THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Our pre-dawn convoy set off at an unpredictable time ... avoiding roads where explosives may have been secreted through the night. We struck out across country and, after an hour of steady jolting, slowed and regrouped. Dawn broke on an earlier century. I watched as a nomad steered his flock, weaving between the military vehicles with not a glance at this latest invader. Nearby were low-slung Bedouin-style tents, with fierce hounds tethered beside them."

In "Mission Drift", renowned investigative journalist Chris Masters accompanies Australian troops on their travels in Oruzgan province, Afghanistan. He discovers that although their progress is slow - and their mission increasingly dangerous - the Australian forces are rebuilding the region; and their next step, in concert with the new Afghan National Army, is to "erect a barrier between the top-tier Taliban and the rest of the Afghan people", to gain the trust of locals wary of foreign control.

"All our trouble is for the sake of inspecting a range of construction projects being undertaken by the local Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). Throughout Afghanistan there are 34 of these PRTs, involving many of the participating nations. As in this case, a small group of engineers travels with a larger group of heavily armed infantry. The idea is to do good work, to improve facilities for the Afghans, rather than shoot up the place."

"Toots arrived one cold spring morning. She had fallen out of the nest her parents had built in the back wall of the house, and one of her legs was broken. Bippin, the cook, brought her to me. We tried putting her back in the nest, but she was immediately expelled by the parent birds."

In "Toots's Kismet", Robyn Davidson explores the behaviour of animals, reflecting on the time she spent in the Himalayas with Toots, an injured whistling thrush that she shared her home, and her life, with. Do animals and humans, she wonders, influence each other?

"Do animals think? Are they self-aware? The answers depend largely on the attitudes of the scientists looking at the data. Some, going back to their behaviourist roots, simply rule out consciousness as being in any way relevant to the study of what goes on in a brain. All organisms are best thought of as information-processing machinery. Computers have to be programmed; animals too are programmed by natural selection, via their genes."

"Almost my favourite moment on radio, ever, came during a Richard Ackland interview [on Radio National's Breakfast] with the redoubtable but garrulous Geoffrey Robertson. There was a moment when it appeared likely that a Robertson answer would never end. Ackland had sufficient mastery of the technology to inform his listeners, without interrupting Robertson, by now in full flight, that he was going out for a quick smoke."

And in "New Teeth For Aunty", Robert Manne explores the importance of the ABC to his life and that of so many Australians. As the national broadcaster, the ABC's most important job is to foster new talent and to represent and reflect Australian society. But during the years of the Howard government the ABC was under-funded and became a battleground in the culture wars, often at the expense of local content and quality programming. Manne looks to a future in which Aunty will be politically independent, free to again show us who we are as a nation and a people - as has happened in the past, through so many great programs.

"Sometimes, as in The Fast Lane or Grass Roots, these shows have provided memorable and unflattering images of what contemporary urban life and character is like. Sometimes, as in True Believers or Bastard Boys, they have provided the opportunity to argue about our political history, and reminded us, pace John Howard, that history can never be told as an uncontested, uncontestable, single-perspective narrative. Sometimes what has been produced has genuinely broken new ground. I think, for example, of John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley's series, The Games, where the curious quality of life, both local and cosmopolitan, in the media-drenched postmodern world was illuminated with genius. And sometimes, as in the idyllic SeaChange - an enchanting fantasy about the restoration of community in a fragmented world - a deceptively simple and gentle drama has allowed the nation to think about the way we live now, about what we ought to value, about the kind of world that we have lost."

THE NATION REVIEWED

In the Monthly Comment, Judith Brett looks at the 2007 election and tracks John Howard's downfall, from the drawn-out phoney campaign to the dull campaign proper, from the polls that always had Kevin Rudd ahead to the "the last bag of bribes" from the government, and now to  Rudd's biggest challenge: to effect change without alienating those who elected him.

"In the next year we can expect to learn a great deal about the inner workings of Howard's government, as people no longer have a reason to keep silent. The leak about his personal intervention in the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History could be only the beginning. Perhaps we will finally learn the truth about what happened with children overboard and the Australian Wheat Board's bribes to Saddam Hussein's regime. And the way will be cleared for a younger generation of Liberals to think about what the party stands for, beyond Howard's social conservatism."

In "Dropping the Ball", Mungo MacCallum critiques political commentators' tendency to adopt the language, and the attendant notions (points, free kicks and knockout blows), of sport. Sport and politics, in fact, have become so intertwined that the electorate is presented with merely an elongated game, an interminable contest devoid of vision and grand ideas.

"We have already debased the system to the point where Australians routinely expect their politicians to lie, break promises and implement policies for which they have no mandate; many are alienated to the point where they resent even having to cast a vote every three years. After all, if it matters no more than any other transient sporting event, why bother? You might as well stay home and watch it on television."

In "Society of Birds", Don Watson observes the structure of bird society, with its relentless savagery and its moments of unexpected gentleness - the universally disliked crow, for example, who will shield galahs from predatory falcons.

"I saw a kookaburra dive from a fence post on one side of the road to the verge of the other; in pursuit of what I don't know, because in the instant that it dived, a man on a motorbike roared round the corner and the bird's head struck the front wheel. The collision killed the kookaburra: it bounced back across the road and lay there on its back, quite still. What Australian does not love kookaburras? To be truthful, in that moment I would have been no more dismayed if it had been the motorcyclist on his back and the kookaburra flying on down the road."

In "The Sense of Danger", Ann-Marie Priest plunges headfirst into the weird world of workshops, attending a course for budding screenwriters and joining her colleagues in mining past traumas for creative ends.

"I have read enough fiction writers talking about how they channel or become their characters to know that it is a common experience, brought about, I assume, by intense identification. But I couldn't help wondering whether it was helpful advice for a roomful of wannabe screenwriters. How could hearing voices be a skill you could learn? People with this particular gift are in a class of their own, and whatever else may be said of them, they probably don't need to go to writing workshops."

In "What a Pratt", James Kirby profiles businessman Richard Pratt, a man always intent on building an empire akin to that of the family he so admires, the Rothschilds.

"On the day of Pratt's key appearance at court, he faced the press with a written statement. It should have said, I'm sorry; I won't do it again. Instead, it hinged on the following, deeply ambiguous line: ‘I know a lot more now than I knew then.' The statement diluted his public humiliation. It implied he didn't know everything in the bad old days, that he didn't always know what was going on in the company he ran like a ‘benevolent dictator'."

In "Buyer's Market", Gay Bilson attends the Tasting Australia event in Adelaide. Hoping for intelligent discussion of food and cooking, Bilson discovers panels of celebrity chefs flogging books of recipes derived from their own TV shows.

"Food is so beholden to commerce, so lacking in independence from the idea of marketing, as opposed to the original definition of ‘market', that our personal relationship with what we eat seems to have no legitimacy. Yet this is really all there is: the growing and production of food, through to its transformation into dishes in kitchens, is so completely material, so literally down-to-earth, so nutritionally necessary that it defies advertisement. But something else altogether is for sale at Tasting Australia."

And in "Dogs of War", Charles Firth investigates the death of two military dogs in Afghanistan, which has overshadowed the injuries sustained by their human handlers. Inexplicably barred from the official memorial service, he takes comfort in the knowledge that these dogs bring a warm and fuzzy element to the bloodiness of war.

"There are far more roadside bombs in Afghanistan than dogs you could throw at them. That's what I presume, anyway. When I asked how many dogs were serving in Afghanistan, a Defence spokesperson told me the number was ‘significant', but added that ‘the ADF won't release the specific number of dogs deployed ... for operational security reasons.' Imagine if the Taliban learnt exactly how many dogs Australia had in Afghanistan ..."

ARTS & LETTERS

In "Let the Bird Sing, Let the Bird Fly", Luke Davies reviews Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, a film which attempts to portray the many faces of Bob Dylan. The standout in a series of vignettes - featuring actors such as Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale - is that starring Cate Blanchett as Dylan on his infamous 1966 tour of England, "the prankster, that elfin and other-worldly figure seen in DA Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back".

"Blanchett is marvellous as Jude Quinn, the Dylan of this period and that tour in particular. Haynes has said he wanted to cast a woman to give a sense of the utter strangeness of this androgynous enigma, with his pale skin and shock of wild black hair, who came under such intense media focus and who fascinated and repelled a world used to less-challenging entertainment. Blanchett plays Dylan as an amphetamine-driven (driven to distraction, in fact) Pierrot figure, mischievously embracing the chaos unfolding around him."

In "Sixty of the Best", Peter Craven offers a guide to the best books (and audio-books) for summer, from cricket to Catholicism, from politics to poetry, and from fiction to film stars.

"Christmas is one of those times when the world gives books, almost as if a nostalgia for filling the mind with images suggested by words has as deep a pull on our unconscious mind as the birth in the manger of that Jewish preacher who said we should love the next person the way we love ourselves. It becomes a toss-up as to how much we treat our loved ones to what we would like ourselves or feed them their own poisons. Not everyone who is attracted to Julian Burnside QC's Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice is going to rush to read Julia Fox's The Infamous Lady Rochford, about Jane Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's sister-in-law who was also executed and whose story is told in sumptuous Antonia Fraserian prose ... Burnside may share more readers with that most intense and intellectually impassioned of Muslim-Australian voices, that of Waleed Aly in People Like Us."

In "Wunderbar", Anna Goldsworthy revels in the mysteries investigated by Oliver Sacks in his latest book, Musicophilia, which charts the relationship between music and the human mind. Through his patients Sacks discovers music's ability to comfort people with dementia and other brain disorders.

"Sacks is a different kind of scientist and is prepared to be moved by a thing without knowing why. One of his favourite patients, Harry S, laments the loss of ‘wonder' after a brain aneurism. ‘Wonder,' Sacks says, ‘had been at the core of his previous life.' Wonder is also at the core of Sacks's writing ... his work is so illuminated by wonder that it reads as a song of praise. And in this wunderkammer of a book, music emerges as Sacks's greatest treasure, its mystery still unavailable to science."

In " Reigning Bull", Gideon Haigh ploughs through the memoir of former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence. The economist's spiritless language is perked up a notch, but it is still a dreary and cliché-ridden read, though it offers insight into his capacity to be charmed by successive American presidents.

"The book, for which the publisher paid an advance of US$8 million, finds Greenspan still playing up to his role as the wonk's wonk, all owlish specs and oracular pronouncements, a man who once jested of himself, ‘I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.' On the first date with his future wife, he talked about monopolies and asked her back to his flat to read an essay he'd written on anti-trust. So dense is his expression, even in repose, that it later took five attempts before she realised he had proposed; on their honeymoon in Venice, he exasperated her with remarks like, ‘What is the value-added produced in this city?'"

And in "Confession & Hits (Hits & Confession)", rock critic Robert Forster takes on the latest release from pop princess Delta Goodrem, Delta. Returning with a revamped sound and a lyric sheet that veers from the alarmingly banal to the inspired, and older and happier Goodrem, accompanied by an army of producers, is tilting for the big time. Can this album, her third, satisfy the fans of her early work and attract an international audience?

"Goodrem is a showbiz kid. She did her first television commercial at age seven; dancing, singing and piano lessons started soon after; and she had an artist-development contract with Sony at 15. At 19 came Innocent Eyes (2003). It's a good pop album, and just as importantly a strong showcase of her singing, songwriting and piano-playing talents. Mistaken Identity (2004) came too quickly. It's a much darker affair, presenting the muddle of a young life struck by stardom and strife. Track two is called ‘The Analyst'. Track three, the album's title song, has the chorus, ‘The girl I used to be has a terrible case of mistaken identity / And yesterday's girl is not what you see.' Which was true, but not what the record company wanted to hear. It sold well under half as much as her debut ..."

Rounding out the bumper December-January issue are Zora Simic, assessing Pierre Bayard's provocative How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read; Craig Sherborne, with two new poems; and Shane Maloney, recounting the meeting of Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence.