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.

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, by Peter Maass

‘It’s the devil’s excrement’, according to former Venezuelan oil minister Perez Alfonzo. Why? Oil acted like a dangerous, addictive drug on the Venezuelan economy. It gave a fantastic rush of money when oil prices were high, prompting profligate spending. Yet when prices dipped, there would always be the morning after.

In this wide ranging book journalist Peter Maass (he contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine and New Yorker) looks at all the ill effects oil has on individuals and countries alike. As you’d expect, Crude World is a depressing tale of extreme fear and greed.

The main thesis of the book is that oil creates volatility and havoc at all levels. For poor African nations like Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, plundering US oil concerns are happy to work with dictators and strongmen. The money that should go to the impoverished people of these countries is funnelled back to corrupt leaders who lead the sort of lavish lifestyles that would make Marie Antoinette blush.

Other countries, like Ecuador, find their environment despoiled by marauding oil companies. The unhappy histories of the Middle East are well known. War in Iraq and Kuwait, US meddling in Iran. Saudi Arabia is an unusual case all of its own. Its massive oil endowment has created a lopsided economy, completely captive to the vicissitudes of the global oil market. (90 per cent of the country's exports are oil, bringing in 75 per cent of the country’s revenues.)

Saudi Arabia has high unemployment, a large foreign workforce of professionals and an indolent class of royalty who all live on a stipend. Oil has allowed the population to explode, but reduced the pay checks of royal princes. A lot of young people (the Kingdom has a high youth population) have nothing to do, living off a virtual mono-economy that doesn't provide career paths.

Maass summarises nicely the ill effects oil can have on an economy (The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher made a similar argument recently, with regards to Australia’s export of coal):

"We’ve seen this before: as the oil sector grows, farming and manufacturing contract, unemployment expands, inflation rises due to the influx of revenues from oil sales, and the gap between rich and poor widens."

While we in the West can hold our nose when we read about these terrible troubles in the rest of the world, the reality is that our oil dependence means we help contribute to this ugly reality. Our leaders cheerfully extol the virtues of globalisation, but don't like to talk about the money that Saudi Arabia funnels into supporting fundamentalist causes.

Maass also gives an eye opening look from the business end of oil. How ironic, he notes, that we easily recall the names of superstar CEOs from the world of business. Yet the oil industry’s superstar CEO, Lee Raymond of ExxonMobil, is a complete unknown to us. The author gives an almost Dickensian description of the corpulent Lee Raymond. He is more medieval king that CEO.

"Raymond fascinated me. Despite his stature and power, he was nearly unknown outside the environmental lobby, which despised him, the financial industry, which swooned over him; and the oil industry, which feared him. (Exxon’s executive suite was known as "the God Pod".) Think of the tycoons who are part of the contemporary lexicon – Gates, Murdoch, Buffett, Jobs, Branson – and realise that absent from their ranks is the long time leader of one of the most profitable multinationals of the twentieth century. Raymond was smart enough and secure enough to neither crave nor need publicity, which he knew would invite unfriendly questions. He did what he had to do, meeting financial journalists to announce earnings, but little more. He turned down my requests to interview him."

A lot of the territory that Peter Maass covers in Crude Oil has been well documented elsewhere. What makes this book attractive is the extensive first hand reportage. Maass has access to a lot of good interview subjects, both high level political and business players, down to activists and the ordinary people affected by oil. This he mixes with an engaging and cheerful style. Maass has the novelist's gift for drawing lively portraits and is never at a loss for an evocative metaphor. It's these qualities that really made Crude Oil a very enjoyable book.

So often we are immersed in 'facts' on these economic and political questions. How refreshing it is to get a first hand description of real people rather than just the general sweep of events.

Crude Oil, despite its gloomy and depressing subject matter, ends in a rather upbeat tone. The problems of our oil dependence can be fixed by enthusiastically taking up the existing renewable technologies, we are assured. All we need is the will. This optimistic ending didn't work for me though, especially after wading through so much depressing reality. Peter Maass makes for a brilliant observer, but it seems obvious he hasn’t thought through very deeply the question of how we will segue from the oil economy to the new renewable economy.

And that day is coming sooner than later. In all likelihood we have used up half the world’s oil endowment. We’re quickly on our way to consuming the last half.

Crude Oil opens with an interview with Matthew Simmons, author of the influential Twilight in the Desert. Simmons is an investment banker, and a former energy advisor to George W. Bush. He has studied in depth the technical papers of the Society of Petroleum Engineers on Saudi Oil. What he found was that the Saudi authorities have vastly overstated the capacity of their reserves. He also found serious mismanagement resulting in damaged oil fields: all of the remaining oil may not be recoverable. He believes we could be in for serious trouble unless we can come up with an alternative energy source.

Even more pessimistic is James Howard Kunstler. In his book The Long Emergency Kunstler provides some unpalatable statistics for the reader to digest. The world's total oil endowment is some 2 trillion barrels. We have made our way through 1 trillion barrels so far, most in the last 50 years. At our current rate of consumption, we will empty out every last drop in 37 years.

That does not take into account any growth in the Chinese and Indian economies - or any other economy for that matter. Nor does it factor in the difficulties in extracting the last half of our global oil endowment. All of the remaining oil will not be recovered. (There is a range of technologies used currently to extract oil out of the ground, like injecting water into oil fields. They all use rising levels of energy, thus diminishing the value of the oil recovered.)

Babies born today will not be driving cars run on petrol when they hit their thirties. How will they drive their cars? How will food be transported? What will happen to all the new outer suburbs that are currently totally dependent on cars? Why aren’t governments planning for this?

Kunstler says the economy built by oil has been nothing more than a 100 year bubble – and it’s about to burst.

Can a new energy source ‘come online’ that has the value of the one trillion barrels of oil we’ve used so far, keeping us living a lifestyle we see as normal? Peter Maass thinks that if we work for it such a reality will come, yet the bulk of his book – the ugly politics, violence and money – speak of a troubling future.

The Long Emergency: surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century, by James Howard Kunstler.

Consider this: In the beginning, there were 2 trillion barrels of oil. We’ve now made our way through half of our oil endowment. That means there are 1 trillion barrels of oil left in the ground.

That’s still a lot of oil. Although remember, it took us roughly the last 50 years to gobble that amount up. According to James Kunstler, if we were to continue consuming at our current levels, every single last drop of oil will be gone within 37 years.

But even that is an optimistic figure. You see, the top half of the oil is the easiest to get. The bottom of the barrel, as it were, is much harder to extract. Even Saudi Arabia now has to pump massive amounts of sea water into the ground in order to push the oil up.

Here’s another thing to consider. At the dawn of oil discovery, the energy requirements to get oil out of the ground were small. But now as the oil is much harder to get out, a lot more energy is used. Eventually it will reach a point where it simply takes too much energy to get the oil out of the ground. For example, if you were to use one barrel of oil in energy to get one barrel of oil out of the ground. Obviously this wouldn’t be worth doing.

To cap it all off, there are emerging economies like China and India. All of their people are going to want to drive cars and live lush Western lifestyles in the near future. So their populations will put more pressure on oil.

In short, we have 37 years to find a new energy source to replace oil. That’s a best case scenario. In reality it could be 20 years. Or we could see real changes within the decade, as it becomes clear that we have reached what’s known as ‘peak oil’.

Peak oil is not some left wing, greenie spoiler theory. It was developed by geoligist M. King Hubbert. He correctly predicted American oil would peak in 1970. He was spot on. He predicted global oil would peak around 2000. On this he has been wrong. No matter, a lot of eminent geololigsts and people who work within the oil industry know that we are close to that peak.

This peak in global oil will be confirmed a few years after the fact. That is, when we see supplies tapering off. When this time comes, it will obviously cause great alarm and a seismatic political shift. For our rich way of life, our very economy, is based on cheap oil.

The Long Emergency basically tries to look at this post-oil world, describing a rather bleak, reduced world where we will have to go back to a much more basic, some may say medieval, lifestyle. We will live in more tightknit communities, and we will spend a lot of our time in farming and producing food closer to where we live. Our current lifestyles, which are so devoid from reality, will be a thing of the past.

The Long Emergency, however, isn’t a kind of peer-into-the-future kind of book. It’s really a sustained cultural, economic and political critique. Kunstler really knows his stuff, and he writes in a no-nonsense, off-with-the-gloves style. The politics of the environmnt are very much divided along left / right lines. Kunstler is refreshing in that he has not time for all of this cant and just delivers his opinions straight. Frankly, I’m jealous of his assured and erudite writing style.

Here’s a sample:

"The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal staus of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal foodting with other persons in a given locality. Thus Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn’t order 50,000 coffee –makers at a crack from a factory 12,000 mmiles away in Hangzhou, and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been given the chance."

Or here’s another favourite:

"The industrial experiment took the idea of currency (money) to the next level of abstraction – as hard currency can represent actual goods, so paper currency can represent hard currency and actual goods. As trade increased and took place over ever-greater distances, paper promises to pay hard currency began to steadily take the place of the hard stuff itself, which was cumbersome, hard to to lug around in large quantities, and subject to theft in transit. So to steamline these trades, all kinds of certificates were used as equivalents to hard currency: individual IOUs, bills of lading, letters of credit from rich people, promissory notes issued by guilds. In time, the use of paper certificates became more and more normative and conventionalised. Protocols of exchange were established. Institutions were created to process them. This process of managing monetary affairs – of wealth abstracted in paper – was called finance. "

The Long Emergency has 300 pages of this kind of dense analysis. I found it utterly stunning.
As you can tell, I was a big fan of this book. Kunstler has written two other books about suburbia, The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere. He’s also written a swag of novels.

You may disagree with a lot in this book. Perhaps this is all doomsayers stuff. Maybe a new super energy source is just around the corner. Kunstler could be all wrong about the modern market economy not being able to come up with some nifty ideas. I mean, I even read a recent release by my own party, the Greens, claiming that a rigorous emissions trading system would unleash the creativity of the market to solve our energy problems.

One thing is for sure, Kunstler is no bullshit artist. He most certainly believes what he writes about. I hope things don’t turn out as bad as he says. Although I think we would all do well to start thinking seriously, now, about what we’re going to do when the oil runs out. How will we make things, travel, conduct our current economic life, and most importantly, grow and transport food?

The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith

A conclusion has been creeping upon me over the years that so much of modern life is made up of useless busy work. This is because our economy is made up of an inordinate amount of superfluous rubbish. Every one is trying to sell us some crappy product that we don’t need. How much stuff in our houses do we regularly have to ditch? Yet all of these crap producing industries are vital as they provide employment.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) in this nicely argued book (originally published in 1958) takes the reader through a history of economic thinking up to today. He also introduces in The Affluent Society the phrase ‘conventional wisdom’. Conventional wisdom is the accepted thinking on economic matters. However, when reality crashes against conventional wisdom we must reassess.

We have much to thank modern economics for. The capitalist system has given us the great affluence-making phenomenon of productivity. We now produce in abundance essentials like food at a low price (in the West, that is). Hence the modern economy has dispatched uncertainty and replaced it with economic security. In Australia, for example, we all have more than enough to eat. No one need go hungry. (Although Aboriginal Australians of course experience very poor health, but that’s more of a political problem.)

So far, so good. But then a rather ironic thing happened. We started to produce beyond what our needs or wants were. We started on a kind of useless productivity, and we did this not because we needed the items produced but rather because we needed the employment that such useless busy-work guaranteed.

One piece of conventional wisdom that Galbraith returns to again and again (and this is more relevant in the American context, seeing they have such a strong antipathy to anything to do with government service provisions) is how sacredly held is the idea that private consumption leads to the greatest good for society and the economy.

This leaves public services always under funded and in a state of constant atrophy. Galbraith maintains that there is such a thing as human investment. Education, for example. Galbraith also makes the good point that much of private industry relies on the skills of its workforce that are acquired through the public education system. Even the computer, he reminds us, was developed with the help of the military: public money.

The solution to this ‘social imbalance’? A consumption tax to transfer the money to the public sphere. Better schools, better public parks and spaces.

If you haven’t read Galbraith before, you have to keep pinching yourself to remind yourself that he’s actually an American writer. His style is so dryly witty and elegant – he’s never at a loss for the most perfect word – that you think him British. (Actually, I've just read that he was born in Canada but became an American citizen in 1937.)

This is one of those great books that will change the way you look and think about the economy, and the way we live. A must read.

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 Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, by Richard Sennett

This book is interesting, as far as it goes. Richard Sennett mixes real life examples of people being chewed up by contemporary capitalism with his own philosophical ruminations. The results are a bit mixed. Sennett likes to give us the etymological roots of words to do with economics and the work place (for example, the word ‘career’ originally meant a road for carriages etc.), but the trouble is he doesn’t really develop any bigger meanings out of this. In the end you ask yourself, is the author really saying anything? Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. I can’t quite figure it out.

The book also has a bit of a dated feel. (It was published in 1998.) Maybe it feels slightly dated due to the huge global economic shocks of the past two years or so.

So I don’t know if I’d recommend you read this book. Instead I’d point the reader in the direction of Barbra Ehrenreich's wonderfully snappy first hand reporting in her two books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. These books refrain from the intellectual fancy work of Richard Sennett and go right for the jugular.

Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov

I knew nothing about this writer and novel, until it was recently brought to my attention. Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891) was a servant in the Russian government. In his free time he wrote novels and essays. Goncharov is thought to be his best.

Russian novels fail to ever disappoint me, and this book was no exception to that rule. The story follows Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov (what a great surname!) and details his utterly hopeless irresolution. In one part of the book he is likened to Hamlet, unable to be a man of action and usefulness. The main difference to Hamlet is that Oblomov is more of a comedy. The backflap of the Everyman hardback I read described it as a ‘Sluggard’s Comedy’, and I think this describes the book well.

The marvellous thing about Oblomov is the relentless psychological detail. The first hundred and twenty pages merely describes Omblomov lying in bed, dreading all the minor domestic details that he must attend to. If you’ve ever felt a dread in the morning, not wanting to go to work, or attend that meeting, or simply experienced that anxious knot in your stomach at the prospect of having to go out into the world, then you’ll relate to Omblomov’s groans and turning to the wall in search of some escapist fantasy.

The paradox struck me when reading though: is Goncharov describing himself, his own frequent dolorous moods in the morning, his own inertia? If so it’s ironic seeing it must have taken so much energy to write this novel.

A brilliant, effervescent novel of psychological realism. Thanks to Mr Chris Hubbard and the president of the Arden Valley Russian Literature Appreciation Society, Ms. S. Whiskers, for this reading suggestion.

Edward Koiki Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land Rights, by Noel Loos and Koiki Mabo

The heart of this book is a fragmentary autobiography by Edward Koiki Mabo, put together from interviews conducted by Professor Noel Loos, who teaches the history of black-white relations at James Cook University at Townsville. (The book was published in 1996, so I don’t know if he still teaches at that university.) In addition to Koiki Mabo’s autobiographical material, there is a personal memoir of Mabo by Professor Loos. The last part of the book concentrates on Mabo’s final years, and his struggle for the native title rights to his Torres Strait Island home of Mer.

Like most Australians, I’ve always had a general outline of what happened when Koiki Mabo challenged the legitimacy of lands declared to be the possessions of the British Crown. However, recently I watched the last episode of the SBS series, The First Australians. This episode dealt explicitly with Mabo’s achievements, and I found the episode so moving that I decided to try and read up more on Koiki Mabo.

I don’t have to go into Mabo’s extraordinary achievement in overturning the whole idea of terra nullius. To think that a man from the fringes of Australia, on a little known island to the east of the Torres Strait, could turn how Australia thought of itself on its head, beggars belief. It mystifies why we don’t have a national day in the man’s honour. Then again, maybe not.

This book is okay. I didn’t find it too riveting a read though. The autobiographical part was never completed. Nevertheless, it does give the reader a good impression of Mabo’s character, temperament and thinking. He seemed to have a simple and clear minded idea on what he wanted to achieve, uncluttered by political ideology. The most pressing case for Mabo was to get the best possible deal for his people.

Students of Mabo will no doubt find this book indispensable. Those already interested in Koiki Mabo and his achievements will find this rewarding reading. But for those looking for a bigger political and cultural picture, this won’t really fit the bill.

I guess you could say the bigger political and cultural picture was what I was after.

Nevertheless, Edward Koiki Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land Rights provides a valuable document of a man who changed Australia for ever.

Bicycle: The History, by David V. Herlihy

Ever since I took to bike riding again, some eight years ago, I have had a creeping interest in the history of the bicycle. Who invented it? How did it come into being? Happily David V. Herlihy has written a charming and entertaining history of the bicycle (a French word by the way), from the early 19th century right up to the current day. The book is also handsomely presented with plenty of big, glossy reproductions.

Herlihy writes in a conservative, text book style, yet the material he presents is always so interesting that the book never dulls for a minute.

The first version of the bicycle, then called a 'Draisine' or 'velocipede' was created by the German Karl von Drais. His early bike was patented in 1818. His 1818 invention was also called a 'dandy horse' or hobby-horse. Made almost entirely out of wood, the machine had no peddles, so you just pushed along the ground. As you can imagine, there were pros and cons with this early version of the bicycle. Going down hill was fine, but going uphill was useless. The draisine was originally a popular fad that soon died out. Obviously, due to its limited utlility and hefty price, its vogue soon waned.

Interestingly, it took about another 50 years for the cause of the velocidpede to be taken up again. This time it was France that was to make the next major contribution to the bicycle. By the late 1860s a velocipede with pedals attached to the front wheel was on the market. The provenance of this technical advance remains somewhat under a cloud, so I won't go into all the disputes over whose idea it was to add pedals.

The 1870s saw the invention of the penny-farthing, with the huge front wheel that facilitated quicker speeds. At this stage bicycles were still very much the domain of well heeled recreational riders, dandies with money and time for the pursuit. The bicycle still awaited a more widespread popular usage.

This came in the 1880s with the so-called 'safety-bicycle'. A chain system turning a back wheel allowed for a bike that was closer to the ground, hence protecting the rider from the dreaded 'croppers'. Now the rider just had to put their feet to the ground to stablise the bike and prevent a fall. This new development had a lot of appeal for women in particular, widening dramatically the popularity of the bicycle. (Indeed, a lot of feminists at the time talked up the benefits of cycling for women. American feminist Susan B. Anthony dubbed it a 'freedom machine'.)

The basic design of the safety model is the type we all ride today. So things have not really changed that much since the 1880s. Sure there have been lots of important improvements, but the basic safety model has never been superseded.

The fortunes of the bicycle have waxed and waned over time. A new model or technological advancement creates a new spike in usage, which then tapers off. When bikes should have really taken off, with the invention of the safety bike, then along came the car. In tough economic times, though, the bike has experienced an upsurge in popularity. During the 1970s oil shocks, bike usage shot up.

Of course we are now in another period where bike popularity is waxing again. Environmental concerns, the obesity crisis and the volatility of oil prices are helping to make the bike appear an answer to a lot of these problems.

Another interesting historical fact in Mr Herlihy's book is the public hostility to bike riders. Since day one there have been consistent complaints about bike riders on footpaths and knocking innocent pedestrians over. Even policemen and judges were notoriously unforgiving of rogue cyclists. Things have not changed much. Recently in Melbourne there was a spate of fines for riding through some inner city paths. Cyclists copped fines of $250.00 a pop.

There is much to recommend in this book. I especially enjoyed the way that the author quoted a lot of contemporary sources for attitudes to bikes and cyclists. Mr Herlihy has an eye for a quirky story or interesting detail, making sure he keeps his history a constant enjoyment. And the many illustrations are fantastic. I never knew there was so much pictorial material available of the history of the bicyle.

I feel obsessive and recreational bike riders alike will find much fascinating reading in this book. Full marks to Mr Herlihy for this brilliantly organised and researched history of the bicycle. Bike riders will find all their questions answered, and then some.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay

In short, this is a very queer and perverse book. I was quite surprised by the tone and style of the writing, which is quite baroque and artificial. It seems to almost parody itself in its flamboyance and flowery descriptions. Before you even get to the novel proper, you’re given a dramatis personae of all the characters, as if you were reading something stagy like a play.

In fact, I note that political sketch writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, Annabel Crabb, purloined a line or two to lampoon Kim Beazley in her book on the Labor party in opposition, Losing It.

Annabel Crabb:

"That night – Wednesday 4th June – the busy main strip of the Manuka dining precinct was treated to the comparatively rare sight of Kim Beazley, propelling himself along the footpath with all the inconspicuousness of a Spanish galleon in full sail."

Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock:

"Now an immense purposeful figure was swimming and billowing in grey silk taffeta on to a tiled and colonnaded verandah, like a galleon in full sail."

Lindsay is describing the appearance of Mrs Appleyard, head mistress at Appleyard College. In fact, much of Annabel Crabb’s humorous writing style you can see must come from Joan Lindsay.

The only mystery for me with Picnic at Hanging Rock is why it’s gained such a reputation for being a true story. I too thought it was a true story until only recently. However, I don’t see how anyone after they’ve read the actual text could entertain such an idea. It’s wilfully over the top and self dramatising. Read in a particular way, it comes across almost as black comedy. (Even the deaths must be treated exotically. Sara Waybourne’s corpse gets a gala treatment, her body found in a beautiful garden bed; Dora Lumley and her brother Reg’s death by accidental fire come across as another comic travesty.)

When the indomitable Mrs Appleyard must write letters to the parents of the missing girls, rather than be consumed by grief at the looming tragedy, she rather angrily laments losing some of her best pupils, and the academic reputation of the college sliding with the disappeared girls. Then Mrs Appleyard goes on to wish that the college dunce, Edith Horton, had gone missing instead!

Still not satisfied with these impure thoughts, Mrs Appleyard lambasts Greta McCraw, the missing mathematics mistress. In another humourous passage, witness statements are taken from girls who last saw Greta McCraw talking ‘wildly of triangles and short cuts.’

Lindsay obviously relishes these kinds of ironies, a maths teacher getting lost. By the time I got to the end of the novel, I thought that Picnic at Hanging Rock was perhaps Lindsay’s revenge on Clyde Girls’ Grammar, which she attended as a day-girl in St Kilda. What else can explain the way the author describes in such a feast of language the slow and mad disintegration of Appleyard College and its head mistress?

Mrs Appleyard herself almost reminded me of something out of a Jean Genet play, like Madame out of The Maids. She is described as amazingly steely, but unable to control fate and destiny. (She likes to tipple on whisky in private.)

Check this quote out:

"For the first time in many weeks she thought of the mathematics mistress and brought her fist down on the dressing-table with such force that the combs and brushes and curling pins danced on its polished surface It was inconceivable that this woman of masculine intellect on whom she had come to rely in the last years should have allowed herself to be spirited away, lost, raped, murdered in cold blood like an innocent school girl, on the Hanging Rock."

Mrs Appleyard is clearly a nut case! What fun Joan Lindsay must have had lampooning some old headmistress that drove her crazy at Clyde Girls’ Grammar. But wait, there’s more! Lindsay finishes off the mad woman by hurling her off Hanging Rock in a comic, ludicrous death scene. A spider at the scene is smart enough to scuttle away to safety. It’s the kind of macabre comedy that the poet Emily Dickinson would have concocted.

"An eagle hovering high above the golden peaks heard her scream as she ran towards the precipice and jumped. The spider scuttled to safety as the clumsy body went bouncing and rolling from rock to rock towards the valley below. Until at last the head in the brown hat was impaled upon a jutting crag."

This is the kind of finish the Marquis de Sade would have given his Justine, a perpetual victim. Boing, boing, boing, splat! Mrs Appleyard starts out as an imperious Sadeian heroine, but is in turn victimised by nature itself.

Madness, fate, nature, the inability to control all, finally consumes the head mistress.

Jean Genet wrote in one of his novels that the only way to avoid the horror of horror was to give into it. I think this is what Mrs Appleyard is forced to do.

Battlelines, by Tony Abbott

This book purports to provide future intellectual and policy directions for conservative politics, or more to the point, future direction for the Liberal Party. I thought the book would have more ideas and an overall modern conservative program. Afterall, the blurb on the back of the book asks ‘What’s next for the conservative side of politics’.

If that’s the kind of book you’re looking for, this is a pretty potted effort. It’s more of a mixed bag of personal history, restrained opinion, first hand ministerial experience and a list of prescriptions to improve government bureaucracy. The centrepiece of the book is a call to, if not abolish the states, at least reduce their power. The appendix of Battlelines contains a proposed bill to allow more Commonwealth power in areas of shared responsibility with the states.

This may strike the reader as ironic, seeing Abbott is such a staunch Monarchist. One of his main criticisms of becoming a republic is that it would give too much power to a newly elected president, especially if we had a directly elected model. (I agree with this, by the way.) Yet he wants to concentrate more power in Canberra.

Tony Abbott can seem unusually modern at times. For example, I was surprised to read this rather extraordinary line:

"In politics, what’s not reported might as well not have happened."

Then again, it may explain why he seems to constantly pop up for television interviews.

Much of Battlelines reads like a long love letter to John Howard. Abbott goes over much of the Howard government’s achievements, and unequivocally thinks John Howard the exemplary style in leadership. (How interesting to contrast this against Peter Costello’s memoirs, where Howard is a shadowy, ill defined figure.) You get the impression that Howard is a bit of a father figure to Abbott. What else can explain this unblinking devotion?

There is much that is salutary in Abbott’s effort to write this book, but by the time I got to the end I realised why I could only go so far with the author. Abbott writes in a nice plain style, and his thinking comes across as neatly organised, yet every now and again there is a surliness in the writing. It’s subtle and passes you by, but sometimes its very weirdness sticks out and cries for attention.

For example, in a section where Abbott suggests that maybe a different category of marriage should be envisioned, one with a no-divorce option, the author writes:

"Certainly, if the law is to establish a new type of legally recognised relationship for gay couples, it might also manage to enshrine once more, for those who want it, a type of marriage that approximates to the Christian ideal."

Does he really see gay marriage as being a precursor to ‘Christian ideal’ marriage, a ‘death-til-us-part’ marriage? No, he’s just having a subtle back-hander at gay marriage advocates.

Then there are silly sub headings like ‘Environmentalism might hurt the environment’. I mean, this kind of irony is so lame and we know what the subtext of it is: environmentalists are a bunch of economic vandals who don’t have a clue about what they’re doing. Why not just come out and say it rather than sulking?

Another sub heading is called ‘Kings in Their Own Cars’, and pursues a defence of car drivers against any type of critic, legitimate or not: ‘For too long, policy makers have ranked motorists just above heavy drinkers or smokers as social pariahs.’ Really? Abbott fails to discuss the volatility of oil prices, time wasted in traffic congestion and the car fumes we all now breathe. Not to metion the heath impacts of taking in so many toxins along with our oxygen. No, because car drivers are absolute monarchs. It seems Abbott wants to keep car drivers wrapped up in cotton wool about the negative aspects of our car culture.

The impression I get at the end of this book is of a man with nowhere to go intellectually or ideologically, and he’s angry about his limited options. The Postscript is called "Days from Hell". He airs a few grievances over the fact that his colleagues did not think he would be suitable as a leader for the Liberal Party.

"Six years’ hard work in parliament as Leader of the House of Representatives, nine years as a minister managing fraught portfolios, and regular intellectual advocacy on behalf of a sometimes rhetorically challenged government seemed to count for little or nothing."

It seems to me Tony Abbott is in a world he can’t possibly change (think green politics, Aboriginal rights, feminism, gay rights). He wishes it wasn’t that way, and he would like to be able to think he could wish upon a star and these political and cultural realities would vanish. His problem is to fuse his antipathies to gay rights, environmentalism, feminism etc. with his own cultural agenda. And it seems he can’t possibly do it. He has to be civil about gay rights and the environment, paying a polite kind of lip service. He may tolerate these movements, but perhaps secretly finds them intolerable.

Indeed, I sense that his default position, going by the below quote, would be that of a morals campaigner. Here’s a line from the Days From Hell postscript:

"As an ambitious politician, I had never had the slightest intention of becoming a morals campaigner."

I’d be more interested to see Tony Abbott as a morals campaigner. It’d be fascinating to hear his views on a range of subjects, without the check his own political ambitions have put on his (perhaps?) true calling

Emily Climbs, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

This is the second in the series of Emily novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery and covers its heroine’s teenage years. In order to go to Shrewbury College, Emily must promise not to write fiction, or made up stories.

In Emily Climbs Emily very much starts putting in the hard yards required to make it as a professional writer. This means dealing with the heart break of endless rejection slips. But all the hard work pays off in the end, and Emily gets her work published and is even in the end offered a lucrative writing job. Surprisingly, she knocks it back.

Like the first novel, one of the chief charms of Emily Climbs is how authentic a description it is of the writer’s ambition. For this alone it makes fascinating reading.

I looked up the Wikipedia page for Emily Climbs and was interested to find see this quote from Montgomery:

"People were never right in saying I was Anne. But in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily."

Apparently at the time of writing, Montgomery was transcribing all of her early journals, material which very much influenced the writing of the Emily series. And boy does it show.

I perhaps enjoyed this novel even more than the first one. Unfortunately, from what I hear, the third novel is not as strong as the first two. No matter, that should not discourage readers from enjoying the first two.

You can find my Lucy Maud Montgomery files here.