THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli, another event of world-historical importance was taking place on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary scholars think that one million people were murdered during this catastrophe. The crime was committed by the leadership of the Ottoman Turkish Empire: the empire which Australian troops, as part of the Anglo-French force, invaded."

In "A Turkish Tale", Robert Manne tackles the awful episode that, for Australia, hides in the shadow of Gallipoli: the genocide which bears directly on the major Australian involvement in World War I but which forms no part of the Anzac story.

"In the scores of books written about Australia and Gallipoli, why has no Australian historian ever asked the question that should have occurred most naturally to a member of the profession: namely, did the Anglo-French Dardanelles campaign play any role in the Ottoman regime's decision for genocide?"

"Max Marchetti wonders if his will be the last generation of farmers in this area. He already talks about his farm as a kind of museum. ‘I couldn't imagine my kids, if farming continues the way it is, becoming farmers. Most of the time, to tell you the truth, I keep the farm going to show them,' he explains."

In "Take Me to the River", Chloe Hooper visits the dust-dry Mallee region, in northern Victoria, to see the effects of climate change. It will rain again, she says, but farmers believe it may not rain the way it did in the past, and break the drought.

"As every day brings news of melting glaciers, shrinking Greenland, coral bleaching, mammoth bushfires, cataclysms or portents of cataclysms, no other subject, including sport, can keep the weather out for long. The effects of global warming are exponential: for a long time, climatic changes seem negligible, then suddenly appear apocalyptic. Britain's Meteorological Office is already predicting that 2007 will be the hottest year on record."

"It seems particularly Australian to hang onto so much prime land for the public good. Although we're a soft touch when it comes to the privatisation of our minds, we are deeply hostile to the privatisation of what we can see and touch: our land. We are a materialistic people. We worship the material world. You can buy up our art, but you leave our beaches alone. So where does our history fit, on this spectrum between the two-dollar-shop of ideas and the Fort Knox of bushland and beach? How tightly held is our history? Do we care enough about it not to sell it to the highest bidder?"

In "Corporatising Culture", Malcolm Knox visits Japan, looking to its seamless mergers of shops and museums as a possible precursor to corporate ownership of cultural institutions - and to airbrushed versions of history - in Australia.

And in "America's Australia", John Button reflects on the relationship - usually benign, and characterised on both sides by "vague impressions and fuzzy understandings"- between the two nations, and how a US Army guide from World War II illustrates the American perspective on our country.

"It is when the countries share a cause that the two peoples have got to know each other best. Between 1942 and 1945, when Australia's population was seven million, one million US service personnel came here. They were made welcome, and strange things happened. American sporting results and recipes were published in the newspapers; ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' was played at the start of theatre and concert performances. Australians were introduced to the hot dog; Americans, reluctantly, to the dim sim."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"As federal parliament began its final session of 2006, John Howard must have been feeling a bit like his beloved Australian cricket team: all he had to do to win was turn up. The past three elections had proved conclusively that he was not only omnipotent but invincible, and quite possibly immortal as well. Each time, about a year out from polling day, the pundits had come up with a list of reasons why his government should not, could not survive, and each time he had proved them wrong, freeing himself with one mighty bound."

In the Monthly Comment, Mungo MacCallum examines why it could be a case of Exit Right at the next election. Interest-rate rises, industrial-relations problems, an absence of ministerial accountability - and Kevin Rudd's surprising mongrel streak - suggest that this time around, the Opposition really will challenge the Coalition.

"Howard will tell you the economy is not going bad, and in broad terms, he is right: while there is a bit of fraying at the edges, the basics remain sound and a lot of people continue to do very nicely out of his government, thank you. But there are quite a few who never have, and rather more who are becoming worried that the good times are coming to an end."

"On the front desk at the head office of Sydney IVF, in Kent Street, rests a marble statue of three fused figures. Two adults and a child form a clenched posy of hands, knees and feet; the stone is so dark and smooth it's impossible to tell where one limb ends and another begins."

In "Many Me", Kate Rossmanith enters the fraught and complex world of stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning, investigating the ways in which advances in science question Western notions of individuality and uniqueness.

"Of the thousands of frozen beginnings at Sydney IVF - fertilised embryos stored by couples for future use - around 400 have so far been donated to the labs for stem-cell research. ‘Half the couples are happy to donate their unused embryos, rather than have them thrown away,' Teija Peura, the principal scientist at Sydney IVF's stem-cell lab, tells me. A framed photo of Mel Gibson sits on her desk. ‘He's a hunk. He's also opposed to the research I'm doing - but then, everyone's entitled to their opinion,' she says."

Plus, Ashley Hay interviews the departing director of the Perth International Arts Festival, Lindy Hume; John Harms celebrates the Northern Territory's greatest trailblazer, "road artist" Lenny Beadell; and in "Writer Gets Leg Up", Linda Jaivin eloquently describes the experience of pain.

ARTS & LETTERS

"In effect, Keating! is a revue, a very good one that at times seems to strive for something grander, a little like Paul Keating himself; reality, a need for a few more strong songs, and the arrival of John Howard bring it all back to earth."

In "A West Side Story", Robert Forster attends the Belvoir St production of Casey Bennetto's hit musical Keating! and is charmed by fine performances - the lead actor, Mike McLeish, in particular - a tight live band and, most of all, a glorious conceit:

"Here's the kick. Bring Keating back from jowled middle age, keep the Italian wardrobe and the glint in the eye, and play him as part Rat Pack cool, part Jeff Koons geek. Let him dance and let him sing, just like all smartly dressed young men do in musicals. But instead of songs of love and happiness and dreams, have him sing policy: reconciliation, Asia, the possibilities of a republic. He's a song-and-dance man, but a song-and-dance man with ideas about the future of Australia."

"Les Carlyon's magisterial Gallipoli, perhaps the best and probably the most successful work of Australian history since Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, has been seized upon by conservatives as an antidote to all that po-mo persiflage corrupting impressionable minds in our excuse for a university system. His new book was launched by the prime minister, who hymned its ‘beautiful style'. That it certainly has, with hardly a page passing that is not distinguished by Carlyon's flair for either keen observation or the pungent putdown."

In "The War Not Thought", Gideon Haigh is underwhelmed by Les Carlyon's blockbuster history The Great War, a work that swings from details of far-off heads of state to the intimate letters of Australian troops in the trenches of World War I.

"It is characterised not only by immense, almost religious fidelity to its primary sources of letters, diaries and eyewitness accounts of devastation and courage, but also by fair-minded judgements. And yet. And yet. The sum of such parts should be a far greater whole."

There's also Anna Goldsworthy on life after Aaron Sorkin in the West Wing family; Adrian Martin on Australian director Margot Nash's confronting new film, Call Me Mum; and Chris Womersley on The Museum of Doubt, a collection of hyperactive short stories by English writer James Meek.