Floating Life

1. John Stone on Aboriginal policy in April’s Quadrant.

I had planned to say something about this article, which I have read. Former Treasury head Stone is not afraid to put his foot in his mouth, making him a lovey of the anti-PC lobby of course. Shame about the Tasmanian Aborigines though. By Stone’s logic there aren’t any. My nephew is a fake Aborigine too, of course. Really enlightened stuff. But I found myself frustrated when, not for the first time, the Quadrant site looked like this. What is it with the Quadrant site? Does it collapse in a screaming heap if two people try to read it at the same time?

However, after one of those updates arrived from Firefox the site suddenly decided to appear. So now you can read Stone for yourself.

In what follows, therefore, I begin by examining the origins of our present discontents. Next, I consider what, following Mr Rudd’s “Apology”, now seems likely to be the course of future policy, and seek to assess its likely success. I conclude that the prospects of significant improvement in the areas where it really matters remain problematic at best and negligible at worst. The central reason for this feared future failure is that the fundamental problem—the elephant in the room—is not only not being addressed, but also remains an object of continuing ritual obeisance. I refer to the problem of Aboriginal culture itself.

I refer throughout to “Aboriginal” issues, as distinct from “Indigenous” ones. That Orwellian term, imported into our public discourse as part of United Nations-inspired talk about “first nations” and other such nonsense, is both inaccurate and objectionable. Like about 16 million other native-born Australians, I claim to be an indigenous Australian; attempts to reserve that term for the 517,000 Australians attributed by the 2006 census as people of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent (a high proportion of whom are, genetically speaking, as much or more non-Aboriginal as Aboriginal) should be firmly rejected.

While the term “Indigenous” is commonly used to describe Australians of Aboriginal descent, in fact it comprehends not merely them but also those of Torres Strait Islander descent. The latter are strongly, and understandably, insistent on their cultural separateness from—by which they mean cultural superiority to—Aboriginal Australians. Although this article sometimes employs statistics covering both groups (the form in which such figures are most readily available), it is principally concerned throughout with the problems of Aboriginal Australia.

I AM NEITHER an anthropologist nor a professional historian specialising in Aboriginal matters…

Yes, and it shows…

“Like about 16 million other native-born Australians, I claim to be an indigenous Australian…” Make that 15,999,999… Some of my ancestors were Indigenous, but most were not. John Stone is about as indigenous, in the proper sense, as a rabbit, a fox, a starling, or a cane toad. No doubt all the current rabbits etc were born in Australia. That does not make them indigenous to Australia. What worries me about Stone’s line of reasoning is that it endorses and excuses the dispossession by blurring an essential distinction. I am not saying that we “latecomers” — albeit in my father’s family’s case 180 years ago — don’t belong here; we do, whether we arrived with the First Fleet or last year, or on the “Tampa”. I am merely saying we cannot claim to be indigenous.

Stone, it seems, would be much happier in a world where half-caste, quadroon, and octoroon were acceptable terms.

He also thinks, I believe, that John Howard was Australia’s Greatest Prime Minister. The fact I think he was one of the worst is beside the point, of course; Stone is entitled to his opinions on that score, though I seem to remember he was not quite so keen on Howard’s intrusions into state powers a year or so back, and anyway such judgements are entirely matters of opinion and depend on how you would define “greatest” — or “worst”. His views on Aboriginal policy, unfortunately, are more than mere matters of opinion. They are revisionist in the extreme and deserve to be ignored. Probably only Quadrant under its present editorship would publish them in 2008; whether that is a good or bad thing is also a matter of opinion, I suppose.

One thing I will concede, however; the diversity of the Indigenous population, however defined, means that policy has to cope with and incorporate that diversity. One size fits all is no way to go; but I suspect, from what I see, that the Rudd government is well aware of that.

LATER

After watching Message Stick tonight — the site is hopelessly out of date — I am moved to appear somewhat more positive, not about Stone though, as my point would be that his irrelevance was amply demonstrated by the level of discussion between the three guests, none of whom questioned each other’s “real Aboriginal/Indigenous” status: Mark Ella (Koori, NSW), Joseph Elu (Torres Strait), and Bill Moss (former Macquarie Bank Chief, not Indigenous) who spoke of Gunya Australia. Check the PDF discussion paper from Gunya.

2. God’s Politics Blog: Immature Media or Mature Faith? (by Diana Butler Bass)

I commend this comment on two recent television events in the USA, partly because I think Diana Bass makes a good point, and partly because those whose minds are locked into stereotypes about America, American religion, or religion in general would probably not note such sane offerings. Have a look at it.

Via God’s Politics too comes a link to Our debt to Jimmy Carter, an editorial in the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The government of Israel is boycotting Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, during his visit here this week. Ehud Olmert, who has not managed to achieve any peace agreement during his public life, and who even tried to undermine negotiations in the past, “could not find the time” to meet the American president who is a signatory to the peace agreement with Egypt. President Shimon Peres agreed to meet Carter, but made sure that he let it be known that he reprimanded his guest for wishing to meet with Khaled Meshal, as if the achievements of the Carter Center fall short of those of the Peres Center for Peace. Carter, who himself said he set out to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt from the day he assumed office, worked incessantly toward that goal and two years after becoming president succeeded - was declared persona non grata by Israel.

The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government’s history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world…

Whether Carter’s approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter’s method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.

3. April Monthly

Pretty much a shameless plug, but one that is sincerely meant. I guess then they won’t mind my lifting their own account of what’s in April’s issue:

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“Patrick White’s last bestseller appeared at the end of an amazing final run that began with the Nobel Prize in 1973, included the mighty Twyborn Affair and climaxed in 1981 with the book that sold more than any other in his career, Flaws in the Glass. Even before his death, his reputation had begun its long, slow - but not uninterrupted - slide … Somewhere along the track, for reasons that go deeper than publishers’ neglect, we stopped buying the distinguished writers of our own recent past. White was one of three Australians of his generation with big literary reputations at home and abroad. None sells strongly now. Nielsen BookScan, that pitiless surveyor of the trade, tells me that last year White’s 13 titles in print sold only 2728 copies. Shirley Hazzard did better: her eight sold 4270 copies. Christina Stead’s seven sold 199. That’s not a misprint.”

In “Patrick White: The Final Chapter”, White biographer David Marr reveals the gem within the unpublished - and until recently, unread - manuscripts of Australia’s most lauded fiction writer. The abandonment in 1981 of the novel “The Hanging Garden” was, Marr writes, “a watershed in White’s life and a loss, a damn shame, for Australian writing”. Through Marr’s own diaries and revelations in personal documents purchased by the National Library, the essay also offers a new reading of White’s late years, including his death and that of his partner for half a century, Manoly Lascaris.

“We had a deal that after the Life went to the publishers, White could see the text for the purpose of identifying errors … He made me sit with him as he read the manuscript through again, slowly, page by page, complaining and laughing - always at his own jokes. He loved in particular reading what he’d written in the letters he’d begged everyone to destroy. On some of the sticky issues he finally acknowledged the truth, even admitting one morning that despite all the abuse he had heaped on his mother over the years, his life was the realisation of her ambition for him: to be a writer. I counted this a late victory in a long tussle. He identified a couple of dozen errors of fact and corrected spelling mistakes in several languages but did not ask me to cut or change a line. But Lascaris was humiliated to find a stranger in the text …”

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“In late October 2006, in time for Christmas shoppers, the second edition of The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet was released, at a launch attended by Julie Bishop, the then federal minister for science. The second edition contains a page discussing red meat and colorectal cancer, including this statement: ‘Studies have shown that fresh red meat (beef and lamb) is not a significant risk factor for colorectal cancer.’ Why the clear discrepancy between what the CSIRO’s researchers were telling it privately and its advice to the public? Had any new evidence emerged to alter the opinions of its researchers? Certainly the board and CEO documents don’t mention any new research containing contrary findings.”

In “Confounders: The CSIRO and the Total Wellbeing Diet”, Geoff Russell asks why the best-selling diet from Australia’s leading research organisation recommends potentially dangerous amounts of red meat, despite two major reports linking red-meat intake and bowel cancer.

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“In 2007, more than 5 million meth laboratories were detected in the US. In Australia, the number is fewer than 500; but in a small population living around the rim of a large continent, that represents an enthusiastic uptake of a swiftly made, relatively cheap drug … Roughly 90% of the pseudoephedrine used in illegal labs to make meth as powder (of 10% purity) or base (of 20% purity) comes in tablet form from retail pharmacies. Police photographs taken at lab busts show packets of Sudafed (or Demazin, Zyrtec Decongestant, Home Brand Cold & Flu, or any of a dozen or so other commercial preparations) piled up like briquettes waiting for the stoker’s shovel.”

And in “Running Dogs: The Legal Trade Behind the Manufacture of Methamphetamines”, pharmacist and journalist Gail Bell takes us to the chemist’s counter, where sales of cold and flu tablets containing pseudoephedrine are now monitored by the authorities; into the world of the “pseudo runners”, the people who source the tablets for criminal gangs; and finally to the clandestine labs, where cooks turn pseudoephedrine into street drugs such as ice.

“Joe’s goal is quick profit based on fast turnaround. For a competent runner working for cash, a day’s work might yield ten packets of, say, Demazin, sold to a dealer for $600, yielding a healthy net profit after subtracting pharmacy costs and petrol, not to mention time and anxiety. These runners know who sells and who doesn’t; which pharmacies have CCTV operating; which staff inside an otherwise straight shop will turn a blind eye. They use aliases; possess multiple IDs; spout a line about an ear, nose and throat specialist’s recommendation …”

THE NATION REVIEWED

“‘Enter poor Brendan Nelson,’ John Hewson wrote in the Australian Financial Review last month. ‘He’d struggle even if he were Nelson Mandela.’ This is something of an exaggeration; I am sure that had Dr Nelson spent 27 years in prison and then emerged as the saviour of his people and his country, even the Canberra press gallery would accord him a certain amount of respect. As things are, though, its members can only report what they see; and what they see is a neophyte leader floundering in the opinion polls and being treated with contempt even by his own side … However, there is no doubt that Hewson’s basic premise is right: the coverage of the current leader of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition has been uniformly unkind. But this does not mean it has been unfair.”

In the Monthly Comment, Mungo MacCallum looks at the fate of Australia’s Opposition leaders, particularly those who are first up after an election defeat. History provides an unpleasant lesson for Nelson, the man who as education minister wanted “a flagpole in every yard and a poster of Simpson’s donkey in every classroom”. “It is no more than realistic,” MacCallum says, “to suggest that Nelson’s chances of success in 2010 are, at best, somewhere between Buckley’s and none.”

“Since the end of World War II, Australia has had 17 different federal Opposition leaders, four of whom (Gough Whitlam, Andrew Peacock, John Howard and Kim Beazley) have held the position on two separate occasions. Between them they have contested 25 elections, not counting separate polls for the half-Senate. And just six of them actually won, and one of those (Malcolm Fraser) was appointed prime minister before doing so. So the odds on Nelson, or for that matter anyone else, joining that exclusive band are not good. Clearly it takes a rare combination of talent and circumstances to prevail, and at present the circumstances are not in Nelson’s favour. And even if things do change, here is the killer: not a single first-up Opposition leader has ever won a federal election.”

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And in “If Those Trains Had Only Run …”, historian Robyn Annear revisits the infamous Sunshine rail disaster.

“God works for V/Line, the Victorian country rail service. Actually, it’s God for short; full name Godfrey, he’s an ex-conductor now employed on station duties. ‘Pass us that stapler, God,’ you’ll hear a colleague say to him. But not even having God on the payroll could, in all probability, have averted the disaster that befell the Ballarat and Bendigo ‘up’ trains on Easter Monday 1908 at Sunshine, 12 kilometres from Melbourne … Upwards of a thousand people were packed aboard two trains hurtling towards Sunshine. It being the end of a four-day holiday, extra carriages had been borrowed from the suburban lines, making the trains twice their usual length. Even so, they were stuffed beyond capacity, with 12 passengers squeezed into six-seat compartments and yet more standing in the corridors.”

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Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Alice Pung takes part in a Buddhist retreat and is troubled by the sounds of silence; and birdwatcher and author Sean Dooley tells the real story of the much-maligned Orange-bellied Parrot, an endangered bird unfairly accused of stopping major infrastructure projects.

ARTS & LETTERS

In “Kitchen-Table Candour”, novelist and critic Robert Dessaix reviews Helen Garner’s much-anticipated new book, admiring its “superbly refined” prose yet taking issue with its presentation as a novel.

“Whatever sort of writer Helen Garner is - tribal storyteller, memoirist, reporter, diarist, essayist - nobody’s words on the page command attention quite like hers. To call a book a novel, though, does raise certain expectations in the reader which Helen Garner never sets out to satisfy in The Spare Room. Why should she? The Spare Room is a hard-hitting, flinty-eyed report from the front, not a novel. It’s a report, in fact, from two fronts: one in a cancer quack’s surgery and the other a house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs where Helen (that’s the character’s name), riding a surge of pity, love and anger, is looking after her dying friend, Nicola, for three weeks while she undergoes a miracle cancer cure. It reads like the monologue of an angry, exhausted friend, sitting across the kitchen table from you, telling you, since you haven’t asked, what looking after poor, mad Nicola was like in gritty detail. She’s a woman of penetrating intelligence, this friend of yours, plain-spoken and not given to lyrical effusions … It’s a performance, of course - you know that. Shaped, rehearsed and dotted with lines she knows will cut you to the quick, such as, ‘The station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer.’ And it’s a performance calculated to evoke empathy for Helen, not Nicola.”

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And in “Embracing the Inner Bunny”, novelist Linda Jaivin is back at the raunch, taking on three new Australian books about the effects of pornography and raunch culture: Princesses & Pornstars, Consuming Innocence and The Porn Report.

“Society was awash in filth. Young women chased fantasy and titillation at the expense of their mental and physical health, not to mention proper relationships. And they couldn’t keep their hands off themselves. Something new had appeared on the scene, something dangerous. Respectable commentators agreed it was the source of all this trouble. It was the novel. The authors of The Porn Report cite the moral panic around fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reminder that aspects of popular culture will always get people’s knickers in a twist. Today, it’s the explosion of pornography, particularly on the internet, and raunch culture, through which the aesthetics and values of porn have had an unprecedented influence on fashion and mores. Here, there’s considerably more twist than knickers - think Bratz, Britney, porn-star chic and 12-year-olds learning to pole dance.”

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There’s also Gideon Haigh on how Oil!, the novel by that great American socialist and muckraker Upton Sinclair, was reduced to gas in Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent Oscar hit, There Will Be Blood; and Luke Davies critiques Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages and Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, two films about “horrible, horrible people”.

Plus, David Day wades through Blood and Soil, Ben Kiernan’s account of global genocide; Meg Mundell is enthralled by Australian writer Julia Leigh’s new gothic novella, Disquiet; Justin Clemens assesses Poe: A Life Cut Short, Peter Ackroyd’s latest literary biography; and Shane Maloney recounts the meeting of Jackey Jackey and Cape York’s Yadhaykenu people.

Pisses on Quadrant. Except Quadrant has, its saving grace from my viewpoint, more poems and stories. But those are, naturally, merely opinions…