THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"The wet-season month of February is famous in Darwin for its stormy weather, torrential rains and monsoonal winds. On the night that Mansur La Ibu died, on 26 February 2003, the weather was described by the investigating officer as cyclonic. A policeman called to the scene the next morning recalled that the rain and wind were so heavy he could hardly stand. The seas were tempestuous."

In "A Death in the Harbour", Vogel-winning author Ruth Balint unravels the story of a young Indonesian fisherman's death in detention. Arrested while fishing in Australian waters, Mansur La Ibu was held on his vessel in Darwin Harbour, where he died after almost a month - after the case against his captain had been prosecuted, and while waiting for sufficiently calm weather to sail home. This powerful essay investigates the changes in the policing of Australia's northern waters, and raises new and disturbing questions about the federal government's detention procedures.

"The coronial inquest took four days, and left many questions unanswered. Mansur's family weren't invited to attend, and were apparently not even informed that an inquiry into their son's death was taking place. None of the boat's crew was brought back to Australia to testify. Only one of the Barefoot Marine employees rostered on that night turned up at the inquest, making him the only witness to give evidence."

"In some ways, John Howard is one of the least conservative prime ministers to occupy the Lodge. He is not a stickler for due process. Unlike his political hero, Sir Robert Menzies, he is not steeped in the great traditions of individual liberty inherited from the English legal system. Although he honoured the ‘progressive spirit of the Enlightenment' in his 2006 Australia Day address, he is quick to ditch its key precepts when it suits."

In "The Lone Ranger", Walkley-winning journalist Brian Toohey looks at the ways in which the prime minister has acted outside the boundaries of the Westminster principle while in office, sidelining the public service and abandoning due process. He examines the cases of water policy, the Iraq war and David Hicks; and, in particular, Australia's extravagant and extraordinary defence spending under Howard, including the controversial $16-billion acquisition of Joint Strike Fighter planes.

"Is there something sinister about Howard's expansion of governmental power? Not in the sense that a would-be dictator lurks behind his reassuringly dull facade. Yet to flagrantly disregard long-established safeguards against abuses of power is no way for the leader of a government, whether conservative or liberal, to behave."

"He isn't a pretty actor. He doesn't have eyes that stare at sunsets and make you think of bush heroes, or Shakespearean ones, like Mel Gibson or Heath Ledger. He would be a character actor, except that his plainness or snakiness gleams like a revelation and he makes his characters glitter more mesmerisingly than a pack of stars."

In "As You Like It", leading critic Peter Craven interviews Geoffrey Rush, who returns to Australian theatre for the first time in five years with a production of Ionesco's Exit the King. In a discussion that ranges from Beckett to De Niro, from Trotsky to pirates and pelicans, Craven finds Rush is both conscious of the advantages that success in Hollywood has brought him and charmingly cynical about the industry's glamour obsession; but, most of all, he is passionate about taking Australian theatre - productions, as well as plays - to the world.

"He radiates his love of the theatre with a seriousness that he knows sometimes scares him witless and is not separate from his crazy humour. You can feel the hilarity and the pensiveness in this man, as well as an iron in the soul not separate from his frailty."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"The new leader of the Opposition was enjoying one of the sweetest of political honeymoons. Something needed to be done. The government revealed that Kevin Rudd had in 2005 met with the political fixer and convicted felon Brian Burke, a former Labor premier of Western Australian. Rudd was unbalanced and embarrassed by the revelation. For a day he looked like someone caught with their hand in the till."

In the Monthly Comment, Robert Manne discusses how a fortnight of unedifying mud-slinging could affect the result of the 2007 federal election. Manne ponders the contrast between Australian politics and the "large-spirited politics" seen in ABC TV's The West Wing: in particular, the episode which staged a potent debate between two contenders for the presidency.

"The mud-slinging is not difficult to explain. John Howard is one of the most unscrupulous but effective politicians in our history. When Kevin Rudd won the Labor leadership, Howard sensed a dangerous rival. As he had done three years earlier in the highly successful personal destruction of Mark Latham, the prime minister once more went in search of political dirt."

"Most awareness campaigns have nothing to hide. World AIDS Day, Bandanna Day, Daffodil Day and the like are simply fundraising techniques for reputable charities. Many more obscure events, such as National Orthoptics Week, are actually conferences that call themselves awareness weeks because everyone else does, and they make no attempt to solicit funds."

In "Kuru Awareness Week", Richard Cooke, a writer for The Chaser, finds out just how easy it is to contribute to the modern phenomenon of days, weeks and months that are dedicated to ailments of all description. His awareness-week condition? An obscure, devastating disease with a highly specific manner of infection.

"Kuru is a very rare, very unpleasant and invariably fatal disease, closely related to mad-cow disease. Those infected spend months in agony before madness, paralysis and eventually death set in. It has a cruel symptom which gives it one of its informal names: laughing sickness. The only good thing about kuru is the ease with which it can be prevented."

Plus, Charles Firth salutes the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, a man who engaged with reality in exactly the way that reality TV doesn't; and Malcolm Knox ponders where Australians can learn Arabic when most of our universities do not bother to teach it, and the implications of this absence.

ARTS & LETTERS

"Lately I have been pursuing novelists who seem to think they are writing near-enough history, when in fact they are making it up. Now two heavyweights have slipped into the ring: Nobel-winner JM Coetzee, and the long-time champ of the American Middleweight Literary Division, Norman ‘Maler-Than-Thou' Mailer."

In "Lost in the Woods", eminent historian Inga Clendinnen savages Norman Mailer's latest novel, arguing that Adolf Hitler's psychological make-up is too important a matter for the sort of game-playing that Mailer employs in The Castle in the Forest. Clendinnen finds that there is some respite ­- inside the tome lurks a "small, sweet" novel of family life and beekeeping - but nonetheless that Mailer's imagining of the young Hitler is a lengthy, trivial and banal exploration of evil.

"Having trudged through an imaginary landscape littered with blood curses and demonic presences, surely it is reasonable to ask: What possessed the occasionally great Mailer? Does he believe any of this stuff? It is seriously difficult to believe he does."

"We're off the highway. We were four songs in when suddenly this ugly metal guitar appeared, and now vegetation's flying past the car and dead bugs are encrusting on the windscreen. I glance over at Lucinda. She's driving. She has been here before: I can see that from the hard set of her face. This has to be done, she is probably thinking. We'll be back on the road soon; the next song won't have this guitar on it. For a while, though, we're taking the path less travelled."

In "No Weddings and a Funeral", award-winning critic Robert Forster reviews West, the new album by innovative American country musician Lucinda Williams. He finds an album of intermittent quality, coloured by the themes of a relationship break-up and a death, and by some inappropriate decisions about production.

"If you want cookie-cutter songs, as the great Texan singer-songwriter Guy Clark calls them, you won't find them here. There is not a song on this album that fits the verse-chorus swap of conventional song-writing."

There's also Luke Davies, author of the novel Candy, on the rewards of watching Into Great Silence, German film-maker Philip Gröning's contemplative documentary about life in a Carthusian monastery high in the Alps, untouched by the modern world; and David McKnight on the new collection of political BA Santamaria's letters, Your Most Obedient Servant, which reveals a man of profound influence and near-fanatical belief, and whose critique of economic rationalism actually had much in common with left-wing thought.