THE MONTHLY ESSAYS
"I asked: How often do you think about the worst-case scenario? Andrew Chan's face turned instantly sombre; his answer came lightning-fast. ‘I don't have a bond with negativity. If I let that grow, it will grow forever.' When I asked Myuran Sukumaran the same question, he said, ‘For me, I don't think about it at all. I think: It's not going to happen. It can't happen.' He waved his hands emphatically in front of his chest, as if waving something distasteful away. ‘Whatever happens,' he went on, ‘you can deal with it. As long as you have the future.' Chan gave the impression of being determined to keep things busy, and stay in the moment. At times, Sukumaran seemed so consumed with anxiety about his predicament, it was a form of deep distractedness in itself. But it struck me that, under the looming pressure of a death sentence, both of them are in their own ways striving to delineate the question of how best to be human, to actively exist, with consciousness and will, in the worst of circumstances."
In "The Penalty is Death", Luke Davies talks with Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two members of the Bali Nine who are on death row in Bali's Kerobokan Prison. In exclusive interviews, Chan, Sukumaran and their families speak for the first time about life under a death sentence. Also incorporating previously unpublished writings by Van Nyugen, the young Australian executed in Singapore in 2005, this stunning essay reveals the human cost of the death penalty - which spreads far beyond the life of the individual rightly, or wrongly, convicted. No matter your opinion of capital punishment, it is compulsory, compelling reading on a matter of international import.
"The threat of annihilation of a loved one eats up the capacity to be present. Time stops, even as it moves forward to a date with a firing squad. ‘After a while,' Rajini Sukumaran said, speaking perhaps not so much of her children, but of the wider world of relatives and friends and colleagues, ‘everybody else got back to their lives. I go back to the seventeenth of April, 2005. What if that day never happened?' ... She had one request when I left: would I please not use the expression ‘convicted drug smuggler' when describing her son. In the grand media narrative of the Bali Nine he is, of course, just that. But I understood, hearing the desperation in her voice, that Myuran is, to Rajini, a continuity of being that came from her womb: all memory, and growth, and joy, in an unending line, to now."
"When I left the Middle East, the sense of things in dust and fragments seemed very strong: I went back to my home in Darwin, and started trying to forge my thoughts into a continuous narrative, a smooth stream of words - but soon I fell into composing in fragments; I would write nothing more than stray snatches of story; and it was not just that I was failing in my tasks - for what author is not always distorting and betraying the first image that forms in his mind's eye of his work? No: the fragment, the symbol-laden fragment, rather than the flowing sequence, was the necessary form for what I had to say: what I meant was in fragments, and dust; it was best told in fragments - fragments were all that I could manage, and even they seemed too controlled, too much a bid to reimpose order on a flux of shimmering, glancing, barely causal connecting chains."
In "Fragments and Dust", Nicolas Rothwell draws on his travels and readings in the Middle East and remote Australia to examine the decline of religious and narrative traditions in the West. "Is there a link between ... the demise of the divine and the demise of narrative?" he asks. In resonant prose, he proffers an analysis at once evocative and stark, and melancholy - but not without hope.
"I have a persisting sense that the novel sits uneasily in the Australian context, in the Australian landscape ... My impression is that the Australian bush has not been successfully transformed into a Western space fit for established models of writing. It is not a landscape that offers us easy grace, or immediate redemption: it does not have the flavour of settled, European or New World landscapes, against which epics of social progress and personal discovery can be straightforwardly played out. There is always something further in the landscape. It is more a place for tales, for deep-hidden meanings, and symbol-laden fragments - and all this is connected to religion, and the religious centre of gravity of the continent. How have Australian writers tried to come to terms with this new world we have taken for our own?"
THE NATION REVIEWED
"Aboriginal people make up 2% of the population and 10% of footballers in the Australian Football League. As anyone who has seen them in action will attest, they seem made to play the game, but were they makers of the game as well? Their role in the game's origins has been a matter agitating the football world and its historians since the appearance in March of The Australian Game of Football Since 1858, the authorised version of the AFL's history ... The book has many authors. The editor chose Gillian Hibbins, a well-credentialled sports historian, to write the opening chapter on the formation of the game. She made no mention of the Aboriginal game of football, Marngrook. The editor then asked her to deal with the supposed connection between this game and Australian Rules. She produced a one-page supplement to her chapter which completely dismissed any connection. She declared that she would be very happy to find an Aboriginal influence, but sadly there was no evidence for it: it was no more than ‘a seductive myth'."
In the Monthly Comment, John Hirst provides a timely intervention into the debate about Indigenous influence in the origins of Australian Rules. He argues for a shift away from rigid analyses of the game's foundation to a broader, more complex consideration of how Australian football transformed in its early years from a "grinding, low-to-the-ground, low-scoring contest" into the more "open, free-flowing game with high marks". As the AFL celebrates 150 years of the sport, Hirst offers an assessment far-reaching in its implications for Australians' understanding of their cultural history.
"In the early years of settlement, Aborigines and whites lived close to each other. The isolation and institutionalising of Aborigines came much later. They were both highly mobile peoples. We don't have to be too particular about who was where when to suggest that whites would have seen the Aboriginal game of football ... Wills and Harrison, two early, commanding players, had a strong connection to Aboriginal life. But the influence I do not want to exclude would be more vagrant and unbeknown ..."
In "'A Tale of Two Sittings", eminent American author and editor Cullen Murphy takes a personal historical tour of Brisbane, tracing his illustrator father's wartime footsteps through a city once dominated by General Douglas MacArthur.
"Many of the old haunts, like Lennon's Hotel, where the senior American officers had their apartments, are gone, but quite a lot is still here to be seen. I started with St Stephen's Cathedral, where my father attended mass every day (faithfully recorded) and went to confession weekly (the fact, though not the transgressions, also recorded). There's an entry in the diary that reads ‘Blind date (awful),' which doesn't suggest much material to work with on the confessions front. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters, where my father spent much of his time, were right around the corner from St Stephen's ... My father was an aide-de-camp to a general named William Marquat ... It's clear to me from reading the diaries - as it gradually became clear to my father - that Marquat initially wanted him on board for one reason only: to paint portraits of senior Allied officers and their families, in order to help Marquat grease the political bureaucracy of the MacArthur regime. ‘We've got some decorating to do around here, Murphy,' Marquat says to him upon first meeting - meaning, it turns out, Grab your brushes!"
And in "Saving Yourself", Benjamin Law sits in on a high-school lesson led by a husband-and-wife team of travelling abstinence teachers.
"We're told that 200,000 Australian teenagers will get an STD this year; 12,000 American teens contract a sexually transmitted disease in a single day; condoms are only 50% effective against STIs; condoms have a failure rate of between 1% and 30%. ‘We're talking about a frail piece of latex here,' Jim Lyons says. ‘We're not talking about a tractor tyre' ... Faye and Jim have also made their own Straight Talk Australia brochure, a bright-green leaflet called ‘101 Things to Do With Your Boyfriend or Girlfriend, Instead of IT!' Alternatives to ‘it' (which, Faye helpfully explains, is what young people call sex) include: ‘learn yo-yo tricks', ‘fix lunch for some elderly folk' and ‘pick a bunch of dandelions for your mother'. Other recommendations seem outright suggestive: ‘feed each other sushi'; ‘play army'; ‘make a candlelit dinner'; ‘have a water fight' ..."
Plus, in "Operation Tom Yum", Ashley Hay goes undercover in Sydney with a group of food tasters to discover the essential ingredients of an authentic, government-approved Thai meal.
ARTS & LETTERS
"When I first travelled to Palm Island, to attend the inquest into Cameron Doomadgee's death in custody, I was venturing into Astley country. The great Thea Astley had a love of the fecundity and the rot of tropical life, of small communities where agoraphobia and claustrophobia commingle, and she was one of the first novelists of her generation to write about the bloodshed of the Australian frontier. Astley was intensely interested in the effects of violence, of male violence in places where it seems too hot to move but punches are thrown liberally. She wrote of outsiders, of people ‘living on a cyclonic edge'. And Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley - the very tall, very broad, some said charismatic policeman suspected of killing Doomadgee - was a perfect Astley character."
In "Under the Rainshadow", Chloe Hooper returns to the heart of darkness, tracing the disquieting parallels between the case discussed in her recent book, The Tall Man, and Thea Astley's The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, a novel based on horrific events that occurred on the same island some 80 years earlier.
"Curry, a Kurtz-like figure known to the Palm Islanders as ‘Boss' or ‘Uncle Boss', was an ex-army man, a veteran of the Great War who oversaw the settlement of the island throughout the 1920s, establishing it as a kind of open-air jail for those Aborigines who had proved troublesome on Queensland's regular reserves ... When rumours spread on the mainland that he was flogging young Aboriginal women, Curry suspected his rivals. But the allegations were true. Without these whippings, he told his superiors, his ‘authority would have been weakened'. He'd turned tyrannical in a place he described as akin to ‘living on the rim of a volcano'. Curry hated the Palm Island doctor, an enmity that intensified when Curry's wife died in childbirth. Drinking heavily in his grief, and dosed with novocaine for neuralgia, Curry donned a long red bathing suit, a bullet belt, and, with a gun in each hand, went on a rampage."
In "Only Look, Only See", Inga Clendinnen examines David Malouf's On Experience, which explores the strangely interwoven experiences of writing, reading and remembering.
"I have come to think that every last scrap of Malouf's writing is about how sensations, framed by a particular situation within a particular slice of time, are transformed into experience: the random intensity of the stimuli, the vulnerability of the process, the mysterious ways in which still-tentative accounts are found good or disastrously wanting. This is his temperament, his history, and the core of his writing craft. It also appears to be infectious. It was only this morning that I realised I have stolen a Malouf experience: a trio of children watching a great fish dying on a beach in a final blaze of colours ..."
And in "Unhappy Endings", Amanda Lohrey offers an original assessment of the acclaimed writings of Annie Proulx. Proposing that Proulx's work can be divided into "the comic novel of baroque folksiness that documents the culture of a remote regional community, as in the phenomenal bestseller The Shipping News" and "the grim short story of the western frontier, set mostly in the wilds of Wyoming", Lohrey argues that the latter - of which the new Fine Just the Way It Is is the third collection - has become predictable and uninspired in its unrelenting bleakness.
"For anyone coming to Proulx for the first time, the power of her anger is enlivening; it's only when you read the Wyoming stories in sequence that you are likely to question her method ... you begin to perceive a default mode of willed violence that seems not to grow out of the stories but to be imposed on them ... characters are castrated, hideously disfigured, trampled by steers or beaten to death with a tyre iron. The New York Times reviewer Walter Kendrick caught the mood when he lamented ‘the abattoir without walls that is Ms Proulx's America' ... In Proulx's latest volume, a law of diminishing narrative returns begins to kick in early: a farmer's wife dies of a post-partum haemorrhage in an isolated cabin; a poor cowherd freezes to death in a snow drift; a young bushwalker dies agonisingly on a hiking trail. You begin to feel that you have been here before."
Elsewhere, in "Totally Wired", Gideon Haigh finds the ageing arty minimalists of punk, Wire, still playing like they mean it on their new album, Object 47. There's also Zora Simic on Christina Thompson's unlikely romance, Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All; Kevin Patrick on the latest in the long line of Phantom comics; and Shane Maloney on the time ‘Banjo' Paterson and Rudyard Kipling went motoring together.
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