June 2014

Arts & Letters

Bob Carr’s ‘Diary of a Foreign Minister’

By Rhys Muldoon
NewSouth; $49.99

“Credit where it’s due. Deification not required. It’s not that hard to get here, to this table … There’s always a vacancy and it’s got to be filled. With competence you can keep on rising. None of this warrants deference.”

And so it came to pass that Bob Carr, the erstwhile premier of New South Wales, became a federal senator, the foreign minister and possibly the happiest highbrow holidayer in our history. This is his story.

Carr opens his account of adventures abroad by musing on the bacchanalian appetites of Bismarck and Churchill: pre-lunch gin, cigars dunked in cognac, plates of profiteroles. None for our thin white duke, though. Such temptations are for another lifetime. This one demands lean cuisine, and it is discussion of these two obsessions, lean and cuisine, that peppers this tome like a waiter with an overly powerful wrist.

Carr is obsessed with finding protein and putting on muscle, both literally and metaphorically. He is in some ways an embodiment of Australia’s international ambition. We are also vain (if not so self-consciously regal) and a little self-obsessed, and want more bulk. We’d like to be able to look after ourselves, but to do it while flying first class. Much of Carr’s conundrum, diplomatically, concerns where we sit between China and the United States. To whom should we be closer? Is it the “Asian century”? Are we merely the crumbling cartilage in the US’s arthritic knees? Carr’s deep love for the US suggests otherwise.

While it would be easy to mock Carr’s concerns about travel that is anything moins que la première classe, he is both charming and cheeky about them himself. He includes a letter of reply from an airline regarding his complaint about subtitles for a Wagnerian opera (that must have been a long flight indeed). His vanities and obsessions parade nakedly around the pages, yet I never felt the need to look away, because you can also see, if you look closely, the tongue resting lightly in the cheek.

Over 500 pages, much is said but little is revealed. To expect more from a diplomat is probably naive, yet I would love to have read more about the gatherings at the shadowy Bohemian Grove, with its strange rituals and its billionaire world-shakers and tree-pissers. It is a rarefied world Carr has been visiting, and in many ways it is disturbing how arbitrarily so many decisions are made or, often more importantly, not made. They are made, or not, from on high, between silk sheets and pure cotton pyjamas. They are made from the first window of the plane, by very tired people looking for protein.

In this diary, we are allowed into the foyer of the first-class lounge, but not, as is protocol, aboard the plane.

Nonetheless, une bonne lecture.

Rhys Muldoon
Rhys Muldoon is a contributor to The Drum, as well as an actor, director and radio presenter. In 2010 he co-authored a children’s book, Jasper & Abby, with Kevin Rudd. @rhysam

From the front page

Members of the Kanakanvu tribe perform at a Saraya harvest festival, Donghua Village, Taiwan.

Who is Taiwanese?

Taiwan’s minority indigenous peoples are being used to refute mainland China’s claims on the island – but what does that mean for their recognition, land rights and identity?

Image representing a film still of abstract colours

Tacita Dean and the poetics of film editing

The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousness

Image of David McBride

David McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform

The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protections

Illustration by Jeff Fisher

Mars attracts

Reviving the Viking mission’s experiments may yet find life as we know it on Mars, but the best outcome would be something truly alien

In This Issue

Thomas Piketty. © Ed Alcock / MYOP

An Australian take on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century’

Is the growth of inequality inevitable?

Names of the game

A singular analysis of AFL players’ names

Mark Oliphant & J Robert Oppenheimer

Medicine and the mind-body problem

What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads?


More in Arts & Letters

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981

A clear view: Emily Kam Kngwarray at the NGA

A major exhibition of the late Anmatyerr desert painter is welcome, but the influence of the rapacious art market on Aboriginal art is inescapable

Image of Agnieszka Pilat with robot dog, in front of painted wall

The rule of threes: NGV Triennial

The sprawling show’s exploration of technologies and pressing politics takes in artificial intelligence and deep-fake photojournalism

Black and white close-up photo of Sigrid Nunez

Animal form: Sigrid Nunez

The celebrated American author’s latest book, ‘The Vulnerables’, completes a loose trilogy of hybrid autobiographical and fictional novels

A public-housing brick three-storey building in Ascot Vale

A house provided: Preserving public housing

The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projects


More in Noted

Cover of ‘Question 7’

Richard Flanagan's ‘Question 7’

A slim volume of big ideas that takes in H.G. Wells, chain reaction, Hiroshima and the author’s near-death experience on the Franklin River

Scene from ‘The Curse’

‘The Curse’

Nathan Fielder directs and co-stars in an erratic comedy about the performative benevolence of a couple creating a social housing reality TV show

Cover of ‘Wish I Was Here’

M. John Harrison’s ‘Wish I Was Here’

The uncategorisable English author delivers an ‘anti-memoir’ meditating on the profound relationships between memory, imagination and fiction

Cover of ‘The In-Between’

Christos Tsiolkas’s ‘The In-Between’

The latest from the acclaimed Australian author throws scorn at those who claim virtue and the complete control of their desires


Online latest

Image representing a film still of abstract colours

Tacita Dean and the poetics of film editing

The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousness

Image of David McBride

David McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform

The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protections

Installation view of the Kandinsky exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, showing three framed abstract paintings hanging on a wall

Kandinsky at AGNSW

The exhibition of the Russian painter’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW provides a fascinating view of 20th-century art’s leap from representation to abstraction

Image of Margret RoadKnight playing guitar and singing.

The unsung career of Margret RoadKnight

Little-known outside the Melbourne folk scene for decades, singer Margret RoadKnight’s 60 years of music-making is celebrated in a new compilation