THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"In late June 1956, towards midday, after a swift flight through dry-season skies, the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambered from a prop plane at Milingimbi airstrip and stepped for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.

This arrival, which would have life-changing consequences for Kupka, and open a new chapter in Western appreciation of Aboriginal cultures, had been long dreamed of and long planned. Kupka, by then, had already lived in self-imposed exile from his own country for more than a decade. He had made himself into a virtual Frenchman, a Parisian, an aesthetic scholar. He was in pursuit of knowledge, but knowledge of a subtle, momentous kind, almost beyond the reach of words, although he spent weeks on end seeking to pin down the subject of his investigations, and years later, after protracted struggles to reduce his findings to a single statement, he would die with this formula upon his lips."

In "The Collector", Nicolas Rothwell traces the northern journeys of Karel Kupka. Drawn to Australia and enchanted by the range of art in the communities of Arnhem Land - where, he wrote, he was "looked on as a friend" - Kupka knowingly became "the only Western artist, fully alive to the trends and experiments of the modern avant-garde, who had even seen these works", and he acquired them enthusiastically for collections in Europe. Through discovering and collaborating with the artists of the north, Kupka went some way to realising his dream of being able to "share the emotion of the artist-creator", as he put it, of a pre-Western art - and yet, in his writings, he fashioned himself as also the harbinger of that art's eventual decline.

"Near the end of his first, triumphant collecting season, it seems a simple thing to imagine the thoughts and plans and hopes that enticed him on, that led him to believe there was a role for him in northern Australia - and in the continued pursuit and explanation of works he saw as mirrors, reflecting from the dawn of time. He told himself that he was searching for the origins of art, its motive forces, the nature of the need that it was striving to fulfil. Such was his overarching idea, but it was also a compulsion: what was original and pure and untainted by the mark of Western culture could have redemptive force, could allow him to gaze beyond the veils and the deceptive draperies of the world he knew."

"Liberals love leaders.

They shouldn't; they are supposed to subscribe to a libertarian philosophy which centres on the primacy of the individual and aims to keep the role of government of any kind to a minimum. The mere idea that society needs a strong leader to keep it on track ought to be anathema to any true believers among the heirs of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Yet the modern Liberal Party, since its formation in 1944, has depended, not just for its success but for its very survival, on the quality of its leaders, the guiding principle being the more powerful the better. When the leader has been in total control, the party has flourished; when the leader has faltered, the party has slumped.

The same has been true of other political parties, of course: a headless chook is by definition non-functioning. But the Liberals are unique, at least in Australia, in that all power is concentrated at the top; the membership, from the deputy leader down to the neophyte backbencher, from the federal president down to the humblest envelope-stuffer, has no real function, except to support the parliamentary leader. A Liberal prime minister enjoys the same status as a medieval monarch, and in many cases exercises a great deal more power."

In "Le Parti, C'est Moi", Mungo MacCallum traces the style of Liberal leadership from Menzies to Howard: centralised control and an all-powerful leader who chooses the ministry and dictates policy direction. It is a system both mightily effective and quickly undone when a takeover from the incumbent is required and no strong leader asserts himself - or when the anointed predecessor has been drained of drive after too long in the wings, as in the case of Holt, who waited three decades for the job.

"Bored, happy starers at the TV screen. Thousands of them, who couldn't care less about Spring Carnival fashion shows or Heath Ledger spotted in the mounting yard. They've got their losing to get on with. Each race breathes into them new sick, refreshing life. They care nothing for what a horse is. A horse has no fate or meaning other than race two, number five.

But animals are not numbers or performers on a garish, chattering screen. An animal is better to be with than you, and you, and you ...

Animal is peace. Human is war. Some humans cross over, back from the war side where the winning is to the peace side, to the deep, dirt soul of Horse. They belong on the Horse side, those humans, like a grafting of two species into one."

In "The Way of Horse", Craig Sherborne goes to Flemington to meet Brian Mayfield-Smith, one of Australia's most successful trainers and a man who for years gave racing away to try to improve animal welfare. The relationship between human and animal is recast in the shy, contemplative Mayfield-Smith, who is more at home in the company of his horse tribe and deeply affected by humans' cruelty to animals, not least by the amount of whipping in Australian horse racing. Sherborne recounts how, horrified by the killing and poaching of African wildlife and desperate to do something to remedy the situation, in the mid-'90s Mayfield-Smith and his wife left the comforts and glamour of the Sydney track for Death's continent.

"Death has a home in every city and cranny of the world. But Africa is its mansion. There Death can sprawl out in a boneyard garden of disease, famine and warfare. There it can admire the rare beasts being slaughtered for the trinket body parts that humans trade. Ah yes, Africa is Death's favourite address.

‘We were there when the brutal poaching of elephants was at its worst. It just seemed like an outrage. When you've seen elephants with their faces cut out for their ivory, their bodies left to rot, to die ... Poachers just chop the faces out, pull out the ivory. They kill whole families of elephants. They kill the babies for just three or four inches of the stuff.'

When he says ‘brutal', his left eye bites down hard at the corner in emphasis. Silence is Mayfield-Smith's first language. English is merely what he speaks to transact quietly the daily business of living."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Interest rates were not only central to the 2004 election. They have been a recurring theme of the past 11 years of Coalition government. Even more importantly, it is almost certain that interest rates will be a major theme, perhaps the major theme, of the next federal election campaign. The story Howard and Costello will tell the Australian people will go, roughly speaking, like this. Under Labor interest rates are always unacceptably high. Under the Coalition they have been and will remain low. They will suggest to the Australian people that interest rates are controlled by governments and directly linked to federal budget deficits and surpluses. As no part of this story is actually true, the next election campaign will be conducted on the basis of a series of seriously misleading or straightforwardly false Howard-Costello claims."

In the Monthly Comment, Andrew Charlton identifies the myth fundamental to the government's assertion that only it can keep interest rates low by delivering a budget in surplus. Not only do countries such as the US run enormous budget deficits while maintaining low interest rates; because Australia is a small part of a global economy and prey to its fluctuations, the budgetary actions of its government - its borrowing - can only have a small effect on the nation's interest rates. By unravelling the central economic claim of John Howard and Peter Costello - that interest rates would necessarily be higher under a Labor government, a claim wrongly given credibility by Labor under Mark Latham during the 2004 election campaign - Charlton points to a far greater concern than interest rates alone. Australians, encouraged by the current government, have accrued record personal debt, leaving them vulnerable to even minor rate rises, and consequently to the economic spin of the Coalition.

"Economic policy has been one of the Coalition's key electoral strengths. The great triumph of Howard and Costello has been to convince Australians of a spurious link between his government's fiscal conservatism and low interest rates. It is a story that may play well in the marginal electorates, but is also one that doesn't make economic sense. Interest rates have been flat since 1996, when Howard and Costello came to power. Interest rates have enjoyed consistently low inflation, and the nation has enjoyed a benign economic climate and a new monetary policy which has been implemented competently by the Reserve Bank."

"At their last annual meetings the directors of One.Tel and HIH were re-elected without a murmur, despite having brought their companies to the brink of self-destruction. The board of James Hardie Industries remained intact until the Australian Securities and Investment Commission commenced civil proceedings against several directors last February."

In "Backing the Truck Up" Gideon Haigh questions the logic that sees the boards of major corporations re-elected without dissent. In the season of annual general meetings, what are billed as opportunities for shareholders to have a say in the running of businesses are in fact a series of rubber-stamp votes accompanied by afternoon tea. Thanks to the acquiescence of the government and the stock exchange, the most solid investment for shareholders might actually be in chief executives, whose remuneration continues to soar.

"Australian businesspeople are apt to stress their weighty responsibilities and the importance of accountability. Yet the burden imposed by shareholders is light indeed. In most meetings, in fact, the show of hands is altogether unnecessary, the big funds having already signed their proxies and the smaller ones along mainly for the sandwiches."

Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Ashley Hay visits the University of New South Wales' Museum of Human Disease for a creepy-yet-strangely-beautiful view of the inside of the human body; Charles Firth scrambles to get on the electoral roll in time without outmoded late-'90s computer technology; and Alice Pung considers the role of property ownership in recent migrants' version of the Great Australian Dream, and what it means to be unable to buy property in even the modest suburb in which she grew up.

ARTS & LETTERS

"It's Herzog in familiar territory: for more than 40 years he has been investigating what makes unusual people tick and encouraging us to get lost in their strange realities. It's what makes him great at times, and fascinating even when he misfires. He aspires to a cinema that induces an altered state, rather than one that provides diversionary amusement ... yet Rescue Dawn is the closest of all Herzog's feature films to being a straight entertainment, rather than a mystic trance."

In "Low-Flying Aircraft", Luke Davies reviews Werner Herzog's new film, Rescue Dawn. American pilot Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), has been shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, a scenario which allows Herzog to craft one of his typically engaging and obsessive character studies. Dengler's story, in fact, is a real one - and one that Herzog, who so often uses cinema to reflect on the way outsiders behave in extreme circumstances, has previously examined in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. According to Herzog, Dengler's relentless optimism in attempting to escape from the camp embodies all things great about the US. Resolutely apolitical and with a conclusion more Top Gun than Apocalypse Now, Rescue Dawn is also the closest Herzog has come to making a Hollywood film.

"In other hands the material may have seemed slight, but Bale single-handedly carries it off. The ending - make of it what you will - aside, the film works in a very contained way ... Bale, with that beautifully mischievous twinkle in his eyes, gets this. It is as if he understands that his task is to embody the Buddhist maxim about joyful participation in the sufferings of life."

"The Years of Extermination is in my view not only the most important narrative history of the Holocaust. I find it difficult to believe that anything of comparable quality will be written in the future. Friedländer is old enough to have experienced the Holocaust at first-hand. He has lived long enough, and possesses enough intellectual stamina, to have read the vast mountain of research that has appeared over the past 30 years. Friedländer has wonderful historical judgement and impeccable moral taste. As his book reminds us, at the moments of its greatest achievement, history is one of the major Western literary forms."

Robert Manne appraises Saul Friedländer's The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 in "A Desert Inside". Friedländer's critical reading of the major thinkers on the subject; his comprehensive response to recent, divergent historical approaches and new empirical evidence; and - perhaps above all - his sensitive, detailed use of primary sources: all inform this unmatched and clear-eyed account of a "fallen world".

"It was only following the decision for the systematic extermination of European Jewry, taken between October and December 1941, that Hitler finally abandoned all rhetorical restraint with regard to the struggle against the Jew. From this moment, as Friedländer shows, the war against the Jews was the primary mobilising myth of the Nazi regime. From this moment, until the downfall of his regime, both Hitler's public rhetoric and his private conversation were dominated by the ferocious redemptive anti-Semitism that lay at the centre of his thought - about the Jew as the source of Bolshevism, plutocracy, cultural corruption; about the Jew as the malicious wire-puller behind Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt; about the struggle being waged between the Aryan and the Jew for domination of the world."

There's also Richard Flanagan looking back on the events that led him to write his novel The Unknown Terrorist. Confronted by David Hick's imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay and the government's anti-terror legislation, shock-jocks' ranting and dubious dealings over the proposed pulp mill in his home state of Tasmania, Flanagan felt unable write in the way he used to. The result, though driven by manifestations of hate and divisiveness, was a study in love and the things that unite us.

And in "A Righteous Certainty", John Birmingham applauds Paul Toohey's The Killer Within, a dark, no-nonsense examination of the character and trial of Bradley John Murdoch, the convicted killer of British backpacker Peter Falconio. In an exemplary work of journalism, Toohey has investigated the culture of drug-fuelled outcasts in northern Australia and created a terrifying portrait of a killer who, through the shortcomings of the police and the courts, was almost certainly allowed to re-offend.

Plus, there's Greg McLaren on The Door, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poems in more than a decade; and Chris Womersley on The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book, an invigorating publishing polemic by Sherman Young.