THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"In 1934 the Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, AE Elkin, published a small pamphlet which called for ‘a positive policy which aims at the welfare and development of the aborigines' ... Following his call, a 70-year journey of government-led policy experiments to build a future for the Aborigines began. The mood of these experiments has since lurched erratically between rather pessimistic realism and over-optimistic hope. The most recent experiment was the decision in June to dispatch police, troops and medical workers to protect Aboriginal children on the remote settlements of the Northern Territory. The Howard government has now altogether abandoned the hopes embedded in the language of reconciliation. Realism once more rules. How did we arrive at this point?"

In "Pearson's Gamble, Stanner's Dream", Robert Manne tracks the history of both government policies on Aboriginal communities and the thinking of key anthropologists - Elkin, Baldwin Spencer and, most significantly, WEH Stanner, who worked with Nugget Coombs - who have influenced these policies. From the early attempts at assimilation through the move to Indigenous self-determination, this far-reaching essay places the government's recent actions, and in particular the pivotal role played by Noel Pearson, in a historical perspective.

"It was Noel Pearson who broke the ideological stalemate over Aboriginal policy and the remote communities. Pearson had been a land-rights activist and a man of the Left. At one memorable moment in the early years of the Howard government, during the political skirmishes surrounding native title, he had labelled his conservative opponents ‘racist scum'. In 1999 he shifted gear. Pearson now acknowledged that over the past quarter-century or so the communities at Cape York had experienced what he would call ‘a descent into hell'. For the Left, insofar as problems of violence, sexual abuse, suicide, alcoholism, drug dependency, petrol sniffing, gambling, illiteracy, truancy and child neglect were acknowledged, the historic process of colonisation and the trauma associated with the dispossession were blamed. Although this explanation might in the most general sense be true, for Pearson it was not only useless - by explaining everything it explained nothing - but also misleading."

"Timor's people have been struck by succeeding waves of misery. Four centuries of neglect under Portuguese rule were followed by almost a quarter-century of illegal Indonesian occupation. Repression, mass killings and a deliberate policy of starvation traumatised the nation. Nearly one-third of the population died, and the Indonesians laid the country to waste when they departed ignominiously after the 1999 independence vote."

In "Timor's Future", Mark Aarons travels to East Timor and speaks exclusively with Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta, the two men who will help shape the future of the small nation. Xanana and Ramos-Horta eloquently outline their respective plans to reform the bureaucracy, create an "island of peace" and address the extreme poverty that affects so much of the population.

"At least one thing is certain: most East Timorese believe that Fretilin no longer points the way forward. The formation of the coalition that supports Xanana as the next prime minister reflects the widespread desire for a new direction, as did the second-round vote of 69% in May that made José Ramos-Horta president. These shifts may indicate an evolving political maturity in voters."

And in "A Husk of Meaning", Drusilla Modjeska examines the ways in which the idea of community has changed since her collective-living days in '70s England. Memories of Pilsdon, a communal farm in Little Gidding, re-emerge for Modjeska when she encounters Tobias Jones' new book, Utopian Dreams, which describes the author's search for "a good life" - a simpler life for his young family - in a range of collectives across Europe.

"The cynical view is that even community can be commodified (as clearly it can) and if we want it, in this view, it's as a prop for ourselves that doesn't necessarily mean we're prepared to do anything, let alone give up anything, for others. The more optimistic view is that something deeper is stirring in our collective psyche: an ache of absence that's trying to find a new voice, reaching towards new forms of old ideas that have to do with connection and integration. We've been bewitched by prosperity, bamboozled by the princes of a global economy, and a whole generation has been raised to assume the primacy of the individual. But the questions being put to us now, like WorkChoices or climate change, ask us, as we haven't been asked in a long time, to consider our social nature and the fabric of our shared world, even to the extent of its survival."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Though his ideological agenda may not have been part of his (I suspect complex) motives for his recent national emergency, John Howard must have hoped that it would advance that agenda. His fellow combatants had no doubt that it had. Writing in the Australian and other places, they proclaimed that the need for such a ‘draconian' intervention in Aboriginal communities marked the decisive defeat of more than 30 years of left-liberal policies on Aboriginal matters, policies that had focused on Aborigines' calls for self-determination."

In the Monthly Comment, philosopher Raimond Gaita questions the government's recent intervention into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Gaita argues that John Howard's history of disdain for the supposedly empty gesture of reconciliation - most evident in his emphasis on "practical reconciliation" - shows a lack of respect for the people he now claims to be helping. The result, Gaita says, is serious moral and political confusion.

"No plausible description of the plight of the Aboriginal communities can justify the condescension shown for them and their leaders by the lack of consultation and the reckless disregard for the consequences of such dramatic but ill-prepared intervention. Even to describe the intervention as ‘draconian' does not capture the nature of the condescension, because it does not distinguish between tough laws imposed after due consultation and tough laws imposed without it."

"The past 200 years has seen the rate of language death accelerate to the point where some experts estimate that in the next century 5400 - 90% - of the world's languages will disappear. David Crystal, an eminent British linguist, calculates that on average one will die every two weeks. There were around 250 Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia before 1788; recent estimates published by the Department of the Environment and Water Resources suggest that half of those are now extinct and most others are in danger of extinction or are in decline."

In "Live Long and Prosper", Christopher Scanlon finds that the once-fictional language of Klingon, spoken in Star Trek, is in better health than many of the world's indigenous languages. The death of these languages, he posits, often means losing a people's accumulated knowledge of the natural world.

Plus, Alice Pung has her day in court, following a small claim through the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal; Gideon Haigh finds happiness at the bottom of an old trunk that belonged to a long-forgotten Lord Mayor of Sydney; and Nikolas Brudenell talks to the charismatic, optimistic leader of the 42 West Papuan refugees.

ARTS & LETTERS

"No matter how much a faith has been ground into your identity from birth, how is it that despite being told that Revelation 8 and its attendant apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ would happen in the year 2000, you still have respect for your religion when that event doesn't happen? Indeed, how could you have respect for your religion for wanting it and its carnage to happen in the first place?"

In "Faith Healing", Craig Sherborne reviews Tanya Levin's People in Glass Houses, the story of Levin's time in the Pentecostal Hillsong Church. With the frank, caustic humour of his own memoirs, Sherborne - an avowed atheist - tries to get to the bottom of Levin's "strange hatchet job" and her love-hate relationship with her former religion, and the wider matter of why commodified religion is attracting so many young devotees.

"I for one wanted to know how it is that someone clearly intelligent and well beyond infancy could, in this day and age, be filled with those programmed fears of hers and still give themselves over to an animist-pantheist jumble of beliefs where ‘every mountain range, every sunset, every laugh from a child, every moment of peace was created by God.' Fear may engender obedience, but surely only a masochist would experience reverie from it. Mind you, she does theorise that Pentecostals are ‘drama junkies'.

"Even today, when I have been absent from the screen for more than five years, interviewers take it as self-evident that I have a question to answer: Didn't television fame rule out any possible reputation as a serious writer? A variation on this, if the interviewer is ready to concede that I might be some kind of serious writer after all, goes thus: Didn't my reputation as a prose writer rule out any possible reputation as a poet? These questions are really based on two different levels of the same assumption: that poetry should be pursued as a single, dedicated vocation."

And in "The Velvet Shackles of a Reputation", Clive James wonders why success in show business would render one ineligible for membership of the poetry establishment.

There's also James's poem ‘The Nymph Calypso'; Anna Goldsworthy on Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, Norman Lebrecht's over-the-top history of classical recording; Luke Davies on two small but excellent new films, Once and The Home Song Stories; and Robert Forster on singer-songwriter Meg Baird's Dear Companion and the psychedelic-folk resurgence.