & Snappers", Clare Press luxuriates in the excess of arty glamour - "style with substance" - to be found in the new Vanity Fair Portraits, a collection of the last century's most famous faces captured by the era's most celebrated photographers.
"Not surprisingly, there is more youth and beauty than decaying flesh displayed in these pages. A 1927 picture of the Albertina Rasch dance troupe is so laden with silvered tulle it calls to mind a lavish dessert. Steichen's young Clark Gable sits opposite Aviator-era Leo DiCaprio; both look good enough to eat. There's Cecil Beaton's picture of diamonds and pearls in which the actress Merle Oberon is also to be seen. The cover image is of Kate Moss dressed up like Marlene Dietrich, and inside it's next to a 1935 shot of the real Dietrich. Herb Ritts shoots Sylvester Stallone kissing a rapt Brigitte Nielsen above an adoring crowd, leaving Juergen Teller to snap designer Marc Jacobs slapping the arse of film director and fashion fan Sofia Coppola (don't worry - he's gay; they're just friends)."
In "The Conflict Business", Peter Hartcher offers an astute examination of the history and role of Australian political books, from Robert Menzies' The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy to Latham's dirt-dishing and the recent Costello Memoirs, and beyond.
"Costello's version will not go uncontested. Howard plans to write his account next year. Tony Abbott is writing not a memoir but a manifesto, under the working title ‘Conservatism After Howard' ... Abbott's publication promises to make the manifesto-style book as important for conservative politics as it is for the progressive side. This would be no big deal in the US, where John McCain has five books to his name and Barack Obama two. But in Australia, it would be a serious intensification of the intellectual effort that goes into political campaigning. This is a happy development. For the key figures on both sides of politics to canvass ideas for our political future, rather than just settle scores from their political pasts, offers the prospect of a leadership class that is better prepared and a voting public that is better informed."
And in "Unsettled", Sebastian Smee reviews The Henson Case, David Marr's investigation of the controversy that has surrounded photographer Bill Henson this year. Supplemented by his interviews with the renowned artist, Smee's analysis is an informed and timely contribution to a debate that continues to captivate the art world and the wider community.
"There are thousands of people around Australia, and elsewhere in the world, who have been moved by Henson's photographs ... Are they so moved by Henson's work because it appeals to their prurient, perverted side? I doubt it. Equally, however, Henson's work is not there solely to remind us that the teenage body is beautiful, innocent and good. His work is more ambitious and unsettling than that. It speaks to a part of the soul that is permanently on the threshold, vulnerable to collapse, hungry for ecstatic release, thwarted, confused, tender, longing. Inevitably, eroticism plays a role in this. So does an apprehension of death, and of the unearthly, haunted silence of each moment as it recedes into the roar of history."
Plus, in "High Wire Acts", Luke Davies marvels at the poetry and daring of French wirewalker Philippe Petit, the subject of the recent documentary Man on Wire; and in "What Might Have Been", Christina Thompson sees in Kate Grenville's latest historical novel, The Lieutenant, an alternative beginning to relations between Indigenous and white people in Australia. There's also Mary Ellen Jordan on Christos Tsiolkas' bleak new novel, The Slap; and Shane Maloney on the time Margaret Preston threw cake at Thea Proctor.
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