Non-fiction

Chast burrows into this feral old age and draws it out with uncanny, page-expanding, emotional precision. It is not reporting from the trenches, or a facing-down of the last frontier, but something else. Chast is giving over a whole multi-tracked, multi-voiced, sensory feast of a book to something – something barely bearable sometimes, and infused with pain and dread always; something that gets sprinted past, or poeticised to within an inch of its life, or else chronicled with a deadly, breathless earnestness – and she does it in such a way that I could not tear myself away from her book.

Two lessons may be learned from American military lawyer Michael Mori’s account of his defence of David Hicks. Neither of the lessons is new, but each requires constant reaffirmation. The first is that power corrupts. Despite its high-flown rhetoric about freedom and the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the United States refuses to join some of the most potentially powerful international instruments of justice, including the International Criminal Court… The second lesson is that in contemporary liberal democracies, things are rarely done because they have intrinsic organisational or ethical merit. Rather, it is strategic usefulness that rules.

In 1950, ASIO’s Canberra office could record only two telephone lines from the Soviet embassy at any time. By contrast, in a single month in 2013, according to Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency acquired data from more than 3 billion calls and emails. Perversely, the staggering gulf between then and now makes ASIO’s history more relevant than ever. We do not (and cannot) know what the secret organisation does today, but its record allows us to extrapolate.

This is a book every Australian should read. The kind of people we are, the kind of nation this is, the big myths and the way they have been forged – these are the stones with which Watson’s builds his book.

Reading across Noel Pearson’s work, from his 1986 honours thesis on the ‘mission culture’ of his hometown of Hope Vale to this newest essay, A Rightful Place, there are notable consistencies. He is ultimately a romantic thinker, in the sense that he always aims to trace a course from disaster towards redemption, rather than mere remediation.

At the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe, Chris Andrews captures the tension between the public articulation of Bolaño’s now canonical status and the almost inexhaustible fascination he provokes. Admitting that his own book of criticism is participating in the ‘process of monumentalization’ that has been going on around Bolaño virtually since his death, Andrews also reminds us of the ‘incalculably diffusive’ effects of Bolaño’s work.

If, as Jensen suggests, Cullen was in his work a sort of shaman of suburbia, a lightning rod for its deficits and its hidden pain, this only serves to sharpen his loneliness. For shamanism was and is a communal profession, and Cullen was a deeply isolated man. His substance abuse, so called, can be seen through the same lens: a once communal act now indulged in agonised solitude.

Throughout the book, Beudel uses a technique that approaches – and seems to be trying, humbly, to learn from – Aboriginal ways of seeing country, of the dynamic interrelatedness of people, animals, plants and the land itself, to write her own story.

The recent skirmishes over the meaning of Anzac Day and the implementation of the national history curriculum suggest that Forgotten War is unlikely to dampen the flames of historiographical contest. But Reynolds claims that Nicholas Clements’ Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania will do just that. In contrast to Reynolds’ overview of the frontier wars, Clements has chosen just one — Tasmania’s ‘Black War’ — and has reached deep into the archives to produce a painstakingly researched social history of this episodic conflict.

The danger that ANZAC will seem like just another commemorative album relates, I think, to a tendency that is legible across Aberhart’s considerable oeuvre, one that is not in itself problematic. This is a pull almost in the direction of nostalgia – a preference for folk cultures, throwbacks and remnants; a preference for obsolete things and for places that seem like outliers from the busier and slicker centres of late modernity.