Growing Up African, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke.

An absorbing new collection of autobiographical pieces by African-diaspora Australians.

Growing Up African in Australia (edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke, Magan Magan and Ahmed Yussuf ) is a collection of autobiographical essays by African-diaspora Australians. Most of the pieces collected here are fairly short in length and cover a broad spectrum of nationalities and experiences. There are stories of leaving war-torn countries, the pain of being separated from family, the difficulties of cultural adjustment in a new land, the feeling of not belonging anywhere.

The inevitable experience of racism, in all its forms, whether it be a misguided but well-meaning remark, the cruelty of children in the playground, or the more sinister type, are all candidly discussed. The most common fault of white Australians is to ask: where do you come from? The onus always on the person of colour to validate their identity; the underlying assumption of the question being: you don't belong here.

While there are stories of struggle, pain and suffering, there are also inspiring stories of achievement and personal success, of finding friendships, love, place and community. A large number of the contributors are artists, performers and writers, and their stories are also a testament to the power of creativity to give solace and empowerment.

There is much to learn from this engaging and enjoyable collection. Growing Up African in Australia highlights the power of the word to create empathy and understanding.

Growing Up African in Australia, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke. Published by Black Inc. RRP: $29.99

Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer, by Elizabeth Kleinhenz

Biographer Elizabeth Kleinhenz tells the fascinating and complex story of Germaine Greer.

In 2013, Germaine Greer sold her archives – some 500 boxes - to the University of Melbourne. Academic and educator Elizabeth Kleinhenz has spent several years going through this rich resource on Greer’s life to produce a new biography. This is the second book on Greer's life – a notoriously unwilling subject – following Christine Wallace’s 1997 Untamed Shrew.

Kleinhenz produces a fairly straight forward biography here, something most readers will find easily accessible. The book doesn’t examine in critical detail Greer’s literary and intellectual output, which is fair enough (all the major works are discussed, however). That is really the task for another book.

What the biographer concentrates on is Greer the brilliant, complex and often contradictory woman. We get a portrait of someone who is generous, prodigiously intelligent and blessed with a sharp sense of humour, but also quick to anger, difficult and sometimes downright mean. Greer appears in these pages as a strangely isolated figure, yet surrounded by plenty of people. One almost feels sorry for her inability to forge strong, lasting relationships. 

Writes Kleinhenz: 

“Her behaviour can be as puzzling as it is annoying. Despite her singular intelligence, she can be as inconsistent and irrational as she is insulting. Her apparent lack of emotional empathy is strangely at odds with her literary sensibility. It is amazing to see how a bruising clumsiness in personal relations sits beside the almost pitch-perfect refinement of the best of her writing. A complete contradiction.”

Or as Salman Rushdie noted, after her refusal to sign a petition defending him during The Satanic Verses controversy, “...her determination to be out of step leads her into batty positions.”

I very much enjoyed this fascinating biography, reading it in a couple of days. It goes a long way to explaining some of the more unexplainable aspects of Germaine Greer’s personality, while also lauding her role as a public intellectual and feminist of considerable stature. 

Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer, by Elizabeth Kleinhenz. Vintage. RRP: $39.99

All That Happened at Number 26, by Denise Scott

After years of working the Australian comedy circuit, a career that involved stand-up, regular radio spots and TV appearances, performer Denise Scott has put pen to paper to write this warm chucklefest of a memoir.

The number 26 of the title refers to the home Scott and her husband bought when they were skinflint. Directly after her husband had bought the home at an auction, at Scott’s prompting, she immediately broke down, bawled her eyes out and declared she hated the house. Her flummoxed husband asked what the matter was. "Well, why did you tell me to bid?"

"Because we have to live somewhere and I knew all we could afford was some ugly, horrible piece of shit."

Amazingly, Scott and family (two grown up children, Jordie and Bonnie) still live at number 26 today. The reason? You adapt, says Scott, and soon learn to turn negatives into positives.

This attitude, of turning positives into negatives, underlines a lot of the comedy in this book. All Scott ever wanted was a nice suburban house, to live like ‘normal’ people with nice things. Instead all she got was a house that was frequently falling down around her ears, leaking water, and filled with furniture that was either found, borrowed or donated to the family.

Life at number 26 it seemed would never be normal, no matter how much Scott strived for middle class respectability and decency. One day the comedienne was shocked to come home and find her husband airing their filthy futon – with its years of built up mould from sleeping on it directly on the floor, ignoring the shop assistant’s advice to roll it up daily – out in the front garden. This was literally airing your dirty laundry in public.

So financially stretched were the couple that they thought nothing of even taking in unwanted underwear and sharing it, like the time they accepted a unwanted pair of underpants from husband John’s cousin, Gavin. They were a pair of pale-brown undies with dark brown trim and made of 100 synthetic bri-nylon. Scott described them as an ‘emergency pair’. One day she mindlessly put them on and went to a TV shoot for an SBS series called Piccolo Mondo. It turned out the love scene she was doing in the end required her to remove her underpants – Cousin Gavin’s as it turns out – while still on the set. Oh, the humiliation and embarrassment! The underpants didn’t fare well under the hot studio lighting.

"High temperatures and bri-nylon do not a good marriage make, that’s all I’m trying to say. My memory is of the wardrobe lady, looking as though she was about to dry-retch, gingerly taking my cousin Gavin’s underpants from me and holding them at some distance as she carried them off-set, where she was charged with keeping them on ‘stand-by’ in case we reached a point where I could put them on again."

As Scott says of her house, you adapt and you turn negatives into positives. In this case, she soldiered on with her career and made a decent living out of making radio and TV appearances, plus doing her stand-up comedy gigs. Scott even worked for a time as a writer for Steve Vizard’s Tonight Show.

All That Happened at Number 26 is a laugh a page book filled with much chaotic humanity. Her mad house filled with adventures is like a Chaucerian tale gotten out of hand: the Wife of Bath pissed on Chardonnay and watching television at 5.30 in the afternoon. It’s warm, funny and makes you ready to accept your own humanity.

Car Wars: How the car won our hearts and conquered our cities, by Graeme Davison, with Sheryl Yelland

Car Wars sounds like an overly dramatic title for a book that details the history of the car and its impact on the Melbourne landscape, but once the car goes from being a luxury item to a necessity of suburbia, then indeed war does break out.

This is the irony of the car, as presented in Car Wars. First the car was a gentleman’s toy, a pleasure only the rich could afford. Then as prices came down and more and more people could afford them, it was the car that started to create the environment. The sprawling suburbs could only come into being with everyone owning a car (and petrol being cheap).

I know when I was growing up in suburban Aspendale, in a brand new house on a street with lots of other new houses and quite a few vacant blocks, we had two cars. The walk to the station was 15 minutes and I seriously don’t think either of my parents ever, ever caught the train.

The second major change that the car wrought on the environment was the complex system of roads and freeways that became progressively more congested as time went on. When governments tried to build freeways through the inner city suburbs, they found the natives revolting.

Car Wars ends with the Kennett government and its CityLink project, a privatised tollway that caused many a headache.

Once you get to the end of the this book it becomes clear how many limits there are to the freedom the car can provide. The need to keep on creating costly and complex freeways to transport everyone from our ever expanding suburbs seems to make less sense than a cat chasing its tail.

This is a fascinating car and road biography of Melbourne, highlighting the possibility that we may have reached our road and congestion limit.

Once Were Radicals: My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist, by Irfan Yusuf

Mr Yusuf is an Australian writer who frequently publishes opinion pieces in print and online media. I’ve always enjoyed his humourous slant on Islamic issues, so I thought I’d give his debut book a go.

A bit to my surprise, seeing the subject matter is growing up Muslim with Indo-Pakistani parents, I found this memoir to be a real page-turner. Before I knew it I was half way through the book, and by the time I got to the end I wanted a bit more.

For me one of the chief appeals of the book is the descriptions of the scholarly Islamic environment Irfan Yusuf was raised in. The descriptions of his educated, Urdu speaking mother are both endearing and funny. (Her anxieties centre around young Irfan doing well in his studies.)

The second half of the book describes the author becoming interested in political Islam. This leads him to make a few hasty conclusions about what it means to be a true Muslim. After much reading and soul searching, Yusuf rejects many of the tenets of political Islam. A lot of it he sees as enforcing monoculturalism and homogeneity.

Most non-Muslim Australians like myself see Islam through the lens of a hot and intemperate media. At the back of our minds, no matter how liberal we try to think ourselves, the media has created a mental template that equates Muslims with terrorism.

You should give this very enjoyable book a go as it will give you a more three dimensional, human picture of what it’s like to grow up Muslim.

The Lucky Country, by Donald Horne

I’ve long wanted to read Donald Horne’s classic, and now I have. I don’t know what to make of it though.

It’s written in a sophisticated, urban style, which is well enough as its 250 odd pages paints Australia as a dreadfully parochial backwater. Horne is witty too. And his elegant writing style holds up well 45 years after the book was originally published (1964).

Yet in a lot of ways this is a long opinion piece about something very broad and abstract: a whole country. True, he does break Australia down into a lot of subjects for individual dissection. I found his chapter on Menzies fascinating. But the trouble for me when reading these opinion pieces on national character is that I can’t figure out if what the author is saying is true. I have nothing to test what the author says against my own experiences.

Here is an example. I think I know what Horne means, then again I’m not so sure.

"Australians ‘learn’ their culture. They ‘learn’ it as if it described their own life and attitudes, when in part it does not, and this process seems to make the relevant in the culture they ‘learn’ also unreal. This sense of unreality can affect even those who have ‘learned’ their culture very thoroughly: they cannot detect the difference between their own society and the societies of the culture they have ‘learned’. But some of the valuable parts of the culture they ‘learn’ – its awareness of horror, failure, inadequacy can also seem unreal."

Horne goes on in this vein for a little while longer. It was doing my head in typing it up, so I’ve stopped. You get the idea though.

I remember George Orwell wrote a short book, during the second world war, which was about the national character, called The Lion and the Unicorn. Reading Orwell make all these pronouncements about English character, I thought, can this possibly apply to every Englishman and woman?

This is a curious book about Australia in the 1960s. It makes Australia sound like a pretty boring, vapid place. No wonder it drove people like Barry Humphries semi-mad and gave us characters like Dame Edna – the personification of Melbourne.

Horne said it would be inevitable that we would have much higher Asian immigration. That came to pass. And he also insisted that Australia would have to become more innovative and competitive. The Hawke-Keating era ushered that in.

However, The Lucky Country gave me a kind of creepy feeling. It has an artificial air.

Sophisticated, sharp, witty, urbane, yet kind of unreal. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to read another Donald Horne book.

The Best Australian Essays of 2008, edited by David Marr

The best Australian essays, as decided by David Marr and the people at Black Inc. books. Being publishers of The Monthly, you can rest assured there are lots of lengthy essays from that particular publication.

Actually, this is a really good collection. There were only really a small handful of essays that I didn’t enjoy very much. But for the most part, I thought there was plenty of interesting stuff in this collection.

Favourites were by Tim Flannery, on the ocean deep. John van Tiggelen on Aboriginal Australia (this was a riveting essay, read it if you can). Robert Manne’s essay titled Sorry Business, on the apology. Gideon Haigh offers a fascinating Monthly essay on the Packer empire and the Bulletin magazine. I even enjoyed David Marr’s essay on Patrick White.

But I must give a separate paragraph to Barry Humphries and his piece on Arthur Boyd. I absolutely love the way Humprhies writes. He’s so witty and amusing, and basically such a good writer. I didn’t want his article to end. (I wish Humphries would write another book for us.)

As I said above, there was some stuff I didn’t like, by writers I’ve never really liked anyway. So I won’t bother going into that.

On the whole, this is a good, strong collection, worthy of the titles Best Australian Essays.

The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper

Where to start with this amazing book? Chloe Hooper’s first book was a novel called A Child’s Book of True Crime, published in 2002. This was followed up six years later with not another novel but a non-fiction work about the death in custody on Palm Island, in Queensland’s north, of indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee.

The events surrounding Doomadgee are hard to fathom. He was picked up by policeman Chris Hurley for apparently using some bad language. Whilst being taken to the lock up both men tripped at the doorway and fell into the station. Chris Hurley maintained that he fell beside Doomadgee, not on top of him. Yet Doomadgee suffered the most horrific injuries. His liver was cleaved in two as it was pressed violently against his back bone. He died from these injuries. How did his liver come to be so violently cleaved in two? The court case never really looked into it, or made it a point of finding out.

A week after the death the Aboriginal community on Palm Island rioted and burnt down the courthouse, police station and police barracks. To all intents and purposes, this was pretty much a state of war. You can’t help but think of the footage you see on the news of the violence that happens in the Gaza strip in Palestine.

Chris Hurley eventually went on trial for Doomadgee’s death, but was found not guilty. The Aboriginal community felt that they never really did have a chance of securing a conviction. Like always, this would be another one of those sad death-in-custody cases.

You have to admire Chloe Hooper’s courage in travelling to Palm Island and other North Queensland remote Aboriginal communities in order to do on the ground investigative journalism that this sort of book requires. What she reports back from the whole terrible affair is how much we live in two distinct Australias. There is one Australia that is like a third world country, with its residents doomed to staggeringly poor health and next to no political or economic power. Then there is the well heeled mainstream, people like me.

It was tragic to read about so many Aboriginal people whose basic health was just terrible – diabetes, alcoholism, constant violence. Hooper also cites polls that find white Australians in the North of Queensland have a very low opinion of the indigenous population. And from all the descriptions in this book, you can sympathise. Here in leafy inner Melbourne you simply don’t see all the problems on a day to day basis.

The question is, why is the status of the Aboriginal population so bad, and can we honestly answer that question?

This book paints a very clear picture of two different countries within the one Australia. One is strong, rich and healthy, the other weak, in a constant state of sickness and completely dependent. Look at the body differences between Chris Hurley (115 kilo) and Cameron Doomadgee (75 kilo). This was reinforced in the book with the descriptions of the fit Queensland Police Force, who rallied to support their member Chris Hurley when it was announced he would go to trial. This in contrast to the alcoholic, sick, medicated and mentally befuddled Aboriginals who gave evidence at the trial.

In the end, the subtext of this book seems to be: black and white Australians may be in theory equal before the law, but the reality is white Australia is by far the more culturally, economically and politically powerful. No indigenous Australian has much of a chance of winning against such a powerful establishment of people. Better outcomes would occur, it seems, if the Aboriginal population was far more politically organised and could exploit the democratic system to get the best possible results in all situations. Yet this book showed, as I’ve already mentioned above several times, that the Aboriginal population are sick, weak, disenfranchised, addicted to alcohol, poorly organised, and with a long history of being completely downtrodden.

This is one of those books that you want all Australians to read.

The Henson Case, by David Marr

What started with a bang, and soon blew many gales of sound and fury, could only really end in a whimper. The drama of the Henson photos showed Australia was capable of considerable moral outrage, yet didn’t have the energy or inclination or ability to follow through on its convictions.

Bill Henson was never going to be found guilty of making kiddie porn. He’s been making these types of photos for the past 30 years. His photos have been collected by politicians, galleries and parliament buildings, for heaven's sake. Henson couldn’t be found guilty of such a charge, because if he was, the whole culture would have gone down with him.

That was my initial response. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup that could not possibly have gone anywhere. Then when I studied the legal case, that seemed impossible too. How would we make it illegal for people to take naked pictures of children? Could parents become child pornographers merely be taking a happy snap of their kid in the bath? And what would it mean for the culture at large if our attitude to child nudity was to immediately associate it with having sex with children. This is a perverse idea, and completely unworkable.

David Marr I find quite a shrill from time to time. (When Fran Kelly of ABC Breakfast interviewed Marr on the Henson case he was horribly condescending to her. She deserves more respect than this.) When Marr is giving opinion he can become histrionic and over the top. This is in curious contrast to his work as a journalist, which shows a sharp, forensic intelligence.

As you’d expect, this book is pretty – very – sympathetic to Henson. Marr doesn’t try to look at things from the angle of concerned community opinion. If he does skirt close to this, he seems to say the internet has warped perceptions and created a more heightened environment. Too much stuff is available on the net, a lot of it we don't need.

To me this seems the most obvious subject here: the social taboo on candidly portraying a naked girl entering puberty. Why doesn’t Marr explore this? And why doesn’t he take a more nuanced look at community outrage?

This is a story really of two worlds. One, what Marr calls the ‘citadel of art’, involves a cloistered community of artists and supporters. They seem oblivious to the rabble of commoners all around them, outraged at their behaviour.

Most bizarrely, in interviews with Henson in the book, the photographer says he never, ever took any notice of similar art controversies, involving the photographing of young people, that had happened overseas. How can you be involved in this type of work and pointedly never consider the impact your work could have on the community at large? This is wilful ignorance, coming from someone who is supposed to have deep aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sensibilities. It makes you wonder.

This is the real problem. Henson deals in a photographic language that the suburban hoi-polloi don’t at all understand, brought up as they are on an aesthetic of American cinema and Australian soapies.

For my money, Henson’s art is not that successful. The twilight time between youth and adulthood that he is trying to capture doesn’t work for me. His images are self-indulgent and obvious. He’s not a pornographer, but nor is he a particularly good artist. Why do people go into raptures over his work?

Despite all I’ve written above, Marr’s book The Henson Case is a valuable contribution to the controversy of the Henson photos. It goes into much detail of what actually happened, describing political and judicial responses, plus contains interview material with Henson himself.

Yet this book will not build a bridge to ‘the citadel of art’, and most of the country’s simple commoners, lacking that artistic world’s sophistication, will remain locked out.

Maybe they are crude minded peasants, or perhaps they are simply responding to a deep seated cultural taboo. That question I leave up in the air.

Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, by Paul Toohey

This is a beguiling and somewhat hard to follow essay by journalist Paul Toohey on the subject of the Northern Territory intervention. I’ve said before, there are those writers who seem to mumble or largely talk to themselves. This is one of them. You have to lean over and strain an ear, trying to follow what’s being said. With most writers on the subject of Aboriginal affairs, you at least know where they stand. I couldn’t figure out what point Mr Toohey wanted to make.
Rather he seems intent on highlighting what a mess the whole situation is. If that's the aim, well, fair enough.

Despite all of the above, I did find this an interesting essay, even if I couldn’t follow the theme of the essay.

Like most people, I have a minimal knowledge of what life is like for Aborigines. Nor do I have much of a clue about Aborginal politics, or how we should ‘solve’ the Aboriginal problem. My information on Aboriginal current affairs is gleaned from television segments, or newspaper reports. It's not substantial.

What we all do know is that Australia’s indigenous people live in third world poverty and die far too young.

Every one seems to have an opinion on how best to ‘fix’ things. People on the right sling mud at lefties, and lefties sling it back again. In the end it just seems that the poverty and humiliation that Aboriginal Australia experiences will never be fixed.

Most white Australians just wish the problem would simply go away, which basically means ignoring the problem. As far as most Australians are concerned, the concept of terra nullius is a valid one. If it were to be questioned and completely overturned, then Australia as we know it would collapse. (It’s interesting to note that the one time John Howard really and truly lost it was at that Aboriginal reconciliation talk where he defended his ten point plan on native title and started thumping the lectern and haranguing his listeners. He came became completely unhinged.)

Anyhoo, after all of that, I must say that I found this essay quite absorbing and densely written. Most Quarterly Essays in my opinion are light and fluffy, trying to puff themselves up into a seriousness that the author thinks the subject demands. Mr Toohey’s essay however is a solid read that negotiates the politics and personalities of Aboriginal welfare in the North. The fact that he lives in the Northern Territory and has hands on experience of what he writes of course makes all the difference. He is personally engaged in what he writes about.

Although I can’t claim to have a clear understanding of all the subjects raised in this essay, or the politics discussed, Toohey has at least shown me what a deep, deep mess many Aboriginal lives are in.

He ends with the story of Sophia Moreen, sentenced to 2 years and 3 months for assault. Her history is one of unremitting trouble, the legacy, Toohey tells us, of being born Aboriginal. ‘Hers was the real story of the Northern Territory,’ as Mr Toohey finishes his essay.

Behind the Exclusive Brethren, by Michael Bachelard

The Exclusive Brethren are a Christian sect that gave a lot of financial support to the Howard Government; they also surreptitiously letterboxed leaflets bagging the Greens. In this history / expose of The Brethren, investigative journalist with The Age Michael Bachelard paints a picture of a patriarchal religious sect that is frighteningly heavy on the control and brain washing it imposes on its adherents.

The most shocking part of the sect’s doctrine is that of ‘separation’. It doesn’t sound so bad when you read about it in that way, but when you see what it in fact does by utterly destroying families and relationships, then you’ll be amazed at the cruelty of it all.

(Chapter five, simply titled The Aldterton Family, highlights the tragedy and ruin The Exclusive Brethren have wrought upon families.)

Basically, if you do something the sect feels is not in line with its values, you can be ‘withdrawn from’, more properly this means ostracised. You’re treated like you don’t even exist by family or spouse. This can go on for years. In the Alderton Family chapter, one couple of grandparents who gave up the sect have never seen most of their grandchildren. They’re seen as evil by those of their family still in the sect. You do wonder at the viciousness of it all. And this is a group that espouses family values?

There is another chapter on the cases that have been brought before the Family Court, in which one Justice describes the practice of separation as ‘vicious and cruel’.

Then there is John Howard's relationship to the group. Even during the most turbulent period of Howard’s office, the period where the Howard Government was tanking and Howard was flailing around trying to save his government, he still could always find time for the Exclusive Brethren’s man of God, Bruce D. Hales. It does make one wonder. The Liberals had always been spruiked their family values, but how could you harmonise the Brethren’s take on the family with that of the wider community?

Also frightening is how the Brethren liked to control women. They were barred from even finding employment where they would have authority over a man. There’s even a quote from nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, who grew up in the Exclusive Brethren until her family left when she was 17 years of age. On women she says, ‘They were not allowed to have too much education because then they might have some authority over a man.’

One is amazed that groups like this actually operate, and that people submit to it and become so brainwashed by it. Even more amazing, why do Liberal politicians make so much time for groups like this (or hippie Christian groups like Hillsong Church?). These are only small groups. Why do they get so much political attention? It’s truly baffling. (Actually, the answer is they’re well organised and persistent.)

Michael Bachelard says Howard was probably attracted to the Brethren because they’re control freaks. Who knows? It all seems so extreme. The take away is that we all have to remain vigilant about what is happening in politics.

Thanks to Mr Bachelard for taking the time to research and write this illuminating and depressing book.

Eating Between The Lines, by Rebecca Huntley

Eating Between the Lines purports to be about food inequality in Australia. It sets out to explore why the poorer you are the more likely you are to have a poor diet, and consequently be fatter. For example, author Rebecca Huntley cites statistics that demonstrate how poorer suburbs have more nasty take-away food outlets than in the posher areas.

Fair enough, this is a subject worth exploring. Problem is, Huntley pretty much drops her subject after the first chapter and before you know it, you’re in the middle of chapters with titles like, Sex In The Kitchen. As you read things that seem entirely unrelated to the topic, you wonder: how did we get here?

Before you know it you’re at the conclusion with a grandly sounding chapter heading, Republic of Food, and the author ties everything up with a lot of broad statements. Yet nothing has really been revealed.

To be honest, this book is like a lot of glossy weekend supplement features all strung together and then called a book.

There were some interesting factoids along the way, like I didn’t know that 80% of the traditional Aboriginal diet was plant based, and only 20% meat based. No wonder those 19th century pictures you see of Indigenous people show them in such splendid shape. The ‘superior’ Western diet put an end to that.

This book doesn’t say a lot that is new. As I said, it reads like a lot of magazine features strung together.

My personal theory on obesity, for what it’s worth, is that modern processed foods are really like drugs now, backed up by million dollar advertising campaigns. People are getting hooked on sugar, fat and the empty calories in white flour, rice and pasta. Plus the chemicals that make up fake flavourings have corrupted people's tastebuds. We don't know what real food tastes like.

The only way to substantially turn this around, in my humble opinion, would be government intervention in the form of tax on junk food, with the money being used to, at least in part, subsidise fruit and veg (hooray for us fruit and veg lovers!).

Yes, people on the ‘free market’ side of politics will argue that people should be free to eat what they want, and this is not a nanny state. Fair enough. But why should my taxes be used to prop up a crumbling healthcare system due everyone being hooked on this junk food?

I want my healthcare system in good shape, and more people looking after their health would help that.

You’ll probably want to read this book if you work in the food or nutrition industry. Or if you want a book with a decent overview of Australian eating habits today, then on this front the book’s not that bad either. It's just not rivetting stuff.

The Future Eaters, by Tim Flannery

This is a subject I know very little about. It’s embarrassing to say, but Australia’s ecological history, its natural past way beyond any human habitation, is something I’ve not given much thought to.

Tim Flannery’s genius is in taking as a starting point for Australia’s history year dot. Part one is pre-Aboriginal life, then the impact of the Aboriginal lifestyle on the environment, then finally, in part three, European impact on the environment.

Flannery’s thesis that Australia is overpopulated has been controversial. He basically thinks the population should be reduced to around 9 million people. Our dry, harsh climate is not conducive to carrying so many people.

My limited readings in science tell me that it is a maddeningly contradictory discipline. Flannery indulges in so many what ifs and theories and ‘my hunch’ type of speculations that the reader can frequently find themselves rolling their eyes. No wonder people are sceptical of so much science (especially global warming).

It’s of course fair enough that Flannery will have his theories for things that happened millions of years in the past, but in the end there is no way of proving them to be true. So in the end it makes you wonder how much the imagination of these scientists takes over reality.

Furthermore, you sense a creeping political agenda, for a population policy must have an agenda. This made me squirm in my chair a bit. I thought I was reading a book about science, but really the book was compelling me to be in sympathy with a certain political outlook.

One other last point: some of the writing in the book I wasn’t too fond of either. It was a bit fey, or too cute. Sometimes too romantic. Again, I thought this book was a scientific treatise, not an Emily Bronte novel. (More chair squirming.)

I hope the above doesn’t sound too cynical or negative. I like Tim Flannery, in fact I like him a lot, and I’m in broad agreement with The Future Eaters.

We must live within the bounds of the Australian environment. We must not pretend we’ve successfully transplanted Europe to Australia. We must not make undue demands on the environment. We must live sustainably.

I learnt a lot from The Future Eaters, and it has changed my outlook and opened my eyes considerably.

The Future Of Jesus, by Peter Jensen

It’s been years since I’ve read anything in the Boyer lecture series. Dr Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, gave this 2005 Boyer lecture.

Let me say at the outset, this is the most awful, pathetic, intellectually dead essay or book I’ve ever read.

Perhaps the cover and title tells you all you need to know, The Future of Jesus.

One wonders if Dr Jensen is going to look into the future for us, and advise of Jesus’s future plans. Or should a question mark come after the future of Jesus? Does he have a future in Australia, will church attendances continue to dwindle?

Jensen doesn't really make clear what he means by this weird title. It surely can't be a statement. How would Jensen know? So it seems more likely to be a question. Yet Jensen argues against this in the body of the essay.

Even more bizarrely, the cover of the book mimics an Ipod commercial. Jesus is shown in silhouette, holding an mp3 player, as though he’s a hip, young thing, perhaps listening to something by Hillsong church?

Dr Jensen makes his Jesus look so insubstantial and unsure of himself that you often find yourself wondering how much it would take to bump the Archbishop into the realms of atheism. This lecturer seems to hold his faith together by delicately suspending reality.

There was much in this book that simply was mind boggling to read. His chapter on the miracles of Jesus, and how we can prove they actually happened, had this reader scratching his head. Some sentences I read over and over but could not make head nor tail of.

Once again, these religious figures seem to think they know more about Jesus than he actually knew about himself.

You really have to feel sorry for Jesus, having these crappy emissaries. I hope he can forgive them.

The fact is, we know next to zilch about Jesus. To my knowledge, there is one brief contemporaneous reference to him, in the Jewish historian Josephus’ writings. (Josephus' writings also make reference to Jesus's brother, James and John the Baptist.)

The gospels were actually written some two generations after Jesus's execution. What we read in the New Testament is what was passed down by word of mouth.

To me, Jesus was the greatest moralist there ever was. His teachings should be studied by everyone.

The last thing Jesus needs is someone like Dr Jensen trying to make him relevant for us all, tarting him up in an mp3 player, a visual concept thought up by some advertising executive. For shame!

I’m amazed that Dr Peter Jensen is such a big muckety-muck in the Anglican church. No wonder people don’t go to church as much as they used to. You need someone to give a convincing message.

I sincerely don’t think that Dr Jensen is even convinced by his own message.

The Best Australian Political Writing, edited Tony Jones

I was amazed by how poorly Tony Jones writes. His introduction to this collection of newspaper and journal essays is dire. Hackneyed, difficult to read, full of bad turns of phrase. Pur-lease!

I don’t know why, but for some reason I expected something better. That’s not to say I’m a real fan of his interviewing work for the ABC. I’ve often sat cringing as he attempted to slowly roast a political interviewee, thinking, no wonder these pollies always go belly aching about left wing bias at the ABC.

(Note to self: I must try and find the transcript of that interview with Malcolm Turnbull, where Tony Jones had to apologise for trying to ambush him on some issue. The basics of the situation, from what I recall, were that Jones had not done his reading properly and was trying to quote to Turnbull something that was patently false. (UPDATE: The link for that interview is here. It shows Jones at his most petty minded. He had to admit his error at the end of the interview. To the ABC's credit, they aired the whole interview, warts and all.)

So okay, should you read this collection? If you have a life, probably no. If you don’t have a life, then perhaps. Or maybe if you want to find out how dull Australian politics can be.

This book would perhaps be best employed by up and coming journalists and writers as a way of ascertaining good and bad writing styles.

The book is divided up into sections on Rudd’s ascension, Howard’s decline, Aboriginal Australia, the age of terrorism, culture wars, global warming and Australian values.

To my surprise, the essay I enjoyed best was by Noel Pearson, a piece entitled White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for the Radical Centre. In fact, again to my surprise, the most outstanding section was the Aboriginal part of the book. Louis Nowra’s essay, Culture of Denial was amazing too. To anyone reading this blurb, I’d strongly recommend you read the above mentioned essays. (Link to Pearson's essay is here.)

The most dull essays were of course to do with political machinations, written by self-important newspaper columnists. I love Michelle Grattan, but her newspaper work falls so flat in a book.

The excerpt from David Marr’s quarterly essay, Yes Prime Minister – We’re a Nation in Authority’s Grip, shouldn’t have been included here. There were much better quarterly essays that could have been used.

The environmental section was really yawnsville, except for Richard Flanagan’s peerless essay Out of Control on the Tasmanian pulp mill.

I didn’t mind Thomas Keneally’s Flattened by a Falafel, and the always fascinating Guy Rundle put in a good showing with his essay Goodbye to all that. Plus I found Mark McKenna’s The Anzac Myth really absorbing.

Plus there’s some good right wing pornography in Tom Switzer’s Conservatives are no longer losing the culture wars.

One last piece of praise goes to Paul Kelly’s The defeat. Well done Paul! Top marks from me.

A book that is best read selectively.

The Lucy Family Alphabet, by Judith Lucy

Some are born comedians, some achieve comedy, and some have comedy thrust upon them. Having read Judith Lucy’s first book, The Lucy Family Alphabet, I’d have to surmise that for this local funny lady the latter is the case.

Being raised by two out-of-the-box parents like Ann and Tony Lucy, it seems their daughter had either one of two choices: turn into a furious madwoman, or laugh herself out of the whole sorry mess.

Judith Lucy took her anger and spun it into side-splitting laughter. Beneath the gags and chuckles though there bubbles deeply complex emotional and psychological undercurrents.

In a recent interview with Richard Fidler, the broadcaster noted to Lucy that she was the type of comedian who had to be making a joke every ten seconds, otherwise they'd be reduced to panic. It seems that even a brief cessation in making light of things for Lucy would allow the whole world to come crushing down. Comedy for this performer is a survival tool. At school, Lucy stopped people thinking she was a fringe dwelling freak by making them laugh.

Using her family for material is not something new for Judith Lucy. Horrid family Christmases, bizarre grooming regimes, a mother with a natural flair for lying, all have been exploited for fun and profit.

The seminal family tale of course is the Christmas that Lucy, at the age of 25, discovered she’d been adopted. After a day of hard drinking and inter-family brawling, Judith quipped to her sister-in-law what a fun family she'd married into. ‘There’s something else you don’t know,’ her sister-in-law said ominously. ‘It’s not some weird sex thing is it?’ Judith quipped. ‘No, it’s to do with you.’ Lucy describes a penny dropping moment. ‘Oh my God, I’m adopted.’

Lucy was shocked into writing The Lucy Family Alphabet when she discovered that a birth relative assumed that she hated her parents after hearing one of her more acerbic jokes. It had never entered the comedian’s mind that some in the public might have misconstrued her humour as an all out attack on her parents.

This revelation knocked her for six. ‘No, I really loved them,’ she informed the relative. ‘Who doesn’t love their parents?’

Reading The Lucy Family Alphabet though, you get the sense that Lucy has been subconsciously writing this book for years. The bad case of joke indigestion experienced by a relative was just a good excuse to start writing a detailed a-z of her parents’ nuttiness.

Lucy’s Family Alphabet, as the title suggests, is a lucky dip into the obsessions, oddities, pathologies, and eccentricities of Ann and Tony Lucy. The Lucy family portrait is not painted with big-picture strokes, but it rather built up by show casing an array of strange family curios and relics.

There are passages on bad taste, hypochondria, Neil Diamond and Val Doonican (of the latter, Lucy notes ‘If I were Irish I’d be pretty quick to handball this cardigan-wearing no talent to Wales or maybe Indonesia’), bizarre diets, lousy holidays, psychologically disturbed pets, embarrassing fashion ensembles, useless cars, inadequate sex education, the obsessive use of gladwrap, and of course, the tales of drinking until you pass out.

Many readers will recognise in these pages a familiar suburban Australia. That is one of the book’s great strengths, and makes it, in its funny way, a book about Australian culture and social mores. The people and behaviour, the bad Christmases, boring holidays and excesses of alcohol. You either knew people like this, had them as neighbours, or worse, suffered them in your own family. It's ironic that so many of those ‘normal’ suburban houses we grew up in were really hotbeds of eccentricity.

It’s common to talk these days of ‘Australian values’, but you have to wonder what the Lucy household would have made of such an idea.

Despite this family alphabet being ostensibly a gag a page funny book, there are some very poignant moments. In one section Lucy describes as an adolescent bursting into tears while out shopping with her mother.

‘It was hard to miss how unhappy she was,' Lucy writes of her mother. 'I remember one occasion, shortly before adolescence hit, when my mother and I went shopping and in the middle of trying on some burnt orange corduroy culottes (probably), I burst into tears. Not, as you might expect, from trying on such an attractive article of clothing (hopefully I’d teamed it with a poncho), but from a feeling I didn’t fully understand at the time. When Mum asked me what was wrong there was nothing I could say, because the answer was her. Everything about her life made me sad, but I didn’t know how to help. We had no connection whatsoever.’

For those who grew up in a complex battle with their parents, for whom life in suburbia was full of loneliness, frustration and alienation, in short, for many who grew up in suburban Australia, you will consume each page of this book for the truth that it speaks so plainly.

Judith Lucy’s Family Alphabet comes close to poetry in describing the suburban condition. I laughed a lot, recognised people I’d grown up with and known, and appreciated her wanting to tell the story of her parents.

Reaction Time, by Ian Lowe

This Quarterly Essay is an argument against the use of nuclear power as an answer to our greenhouse gas emissions problem. Ian Lowe intelligently presents all the problems – both scientific and political – involved in the use of nuclear power.

Essentially, Lowe sees the use of nuclear power as a short term fix, a band-aid for a problem which is really going to require long term solutions. Our whole thinking with regards to economic benefits will have to change.

Coal and nuclear might be cheap and easier forms of energy, and from a purely financial point of view, it might make good economic sense to use these sources of energy. Yet coal and nuclear have hidden costs that will inevitably rear their head later on down the track.

Renewable energies may be more expensive and not show as quick a turn around for your buck as nuclear, but long term, they are far superior: zero waste.

Wouldn’t future generations prefer this than being left with tonnes of nuclear waste?

At the start of this book Lowe has a great example of how our lives have changed in the era of ‘cheap’ energy.

“The average use of energy in OECD countries varies from about 3 to 10 kilowatts for every person. One way of visualising this is to imagine that our average energy use in Australia is equivalent to about forty human slaves working for us in shifts, doing what slaves used to do: produce our food, carry us about, wash our clothes, entertain us, fan us when we are hot, provide hot water for washing and so on.”

See what luxury we wallow in. And this type of 40 slave per person lifestyle we think completely normal. Even people who excel at conserving energy are still employing these ‘energy’ slaves. Think how busy we would be if we didn’t have this cheap energy.

I’m all for conserving energy and fast-tracking as much renewable energy technology as possible. If Australians were given a choice between having toxic energy waste stored near by them or investing in crystal clear renewable energy at a higher price, I think we all know that people would rather pay more money to secure their health and well being.

The Bringing Them Home Report

The Bringing Them Home report, commissioned by the Keating Government, was released in 1997. Eleven years later Kevin Rudd kicked off his government by issuing an apology on behalf of the federal Australian parliament to the so called 'Stolen Generations'.

We all know of John Howard’s stubbornness on this issue. Alas, it seems the history of the Aboriginal people in Australia is to try and bury them, yet they keep popping up. This report recommends financial compensations, an idea knocked on the head by Kevin Rudd. Yet it seems another inevitability that Aboriginal people will eventually receive the wished for compensation.

My understanding of Australian history with regards to the Aboriginal people runs thus. Firstly, they were pushed off their traditional land by European settlers. Secondly they were corralled onto reserves and designated a ‘problem’ to be dealt with. Thirdly their children, if they were of mixed descent, were removed from their Aboriginal mothers in order to be ‘saved’ from being black. The object was to erase their history and culture and to become white.

We know that in 19th century Australia there was an idea that black Australians were an inferior race who would die out. This of course was wishful thinking on the part of whites. To help this process along, it was government policy to remove ‘half caste’ children from their black mothers, erase their Aboriginality and hopefully turn them ‘white’. Now we know this idea was a big mistake.

The Bringing Them Home report is probably the ugliest thing I’ve ever read. We white Australians have no or very little idea of how Aboriginal lives have been destroyed, and how deeply traumatised Aboriginal people have been by white policies.

I mean, try to imagine being taken from your mother and never seeing her again. Imagine being brought up on cruel missions, sexually abused and told how worthless you are because of your skin colour. This is the collective trauma that Aboriginal Australians live with today. You could see it on the sorry day.

Australians feel uncomfortable around Aboriginals because it challenges their legitimacy. The status of white Australia is unresolved because no treaties or settlements were ever negotiated between black and white Australia. White Australians simply took land without questioning if they had a right to take it. Every time Aboriginals talk about their dispossession it annoys white Australians. They don’t want to be reminded about it.

The best line to illustrate Australians’ uncertainly about their place was when Pauline Hanson said, if Aboriginals own the land, where the hell am I supposed to go? Good question.

Postcode, by Wayne Swan

This is your classic boring book. While the subject matter is salutary, the execution is dire. Wayne Swan writes like a dutiful school student fulfilling an essay request. He does all his homework, provides the graphs and the detailed bibliography. Alas, his writing is so unbelievablely dull. Surely politicians are not designed to be such boring technocrats? Reading his rallying cry to Australia’s poor, Postcode, you get the distinct impression that Swan does not venture beyond government departmental reports and the like.

It’s a shame that this book is such unfriendly reading, because I believe that Swan, after looking through all the statistics, and experiencing himself the plight of Australians who are less well off, does genuinely worry about Australia’s poor.

During such hey days of what seems like a constantly booming economy, Swan has shown that there is still an underbelly in Australian society that has not done well from the boom. His most convincing argument, and one that I agree with wholeheartedly, is that it is important for the country’s continuing economic health that people who are struggling be given a helping hand, whether it be education or health or what have you. A poor child given an excellent education and good health care and access to facilities will end up earning a bomb and providing a good revenue source (taxes).

Alas, this is a really dull book. Or was it just me? Maybe I just can’t concentrate on important studies and their mind boggling statistics.

I can’t really recommend that you read this book. Swan is saying that there is a problem here that the Howard Government has failed to recognise and address (the book was written in 2005). Now Swan is Treasurer it is his chance to show that he is serious about combating Australian poverty.

If you do decided to read this book, it will be a good reminder that not everyone in Australia is doing that well, and that in a rich country that should not be the case.

People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and West, by Waleed Aly

Let me say from the outset that I thought this an absolutely terrific book and I’d urge anyone who comes across this review (or rave, rather) to give this book a whirl. Unbelieveably, the book wasn’t even Waleed Aly’s idea. Author Martin Flanagan talked Aly into writing it. What’s even more amazing about this book is Aly’s age: he’s only 29! (I know that’s probably a superficial point, but for a book that shows such depth, erudition and maturity, I’m frankly in shock.)

The most basic premise of this book is how poorly the West and Islam misunderstand each other. Aly sees himself as especially well positioned to discuss this issue as a Muslim who was raised in Australia. He has feet firmly placed in both cultures, and sees the argument that is played out before him frequently as some terrible farce.

What’s helping to compound this problem is the language we use. Aly quotes George Orwell to show that the language we now use in regards to this issue specifically limits the discussion. I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

Aly goes into a few key words and expressions to show how important the subtleties of language are. Arabic language and Islam are constantly translated into meaningless sound bites. (Aly also criticises the ‘Muslim world’ for the same thing.)

For example, the word jihad is frequently misunderstood. The word means ‘struggle’, and has a personal/spiritual dimension as well as a more military version. The former we are told is thought to be the more important in Islam. Of course all the subtleties of this word, its nuanced religious meanings, are flung out the window once it’s used by news broadcasters for shocking 6 o’clock news programs. I recall even Canberra press journalist Michelle Grattan using it to refer to inter party fighting amongst the Liberals. The word is thoroughly corrupted.

Aly also discusses the controversy over the wearing of the hijab, and the proposed banning of it. The author goes warily goes into the varying reasons that women like to cover their heads. I say warily because Aly notes that barely any hijab wearing women are ever asked why they wear it in the first place.

Even if you consider yourself a liberal minded Westerner on the issue of Islam, there is much in this book that may surprise you, as Aly breaks down the over simplified language we use in the West to describe Islam.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book describe Islam’s history and cultural contributions. When this is contrasted again Christianity’s history, Islam comes across as a modern, anti-hierarchical religion. As Aly notes, Islam simply doesn’t have an established church like Christianity does in the West. For example, there is no religious authority like the pope. Interpretation of the Koran is not so dogmatic as Christianity’s interpretation of the Bible. (Recall so-called fundamentalism, a modern phenomenon, began with Christian word-for-word readings of the Bible, what’s known as the inerrancy of the Biblical texts.)

As I mentioned earlier, there are many subtle and nuanced arguments in this absorbing book. When a young Western newsreader parrots the word jihad, mindlessly reading their teleprompter, what they are saying is virtually meaningless, meaningless to Islam anyway. What do they know of Islam’s 1400 year history, it’s culture, history, philosophy, beliefs etc? You know the answer.

Again, I urge anyone reading this blurb that they check out their library and give Waleed Aly’s book a go. He shows in equal measure the prejudices and delusions of the Islamic world, and the arrogance and ignorance of the Western world. His book is an admirable attempt to breach this huge gulf of understanding.