THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"‘There is no one in [News Corporation] with Rupert's vision or breadth of interest,' warns Andrew Neil, a former senior Murdoch employee ... ‘Wendi has two young kids to look after, but everybody's view is that she is biding her time. She keeps her hand in as to what is going on. He's very close to her. Everybody expects to see her as a rising player. From everything I hear about her, underestimating her would be very foolish, particularly in a post-Rupert world. She'll want to be there when the  [company] carve-up happens, and she's got two kids who are increasingly being cut in to the post-Rupert pie,' says Neil."

In "Wendi Deng Murdoch", renowned journalist Eric Ellis profiles the wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. From her early life in austere communist China, her time as a student in Los Angeles and her subsequent swift rise in News Corporation's Star TV, in Hong Kong, to her recent involvement in the News-owned community website MySpace, this is the story of a person both ambitious and disarming, intelligent and charming. Avoiding salacity in favour of far-ranging, detailed investigation, Ellis offers an even-handed summation of the life of a highly important yet scarcely known person, and of her role in News Corporation.

"If she is assuming a grander role for herself at News, can Wendi deliver China to her husband? [Former Star CEO] Gary Davey says that at the very least she'd be an improvement on her predecessors. Over the years, he explains, News has been inundated with fixers, influence-brokers and spruikers promising riches in China but not delivering. ‘We'd have two or three a day,' he remembers, ‘members of the politburo who'd show up with their hands out. It was just revolting. It's all very well having the connections and the guanxi [influence] and all of that nonsense, but most of the guys who are in that racket wouldn't have a bloody clue about how to run a business.' Wendi is different, Davey says, bringing to the role an understanding of the culture and language, and also ‘really intense business nous, one of the missing pieces of the China puzzle'.

"1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might ‘lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization'. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons. How many people during that transition read JB Priestley's ‘Russia, the Atom and the West' in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute's novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation."

In "Shute the Messenger", Gideon Haigh reassesses one of the most important Australian novels, the one that has likely had the greatest impact upon the world and yet is now relegated to something like obscurity. Through extensive biographical research and with characteristic flair, Haigh tells the story of how Shute, a Briton who moved to Australia, set the end of the world in 1950s Melbourne.

"The decline of Shute's reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: ‘The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.' His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line."

And in "War of Words", Eric Beecher, a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, tackles the problem faced by quality newspapers: how to offset declining print sales and the rise of internet-advertising revenue.

"It would be difficult to overstate the serious media's anxiety about the future of quality journalism. This anxiety stems from an old dilemma - is journalism a public trust or a business? - overlaid on a new dilemma: that as the internet matures into a successful commercial medium, the funding model for quality commercial journalism is collapsing. This is no longer simply a debate about the role of press barons like Rupert Murdoch. It is now about whether the owners of quality commercial journalism - predominantly the owners of the world's major newspapers - are prepared to accept lower profits and diminished share prices in order to continue funding costly but important journalism. There can only be one conclusion: in your dreams."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Why would people vote out a government that has overseen, if not generated, 11 years of sustained economic growth and full employment? If the hip-pocket-nerve theory of voting is valid, there is nothing to stop the Coalition buying itself another term in office. Yet a niggling worry now seems to be intruding on Australia's long period of comfortable complacency. A hitherto suppressed fear is felt by many: that the good fortune enjoyed by this generation may leave a world less habitable for future ones. In the past 12 months the true implications of the scientists' warnings about the climate crisis have begun to sink in and cast a pall over the whole project of ever-increasing prosperity."

In the Monthly Comment, Clive Hamilton argues that the real obstacle to addressing global warming in Australia is not technological, nor even ideological, but psychological. The challenge demands, he argues, not so much a substantial cut in the nation's wealth - something which climate-change sceptics have maintained - as a complete redress of the way in which we all consume, and hence in our very identity.

"In consumer societies such as ours, consumption activity is the primary means by which we create an identity and sustain a sense of self. If, in order to solve climate change, we are asked to change the way we consume, then we are being asked to change who we are - to experience a sort of death. So desperately do we cling to our manufactured selves that perhaps we fear relinquishing them more than we fear the consequences of climate change."

"The chorus of an old American folk song begins: You load sixteen tons and what do you get / Another day older and deeper in debt. Whatever the equivalent tally was for Australian watersiders, by 1996 they were not loading it. Nor did they complain too much about being deeper in debt. The in-joke about their remuneration was ‘the prime minister's wages plus half the cargo'."

In "Waterfront Blues", former federal minister John Button takes a wry insider's look at Australian ports in recent decades, and in particular the waterfront dispute of 1998, through the lens of ABC Television's Bastard Boys.

"I found myself troubled by Bill Kelty's wig, and by the fact that he seemed so much less effectual than he always was in his time at the ACTU. And I don't believe that the real protagonists swore as much as they did in this production ... For a fastidious person like me there was too much vomiting. The young wharfie Sean vomited twice, the Josh Bornstein character vomited once and, for ideological balance, Mrs Corrigan vomited once as well. Perhaps all the swearing caused them to vomit, but the reality is that swearing in this production was a metaphor for toughness, and vomiting a metaphor for sensitivity."

Plus, Kate Rossmanith visits Port Douglas, where people and crocodiles live side by side, and the former know that they can become food; and Mungo MacCallum reminds Labor, as the party ropes in an ever-growing number of celebrity candidates with which to fight the federal election, that just as a star rises, it also falls.

ARTS & LETTERS

"I anticipated the publication of Sven Lindqvist's new book, Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land, on the fate of the Australian Aborigines, with real hope. There is no Western society which more needs to hear a local version of the Lindqvist sermon than post-Windschuttle Australia. But I also anticipated its publication with a certain dread ... Lindqvist is more than capable of spoiling the true and important things he has to say by certain characteristic flaws: hyperbolic exaggeration, historical oversimplification and inaccuracy, cavalier carelessness in the mounting of argument, fanciful self-indulgence. As it turned out, both the hope and the dread were justified."

In "The Lost Enchanted World", Robert Manne examines two different takes on Aboriginal society, before and after European contact: Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist's tale of his recent travels around Australia, and Louis Nowra's report on the roots of violence among Aborigines.

"The flaws in Louis Nowra's account of culturally conditioned contemporary male violence are deeper than his misrepresentations ... for his entire argument is mounted without sufficient clarity or care. In general Nowra suggests that contemporary Aboriginal male violence against women and children is rooted in what he calls at one moment a "pathological distortion" of traditional pre-contact custom. [But] any general argument about contemporary abuse as a pathologised distortion of tradition must begin by explaining the awkward fact that one of the two main forms of contemporary Aboriginal male violence - the sexual abuse of children - did not exist in the pre-contact world."

In "Letter to a Young Friend on God and the Question of a Good Lunch", award-winning author Amanda Lohrey reviews four recent polemical works against religion. The atheists are in a fighting mood, she finds: French philosopher Michel Onfray summons the ghost of Marx, albeit in a longwinded fashion; likewise, the irascible Christopher Hitchens is "the suburban Chinese take-away of the sceptical position"; Richard Dawkins makes the neo-Darwinian case, sometimes far too smugly; while the Australian thinker Tamas Pataki offers a psychoanalytic reading of religious devotion.

"Onfray's excursus into metaphysical housecleaning is easy to read, written in a playful Gallic style, never ponderous or dull. His reaction to an education in an orphanage run by Salesian priests is to espouse an enlightened hedonism and, it has to be said, he walks the talk. When at 28 he had a heart attack and was advised to change his diet, he replied with the now widely quoted response - appealing to a Western culture congested with dietary advice - that he would prefer to ‘die eating butter than to economize my existence with margarine'. He then wrote a book on the eating habits of the world's great philosophers, so writerly a response to a health crisis that I warmed to the man."

There's also Luke Davies, The Monthly's film critic, on Cherie Nowlan's Clubland, an often hilarious Australian film about a dysfunctional mother-son relationship, redolent of Muriel's Wedding in its warmth and quality; and Anna Goldsworthy on Fantasy, the new CD by virtuoso Russian concert pianist Evgeny Kissin, a performer of such unparalleled talent that, paradoxically, his only flaw may be his android-like perfection.